The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today, allow me to shed some light on a very current topic that touches the immediate present from the point of view of Theosophy. The fact that it is possible for such a question, such a movement that directly engages cultural life, to be placed in the light of our worldview is demonstrated by a small piece of evidence from the last few days that is extraordinarily significant in several respects. It shows that practical people in particular recognize the need to deepen our culture through the theosophical worldview, and that on the other hand, in the broadest circles, theosophy is still something that seems quite unknown.

Last Sunday, a very strange article appeared in the “Tag”, on whose political content I do not want to go into at all, about Russia, Japan and peace, by Carl Peters. You can think what you want about the name Carl Peters; no one will dispute that he is one of the great practitioners of our day. In this article, he talks about the differences in the perception of the peace between Japan and Russia within the two countries. He mentions the manifesto with which this peace was proclaimed to the people in Russia, which contains the words that God may give his great blessing to these people, and for the development of Russia in the future. He then mentions the proclamation of peace to Russia. [The Mikado says in his peace manifesto]: The result of the war is due to the kind souls of our ancestors. Now that peace and quiet have been secured, we call upon the great ancestors to enable us to pass the fruits on to our descendants. The Emperor of Japan visits the temple to bring the news of the conclusion of peace to the imperial ancestors. ... [space] I am quoting this because of the words the author of the article says about it. He says: “The two have this in common, that they appeal to a spiritual fate in the world process.” The difference is that, according to the East Asian view, it is not a victory of the material. The Japanese view is more pantheistic, the Christian view more [monotheistic]. Which one is right cannot be determined by rational arguments. I would like to add the following remark: The Japanese are a [sober, almost mathematical] nation, so I do not assume that what we can believe plays a major role for them. If they assume an influence on earthly fate, it is based not on faith but on knowledge. I would like to suspect that High and East Asia possess certain spiritual knowledge that the highly developed West can only dream of. If they are able and willing to introduce such knowledge into our more or less flattening culture, they would provide us with ideal values that go far beyond what we can offer them. ... [space]

It is not what is contained in these words that we want to examine. The fact that they have been spoken by a so-called [practitioner] is what we want to put at the top of our consideration. Two things strike us. One is that the necessity for a spiritual deepening of our culture is pointed out in such harsh words [about forces that do not live in the material world], and on the other hand, reference is made to East Asia and the hope is expressed that our flattening culture should receive a refreshment from the East, in that the hope is expressed that these knowers can offer us more than we can offer them with our culture. The fact that one can know something about the forces emanating from people who no longer live in earthly existence is taken very seriously here by a man of the world.

It is very strange that on the one hand the necessity is so emphasized, and on the other hand at the same time there is no awareness that for thirty years there has been a movement in Europe that is not working from the remnants of an older people whose spiritual consciousness cannot be at its full height today, but that, I say, there has been a spiritual movement in Europe itself for thirty years, as there is Theosophy. This is completely forgotten; and no consideration is given to the fact that we may be called upon here to establish this spiritual culture in a completely different way than those East Asian peoples. The whole thing is a throwing of light on the one hand, after the longing for spirituality, for knowledge of the spiritual world, and on the other hand, I would like to say, a superficial conception of our own European aspirations.

More than any other question, what has been touched on here may interest us when discussing the women's issue. The theosophical movement can in no way be suspected of treating this matter in any reactionary way. Simply the way it has developed would flatly contradict such an assertion. Women have been among the best founders and collaborators of the theosophical movement from the very beginning. Yes, the actual founder of the Theosophical Society – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – was a woman. And in terms of the sum of knowledge contained in the works of this woman, nothing that has been given in the cultural works of the last few centuries can match it.

You don't have to believe it. If you seriously immerse yourself in what this woman has given, then the conviction grows that what has just been said is a truth. And Annie Besant, her successor – another woman – has understood in a quite extraordinary way how to combine modern science, modern thinking, and a progressive outlook on life with the theosophical ethos and the theosophical movement in general.

Within the Theosophical Society, men and women work together. Never, in any way, does one have the feeling within the Society that gender plays any role in this. Yes, from one side, which has not grasped the Theosophical movement in its deepest essence, this movement has been called a feminine one; partly because it was founded by a woman, partly because perhaps now in the majority women work in the movement. This fact protects us above all from the prejudice that we could understand this matter in some kind of retrogressive, hostile sense.

But the theosophist is called upon to consider all these things in the light of spirituality, in the light of the highest spiritual culture. He must also do this with regard to this matter. Above all, we will notice that this women's issue, as it now presents itself to us, is a product of our modern world view, our modern thinking and feeling. The way it presents itself to us today would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Insofar as Theosophy is always concerned with clearly and distinctly understanding the spirit of humanity in different epochs, we will also have to clearly understand how this women's issue in particular has emerged from our culture. Theosophy is less concerned with criticizing and more with understanding in all directions. Therefore, it will be less programmatic about this issue of women's rights, but will rather have to explore what the cause of this issue is.

We do not get to the bottom of this issue as easily as we do with others. This is because Theosophy leads us deep into human nature. And this is more diverse and complicated than one might think. While the modern man could easily ignore the distinction between man and woman, the theosophist must look at this difference from the depth of human nature and ask himself whether, despite this difference, the peculiar cooperation that has emerged within the Theosophical Society could also benefit larger cultural circles, perhaps even give rise to a general world view on this question in the present day.

If we look back over time, we find that the perception of women, both of themselves and of the perception they had of the opposite sex, has changed greatly over time. Likewise, the external institutions within which the two sexes have lived have changed significantly. If we look at this superficially, we will not arrive at the real cause and basis. It is known that in the beginning of the time into which not history, but prehistory leads us, the woman played a substantially different role. It is known that patriarchy, the “father family”, with its peculiarly constituted inheritance law and other social institutions, arose from an original “mother family” - matriarchy, that woman had a privileged position with regard to matters relating to the offspring, such as inheritance law and so on.

The theosophist must ask himself: how is such a thing connected with the original spiritual forces of the world? This brings us to the discussion of a fact that has been touched on here several times, but which we must apply to this particular case. The basis of all human life in its historical development on earth is a natural one, one that has developed from an [instinctive] disposition to conscious, clear thinking, to conscious, clear institutions created by the intellect and certain moral concepts.

The original bonds of humanity had arisen from nature. Blood relationship was the original one. Institutions that created moral concepts are later placed in the place of ancient blood relationship.

The materialist sees nothing but the raw force of nature in this blood relationship. But anyone who has a spiritual worldview knows that what is expressed as instinct, what comes to the fore as drive, what is expressed as blood relationship, can all be traced back to spiritual forces, to spiritual beings that stand behind the sensual existence. Just as man today, more or less consciously, directs the social order, so originally the devas [or dhyans], divine powers, directed the context of humanity, [they ordered human conditions].

This working out of a spiritual basis, which is still unconscious to man, appears as drive and instinct. The bearer of this original instinct, based on spiritual essence, was woman. The ancient myths and legends of the peoples bear witness to this fact. [From the theosophical point of view this is easily provable, but this view can also be proved purely intellectually.] Only one thing needs to be mentioned. If you look at the images that go back to the earliest stages of human existence, you will have found in these images the tradition of an original female basis for the entire human race. The Greeks depicted their Zeus with a female bust.

The theosophical worldview takes us back to the very beginning of time, as far back as we can trace time on Earth, to those times when there was no gender separation, to those times of which we cannot speak in detail today, to those times when the sexes were not divided between two different individuals, but were united. Those familiar with scientific research will know that even natural science points to a being from prehistoric times that was not single-sex but two-sex. In this regard, I draw attention to the Darwinian Oskar Schmidt. Theosophy speaks of that time in which the pictorially represented prehistoric man was a fact. He was more inclined towards the female sex.

A little thought can make this clear. Reproduction was tied to the female sex at all times. That which was there as a basis was also expressed in the external social context. In the early days, this natural basis was translated into a kind of moral worldview, in terms of social institutions, rights and institutions.

That the spiritual power of man was particularly concentrated in woman, is shown to us even by the view that we find in Tacitus, where woman is seen as a prophetess, [called to proclaim from the spiritual world what will happen in the future – Velleda, Alruna –] who has to proclaim whether right or wrong exists, whether something should be undertaken or not. We find such views among various peoples. The fact that the spiritual, too, where it appears at the beginning of our times, where it appears as something new, as something wise, is rooted in the same natural foundation, emerges from such facts.

And now something else: Go back to the earliest times of religious world view, and you will find a common trait in all peoples that is connected with this natural basis of the human race, and on the other hand with the consciousness from which the oldest institutions and the thoughts and aspirations of humanity have developed. In sexual symbols, in images that are connected to this natural basis, the culture and religion of different peoples is expressed in very specific times. These are naive but beautiful and magnificent times when people, in sweet simplicity and naivety, associated nothing low or frivolous with these sexual symbols, where procreation was a power of nature and was symbolized in the woman, who showed herself in various forms of expression like the divine creation for them. There have been attempts to revive these views from a so-called sexual religion. There is no right to do it the way it was done. For the current basis of feeling is not such that one can feel one's way back to that original and unblemished state that was associated with these symbols, so that the way these old things are discussed today has something offensive about it for the connoisseur.

Only slowly and gradually did those institutions, those states of consciousness that are linked to the female origin of the human race, change into a different order, an order that, to put it briefly, was made by man, by the man who has broken away from this natural foundation, by the man who has nothing to do with the visible progress in the human race.

It is only through the law, through legal regulation, that the right of the man is introduced into the original right based on blood relationship, taken from the female point of view. Thus we see that it is only on this original basis of a religious world view, which starts from the generative powers of nature, that what we encounter in the remnants of ancient peoples, [Mongolian ancient tribes] as ancestral culture, develops. A power that worked directly was revered in woman.

Then, in place of the wise and the soothsayers, and in place of the veneration of the directly present female, there arises what is called the cult of the ancestors, the veneration of deceased members of the people who have rendered outstanding services for the good of the whole — male ancestors. They venerated what had an effect beyond death. You can still see this in the fact that the Mikado brings the message of peace and war to the graves of his ancestors. So we see the transition from female culture to male culture.

The conquest of institutions that have been linked to women by nature since time immemorial through reason and the thinking of man is slow and gradual. But something else is connected with this, something that I cannot better describe than as the transition from a primeval conservatism to an idealism that is gradually emerging in the world.

You can follow this in those periods of world development in which those old religious cultures of which I have spoken developed. These go back either to times when the divine-creative could be seen in the power of creation, or to times when it had long since died but still continued to work as something present. These cultures build on something in the past. At first, we find in world development those that build on humanity's starting point, that point to the old, to what has come from before, to what has been sacred since time immemorial, to nature, to the ancestors. This is the starting point of the human race, and gradually this view changes into a completely different one. In all peoples who have provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you will find the veneration of the ancestors in the veneration of the prophets, the veneration of those who proclaim the future. In all the peoples who provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you find, instead of ancestor worship, the worship of the prophets, the worship of those who proclaim the future, those who hold up the high ideals to the people. Primitive conservatism gradually gives way to idealism. The focus turns from the past to the future, even among the people from whom Christianity itself emerged. The prophets were the real great personalities, and hand in hand with them goes a detachment from the natural, from mere blood relationship, from all that points to the foundations of our race.

We see the tremendous depth of human development when we look at this turnaround. That which is connected with the relationship between the sexes, which is the subject of much discussion among anthropologists and others today, the so-called sense of shame, was not present at the starting point of our culture. [What was connected with the creation of man was not hidden; it was something natural, self-evident.] It only emerged at the time when a characterized change took place as a necessity. Where the power of nature gave way to reason and ideals, people began to cover what was considered to be a remnant of the natural foundations of the human race.

Take a closer look at this point. What is man ashamed of? Consider this feeling of shame in other areas. Everywhere you will find that man is ashamed when something is done by him in such a way that he actually more or less recognizes the demand that he could have done it better, that it is actually not right the way he did it. We can say something quite similar about the feeling of shame in general. It is there and refers to something that comes from ancient times and can be overcome, and which is as it should not be if we look to the future.

Here human instinct, human perception, points to something that the theosophical world view presents as realized in the distant future. Today I must point out that the development of humanity through the sexes is only a transitional stage, that just as humanity has emerged from the union of the two sexes in one individual, humanity is again heading for a state in which there are again not two, but only one sex. Thus you see our present development through the theosophical world view placed in a distant past and a distant future that are similar, that resemble each other in certain ways.

We can perceive how this fact is reflected in the most intimate expressions of the human race. Take a look at ancient artistic or semi-artistic representations of the divine creative power, at the way the ancient Egyptians associated it with the service of Isis, and compare it with the peculiar trait that emanates from Raphael's Madonna. What is natural, what is connected with the power of creation, can be seen to have been expressed in a semi-artistic way in ancient times. This creative power is shyly veiled in a Raphael Madonna, and we encounter a completely different, higher moment: love, a spiritual relationship that takes the place of the old natural relationship. The mother with the child, bathed in the magic of love. And the spiritual is expressed, as for example in the Sistine Madonna, in the protruding angel heads. The creative power is hinted at as a spiritual echo. There you see a great universal truth sensed by the artist.

The religions themselves take this path. Ascetic religions, such religions that are escapist, are not at the starting point of humanity. They only emerge at the time when the indicated change has taken place. It is magnificent and powerful in the times when this change is being prepared. The saviors in human development are mythically depicted as immaculately conceived. You have this with Buddha and with the other saviors of humanity and finally in the Christian religion itself. In religion, the original natural foundation is developed into the most sacred.

[Again, compare the Egyptian Isis service with these spiritualized religions.] This is wonderfully indicated in the transformation of Egypt, with the ideal and the spiritualized perception at the starting point of our era. Then you will feel this transformation in all humanity. That is why the theosophical world view is clear about the fact that the natural basis from which the human race originated is the external physiognomic expression of a spiritual being. This spiritual essence is the same that man will approach again in a conscious way in the future.

If we bear in mind that we are progressing from the spirit in its natural form to the spirit in its immediate form, then we will understand many things better that have taken place in the course of sexual development. Above all, we will better understand what I mentioned earlier: the replacement of ancient female institutions and female foundations by a male culture, in which we still live today. The natural basis was to be suppressed. At first it could only be suppressed in the area of external institutions, but otherwise it remained in place, and so we are confronted by a strange hybrid in our present-day institutions. Half of them are still based on what remains of the old natural basis with blood relationship, and half of them are steeped in human understanding, in moral institutions that have been poured over them. In our current institutions, both elements peek out in a colorful mix. [Basically, man has only whitewashed what the original natural basis of women's culture has provided him with; it shows through everything.] However, we will turn to the future with its culture and efficiency. Then this spirit will show itself in its actual, appropriate form, and in the light of a completely different view than the one that originally existed. When man originally wanted to raise himself to the Divine, when he wanted to raise his eyes to Him to whom the highest honor and worship must be paid, then he turned to the Power that is germinating and sprouting through man himself, creating naturally.

More and more, this view is changing into a completely different one, and today we are only just at the dawn of this other view. But for a select few, it has long since emerged. Three words in the wonderful, ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom already express the germ of this world view: Tat twam asi – that art thou. – And what does this mean? It means a great deal. When the Vedanta sage immersed himself in this “That thou art”, he turned to the whole great universe, he turned to everything outside of himself, to that with which he felt at one. He then said to every stone: You are of the same nature and essence as I – that thou art. Just as my hand belongs to me, so the stone belongs to a being, to which I also belong.

Everything around us is an invitation to look outside, to seek the divine in the world itself, not just to worship the spirit in the creative and generative forces that work through human nature itself. Tat twam asi is the worship of the divine spirit in all of nature, and with that, at the same time, the call to carry this divine spirit into our entire environment, to transform this environment so that the original state around us from which the human being himself has sprung will arise again.

From asexuality comes sexuality. From the male-female comes the male and the female. This difference will again submerge in the common, objective spiritual world when man will find his self in the great universe, when he will feel brotherhood and connection with the whole great universe, which has no gender, which is all the more perfect the more exalted it is above all similar differences.

When this thought lives completely so that he can permeate culture with this thought of the higher human being exalted above all gender, then the sun has risen. This is what shines for you today as the dawn of a new culture. Then the future of our culture is self-evident, the culture into which we must enter when idealism is further developed, and this culture must not carry anything in the outer world that has anything to do with gender. So we enter institutions and facilities that show us a cultural environment, a moral environment, that applies equally to men and women, that is the same for men and women.

That is the theosophical thought, and the theosophical ideal is to reorganize our institutions according to this, which have emerged [from an originally female culture that has passed through a male culture, to bring them into a higher state in which these two epochs will only exist in the Hegelian sense as dissolved moments].

This can only be in a culture that is spiritual in the best sense of the word, a culture that starts from what has nothing to do with gender differentiation. The one that is emerging in the theosophical movement is such a culture. For what does the theosophical worldview cultivate? The higher self in man, that nature and essence which has nothing at all to do with man and woman. For that in man which the theosophist looks at, that which he makes the object of his special consideration and study, the higher man, the spiritual man, appears in one embodiment as man, in another as woman. The one who lives as a man today has, like the other who lives as a woman, passed through as many male and female incarnations. Man and woman were an outward expression of the inner higher individuality, which is neither male nor female.

Thus, something that is male-female at the same time already lives in today's man, something that unites both sides. And a worldview that shows this male-female as the basis of both through the embodiments, a worldview that cultivates this, only prepares the ground on which man and woman are completely equal, not only in our legal institutions, but also in their feelings. Through “Tat twam asi” we overcome gender differences, and the cooperation between men and women in the Theosophical Society is a kind of model, a small beginning for a great, powerful culture that must develop in this direction in the future, where the two sexes will not live side by side in abstract equality, because the diversity can be greater than it is today. But what is the same is what matters. That is the external world that is formed around us.

What matters is not what we carry within us, but what lives around us outside. As long as man is selfish, as long as the whole culture is based on domination and personality, man draws the impulses for institutions from his female or male personality. But as soon as he creates what is grounded in the higher self, the inner being can be shaped as it likes, the outer world, which is reflected in the inner being, is the same. To use an image, set up two concave mirrors, a convex one next to a concave one, and place the same image in front of both. The convex mirror, the one that curves outwards, will show a different image than the concave mirror, but it is the same image in both cases. As long as there is male and female in the physical body, there will of course still be a convex and a concave mirror, but the same external world will be reflected. It must not be shaped in a one-sided way by one sex or the other.

Those who have grasped the spirit will see something infinitely higher in it. Only a materialistic view sees the spiritual as an effect of matter. The theosophist, however, comes to the conviction that all matter originates only from the spirit, that everything that is material today was once spiritual, and that everything we could observe at the starting point originates from earlier, spiritual foundations. In the same way, a future natural super-sexuality will arise from the present super-sexuality, which man himself creates. We will create our outer institutions, which we will bring into the world, to an equal extent out of the spirit of woman and man. They themselves will be the cause of the later natural effects. What man creates as asexual culture will later create a super-sexual nature.

Therefore, it was quite natural that the original culture reverted to the worship of that which was conservatively held from ancient times, to the worship of creative natural forces, to the worship of ancestors. The spirit preceded nature. Through it, nature was created. If one wanted to look up to the spirit, one had to look at the dawn of the world. But if you want to see the future, you have to work with it as a human being – in both the conscious and unconscious state. Then the prophetic view of the future takes the place of the old cult of ancestors and the worship of the family. We ourselves must prepare today what is to be in the future, what kind of external culture is to exist.

Thus a great, all-embracing cosmic horizon leads us to a solution of the women's question that opens up great perspectives for us. If today, through the theosophical worldview, the higher human nature is sought in man or woman and gender remains a completely private matter, then what is really being covered is not considered. In a sense, this is the higher development of feeling, which emerges as a sense of shame in times of transition. What used to be a shy concealment is now a holy overcoming.

This kind of reaching out and looking forward is a great and powerful ideal for the future. By developing the higher human being in man and woman, the theosophical worldview awakens such feelings in man and woman that create culture. Noble, beautiful feelings that transcend everything base must arise from this cultivation of the higher human nature. Culture originated from a kind of female foundation. And when we look back to ancient times, we can find the female generative powers revered as divine nature everywhere. This then developed into a [male] culture. Initially, we have a true antithesis to this [male] culture in today's women's movement, which can also be explained from it, [today the women's movement is a revolt against this male culture, and it is entirely justified].

But every one-sidedness in the world shows us its complement. What confronts us in external history presents itself to us ideally in a kind of counter-image. The one-sided older culture seeks a counterpart. The old feminine culture, the Isis culture, finds its ideal antithesis in the Osiris cult, which was dismembered, perished, and for which Isis longs. This is the image through which the female wants to complement herself, where a new thinking takes the place of the old culture.

Then another ideal appears in Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity had to be a masculine level of culture. But it was complemented. Just as the culture of Isis was complemented by an ideal of man, so this culture of man was complemented by an ideal of woman: in the medieval cult of Mary.

Goethe also hinted at the contrast between female and male culture in his “Faust”. “The eternal feminine draws us up,” he says in connection with the preceding verses. This is what he envisioned: higher culture will be the one in which the female counterpart of the male no longer needs to be longed for in the female and the female ideal no longer longed for in the culture of men, where the feminine no longer needs to be drawn up, but where the higher divine, the higher self, appears as the drawing force in man. This higher self, the whole human being, is what the theosophical worldview strives for. How could it not be that women are the first to understand what is now, at dawn, to be the culture of the future.

For thousands of years we have had a culture of man. Our whole culture is a male culture. Our modern justice, theology, medicine and so on are almost exclusively products of the male culture. Those who approach these things more deeply will easily find a physiological expression of the male soul. But if it is to be different now, then it is self-evident that the inspirer must be the woman. If the theosophical movement is to be understood more quickly, then it must be understood in this direction. Those who do not see it this way can call it a feminine in a pejorative sense today. But those who are clear about the fact that the great progress of culture takes place from the feminine to the masculine and from there to the masculine-feminine will find it self-evident that women can best understand this theosophical world view.

It is more difficult for a man to [free himself from the prejudices of today's culture], because he has grown up from an early age with the results of a man's culture. He should literally transform himself inwardly. He will also have to do so if he wants to be up to date. But all that is to come also prescribes for us the free interaction, the completely free cooperation of man and woman, the absolute equality in the perception of the higher self, the actual spirit of the human being.

Thus the former ideal of the eternal in man, which we encounter in the Osiris cult, and the eternal in woman, which has found a mystical formal expression in the new age and has been lived by poets and mystics, will be transformed into the ideal of the harmoniously structured human being, who is not afflicted with any one-sidedness. We can foresee a culture all around us that will bear the outer physiognomy of supersexuality. That is the task of the theosophical world view. We do not work with phrases, with words and programs, not with demands, but we seek to awaken the living life in the soul from the contemplation of the spirit, to open up the source that is self-creating. We do not just speak as Theosophists, but we indicate what, according to the nature of the facts, must develop in these souls.

So you can see from this particular question that European spiritualism, European theosophy, has something quite different to say than to reproduce the remains of old worldviews that have retained the cult of the ancestors. They have spirituality, the reference to the spiritual, but they do not have what we have as those who have to work according to ideals, not according to old habits. Spiritualism is certainly a necessity for us and it must come into the world; but not a spiritualism that carries the achievements of our culture to the graves of our ancestors – although we can understand and respect such a thing – but a spiritualism that is prophetic, that carries the best that we can develop within us to be burned for a fire that will be the beacon of our future.

It has often been emphasized here on other occasions that what is called spiritual science or, in more recent times, theosophy, that these are by no means mere theories floating in worlds far away, that theosophy does not merely seek to satisfy curiosity about higher worlds. Theosophy should not be something far-removed from the world, something unworldly. If it wants to fulfill its task, its mission, it must draw the forces and the impulses for its work from the higher worlds, and its work towards its goal and its mission must take place under the authority of these forces. Only then can it help in the further development and salvation of humanity. It would be a rather idle knowledge of the higher worlds if one did not want to apply it in practice, to life. For no one can understand life who does not know the deeper forces on which it is based. These forces do not lie on the surface; they lie hidden in the depths. Just as iron, when first seen as a substance, does not reveal that it contains electricity, which only becomes apparent when it is rubbed, so too these forces must lie dormant in iron and must first be drawn out of it. If we wanted to work on the service of progress for humanity without knowing these hidden realities, then our work could only be superficial. Beneficial work is only possible if we explore the deeper forces and entities.

Of course, we must also recognize the goals of our work. What does man work for? For the future! But nothing lies in the lap of the future that is not already present in the present. Let us look at the plant. It does not yet bear flowers or fruit. It will only produce these in the future. But the forces for these flowers and fruits already lie dormant in the plant. It already contains in an invisible form what will happen in the future. And only because people usually remember how similar plants have borne blossoms and fruits can they say that this plant will bloom in this way and not in another way, and bear fruit in this way and not in another way. But if man could see into the interior of the plant, then he could see the forces at work in the plant that will produce those flowers and those fruits.

There is something that lies in the future and that we cannot know, whose development we cannot foresee, and that is the body of the human being. What will one day be in the physical world already rests today in humanity, just as the flower and fruit already rest in the plant. If we are not able to delve into what lies dormant in the womb of humanity today, we cannot become rulers over the forces that will unfold in the future. Those who want to work on the development of humanity are thereby working on something that has not yet existed, and those who want to grasp that must descend below the surface. The theosophical worldview must take on this task and carry it out in practice.

Nowhere is the eminently practical nature of the theosophical world view more evident than in the field of child education. In the child, we have before us, so to speak, the riddle that lies hidden in the future. And every day we have to solve this riddle anew. For the child of seven is not the same child as he was at six, and he is not the same as the child of fourteen or sixteen. Only when we are in harmony with the deep forces that work in secret, only then can we approach the numerous questions in the field of education that are so burning for humanity today. Real orientation in all these questions will only be possible when the theosophical view dominates people's minds.

Today we want to take a closer look at the mission that Theosophy has in modern culture in relation to educational issues. To do this, it is necessary that we know the whole structure of human nature. We know that, in the sense of spiritual science, man is a complex being. For those who look more deeply, the material body is only part of the human being. This physical body combines the same substances that are present in the natural world. In the human body, they are combined in a highly complex interaction. Science tells us: When we look at a machine, we see the effect of the materials of which it is composed; but when we look at a living being, we see not a mere structure of dead materials, but a body that is permeated by life, which regulates the physical forces and brings them to life.

This life was described by an earlier science as “life force”. But today's materialistic science claims that there is no “life force”, that substances develop life within themselves. In recent times, however, people have been moving away from this point of view. It is seen that one does not get very far with this theory, that one must indeed reckon with some kind of life-force to explain the living. But even in this sense of the newer natural sciences, the theosophical view does not speak when it speaks of the second link in the human being, the etheric or life body. It is not concerned with mere theorizing, it does not speculate, but its way is to develop the higher vision in man himself. Just as other beings are only present in the world for man if he has the organs to perceive these beings, just as he perceives light and color only if he has the eye for it, just as he perceives sounds only perceives sounds only if he possesses the ear for them, so for man the higher beings are only present if he has developed organs within himself to perceive them through the training that has often been mentioned here.

If there were a man who had no eyes but organs to perceive electricity, for example, if such a man could see the forces at work that ignite the light here in the room, that play back and forth outside in the telegraphic lines, how very different the world would appear to such a person! With each new sense, new worlds arise for man, and slumbering within him lie the senses that make the higher worlds perceptible to him. They can be developed. No one can justifiably assert that such worlds cannot exist. It would be the same if he were to say that there are no higher worlds because he cannot see them. It would be the same as if a blind man were to say about color that it does not exist because he cannot perceive it.

But if a person has developed through schooling, then the etheric body is an experience for him; he can then see it. In its size, it is almost the same as the physical body. One often imagines the etheric body as consisting of a finer substance, a kind of mist, but that does not correspond to reality. Rather, it consists of forces and currents of a spiritual nature that interact.

The third link, the astral body, differs from the etheric body in that, while in the latter the forces of growth, reproduction and so on are at work, it is the essence of the astral body to feel and to be conscious. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of desires and passions.

Beyond these three members is what makes man the crown of earthly creation: the self-aware ego, the center of the human being, the innermost power in man. So when we have a fully developed human being before us, we have a structure of four members before us.

But you can only understand how to act as an educator if you understand this structure of the human being correctly, if you know that it does not play the same role in a newly born child as in a child of seven or fourteen years, if you know that the development of these links is different at each age level of the adolescent. Only when you know all this can you solve the puzzle that the child presents to us day after day. And we learn to understand all of this best when we start from the assumption that we see how the human being lives before birth.

Before the child is born, we have enclosed the child's physical body, enclosed in the mother's body. Nothing can reach the child without passing through the mother's body. No ray of light, no external influence reaches the child directly. It rests enclosed in another body; one physical body rests in another. Birth consists of the physical mother's shell being shed. But in this moment, from a spiritual point of view, not the whole human being is born, but only the physical body. The second birth takes place gradually, not in a single moment like the physical one. It essentially takes place when the child changes teeth. At this point, something similar happens in the spiritual realm to what happens in the physical birth.

Up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric shell, just as it was surrounded by a physical shell before the physical birth, the womb. And so one could say: up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric mother. Just as one cannot get to the child before the physical birth other than through the mother's body, one can no more get to the child's actual etheric body before the age of seven. And just as one must care for the mother before the physical birth if one wants to care for the child, so too, in order to care for and develop the child's etheric body, one must, until the seventh year, keep away everything that could harm it and give it everything that can promote its development. In the seventh year, the etheric covering is pushed back, the etheric body of the human being is born, very similar to the physical birth of the physical body.

And later on there is a third birth, the birth of the astral body. When the human being has shed his etheric cover in the seventh year, he has not yet fully developed his astral body; to the spiritual seer's eye he is still surrounded by an outer astral cover. He is wrapped in this until he reaches sexual maturity; then it is also shed: the actual astral body of the human being is born.

The educator must know all this. He must know about the physical, etheric and astral birth of the human being, because the individual educational epochs are based on this. He must know that just as it would be nonsensical to want to reach the physical child in the mother's body, it is also nonsensical to want to reach something that concerns the etheric body through education up to the age of seven, or something that concerns the astral body until sexual maturity. The limbs of the human being are the carriers of very special soul forces. The physical body is the carrier of the physical sense organs; the etheric body is initially the carrier of the growth and reproduction forces. But that is not all, because all these different bodies are worked on from within by the human ego. This works from the inside. And so the bodies of the human being are particularly related to the soul forces. The ether body is the carrier of memory, of all lasting habits and inclinations, of temperament.

We find concepts of the intellect, images of external objects and so on in the astral body. But when the image is also a symbol, a parable, when it rises to artistic imagination, when it becomes productive in the soul, then the etheric body is the carrier. What we call judgment, criticism, intellectual activity depends on the astral body.

If we know all this, then we will be able to apply it in relation to the emergence of these limbs in the course of the child's development. If we know that the etheric body is enclosed until the seventh year, we also know that until then we must not act on what the properties of this etheric body are. Only when it is released by the second birth may we educate it. There is a saying that can spread light and should be the basic principle for the education of a child up to the age of seven. Aristotle expresses this saying when he says: 'Man is the imitator of animals'. Imitation is what characterizes the child up to the age of seven. The child must see what it is supposed to learn, it must see and hear it. There must be something in its environment that is intended to have an effect on the child. It should not be taught overnight, but rather it should be shown and exemplified what it is supposed to imitate.

Exemplarity and imitation are the two magic words for a child up to seven years of age. What kind of teachings you give them, what principles you have, is not important, only what you do in the presence of the child. That alone is important. The example is what is actually effective. What the child is to acquire must be introduced into the physical world. One should avoid, as far as possible, allowing something into the child that the child should not imitate. A thousand good teachings are of no use to a child of this age; the child should imitate what it experiences with its physical body in the physical world. A little story will show you how far this imitation can go. A child of five years, who had been well-educated until then, suddenly took money from his parents' cash box. They were extremely upset. The child stole and gave the money to another child. The parents could not understand how their child came to steal. The explanation is simple. The child saw how the parents took money from the cash box and simply imitated them.

We can see from this how far we must go to avoid anything we do not want our children to imitate when it is also allowed to adults. Anyone who observes a little sees that children copy writing – like signs, without understanding the meaning. The meaning of what is written can only be conveyed to the child when the etheric body is born; but it can imitate the writing before that. Learning to write should begin by having the child first copy the shapes of the letters. Later, one can then explain to him what he can already do.

Today, far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that meaning should be involved in everything that is taught to the child. But it is far more important to ensure that the child's entire environment is set up in such a way that the external forces surrounding the child have an awakening and life-promoting effect on its etheric body. — In doing so, we recall Goethe's words: The eye is formed by light for light. The animal that is forced to live in dark caves gradually loses its eyesight and becomes blind. Light has a creative and formative effect on the eye. The forces of nature create organs and develop them. A human being is not yet complete when he is born. Every ray of light continues to have a formative effect on the eye. And so everything in the child's environment can have the effect of awakening life or stunting it.

Here spiritual science shines through to the smallest details. For example, it is not unimportant whether the child's surroundings are red or blue. The same color is by no means suitable for a lively, perhaps even nervous, child as for one that is quiet or even apathetic. Blue is the right color for the latter, red for the former. Thus, even clothing can have a beneficial or debilitating effect on the child. In this way, it is influenced right down to the brain and heart, these instruments of the soul. It depends on the child's environment whether these organs dry up or mature into liveliness, whether they develop slowly and sluggishly or whether they are awakened to active life.

Education has to ensure that what is an indicator of inner prosperity is taken into account: pleasure and joy. These are not there for nothing; they should not be suppressed, especially not in childhood. They should not be suppressed, but ennobled. Thus, for example, the body's need for a particular kind of nourishment is indicated by the fact that one has a desire for it. In this way the body indicates that it needs it in order to thrive. Everything that gives pleasure, that arouses interest, has the effect of creating organs. The organs are brought to life by this, and regulated.

But if a child becomes bored, then you kill something, you have a weakening effect on your organs; and that is very bad. Because what has not been developed by the age of seven is lost forever. The whole direction, the growth tendency is indeed given by then. One might try – or rather, one had better not try – to test the truth of these assertions of spiritual science by, for instance, giving one child a lot of eggs to eat and another very few. The latter child will show remarkably healthy instincts for what his body needs as nourishment; the former, on the other hand, will not. This is because an excessive amount of egg white extinguishes healthy nourishment instincts.

So it is in the seventh year that the child's etheric body is born. The body that is the carrier of habits, temperament, memory, is freed. All these qualities must be cultivated in the period up to sexual maturity. This is the epoch in which one approaches the child with the subject matter of learning. For this time, not only what is present in the physical world applies. Imitation is the magic word up to the age of seven; there is now also a guiding principle for the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity: imitation and authority. Just as the child imitated before, so now, to use a saying of Goethe's, it must choose its hero and follow him on his path up to Mount Olympus. If you expound the most beautiful moral principles or pass harsh judgments in front of the child, you will find that such teachings are of no use to the child. However, if you place a personality in the child's environment as an authority, then it has an effect. Not moral principles, but embodied morality should be given to the child. The soul and conscience of the child are not developed by mere teaching, but by the child saying to itself when it sees such a personality: What he does is right. And it learns to look up with reverence to such a personality.

Nothing is more beneficial for later life than reverence cultivated in childhood, nothing more fruitful for the whole of life. When a child hears about someone who is a person to whom everyone looks up with reverence, and then sees this person for the first time and feels a shiver of awe run through his heart, too, then that is a wonderful basis for education. Respect and authority, these words must gain resonance if one wants to have a firm basis for education.

The child can only properly follow principles if it has previously seen them embodied in a person. Only then do the principles become second nature, or rather part of the etheric body. They remain in the memory. Anything missed during this time remains missed for life. To exercise the memory, the child must also absorb a great deal of material; he can then later permeate it with his own judgment; now he must first practice the memory. Later he must have material in order to be able to judge it. It is bad for the developing human being to be called upon to criticize too early. First it must get to know the world, must learn from great historical examples, must feel reverence. One must paint for the child in words and pictures what great personalities have achieved. The pictorial imagination must be cultivated in this period.

In this respect, the current materialistic way of thinking is in a sorry state. One must compare two things. Up to the age of seven, only the physical organs are developed, then the character and temperament; and we have seen how education can have the effect of awakening or stifling life. A child that is healthy in body and soul will always prefer a toy that it has created itself to a finished, beautiful and complicated thing. His rag doll, which has been given eyes, nose and mouth by ink blots, will be a dearer toy to him than the most beautiful doll bought. Why? Because when the child looks at his beloved rag doll, he has to do something, because he has to complement what he has in front of him through his imagination and power of imagination. The imagination must work, otherwise it withers away.

There is a great difference between letting a child develop by putting together artificial structures from individual parts and having something alive in front of you. There will come a time when people will no longer worship the construction kit. Truly, the occultist should not become sentimental, but here is a point where he is tempted to become so. He sees the materialistic way of thinking developing in the tender, childlike growing human being and knows that it comes from having put together dead individual things into a dead whole in the nursery. Just as the building blocks produce a lifeless thing, so the materialistic point of view achieves a lifeless world development. The materialist's brain has atrophied; it cannot be led to the living, cannot be pointed to it.

Therefore, give the child something alive, so that his brain may be awakened to life. Give him the simple toys of the country fair, where, for example, two figures set the blacksmith's hammer in motion, or a picture book in which figures pulled on strings can move. That is much better, that is alive. That is much more beneficial for the child than if he puts together dead things from dead things. There the child sees life, there it seeks the reason for the movement. This is how the child's soul develops. — All the pain in the world is deposited on the soul of the spiritual researcher when he has to see how the wrong things are brought into the child's environment. The spiritual researcher sees the forces in the organs of the developing human being wither and know: they are permanently withered.

In the period after the child's second dentition, what the etheric body is the carrier of begins to develop: a lasting stock of habits. If you want to cultivate calmness, security, simplicity and straightforwardness in the child, a personality with these character traits must walk before him as a living human being until the age of fourteen to sixteen. He must learn to develop these qualities by observing them in others. But the etheric body is also the carrier of all artistic powers. We must realize what should be given to the child artistically during this period. If the child's taste is spoiled during this time by bad pictures and so on, then it remains spoiled. From the age of seven, the child is also receptive to comparison. In this respect, there is the greatest lack of understanding in our time. For example, research is being done into the meaning of children's songs. Meaning should underlie everything. But children's songs, such as “Fly, little beetle, fly!... Your mother is in Pommerland” — that is, in Kinderland — they don't want to have any meaning at all; they are partly symbols, partly they should just give euphony.

The point is that from the age of seven, sound and color are transformed from the sensual into the meaningful. Our materialistic age is not exactly suited to this. It is not inclined to make itself understood allegorically. If, for example, you want to show the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis as a symbol for the emergence of the soul from the body, you yourself must also believe in such a parable as reality. Who really does that today? You may say to yourself half pityingly, the child with his still undeveloped mind cannot yet grasp what I mean, so I will make it clear to him in a symbolic way. But if you delve into the spirit of things, then such a parable is a profound mysterious process; then what the doll and the butterfly show us in a subordinate sphere is the same process that is repeated at a higher level when the soul emerges from the body.

If we realize this, if we feel it vividly, if we take this process not just as a comparison but as a pictorial expression of a higher truth, then the power of this idea flows into the child's soul. Everywhere, in everything, the educator should see a parable for the eternal and pour the power of this parable into the child's soul. Only then will he be able to work fruitfully. And this is not just the affair of some specially gifted or chosen person, but every educator can work in this way, every educator can impart these things from soul to soul and thus awaken productive life in the etheric body of the child.

With the time of sexual maturity, the last cover is then removed. Only now has the time come for the child to awaken to criticism and discernment, only now can abstract teachings be given, not before. And it is wrong to lead a person to their own judgment earlier than this. It is essential for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen that religious ideas also be brought to life. Religious education is just as essential for this period as the right physical environment was for the previous period. The child should not just hear about what is in the worlds beyond, but faith should be implanted in him as a matter of course.

But nothing is worse than calling a person to judgment before the astral body has awakened. First he should learn to worship, then to judge. First he should possess a great deal of memory knowledge before penetrating it with his mind. But to call him to judgment and confession before he can distinguish is the greatest corruption. First he should be imbued with a sense of authority, only then can one appeal to his judgment. It is not there before; it has not yet developed. It only develops in the years before and after sexual maturity. It is therefore grotesque when young people of eighteen appear and give their judgments, and even write thick books in which they want to overturn what has been created over thousands of years. In this respect, much will be able to change through spiritual science. Through right education, judgment can be formed and guided in the right way.

On the whole and in particular, it should be shown how one can become the right educator through a deeper knowledge of the development of the individual members of the human being. If someone says that one cannot know about this, then it must be answered: Just try educating people in this way, in the sense of these three births, and you will find the proofs of the theosophical truths in life and in practice. It is not a matter of formulating theories or principles, but of putting them into practice. The principles are good that prove beneficial in life, that, when applied in life, bear witness to their influence on culture in a beneficial way. What promotes culture, what awakens life, that is true. When the teachings that relate to the supernatural are applied, one will receive the proof of their truth. It will be recognized that Theosophy is something eminently practical, that it is not foreign and far removed from life, but that it is full of life and awakens life, that it gives strength and security to the human being. And what is more important than this in the education of a child? Education should bring down into the visible, into the sensory, what lies hidden in the supersensible. Therein lies the key to what happens in the childhood of the human being. The full significance of the question of education arises when we realize that every human being is a mystery that we as educators must solve by truly delving into their inner being.

Answer to question

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: The best way to counteract and eradicate this is to let the child achieve what it wants to achieve through this spirit of contradiction, so that the child experiences that what has been achieved is wrong and that it is harming itself by doing so. By forbidding, instructing and so on, little is achieved, and in most cases even more contradiction is provoked. The child learns best through its own experience.

Question: How can we explain the influence of colors on children?

Answer: Take the following example: If you look at a white surface with red squares on it, and then after a while look at an empty white surface, you will find that the squares that you previously saw as red now appear green to your eye on the empty white surface. The red that one was looking at has turned into green in the person. Green is now a soothing, calming color. Even the overly lively, nervous child, who has a lot of red in his environment, transforms this red into soothing, calming green.

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: It is so harmful to young people because it leads to impoverishment in later years. People then have no understanding for certain things. One can only judge about what one has experienced oneself. The power of judgment, summoned up too early, puts a stop to the whole broad reality of life. Life becomes impoverished; because only those who know can judge. Hence the rapidly impoverishing writers of our time.

Question: The sexual question: Should we educate children?

Answer: The question that is now so often asked in discussions about whether to explain sexual processes to children is often answered: I do not want to and must not tell the child any untruths. Well, one should not tell the child an untruth, one should tell him the whole truth, but a truth that lies in a completely different area than in the banal description of the physical processes of conception and birth. Our ancestors did not tell their children untruths when they said to them: “Your mother is in Pommerland, fly, little beetle, fly!” Pommerland is the land of children, the land of the soul's home. There is also a spiritual aspect to “flying”. People knew more than people today, they knew about the spiritual processes that take place at the physical birth of a child, they knew that these processes are more important, that birth is not just a physical act. And in this sense, we should also speak to children today when the question of the origin of man arises for them. We should tell them in the most beautiful poetic images about the soul that descends to give birth, we should fill their soul with images full of spiritual beauty and purity, holiness and reverence. We cannot reach high enough, we cannot be poetic enough when we place these images in their souls. And when the time comes when, with sexual maturity, the physical processes of conception and birth also become clear to them, these will appear to children only as what they are, as the inessential. Their soul, filled with high, sacred, awe-inspiring images and ideas, will regard the birth of the body as a more trivial matter.

The present cultural conditions and in particular the perspective on the conditions of the next future will certainly ascribe more and more importance to the human self-education. This evening I would like to say something about that, even if only by way of a hint. Expressly I would like to stress from the start that this talk wants to speak on the usual self-education and not on the education for spiritual research. The usual self-education has to precede the education for spiritual research; it is not only of importance for the latter, but generally for every human being.

Everybody certainly feels already with the word self-education that in a certain respect, this word indicates, actually, something contradictory or at least something whose execution causes big difficulties. Why this? Simply because education requires the support of something strange, of somebody outranking the child to be educated. But if one speaks of self-education, one means, of course, that education which the human being can grant to himself, that means that education where the human being is educator and pupil at the same time. With it, a big life difficulty is certainly called.

Let us consider what one can say about the education of the child, of the young human being, from the viewpoint of spiritual science. You find it summarised in my booklet The Education of the Child from the Viewpoint of Spiritual Science. It is impossible, of course, to state even introductorily today, what I have written in that booklet. But I would like to point to the fact that if we pursue the development of the young human being we get around to accepting certain main impulses of education as it were up to a certain degree of maturity of this human being. There we realise that about up to the seventh year of the child, up to the second dentition, the education has to start from the imitative instinct of the child. I have stressed in that writing that that is more important than all rules of morality and all other instructions for the education of the child in these first years which the child sees and hears from the adults in its surroundings. If we go on, we find that important period which begins with the second dentition and lasts possibly until sexual maturity.

There we find again if we get free from all prejudices and look only at the real development of the human being, at the real conditions of this development that authority is the most significant impulse of education for these years. A healthy education for these years comes about if the child faces adults in whom he can trust, so that it can form its principles, its rules of conduct based on authority of these human beings without intervening with any pale intellectual idea or any immature criticism. The authoritative principle is the basic educational principle for these years.

If we pursue the young human being up to the twentieth, twenty-first years, we find as the essentials the maturity of reason and in particular the view up to an impersonal ideal, so to a purely spiritual educational impulse that stands over him what the human being himself can be at this age. This is just the being of the ideal for which we strive and have the feeling any time, in particular as young people, that our whole behaviour and being are not really commensurate to the ideal that we can never really reach it. Not before these periods are over, the human being arrives at that epoch of his earth existence in which he can begin self-education.

With the exception of the third educational impulse which is also for the young human being in such a way that he takes it as an ideal from the great impulses of world history, and that other human ideals are given to him that he takes over also from the outside, the other educational impulses are founded upon an ideal, upon the relation to something still strange, to something that is assumed to be more perfect. That is why the pupil faces the educational impulses as something strange, he looks up to them.

If one has really to speak of self-education, it is a given that one cannot speak as one has spoken of the educational impulses for the first years, and in that is not only contained the logical-inconsistent, but the ideal-inconsistent.

If the human being has to become his own educator, one has to assume that the impulses of that are in him. But if the human being has to become his own educator, does it not at once suggest itself that he less improves himself with this own education, or that he makes his living conditions richer than rather to restrict them? Does it not suggest itself at once that he undertakes the self-education according to certain things which are already in him which he has taken into his head or has accepted, and that he neglects the rich possibilities which may come from his inside, so that he could easily restrict himself by such a self-education instead of increasing and perfecting it? Does this contradiction not suggest itself?

Yes, we see—because of the conditions of civilisation—that necessarily self-education becomes more and more the object of consideration that everywhere the views about self-education appear. We can understand this. We do not want to go back to the ancient India or Egypt and to understand how there a certain caste classification put the human being to a certain place of life from the start and made it impossible to him to develop freely, and that the social order dictated or even dictates today how he had or has to behave.

We do not need going back to these old times. We can go to those times, which still project in ours, and we realise that the human being was or still is defined by blood relationship, by the fact that he was or is affiliated to a family, to a caste and so on. But we also realise on the other side that from this social structure just in our present something else forms that confronts the human being with the other human being, so that human being and human being face each other in the social order. Yes, we see even that not only human being and human being face each other, but that the human being is on his own more and more if he feels confronted to nature and universe.

We realise that he depends on his own judgement in the course of his life, on his convictions, on how he can think about moral, aesthetic, religious relations. It is quite natural that the human being who is more on his own must have the requirement: I have to look into myself what confronted me as a human being to the human being what puts me generally as a human being adequately in the world. We can understand that under these conditions more and more one calls for self-education. How the human being has to behave if he has to position himself in life and world according to particular conventional rules, this can be put into the education of the child. However, as our life develops and has to develop more and more, because the conditions of this development cannot be turned back, it turns out that the human being has to feel called in every situation of life in which he faces another human being, actually, to develop an unbiased judgement over and over again.

There he has to work on himself his whole life through to get a bigger and bigger perfection towards the world. The most important impulses for it are not given, actually, during our childhood, but when the human being has to gain his own position in the world, so that he is on his own according to his age. Then he has to begin becoming his own educator when he does no longer feel the urge to submit to other educators. Thus, we see our literature and our public life flooded with all possible considerations about the development of the personality, about the attempts to find the harmony of life and so forth. This is comprehensible for our time. However, someone who looks deeper into these things notices soon that within such contemporary attempts just that is often expressed which I have characterised as an impulse which limits life instead of improving and enriching it.

There we realise that one follows this or that ideal to give instructions with which the human being is able to work on his thinking. The other prefers physical instructions, prescribes for all human beings what he himself likes mostly maybe according to his palate and preference, gives all kinds of outer physical education or prescribes this or that diet, this or that daily organisation and so forth. However, I would like to stress from the start that I do not criticise these attempts completely; much good can be in them. However, a lot can also work one-sidedly, as for example the attempts which go back to the book In Tune with the Infinite (1897) by Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958). Somebody who dedicates himself to such attempts and makes a narrow concept of a harmonious life, develops and improves not so much his vitality, but restricts and limits it even if he may experience a feeling of well-being or inner satisfaction or maybe even bliss because of such a restriction. However, one can ignore that just with these attempts in the present the strangest peculiarities appear and give everybody the opportunity, without occupying himself very much with these matters, to recommend that as something generally human for which he has personal preferences.

One has to go deeper into the human nature if one wants to speak spiritual-scientifically about self-education. This is just the characteristic of spiritual science that it avoids the one-sidedness of the other attempts. It has as it were these other attempts as small circles around itself, and it wants to be the big circle, which wants to recognise the conditions for the single human life from the devotion to the whole nature of the human being. It is always more comfortable to dedicate yourself to one-sided directions which promise to restore health possibly in short time or to improve memory or to get practical results in life. The way of spiritual science is more difficult and more uncomfortable, but it is that which is based on the whole nature of the human being.

Speaking of self-education we maybe can get a tip thereby how self-education is to be managed favourably if we consider that already at that time when the human being has to be educated by others a certain self-education intervenes. This may appear as an even bigger contradiction than the earlier intimated one; but it is not. For spiritual science shows that the human self is different from that which is enclosed in the immediate personality. Yes, the whole spiritual-scientific consideration is based on the fact that the human being can exceed himself as it were without losing himself. Do you already find any example of that which spiritual science wants to represent in much more comprehensive way in all areas of existence, actually?

Yes, two things in the usual life already show that the human being gets beyond his personal and can stay, so to speak, with himself, does not need to lose himself. One of them is sympathy, shared joy, compassion, comprehensive love. What is this love based on? It appears not so mysterious only as it is because the human being accepts the habitual easily. As well as the savage does not ask why the sun rises and sets, but accepts the habitual, and the human being only begins thinking about rising and setting if he is cultivated, the human being does also not think about shared joy and compassion. Not before one begins recognising the sense and the purpose of life, something like shared joy and compassion become life riddles. We need only to imagine one thing, and we will realise at once that shared joy and compassion are extensions of the human self.

Joy and grief are the most intimate experiences of the human being. If we face another human being, and an impulse appears in us that reflects his grief or joy in us we do not live only in ourselves but also in the other. But any philosophical speculation that the sensory impression anyhow releases something in us cannot belie the reality that something active originates from the commiseration of joys and sufferings of the other in us. Where we feel his joy, his grief intimately, we have left ourselves and have penetrated into the sanctum of the other human being. We need only to imagine, because we cannot penetrate the consciousness of the other with our consciousness: if we experienced a faint-like state in the soul of the other when we feel compassion or shared joy in the other soul, then we would be unable to go from the one to the other personality without losing ourselves. As weird as it sounds, as significant as it is for life: we leave ourselves and penetrate into the other without becoming unconscious.

Exactly after the same pattern, any spiritual-scientific development takes place. As the human being penetrates by shared joy and compassion into a foreign being without losing himself, he penetrates spiritual-scientifically recognising into foreign beings without losing himself. In the normal life, this is not possible, because if the human being leaves himself recognising, perceiving, he just falls asleep, then he is no longer aware of himself. In the normal life, the human being does not do this what he does in the moral life just in the case of shared joy and compassion. This is why the peculiar behaviour of the human being with shared joy and compassion is the exemplary picture of any spiritual-scientific activity; it proceeds in such a way as the normal life proceeds in compassion and shared joy. This is the one where the human being exceeds his own personality and does not lose himself.

The other thing that is also for the usual life in the field of moral is the conscience. Someone who investigates the conscience knows that it already exceeds the personal sympathies and antipathies; yes, it can even correct them powerfully. Again, our moral life is so organised that we do not lose ourselves or faint if we exceed ourselves by such judgements of conscience. Spiritual science is based on the fact that the human being can enter an area which is beyond the personality which he encompasses with his everyday consciousness and in which he still does not lose himself. Is that also not based on that with which we have dealt in these talks repeatedly: the insight into the repeated lives on earth and into the principle of causes and effects from one life to the other? It is also based on it. The human being who encompasses with the usual consciousness what is between birth and death learns to recognise by spiritual science that he may regard this as his personal self. He also learns to recognise his higher self to which he ascends if he leaves his personal self with thinking. He recognises that this self builds up the body and lives not only between birth and death, but goes through many births and deaths and appears repeatedly.

If the human being cannot remember former conditions of the earth and only theoretically convince himself of the truth of reincarnation and karma, he can still assume that that which is in him which is transpersonal does not exhaust itself in his personality, but that it creates his personality first, becomes effective in it. As we exceed ourselves in our conscience, in compassion and shared joy by immediate experience, spiritual-scientific research exceeds by experience to a higher area.

But the human being can never admit if he knows spiritual science that he himself is lost in this higher area, but there something prevails that is connected with him to which he belongs and in which he does not lose himself at all if he loses himself at first with his usual normal consciousness there.

Thus, spiritual science is something that appears as an exemplary image of a being enclosing a higher self as we enclose other foreign beings in compassion and shared joy without losing ourselves. If we know our enlarged self by which we enter into foreign beings, we are allowed already to speak with the education of the child that except that with which we can comply as educators, which develops from the normal consciousness, a higher being already works on the child. If we consider this, we maybe find something in the child where already a kind of education takes place, while we can turn with our usual education only to the personal self of the child.

Where do we find the higher self of the child, which does not become conscious? It may seem weird; still it is right, that it works in the child with the rational, with the well-controlled playing. To the playing child we can only give the conditions of education. But what is done by playing is done by its self-activity, by everything that we cannot formulate as strict rules. Yes, just the essentials and the pedagogic of playing are based on the fact that we stop with our rules, with our pedagogic arts, and leave the child to its own forces. Since then the child tries playing with outer objects whether this or that works by its own activity. It puts his own will in motion, in activity. And by the way in which the outer things behave under the effect of its will, the child can educate itself in another way than by the influence of a person or his educational principle, even if only playing.

Hence, it is so important that we mingle as little intellectual as possible into the play of the child. The more the play operates in that what is not understood what is looked in its living, the better the play is. If we give, hence, the child toys which simulate the movements of human beings or things by drawing threads or in any way, may it be in a picture book with movable animals or human beings, or in other toys, we educate it by the play better than giving it the nicest boxes of building blocks. Since in this too much intellectual activity interferes already what belongs to a more personal principle than that experimenting around with the alive-movable that is not grasped intellectually but is observed in its full activity. The less defined and contrived this is what appears in the play, the better it is because something higher that cannot be forced into the human consciousness can then enter because the child relates to life trying and not intellectually. There we realise how something educates the child already that exceeds the personal.

In a way, playing remains an important educational factor for the whole life. Of course, I do not mean the card game here, because all games that are directed to the intellect claim the personal of the human being that is bound mostly to the instrument of the brain. Even if much favourable is said about chess, it can never be a factor of self-education because it depends on that which is bound mostly to the instrument of the brain that has to infer. If the human being is active with gymnastics where he has to set his muscles in motion in such a way that he can infer nothing at all that he does not strain his intellect, but directly develops with the activities and not with intellectual understanding, then we deal with a self-pedagogic play.

From it, we directly gain an important principle of any self-education. This is that the human being who has to educate himself by the education of his intellect and in particular by the education of his will depends on the care of the contact and interrelation with the outside world. The human will can be educated not by inner intellectual training, but it strengthened, so that the human being has a firm hold inside if he maintains the will while the own will and the outside world interact.

That is why the usual self-education is almost injured if the human being tries to strengthen his will for the outer life by inner means, by inner training. There we get to various things which are downright recommended for self-education today, and against which spiritual science cannot enough warn. There one recommends how you can get a confident manner how you develop the will, so that you can position yourself in life and carry out such actions which correspond to your intentions. There one recommends, for example: do such exercises to avoid fear, curiosity, or other passions and negative sensations. I know that someone who hears that will say after, today he has spoken against the control of fear, of passion and so forth.—But this is not the case, I have said that the requirements that the human being puts to himself in such a way can lead to no real will culture. Since he should get this will culture which the human being needs for the outer life by the interaction with the outer life. It is much more appropriate if the human being needs a strong will for life that he tries to get it by exerting outer strength while he has to strain his body and to pay attention with his eyes, so really leading off the fight with the immediate sensory world. This harmonises us with the outer world, with that outer world from which our whole physical organisation is formed, admittedly, formed by the spirit.

However, while we direct our self-education in such a way, we also work on those parts of our spiritual organism that harmonise us with that outside world. But if we work only inside with concentration of thought and other methods that are found in the bookstores today, we work separated from the world in this restricted soul that is not harmonised with the world, but just has its importance from the fact that it secludes itself. It is quite correct that that who exposes himself to outer dangers and tries to overcome them practices a better self-education than that who buys some books about self-education and carries out exercises to achieve fearlessness, dispassion and the like.

Indeed, such things of easy kind can give personal advantages, but always because the person concerned develops what separates him from the world, while he positions himself by the first characterised attitude unselfishly in the world. I said, now someone could state, so you speak against fearlessness, dispassion and against all things about which one can say that it leads to self-education while overcoming them.—Only in one case, this must be stressed if it concerns the development of the will for the outer physical world if the human being wants to strengthen the will in the outer world because just these things cause only an inner work and are applied wrongly to the education of the character, to the education of the will. Rightly, you apply them to the education of your knowledge.

Someone who wants to get knowledge who wants to behold into the supersensible world and has no other goal at first, can rightly do such exercises. Hence, if anything is got out of spiritual science competently, the instruction is not given: How Does One Attain Forces to Develop the Will in the Everyday World?, but there are instructions: How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds Where such instructions are given, one pays attention to such terms exactly. These things, as they are described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, also lead to a culture of the will, not directly, but indirectly, while that which aims at this development in the higher worlds waits for that which comes then. The development of the will must take place by itself, and then it works in the right sense and takes healthy ways.

So we can say that will culture, self-education of the will must be out to produce a healthy relation to the outside, whether this relation refers more to issues of the physical culture, whether that what is searched here refers more to the development of character. There it is much more important instead of brooding how one becomes intrepid, without passion and the like to face life and the human beings, and then to leave yourself to your impartial feeling which is filled more or less with sympathy or antipathy. While we go through life in such a way that we develop our interest in life everywhere, we produce that interplay with the outer world that can lead the will from step to step. This develops our will, while we face life with all sympathies and antipathies that it claims from us. To put it another way: that forms our will, which leads us beyond us to the world. Everything that leads us from the world into us develops—and there it is necessary—our knowledge, this just furthers our inner life if we want to develop own knowledge. However, own knowledge is in the field of psychic development. We have to confess that we become more harmonious in relation to the philosophy of life, to the achievement of life riddles, while we develop our cognitive faculties, while we appropriate inner forces. Against it, the will is only developed for life itself in the right way.

With it, we have shown where the teacher of self-education is to be searched, actually, who would have to be the human being himself. No, the human being must not be it in his narrow personality, and in particular, he has not to be it in relation to the self-education of will. If we assume with spiritual science that the human being can leave his personality without losing himself, then we educate if we open ourselves to life, in particular in such a way as playing works on the child—the comparison must not be misunderstood—then we educate our will. But how? The intellectual culture does not really further our development, has no self-pedagogic value. That element must play the biggest role with self-education that outreaches intellectuality, reason, while we appropriate maturity of life. Just like playing educates the child best of all that it is educated not intellectually, but while it is trying, the human being educates his will best of all with those experiences of life which he understands not with his reason but facing them with sympathy, with love, with the feeling that the things are lofty or touch humour. This furthers us. Here is the self-education of the will. Reason, intellectual culture cannot work on the will at all. Observe how the immediate experience works on the will.

A moral philosopher who does not stand on the viewpoint of reincarnation—Carneri (Bartholomäus C., 1821–1909, Austrian philosopher, poet, politician)—draws the attention to the fact that the character of the child is something steady, but forms just with those elements which emerge immediately from life. Then he asks, what can the character of a human being change in short time? He says, it can change radically, for example, by mighty love or by a friendship where the human being suddenly unfolds such a sympathy that does not examine but loses itself in the human being.—There the character can suddenly take another turn simply because in those spheres where the character is, that is where the will works, the frames of mind are involved in the immediate life. If we face a human being and recognise him as this or that excellent or bad person working directly with our reason, our character does not change; otherwise, the judges would often have to change within one week. But if these or those feelings of friendship occur, the whole configuration of the human character often changes. This is evidence of the fact that the culture of will depends on the development of the frames of mind. Because we can take charge of our life, can change our frames of mind, in a way, so to speak, we take charge of our will-education in certain respect. But it is important to pay attention to life and that we do not live chaotically and dedicate ourselves comfortably to the stream of life, but just pay attention to it. Then we realise that a human being can be more the educator of his self if he can take charge of his frames of mind but that the worst self-educator is that human being who never takes charge of his moods, but perpetually loses himself in them.

If we want to be educators of our will, we have to turn to our feelings and sensations and to investigate in wise self-knowledge how we can work on our feelings and sensations. If we have lost ourselves in sympathy or antipathy, then it is not the time to work on us. Hence, we must pick out the moments of will education where we especially are not engaged with our moods, but can think about our life and our sensations. That means that self-education must take place just when the demanded moments require it in the least from us. But then people do it in the least, because they are not concerned. Someone who resorts to his moods after again notices only later that he has omitted something. This is one of the most important principles that the will must be educated in life, while the human being wisely takes charge of the course of his moods.

Against it, the will is always developed to the selfish side when the human being wants to strengthen his will from the intellect. Such exercises are good immediately for our knowledge culture, for that what we want to get in the spiritual or later even in the psychic fields. But then we can do nothing but working on ourselves within our souls. Besides, it is particularly important that the human being pays attention above all to the big contrast which exists between the self-education of the inner life and the self-education of the outer life. In relation to both mistakes about mistake are done, and we see one-sidedness about one-sidedness working. What is not recommended for the body? It has become maybe rare, but there also are even today people who wrap themselves especially strongly and say, wrapping also protects against heat. The other is more widespread that one recommends one-sided toughening to protect against cold and the rigours of weather, against it to expose oneself to aerial and solar cures. These are not the essentials that the human being exposes himself to solar heat so and so long what may be quite useful for this or that purpose, but may not be a means of education, or that he does cures with cold water repeatedly. The essentials for the body are versatility which enables the body to expose itself also once to the cold, without catching cold, or to walk once in the boiling solar heat about a quite unshaded place. Hence, one could say that a reasonable self-education cannot agree as a rule with most things that one recommends today, but will pay attention that something of all works on us harmoniously.

Just the opposite that is good for our body is good for the mind, for the soul. While the outer body needs versatility, adaptation to the outer conditions, the soul needs concentration for the intellectual culture, the possibility to lead back the sum of thoughts, sensations and perceptions to few basic ideas. That human being who does not endeavour for his intellectual self-education to lead back his knowledge to some basic ideas that can control everything else will see his memory suffering, also his nervous system and the way, in which he has to position himself in life. Someone who can lead back certain things to main ideas will realise that he faces the outer life quietly where it demands actions from him. However, someone who goes through life only in such a way that he does not lead back that to some basic ideas which life offers will show that he hard remembers, that he faces life with a certain disharmony. Because in our time the belief in the concentration of the mind exists so little and is searched so little, also a lot of other evil appears as defects of self-education, above all nervousness. While one develops the will, while one lets his muscles interact with the outer life, one has to develop his nervous system by mental concentration. Briefly, everything that works from the inside out and develops in the nervous system is furthered by leading back our life to single ideas, by recollection. The care of the nervous system and of that, which forms its basis in the spiritual, is necessary if the human being wants to face life internally strengthened.

If we speak about these questions, a newer, materialistic view can force itself on us in this respect, even if the older one can be often disputed from the viewpoint of modern humaneness. One confuses two things normally. The human being cannot become nervous by education of his will, but by a wrong education of his will. The will education can lead to nervousness, while the human being searches it wrongly, if he wants to get around to it with some inner means that work on his mental pictures instead connecting himself with the outer world and strengthening his will with its obstacles.

Thereby his will can easily become nervous. Today this nervousness is already so understood that it has to be treated rather leniently. Carneri tells an interesting case of it. Once there was a landowner who, while he was, otherwise, a good-natured person, had such a soul state sometimes that he pummeled his people, and one called this a special case of nervousness. His people had to suffer exceptionally much, but those endlessly regretted who understand the most after the present views that he had to pummel his people repeatedly. This went well as long as he caught a Tartar once whom he also wanted to pummel. However, the other man took a stick and pummeled the landowner severely, so that he had to remain lying in the bed for one week. Now something appeared, while once the landowner was regretted because of his soul states, now one stopped not only regretting him, but he was completely changed after some time.

I do not want to recommend something with it, but such a fact is exceptionally instructive. If we check it, we can realise very well: if one had tried to persuade the landowner, his nervousness would have remained. If one had worked on his mind, he would not have interacted with the outside world, he would not have changed. However, he interacted with the outside, namely with the cane of the other. With something that he would never have understood in the very own sense he got to know the effect which he had produced from his frame of mind, from his nervousness when he faced life. Thus, the concept “will culture” must be corrected first that the will can be only toughened by the contact with the outside world even if we do not want to educate our will as in the cited drastic case.

As to the intellectual life with self-education, we have to be able to live internally in such a way that we evoke this fruitful element that is in us, indeed, but may lie idle. We develop it, while we hold together our stock of perceptions, while we peruse it repeatedly, look back at certain ideas, and survey what we have experienced in life to put it repeatedly before us. In particular, it is important that we can not only remember, think, imagine, but that we learn to forget in right way. Oblivion should not be recommended here as a special virtue, but if we face the one or the other in life, we notice very soon that we cannot carry that what we experience completely from one moment of the experience to a later one. We can do it with mental pictures sometimes, but we can do it in the least cases with sensations, feelings, pains, and sufferings. How do these working on? They grow pale, and in the hidden depths of the soul, they are working on. That which one forgets there is a healthy element, which descends in the hidden depths of our soul life. By this descending of a healthy element, we have something that works on us that can bring us again from step to step. It does not concern that we stuff ourselves as it were with all kinds of material, but it concerns to pursue the things carefully but to keep back that which we need, and to sink that which we have otherwise experienced in the depths of our soul. Thereby we maintain attention in particular. Someone who does not believe that this is something important will say, oh that does not matter.—He does not take charge of his own personality. However, somebody who knows that it matters what one forgets, says to himself, I have to take charge of my life, I must not let everything work on myself. If I go to this or that circle where one chats silly stuff only, it can be that I forget it because I am an intellectual person, but it matters whether I forget this silly stuff or something reasonable.—Thus, it matters which object you include in your oblivion. Since from this forgotten something often ascends that now is the object of our imagination, of our fancy. While the intellectual element fatigues life, everything that sets our soul forces in motion in such a way that we invent something, is a fruitful, stimulating and life-supporting element. This is something that we have to foster in a wise self-education in particular.

Thus, we have also considered some moments of self-education relating to the intellect and the inner soul element. If we foster this inner soul element in particular and appreciate it, we will realise that it flows into the will automatically, into the character, while we rather weaken it with all efforts that we undertake to influence the character directly because we do not interact with the world.

Spiritual science can support all such things that can serve for self-education with the principle of reincarnation and karma. That means, what I experience in the present life is the effect of former lives, and what I experience now causes that which I face in the following lives.

Thereby you learn if you introduce the ideas of the repeated lives on earth and of karma in your life to cause the right balance of resignation and desire of activity. Concerning both, we can commit the biggest sins with our self-education. People do just the opposite of that resignation and desire of activity that corresponds to a real wise self-education. An anthroposophist will say to himself, what occurs to me in life as my destiny, as pains or joys what brings me together with these or those human beings and so on I have to consider it under the viewpoint that I am that with my self which exceeds my narrow personality who has caused all that.

Then we get to something that could appear at first in such a way, as if it could lead to weakness, to the resignation of fate because we know that we ourselves have caused it. As well as the things occur to us, they must occur because they have originated from us in such a way. If we have this resignation, it strengthens our will because it is not caused by an inner training of the will, but by a relation to the outer destiny, to that what occurs to us. There is nothing in the self-education that can make our will stronger but resignation and the devotion to destiny, but serenity. Someone weakens his will who is liverish at any opportunity and is indignant at his destiny. Someone strengthens his will who is able to submit to his destiny in wise self-education. Those human beings have the weakest will who feel at any opportunity in such a way, as if this and that occurs to them completely undeservedly, as if they have simply to shake off it from themselves.

The present human being does seldom like this devotion. For it, he develops another devotion even more. Everywhere we see the devotion to the inside widespread, to the intellect, to the inner forces. There the human being dedicates himself straight away to his inner soul state and says, if you do not like this, it is due to you, because you are not attentive enough.—Today just those people are dedicated to the inside in the most who are indignant at the outer destiny. How complacent is the human being. The human being is especially complacent if he stresses repeatedly that nothing must be developed, actually, but that is already in him today. The today's doctrine of individuality is the purest doctrine of devotion. The fact that the individuality must be led up and that one has to let no opportunity unused for that is something that argues tremendously against the feelings of devotion of the modern active human beings.

One has to harmonise inner humility and activity properly. But we are able to do this only if we are open to life. This is a demand that we must put just to ourselves self-education. So the human being looking at the future can say to himself, that which I develop will work on me in future, will enrich my destiny.—If the human being extends his life beyond the present embodiment and can look at the effect of his present existence, the urge of activity will awake and the human being will rise beyond his present nature, and his devotion will be active in right way, if he understands that he himself has caused what he experiences in the present.

Thus, just the ideas of reincarnation and karma can deliver what we want for our destiny. The questions of self-education no sooner get right answers before spiritual science cannot merge into the inner longing of the searching human beings. Spiritual science does not want to agitate, but it wants to give that to the present, which corresponds to the inner urge of the modern human being. It was always in such a way that, indeed, truth had to serve to any age for which it was determined in appropriate form but that at the same time this age has always rejected truth. Hence, spiritual science can also not escape from the destiny, as necessary as it is, to be misjudged and faces the fact that today one says, it is an empty pipe dream, daydreaming, unless anything worse. But just if one considers such decisive questions, one sees the meaning and the range of that what spiritual science can offer as an elixir of life. Then one can also expect what it is, and what it can be as an elixir of life. One can apply a saying to it which can help somebody who realises its true depths and significance get over any opposition and misunderstanding, a saying which a man has spoken with whom one cannot agree everywhere but who hit the nail right on the head in certain respect. The saying of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860, German philosopher) is applicable to the destiny of the spiritual-scientific truth: “During all centuries, the poor truth had to blush about the fact that it was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not its guilt. It cannot accept the figure of the sitting enthroned general fallacy. There it looks up sighing to its protective god, the time, which promises victory and fame, but its strokes of wing are so big and slow, that the individual dies in the meanwhile.”

Schopenhauer could not yet add what the modern spiritual science can add. May the protective god do such big strokes of wing that the individual cannot realise the truth of the time, that the individual has to die before the truth is victorious, spiritual science yet shows that in the human being an everlasting essence lives which always comes again and does not confine itself, but goes from life to life.

Hence, we can say to ourselves, even if the time's strokes of wing are so big that the single individual dies and does not experience the victory of truth,—our self, exceeding our personality, can still experience the victory of truth, this victory and all victories, because the always new life will defeat the old death.—The soul can express that which the spiritual researcher has to say about the enclosing nature of the human being as the deepest, most significant force of its life while saying to itself with Lessing: “Is not the whole eternity mine?”

On 13 October 1882, a dying man went from a hotel in Turin to the railway station. He still died on the way to the railway station, lonely, not surrounded by friends who wanted to meet him as agreed in Pisa again. A strange man whose death, one would like to say is symbolically typical for the way, in which he lived. Lonely he died in Turin on the way from the hotel to the railway station, at that time, actually, only nursed by the hotel director who had foreseen his bad bodily condition. Lonely the man died, as he had lived lonely long with the best that he had owned, lonely in his soul in a varied life. A strange man. He inquired his pedigree. Now we may acknowledge his inquiries more or less as historical truth, their result became effective in his consciousness as we shall recognise at once, and we can recognise his work as intermingled with the impulses which he got from these inquiries of his pedigree. He led his pedigree back to the ninth century, to a Viking, Ottar Jarl, and led his pedigree further back to Odin himself. One would like to say, a proud consciousness might have arisen from the result of such inquiries. With the personality that I mean here, with Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), this consciousness changed into far-reaching, significant ideas that have become principal and indicatory for the complete intellectual development of the nineteenth century.

When in 1853 Gobineau's most important work appeared (Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, English: An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) which contained the results of his study of ideas, the few people who understood something of its contents could gain the knowledge that in this man not a single one but the consciousness of Western humanity had spoken in a particular time of its development. Ideas were contained in it that were odd to many people. But for those who try to consider it spiritual-scientifically the work is fulfilled with ideas that point more than something else does to the way in which an excellent man had to think at the middle of the nineteenth century.

This work was inspirited by the views that Gobineau received with his many posts as diplomat, above all in the East. The idea had arisen to him from an exceptional wealth of observations that were done with the keenest urgency that humanity took its origin from some original human types, which he saw at the starting point of human evolution, at different places of the earth, human types of different figure and different value. To each of these human types he ascribed as it were a certain inner wealth of developmental contents which it has or had to develop with the further evolution from its inside, and to bring to the enclosing life on earth. Gobineau saw the ascending development in the fact, that these original human types, as long as they remained unmixed, got their original predispositions and unfolded them more and more about the earth, so that the results of this development appeared as world history. But to such an extent, Gobineau said to himself, as the members of these original human types intermingled a certain equality of the singles begins spreading out about the earth; but he saw everything great, immense, elementary and continuing to have an effect in the human culture in that which arises from the different, unequal human types or races. After his view the idea of equality flooded humanity in the course of time, the inequality of the races was overcome. But at the same time Gobineau regarded that as the impulses for the decadent cultures.

Hence, he imagined the human progress in such a way that that what should happen will happen most certainly that the human beings will more and more intermingle that with this mixture the human beings become equal, indeed, but also worthless as Gobineau means.

In particular, Gobineau believes to realise that the Christian culture with its ideas of equality and general humaneness has, indeed, infinite value for the further development of humanity, but it adapts the human beings gradually to each other. That is why, he characterises Christianity as the religion that can never change into a Christian civilisation. Sharply he expresses from that viewpoint that Christianity leaves the outer garb to the Chinese or to the Eskimo that it leaves the basic structure of his religious being to the Eskimo and to the Chinese even if he accepts Christianity. Since Gobineau regards Christianity as a religion which is not “from this world,” that means it gives the human being something that can be effective inside his soul but that it cannot change in such a way that it steps outwards, that it becomes impulses which change the outer civilisation and outer civilised behaviour. He thinks that everything that appears in the outer civilisation and civilised behaviour were original tendencies of the races that were unequal at the starting point of human evolution on earth.

From this view, Gobineau got his strange pessimism. While he realises that the contrasts of the original human types can be equalised as humanity takes up Christianity more and more, that something just develops in humanity in the future gradually that what is the holiest, the most important Christian view which can become no impulse for the outer civilisation. However, for it the Christian view will lead, while it equalises the human beings, to degeneration at the same time, so that less and less strong impulses will be there for the progress of humanity, and civilisation will become more and more decadent. Once the earth will outlive the human race that will become extinct on it, because it has set out everything that it contained embryonically in itself and has no other life impulses in the future. That is why Gobineau believes that once the earth stays behind as a living planet. Humanity becomes extinct, and the portents of this extinction are all those impulses that balance out the differences between the human beings.

Surveying this line of thought, we have to admit that it corresponds to all requirements of the intellectual life of the nineteenth century which is given only in such a way as these requirements of the intellectual life were reflected in a great, ingenious man who felt the urge to think the ideas of his time not only to a quarter or half, but to pursue them in their ultimate consequences really. But as significant his ideas are in the just characterised sense, they could settle only a little in the consciousness of his time. One may say that, the name Gobineau was known to few people only, also after the huge work On the Inequality of the Human Races had appeared.

Few years ago, the consciousness of time appeared quite different, again with a person in whom not only the individuality, but also the whole time expressed itself. In 1853, the two first volumes of the just mentioned work by Gobineau appeared, in 1855 the two last. In 1859, the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) appeared On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

At first, we can see in the effect, which the work had, that in this work of Darwin something significant was thrown into the mental development of humanity. How did it work, for example, in Germany? As something significant it has worked at first, it also worked, while the leading scholars who believed to enclose the whole science with their logic related to Darwin's work at first in such a way that they laughed at him, because he believed to be able to speak of the transformation of animal forms on account of observations of the phenomena of the animal realm. One was used up to then to put them side by side without remembering how they relate to each other, and without remembering to bring the idea of becoming into the idea of the continual being. But it took few years only, and the work of Darwin showed its effect, in particular within the German research. There the courageous Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) took the ultimate consequence from the Darwinian requirements on the naturalists' meeting in Stettin (now Szczecin) in 1863 that also the evolution of the human being is to be brought together with the evolution of the animal forms. Those do not stand only in the world side by side, but have developed from imperfect to more and more perfect ones.

Not only had this taken place but something quite different had happened. The leading ideas of the Darwinian view penetrated into the entire scientific research, settled down in such a way that within a few decades the complete scientific literature was interspersed with that which Darwin alleged as an idea. Today we realise that those who have not yet understood that Darwinism just leads beyond itself in the serious research, even found an entire worldview, one may say found a “religion,” on the Darwinian idea. Strange difference of the destinies of these two persons: the little known Count Gobineau, and the famous name of Darwin whose ideas settled down in the minds. So that one can say, Darwin transformed the thinking of many people within few decades.

Someone can doubt the last sentence only who did not familiarise himself with the current ideas, which penetrate the public thinking, and at the same time with ideas, which controlled the public thinking before Darwin. In the answer to the question, why the destinies of both persons are so much different, something is contained of that which makes us aware of the task and the significance of spiritual science in the present.

If we look at that which was brought in a part of the human consciousness with Darwinism, we have to say, Darwinism is completely based on the thought that scientific consideration of the becoming can originate only from outer sensory facts and the treatment of these outer sensory facts by the thinking that is bound to the brain. Everything that would exceed such a scientific direction would be unscientific or would belong to mere belief in the sense of the Darwinian way of thinking that should have no impact on science. Those who look at the course of the events will say lightly, well, what in former times people have thought about the becoming of the human being corresponds just to imperfect human research; science was able to construct a worldview strictly by real, knowledgeable investigations only in the nineteenth century .

Hence, these thinkers say, science itself makes the human being refrain from all supersensible and confine himself to the course of events that arises if one limits science only to the sensory facts and to that which the intellect can make of them.—That is why some people probably believe that science and its thinking make reject simply any supersensible research. Is it this way? Today a lot depends on the answer to this question! If it were really in such a way that science forces us to omit anything supersensible from the observations, then someone who takes science seriously would have to take this consequence without fail. But we ask, what is this scientific necessity based upon which has arisen to the matured humanity only in the nineteenth century?

For Darwin and the next Darwinians was the reason, why they attached the human being not only as a perfected bodily but also as a spiritual-mental being directly to the animal realm, that a striking resemblance appears everywhere, for example, of the skeleton, but also of the other organ forms and of the activities of the single beings, if one looks at the human being and also at the animal realm.—In particular, Darwinians like Huxley (Thomas H., 1825–1895) stressed that the human skeleton is like that of the higher animals. This leads, one said, to the assumption that really that which the human being carries in himself has, all in all, the same origin as the animal realm, yes, has developed gradually from the animal realm by mere perfection of animal qualities and organs. We ask ourselves, is the human reason forced to take the just characterised consequence from these events?

Nothing is more instructive to the answer of this question than the fact that before Darwin Goethe in a peculiar way became a precursor of Darwin. You find the whole Goethean worldview not only in my book, directly entitled Goethe's World View, but also in the preface which I wrote in the eighties of the last century for the Goethe edition of the German National Literature. If we see how Goethe occupied himself urgently with the animal and human forms to get to a particular result, and if we consider the significant fact that he was stimulated to the basic ideas by Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803), then we must say, a person with another way of thinking, with a quite different scientific disposition and spiritual condition than Darwin could also get to the same results, nay, could also feel the necessity of these results.

In relatively young years, Goethe endeavoured against the dictum of all leading naturalists of his time to show that an outer difference does not exist between the bodily frames of the human being and of the higher animals. Strangely to say, one had assumed such a difference details. One had stated, for example, that the higher animals differ from the human being because they have the so-called intermaxillary in the upper jaw in which the upper incisors are, but the human being would not have this bone, that his upper jaw would consist of one piece. This was the opinion of the most significant naturalists at Goethe's youth that between the higher animals and the thinking human being must be a difference that appears also in the outer frame.

Goethe went about his work really with scientific conscientiousness when he proved that the human being as embryo, before birth, has the intermaxillary just as the animals have, save that this bone grows together with the human being, so that it does no longer appear in the full-grown state. This discovery seemed to be significant to Goethe. We see in particular in the way in which he wrote to Herder at that time that he also regards the importance of this discovery, because he writes on 27 March 1784: “You should be also glad, because it is like the keystone of the human being, it is not absent, and it also exists! And how! I have thought it also in the context with your whole how nice it becomes there.” The fact that one has really to ascribe this to no materialistic attitude, but to the opposite one proves that Goethe just regarded his discovery, in full harmony with Herder, as confirmation and consequence of a worldview based on spiritual facts that the spirit prevails everywhere from the lowest creatures to the highest ones and pursues the same basic plan everywhere.

It was Goethe's intention to prove this, and the result just was evidence of the effectiveness of the spirit. Hence, it was to him also evidence of the effectiveness of the spirit when he discovered something that, actually, natural science found again in the second half of the nineteenth century that one has to consider the cranial bones as transformed vertebrae. Goethe meant that this spiritual has a basic form in the dorsal vertebra that transforms it in such a way, that this form encloses the organ of the brain. It was a quite miraculous fact to me in certain respect when I found a notebook of Goethe during my several years' studies in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive one day. There Goethe had put down with a pencil that the whole human brain is, actually, only a transformed ganglion, in any ganglion that is already included as it were embryonically which the spirit transforms, so that it becomes the complex organ of the brain.

There we realise that that which the Darwinians later regarded as evidence of the fact that one has to look only at the sensory facts if one wants to explain the becoming of the human being became evidence of the universally working spirit as to Goethe which conjures up, so to speak, the most complex forms from the simplest ones and develops the work of nature gradually this way. Are we allowed to assert compared with such a fact that scientific observations would have forced the human being to found a kind of materialist-monistic worldview on Darwinism? We are on no account allowed to do it, because we realise that with Goethe the same course of research leads to an idealistic spiritual result. What may it depend on that in the second half of the nineteenth century on basis of Darwinism that we can downright call a kind of Goetheanism in relation to the sensory facts, a Darwinian-materialist worldview or even religion develops? That does not result from the facts which urge the researchers, but only from the habitual ways of thinking, because to a man who is spiritually different from those who develop a Darwinian-materialist worldview from the results of Darwinism, just the same scientific way of thinking serves as basis of a quite different worldview. This is the important fact that we have to consider. Then we also understand that the materialist-monistic way of thinking is something that captivates the human beings in the second half of the nineteenth century that intervenes deeply in the thinking of the human beings regarding themselves as advanced, and we understand that this way of thinking also intervenes where one does not want to be Darwinian.

A researcher offers a significant example who is certainly not enough appreciated today who has, indeed, something unpleasant in his behaviour who is still, significant his scientific results for the present. I mean Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920, Austrian neurologist) whom I have also called here in the course of the years. Moriz Benedikt is no Darwinian, but a development theorist. He admits a development, even if not in the sense of the Darwinians. One single result from the wealth of Benedikt's results should be stressed here. Benedikt intended to examine morally defective persons, criminals. Before in a more popular way Lombroso (Cesare L., 1836–1909, Italian criminologist) pointed to such facts in a dilettantish way, Benedikt had done such investigations already some years before. He examined brains of criminals, of murderers. He discovered that all the brains had something characteristic. A quite strange fact appeared to him that certain furrows, which are, otherwise, at the surface of the brain, run more inside with the criminal's brain, were covered by the cerebral mass and did not run outwardly. But he also examined brains of murderers who made, otherwise, the impression of good-natured persons. There appeared everywhere that in the back of the head certain irregularities were that the lobes did not completely cover the hindbrain, and that with such persons the form of the brain was like the brains of apes in a way. Hence, Benedikt got to the result that strictly speaking in this physical organisation of the human being, in the fact that it was not completely developed the reason would be of his unusual actions, so that as it were the lower animal from which the human being originated is expressed in the inner forms of the brain. Because the human being bears that in himself, which he should exceed, he becomes a criminal. Thus Moriz Benedikt founds his whole view of law, of morality and punishment upon the fact that, actually, with the criminal something is to be found as heirloom of those times, when the human being was still below with his original being among the higher animals.

As I have said, Moriz Benedikt is no Darwinist, but he also does not get further with his thinking than believing that one has to stick to ascribing such an organisation to the criminal that forces him to his actions from the physical. In anthropology, this researcher of the nineteenth century searches that what he believes to need for the understanding of criminal actions. Thus, we see that everywhere the mere belief comes along in the decisive of the outer sensory facts and of that science which founds itself on these outer sensory facts. We also are not surprised that Darwin's results were interpreted in a materialist-monistic way. Not Darwin's results demand this interpretation, but the habitual ways of thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. One may say, if it had been possible that Darwin would have done research in another age, it would be also conceivable that his results would have been interpreted in an ideal spiritual sense as Goethe did it, that the creative, prevailing spirit uses the transformation of the forms to let the manifold phenomena arise from few basic forms.

This is the peculiar fact that the age, which is just over, had to bring the deepening in the outer sensory facts that for a while humanity had to divert its attention from everything that turns the view to the supersensible worlds, so that the whole web of the sensory facts can once work on the human soul. Thus, we recognise the necessity of the materialist-monistic way of thinking in the whole human evolution as it were, we realise that the nineteenth century was destined to divert the attention for a while from the supersensible and to look only at the sensory. If we consider the deeper sense of this fact, we have to ask ourselves whether humanity has gained something significant for its spiritual life by deepening in the sensory world.

Answering this question, we have to consider something that I have already mentioned in these talks that an enormous amount of important facts could be really investigated only, while one looked impartially at this world of facts. One did not let the view be clouded by any kind of assumptions of the supersensible world, but turned it only to the outer world. That is much more important and essential compared with the prime concern of Darwinism that significant, great connections were explaind between the organs of the single animal forms and plant forms. We have seen in these talks that Darwinism has overcome itself that, actually, the facts demand to speak no longer as simply as Ernst Haeckel once spoke of a connection of the animal realm with the human being. However, in spite of all that if one surveys the immense amount of research results which have come about just under the influence of Darwinism, one finds enlightenment of a big, immense basic plan of the animal and plant realms.

Thanks to this research, we see into connections today, which would not have arisen in such a way if one had approached them with preconceived ideas of an old supersensible research. Thanks to the materialistic one-sidedness, we have results, which one once will interpret in the right way, but which could be found only with one-sidedness. Thus, we must not misjudge the big merit of Darwinism and not neglect the fact that it is significant if Haeckel, starting from his General Morphology of the Organisms (1866) to his extensive Systematic Phylogeny (1896), puts together the resemblance of the animal forms and plant forms to construct, so to speak, a pedigree of life from it. It may be that his pedigrees are wrong—they are not—, one may abandon them, the idea of descent may be quite wrong with Haeckel, we can disregard what arises as theories with him, and look at that what shows resemblances and connections between the forms in a way unexpected in former times. This is the significant.

How does the supersensible research place itself besides it? In such a way that it shows how the human being can experience, indeed, a certain development in his inside, can turn the sight into supersensible worlds, can find a supersensible world of facts, and that in this the true causes are to be found of the sensory facts. We have realised how the human being finds somethimg enclosing mental-spiritual with supersensible self-knowledge already in himself which lives not only in such a way in him as he grasps it with his normal consciousness, but exists as something real behind the normal consciousness that we have to search in a spiritual form, long before the human being enters the earthly existence.

We have to search it this way that that what comes from father and mother connects itself with that which comes from a spiritual world while it experiences the events in the time between birth and death. Entering the spiritual world by his Imaginative, Inspirative and Intuitive self-knowledge, the human being gets to know the creative being that still works on us before the consciousness appears which constructs the human body where the human being could not yet work with his consciousness on himself because this work goes into the finer organisation and configuration of the body. The ego just works there, which comes from the spiritual world, on the finer development not only of the brain, but also of the whole body.

Thus, the human being is able to recognise without going through the gate of death that a spiritual world shines through the sensory world, which is as real for supersensible knowledge as the sensory world is for the sensory knowledge. If he knows his spiritual-mental essence working, and if he knows that this gets the forces and impulses from the spiritual world to create a new life and a new earthly embodiment, then he can also easily get that knowledge which connects the views about the human nature with moral ideas which brings together the views of the spiritual-mental being with that which the human being needs as a force for life, as consolation and security in life and so on.

All questions whether the human being sees his relatives and friends again can be affirmed in a quite appropriate way that the human being lives with his true being not only in the physical body, recognising and acting, but can also live disembodied where then everything that he founded in the physical life lives on in the spiritual world and forms the bases of a new incarnation. Those relations from human being to human being remain important in the spiritual world and almost form the starting point of our next incarnation, so that we meet the same human beings whose connection arises if we are disembodied, while we feel attracted to them, and get the forces to be able to meet them in a new incarnation again.

The human being is led by spiritual research into the sphere of a spiritual world, so that he does no longer find his origin in an animal form of the past world, but he finds his origin and that of the animals in the spiritual world. Spiritual science will show this more and more. With it, it positions itself beside what the materialist-monistic culture has done in the course of the nineteenth century. If we realise that a common plan of the evolution of living beings forms the basis that we can really see basic ideas and basic forces that develop from imperfect to perfect stages of life, then such a result gets its real significance just in the light of spiritual science. Today we can draw attention in this comprising talk only by a simile how the indicated gets significance.

If we see the human being in a later age and compare him with that who he was, for example, as child, then we say to ourselves, our spiritual-mental essence has worked on our outer organisation. The same that I realise if I become aware of that which produces thoughts, feelings and will impulses from dark soul depths has worked on my body when it could not yet produce this, when I was dreaming into my life. This body was still an imperfect tool for the mind and became a more perfect one only later. That which is purely supersensible what lives only in my thoughts, feelings, and mental pictures has worked as a real being first on my physical body, but I could become aware of it only later.

If one understands that in its basic meaning, one has also understood how the spirit has worked for millions of years only to produce the whole range of living beings in their ascending forms to produce the human being of the present in the end. As that which we are as a 30-year-old human being must arise in its internal spirituality by the fact that we work first on our imperfect organism of our childhood, the human cultural life could arise only because this spiritual-mental essence which is yet the starting point of any spiritual becoming prepared the human organism only slowly and gradually in the whole range of organisms as well as the single human being prepares his organism in the childhood which should be later the tool of the developed mind. As it is the same ego which thinks, feels and wants at the age of thirty years and which works on the outer body in the first years, overcomes it and transforms it into the tool of the mind, one can also imagine that the human being had to overcome with his mental life which faces us developed in the animal realm. The actions of the human mind which prepares itself only to that which it should become in the outer animal or generally organic figure, face us while we survey the connection of the outer creations.

What has the Darwinian attitude of the nineteenth century done without knowing it? While it has developed the outer forms so admirably, it has shown the actions of the human spirit when it worked on the outside world, before it could penetrate to its inside and unfold its own being and becoming. This will be the progress in the human development the intellectual culture that one will recognise that in that what the Darwinian attitude has given the whole action of the human spirit is contained. It has prevailed in it as our ego prevails in the childish organism. Darwinism has studied the divine actions of the human spirit up to now, without knowing it. One appreciates correctly what was created on basis of Darwinism if one beholds the creative human spirit in all details which are brought to light if one admires what the human spirit had intended, before it has got its conscious, historical creating. Thus, something great has been prepared that one only misunderstands, as if it is effective from itself, while it is the plan that the creative divine spirit pursued on its way to humanity. With it, the human being can progress a certain step and can only recognise really, what was done, actually, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Now we turn our glance once again back to the Count Gobineau. There we find how the ingenious mind of this man realises that what presents itself in the outer world, but he sees it with the proud consciousness of a person who knows something about the fact that the human being is descended from the spiritual. As fantastic this may appear today, one has to appreciate in this context that there was such a person in the nineteenth century to whom that was a personal fact what is only a theory, maybe religious conviction for other people that we come to something spiritual if we go back to our origin. One only appreciates the unique personality of Count Gobineau if one can put his consciousness in the right light which says to itself, if I trace back what I am what lives in my abilities and qualities as they are handed down to me by my ancestors, there I find that the line of heredity goes back to the Viking Ottar Jarl, to the descendants of the God Odin, and that it does not end with a physical, but with a supra-physical being like Odin himself.

However, in this line of thought no hint to that spiritual-mental essence was included which works in the human being, not within the line of heredity or race only, but works in the human being from incarnation to incarnation which is independent of the outer physical form and configuration. Thus, Gobineau looks only at the appearance, which does not enclose the spiritual-mental essence of the human being. That is why he stands there as just a courageous man who does not stop at a half measure, but takes the ultimate consequences of his requirements, saying to himself: surveying the world, I recognise a decline of the appearance; humanity on earth becomes extinct, and the earth will outlive humanity.

This idea is there, as if a plant would express it, a plant that has developed blossoms and cannot realise that it can take up something from without that flies to it, that it can take up the pollen from another plant for a new figure. Gobineau cannot imagine that in the human being in his race existence a spiritual core lives which can take up a new spiritual element at a suitable time which is not in the original races and the intermingling ones, but in the spiritual-mental essence which the individualities take up and which fertilises the spiritual-mental essence of the human being from the spiritual world and continues the human being if his appearance drops.

So Gobineau could properly imagine the outer appearance in such a way that it is on the way of decline. However, he still lacked the view at that spiritual-mental essence of the human being who arises to the supersensible research. He could still substitute it by his consciousness of his personal connection with the divine world. But he remained lonesome with it. However, humanity had arrived at that stage where it found looking back the sensory facts only as starting point of its origin; it found its ancestors in the animal realm, while, indeed, the animal realm is to be imagined as I have just characterised it.

But if the human being can understand what works there in him, regardless of all outer forms which the natural sciences of the nineteenth century explained so magnificently if he looks at the spiritual world and notices the resemblance of his spiritual-mental essence, then he also admits that the spiritual-mental essence is fertilised repeatedly, so that the pessimistic idea changes into the wonderful idea of a human development in the future. If we look with Gobineau at that which was given to the races originally, that dies, indeed, which one can see externally, but inside that lives which can take up new impulses which becomes more and more full of contents, and walks from the earth which it leaves as the spirit leaves the corpse at death—to new creations, to create a new existence from the spirit. We realise that, so to speak, in Gobineau a courageous, energetic, and ingenious thinker projects from a past time who thinks the idea through to the end what has to originate from humanity if we turn our glance to the appearance only. Thus we recognise that humanity, after it has come to these consequences, needs something in another idea that invigorates the becoming in such a way that the everlasting is recognised in it which carries the essentials over to other ways of life, even if the outer cover drops from the essentials and really takes the way which Gobineau predetermined.

Any force develops by overcoming the opposing force. Gobineau had still received the fulfilment of his thinking with a divine-spiritual from his personal faith in his origin. Finally, Darwinism expelled everything that was no sensory fact from the views about the human origin and about the spiritual origin of the organisms. From the counter force which the popular Darwinism develops from the mere looking at the only outer world of facts the longing for the supersensible world will arise which already approaches and works in the human minds. The number of the human beings will become bigger and bigger who feel this longing who feel that the old thinking leads even in the most ingenious thinkers to such consequences as Gobineau or the popular Darwinism have taken them. But if the human beings realise that they can stop impossibly at that which is so seemingly firmly founded in the outer science, then they will ask for supersensible research, and then one will realise more and more that the supersensible research can proceed as logically and conscientiously as the outer science proceeds.

If we survey the connections that way, we recognise the necessity of supersensible research in our time, and then we easily recognise what this supersensible research, actually, intends. An idea of that which it intends I wanted to awake in these winter talks too. The whole cycle of talks was a hint to that which I have summarised today, and I just wanted to show with it in detail how spiritual science positions itself quite consciously in the present cultural life to serve it appropriately. Hence, one has not to be surprised that this spiritual science is so often misunderstood today. One has repeatedly to experience that this or that objection which I do here are later are put forward as their own objections by those who have listened here, so that one does not regard that that which may be argued, spiritual science has already removed. But someone who understands the course of the human culture, will not become chicken-hearted about the judgements which spiritual science experiences today in the outer world, but he will be able to point to the many examples that that which was regarded as a matter of course, for example, Darwinism itself, caused the strongest opposition at first. Examples of this kind are many.

The true spiritual scientist will always concede: even if some things will not last, it is not different from any other science, but the basic truths remain and settle down, because every true sight to our life shows the necessity of spiritual science.

Just if we look at the greatest men like Count Gobineau and the confessors of Darwinism, we notice that it is necessary to insert the supersensible research to the cultural life of our time, and that supersensible research almost corresponds to the longing of those people who want the true progress of the cultural life in our time.

Indeed, in the next time one will more appreciate various sensational things which happened here and there or even happen—if at all one cares about spiritual science or anthroposophy—as outgrowths of spiritual science. You can easily regard spiritual science as something fantastic, absurd, maybe also as folly if you limit yourself to its outgrowths, but it will be just more comfortable for a certain public to mock at the outgrowths than to deal seriously with the scientific research within spiritual science. You must concede at least that I have tried in these talks to apply the same logic, the same scientific thinking to this spiritual science as they rule in the outer science. The German biographer of Count Gobineau also said that against the ideas of Count Gobineau some people had something to argue; what Gobineau meant could be easily disproved, because any pupil of a high school could know this and could understand his ideas. But you have to require that thoughts of a pupil are not sufficient to understand Count Gobineau, and that you have to exceed what you believe to own as firm logic and must not stop at the logic of a pupil if you want to touch the nerve of spiritual science.

Even if the evaluation of spiritual science and its results will take place long in the way I have just indicated, there will be always single human beings who will yet realise that at least one tries to go forward in spiritual research with the same conscientiousness and with the same strict logic as they are usual with the education of thinking during the last centuries. Spiritual science should be recognised by this intention, not by some mistakes and outgrowths that maybe appear within it. The few human beings who will realise this will form the core of that thinking and willing whose necessity one recognises just if one goes back to the most logical thinkers of our time. That is why I have gone back today not only to Darwin, but also to Count Gobineau.

Those who form the core of such a human thinking and willing may still be alone today. Lonesome were all those who became bearers of such ideas which were matters of course in a later time. In the time in which science bore a materialist-monistic religion from its bases, you must not be surprised if spiritual science also makes the human being lonesome in a way.

For many people regard the real object of spiritual science as a non-existent object or deny the possibility of a knowledge of this object at least. But the human being cannot stay without knowledge of the spiritual. With it, spiritual science appears on the scene so that he does not remain without this knowledge of the spirit. We have to consider the outer sensory world like a shell of a crustacean. The spiritual appears as that which has overcome the shell, which creates itself by itself, by spiritual science. The outer science teaches what had to be overcome, and what still serves as tool that we have to use. But spiritual science will urgently teach that the knowledge of the outer shell of the being must not remain limited. It will show that we have to see the actions of the spirit in the outer figure that it lives in its results, and that it is the same if it withdraws into its place of origin, in its inside but that it has something in this place of origin that gives it a perspective to eternity.

Spiritual science will renew and raise—this was the program of these winter talks—a certain Goethean view which has given the whole program of these talks with a deep conviction with which Goethe faced the natural sciences of his time when from one of its representatives, Haller (Albrecht von H., 1708–1773), the words sounded:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom
She shows her appearance only.

Goethe replied what spiritual science always answers to an outer knowledge and conviction that wants to limit itself to the outside world. Spiritual science answers: you also recognise this outside world in its true figure only if you behold the real spirit. You will recognise what Darwinism has created in its true figure if you regard it as actions of the active spirit.—Spiritual science makes the human being completely aware of the fact that one also recognises the shell only if one recognises it as the expression of the spirit, and because one recognises the spirit only if one grasps it in its creating as it already promises in the current existence to raise new creations from the bosom of the future that it must become creative in its inside. The outer shell shows what the spirit has created. Therefore, spiritual science answers to the words:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom
She shows her appearance only.

with Goethe:

Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

With it, I would like to close these winter talks. I would like to hope that spiritual science really finds its goal and solves its task so that it does not remain a mere theory, a mere sum of thoughts, but an elixir of life that works in the human being. It does not work only in the knowledge of the outer shell, but above all is inside effective so that the human being recognises whether it is a kernel or a shell, so that the impulse arises from a strong will not to remain a shell, but to be always a kernel and become a kernel.

As in the past winters, I will take the liberty of giving a series of lectures on spiritual science here in this place during the course of this winter semester. The program will show that these lectures will first cover what spiritual science has to say about the questions of life from its point of view, that then the transition will be made to the illumination of some important cultural phenomena, outstanding cultural facts and outstanding personalities of the past, such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, and that finally the relationship between spiritual science and various phenomena in the immediate present spiritual life will be illuminated. Today, these lectures are to be begun in a peculiar way. At the outset, we shall not present what can be said in support and confirmation of this spiritual research, but, on the contrary, what can be said in the way of possible, more significant objections to this spiritual science.

It is in the nature of things that this spiritual research attracts much opposition in our time, owing to the state of our present-day culture and owing to many other facts. But nothing would be more inappropriate to this spiritual science than for it to lapse into fanaticism and, so to speak, only to want to see what can be adduced in support of it from the standpoint of its representatives. Fanaticism must — and we shall see for what reasons this is completely foreign to spiritual research. Therefore, more than is perhaps necessary from any other point of view, it must be anxious to understand the objections of its opponents; indeed, in a certain sense it must almost tolerate them, and it must appear understandable to it that a good number of honest truth-seekers of the present time cannot go with it. It has been my custom – and those who have honored me with their attendance at my earlier lectures will be aware of this, and I shall continue to follow this practice – to take possible objections into consideration at the same time as I present my arguments. Today, so to speak, more significant and weighty objections are to be anticipated. For objections to what can be said from the point of view of spiritual research do not arise merely from the opponents, but in the conscientious pursuit of spiritual research, the soul that is devoted to such an undertaking is confronted with these possible objections at every turn. Since the truths of spiritual research have to be won and fought for in the soul, the soul must in a certain sense be equal to the opponent with regard to such objections as are raised in the soul itself. And much better progress will be made in this field if one is clear from the outset about what can be objected.

Now it is not my intention to deal with those objections or alleged refutations which can be found on the street, so to speak, or conjured up out of thin air. Instead, I shall consider the objections that an honest seeker of truth in our time, based on our education and the spiritual foundations of our present age, can and to a certain extent must raise. Nor will the objections of those be dealt with who often call themselves spiritual researchers or Theosophists; for it must be admitted at the outset that much of what passes today under the name of “Theosophy” is not to be taken seriously. But what has been and is advocated here is to be taken into account in my objections today. But if we want to engage with such objections, then much of what has already been said in the course of the previous cycles and what will be discussed in the next lectures must be brought to mind, as it were in outline. So, let us briefly agree on what is meant by spiritual research in terms of its content and sources here.

First of all, one can characterize spiritual science in very general terms by saying that spiritual science takes the view that it must go beyond everything that man perceives through his senses, everything that he is able to fathom with a science that is based primarily on the senses and on the intellect, which draws its conclusions from the senses. that it must go beyond all this to the spiritual causes of the sensual facts that can be investigated by the mind, so that it not only assumes but attempts to prove a spiritual world behind these sensual facts, a spiritual world in which lie the causes of all that the senses can see and the mind can investigate.

This spiritual science differs from many other schools of thought in the present and the past in that it does not merely assert in general, hypothetically, that there is a spiritual world beyond the mind and the senses, but that it assumes that the human being is capable of training and developing his powers of knowledge and soul to such an extent that they are able to see into a spiritual world — something they are incapable of doing without this development. So it is not just the possibility of a spiritual world, but the recognizability of a spiritual world that is the peculiar feature of this spiritual research or anthroposophy, if we want to call it that. It is admitted from the start that the soul forces and the qualities of the cognitive powers as they are in man in his ordinary daily use, if we may so express it, are not such as to enable him to penetrate into the spiritual world. But spiritual science denies that these powers of knowledge are undevelopable, that they cannot unfold to look into a spiritual world after their externalization to this higher point of view, just as the eyes look into the sensory world. But with that we are already at the sources of this spiritual research.

These sources reveal themselves to the soul when, through inner work, through inner development — and the methods of this inner development have often been mentioned here — this soul works its way up to a higher point of view. Then, as spiritual science shows, there is another world, a spiritual world, alongside the sense world that surrounds us, and it is from this spiritual world that the true causes of all phenomena in the sense world emanate.

Through the study of the spiritual world, however, we come to see man as a much more complicated being than he is for ordinary sensory or intellectual perception. We come to see man as a four-part being. That which is called the physical body is regarded by spiritual research only as part of the entire human being. This physical body can be observed by the ordinary sense life and can be grasped by the intellect. This sense body is the subject of ordinary science. For a large part of our present-day view of the world, this physical body is the totality of the human being. For spiritual scientific research, it is only one part among four members of this human being.

Beyond this physical body, spiritual research distinguishes the so-called etheric body or life body, which is incorporated into the physical body. But spiritual research does not speak of this etheric body or life body in the same way as if it were only accessible to the mind, but in such a way that the developed soul powers are able to see it, just as the developed eye can see the colors blue or red, while the color-blind eye cannot see these colors. And then she says that the necessary conclusion arises that the physical body, through the powers inherent in it, naturally disintegrates at death, because the powers belonging to the physical body cause its disintegration, its decay, and only held together by the etheric body, which is a continuous fighter against the disintegration of the physical body, being incorporated into the physical body during the time of life between birth and death. Only when the separation from the etheric body occurs at the moment of death does the physical body follow its own forces, which, however, then, because they work in their own way, cause its decomposition. The human being has the physical body in common with the whole mineral, inanimate world. The etheric body is shared with all living things, with the whole plant world.

But spiritual science cannot stop there. It recognizes a third link in the human being that is as independent as the physical body. There is no need to be offended by expressions; they will be explained and have already been partly explained. The third link is the astral body. It is the actual vehicle of the passions, desires, instincts, affects, in other words, of everything that we call our soul life, that takes place within. And in spiritual research, we then distinguish the actual carrier of the ego from this astral body. While the human being shares the astral body with everything that, for example, has affects and passions in the animal world and can develop an inner life of imagination, the human being has the ego as the fourth link of his being for himself as the crown of his individuality. Man's being initially lies in the physical body, in the etheric or life body, in the astral body and in the I-bearer for spiritual research.

Furthermore, for those who are able to penetrate into the spiritual world, there is the realization of how a large part of our life conditions, to which we are subject, differs from ordinary life, namely the life of sleep. For the spiritual researcher, sleep differs from waking life in that in sleeping humans, the I-vehicle and the astral body of the person are separated from his etheric body and physical body. The latter two remain in bed during sleep like a vegetative form, whereas the I-bearer with the astral body and with the affects, drives, imagination and so on move out of the physical body and ether body during sleep and then unfold their own life in a spiritual world that exists for itself. But for the average person today, when the I and the astral body are alone during sleep, ordinary life is impossible because this astral body and the I have no organs for perceiving the environment, do not have eyes and ears like the physical body. So it is impossible for the astral body and I to perceive the world in which they then are.

The higher development of the soul consists precisely in the astral body and I becoming able to develop organs to perceive their surroundings, and that through this a state can arise for the spiritual researcher in which he perceives the spiritual world ; so that in addition to the waking state and the sleeping state, he has a waking sleep state, if we may call it that, which is precisely the state in which the spiritual researcher can perceive the spiritual world to which man belongs according to his actual origin. Thus spiritual science tries to explain the transition of man between waking and sleeping in twenty-four hours on the basis of spiritual facts.

What is more, spiritual science approaches the great riddle of life and death, that is, in other words, the question that moves the human heart so: the question of the immortality of man. Spiritual science comes to the conclusion that the actual spiritual essence of man is not just a result of his physical organization, but an independent unit and entity belonging to a spiritual world, which builds up the physical body, which exists before birth, even before conception, and from the first moment when man enters into existence as a germ cell, has the effect of building up his organism. In other words, it is the spiritual soul that is actually active and constructive, that organizes the human being throughout his life, that carries only the fruits of his life experiences through the gate of death and that passes with death into a spiritual world to then have further experiences, and that then organizes a new physical body for a further life, to undergo a new life and repeat the cycle.

Spiritual science speaks in other words of repeated lives on earth, speaks of repeated lives on earth in such a way that we look back from our present embodiment within the sensual existence to other embodiments in the past, but also look into the future to later incarnations of our being. So that we divide the total life of a person into one life between birth and death and into another one, which runs purely spiritually for the senses and for the mind between death and the next birth. But spiritual science does not see this in an eternally recurring way, but rather in such a way that it recognizes only intermediate states in these repetitions, but traces the total life of man back to an original spiritual state that preceded all life, especially on our planet; so that the lives on earth once had a beginning when man emerged from a purely spiritual existence, and that, after the conditions have once been fulfilled, man will again enter into purely spiritual states, which will contain within them the fruits of all that man has gone through through the various earthly lives.

This is, of course, only an outline, which will be filled in with individual colors in the coming lectures, but which can show the results that spiritual scientific research comes to. If we picture this whole tableau before our mind's eye, then it must be said that for a large part of thinking humanity today, this picture will not only have something incomprehensible, unprovable, but perhaps even something offensive, something that may even provoke irony, scorn and derision. Even when speaking of the nature of spiritual science, a person who wants to relate everything important to him on the right ground of science must raise serious objections. A person who stands on this ground of science must ask himself: What do all the great, not just individual, achievements of science mean in the face of such an argument? What do scientific methods mean, what do seriousness, dignity, exactness mean in the face of spiritual research, what do all the efforts that science has made in recent centuries and decades to achieve certainty, to achieve objective certainty, mean? Spiritual research does not want to work against science, as has often been emphasized, but to be in full agreement with science. Therefore, it must be aware of what science has to object to, not only in terms of its content, but especially in terms of its seriousness and its achievements in recent centuries.

It can rightly be said that spiritual science points out that these sources of spiritual research lie in a certain development of the soul, in that the soul undergoes certain inner processes of perception, feeling and will, undergoes that what is called meditation, so that it has inner experiences, which are of course purely limited to one's own soul, which no one can control but the person experiencing it, and then something like this is presented as a scientific result about the spiritual worlds that cannot be verified. Where does science come in, can it say, on what is precisely the most beautiful achievement of this science, that through the research of the last centuries it only accepts that which can be verified by every person, objectively and everywhere and at all times? External experiments and observations have the peculiarity that everyone can approach them. Not so with that which is achieved and fought for within. When we look at people who experience things in this way within themselves, does the great variety of the contradictory things they constantly express not show how uncertain the experiences are that are given through a mystically absorbed consciousness? By contrast, how the research conducted by individual researchers in the clinic, in the laboratory and so on must agree! It will be pointed out that this could not be otherwise, so that what a person experiences subjectively is thus shown to be unscientific, and this especially because it cannot be checked by anyone else, since the other person cannot look into the soul of the spiritual researcher in question.

Do not these experiences of the soul bear a complete similarity to everything that can be proven to come from some kind of pathological state, from exaggerations of the soul, in ecstasy and so on? If the spiritual researcher objects that he is not willing to accept every vision that occurs in the soul as a research result, but that he proceeds according to certain methods, then one can still object, and this objection seems entirely justified: Yes, but does it not appear in everything that people experience through visions, hallucinations and so on that such people, when exposed to such states of mind, develop a much greater belief in their fixed ideas, in their hallucinations and visions than in what their senses give them externally or what their minds impose on them? When one beholds the rigid and unbending faith of the illusionists, one must become dubious about what the spiritual researcher wants to bring up from the depths of his soul, as something that is not an illusion, that is supposed to have objective existence in the spiritual world. One could say that there could be something that has an objective existence in the spiritual world, but with regard to the validity of such a soul experiment, it must be said that the illusionist has just as much confidence in his delusions as the spiritual researcher has in his research results, which he owes to what comes up from the depths of the soul.

Only someone who has not followed the development of objective research, which one might say is the sound science of the last centuries and decades, can smile at such an objection. It is more weighty than one usually thinks, and is usually thought by those who come to their spiritual-scientific results from a one-sided direction. It must be said, for example, with reference to what is communicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where certain indications are given for the individual soul, that the soul, if it abandons itself entirely to such an experience, has no point of reference to control it. All this shows that one must deal with such an objection, which may even appear trivial to a superficial spiritual researcher, in the most serious way. So much has been said about the nature of, as one might say, untrue ideas that what is said against it can also be applied to spiritual science by saying: everything you present as methods to educate the soul need not be anything other than just a more sophisticated ability to create illusions and hallucinations.

But then, especially spiritual science appears out of place compared to serious, verifiable science when it points out the individual results. The conscientious seeker of truth of the present day, who has become familiar with the developments of recent years, might say: Do you know nothing of all that has happened? You speak of an etheric body or life body that is supposed to have an independent existence from the physical body. Do you know nothing of the fact that until the nineteenth century people believed in something called life force, and that serious scientific efforts have finally dispelled the belief in this life force? Do you know nothing of the following fact: In earlier centuries, it was said that a chemical process takes place in inanimate nature between the individual chemical substances out there. But when the same combination of substances enters the human organism, the so-called life force takes hold of it; then, under the influence of the life force, the individual substances do not interact as we learn in chemistry and physics, but the individual substances interact under the influence of the life force. It was a great advance when this vital force was thrown overboard, when people tried to say that this vital force does not help at all, but that one must proceed in such a way that what can be investigated in the inanimate world can be investigated must be pursued further in the living organism, that one must only take into account the more complicated way in which the substances interact there, and that one does not have to throw oneself onto the quagmire of the life force.

The vital force was dismissed as just such a “scientific redoubt” when it was shown how the effectiveness of certain substances, which in the past could only be thought of as influenced by the vital force, could also be achieved in the laboratory. And because it is not yet the end of the day, science must still set itself the lofty ideal of also considering the composition of substances as they are present in the cell of the plant, and must not lie on the foul bed of a life force when it comes to investigating how the substances and forces work in the organism.

As long as it was not possible to produce certain compositions of matter in the laboratory, it was justified to say that they only came about when the individual substances were captured by the life force. But since we have succeeded – particularly through Liebig and Wöhler – in producing certain substances without the aid of a special life force, since we no longer believe in the life force, it must be said that even the more complicated combinations in the human organism no longer require the help of a special life force. Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century, science was confronted with the lofty ideal that most researchers hold, even if there are also “neo-vitalists.” This ideal will be fulfilled: to recognize the material connections as they assemble in the living organism and to produce them without the aid of a nebulous, mystical life force, which, as the serious scientific research of the nineteenth century has always maintained, is of no use at all because it contributes nothing at all to the objective knowledge of nature.

Anyone who recognizes these facts and, above all, who sees the seriousness and dignity underlying this development of science, may well object: Is it credible that a number of people are now appearing as so-called spiritual researchers who, in the form of their etheric body or life body, are reviving the old life force? Is it not a sign of scientific dilettantism? They may “believe” who know nothing of the ideals of science; but the scientific researcher himself cannot be taken in by what can only appear as a rehash of the life force. Thus spiritual science, one might say, dabbles in a dilettantish way, disregarding everything that belongs to the most beautiful ideals of modern science. It only uses the fact that science has not yet succeeded in producing certain substances found in the living organism in the laboratory, in order to be able to claim for the time being that a special etheric body or life body is necessary for the production of life. It can be said that advancing science will eventually expel this etheric body or life body from the human being. As long as science, in its triumphal march, has not yet succeeded in showing that there is no etheric body and that the combination of the substances of the living organism can also be produced in the retort, as long as the theosophists or spiritual researchers make a fuss about the etheric body, which is just a rehash of the old life force! This reproach could be raised, initially, as a fact of dilettantism.

If spiritual science now says of the sleeping life: affects, drives and desires of the human being are bound to a special astral body, and this emerges from the etheric body and physical body when sleep overcomes the human being and leads an existence of its own, then one can say that it is very easy to speak of an inner soul life if one simplifies matters by not accepting this inner soul life with all the difficulties and riddles that present themselves to science, but by saying: There is an astral body, and what takes place within is bound to it. One can also refer to the progress of science and ask: What about the great progress that has been made, especially in recent decades, to explain the phenomena of sleep life and dream life in purely scientific terms? It would take a long time if I wanted to present to you all the efforts of science – which are to be taken very seriously and with great dignity – to explain the life of sleep and the life of dreams. It would take a long time especially because a large number of research projects have emerged recently that are very much open to discussion.

It suffices to consider one point of view that can show how difficult it is for the serious truth-seeker of the present day to profess what may initially seem like an assertion: the I and the astral body of the human being withdraw from the physical body and etheric body when falling asleep.

If we take a blanket explanation of sleep life, summarizing a large number of different hypotheses and statements about sleep life, it is the following: It is said that to explain sleep life, all that is needed is an unbiased look at the phenomena of the human or animal organism. It shows that waking life consists of the phenomena of the environment making an impression on the sense organs, of them exerting stimuli on the brain. Throughout the whole day they exert such stimuli. How do they affect the brain and nervous system of the human being? They have the effect of destroying the substance of which the nervous system consists. All day long, says modern natural science, we are confronted with the fact that external colors, sounds and so on penetrate our soul, that is, our brain life. This causes dissimilation processes, that is, destruction processes. Certain products are deposited.

As long as these processes are taking place, the human being is unable to bring about the reverse process, that of rebuilding his organism. Therefore, every time we wake up, our inner soul life is destroyed to a certain extent, so that by the time we have become tired, we have destroyed our organism and it can no longer develop an inner soul life; it ceases. We need assume nothing else except that fatigue substances are deposited in our organism through the day's life. We need only assume the attrition of the organic substance, that the organic substance is no longer able to develop its internal processes for a certain time. But then the external stimuli no longer work, and the result is that the inner organism now begins to develop its nutritional processes, the opposite of the dissimilation processes, the assimilation processes, that it now restores the destroyed organic substance, and this is how night sleep is effected. Once the organic substance has been restored, the inner soul life is also restored, and so the waking life can again exercise new stimuli until fatigue sets in again. Thus, we are dealing with what is called the self-regulation of the organism.

Can we not admit that the conscientious truth researcher, who is familiar with the results of today's science, must say: If the alternation of waking and sleeping can be well explained by the self-regulation of the organism, then it is not only superfluous but also directly harmful to impede the progress of such human science by saying that there is no self-regulation, but that something comes from outside the organism because the human being is independent. Since it can be explained entirely by the organism that the alternation of sleep and waking occurs, it is unnecessary and harmful to assume that consciousness is something special and steps out of the organism to develop a special life during the night. Again, one can point out that on the part of spiritual science there is a terrible dilettantism in which only those who do not know the path of science itself believe in order to explain the organism from within.

When people speak of the independence of spiritual life, when they speak of the fact that spiritual life is independent, that we have the human organism as a physical one through our senses and explore through the methods of science how physical occur, while the spiritual is still there, this is something that has often been emphasized, for example by Du Bois-Reymond and also by others who do not readily profess materialism. For example, take any cerebral representation: if you magnify the human brain to such an extent – Leibniz already said this – that you could walk around in it, you would only see material processes in it. But the spiritual life is still something special, and that testifies that one is dealing with a spiritual life that is separate from the processes of physical life. If that is justified, then what Benedict says, for example, shows this: the fact of consciousness is basically no different from the fact of the effect of gravity in connection with matter. Because we see, for example, the physical matter of a celestial body. According to the assumptions of physical science, this exerts the force of gravity, and there is something that is attracted, for example, by the sun. In the past, such effects between the sun and the earth or moon were thought to be something supernatural. But it is just the same as if we have a piece of soft iron and, in addition to it, the power of electricity or magnetism. And when we have the brain before us, with its crowded ideas, passions, affects and so on, it is just the same as the fact that gravity and other forces prevail around the material earth. So why should it be different from another effect, when processes are at work around the brain that occur in the same way as the gravitational processes around the material earth? The earth in connection with gravity and the other invisible forces at work around it is no different from what is at work around the brain in the form of affects, ideas and other processes. How can one have the right, one might ask, to speak of the independence of the spiritual life when one does not ascribe to oneself the right to speak of the fact that gravity is also exerted when there is no attracting body? And one can go on to say: Just as one has no right to speak in such a case in the free space of the universe of a world body developing gravity, so one has no right to speak of a special soul that is not bound to a material existence in a brain.

It should be clear to every serious spiritual researcher that such matters must not be dismissed with an unscientific fanaticism.

If there are already serious objections to the spiritual-scientific assumption about the life of sleep and wakefulness, about the independence of consciousness in general, how can anyone who takes the scientific methods of the present seriously somehow reconcile himself with what spiritual science about repeated earthly lives, about the existence of the human core of our being, which continues to exist after death, which undergoes experiences in the time between death and a new birth, and then reappears in a new, next physical earthly life! This is not only objected to by those who rely on scientific facts, but also by those who today want to be spiritual scientists themselves in many respects: by psychologists, by the soul researchers of the present day. The question is asked: What is the necessary characteristic for the continued existence of the human being? The psychologist of the present can find this in nothing other than in the fact that the human consciousness remembers the conditions it has gone through during life. Continuity of consciousness is what the psychologist of the present particularly focuses on. He cannot concern himself with that which does not fall within the consciousness of the human personality, and he will always have to rely on the fact that although man has a memory of his particular states in his life between birth and death, nothing analogous can be shown for the existence of the human being that comes over from previous earthly lives. Many a serious seeker after truth today will be able to object to many other things that have been presented in the course of this series of lectures. It can be said: You can indeed put forward the idea that certain things in human life appear in such a way that they cannot be explained by the events of the individual life, but that one must assume that a person brings certain abilities, talents and so on with them through birth, so that one can assume that the soul already exists before entering into physical life. But all of this remains a mere daring hypothesis. All this remains insufficient in the face of modern soul research, in that the latter again takes a path that seems to be steering quite conscientiously towards an ideal.

What is presented here can be characterized in the following way: anyone who looks impartially at human life, at how it unfolds with these or those passions, with this or that shade of feeling, with an inclination towards these or those ideas, will, if they place themselves without much hesitation the standpoint of spiritual science, will say: Our education has indeed achieved many things for us; but it cannot explain everything, for we bring with us from birth something that comes from earlier stages of our existence on earth. But, the serious scientist may reply, have we not started to investigate the first childhood life, the childhood life that is not remembered later?

The modern natural scientist or the philosopher might then say: Here the spiritual researcher wants to explain an ingenious person, such as Fexzerbach, for example, by saying that he has brought certain powers with him from his previous life and that this has enabled him to work artistically. But now the following discovery has been made: Such a painter paints with a very special color mood, prefers a certain facial expression and so on, in a very specific direction. If one follows this up, one finds that, for example, in his first years as a child he saw a bust in his room and that a particular way in which the light always fell on it engraved itself on the child's soul. This then reappears later, and it then becomes apparent, one might say, that such impressions are deeply effective and significant. It is possible to explain a lot through this. Spiritual science wants to trace everything back to earlier lives on earth, while perhaps everything can be explained by careful observation and research into early childhood.

One can then point further to modern natural science, which shows through the biogenetic law how man really does go through the animal forms, which are assumed to have passed through the human race in earlier states on earth, in the prenatal state, so that there is justification for showing this. Following on from this, one can say: Where does spiritual science point to something similar, that something is repeated in the individual life that a person has gone through in previous lives on earth? One would have to be able to demand this if, as a legitimate seeker of truth in the present, one is to believe that in this respect spiritual science applies the same seriousness and dignity that is present in a similar claim on the basis of natural science. And so it has come about — and with a certain justification one can say — that once man has acquired a little scientific knowledge about human life, animal life and also planetary life, which is accessible to us through astronomy, he can then give free rein to his imagination, draw conclusions and devise all kinds of other worlds that give a very strong impression of reality. Of course, someone who has no knowledge of natural science will very soon become entangled in contradictions, and his ignorance will soon become apparent as he projects all kinds of things that do not correspond to the results of natural science. But anyone who is familiar with natural science will show that his ideas fit very nicely into what natural science shows. Then he will not be refuted. But who in spiritual science stands up for the fact, one can ask again now, that something like this has not been projected out of such assertions without justification and then developed fantastically? Who guarantees that we take the standpoint that only that which can be investigated by everyone should be valid? Therefore, we would have to embrace this for the simple reason that we see how something emerged in the nineteenth century that is also asserting itself in modern spiritual science.

We have seen that in the nineteenth century in German and French intellectual life, the things that spiritual science asserts have asserted themselves. In 1854, Reynaud published a work, “Terre et ciel”, and Figuier published a work about what happens to man after death. There have been numerous opponents with a scientific education who have said: Yes, what is better, that you invent facts based on natural science about a multitude of human lives on earth, about life after death, and so on, or is it better to accept some other equally fictitious hypothesis about these things?

When such objections are raised, and when they are not raised in a frivolous way, but entirely on the basis of a serious search for truth, then it must be said that they are not objections that arise only from a spirit of contradiction, but that the human soul must raise itself, all the more so because on the other hand one sees again how little conscientiousness on the part of those who want to cultivate spiritual science when “proofs” are presented that human life is an individual one and it is said that one cannot find an explanation for phenomena such as human conscience and the sense of responsibility unless one wants to assume certain tendencies and inclinations from previous lives on earth. Some people say: If I feel responsible, then I must have acquired the disposition for it. Since I have not acquired it in this life, it must have been in a previous one.

It is also said that human conscience is a phenomenon that proves that an inner voice speaks to us that we cannot derive from this life, and therefore we must derive it from a previous one. Then it is also said: You look at the different children of the same parents, they have very different spiritual characteristics. But if everything is supposed to be passed down from parents to children by inheritance, how can such differences be explained, as they occur even in twins? Therefore, one may conclude - so people say - that the children of the same parents have different individualities, which cannot be inherited, but must have been drawn from a previous life into the present one.

The conscientious truth-seeker will object: Do you not take into account the fact that the individuality of a person, as he appears to us, arises from the mixture of the paternal and maternal elements, and that therefore the mixture must be different for each individual child? Should not even twins, because they have different mixtures, have different individualities if they are explained only by inheritance?

This objection is not far-fetched, but one that arises from the matter itself. If you consider everything, you find it perfectly understandable that those who always demand a “controllable” science do not include spiritual science because it is not controllable; and if you consider that such opponents have something significant for themselves, you understand them. They have this for themselves, that there is something else besides the critical spirit in our time. This critical spirit is certainly present, and when spiritual science says something, it immediately calls upon its opponents, who are not only logically irritated but also morally outraged that such theories are put forward. Such opponents are called upon, and criticism is something we see springing up everywhere. And because spiritual science and its ideas are a shock to our time, such criticism is quite understandable.

But alongside the critical spirit, credulity also lives in our time, running after anyone who claims something from spiritual science. The longing to get things in such a way that one can also understand them is not very present in people, it is just as little present as the critical spirit and credulity are strongly present. Thus we see that through credulity, through the acceptance of authority by a gullible public, which accepts all kinds of things from spiritual science, the way is paved for precisely that which has always asserted itself against real, serious spiritual research, namely, charlatanry. It is a challenge to charlatanry when people gullibly run after everything. And it is a great temptation for people when all sorts of things are believed, when they are relieved of the difficulty of really justifying these things before the forum of science, before the forum of the spirit of the age. Even in our time, what is mentioned here is only too widespread. We see how credulity and the most blatant superstition are running rampant. There are hardly two other things in the world that are as closely related as spiritual science and charlatanry. If one cannot distinguish between the two paths, if one accepts everything only on the basis of blind faith in authority, just as by nature some things must be accepted on authority, which is often the case in the present time, then one invites what is rightly criticized by serious truth seekers: the charlatanry that is so closely linked to spiritual science. It is understandable that someone who is unable to distinguish the charlatan from the spiritual researcher might object that it must all be charlatanry.

It is easy to make the transition to the moral and religious spheres. We can characterize the objections that arise in these areas more quickly because they are easier to understand.

One can say: Just look how what must be the most intimate matter of the human soul, what a person can find for themselves as faith, as their subjective belief, is blown up into an apparent science! And one can object to the spiritual scientist: If you present that as your faith, we will leave you alone. But if you want to impose on others what you present as a teaching from the higher worlds, then that is contrary to the nature and character of how the inner life of man should relate to the spiritual worlds, to religious life in general. If one then also wants to show the fruits in this respect, one can say: One looks at people who, in spiritual-scientific circles, for example, have made the idea of repeated earthly lives their conviction; one can see in them how what is the moral world view is introduced into the most blatant egotism precisely through a spiritual-scientific world view. And one can compare the results of spiritual science with the materialism of the nineteenth century by saying: There were numerous people who were able to go beyond mere material processes with their minds, and who said: I do not see my higher morality in claiming a spiritual world after my death in order to be accepted by it and to continue to live there, but when I do something moral, I do it without hope of a spiritual world, because duty commands me to do so, because I gladly give what is my own egoity.

There have been many for whom the morality of immortality was only a selfish morality. This morality seemed to them to be much less good than the one that lets everything that is done pass into general world life at the death of man. In contrast to this is the morality of those who say that it would make no sense if what they do did not find its compensation in the following life on earth. This law of karma, the opponents of spiritual science can now say, only favors human selfishness; quite apart from such people, who may even say: I recognize many lives in the future. So why should I become a decent person now? I have many lives ahead of me, and even if I remain stupid in the present, I can still become wise and clever in the lives to come. “So one could say that repeated lives on earth are an invitation to lead a comfortable and carefree life. All this shows that the idea of repeated lives on earth is that selfishness, which wants to preserve one's self, is very far removed from selfless morality.

And an objection can be raised to Friedrich Schlegel's view of repeated earthly lives, as they are assumed by the Indians: The view of the human being's life, which rushes from embodiment to embodiment, leads to man being alienated from active, direct intervention in reality, so that he loses interest in everything in which he is to develop. It is easy to notice a certain unworldly eccentricity in those who immerse themselves in spiritual science. A certain spiritual egoism, a certain unworldly doctrine is cultivated as a result. Indeed, it can be seen that such people say: After studying spiritual science for a certain period of time, I lose interest in what I used to love. This is a common occurrence, but it shows that the objection is taken seriously, that the person should work in the world to which he is assigned! It is a serious objection that spiritual science should not alienate people from the direct and strong life of reality, should not turn them into eccentrics who let everything go haywire.

And now religious life! One can say: What is the most beautiful flower, the most glorious flower of this religious life? It lies in devotion, in the selfless devotion of the human individuality, one can say, to a divine beyond the human. The self-loss of the mind, the self-sacrificing devotion of the mind to the divine beyond the human, produces the actual religious mood. But now spiritual science comes and explains to man that there is a divine spark in him, which first expresses itself in a small way in one earth life, but then is developed and becomes more and more perfect, so that the God in man becomes stronger and stronger. That is self-deification instead of selfless devotion to the extra-human divinity.

Yes, one can object with some justification, if one takes the religious view seriously, that by living in one's own divine nature, if it is realized through the various incarnations, the true religious sentiment can be destroyed, as can the life of love. If a person does not feel impelled to live in direct loving devotion, but thinks that he will make up for it in a later life on earth, then he is only loving with a view to making up the balance. And the religious man can say: In the world view of spiritual science, religious life is based on the egoism that man does not have God outside himself, but within himself. And the objection is justified: what a sum of arrogance, pride and self-deification can be established in the human soul as a result!

Those who have such objections do not need to imagine them. But it can be seen from this how dream-like followers of spiritual science can come to such pride and repeatedly to such self-deification. This is why we find such a rebellion against the existence of the divine spark in man in the Occident, against the existence of the human essence before birth. One should not take it lightly, which one can find in a serious truth researcher as such an objection to repeated earthly lives in contrast to the conditions of inheritance.

One objection, which I will read out – and I will not talk about it further so as not to weaken it – is found in Jacob Frohschammer, who can be taken as a type of person who can object to the assumption of a pre-existence of the soul in many ways:

”... The human soul cannot possibly regard itself as a divine essence or as a part of God, not so much because of the Thomistic concern for the unity of God, since they could still be moments in him without damaging his unity, but rather because of the human soul's own consciousness and testimony, which can neither regard itself nor the world as a direct expression of divine perfection or as the realization of the idea of God himself. As coming from God, it can only be considered a product or work of divine imagination; for the human soul, like the world itself, must in this case come from divine power and activity (since nothing can come from mere nothing), but this power and activity of God must, as in the creation of a model, also be effective in the realization and preservation; thus as formative power (not only formally, but also in a real way), therefore as imagination, i.e. as a power or potency that continues to act and create within the world, thus as world imagination, - as this has already been discussed earlier. As for the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls (of souls that are either considered eternal or created temporally, but already at the beginning and all at once), which, as noted, has been rediscovered in more recent times and is considered suitable for solving all kinds of psychological problems, it is connected with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the incarceration of souls in earthly bodies. According to this, when the parents are conceived, neither a direct divine creation of the souls nor a creative production of new human natures by body and soul takes place, but only a new connection of the soul with the body, thus a kind of incarnation or immersion of the soul in the body, at least partially, so that it is partly embraced and bound by the body, partly it extends beyond it and maintains a certain independence as a spirit, but still cannot escape from it until death breaks the connection and brings liberation and salvation for the soul (at least from this connection). In this state, the human spirit was said to resemble the poor souls in purgatory in its relationship to the body, as they are usually depicted by bungling painters on votive tablets, as bodies half immersed in the blazing flames, but with the upper part (as souls) protruding and gesticulating! Just think what position and significance this view would give to the sexual contrast, the nature of the human race, marriage and the relationship between parents and children! The sexual antagonism only a means of incarceration, marriage an institution for the execution of this fine task, the parents the minions for the detention and incarceration of the children's souls, the children themselves owing this miserable, laborious imprisonment to the parents, while they have nothing else in common with them! All that is tied to this relationship is based on miserable deception!"

If you are a fanatical spiritual scientist, you may smile at such a thing, but fanaticism should be alien to spiritual science. It should understand and truly tolerate that which the soul rebels against. For this reason, this introductory lecture was not given as a “justification” but as a “refutation” of spiritual scientific research. But what will be presented in the next lecture, “How to Justify Spiritual Research?”, will be all the more solid if we can make the objections to be justified ourselves. You may well believe that I do not want to refute spiritual research in truth!

I could only list a very small number of objections here. Many such objections could be made. Some of this can be done in the near future, and the refutation will follow on immediately. But from all that is stated, one can see how man, by undertaking spiritual research, is inwardly summoned to a battlefield, how not only the things that speak for repeated earth lives, for man's passage through a spiritual world, and so on, arise, but how all the counter-arguments can also arise from the dark depths of the soul. It is good when someone who is quietly engaged in spiritual research is also familiar with these counterarguments. Then he will also be able to show the right tolerance towards his opponents. Simply occupying oneself with spiritual science or turning a blind eye or laughing at the objections of one's opponents can never be the way of the spiritual researcher. That this does not have a beneficial effect was already shown in a particular case in the nineteenth century, which I would like to relate here.

In 1869, Eduard von Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published. Even if one does not agree with it, one can still say that it was a good attempt to go beyond the sensory view. Therefore, Eduard von Hartmann had to oppose much of what had emerged as an ideal of science at the time, especially what came from the newly emerging Darwinism. Thus we find much in The Philosophy of the Unconscious that should not have become fashionable in the face of Darwinism. But the one thing that all those who, on the side of Darwinism, could not declare themselves in agreement with this book had in common was that they rose up against Eduard von Hartmann as one who had not familiarized himself with what followed from contemporary natural science. A flood of refutations appeared. It would be a mistake to think that these replies contained nothing but nonsense; some of them were written by people who are outstanding in their own fields, for example, by Ernst Haeckel, the zoologist Oskar Schmidt and others. Among these writings was also one whose author did not name himself, with the title “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In it, a number of cogent arguments were put forward to show how many things in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” could not be sustained and how its author had thereby demonstrated that he was nothing more than an amateur in the field of natural science. Many people were positively amazed at the ready wit with which this anonymous writer attacked his subject, and Oskar Schmidt, then at the University of Jena, thought that from the standpoint of natural science this was the best that could be said against The Philosophy of Unconscious. Some said: He calls himself us, because he is one of us; and Ernst Haeckel said that he himself could not write anything better against the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”.

So it was no wonder that the first edition of this work, “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent,” was soon out of print. A second edition appeared, and now the author called himself : it was—Eduard von Hartmann! Now some voices ceased that had previously said: he calls himself us, he is one of us. But the significant thing had been accomplished: a man had shown that he knew everything that the most serious opponents could bring against him. Once and for all, it has been proved that one should not believe that, if something can be said against a Weltanschhauung, the author of that Weltanschhauung could not have said it himself.

For spiritual science, this is a vital question. Today, I could not say everything that could be said. But spiritual science must know what objections can be raised against it, and it would only be desirable if some of those who believe they can summon up profound knowledge in order to refute spiritual science with this or that good scientific, exact reason could sometimes consider how much better the person against whom the objection is raised knows the matter than the person who raises it. This is the case with a conscientious spiritual researcher. Of course, he cannot bore his audience by always mentioning all possible counter-arguments. But when something is said in favor of spiritual science, and when many opponents arise, then the latter should first ask themselves whether what they are saying cannot be said by those who represent spiritual science.

The task of the next lecture will be to raise the question: How should the soul correctly relate to the counterarguments that arise from its depths? Is it really true that, because so much can be objected to spiritual science, man really has to position himself as - to put it in a somewhat figurative way - Goethe ultimately has his Faust say: “Could I remove magic from my path”? Are the counter-arguments of spiritual research the same as Faust's attitude towards the counter-arguments of magic? Are they such that a philosopher like Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is right when he says: In the face of world observation, there is really only the following. We see that man is weak in many respects. Why should we not admit this weakness to ourselves, and why should it not be a strength precisely when one comes to terms with one's weakness? How man must admit to himself that he is weak against wind and weather, against volcanic forces and natural disasters! How man must admit to himself that he is weak in the face of what nature inflicts on him when he plants the seed in the earth and the unfavorable weather does not allow it to ripen, which only allows a famine to arise from his diligence! If man must often remind himself of his weakness, why should he not say it, out of honesty: although the mind can rise above itself in many ways, it is also weak and limited and can do nothing about what nature imposes on it; so it can recognize nothing about what our nature is – we must resign ourselves!

If the reasons that have now been put forward were so weighty that the next lecture could not be given, there would be nothing left but such resignation, which not only Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, but many others feel from an honest, truth-loving soul, and who believe that they have to defend the idea that man cannot penetrate into a spiritual world. Because the counter-arguments arise not from a spirit of contradiction but from the nature of things themselves, the dispute about the nature and value of the counter-arguments of spiritual science is not merely a theoretical fact, but something that must arise out of the battlefield of the soul, where opinions wage a seemingly more or less justified war against opinions, and where only through hard struggles can one recognize which of these reasons can remain victorious there. If one faces the inner struggle of the soul openly and unreservedly and can say what speaks for and against a knowledge of the spiritual world, then one does not become a fanatical representative of this or that invented or contrived principle, but one adherer to that principle, and builds up a calm conviction on a foundation of reasons which are only then, and never before, asserted for themselves when they have driven out all opposing arguments from the field of their own soul.

When the seeker of truth seeks his conviction in this way, he may confidently go forward into the future development of spiritual life, for what the earnest seeker of truth has said is true: Whatever is untrue, however often it may be repeated, will be cast out by the ever-developing striving for truth in humanity. But that which is true and has to fight for its existence against opposing arguments, as we can see in the events of world history, finds its way in the development of humanity in such a special way that one can stand before this development of truth into the centuries and millennia and say: And no matter how many covering impressions, that is prejudices and contradictions, are piled up, the truth will always find crevices and cracks to assert itself, to assert itself for the benefit, progress and use of humanity.

In the preceding remarks, I allowed myself to cite a number of objections and refutations of spiritual research or anthroposophy. It would be a misunderstanding if anyone were to believe that today's lecture was intended to refute these refutations, for it should be stated from the outset that this is not a game of thought, nor a dialectical game with reasons and counter-reasons. The spiritual research that is to be discussed here and has always been discussed is intended to work in full harmony with the science and education of the present day. Therefore, the latterly mentioned replies have not been cited in the sense that one could easily dismiss them out of hand, but they have been cited in the sense that they do, to a certain extent, legitimately arise in the soul of today, in the soul that takes into account the achievements of our spiritual science, the progress of our spiritual culture up to the present day. They have been put forward, not as unjustified objections, but as objections that are justified within certain limits. The feeling should be awakened of the seriousness with which spiritual research would like to work and of the awareness that it can take full responsibility for itself from its sources, itself, although this spiritual research fully understands — that should be said mainly with these objections — that it is, so to speak, dependent only on itself in what one might call the main opposition of three, which it faces.

One opposition arises from contemporary science, or at least from that science which often believes that it is built without contradiction on this contemporary science. The second opposition arises from various religious denominations, and the third arises from the ordinary consciousness of the day, which instinctively rebels in many respects against what spiritual science and spiritual research has to say.

It could easily appear as if the question were justified: How does spiritual research prove its assertions against the objections raised? How does it prove what it has to say? — In the course of these winter lectures, we will hear a great deal about the content of this spiritual research, about the actual results of research into the supersensible world. In these first two lectures, I must be allowed to speak in a way that some people may find difficult to understand or uninteresting, even though it is meant to be abstract. For even if it is not possible to follow all of my remarks in the first and second lectures, it is still possible to gain the feeling that a truly good foundation is being sought for this spiritual research. Therefore, some questions may be raised today that may be found uninteresting by those who would be more interested in immediately receiving this or that story from the supersensible world. The question may be raised: Is it at all possible to apply to the foundation of a world view what is usually called proof in the sense in which it is often believed? Can proof be regarded as something that, when it is present, includes the compulsion for every person to be convinced?

Anyone who seriously professes any worldview usually believes that he can prove it, and he will certainly cite his proofs for this worldview if he wants to be taken seriously. In the face of this widespread belief, I would first like to quote a word from a vigorous, energetic German philosopher, the word of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who says: What kind of philosophy one has depends on what kind of person one is.

If we want to get to the bottom of a saying like Fichte's here, if we want to ask in other words what he meant, we have to say to ourselves: it is not just a matter of evidence, but of which evidence one considers decisive, which evidence has the weight for a person according to the development of his soul, if he wants to gain insight into this or that. Thus, even a philosopher like Fichte points us to the human soul when it comes to evaluating evidence. It is, as it were, demanded that man, through his soul development, has acquired the ability to understand the weight of evidence. To put it trivially, I would like to say: What use is all this evidence in the end to someone who cannot believe in it? And we can see how it is with so-called proofs in many cases by studying the methods of some world-views that appear to be built entirely on the firm foundation of scientific facts.

When I say something like I am about to say now, I must, however, always add at the outset: I do not believe that anyone can have more respect and recognition for the progress of natural science in our time than the genuine spiritual researcher. And today I would like to add in particular that all the objections that were raised eight days ago are meant in such a way that they are justified, in that the spiritual researcher's immediate objections to what was said eight days ago would be unjustified. For the spiritual researcher does not deny what the natural scientist asserts, and rightly so. He fully recognizes it. This fact must also be taken into account.

Spiritual research is constantly being opposed by natural science; on the other hand, spiritual research itself does not oppose natural science at all, if one is able to appreciate the true state of affairs. But there are many scientific facts that are used by certain schools of thought today in such a way, and seemingly put in such a light, that one can fully agree with the facts, but not with the way in which certain world views sometimes want to prove something on the basis of these facts. The facts that arise from natural science are mostly confirmed by spiritual research, and it may be said that the time will come when that which is justified in Darwinism and in the modern theory of evolution will find the right appreciation precisely through spiritual research.

Thus it can also be clear, in particular through spiritual research, that the soul of man, in order to prove itself effective in the external physical world, must make use of certain spiritual functions of certain parts, certain sections of the brain, just as one must make use of other hand movements. Just as the hand is assigned to certain human activities, so certain parts of the brain are assigned as tools to the soul's experience. Spiritual research will enable us to see the true meaning and significance of this relationship, and there is no contradiction between spiritual research and the views of natural science in this respect. On the other hand, the so-called proofs that are adduced often appear very fragile to anyone who understands the value of evidence. For example, when it is repeatedly stated that certain parts of the brain are involved in mental life, and that the disease of these parts of the brain switches off the mental activity in question, and it is therefore not possible to perceive that the soul accomplishes certain tasks, such as speech, so that the speech center is switched off.

For those who understand the value of evidence, such evidence truly meets the objection of the famous, if non-existent, Professor Schlaucherl, who, as some of you may know, wanted to prove how a frog feels. To do this, he put a frog on the experimental table and knocked on the table, and lo and behold, the frog jumped away – so it had heard it. Now he pulled out the frog's legs and tapped on the table again. Now the frog did not jump away because its legs had been pulled out. But from the fact that it could no longer jump away, Professor Schlaucherl concluded that the frog hears with its legs, because if it has no legs, it cannot be shown that it can hear.

When such a thing is stated, one must, of course, apologize. But it is logically and methodically quite in line with what is often cited today for evidential purposes, which are not to be doubted in the slightest by spiritual science, which are even true. But the evidence cited will never be able to truly convince those who are able to judge conclusive human statements.

Thus it is with much of what has just been stated in the previous lecture, as it is a weighty objection that can be made in the scientific sense by serious and worthy researchers of contemporary natural science, that people in the past came up with the life force and tried to explain everything that happens in the living body on the basis of this life force. But the nineteenth century has shown that this life force cannot be used for anything and that, if one only assumes the usual forces in certain substances, one can show, as soon as one proceeds in a laboratory, how certain composite substances, which were previously believed to be produced only in the living organism by the life force, can be produced in the laboratory without this life force. So that the ideal of science must be to assume that one day it will be possible to actually produce more complicated substances of the living in this way. Now the spiritual researchers come along and claim that there is a special life body or ether body in the living organism that is necessary for the living phenomena to come about. But this is nothing more than a rehash of the old life force. It could only have come from dilettantish souls who, out of convenience, seek an explanatory principle where they do not know how to take into account the advances of true science due to their lack of knowledge.

I would first like to explain, by means of a kind of historical testimony, how this whole conclusion affects a soul that is not prejudiced by the, let it be said, justified progress of science, and which does not readily surrender to its conclusions. I would like to show it first through something historical. It is believed that the assumption of an etheric body or life body has been refuted by the argument that it must be regarded as an ideal of science to assemble the living substance from its individual substances in a laboratory ; therefore, one could no longer believe in a basis for life through something supernatural, but one must see it as an effect in the purely material when working in the laboratory and combining the composite substances from the simple ones.

There was a time when people truly believed more than today's serious scientists dare to believe, that not only a single living substance but also the lowest living creatures, even a small human being, the well-known homunculus, could be put together in a laboratory. The time when people firmly believed that the homunculus could be created in the laboratory did not take this belief at all as if it meant that the supernatural nature of life phenomena had been eliminated; on the contrary, it was precisely then that people really believed in the supernatural nature of life phenomena. This is a historical objection to the claim that it is incompatible for human thinking to believe in the supersensible origin of life and at the same time to fully support the natural scientist's view that life could be reproduced in the laboratory. The two things are compatible, and to prove that they are compatible, one must perhaps again bring forward a rather trivial train of thought, but this is no less significant for those who not only do not allow themselves to be hypnotized or influenced by a scientific world view, but who are able to respond to the whole structure of the human soul.

We see certain substances before us. We put them together. We see – we hypothesize – how living substance arises from them. Are we therefore justified in concluding that from what we have seen of the individual substances before us, the life of that substance has actually formed? No, we are not! And we are no longer justified in doing so from the moment we admit that the flies that appear after a certain time have not developed from the food remains in a room. If we see a room full of flies, we can say that these flies are there because the room is in disarray and food remains have been left behind. These food remains were the condition, but they did not make the flies. But the flies will always appear when the conditions are there, and when the conditions are there, life will appear. But no-one can claim that it emerged from this, but only that they were the cause that life appeared.

A supernatural process can also be assumed when things fit together in a laboratory-like manner. Therefore, it would be quite wrong on the part of spiritual research if it wanted to base itself on the fact that it wanted to rise in a more or less ironic or ingenious way above what science strives for as its ideal. It fully agrees with this. But that does not get out of the way what spiritual research contributes to the real, complete understanding of things.

Let us take as another example the objection raised in the first lecture against spiritual research, in so far as it explains the phenomena of sleeping and waking by saying that there is something supersensory in man that rises out of the physical body and etheric body when a person falls asleep, goes into a special spiritual world and submerges again into it when he wakes up. We have mentioned the important objection, which is absolutely convincing, that natural science attempts to explain the phenomenon of sleep by demonstrating a kind of self-regulation of the organism, by showing how the stimuli exerted by the impressions of daytime life destroy, so to speak, consume the organic substance, so that a point is reached where this organic substance, the substance of life, must be restored. While it is being restored, dullness covers the consciousness, and when the restoration is complete, the external stimuli can take effect again. So we would be dealing with a self-regulation of the organism and could say: What need is there of a special spiritual research that indulges in a special description of what is supposed to go out of a person during sleep in order to be in another world - when the phenomenon of sleep can be explained from the human body itself?

The following consideration shows the weight to be attached to the scientific description, which is true within certain limits. Even if the individual facts that I present can only be outlined, they are in harmony, if not in all details, then at least with the general spirit of present-day scientific research.

So what happens when the organism is at rest during sleep, even according to the scientific view? We have to say, according to the scientific view, that the organic substances used up by the impressions of the senses and by the other external impressions are repaired. So there is an inner process, a process that is entirely determined by the nature and the essence of the human body, of the human organism, and we can explain what happens so internally, of course, only from what lies in the laws of the human body, in the laws of the organism. But these laws of the organism can never, in the present or in the future, give us anything other than what the lungs, for example, give us for the respiratory process. Anyone who studies the human respiratory process will be able to understand it completely from the laws of lung life. But what the human being will not be able to understand is the nature and the effect of oxygen. This will have to be researched outside the lungs, it must first enter the lungs from the outside, and anyone who thought that by researching the lungs they would get to know the nature of oxygen would be greatly mistaken.

The lung process, everything that happens in the organism, can be experienced from within the life of the lungs. To understand the whole process of breathing, it is necessary that we go out of the life of the lungs and understand the nature of oxygen outside of it, and we gain nothing in knowledge about the nature of oxygen from the process of lung life. Nor do we gain any knowledge of everything that takes place in the waking consciousness from morning to evening, in which drives, passions, affects, ideals, and so on, rise and fall, by examining what happens in the organism during sleep. Just as the life of the lungs is not the same as the nature of oxygen, just as oxygen must enter the lungs from the outside, it is just as certain that everything contained in the phenomena of consciousness must unite with what comes into it from the outside, which we can study and observe internally during the sleep process as internal bodily processes.

However, it will not be possible to see through such a train of thought immediately. But if you follow it, it is not a mere analogy; it is more than that: it is a kind of educational tool for really looking at the things that we encounter in the characterized phenomenon in life together. And anyone who really enlightens themselves about the relationship between oxygen, which is outside and enters the lungs, and what happens in the lungs, will learn from such a concept, from such an idea, how to about what is outside the physical organism during sleep and about the processes that take place in the physical organism during sleep, just as oxygen must be added to the internal organic processes of the lungs if a breathing process is to occur in a truly vital way, so must consciousness be added if it is to be experienced.

The things that can be called a “founding of spiritual science” are not at all as simple as one often believes. Because they are not, it often seems as if they can be easily refuted. In the Fichtean sense, the recognition of reasons and counter-reasons in this field is really a matter of what kind of person one is, that is, what state of soul one brings with one in order to see things in their true light. How often do we hear people say: Oh, there come these spiritual researchers or anthroposophists and say that the human being, who is perceived as a unified being and for whom we have gained the insight that he is a unified being, is divided into different members or parts, into a physical body, an etheric body or life body, an astral body and an ego. Yes, everything can be categorized. But the point is not to divide at all, but to carry out such research methods according to the justified demands of a thinking that really penetrates into things. If someone has water in front of him, he will not be wrong in agreeing with the chemist who tells him: As long as you let this be “water”, you will never be able to determine what the chemical components of this water are; to do that, you have to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen.

As long as one remains in such a specific area, one will perhaps not hear the objection: You are committing a mortal sin against monism, because water is a monon. You must not divide it into hydrogen and oxygen, otherwise you become a superstitious dualist. In such a specific area, you may not hear such an objection because here the necessity for such a division is too obvious. What is the main characteristic that justifies such a division, considering not only water but the entire field of being under consideration here? The essential thing is that oxygen cannot be only in water, but, as the chemist thinks, also in other substances, with which it can combine completely, and that hydrogen can also combine with other substances, so that water can be divided, and the individual parts can enter into completely different combinations and have their special destinies in these combinations.

If the aim of spiritual research were only to distinguish between what presents itself as a human being, let us say the etheric body and the physical body, without mentioning the other, then one could say: You are just making a division. But follow spiritual research - not everything can be mentioned today - it is just the same as in chemistry, for example. We do not dissect the human being into a physical body and an etheric body because it is so convenient for us to separate the types of manifestation in this way in relation to this human being, but because we actually have to show: just as hydrogen and oxygen, when separated from their watery state, undergo different fates in different substances, so the physical body undergoes its own particular fate at death, as does the etheric body, and the astral body also enters into other connections. Just as the chemist follows water, not regarding it as a monad but understanding it as the duality of hydrogen and oxygen, and showing that hydrogen can take completely different paths from oxygen, so the spiritual researcher follows the paths of the physical body, the ether body or life body, the astral body and the ego in the most diverse areas of life. This entitles him to speak of a real division. An objection that he would thus violate monism would be equivalent to saying that anyone who separates water into hydrogen and oxygen violates monism.

It is therefore a matter of man's understanding, through real insight into the facts, the value, the justification of the objections and also the limits of the objections. One will recognize that one is dealing with true, genuine, serious spiritual science when one engages with it, that it does not lightly dismiss the objections, but that it tries to find the concepts for its results precisely by carefully considering the pros and cons. But if it has already been repeatedly pointed out today that Fichte said, “One has a philosophy that arises depending on one's nature as a human being,” then one could also say what was said eight days ago : there everything is traced back to an inner subjective source, and the power of conviction is sought, not in what is given externally, but in the way in which man could relate to the phenomena of the world. Then we come to the discussion of what was pointed out in the first lecture: the sources of spiritual-scientific knowledge. It was said that these sources arise through an evolution of the human soul. We shall speak again about how this evolution takes place, which paths the soul has to travel in order to truly ascend to knowledge and insights into the supersensible world. Today, we shall only say that the soul has to undergo inner processes that are referred to, for example, as meditation, as concentration of the inner life. What is achieved through such processes?

If someone who really wants to become a spiritual researcher wants to make his soul, so to speak, an apparatus for spiritual research, he must artificially create a similar state in himself to that which otherwise occurs in a state of sleep. That is to say, he must artificially be able to induce, through sharp concentration of will, what otherwise only occurs as a state of sleep through fatigue. He must be able to exclude all external sense impressions, must also be able to suppress all thinking bound to the brain, and yet he must avoid that state which otherwise occurs during sleep: the complete emptiness of consciousness. He avoids this by devoting himself to very specific ideas - we will characterize them later - that are suitable for concentrating his soul powers, contracting them so that they become stronger than they otherwise are. During sleep, when they leave the physical body, they are otherwise, as it were, thin and therefore unable to perceive anything of themselves or the world, their inner power of perception is too weak. Through meditation and concentration, however, they become stronger and denser. The person then withdraws from ordinary thinking not so much that he knows nothing of himself, as is the case in ordinary sleep, but so that he is able to consciously hold himself and, through the nature of this state, experiences: Now you hear nothing through the ears, see nothing more through the eyes, think no longer through the brain-bound thinking, but now you experience yourself in the pure spiritual and have a reality in the pure spiritual.

It is said that an ordinary and again justified objection to such an assertion of spiritual research is: Through such a development of the soul, for example, one can come to inner worlds of imagination, which are seen as an expression of a supersensible world. One can also have the opinion, based on the way these types of ideas arise, that they point to something real. But it can be said that it is known that the person who has hallucinations, delusions, visions also believes in these hallucinations and so on with all his might, and that it is therefore quite impossible to find a distinction in truth between hallucinations, delusions and so on and what arises in the spiritual researcher. Why should not what the spiritual researcher comes to in this way also be seen as a more refined, but still a mere hallucination? Apart from the fact that one can say that what is experienced inwardly is only subjective and cannot be checked by another at any time, as is the case, for example, in a physical experiment.

But now it must be pointed out that it is not at all in the nature of all truths that they can be found or even confirmed by external events. It may be said that the concepts of mathematics could be convincing in the extreme sense for anyone who just wants to think, because they are gained inwardly. To understand this, we need only refer to the ordinary mental image of three threes being nine. To understand this, all that is needed is an inner mental image of the soul, and it is nothing more than a sensualization when someone, for example, visualizes through three times three peas that three times three is nine. It depends on the inner development of the soul when someone has the realization that three times three is nine, and he does not need to confirm it first through an external process. He knows what he has experienced, he knows it without any external control. There is therefore an inner soul-searching for which external control is nothing more than an illustration that is exhausted in what is illustrated, and it can be seen that this inner experience is true.

In a very similar way, only at a higher level, is the difference experienced between error and truth in the supersensible world. The spiritual researcher must want to go through all the things that can lead him to knowledge: where do hallucinations, visions and illusions end, and where does supersensible reality begin? Where one ends and the other begins can only be understood in a similar way to how mathematical truths can be understood. But it can be understood. Anyone who is a genuine spiritual researcher and who knows the nature that really leads to spiritual research will not entertain the world with his visions, and if you find someone who entertains people about the supernatural world by sharing his visions, you can always assume that he is very far from being a true spiritual researcher. For the true spiritual researcher knows that all imaginary, visionary life known in the outer world is nothing but a representation of one's own soul life, that it represents nothing other than a projection of one's own soul into one's own space. And it is not in this space, not in what one actually means when one speaks of the imagination of the spiritual researcher as a non-knower, that what his science is based on lies, but in that which lies only behind this supposed space, after he has gone through the process of objectifying his soul life and breaking through the wall that first arises as a reflection of our inner soul processes.

It is precisely this that is important for the spiritual researcher: to have recognized the nature of hallucinations, visions and illusions in their connection with the inner soul life and to be able to say to oneself for a long time: what appears in this way is not to be understood as the objective determining factor, but purely as inner soul processes. And it is not so much a requirement of a true spiritual science training to use certain exercises, which can be read about in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, to get the soul to have experiences free from the body, to step out of the body; but it is more important that the soul gains a correct judgment about these experiences outside of the physical body, in the purely spiritual.

From a certain point onwards, the soul knows from what it experiences that it is no longer experiencing subjective processes, but that it has shed its subjectivity and is entering into an objective reality that is objective for everyone, just as mathematics is objective even though its validity can only be experienced internally. The mistake that people make who believe in their illusions is that they cannot maintain their resistance to the illusory world long enough, that they believe too soon in what they experience, that they do not say to their experiences not say to themselves long enough: This initially only appears to be a reflection of yourself, and only when you have stripped away everything subjective, as you do in mathematics, do you enter the sphere of objective reality.

This also eliminates the objection that one is dealing with something subjective in spiritual research experiences. One is dealing with something subjective just as little as one is dealing with something subjective when dealing with mathematical truths. When spiritual science is imparted, it is not actually a matter of providing evidence. If it is a matter of that, then one must understand the nature of proof above all. If it had never happened in the world that someone had seen a whale, no one would be able to prove that a whale exists. He could never prove the existence of a whale from all the knowledge he has, because a whale is a fact, and facts cannot be proved, but only experienced. This says something extraordinarily weighty about logic, but one must first be convinced of this weightiness.

From this point of view, the messages of spiritual research are not about providing evidence for the supersensible world or, for example, for the immortality of the soul, but about something completely different. Those who participate in the true work of spiritual research for a longer period of time will be convinced of this. It is not a matter of logical speculation, but of getting to know and communicating supersensible facts. When the spiritual researcher, through the already described development of the soul, has come to understand the life between death and the next birth, it is then a matter of him communicating the facts that he has to adduce for the life of the soul in the time between death and the next birth, of him communicating what he experiences in the supersensible world. In the case of the former, it is a matter of communicating experiences and facts that he encounters in his soul.

In the case of the latter, we may say that it arises from these communications. When it is shown how the soul remains enclosed in itself when the parts of the body disintegrate, how the soul then undergoes certain processes, how it experiences something in a purely supersensible world and gathers the forces for a new life in order to enter into physical existence again in a body when that is stated in all its details, then it is indeed shown how the soul lives when it has passed through the gate of death. Then reference is made to facts. It is a matter of such reference to facts, of such communication of facts, and not of abstract proof.

Now one could say: But then such a becoming acquainted with the corresponding facts would only have a meaning for someone who can see into the spiritual world, who has an evolved soul. Oh, such an objection looks extremely convincing, and this should not be denied. But anyone who knows the real life of the soul will also have a completely different relationship to this objection than many believe. Here we must ask the question: Are we at all convinced in our souls in ordinary life by someone's providing abstract proofs? Let us take an example. Let us take a picture, for example, the Sistine Madonna. Someone who has no idea of what lies in such a picture stands before it. Another person stands beside him and begins to prove to him what is in it. Yes, the listener does not understand at all what the other person is talking about. He can “prove” at length that there is something special about this picture; the listener cannot believe in his proofs. Because the fact that one provides proofs is not yet the essential, but the essential is that the listener has the possibility to believe in these proofs. Another stands before this picture; a second person comes up to him and speaks to him, and the listener now has the opportunity to perceive something that is to be expressed by the picture. Then, through what he has recognized, the other person stimulates in him what he believes is in the picture. He may not speak in a demonstrative way. He only describes what is working in him, only describes what is speaking in him, and once the listener has grasped in his soul what the other person is talking about, and then looks at the picture, he sees the other person in the picture, and it works in such a way that he knows: it is inside the picture. It does not depend on an abstract proof, but on the fact that someone approached us who knows what is in the picture, and that we can really absorb what is in the picture if we want to gain an insight into what is in it.

This is how it is when a person encounters the world and human phenomena, and the spiritual researcher approaches him. If the spiritual researcher were to want to use abstract arguments, then someone who is incapable of reliving in his soul what the spiritual researcher says could never be convinced by any argument. The spiritual researcher, however, proceeds as did the interpreter of the picture, of whom I spoke last. He explains what has arisen in his soul, which he first made an instrument for spiritual truths, as standing in the background of spiritual and human life. He gives the facts that he has experienced. And if the other person is able to absorb these concepts and facts into his entire soul life, he will now see the world in such a way that what the spiritual researcher has to say emerges as his own soul content through what the researcher has to say.

Of course, this cannot always be the case. If the spiritual researcher or student comes to the listener with very distant assertions, which may be truths of experience for himself, if he tells him - and no matter how much he has experienced in the spiritual world - what kinds of beings there are and what they do, then of course the listener, when he hears it for the first time, does not have the slightest inner obligation to believe what he hears. He will not and cannot believe it. Why can he not believe it? Because the distance between what is experienced in the soul and what such a spiritual seer has experienced in the soul is too great.

It would be equally unjustified for someone to believe that they could say that in thirty years a new world savior or a new world messiah would come, who could be waited for and who would impart very special great truths. Such a claim could only be made by someone who had no respect for the human soul and the achievements of human culture, and would only be made to someone who was not prepared for it. But there is a way to do everything differently, by taking up what really everyone with an unbiased soul can follow in a certain way. Therefore, it must be said again and again that the objection is unjustified that spiritual research only applies to those who, through their developed soul, can enter the spiritual world themselves. That is not true. One can only research the spiritual world if one transforms this soul into an instrument of perception in the spiritual world. But what one experiences there, one is, as it were, obliged to cast into such concepts that can be understood by any unbiased soul, according to the relevant period of time, if one just devotes oneself to them impartially and does not resist them through anything, for example, through a supposed or false erudition. Therefore it matters much more how the facts of the clairvoyant consciousness are communicated to some age than that such facts are communicated at all.

For example, anyone who has only read a book can be seen to believe that through spiritual research he has gained a judgment and is justified in saying: these spiritual researchers always begin to use the word “esoteric” when they run out of terms. But perhaps it could also be that when someone says something like this, the word esoteric always results in a kind of emptiness in his concepts, so that the word esoteric has a concept-erasing effect on him. So when someone resists in this way and does not call upon what is in his soul in order to let the results of spiritual research take effect on him, then, as we saw eight days ago, it is natural for the most fundamental objections to spiritual research to be raised. But when the soul devotes itself to spiritual research with an open mind, then common sense, healthy unprejudiced thinking, is enough to experience — not what is lost on the untrained soul, but what can be understood by it. For how does every human soul relate to the soul of the spiritual researcher, who has formed an opinion on certain concrete facts of the supersensible world because he has entered into them? Every soul relates to the soul of the spiritual researcher as a germ of life does to a fully developed life. And just as the germ of life, for example an egg, already contains the complete living creature, so every soul contains within it what only the spiritual researcher of that soul can ever say. Just as it can be shown in the undeveloped germ of life how the individual emerges from it, so the individual soul, when it receives the results of spiritual research, can gain insight into the spiritual worlds in a germinal way, but with complete conviction and insight.

Therefore, it is never justified to reproach the person who does not rely merely on his intellectual power of logical reasoning, but on his entire soul strength, for having to be a gullible person when he embraces what the spiritual researcher has to say. The intellect alone will not be able to comprehend it; but the whole soul will be able to accept it. Therefore, a real examination of spiritual research is possible, has always been possible and always will be. It is not a matter of accepting authority.

It should be noted that I did not call today's lecture “How to Prove Spiritual Research?” but “How to Justify Spiritual Research?”, that is, where to get it from and how can the human soul gain a relationship to it? This relationship will indeed be difficult for many people to find, for the reason that many objections to this spiritual research seem to carry weight. How could it not carry weight – and here I come back to a point where I have to speak in more abstract and uninteresting terms – when someone says: The spiritual researcher claims that in his supersensible consciousness he can follow the soul back to the time after birth or conception, how it lives between death and the next birth, and how it then lives into the present life. Now, it can be shown, so it could be objected, how certain peculiarities that the soul develops during life are prefigured in childhood or prefigured in the mother's womb before birth! Perhaps among the objections to spiritual research, there is nothing of such weight for many as such an objection. Those who have often heard such lectures will know that I myself also make such objections, for example, that so and so many great and minor musicians have lived in the Bach family, so that one could point out with a certain justification how the human being receives purely in the physical line of inheritance what makes him a musician. Thus one can point out how, through inheritance or through appropriation during one's lifetime, that which a person later displays as his special characteristics and as his individuality comes to him. Oh, such an objection is very significant when one occupies oneself with it, when one surrenders to its suggestive power, and every spiritual researcher will understand that there are people who cannot get away from such objections, who are extremely strongly affected by the force of the facts that can be adduced.

But there is something else involved in surrendering to such a force of evidence, namely, to recognize that causes, right causes, can be present and yet not really be the cause, not really the occasion for something to actually come into being. I am saying something seemingly very paradoxical, and for anyone who lets the weight of the spiritual-scientific facts work on his soul, it is not at all necessary to go into it. But here it is a matter of entering into it in relation to the age, in order to point out what can show from the philosophical point of view that causes can be there and yet cause nothing.

Why does a chicken, when it comes into being, have feathers, a beak or this or that bodily characteristic? Someone can certainly say: it has inherited these from its parent chicken, and for the particular shape of the beak and so on, the inherited characteristics are the causes that we find in the chicken from which the one in question descended. But now one must recognize that something special is needed if the properties of having feathers, of having a certain beak, and so on, which are present in the mother chicken, are also to appear in the daughter chicken: something can be a completely correct cause, but it is necessary for a certain germ to arise under certain things in order for the causes to become “causes”. What is important is not that we point from the following to the definite causes, but that we show how the causes can also become causes.

We have now reached the point where spiritual science can use its own facts to develop a relationship with, for example, Darwinism. No one who is not a curious but serious spiritual researcher will dispute the facts and serious arguments of Darwin and the Darwinians. He will even agree when Darwin asks: Why does the kitten snuggle up so when a person comes near it? The scientist points out that it is already snuggling up to its mother on her bed, and from this one can see how the later is connected to the earlier. One can point out the causes of how a person has this or that characteristic, which he may have received from his mother before he was born. One can point this out, but nothing has been said about how the causes have now become causes. Everything that can be said of a world view that appears to be firmly based on science, that can be explained by inherited traits and so on, is readily admitted by spiritual research, and those who raise objections from that point of view usually live under the assumption that they will not be admitted. They are admitted, but the other does not go into the fact that causes must first become causes, so that it is therefore something much deeper than he has in mind. This is generally the case today, that what spiritual research seeks to draw from the depths of existence is always judged only according to the surface that one is able to survey oneself. If this did not always happen, then, for example, a feature article such as the one that appeared in the “Berliner Tageblatt” last Sunday could not be written. I would just like to ask what will be said to a person who has formed a final opinion about chemistry, for example, based only on a single book? But that is what our contemporaries do. It may be said that spiritual research still has weighty reasons to feel vindicated in the present.

For those who have listened to these lectures for a long time, I may well say that much has been said here from the philosophical development. Those who are familiar with this may perhaps come to the conclusion that many philosophers have provided evidence for the immortality of the human soul. I myself must confess that I have never felt entirely comfortable with the proofs of the immortality of the soul or of a supersensible world that have been brought forward by philosophers, for what philosophers usually have in mind are only the concepts of things. Thus, even of the human ego, philosophers have only the concept of the ego. But it should be as clear to everyone that nothing real can be inferred from the concept of the ego as it is clear that a mere painter cannot paint a picture. Likewise, it should be clear that the image of the ego says nothing to the ego itself. Anyone who engages with spiritual science will see that conviction of the reality of the ego is gained through something entirely different, namely through the whole way in which the ego lives on after death.

Thus, one cannot feel comfortable with what well-meaning philosophers bring forward in this direction. But from what those who, as opponents, often really rail against, the one who sees things more deeply gains quite good proof of the nature of the ego. For there are indeed philosophers who say that they can only grasp the ego as a summary of all possible physiological, etc. activities. Then we see that these investigators adduce all kinds of evidence, but what they adduce cannot be related to the I. In this they are in the same sense, only in reverse, as the school of thought that seeks to explain the phenomena of life by the life-force. For just as the vital force is the fifth wheel on the wagon, so the explanations that are provided for the soul life not only explain nothing, but are even quite superfluous when it comes to truly exploring the soul. It is then seen that such explanations really leave the soul untouched and do not approach it at all, so that the soul remains on its own and proves to be something that external explanations cannot approach. Only when the feeling arises in the consciousness of the times that spiritual research cannot be judged superficially, but only by going deeply into it, only then will no judgment that comes from outside of spiritual research be able to be decisive.

The same applies to the objections raised in the first lecture from a moral or religious point of view as to the scientific objections raised against spiritual research. If, for example, it is said that it is infinitely more valuable when someone, out of pure unselfishness, does good even at the prospect of being destroyed in death, only out of the insight and the will that it passes into the general good – as if he did it with a view to making up for it in a future life, then such a judgment is absolutely true and should not be denied. It is true when it is said that a person only does a good deed out of selfishness, if he believes that karma will then reward him with a good deed in his new life as some kind of retribution, or if he refrains from evil because it could manifest itself as a kind of punishment in his new life. It is certain that such an assertion can be seen as justifying selfishness, and therefore it may be said with full justification: So it is precisely through what spiritual research has to say about man that selfishness among men is fostered.

Schopenhauer once said, and you know that I do not agree with him on everything: “It is easy to preach morality, but to found morality is difficult.” What does it mean to found morality? It means to bring about a state of mind in which a person can act morally. Anyone who is familiar with the life of nations knows that preaching morals is not only easy, but mostly very useless; because one can very well know quite good moral principles – and act quite badly. If it were just a matter of listening to sermons, there would certainly be many more moral people than there are.

Someone might say, for example, that a couple would do everything they could to ensure that their children become decent and hardworking people. Because, as the parents say, if we make them into proper, hardworking people, they will be able to support us in our old age and we will be able to get everything we need from them. If the parents educate their children from this point of view, it is undoubtedly a highly selfish point of view. But let us now assume that the children turn out well, so that they are hardworking people when they grow up. Then the parents have indeed done something selfish, but they have not preached morality themselves, but they have justified morality, and it could turn out that if they make the children into good people and the latter then later show something quite different from what they had imagined, they may still come to a quite different ethical view. Then morality would also be justified for the parents, not preached.

Let us assume that a person has no opportunity to calculate the compensation for bad actions for his next life on earth. But by committing acts under the influence of such a view of karma, a moral world view will gradually develop. It will be based on human nature. Someone who is still at a lower moral level will certainly act from a more selfish view of karma. But he who has attained a higher point of view and therefore also has a higher conception of karma will fulfill within himself a selfless moral demand.

Thus, the point is not to point to something abstractly by calling a karma idea selfish, but to show how it leads man upwards to a higher development. This could be further explained and shown how spiritual research goes to the real, the actual, of human nature. If someone were to raise the other objection that many could say to themselves: I have later lives ahead of me, so I only need to become a proper person in later lives; now I still have time, now I can still be an improper person - that would be an objection that can also be refuted theoretically. But to take the right attitude towards it, you need to know the practical circumstances. You have to know that someone who thinks he does not need to be an orderly person in his present life, that he wants to become one only in the next life, has worked this into his next life through such an intention. If he does not decide now to become an orderly person, then he will not have the necessary foundations for this in the next life either. So he is already depriving himself of the ability to be a decent person later on; he is robbing himself of the strength to do so. In this way, the justified moral objections could be discussed piece by piece.

The religious objection has also been taken into account. It is said: Here spiritual research must explain that there is a spark of the divine in every soul and that from life to life the human being develops this divine spark more and more. So the spark of the divine is placed in the human breast.

How one feels about this matter, when one knows how to put it in the right perspective, I tried to show in the first scene of my mystery drama 'The Trial of the Soul'. Of course, one could say that in such a view, what can be called the religious principle is lost, the feeling of dependence on the divine, outside of which man stands, the childlike looking up to this divine that is outside of him. But now take what is to be said from the other point of view, that man fully realizes that the Divine has placed a spark in him, which he must experience and bring to fruition; that he is actually able to realize: You carry a divine spark within you, and if you leave it undeveloped, you allow it to wither away! This being-together with the divine, and yet again the necessity of having to develop this spark first, that is an impulse of an infinitely greater strength than any other religious impulse.

Anyone who engages with spiritual science will see that it is not opposed to any religious belief. Because religious beliefs are so quick to turn against anthroposophical spiritual science, people believe that spiritual science will now turn against religious beliefs. But just as with the scientific objections characterized earlier, it is precisely with this religious objection: spiritual science does not come into the way of any religious confession, because it has to do with the relationship of the human soul to the supersensible worlds, while religion has to do with the relationship to the individual soul.

Those who are truly able to see will see how it is quite possible for a person to pursue spiritual research while remaining fully within a religious belief that is natural to him. But the true foundation of spiritual research, when it is accepted by the world, will be able to give man what can be called a deeper understanding of the life of the soul, both of the individual life of the soul and of the life of the souls together. Anyone who can be even a little convinced that all external human coexistence can only be an external image of how the souls relate to one another will understand the enormity of what arises for the soul when it comes to the realization of how the individual soul relates to the other, how the individual soul can relate to the other when it has correctly grasped what the destinies of the individual soul are in relation to the other soul in the life between death and the next birth, what the destinies are for the individual soul, what it means to be separated from another soul, what it means to gain a new relationship with the departed soul, if the soul that remained here can know something of the supersensible world. New light will be shed on all human knowledge and on all other aspects of human life if what can be brought from the depths of the supersensible world for each individual soul can be sunk into the soul. A living into, not just a thinking into, belongs to the recognition, to the beholding, to the understanding of spiritual truths.

This has not only been recognized through the spiritual research of modern times, but has basically always been recognized wherever one has spoken from a real knowledge of the spiritual world. I do not want to say what I have to say about the position of spiritual research in relation to those who reject it without really knowing it, but I would like to say it about Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If there is much that is serious, perhaps even hurtful to some, in this statement, one should bear in mind that it comes from a man who, full of enthusiasm for spiritual research, wanted to vent his anger at all those who, without really wanting to gain insight into spiritual research, reject it and feel they have to fight it. To them Fichte cries:

"They cannot help but furiously resent that shameful conviction of a higher self in man and all phenomena that seek to confirm this conviction; they must do everything possible to keep these phenomena away and to suppress them; they fight for their lives, for the finest and most intimate root of their lives, for the possibility of enduring themselves. From the beginning of the world until this day, all fanaticism and all furious expressions of it have originated from the principle: if the opponents were right, then I would be a miserable person. If this fanaticism can achieve fire and sword, then it attacks the hated enemy with fire and sword; if these are not accessible to it, then it has (one must also say this latter for our present time) “the tongue, which, even if it does not kill the enemy, can very often strongly paralyze its activity and effectiveness outwardly. One of the most common and favorite tricks of this tongue is to attach a generally hated name to the cause that is hated only by them, in order to defame it and make it suspicious. The store of these tricks and these names is inexhaustible and constantly growing, and it would be futile to strive for completeness here. I will mention only one of the most common and hated terms: the saying that this teaching is mysticism.

Note here, first of all, with regard to the form of this accusation, that if an unprejudiced person were to answer: Well, let us assume that it is mysticism and that mysticism is a false and dangerous doctrine. He may still present his case, and we will listen to him; if he is wrong and dangerous, this will probably come to light on that occasion, — they, who, according to the categorical decision, with which they believe to have thereby rejected us, would have to answer: there is nothing more to be heard; already a long time ago, probably since one and a half human lives, mysticism has been decreed as heresy and banned by the unanimous decisions of all our review councils.

Thus Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte's words are still more or less applicable today when considering the relationship between spiritual research and, say, those who only want to trust their senses and who want the world to be organized according to what their senses tell them. Fichte compares such people — although this comparison is perhaps not entirely justified — who only want to trust their senses and do not want to admit that there is a closer knowledge of the truth, with deaf-mutes and the blind-born, who also do not want to admit sounds and colors when they are spoken to by the seeing. Now, one cannot compare those born blind and deaf with those who do not want to accept what can be given through clairvoyant research, because every soul is capable of relating to supersensible truths. But Fichte says:

"The fact that the deaf-mute and the blind are also taken care of and that a way has been devised to bring them instruction is worth all thanks – from the deaf-mute and the blind. But if this method of teaching were to be made the general method of teaching, including for the sighted, because there might always be deaf-mutes and blind-born among them, and then one would be sure to have taken care of everyone; if the hearing person, without any regard for their hearing, were to learn to speak with the same effort and to recognize the words on the lips as the deaf-mute, and the seeing, without any regard for his sight, read the letters by touching them, this would deserve very little gratitude from the healthy; regardless of this, the institution would of course be made as soon as the institution of public education was made dependent on the opinion of the deaf-mute and the blind-born."

Perhaps one could say, if one wanted to object to this statement by Fichte, that it would not even be like that for the blind and deaf-mute. But if it were up to those who rely only on their senses and reason to determine how the world should be shaped, they would not shape it in the way that the seeing perceive it. They would indeed rail against and rebel against all spiritual interpretation of the world by others, but they would declare themselves infallible with regard to what they know about the world. They would laugh in scorn if it were demanded that only those who know about a matter should speak about it, and that those who know nothing about it should say nothing about it. The main reason for all those who deny spiritual research is only that they know nothing about it. Logically, the first requirement would be that only those who know something should speak about a matter. But such reasons for denying something one knows nothing about are only used to reject a spiritual scientific world view in our time. |

But anyone who can relive in their soul what was said in the first lecture, who does not need to wait for the objections that they can experience within themselves and are able to understand in their spiritual life, will always find a way to justify spiritual research, so that what I also said in the first scene of “The Test of the Soul” and can summarize in the whole constitution of consciousness what knowledge of the supersensible worlds can give us, can give for our hope in life, for our strength in life, for our security in life, for everything we need for a dignified human existence. Everything that can be said, that can be said as rising in the soul, as experienced and felt in the soul, can be summarized in the words: You are not alone with your thinking, feeling and willing. Just as you live with your body in the substances that are spread throughout the universe, so you live with your thinking, feeling and willing in something that is spread throughout the cosmos, in the vastness of space. That is, the saying that I said at the designated place in my mystery drama can become conviction:

"In your thinking live world thoughts,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will-beings.
Do not end with what is far from the world
Through the play of thought-dreams;
Begin in the expanses of the mind
And end in the depths of your own soul:
You will find divine goals,
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

The spiritual science referred to in these lectures is not something that arises from the arbitrariness of this or that person, or is based on the subjective ideas of one or more individuals. Rather, it is a spiritual world view that, with a certain inevitability, arises from the needs and demands of our time, insofar as this time emerges as a recognizable product of the developmental history of humanity. Only when a world view is, as it were, demanded by its time can it claim with a certain justification the trusting words that were spoken in the first lecture of this winter. Only under such a condition can it say: No matter from what quarter it may be opposed, if it contains any element of truth it may rely on the fact that truth will always, however much it is buried, find the cracks and crevices through which it will spread in the spiritual life of mankind.

We shall now try to show, not with generalities but with specific facts, how in the course of the last few centuries and especially in the very last period up to the present day, the seeking human soul has developed more and more into what the spiritual science meant here wants to be for this seeking human soul.

Who could not, if compelled by his own mind and the needs of his soul to seek explanations of the riddles of the world for the strength and security of his life, not be tempted first to turn to natural science, which is certainly not underestimated by spiritual science but fully recognized in its triumphs and achievements? Today, countless people believe that whether a world view will emerge from a synthesis of these scientific facts and laws, which will open up vistas for man beyond what he can perceive with his senses, grasp with his mind, and with which he feels connected in his existence, but which he strives to recognize so that he can know what the destiny of the soul is, and indeed the destiny of its work in the world.

In the face of such longing and such hope, however, it may well be pointed out that in the course of human evolution, the relationship of the soul to what external science can be has changed completely, and precisely the example that we can give here in relation to soul questions in relation to science may show us clearly how our time, in one respect at least, may be characterized not only by the trivial and hackneyed expression, a “time of transition,” but how it is a time that, in the highest sense, demands a new epoch in spiritual research. We need only recall the example of a great personality, who, like many others of his kind, has contributed to advancing our spiritual culture: Kepler, who is the real great formulator of the Copernican world view, on the basis of which, nevertheless, many questions of our present-day world view arise.

Who today, if he has no heart or mind for actual spiritual science, might not even be able to say: Through achievements such as Kepler's, humanity has succeeded in learning about the movements of the heavenly bodies through pure objective natural science and its laws. And how can man say — could man say — that alongside this, the belief persists that these movements of the heavenly bodies are regulated in some way by spiritual beings, to which spiritual science wants to point, by spiritual beings that stand behind the material and its laws, since everything can be explained in a mechanical, physical way! Why is there any need for spiritual forces behind these physical laws?

Such a statement looks extremely compelling, and it can be pointed out that it was precisely the liberation from long-held prejudices of the old spiritual worldviews that allowed people like Kepler to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies in space on the basis of purely physical laws. But if we approach Kepler himself objectively, without time prejudices, and study his spiritual peculiarities, we find the remarkable thing that everything that Kepler's gaze directed out into the heavens, what actually gave him the inner impulses to discover his great and powerful laws was the consciousness of being embedded with his soul in the spiritual depths of existence, in the activity of spiritual beings that fill the spaces and work throughout time. He was clear about the fact that what he ascribed to the planetary movements as 'laws' could only be given to him because the laws are the thoughts of divine spiritual beings. If we investigate the source of such impulses in Kepler, we must say that they were based on the fact that the whole course of human development has always kept the human soul in connection with the spiritual-soul, and that what was spiritual-mental was taken for granted, was still there in Kepler's time, was there in tradition, in the general belief, was there to inspire the soul, to inspire and awaken thoughts in it.

But who could deny that this background of Kepler's creative work has gradually disappeared in the course of the last few centuries, disappeared through what has been has been created out of it, so that today the human soul can easily believe that Kepler's laws and everything that has come into being in this way could be invoked as proof against the assumption of a spiritual-divine world. If we go from Kepler through the centuries up to our time, we see how that which is still born out of the consciousness of the connection between man and the Divine-Spiritual, more and more eliminates this consciousness itself, and how a time is approaching, great and powerful through its scientific achievements, great and powerful through the creation of momentous insights in the field of natural science, a time in which the human soul is gradually incapable of truly rising to the spiritual from the abundance of this scientific material, from the abundance of what has been recognized in the material field. One could say that the course of our intellectual development in recent centuries is characterized by the fact that the more it has brought is immense, great and admirable, but that the human soul's ability to see through to the spiritual from these achievements has been impaired, even destroyed, precisely by the abundance and nature of the scientific achievements.

This becomes clear to us when we consider, for example, the way in which Goethe, with his way of researching natural processes, was still part of the overall direction of the world view of his time. It is interesting to see how Herman Grimm, for example, this brilliant and at the same time profound connoisseur of Goethe, feels compelled to characterize Goethe's place in the natural scientific directions of his time. Herman Grimm asks: How did the centuries preceding the age of Goethe still conceive the relationship of man to nature?

Anyone familiar with these centuries will agree with Herman Grimm: they differed so much from later ones that, when looking at the nature of animals, plants and other things, man stood on the earth and believed himself authorized to see in man something like a kind of conclusion to all the rest of earthly creation, indeed to the creation of the world; that he felt authorized to say: There is such a meaning in the whole development that one can recognize when looking at stones, plants and animals, how an inner essence has gradually developed, already having man in mind, developed upward, in order to present everything else to man and his goal. Whether one still wanted to cling to the old Mosaic creation story in the process is not important. But this conviction was there: to see in all world empires something like an impulse that already includes man and makes everything else only in preparation for making man, who has been there spiritually from the beginning, the summit of all this creation.

What emerged more and more in the face of this? First, as Herman Grimm also believes, astronomy began. The Earth was made into an insignificant world body in the universe and man was placed on Earth as if he, without having been predisposed from the outset in the other realms, had finally surrendered like a natural necessity, so that he would not be entitled to connect his mind to the whole course of events. Geology assumes that an enormous period of time elapsed before man appeared on earth, and that, in the sense of natural science, this would by no means show the traces that everything else would be there to prepare man later. In a certain way, Goethe may be called a radical naturalist. Here I have often mentioned how he endeavored, through his own scientific discoveries, to eliminate from his views on the external structure of the human being anything that might distinguish him from the other organisms on earth. One may call Goethe a descent theorist, a development theorist before Darwin and the other development theorists of our time. But Herman Grimm rightly points out how Goethe did not refrain from seeing something 'spiritual' behind the material processes, which are seen by Darwinism as nothing more than material processes, and which develops spiritually in all material processes, so that man is indeed placed there.

We have a remarkable saying from Goethe that can really draw attention to how hard he tried, even though he was so scientifically minded, to present man as the pinnacle and crown of spiritual existence. He says: After all, what are all the millions of stars in the world for if not to be looked at and absorbed into our being by human eyes at last? And not without good reason. It would take a great deal, of course, to prove the right to ask the question, if we go through all these scientific facts and laws. Where do we find anything outside of man that could give us a clue that spirit reigns in all living and non-living things? Where do we find, when we scientifically consider man himself, after the realization has been gained that mental life is bound to brain processes, where do we find a hint to think of the soul's existence outside the bounds of birth and death?

Today, one need only open one of the more important and famous philosophies, for example that of the world-famous Wundt, and one will find everywhere that when such philosophers start from scientific research, certain conclusions, certain results are the facts of natural science, and that the philosophers everywhere approach, for my part, the spiritual, but that they are forced to stop at the moment when it would be a matter of grasping the spiritual. Why is that? For the simple reason that the whole way of thinking, as it has developed in dependence on the research of natural science and follows the facts of natural science step by step, offers no possibility of finding the way out of matter and its laws into real spiritual happenings and their nature, because everywhere the thread of thought breaks off. Why did it not tear Goethe away? Because Goethe was still imbued with impulses that had emerged as ancient ones in the development of humanity, because something of what had remained historically, of the ancient spiritual views, still lived in him — which we will get to know -, and because his soul had not yet been emptied of what had come to the soul by direct spiritual paths over the millennia when that soul looked out at the things of material events.

But our time developed quickly, and therefore, in its rapid development, those who based their thinking on scientific research have hardly retained what was still present in Goethe. Hence we have seen that although Darwin revealed the connections of living beings in more detail and more forcefully than Goethe, he nevertheless stopped at the whole meaning and nature of his research. But whereas in this whole way and meaning of research Goethe saw the spirit everywhere behind the phenomena, the Darwinians — not Darwin himself! — have had to regard as an obstacle to somehow arriving at the spiritual that which did not prevent Goethe from arriving at the spirit.

Therefore, we can understand that those who place their hopes for a worldview in contemporary science must see these hopes disappointed in many cases. However, something that has existed in humanity does not simply disappear. We can see even in modern times that serious researchers who only want science do not at all agree that science should only present external facts, but could very well serve to prove the continuous course of a world wisdom that lives in things. It is interesting that even a historian from the school of Ranke, Lord Acton, in a momentous university speech at Cambridge in 1895 as a history teacher to his students, could say: I hope that the completely objective description of historical facts will reveal the workings of a divine world wisdom. Yes, even in those days Lord Acton spoke of the working of the “Risen One” in history.

Thus we see that even in our time there still remains from the times when the existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted, something like a carrying of research, like a carrying of all scientific thinking was carried by such an attitude, just as the soul is still permeated by the spirit through this carrying from ancient times. But it is equally true that he who today completely embraces the habits of scientific thinking and, for example, follows how the individual soul activities have their corresponding expressions in brain or other nervous processes, that such a person, precisely by pursuing fact after fact, can easily say to himself: Yes, for what a person is able to think, feel and sense in material life, there are clues for the researcher everywhere; but what might lie for the soul before or after that, science tells me nothing.

How widespread is the error that science, because it cannot get beyond the consideration of facts and their laws to the spiritual, must therefore also reject the spiritual! And again, it is characteristic of the general situation of world-views in our time that even those who hold the view that we can only arrive at a world-view by summarizing the facts and laws of natural science, always warn ed against hasty conclusions, against the making of hypotheses, which always wants to group a few facts together in order to draw conclusions as to how the life of the soul is bound to this or that, what the whole cosmic connection is like, or the like.

Such a warning was recently given again in a significant place. At this year's naturalists' meeting, the very important naturalist Wettstein gave a speech on biology, on the science of life, in its usability for the world view, and he warned against drawing general conclusions for the world view from the facts as they are. But many people still believe that we should therefore wait with regard to the riddles related to the life of the soul until natural science has come to the end of its facts. What has been presented here, namely the assertion that a person who wants to penetrate the secrets of the soul and spirit in order to come to conclusions about soul and spirit must have gone around all the scientific facts in the world, reminds one of a beautiful saying by Goethe: “To understand that the sky is blue everywhere, one does not need to travel around the world.”

But I would like to show in concrete terms how the path of the human soul to its secrets in the spiritual realm is, to a certain extent, independent of what the individual laws of natural science, what the individual laws of learning can give this human soul. To substantiate this, I would like to point out the following fact: In the nineteenth century, we had an important philosopher in Munich, Moriz Carriere. He was one of those who, with a wealth of not only ideas but also of real scientific learning, tried to understand the world and its phenomena. Through his great work on the cultural development of humanity, Carriere proved how he had compiled fact after fact from ancient times in a scholarly manner in order to understand the path of the spirit through world development. From all such processes, Carriere has now formed a worldview, which I mention all the more gladly because it was formed well before the development of an actual spiritual science. It is a worldview that came to the insight of the connection between the soul and a spiritual world spread out through space and time, just as there is a connection between what is physically in the human body and the substances and forces that are spread out in space and that work in time.

One day, Moritz Carriere was shown the manuscript of a simple man, a man who was not at all learned, who had none of the wealth of learning through which Moritz Carriere had come to the view of the connection between the soul and the spiritual that has just been described. This simple man's name was Zeuner, he was born in 1813. Due to a series of events that cannot be described here for lack of time, Zeuner was forced to spend many, many lonely months in prison. He had allowed himself to be carried away by the revolutionary movement, and this had landed him in prison. But he was, without being a scholar, a highly-natured soul. In the manuscript that he showed to Moriz Carriere in the 1870s, he recounts how he brooded and brooded in his lonely cell, filled only – as was the spirit of his time and the people who had surrounded him until then — with materialistic views, but how his soul had become desolate in solitude, how it had suffered from the hunger to have something in which to believe. Then he continues to tell how he once heard a strange song from his cell, which reminded him of experiences from his early childhood and connected him with other experiences, how this again sparked a spark of joy in the soul, and how this impulse, given to the soul as a result, an impulse of inner freshness and activity of the soul, triggered thoughts in this simple, unassuming soul, thoughts that Zeuner then wrote down. And he later sent this manuscript to Moriz Carriere. When you read it – Moriz Carriere had it printed later – you have to agree with Carriere: Zeuner, in abandoning himself to the solitary soul that imperiously struggles to emerge from his breast, has found something that represents the connection between the soul and the world spirit in the same way that Carriere was able to represent it after a lifetime of learning and a lifetime of science.

You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere. The path to the spiritual must be found in a different way than by merely summarizing scientific laws or by drawing consequences from scientific research. Rather, the debate with science must be a different one. No world view can exist today, and no world view may exist - because the needs of the human soul would sweep it away - that would contradict science. Therefore, in the first two lectures, it was necessary to emphasize so sharply what can be said by natural science against spiritual research and how spiritual science has to react to it. And it cannot be emphasized often enough that one should feel misled with regard to any spiritual-scientific knowledge if it comes into conflict with a justified result of natural science. But if one then again looks at this natural science and if one has a sense and a heart for the necessary authority that must emanate from natural science, then one will all the more have to point out what can mislead the soul, what must mislead it precisely through the abundance of what is available, if it wants to set out on the path to the spirit. I would also like to substantiate this with examples.

Let attention be drawn to two researchers who were both grounded in the history of development, in the field of natural science. Both researchers understood the origin of individual living organisms in the same way as the Darwinians, but they only excluded the human being. They were clear about the fact that the laws applicable to the animal world could not be applied to man, but that, just as one had to derive one's physical from the physical, so one had to derive one's spiritual-mental from a spiritual-mental. Both were completely clear about this. They were equally good naturalists and spiritualists, but their thinking habits were those of the scientific direction. They thought like a true scientist thinks. How did one of them, Mivart, and how did the other, Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, think about the actual processes of evolution?

Wallace said to himself that man could not simply be placed in the animal series. Not only because there is a considerable difference between man and the most highly developed ape in the external structure of the brain, even if we only consider the savage, and because the ape's brain is far too imperfect compared to the brain of the savage if man is supposed to have developed from the ape in a straight line of evolution.

The other researcher, Mivart, found that the cultural level of the wild man was not outwardly different from the developmental stage of the most highly developed ape. But if you look at the mental activities of the savage and, in contrast, the activities of the most highly developed ape, you have to assume that the brains of the two are so similar that man therefore does not belong in the animal series. If you look at the brains again, you can clearly see that the human brain has not developed from the ape brain through adaptation to external tasks, but that civilization develops all possibilities in such a way that it only appears as if everything is already predisposed so that it could one day become the tool of civilization.

So because the ape brain and the human brain differ so greatly, one man, Wallace, believes he has to assume that there is no relationship between man and the animal kingdom. And it was precisely the similarity of the mental characteristics in both that was proof for Wallace of what he said. For Mivart, his contemporary, the opposite was the case; he was of the opinion that if one compares the mental characteristics of wild man with those of the highest-standing ape, such a great difference emerges that one cannot assume any ancestral relationship between the savage and the ape because of this difference.

We see, then, two naturalists, both accustomed to scientific thinking, both assuming what is their opinion for opposite reasons; one because the characteristics of the savage and the highest ape are so similar, the other because they are so different. If now two researchers, both of whom tend to derive man from the spiritual, can be so misled with regard to their evidence by the abundance of facts, how much more so should the who is even more prejudiced in the habits of merely materialistic thinking, not be even more incapable of arriving at the spiritual from these facts and laws themselves through the abundance of facts!

Natural science only leads us from fact to fact. If we have spiritual science, then precisely the natural science can be grasped and put into the right perspective from this spiritual science. But the laws of spiritual science can never be found from natural science in any way. Therefore, the human soul would be deprived of all its spiritual nourishment if it were to rely only on what natural science produces. Natural science itself will achieve its greatness and importance precisely by keeping within its limits.

But anyone who takes even a slight interest in the life of the soul will soon find that the soul needs answers to questions about the spirit for its security, strength and work in life. In ancient times, as we have shown with reference to Kepler and Goethe, and as we can show with reference to others, the answers to these questions were already contained in the soul's entire view of the world. Today, however, they are not, and a new task arises, which we have already been able to characterize and which we will still characterize in its essence: the task of spiritual science. What has been lost through the greatness of natural science must be found anew by spiritual science in its own right, showing the way by which the human soul can reach its spiritual home. Whoever understands the age correctly will grasp how, after the course of events has been described, a strong need, a strong longing, arises to understand the world more and more from the spirit and to establish an independent spiritual science alongside natural science.

If we go into details, even into the law of repeated lives on earth, which is perhaps rejected by many spiritual believers today, we see it slowly and gradually emerging and becoming part of more recent culture, for example in Lessing's treatise on the “Education of the Human Race”. Again and again we see, even if little is known about it today, how in the nineteenth century, inwardly consistent soul researchers are led to the only appropriate law for the human soul: repeated earthly lives.

The more natural science celebrates its great triumphs on the material plane, the more the spirit yearns to go its own way. And again with a concrete example, I would like to show how the whole course of spiritual life in our time is such that it naturally leads to what spiritual science wants to be today. I would like to draw attention to a thinker, to a researcher, whom I will discuss more in the course of these winter lectures, who is interesting precisely with regard to a longing for spiritual science: Herman Grimm, the art historian. A comprehensive spirit, he shows us precisely how, in modern times, the soul has been pushed out of a mere natural scientific view of events, especially in human life, and how the soul is being held back again by the impulses and forces of the time from taking the last step of pushing out, from pushing into spiritual science.

Anyone who carefully studies the writings of Herman Grimm will see that he is looking for a world principle, not a dead world principle, but a creative law, which, for example, the practical historian can hold to, and which must be something other than the so-called historical ideas. Ideas can create just as little as — in the image of the last lecture — a painter can paint a picture. Ideas are dead. Only something living can be effective. Herman Grimm sought for the living element in history, that can powerfully create from epoch to epoch, that once in the primeval epoch of humanity created the form of the human soul for impersonal reasons and then from people to people, from age to age conjured up the individual achievements out of itself. And what did he think he had found as such? The creative imagination.

A German philosopher, Frohschammer, also believed that imagination was the creator not only in historical development but also in nature. Herman Grimm could not get around to showing – which he wanted to do – how imagination is really a kind of divinity that lives in the will and brings about deeds in human history, just as the individual human being brings about the deeds of his soul out of himself. He created what he did in the light of this view, that behind historical becoming stands the creative imagination, that everything has come about through the creative imagination. But what is imagination for him? Do we not see in the urge of a researcher to understand the facts the approach to something spiritual, but which is not spirit? For the creative imagination remains only an abstraction, which is indeed more alive than the ideas of history, but for the realist it is still only an abstraction.

One would like to say that a researcher like Herman Grimm has reached the gateway of spiritual science. He cannot stop at the external material 'facts' and external events, he sees behind all external events what the imagination creates and objectifies it in world events. But no one can recognize in the imagination something real and creative. It remains an abstraction, and only when one penetrates behind it to what is no longer an abstraction, what is spiritual, what is as real as a real sensual, only when one approaches the spiritual facts, which are not circumscribed ideas but are essential, can one understand how what is around us really happens in the world. Therefore, we see from such a profound thinker how the yearning of our time for the spiritual is approaching, and how the obstacles created by time are so formidable that people cannot enter through the gate to the spiritual. Do we not see the urge to approach this spiritual science? Do we not see how this spiritual science has tasks for the present and the future that correspond to the longing, the urge, the demands of the time?

Let us take a closer look at the reasons that hinder the souls of today! From the longing for the spiritual, we can clearly see that people cannot help but long for the spirit and its laws when they look clearly into the conditions of the times, but that they cannot penetrate into the spiritual and are now, so to speak, waiting for a spiritual. Wherever you look, you see the urge for what is still unknown. But from the nature of the urge itself, you can see quite clearly that a time will come, not so far away, when people will understand: spiritual science is the answer to the longing, to the urge they have.

Not long ago, a book could be seen at the booksellers in every train station that was truly not written by a man who would easily indulge in every single enthusiasm. This book does not come from a lonely brooder and a person who does not know the spiritual needs of the time. If spiritual science wants to show its legitimacy, then it must not rely on the often peculiar enthusiasts who, in their sectarian nature, want to understand what can help humanity; but it can refer to what in the book 'On the Criticism of the Times', by Walther Rathenau, which has been written by a man who is in the thick of industrial and commercial life and who knows the workings of our time.

Not that I would agree with everything in it. Objections could be raised against every page of this book, but what could be called the urge of the time for spiritual knowledge is symptomatically demonstrated by such a book. What does Walter Rathenau represent? He represents precisely what I tried to explain in more detail in the spirit of the development of the last century. In Rathenau's case it is as follows: Through the progress of natural scientific development, a mechanization of life has generally resulted. Whereas man in former times sought to explain that which presented itself to his senses out of the spirit, today he explains it out of the mechanical. But the relationship of man to man has also become mechanized. 'Mechanization' is what has come about through the great progress and significant achievements of the time. And one can feel – and Walther Rathenau feels it – how the soul within the thinking and social mechanism becomes desolate, how it gradually becomes empty under such goals, how one can indeed take away its nourishment, but cannot satisfy its hunger through mechanization.

What many of the best connoisseurs of the time have said has also been said here: one pushes back what the soul spiritually desires, and one will be able to see, even if the soul is satisfied with something superficial, that the hunger in question will show itself all the more. — So we see how a person who is completely immersed in his time writes:

It seeks its soul and will find it; admittedly against the will of mechanization. This epoch had no interest in developing the soul in man; it aimed to make the world usable and thus rational, to push back the boundary of wonder and to obscure the otherworldly. Nevertheless, we are surrounded by mystery as much as ever; it comes to light beneath every smooth surface of thought, and from every everyday experience it takes a single step to the center of the world. The three emanations of the soul: love of creature, of nature, and of divinity, could not be taken away from the individual by mechanization; for the life of the whole, they are evaporated into insignificance. Humanitarianism sank to cold pity and the duty of care, and yet it signifies the ethical summit of the entire epoch; love of nature became a sentimental Sunday pleasure; love of God, covered by the regimentation of mythological-dogmatic rituals, entered the service of interests in this world and the next and thus became suspicious not only to ignoble natures. There is probably no single path by which it would not be possible for man to find his soul, even if it were the joy of flying an airplane. But humanity will not take any detours. No prophets will come and no religious founders, because this over-anesthetized time will no longer perceive a single voice: otherwise it could still listen to Christ and Paul today. No esoteric communities will take the lead, because a secret teaching is misunderstood by the first disciple, let alone the second. No unified art of the world will bring its soul, because art is a mirror and a play of the soul, not its creator.

The greatest and most wonderful thing is its simplicity. Nothing will happen except that mankind, under the pressure and urge of mechanization, of bondage, of fruitless struggle, will cast aside the obstacles that weigh on the growth of its soul. This will not happen through brooding and thinking, but through free understanding and experience. What many people talk about today and a few people understand will later be grasped by many and ultimately by everyone: that no power on earth can withstand the soul.

In so far as such words express longings, and in so far as our time demands the spirit, one can certainly agree with them. Only one must add: there is here a complete knowledge of what the time requires, but a complete lack of knowledge of what can satisfy these longings and needs. There is also a clear judgment that the justified individualism of our time is no longer suited to receiving a single religious founder or prophet, or to founding secret schools on any sectarian side that wants to call itself “esoteric”.

True spiritual science will want neither the one nor the other. True spiritual science knows how true esotericism is justified when it does not want to become exoteric but remains within itself. For it is not a matter of what wants to become established as esoteric, but of what wants to become established in our time in such a way that it can be absorbed by the healthy mind. In this respect, the authority of some prophet will not suffice for the age, but only the truth that is completely independent of man and his subjective individuality, to which the human soul can surrender if it only wants to. In this respect, what was meant here by spiritual science has been aptly expressed in the words of this practical man, Rathenau.

But why is it so difficult for our age to return to spiritual science? Why does something like an insurmountable wall arise between the urge of the time and actual spiritual science?

This, too, can be shown, and the real obstacles can be identified. What would someone say, for example, about a science that wants to be a “science” and prove itself to be responsive to the needs of the human spirit, if the person who wants to be a scientist only ever answered every question about the connection between the physical human body and scientific facts by saying: “There is this or that organization in the physical body of the human being; this corresponds to what is also outside in nature.” Can anyone imagine a serious natural science that only ever answers everything one asks it with: “That's nature!” Nature is behind the movements of the stars, nature is behind chemical processes, nature, nature, nature. Just one word! Can you imagine someone who would do such a thing being taken seriously as a naturalist?

Now one can say again: the impulses of the human soul to enter into the spiritual world have become so weak in recent times that the urge to do so, which is very much alive, is expressed in our time only in what would be quite similar in spiritual science as in natural science, where people would only ever cry: nature, nature, nature! Let us see weighty voices raised, vigorously advocating that the scientific study of our time must lead man to the soul. But they do not get any further by demanding this orientation towards the soul than by emphasizing: “Man has a soul, there is a soul,” and so on; “soul, soul, soul - spirit, spirit, spirit,” they say, just as the less than satisfied naturalist would say: “nature, nature, nature!”

We see – and not insignificant, but quite significant facts are cited – how an important man of the present day, at a celebration of Harvard University in America, gave a speech about how a general worldview that leads to the spiritual must be born out of science, Dr. Eliot, a man who stands firmly on the ground of science, who is a close connoisseur of contemporary science. I would like to quote again from a speech delivered at an outstanding place on earth. Dr. Eliot said:

"Men have always assumed a soul different from the body, although inherent in it. No one is willing to be absorbed in his body. On the contrary, everyone now believes, and all men have believed, that there is in man an animating, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something just as real as the body, and more characteristic... This spirit or soul is the most effective part of the human being, it is recognized as such, and this has always been the case.

Dr. Elliot says nothing more than that he points to the “soul,” analogous to how someone would always point only to “nature, nature, nature.” We have not yet reached the point in our time when our thinking about the spirit would be as comfortable as it is with nature. In natural science we distinguish oxygen and hydrogen in water, and we do not say: oxygen and hydrogen belong to 'nature'. There we are dealing with the details of nature. Likewise, spiritual science must come to the point where it can relate that which lives in the soul as forces and as activities not only to a “general spiritual reality”, but to a spiritual world, to a concrete realm of the spirit, which is distinguished and described in the same way as the individual facts of natural science.

Only when spiritual science is able to approach the observation of the individual facts of the human soul in the same way that natural science approaches the observation of the individual facts of nature will it be able to give the human soul what the soul desires. The next lecture is intended to show what these paths are like. But above all, it should be explained how, in our time, there is a desire for something whose meaning and essence is not yet clear, and how spiritual science in our time has the task of bringing knowledge of the spiritual, just as natural science brings knowledge of natural facts. And just as natural science regards it as its task to trace a substance that is also found in the human body in its development out in the world in order to recognize the whole context, so spiritual science will regard it as its task to trace any activity of the human soul back to the spiritual powers and the spiritual principles of creation out in the universe.

From this, however, it will also recognize how that which lives in the human soul relates to the whole universe, to space and time. Only in this way can it arrive at the answers to the riddles of immortality and of the fate of man between death and the next birth. Not the abstract pointing to “spirit” and “soul” in general can lead to anything useful. This will only lead to doubt about the true answers, for example, to the question of immortality. Only when one sees how something completely different is linked to it, which is not subject to transience in the course of time, will it be possible to answer these questions from spiritual science.

If we consider this, we may say that the tasks for spiritual research in the present and future are similar to those that arose for natural science at the dawn of modern scientific development. Just as the old traditions were overcome at the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and so on, and the human spirit itself was directed towards scientific facts, and just as a certain abundance of scientific scientific achievements has come into being, so it must be the most serious task of our time to establish a spiritual science in a comprehensive way and to show the paths that the soul has to take to the individual spiritual entities and the individual spiritual facts.

Natural science has not had an easy time of it. It has also had to fight against obstacles, as we are again facing today in relation to spiritual science. I have often pointed out such obstacles. For example, Galileo tried to make it clear to the people of his time that it had been believed throughout the Middle Ages that the nerves of the human body emanated from the heart, whereas he wanted to show that they emanate from the brain. A friend said to him: “That contradicts everything Aristotle taught.” – Apart from the fact that Aristotle did not mean it that way, people still believed that the nerves of the human body emanate from the heart. The entire Middle Ages did not look at nature itself, but only preserved old traditions and prejudices. When Galileo showed his friend the corpse to convince him that the nerves go out from the brain, the latter replied: “When I look at it, it looks as if the nerves of the human being go out from the brain, but that contradicts Aristotle, and if I come into conflict with Aristotle, I believe Aristotle and not nature.

That is how strongly people's prejudices can pile up. And when, later, in the Galilean sense, Francesco Redi overthrew the prevailing prejudice that living beings could develop from something inanimate, that lower animals, worms and the like could arise from river mud, when he uttered the sentence: ” only from the living, and that it was only an inaccurate way of observing when they believed that worms could come from river mud in which there was no germ, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

And so, when today the spiritual scientist says: If you believe that everything produced by the soul of a developing child is determined solely by what it has inherited from its parents and their ancestors, then you are observing inaccurately; it has its origin rather in a spiritual germ which already went through an earlier life on earth and then underwent a life in the spiritual. If spiritual science points to a spiritual germ, as Francesco Redi pointed to the material germ, then the prejudices of the time stand in its way. Even if they do not burn people anymore, they have other means of rendering such heretical assertions harmless or at least ridiculing them. The way in which the times treat their people changes from epoch to epoch, but the essence of prejudice always remains the same. In a similar way, the time for research into spiritual needs today stands in the same relation to the time of the dawn of scientific development as it did to the scientific needs of that time. And if science has brought an increase in external culture to humanity through its fruits, the fruits of spiritual culture will be quite different. Above all, they will be fruits for the life of the soul.

How many people today suffer practically from scientific prejudices! There stands a person, and if he is a scientific believer and rejects the spirit, he may well say to himself: There is a certain kind of individuality in me; I look up to my blood relationship and have to recognize how I am the result of the inheritance from my blood relationship. Then depression, a lack of energy and an inability to fight against fate descends into many a soul. For if it were the case that man is only the result of heredity, then it would be just as impossible to stop the bad effects of heredity as it is to stop the lightning that flashes towards a person. But if spiritual science does not remain a mere theory, but becomes a force of the soul, so that we know: there lives in us a soul-core that carries what the line of inheritance has given only as an outer shell and must seek ever deeper and deeper forces within itself. Then courage, hope and energy will grow to control and improve what shows up as weakness in the external physical existence through the spiritual. There will no longer be a moment in a person's life when one cannot gain certainty with regard to the spiritual forces in the person to overcome external obstacles.

This is the case in many areas. So mere belief in the material world, in which the life of the soul is supposed to be harnessed, can depress our happiness and energy, while spiritual science, on the other hand, when it becomes the living inner power of the soul, can give us security against all mechanization of life. This is another task of spiritual science: to create the possibility in all fields of facing life with security and health. Dr. Eliot also promises a healthy science in his way. He, too, knows the soul's urge toward the spirit, but he acts like the naturalist who would speak only of “nature, nature, nature” in everything. He says: such a new science will not speak of death and mourning as the old one does, but of life and joy.

I readily believe that the soul longs for a worldview that strives for “life and joy,” that wants to reject and not let “death and mourning” come close to it, to which many old worldviews went back and which above all presented the mystery of death to people. I readily believe that people want to reject death and mourning. But death and sorrow come of themselves. No matter how much people may resist and say that they want to reject death and sorrow in their worldviews, they want to have life and joy. But death and sorrow come of themselves, and then one must come to terms with them. But one can only cope with them when one knows the living spirit, which continues life even where outer nature sets in death and mourning, and which also knows the creative principle in pain, suffering and sorrow. We shall yet see that spiritual science, as it is meant here, is able to regard what appears to be an obstacle to development, evil, that which contradicts life, as something that advances the world and serves life.

One could say: What the truth of spiritual research, as it follows not from the arbitrariness of an individual, but from what man can recognize today, if he correctly interprets his environment through the paths of the soul to a spiritual knowledge , what this truth can mean in the context of the whole world, can be seen in the way the spiritual-scientific researcher relates to the natural-scientific world-explorer in the dawn of modern times. Let us look at Giordano Bruno, in whom Copernicus's world view is most succinctly expressed! How does he stand in his time? He takes up the laws of Copernicanism and looks out into the vastness of space. Before that, there was a worldview that relied only on the external sense perception. When we hear today that everything is uncertain that has not been investigated by conventional science, we might object: But look at the time of Copernicus and Giordano Bruno! As long as we relied on what meets the eye with regard to the starry sky, we did not have the right view of the external world system. It was only when we went beyond the external sense perception and devoted ourselves to thought that we found through inner energy what we now recognize as true.

Only when Copernicus and Giordano Bruno had progressed so far as to overcome the delusion of sensory appearance were they able to point out how erroneous was the previous belief of men that the earth was something fixed in space, around which the moon, sun and planets revolved, then came the sphere of fixed stars, and behind that was, as it were, the so-called eighth sphere, which limited everything. Giordano Bruno stood up and said to the people: When you direct your gaze into the celestial space, there is no “eighth sphere” there, you make it yourself; but there is the blue firmament, and the spaces are filled with worlds like ours, and we see out into a sea of infinity if we are only able to overcome the boundary that we have set for ourselves! It was this conquest of the barrier of space that constituted the greatness of the Copernican and Giordano Bruno world views, in that it was recognized: because man's gaze did not reach further, he believed in an eighth sphere, whereas in truth the expanse of space is unlimited.

Today, humanity is on the same ground in terms of spiritual science. Just as Giordano Bruno showed that the blue vault of heaven is only there because the human eye does not reach further, so spiritual science shows that human life between birth and death is only limited because the gaze of the ordinary person only goes so far. Just as the firmament is no limit to the contemplation of the universe, so birth and death are no limit to the contemplation of man, which we erect only because the ordinary man's view reaches only so far. Just as the spatial limitation of the world was removed by natural science and space was opened up, so today the limits of birth and death for the human being are removed by spiritual science, in that it teaches us to direct our spiritual gaze into the life of the soul in its eternal duration, just as natural science in the dawn of modern times has directed our gaze into eternity or, better said, into the infinity of space. Exactly the same today as then, only in a different field!

Just as the natural sciences, which have turned to the external life of man and to the external knowledge of man's life, have brought infinite advantages and achievements, so too will the soul's view of what it needs for its life, expanded beyond birth and death, beyond the temporal, bring infinite values to the human soul. For spiritual scientific research, when pursued correctly, will pass over into the human soul and will become life there, will become strength and confidence, will place us in the whole social context and bring the soul what the souls, which are only beginning to understand a little, long for so much.

Absolutely true, not only in theory but in life and in strength, spiritual science will do what I have already tried to summarize in a few words, with which I also want to conclude my reflection today, which should show what the spirit and meaning and goal of spiritual science is, and what this spiritual science of the human soul should be. The meaning and goal of spiritual science, we can grasp it something like this:

Man's mind speaks to man:
Things in the vastness of space;
They change in the course of time.
Recognizing, the human soul,
Unlimited by the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the passage of time,
Penetrates into the realm of the spirit.

In the introductory lectures of this year's winter cycle, we have already often pointed out the sources of man's supersensible knowledge, the knowledge of which – and also of its relationship to the world in which we live – this entire lecture cycle is intended to deal with. It was pointed out how these sources of supersensible knowledge lie in the human soul, in every human soul itself, in it as dormant forces and abilities, which can be brought forth through appropriate means in intimate inner experience, so that the human being can become able to look into the spiritual worlds. The development of these abilities lying dormant in the soul is to be sketched out this evening. Further explanations of what is to be presented today will then arise in the next lectures.

If the aim is to make it clear how the soul's dormant powers of supersensory knowledge can be brought out, then one can always point to an occurrence, to a fact that happens to every human being in the course of twenty-four hours: to the alternation of sleep and waking. Man usually passes by those riddles of life that play into his life daily as something familiar, and the rare and, because of its rarity, oppressive will in most cases easily evoke a longing to be solved as a riddle. Such oppressive riddles of life will be discussed here in the next lecture. Today, however, we will start from a mystery that eludes man in its mysteriousness only because he is so accustomed to the phenomenon in question, namely the alternation of sleep and waking.

In order to sustain our lives, we must pass from a state of consciousness into one of unconsciousness every day. What happens when we pass into the unconscious state of sleep? The senses lose their capacity to perceive, the organic limbs lose their capacity to move, and thinking, which is bound to the activity of the brain when it is engaged in the external world, ceases. As we fall asleep, we feel all the activities and all the awareness that fill our day subside. It would be a logical impossibility for anyone who judges impartially to think that what surges up and down in our soul from morning to evening in our conscious state as our ideas, our feelings, sensations, affects, passions, yes, as our ideals and ideas, actually passes into “nothingness” each time we fall asleep and then arises again the next morning. Only logical prejudice can deny that man's spiritual and soul essence is also present while he is in the unconsciousness of sleep.

If we assume hypothetically for the moment – and the following lectures are intended to justify this assumption – that while man is in the unconsciousness of sleep, he has, as it were, withdrawn with his actual spiritual-soul core from his physical body and the forces animating this physical body, and that he then lives in a spiritual world , it is not far-fetched to assume that the reason for this lies within the person themselves: that when a person's spiritual and soul essence is withdrawn from their body, they cannot perceive their surroundings in the same way that they perceive them when they use their eyes, their other sensory organs and their brain in the physical world. It is not far-fetched, I say, to think that man's spiritual-soul powers are initially dependent on using the 'ordinary life of the senses and the brain' in order to have a world around them, and that when man, as in sleep, divests himself of the possibility of perceiving through these instruments, they are too low, too weak to really see, really feel and think what they could then perceive.

Such a supposition could only prove to be correct if there really were the possibility of actually drawing forth from their hiddenness the forces which one suspects as weak, for instance if one were able to condense and concentrate within oneself the soul forces which, as it were, are 'thin' in ordinary normal life concentrate them within oneself, so that what a person experiences in sleep would not have to occur when they stop using their senses or their brain, but that there could also be a state similar to sleep, and yet in a certain respect completely opposite to it. This state would have to be similar to sleep in that the person would not be forced, as when falling asleep, but would voluntarily, through his inner powers, through his will, cause himself to withdraw from the senses or from the brain , so that he could be completely awake but not see his surroundings through his eyes, nor perceive anything through the other senses, but bring his eyes and other senses to complete silence. In other words, he would have to be able to completely suppress all sensory activity through his will, and he would have to be able to suppress ordinary thinking, the kind of thinking that is activated in everyday life through ideas about the external physical world. Furthermore, if man could suppress by his own will what otherwise brings him to perceive, he would now be able, in his spiritual and soul essence, not to reach the unconsciousness of sleep, but to concentrate forces that are otherwise weak and thin, so that he can also properly act without his body, outside of his body.

The question arises as to whether what has just been said can be realized in some way. Of course, this can only be answered by the facts that the person evokes in himself, namely simply by the fact that he is able to apply means to his soul through which what has just been characterized occurs. Through the application of such means to the soul, one comes to supersensible knowledge. The path to supersensible knowledge is not one that leads through external means, that requires all sorts of machinations merely existing in the external world, but it is an intimate path of the soul, and everything that has to be done for it takes place in the depths of the life of the soul itself.

Now, if we want to ascend into the worlds that are to explain to us the outer world in which we live, if we therefore want to ascend into the supersensible worlds, there are three stages that we must pass through. A more detailed account of these three stages can be found in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Here, however, they will only be briefly outlined. When describing these three stages, I ask you not to be put off by the words. Some of the words are used today in everyday language for something quite different from what is meant here, and some of them do not sound good in the thinking habits of the present day because they are used for all kinds of things that are recognized imprecisely or unclearly, or even for those that are rightly rejected. This sometimes causes a kind of emotional emphasis when these words are heard. But it is easy to see that this must be so to a certain extent for the things to be discussed here, because our language is there for the external world. Therefore, the words for the designations must be borrowed from the external world and can therefore never fit exactly for what lies outside the external sense world for which language is created.

The first step of higher, supersensible knowledge is imagination, imaginative knowledge. To avoid the misunderstanding that has just been mentioned, I would ask you to understand by imagination only what I will characterize in a moment. The second stage of supersensible knowledge is inspiration, and the third stage is what, when the word is used as we shall characterize it later and not as it is often used inaccurately in ordinary life, can be called true intuition. Outer sense and intellectual knowledge, which we apply in ordinary life and also in the science of the outer world, is related to these three stages of supersensible knowledge as a kind of preliminary stage, so that, when the stages of supersensible knowledge are added, one can speak of four stages of human knowledge.

Now there are many means, and many means must also be applied when it is a matter of rising from ordinary sense and intellectual knowledge to the first stage of supersensible knowledge, imagination, and I will, because there is not would not have time, I will emphasize with all concreteness how the soul must, as it were, use one of the means – you will find others in “How to Know Higher Worlds” – to awaken the slumbering supersensible cognitive abilities in it. One of the means is the so-called meditation.

If we ask ourselves: What is meditation in the spiritual-scientific sense? — we must say: This meditation is the devotion to an idea, to a thought-feeling or to a volitional content in such an intense way and in such a way that it does not happen in ordinary life, but it is suitable for concentrating and condensing forces that are otherwise present in our soul life, as it were, in a diluted form. In this process, it is good, although the opposite is also possible, not to use concepts for such an understanding of the soul that one otherwise gains in ordinary life or in ordinary science. These concepts can certainly be used, but they are not as good to use. The most useful concepts for meditation are allegorical, symbolic concepts. I will develop such a symbolic concept here, which has already been presented to some of the listeners in other contexts. At first it may seem grotesque, paradoxical, that someone would be expected to let what is now being discussed take effect in his soul, but we will characterize later why it should happen. Let us assume that someone forms the idea that he has two glasses in front of him, an empty glass and one partially filled with water. Now he pours the water out of the full glass into the empty one and imagines that, by pouring the water out of the full glass into the empty one, the full glass does not become emptier and emptier, as it does in the external world, but fuller and fuller. This is indeed a paradoxical idea at first, but this idea is meant to be an allegory, and the spiritual researcher should be aware that it is an allegory. It is meant to symbolize, as it were, the nature and essence of human love for our soul. With human love and with everything that falls under the idea of love, it is certainly the case that this source of love is so infinitely deep and so infinitely rich that when we see the fact of love in the world, we must humbly admit at all times: This mystery of love in its true essence is most certainly unfathomable for every soul. And the more we have this sense of unfathomability, the better it is for the content and intensity of our lives. But there is one quality of real love that we can clearly know and emphasize: that is the quality that is symbolically represented to us by the image we have just spoken of.

The person who gives love and acts of love to another person never becomes poorer or emptier through what he does out of love, but always fuller and fuller, richer and richer in his soul life. This quality of love, emphasized, we have before us, as it were, when we imagine the image of two glasses and the pouring of water from one into the other.

We do something similar to what is done in another area of knowledge, and in doing so we arrive at important results for the external sense world. Let us assume that we have a circular plate made of some substance unknown to us. When we look at this circular plate, we can say that what it is as a substance, how the materials are welded together, is initially unfathomable to us. But there is one thing we can do if we want to know something about this disk: we can draw a circle in front of us. Then we have emphasized something about this disk, namely that it is circular, and this emphasized fact is absolutely certain, however little we know about the disk in general. If we think mathematically, we also do it in such a way – and all mathematics is symbolism in this respect – that we highlight some aspects symbolically. This process of creating images that are perceived by the senses and then held fast by the soul is the preparation for imaginative knowledge for soul-spiritual deeds and for soul-spiritual experiences.

If someone were to say: Then the spiritual researcher sets out to bring images and symbols to life in his soul that do not correspond to any truth at all, so he sets out from the outset to think untruth and to bring untruth to life in his soul – then the answer would have to be: But of course the true spiritual researcher is aware that what he brings to life in his soul as symbols does not correspond to any external reality! If for a single moment he could mistake a symbol for some kind of reality, then he would no longer be a human being on the way to supersensible knowledge, but on the way to illusion. These symbols are not meant to represent outer realities, but to live in our soul, to connect and blend with our soul life and to concentrate our soul life on them.

If we are now able to focus so strongly on such a symbol that we use all the power of our soul to let only this symbol live in our soul and to put aside everything that could penetrate us from external impressions, and to put aside all other thoughts , so that we bring only and alone such an image to the center of our consciousness, then such an image is better than an immediate impression of an external reality, because such an impression always draws us back to the external reality with our soul forces, distracting us from ourselves, as it were. But when we have formed a pictorial, arbitrary idea with full awareness that we have something purely constructed, to which we now surrender, it is something that retains reality only insofar as it is borrowed from it. Whatever images we form, we have taken the components for them from external reality. These images are presented in colors, shapes, etc., they are borrowed from external reality, but they do not refer to external reality. This is because it does not happen in external reality that a glass becomes fuller when you pour out the contents.

Such an exercise has the consequence that the soul must concentrate its powers in a completely different way than if it takes what it has otherwise experienced to help it. If the one who wants to go the way into the supersensible worlds has patience and perseverance to practice such concentrations of his soul life again and again, he will be able to have a very definite inner experience. Having this experience is the first step towards imaginative knowledge. He will experience that he has thereby inwardly changed his soul life, and that after some time he can become aware of how such images, such pictures, arise from his soul itself, without him first bringing them about, and arise in such a way that they present themselves to him with all the appearance of reality, as images otherwise only present themselves when we have made external perceptions and formed ideas from them.

In our ordinary external life, our soul's images arise as reflections of external reality, as it were. Through the exercises mentioned, however, images arise from the depths of our soul life, which are only pictures at first, of course. But this is where the elevation of the soul life lies: the soul now feels inwardly strong and can enter a state that is similar to, yet opposite of, the state of sleep. During sleep we abstract from all outer perceptions and also from brain-bound thinking, but we fall into unconsciousness. In imaginative cognition we also abstract from all outer perceptions and from all brain-bound thinking, because we suppress all that. But despite this, the soul does not become empty, does not become unconscious, but images arise from its depths, images that become richer and richer, more and more extensive, and then present themselves to the soul like a new world. This is the world of which it has already been indicated in these lectures that it can be confused by the layman, who is not familiar with such things, and its value can be mistaken for the world of morbid illusions, hallucinations, delusions and the like. But only someone who is ignorant of the facts in this matter, and judges only from the morbid life of the soul, can make such a mistake; for there is an enormous difference between the morbid, even the slightest morbid, representations of this kind, and those that have been rightly won by methodical soul-education.

Anyone who has learned even a little about what are called pathological soul phenomena, hallucinations, illusions or delusions, knows one thing: that those persons who are afflicted by such ideas ultimately believe in the reality of them so firmly that the faith they themselves have in the experiences of the external sense world is nothing in comparison. That is the characteristic of delusions and illusions, that those who are afflicted by them also develop an overwhelming belief in them. There is nothing more difficult than to talk a person out of their delusions – they don't even have to reach the degree of hallucinations, just ordinary delusions, paradoxical ideas. If, for example, a person begins to develop the morbid idea that other people are persecuting him, it is extremely difficult to get rid of this idea by mere persuasion, and it may happen that he constructs the most marvelous logical thought-constructions to prove how right all these delusions are. Man can become obsessed by these ideas, and he firmly believes in the objective reality of such conceptions.

If you now only take into account some of what is said in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, you will see that while man brings himself to let such images and imaginations take effect in his soul, at the same time everything is done through the right schooling of the spirit to ensure that, to the same extent as this world of images blossoms in the soul, the belief in them as in an objective reality is expelled from the soul, so that at no moment can the person training spiritually ever arrive at the idea that what arises in him as imaginations is an objective reality. All schooling of the spirit is wrong that does not at the same time evoke in the soul the clarity: What occasionally enters as marvels such as new worlds, has no objective reality in the way it comes over you. Everything is initially there only to inwardly revitalize the soul, to make it richer in itself and, if we want to use the paradoxical expression, more inwardly real, more fulfilled by the real. And that is the best, indeed the only true attainment of the disciple, that he knows: the imaginations that arise are nothing other than a reflection of his own being.

If the spiritual disciple is able to overcome all belief in the reality, in the objectivity of these imaginations of his, in the same moment when he receives them, then the spiritual training is the right one. Generally speaking, it is difficult for many people to accept the one with the other, because by applying the appropriate exercises in his soul, the human being is, so to speak, endowed with a new world, a world of sometimes magnificent ideas. But for many people this is an extraordinary satisfaction, an extraordinary pleasure, something that fills them with deep sympathy. And anyone who tried to make them believe, even in the slightest, that all this is not an objective reality but only a reflection of their own nature, that it is only their own nature expressing itself more meaningfully than before, would be regarded by them as an enemy, as a blasphemer of the most beautiful hopes of the soul. But it must be understood that such imaginations, as they first appear, are not at all suitable for giving real knowledge of the higher worlds, but that they are only a bridge for the soul. For now a completely different task begins for the soul, the task that gradually leads from imagination to inspiration. A struggle begins, as it were, between the soul and what appears as its imaginations. If I am to characterize how this struggle is waged, I must use a simile from ordinary life.

We experience time and again in ordinary life that we do not have all the contents of our soul in our consciousness. Imagine what it would be like if you suddenly had in your consciousness everything you had ever imagined! You could remember ideas that you might have had decades ago. These rest in the depths of your soul and are called up at some opportunity. That means that in ordinary life one has the possibility to forget and to bring the forgotten out of the soul again. One also has the possibility to bring out of consciousness what the consciousness experiences as ideas and to separate it from our conscious life so that it is somewhere in our soul independently of it. The content of consciousness can thus be lowered somewhere, so that it is then out of consciousness.

We must succeed in doing the same thing – even if it is different in this area – with all our imaginations when we become spiritual researchers. We must be able to extinguish every imagination that arises from our soul at will, we must be able to extinguish it at will and bring it into a state where it is thrown out of our consciousness in the same way as a forgotten idea is thrown out of our consciousness, which we can later retrieve. This is necessary. In the whole realm of our imaginations, we must be masters of every single one of them, and we must be able to make each one of them independent of us.

A conscientious spiritual researcher who undertakes such spiritual research and then conscientiously communicates it to the world, does this often and often, again and again, that he repeatedly pushes down what arises before his soul as an image, which has emerged, again and again, making it unconscious, erasing it. Then it comes again, and now not only through arbitrariness, but through something quite different: through an inner power of which we only become aware at this very moment if we are at the appropriate level. And not all imaginations come up, but we have the clear consciousness that there are imaginations that remain down there in an unknown, that cannot be brought up again, or if they do come up again, they show themselves as such, which we reject.

The images change when they come back to us; they are then also something completely different. They reach us in the same way that perceptions of things in the physical world reach us externally. For the same reasons that we, if we have common sense, can distinguish externally between something dreamed and something non-existent and something real and present, we can recognize in its reality and in its spiritual essence what emerges again as imagination.

The question was once asked, when such things were being discussed: How can a person be sure when his imaginations come back to him, which he first threw out of his subjectivity and handed over to objectivity, only to have them returned to him, how can he be convinced that they represent realities or unreality? We know that there are suggestions and imaginations that are so strong that they overwhelm a person, so that he perceives as reality what is not there at all. A vivid example was given: if someone is so sensitive that, without drinking lemonade, he has the taste of lemonade in his mouth just at the mere thought of it, that is an example of something being there that is not really there. So one can also be subject to a similar deception with what the reborn imaginations are.

Such an objection can always be made. It can also be maintained in a mere dialectic, in a mere play on words, but not in the face of reality. For anyone who develops his soul in the way described comes to the same possibility of distinguishing truth and error as one distinguishes truth and error in the external world, where one has nothing but a healthy soul to distinguish truth and error. Everyone can form a concept of this if they think, for example, of Schopenhauer's philosophy with the sentence: “The world around me is my idea.

I do not underestimate Schopenhauer's philosophy, otherwise I would not have published it myself and written an introduction to it. But great minds often make the simplest mistakes. For the sentence “The world is my imagination” is actually refuted by pointing out a completely trivial fact: if he imagines a piece of steel at 900 degrees Celsius and thinks of his fingers touching it, he will not get burned. He will never get burned by such an imagination, no matter how saturated it is. But if the real steel is in front of him, he will get burned. Thus, not through concepts or philosophies, but through experience, he will be able to distinguish reality from imagination. But there is no other distinction. And there is no other distinction in the supersensible realm either, except that through schooling one has acquired the right way of being with supersensible reality.

Therefore, it is necessary for our consciousness to know that When imaginations first arise, they have been created by our soul itself, and so they are only a reflection of our own nature. A person can have the most beautiful imaginations — at first he does best to interpret them in such a way that he says to himself: What hidden state of mind, what hidden passion, what belief or superstition is there in me that these or those images arise before my soul? If he sees nothing in the pictures but the reflection of himself, then he has acquired the right state of consciousness for walking the paths up into the supersensible world. He must then be able to be a fighter against himself, drawing on the inner strength of his soul. He must be able to uproot what he is often most tempted to believe in, what he loves most, what for many people could already mean bliss, and let it descend into a sphere of forgotten ideas. When he has so unselfishly torn from himself what his soul had first created and given it over to the world outside of himself, it comes back to him again as inspiration. Then he is able to live with those entities, real beings and facts of the supersensible world to which such imaginations belong.

At first, such imaginations appear quite familiar to us because we can explore how they are formed not differently than we ourselves are in our soul, how they are only a mirror image of the soul. One can always prove from the world of imaginations that these imaginations are so and so, depending on who we are and on our state of mind. But when they return, it is indeed different. The same images do not return, but different ones do, new ones that we have not been confronted with at all before, and which announce themselves as reality just as external realities announce themselves as such to us. Only one has a completely different feeling about them.

We face the things of the external world in such a way that we stand outside them. A table we look at is outside of us. It is there, and we cannot enter into things. When we have prepared ourselves in the way described, we immediately have the inner experience of consciousness when we encounter the facts and things of the higher worlds: we could only come to them by giving them something that we have first brought forth from the depths of our soul. It is truly the case that, as when an object lies before me and I want to grasp it: as I have to stretch out my hand and become aware of its reality, so too, through that which I first achieve through the method described, I have to separate what then confronts me as imagination from my own ego, and plunge it into oblivion. But in doing so, I extend my own being into a world that I can then grasp.

In the world, one experiences many refutations of what has just been said. But however much one looks around, however much one wants to familiarize oneself with these refutations, one thing always comes to mind: the people who refute what has just been said have not yet understood it. This is evident from the way they speak about it. And anyone who has understood it would never dream of wanting to refute it. Thus one encounters very frequently this supposed refutation, namely, that one hears it said: But these supersensible perceptions that you then have and that you take for impressions from beings that are supposed to inspire you, do not differ after all from quite ordinary illusions or hallucinations! They differ tremendously in that the true spiritual researcher has a different relationship to them, a relationship that allows him to maintain his common sense in relation to these things just as he does in relation to the things of the external world. Therefore, persons who are most unfit to become real investigators of the spirit are those who are superstitious or gullible, those who are termed visionaries in common parlance.

Those who readily accept a truth will certainly not be able to conduct proper spiritual research. Imagination and faith are the greatest enemies of genuine spiritual research, although what imagination is in art, for example, and what faith in reality is, can ultimately be the most wonderful gifts of spiritual research. For what can be investigated in the spiritual can be transformed into imagination and become a work of art. Likewise, when it is said that what spiritual researchers proclaim is something that only appeals to faith, the sentence must apply: the spiritual researcher certainly believes what he knows. But he would truly be a fool if he did not believe what he knows; yet he believes nothing but what he knows.

It has just been said that we have to tear what we have acquired out of our souls, so to speak, that we have to stretch out spiritual organs through them and get back the spiritual reality through them. As we become more and more immersed in such a soul life, we also grow more and more together with the beings and things of the spiritual world. Then there occurs what happens in our consciousness in such a way that we do not communicate with these beings as one person communicates with another through external organs, but through what speaks directly from being to being, what is directly perceived by the beings, in that our soul is directly with the being that perceives it, so that it is, so to speak, not outside of it but in it. Then intuition sets in, which is actually only the conclusion of supersensible knowledge, that supersensible knowledge that does not lead us into a blurred, nebulous spiritual life, but into a concrete, essence-shaped, reality-filled life. There is no other way to truly come together with the spirit and its existence than to merge with it, as it has now been described. But anything with which we do not merge can never be accepted as proof of the spirit, for there is no other proof than to find one's own experience coinciding with the experience of the spirit. Whoever wants to experience a spiritual being must bring his soul so far that he can let his own experience coincide with the experience of this spiritual being.

The entire process of spiritual experience, as it has been described, can make it clear – it would be of no use to obscure the facts, for they must be stated openly – that man can most easily can recognize pure spirits, if I may use the expression, through imaginative knowledge. These are spirits that only have a spiritual body and no other covering than a soul or spirit. Spiritual entities that do not come into embodiment and do not express themselves in outer natural phenomena can be recognized at the level of imagination, when we do not yet have the ability to penetrate to inspiration. This happens in such a way that the imaginations which we have sunk down into oblivion come back to us in a modified form, and we then recognize them as images for spiritual entities, which are as spiritual as our spiritual-soul life conceived without a body.

On the other hand, one must ascend to inspiration if one wants to recognize entities that are connected, for example, with the elements of nature, with the glow in nature, with the warmth in nature, and so on. In short, to recognize the powers and entities that lie behind the sensory world, which express themselves in the external world and can only be recognized there in their external expressions. This is only possible through inspiration. For this, what we have in our soul must be torn out more intensely, so that it dives down, than in the case of beings who have a mere spiritual existence. And the strongest powers of vision must be applied if one wants to recognize those creative powers, which the outer mind consciousness only addresses as the materialistic forces of nature, but which in truth are creative entities.

If we want to recognize these creative entities that lie hidden behind all external existence, then we must be able to tear our inner soul life out of us as strongly as it is the case when we have just ascended to intuition. That means that to recognize through supersensible knowledge the preceding incarnation of a human being in a concrete case is one of the most difficult tasks, for in a human being as he appears to us in the sense world, we are also dealing with something that manifests itself in natural and bodily effects.

Behind these physical effects lies something like creative powers. But for the spiritual seer, this is hidden behind the physical exterior just as the spiritual beings that are present in lightning and thunder and behind all nature are hidden behind them; and one is hardly easier to find than the other. Therefore, it will be found time and again that people who develop intuition tell all kinds of real illusions from past incarnations. Therefore, it is good to pay as little attention to them as possible. The true spiritual researcher knows that this is one of the most difficult things that even the most developed soul can do at any given moment.

What has been said so far relates to the investigation of the supersensible, of spiritual life and activity. By preparing his soul in the manner described, the soul itself becomes a tool for penetrating into the supersensible worlds. But for the spiritual researcher who wishes to communicate spiritual knowledge of the world, the most significant task is yet to come. For this insight into the spiritual worlds is mostly misunderstood and misjudged by people who do not know it in the right way. And this also belongs to the correct assessment of the paths of supersensible knowledge, that the human being is able to form an opinion about what real spiritual knowledge is and what is either nonsense, charlatanry or self-deception.

It must be said again and again: to research in the spiritual world, to seek out supersensible facts and entities, the soul must educate itself to do so. But when a spiritual researcher who has penetrated into the supersensible worlds in the right way describes his observations correctly, using concepts that correspond to a healthy human understanding and a right feeling for truth, then what the spiritual researcher describes can be understood in the right way by every person who does not allow himself to be prejudiced. The prepared soul is needed to investigate supersensible facts and beings, but never to comprehend them. This is, so to speak, the secret of the presentation of spiritual things: that they can be presented in such a way that every soul can understand them, after they have been investigated by the supersensible powers of knowledge.

Now there is a peculiarity: the human soul needs the results of spiritual research to understand the things we will talk about, for example, in the next lecture on 'Life's Questions and the Riddle of Death'. The human soul thirsts to have ideas and concepts about what goes beyond death, ideas and concepts to truly grasp the essence of the soul. And anyone who wanted to refuse to understand the nature of the soul could well suppress for a while what may be called the yearning of the soul for the solution of the riddles of the world. But then it becomes all the more apparent that we may well deny the soul spiritual nourishment, but we cannot suppress the hunger that arises and can drive the soul not only into despair but also into unhealthiness. Man needs, so to speak, for his welfare and for his safety in life, the results of spiritual research, and to make the soul happy in the right way with the results of spiritual research, for this it is only necessary to have common sense. The natural sense of truth is enough to grasp what the spiritual researcher imparts. As long as it is not investigated, it cannot be said. But when it has been investigated and formulated aright, it can be understood.

The truth of this can best be seen from the fact that the spiritual researcher himself has gained nothing for the happiness of his soul, for everything that he needs for his soul in general, from his “vision”. He has a new world. But this new world is of no use to him as long as he has not developed it to the point where it can be used to judge the soul life that we lead in everyday life, and which longs for the solution of the riddles of the world. What the spiritual researcher can get out of his research is of no use to him, quite unlike the other person to whom it is related and who grasps it with a natural sense of truth and common sense. But as regards what the soul needs for its life, the spiritual researcher has nothing through his research, but only and alone through what then comes out of the research and can be communicated to everyone. The spiritual researcher can only be of use to humanity as a whole if he is able to express the results of his research in such concepts and ideas that they can be grasped by the ideas of an age, provided that the latter are sufficiently unprejudiced and unbiased. This unprejudiced attitude is certainly still largely lacking in the present day because people believe that other ideas, for example those of natural science, contradict the results of spiritual science. But if one looks more closely at the results of spiritual scientific research, one will see everywhere that this is not the case.

But still another thing stands between the spiritual researcher and his audience. Precisely what the spiritual researcher is, in that he can see into the spiritual world, is actually widely misunderstood. People make serious mistakes about the spiritual researcher as such precisely when they want to approach or long for spiritual research. In order not to speak at too great length, I will merely remark that the greatest error, especially among well-meaning people, is that the spiritual researcher, because he has prepared his soul to see into the spiritual world, is regarded as a kind of “higher animal”, as being somewhat ahead of other people. But by such a view, the one who wants to come to supersensible knowledge, blocks the way to it the most. It very often happens that out of a certain goodwill, the view is formed that the spiritual researcher, because he can see into the spiritual world, is therefore superior to other people, is worth more than they are, that it is something particularly desirable for the human soul and its value to be able to see into the spiritual world. That in our time this striving occurs in the widest circles, stems from a fact that can be briefly characterized in the following way.

In earlier times we also find communications from spiritual research that were given to people. But mostly only the results were communicated. The methods were not spoken about as, for example, one can speak about them today, or as it can be spread in a public book today, as it is in «How to Know Higher Worlds?» or in my «Occult Science in Outline». For certain reasons, the methods were only spoken of to a few individuals whose certain qualities were quite certain. This was right for older times because there was feeling and sense and also a sense of truth for a larger audience, in order to allow the results to affect the soul and also to make the soul happy, but not enough to overcome the difficulties for the soul to enter the spiritual world.

Today, souls live differently. Today there is the possibility of a completely different way of thinking. Let us just compare how people today can think quite differently, not only through the advanced natural sciences, but also through the ever-advancing education that people learn to think quite differently than was the case in the past. As a result, the age has acquired the ability to judge things better. Therefore, things can be communicated. But this is only just beginning. Therefore, it is inevitable that errors will arise.

It is such an error to regard the spiritual researcher as something special. But man is never, by increasing his knowledge, as it has been described, something that stands out above humanity, which cannot have such knowledge. Just as the chemist is no different from the other people because he knows chemistry, so the spiritual researcher is no different from the other people. It is not through such things that the value of a person is determined, but it is determined within certain narrower limits by intellectuality, by the power of healthy thinking. One person is worth more if he can think well than another who can think badly. And in the most comprehensive sense, a person's value is determined by his morality, by the fact that he performs moral acts and has a moral state of mind. He is not ahead by virtue of a particular training of the soul, but solely by virtue of his intellectual and moral qualities.

For this reason the bad habit, which obscures the paths to supersensible knowledge, should be completely eradicated in those who wish to approach such knowledge: that one considers the spiritual researcher, who is able to see into the spiritual world, to be a special authority because he can do so, and regards him as something special. This gives rise to a belief in authority and a blind following, which are bad enough in other fields, but are most disastrous in the field of spiritual scientific research, for experience shows the following for the practice of spiritual research.

Those who, in the ordinary course of life, have acquired sound, straightforward, logical thinking, just as other people do in the ordinary course of life, also carry this logical, healthy thinking into the supersensible world and are thus able to judge what is real, what is right and what is true, and they alone can then pass on correct judgments to their fellow world from what they recognize. It is not by looking into the supersensible world that one forms correct judgments, but by going into it with correct intellect, with good logic. No matter how much a fool can see in the spiritual world, who sees a whole heap of all possible spiritual things, because he has in some way trained his soul for it, will also tell nothing but nonsense about what it is like in the spiritual world. Whether one comes to the truth depends on one's ability to judge. Therefore, even if a person with good sense is unable to see into the spiritual world, he is always able to judge whether what someone is saying, no matter how much he has “seen” it in the spiritual world, is nonsense or whether it has substance. If someone shows that he cannot think well, that he cannot connect things properly, then, instead of listening to the spiritual researcher, he should rather stand guard over his common sense, for then he will always know whether something comes from a wise or a foolish mind.

Even more important in this regard is the moral state of the soul. Anyone who approaches the spiritual world with bad passions, bad feelings and emotions, but especially with vanity and ambition, will see what is presented to him only in a distorted and untrue way. He will see the worst aspects of the spiritual, and these will present themselves to him in such a way that they do not tell him the truth, but create illusions. The spiritual seer's moral state determines what he can see in the spiritual world. To that extent, spiritual vision itself is not suitable for making people some kind of authority. Rather, we have to pay attention to the way in which spiritual research is prepared, and we must know that we will cause the greatest harm if we do not keep watch with our common sense and only look at what can be objectively judged.

This is the way to judge supersensible knowledge on the part of those who long for such knowledge for the salvation and happiness of their soul. If man relates to the spiritual researcher in this way, then truly this relationship of the world to the spiritual researcher is no different than the relationship of the world to other sciences. Just as not everyone can go to the observatory or the laboratory to conduct research there, so too, although a certain deepening into the spiritual world is always possible today, relatively few can see into it. But this is not necessary either, because the fruits of spiritual knowledge can be understood by unbiased comprehension when they are communicated. This can become the right relationship between the spiritual researcher and his audience, and this is also always the right one in the coexistence of people.

The more we succeed in not taking the spiritual researcher as an authority, but rather relying on our common sense, examining everything, and the more we measure everything the spiritual researcher says against how we see it when we compare it to life, when we apply our common sense in other words, the more we do that, the more we stand on healthy ground. We may well say that spiritual science, insofar as the world needs it, is accessible to every human being today, because it is comprehensible, even if one cannot see into the spiritual worlds. We are already at the point today where it is actually no longer denied to any soul to go the way into the spiritual world. Our age demands that people become more and more convinced that the path into the supersensible worlds can also be taken. This is the right thing to do, in contrast to what leads people to a blind belief in authority. But only what is right has value for the happiness and salvation of the soul.

These are a few suggestions regarding the paths to supersensible knowledge, to that knowledge that really leads us into a spiritual world that lies behind our sensory world and that also enables us to comprehend this spiritual world. The spiritual researcher himself has something of the spiritual world for his personality, for his being, only when he can not only see but can also grasp what he has seen. For everything seen is still of no value if it is not grasped. But when it is grasped, grasped by the characterized common sense and the natural sense of truth, then it digs itself into our soul, connects with it, and our soul feels directly what is in it, as the soul, when it comes before a picture, directly feels what is in the picture, even if it cannot make this picture itself. Just as it is not necessary to be a painter to benefit from a picture, it is equally unnecessary to penetrate into a knowledge that is also necessary for the soul to the highest degree, for example, of immortality or of the passage through repeated lives on earth, or to penetrate this knowledge sufficiently to be able to form these cognitions oneself in spiritual vision — although it would be good if more and more people were to penetrate into spiritual vision. But this is conquered by time, and more and more people will also do so because the necessary, insuperable need will arise to live one's way into the supersensible world. Souls will be more and more compelled to become seers, so to speak, to really grow together with the spiritual world.

But this gives - be it understood self-seeing, be it understood seeing of the other - the possession of supersensible truths, of supersensible knowledge, that our soul knows how we recognize through outer science, how all the outer substances that are present in the whole universe, so that we are embedded in the same that is spread throughout the whole universe. In this way, through spirit-comprehending research, he also learns to recognize that in everything that surges up and down in his consciousness or subconscious, he is connected to a world of spiritual beings that are truly more real than the substances with which the body is connected.

Thus, little by little, man feels the fruits of spiritual research in the peace of his soul, and also feels the power to work and be active in the spiritual universe, in the God- and spirit-imbued universe. But that is what makes man know what he is and have the necessary knowledge for him: that he lives and feels connected to and knows that he lives, resting and active, thinking, feeling and willing in the spirit-imbued universe. And that is what the soul cannot do without, what it seeks when it does not have it for a certain period of time. The soul needs this if it is not to become desolate within itself and, through this desolation, become incapable of working with humanity, so that it would not only despair of the divine but also fall into decadence. But the consciousness of belonging together with the supersensible worlds underlies what instinctively felt in Goethe when he says:

Were the eye not sun-like,
The sun could never behold it;
Were not in us the power of the Godhead,
How could we be enraptured by the Divine?

Well, the eye is solar! The same power that is in the sun is in the eye. Thus, as the ancient philosophers said, like can be recognized by like. There is a divine in man, the whole world is imbued with divinity: thus, the inner divine can grasp the outer divine. But Goethe also recognized that the opposite of this is a truth.

Schopenhauer, although he makes the whole world an appearance of will, is unable to see that what is within us is not only necessary for the knowledge of the external world around us, but that, conversely, the external world is also necessary for the existence of the internal world. According to Schopenhauer, the sun only exists because we have an eye. This is how the peculiar philosophy arose that regards the world as soundless, as cold, and so on, and that all this only begins when the human organs enter the world. But Goethe knew the right thing: that not only do we see things by having eyes, we hear sounds by having ears, but that an eye can only arise because the sun is there. From a once eyeless entity, man has become a seeing being because light fills space and brings forth the eye from an organism that did not yet have an eye. The power of the sun created the eye through the light it spread. So it is not important that we carry the divine within us and, for example, in Fexerbach's sense, we only project the divine that we have first created within us into the world, but we must know that we would not have this “sense of God” within us at all if the divine-spiritual did not fill the world and create a spiritual organ in us, just as the outer sun created the outer eye.

Therefore we can say: The consciousness of the belonging together of soul and world, which gives the soul strength and power and lets it rest and be active in the spiritual universe, is composed of two things, two things of which we can characterize one with the beautiful Goethean saying:

If the eye were not itself the sun,
The sun could it never see;
Were not in us the power of God himself,
How could we be delighted with the Divine?

But it is entirely in the Goethean sense when we, complementing this one-sided truth with the other, which only makes it the full truth, add the other saying, which may be:

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could the eyes of beings flourish?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to be filled with God?

The greatest mysteries of life, which have universal human significance, are not presented to us through special scientific research, but we encounter them at every turn in life. And the greatest questioner is surely life itself, which constantly confronts us, a questioner who not only arouses our curiosity with his questions, but who, through his questions, can mean happiness and suffering, satisfaction or even despair for our soul. Spiritual science, as presented in these lectures, is intended primarily to answer these questions posed by life itself, to the extent that human cognitive ability is allowed to look into the secrets of existence. Even if this spiritual science appears to be something new and unusual compared to today's conventional science, this is understandable for anyone who takes just a glance at those branches of conventional science that deal with questions of the soul, with questions of spiritual life. What is today called psychology or soul science can, to a large extent, be researched to the extent that it presents itself, and it will be found that precisely the great existential questions, the great riddles of life, are very much neglected in this conventional science.

One of the greatest contemporary researchers of the soul, Franz Brentano, stated the following in his “Psychology”: How questions are actually answered in current research into the soul, or at least how they are attempted, how one idea follows another, how one sensation evokes another in the soul, how perhaps those soul forces within our consciousness , which we call memory, all this – Franz Brentano also believes – could not be a substitute for what soul research once sought to fathom as a certain solution to the mystery associated with the name of the immortality of the human being. Today, questions such as that of the immortality of the soul are sought in vain in the usual humanities or spiritual science, and the same applies to other questions. They cannot even be raised from this usual spiritual science, so to speak.

One might say that the most trivial words could be used to raise the most everyday great riddles of mental life, namely with the words: How can man come to terms with himself and the world when he experiences in himself how he becomes a different person at every age, how every age presents him with new tasks even in the time between birth and death? How can man answer the great riddle of existence that confronts him every day and that, as everyone can see, is intimately connected with the whole being of man? The great mystery: how is it that everything that flows in and out of us from morning till evening when we are awake, in the form of ideas, drives, desires, passions, affects and so on, sinks into an uncertain darkness when we fall asleep and is resurrected from this uncertain darkness when we begin the new day? — Sleep and waking, which are so intimately connected with the riddle of human existence, science itself must admit and admits more and more that it hardly knows how to answer these riddle questions. And then there is the enigma of death, as already mentioned, about which a significant researcher of the recent past, as already mentioned here, knows nothing to say except what, so to speak, observation of the external physical world reveals. Huxley cites them right at the beginning of his “Outlines of Physiology” the words of the melancholy Danish prince Hamlet:

The great Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole that lets the north wind through;
Oh that the earth, to which the world did bend,
Might fling a barrier to the wind and rain!

And further, he explains what he wants to say by showing that the individual material parts that make up a person, when he passes through the gate of death, gradually dissipate, as it were, into all winds, into the other matters that surround us, and how we would have to search there for what a person was, if we were to look for the material atoms where they can be found after some time, in the vastness of the world.

That this, what has become of the atoms of the great Caesar, is not at all the question that actually concerns the human soul, this is no longer felt, so to speak, by external scientific observation. That the question is this: Where are the soul forces that worked in Caesar? What has happened to them? How do they continue to work in the world? — that this is the great question, even an external science can no longer feel that. And then there is the question that is contained in the meaningful word destiny, the fateful question that really confronts us at every turn in life, that presents us with the great riddle that shows itself to us everywhere. We see a person entering into existence, born into poverty and misery, so that we can predict at his cradle that he will have a less than favorable destiny. Or we see him entering into life with seemingly insignificant talents, so that we can again predict that he will be of little advantage to himself and to others. In another we see how he enters life, born in happiness and abundance, surrounded by caring hands from the cradle, endowed with abilities that show from the outset that he could become a useful member of the world order for himself and his fellow human beings. How much of all that we call happiness and sorrow, and what daily, hourly befalls us, is included in this fateful question! One would like to say that the great questions of existence only begin where science, so to speak, must end. And anyone who today tries to familiarize himself with such a world view, which is shaped by purely scientific principles, will say to himself: What is offered to me as a summary, however beautifully formulated, of scientific truths, shows me only the beginning of the question, the question of how I must pose the great riddles of existence; there are not yet many answers to be found.

In the face of all this, however, it must be emphasized that in the broadest sense of today's education, there is no possibility of addressing the vital questions of the human soul, for the simple reason that, as a result of phenomena and facts that have taken place over the last few centuries – and which will be discussed in the next lectures will be addressed, human thought habits, the entire faculties of human thinking, have been directed more towards external material and only feel reassured when they can apply their judgment and their research to something that is apparent or accessible to the brain-bound intellect. These habits of thinking are often deprived of the possibility of looking only at what is soul life, at those events within which what takes place is not exhausted in the physical, but is specifically soul-based.

It is clear from the lectures already given this winter that the question is not so much whether man can look into those regions where the answers to the questions raised can be found by means of the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the It has been emphasized several times that certain things must be investigated in this way, but that then the unbiased human understanding, the unbiased judgment, is quite capable of grasping what supersensible research can give. If this is the case, then it will also be understandable that the path of supersensible knowledge described in the last lecture always offers the possibility of looking at what is present in life in any case, what presents itself everywhere in life, in the right way and of getting answers to the great riddles of existence through the right view.

The spiritual in man is present everywhere, it is always there, and in order for it to proclaim its immortality, it is not so much a direct glimpse into the supersensible world that is needed as a right contemplation - which, however, can be drawn upon and refined - a right contemplation of the immediate events of our soul life itself. This should be the main focus when judging what is referred to here as spiritual science: the way in which life is observed, the way in which the phenomena of direct soul life present themselves through the unique thinking brought about by spiritual science. If we observe carefully, we find that spiritual science regards the phenomena of the immediate life of the soul in connection with the outer life of matter in such a way that the great riddle of existence, as indicated, can be answered from the direct observation of life.

It has been suggested here several times that spiritual science today is in a similar situation to that of natural science in the days of the dawn of modern education, when, for example, Francesco Redi expressed the great truth that is now generally accepted and recognized: living things can only come from living things. This meant that a powerful prejudice had been combated, a prejudice that was not limited to lay circles at the time, but dominated all of science at that time – and this time is only a few centuries ago: three centuries ago, for example, when Francesco Redi appeared, it was still believed that lower animals, such as fish, earthworms and the like, could arise from river mud through mere combination of the external material. Francesco Redi showed that this was an inaccurate observation. He showed that nothing of living existence can arise without a germ of life, originating from a similar living being, being placed in the unorganized matter, and he established the proposition: Living things can only arise from living things. Within the limits of the application of this law, it is recognized by all, from Haeckel to Du Bois-Reymond. It was not recognized at the time of Francesco Redi. He first had to show how it is based only on an inaccurate observation when one believes that inanimate matter can form itself into a living being.

In the same situation is spiritual science today in relation to the spiritual, as it was in relation to living things for Francesco Redi. Today, spiritual science shows, through the way it is able to consider the phenomena of the soul, that it is based on inaccurate observation to believe that what enters into existence with a person in terms of inner soul life could, for example, come from inheritance, from parents or grandparents, etc., or could only come from what the soul of the person absorbs through external experience, through external experience of the environment. Spiritual science has to show that the belief that it could be so is based on inaccurate observation just as much as the belief that a formed living thing could be formed from inanimate substance. Just as inorganic matter can only be gathered together by a living germ, so everything that is formed in the human soul in the way of inherited traits and qualities, everything that it absorbs from the external world through the senses and the intellect, can only be joined together to that which lives and weaves in us as a living soul being, if there is a living spirit-germ, a spirit-germ that joins together within itself both the inherited traits and everything that is taken in from the external environment.

Spiritual science focuses on this spirit or soul germ, and in doing so it certainly confronts a very, very widespread prejudice of the present day. When we speak today of the character of the human soul, when we speak of everything that a person experiences, then we will - and this has been done through the most conscientious research, which should be fully recognized in its own right - point to this or that, which is “inherited” from one's ancestors. We shall always be tempted to see what lives in the human soul and what the human being develops, so to speak, assembles through these or those causes that lie within the line of inheritance, on which we only want to influence what once storms in from outside to the human being for the overall shaping of the human soul.

A certain harmony between natural science and spiritual science will come about in this field when consideration is given to a question that must always be in the mind of the spiritual scientist when speaking of the core of the human soul and inherited tendencies: the question that is linked to the preservation of the human species as a whole. Within the life of the species, within that which is inherited in the being of generations from grandfather and father to son and so on, we do see characteristics passing from generation to generation. But one thing confronts us as a question when we consider this succession of human existence over the course of generations: that man reaches, so to speak, the age of fertility, sexual maturity, at a certain time, and at the time when he has reached this, he is in a position, so to speak, to bring a complete human being into existence again in the generative sense. In other words, having attained sexual maturity, the human being is capable of producing his own kind, and thus has the abilities that are necessary to produce his own kind.

So human development up to sexual maturity is such that the human being develops within himself all the abilities that make it possible for him to produce a being of his own kind. But the human being continues to develop after sexual maturity. New formations, new soul content also arise after sexual maturity, and it is impossible to relate what the soul undergoes in its development after sexual maturity to the whole development of the human species in the same way as what the human being undergoes to establish the human species until sexual maturity. A sharp distinction must be made in man's whole attitude to the world in relation to his development up to sexual maturity, and in relation to the time after that. This is a question that, as we shall soon see, can only be properly addressed by spiritual science.

Another significant question arises from this, but it shows how what is meant by the term “inheritance” is to be understood, in contrast to what actually takes place in the human soul and belongs to human development. We can see what occurs in man and clearly shows itself to be a product of heredity within the human species in a radical case where heredity occurs under all circumstances, simply because man is human and descends from a being of the same kind, a being of his own kind. One such thing, for example, is the change of teeth at around the age of seven. This is something that lies within the powers that man has inherited, that occur under all circumstances, even if we remove the person from the human community and place him on a lonely island, where he would grow up wild.

This is the case with all characteristics that are actually only based within the line of inheritance. But let us take something that is as intimately connected with the human soul as language, and we immediately find that the concepts of inheritance let us down. Where it is justified to speak of inheritance, the inherited characteristics will appear as with the change of teeth. But if we take a person to a lonely island and let him grow up wild, so that he hears no human sound, then language does not develop. That is, we have something that shows us that there is something in the human soul that is not bound to inheritance in the same way as the forces that we have to address in the eminent sense as inherited.

We could cite many more examples that show how little we can get by with the forces of inheritance to explain the whole being of man. But when it comes to the spiritual side, where one starts out with a prejudiced approach, one makes mistake after mistake, mistakes that simply turn out to be logical mistakes. For example, it is repeatedly believed that spiritual science wants to rebel against something that natural science has to say, while it actually holds the achievements of natural science in the highest esteem.

For example, one might think this when spiritual science asserts that what we call the human soul core does not merely come from the parents, grandparents and so on, but as a spiritual and soul core goes back to a previous, far-distant life of the person, going back so far that spiritual science has to say: The life of man on earth is not a single occurrence but a repeated one. When we enter earthly existence through birth, a soul core comes into existence that has absorbed certain peculiarities and certain forces in previous lives. Because it has absorbed these forces in previous lives, so to speak, concentrated them within itself, it enters a new body and a new physical environment in a certain sense. Just as the living germ in the physical life places itself in its inorganic surroundings and absorbs the inorganic forces and substances from there, so the human soul nucleus, coming from previous earthly lives, approaches the inherited traits, binds them, concentrates them, takes what the external world can give, and thus forms and shapes the new life that we then live through the time from birth to death. The present life is again such a contraction of partly inherited traits and partly of what the outer life offers us. And when we pass through the gate of death, then this soul core is most concentrated. Then, in the time between death and a next birth, it passes through a purely spiritual existence and, if it has continued to mature in this, enters a new earthly life through a new birth or conception.

Unfortunately, it is only a popular prejudice that anything of what today are conscientious and well-researched scientific results should be opposed or even touched by such views of spiritual science. Spiritual science is fully understood - this has already been mentioned - when the natural scientist comes and shows how, through the mixing of the paternal and maternal germ in each individual case, a special individualization of the child's germ takes place, so to speak, and how the individualities of the individual children can be different simply by this mixing of the paternal and maternal elements. Spiritual science in its depth does not engage in the trivial assertion that it is proof of a special human individuality that in one and the same family the children are different from each other, because this individualization can be understood from the different mixing of the paternal and maternal elements. If, on the other hand, the natural scientist comes and points out how what man experiences in life could point to this or that organic constitution, to this or that formation of the brain, and so on, then spiritual science is in complete agreement with this, and it remains amateurish in spiritual science if one does not want to go into it. But if what natural science has to say in this field, and quite rightly so, is to be an objection to the results of spiritual research, then a logical mistake is made that can be characterized something like this: Despite all the results of natural science research, the human soul kernel first draws on the inherited characteristics to shape a life.

Let us assume that a person sees another person breathing healthily in front of him and says: “The fact that this person is alive and standing before me as a living being is due to the air and lungs that are present.” Who would dispute that this is completely true! Just as little as this can be disputed by any spiritual science, just as little can it be disputed when the natural scientist comes and considers the material conditions from the line of inheritance in order to explain the individual form of the soul's life. It is just as true as when the natural scientist says: There stands a man before me who lives at this moment because there is air outside him and lungs inside him.

Can the natural scientist therefore consider the spiritual scientist to be refuted when spiritual science says: Despite everything that has been said, what happens to your soul is determined, spiritually and mentally determined, in a purely spiritual way by what the soul has experienced in previous lives. Despite all this, is the whole destiny of man determined by the fact that man himself has prepared this destiny in previous lives? No, the naturalist must not consider the spiritual researcher who makes such an assertion to be refuted. The naturalist who says, “The man standing before me lives at this moment because there is air outside him and lungs within him,” must not consider the spiritual researcher to be refuted, just as he who says to him: No, that is not why he lives, but he lives in this moment through something quite different; this man once wanted to hang himself, and he would most certainly have died in his then attempt at hanging if I had not intervened. But I cut it short, and that is why he is now alive.

From this we see, then, how the objective truth that the other person only lives because there is air outside him and lungs inside him does not contradict the fact that he only lives at this moment because the other person cut his rope! Just as this latter irrefutable truth does not contradict the natural scientist's realization that a person lives because air and lungs are present, so what natural science has to say does not contradict what spiritual science has to offer: that the ultimate, spiritual reasons for a person's existence lie in repeated lives on earth.

The important thing here is to direct our attention to the right thing in the right way, and here we can look at language as a good example. Every spiritual researcher who penetrates into the depths of things and understands natural science can grasp that one can easily be tempted to say: Man can speak because he has a speech center in his brain. That is certainly true. But it is equally true that this speech center of the brain has only been formed into a living speech center by the fact that a language exists in the world at all. Language has created the speech center. Likewise, everything that exists in the formations of the brain and the entire organic apparatus of the human being has been created by the spiritual and soul life. It is the soul that has impressed upon the human material the reality of spiritual life. Therefore, we must seek the true creative power in the human soul, in the spiritual-soul. We must not regard the spiritual-soul as a product of the brain, but rather the reverse: the brain, with its delicate formation, as a product of the spiritual-soul.

When we consider human life, we find that this is the case in every respect, so that a healthy consideration of life confirms what has just been said. Let us consider for a moment what we can call human development, going beyond the generic, that is, what still develops in man even when, so to speak, the forces within the inheritance are fully developed, when he has become manly, in order to carry within him the forces that can produce his own kind. The soul forces that constitute human development present themselves to us in a completely different way when we contrast them with those forces that are present throughout human life and express themselves, for example, in the preservation of the species and in reproduction. Within the sphere of the powers of reproduction we see how everything unfolds from the inside outwards, so to speak, how man brings forth beings like himself beside him through the powers that play in this sphere, that is to say, how what is within him makes its way outwards. The forces that belong to inner human development take exactly the opposite path. One must be able to see the spiritual as real in the first place. Then one will accept the consideration that is to be given now as a justified one from the outset.

How do we live our lives when we consider the inner soul? We live our lives in the opposite way to how we live life within the species: in the species, all development takes place outwards, in the individual life, all development takes place inwards. This happens in such a way that we absorb what comes to us from the outside, process it within us, and do not push it outwards as in reproduction, but rather we concentrate what we live through in ourselves more and more intensely, stripping it more and more intensely, so to speak, of its character as the outside world and making it the content of our own ego.

Anyone who looks at human life impartially will find that it would be impossible, for example, for our soul life to ever have everything that the soul has lived through, everything it can remember, really in its memory at any given moment. Let us imagine that any one of the people sitting here at this moment should have alive in his soul everything that has ever lived in the soul in terms of concepts, ideas, sensations, affects, and so on. That would be a pure impossibility. But has what we have gone through in the past, what we have inwardly taken in soulfully, been lost because we cannot remember it at this moment? It is not lost. If we compare our soul life in successive moments of time, we will find that perhaps more important than what we remember is what we seem to have forgotten, but what has worked on us and made us a different person.

In the course of our development, we are always a different person, feeling imbued with ever-changing content. If we observe ourselves as we are now and compare ourselves with what we were, say, ten years ago, we will not be able to deny that we are a different person and that what has brought this about are the processed experiences, what has flowed into us, been absorbed by us and taken the opposite path to the forces that serve reproduction. We destroy, as it were, with our looking at things, with our remembering in our imagination, that which we experience, but we take it into our I instead. Our I is continually changing. Therefore, we can say: a precise observation of life shows us how this I changes throughout life, and how it has changed through the experiences it has taken in. We feel how the I becomes inwardly fuller, permeates itself more and more, becomes richer and richer than it was when we entered life as young people. This is based on a very significant phenomenon of life, which is usually not given enough attention.

Goethe, the profound connoisseur of life, who above all saw life as it presented itself to him in his own personality, uttered the sentence: In old age we become mystics. What did he mean by that? What does it mean to become a mystic in Goethe's sense? We must remove from this sentence what is unclear and nebulous about it. What Goethe meant was that as man becomes ever more mature and mature, he has less and less of what the world offers him externally, but draws the forces of experience from the wells of his own soul, into which he has let them descend. “Man becomes a mystic” means: his soul has become fuller and fuller, has contained more and more forces within itself.

If we take a closer look at what our soul core has united within us, how it has absorbed what it has experienced and what it has made of it, then those who have become mystics independently of any age can help us to understand a little better what actually happens in the human soul. Let us ask the mystics! What do the mystics talk about most of all? About a “second self”, about a “higher human being” in man, about the fact that in this human self, which grows up with us from youth, a second self can take hold, which many mystics interpret as a “divine” one. But that is not what matters, but how they felt that as a person grows up, something matures like a second person, which he holds fast, which is concentrated within him. We see the exact opposite of what happens in reproduction: that a second person is born alongside the first, that the second is rejected. What becomes the “second self” is not something that the person rejects, but something that he concentrates more and more within himself.

Thus we can indeed say: by living his life, man shapes something in his individuality that takes the opposite direction from that of reproduction. He does not give birth to anything out of himself; he concentrates something within himself, does not let something emerge from his ego, but imbues something within himself, which the mystic quite well describes as a second human being, which develops, as it were, within the skin of the first human being and acquires more and more spiritual and soul-like determination. This is more or less evident in one person or another; but the sense of the developing human being is based on the fact that we undergo an opposite germination process, where we do not unfold, but on the contrary concentrate something within us. If we call the direction of reproduction an evolution, a development, then we can call what the I undergoes an involution, a wrapping up, an inner shaping of the experiences. And it is self-evident that the inner resilience that the I, having grown up, carries within itself as a second I, is greatest when we are at the end of our physical life, when we pass through the gate of death.

If we examine this once and take a closer look at what has developed as a second self, then we have to say: the human being is not always inclined to take a closer look. Life takes up a lot of his time and he does not pay enough attention to the second being that he is developing. But if he pays sufficient attention to it, he will find that this second being has very definite qualities, and above all bears within itself a significant urge to be independent and free in relation to what we can take up in our further life. In our further life we live in a certain linguistic context. As a result, our concepts always have a certain coloring from this linguistic context. But what we have developed within strives to free itself from what only a particular linguistic context can give, and to shape an outlook on life that is free and independent of any linguistic context. We want to grow beyond what a particular linguistic context can give, and in doing so we also grow beyond what we have grown into from our youth. From our youth on, we have to develop a certain ear, for example. We notice that what we develop within our I is something that wants to become ever freer and freer from our outer physicality. We form a new human germ that is independent of the one that has formed out of our outer physicality when we are adults.

This is what spiritual science wants to direct the soul towards: that a second self develops out of the human self in the course of life, the essence of which consists precisely in feeling more and more fully and intensely, the more independently it can feel from what has grown since youth. And if we take a closer look at this second self that has been formed in our self, we will see that it has such inherent strength that we can characterize its whole nature by saying: this self contains the strength to form a new, different human being than the one through which it itself was formed.

It is not an analogy, but only a clarification, when we say: the I that we have within us can be compared to the plant germ that has developed from the root through the stem and green leaves to the flower. Then it is most capable of life and can provide the basis for a new plant. The whole nature of the plant is concentrated in the germ, and when the germ is ripe, what has grown in the way of stem, green leaves and blossom dies off. In this way, a spiritual-soul core matures in us. Just as the germ of the plant grows more and more, even when the leaves wither and the outer physical form of the plant is approaching death, so the spiritual-soul core in man matures, while the outer layer dies more and more, as the sheaths of the organs gradually wither and approach death. Hence, when we observe our soul properly, we see the remarkable fact that the inner powers of a new ego are strongest when we pass through the gate of death. Then we carry the systems of forces, the interrelationships of forces, through the gate of death into a world that cannot have anything to do with the world in our body.

Even if we do not want to pursue further — which the following lectures will show us — how the spiritual researcher can also show us what happens to these spiritual-soul cores, formed in the I, in a purely spiritual world, which the man experiences in the time between death and the next birth, we can still say: in the same way that the natural scientist goes about understanding the plant, we can go about understanding the human being. The natural scientist turns his gaze to the germ of the plant and sees how the germ can now bring a new plant life to flourish. In this way, he seeks to understand the new plant from the germ, how the remaining germ appears again in a new plant. In the same way, the spiritual researcher can also look at the human being as he enters into life through birth or conception. There we see how the human being initially shows nothing externally other than that his organs develop in a certain way. Then the soul life appears, which we have already characterized by saying that when it appears, the moment also comes for the human being to remember back to later. For he will say to himself: I was obviously already there before this point in time, but I can only remember back to a certain point. It is the point in time when the human being is able to feel himself as an ego; but there is no doubt that he already existed as a spiritual-soul being before that. Why, spiritual science may ask, does the possibility of remembering the past only arise from a certain point in time? Were the inner powers that bring about remembering the past not there before? It would be completely illogical to think that the soul and spirit only begin at the point in time to which man later remembers. Everyday sleep can teach us how the soul and spiritual forces live in us before remembering the past awakens.

Today, people have all kinds of strange ideas about sleep. The correct idea about it has already been partially brought to light in the lectures on waking and sleeping. For example, today people have the idea that sleep is only what can be called sleep if it is brought about by fatigue. I would ask the listeners to the earlier lectures to bear in mind that spiritual science wants to speak precisely. If someone wanted to say that spiritual science itself says that sleep comes from fatigue, that is not entirely correct, because it was said: sleep is there to remove fatigue. In spiritual science, it is always important to understand things very precisely, because the aim must also be to present things accurately.

Can fatigue be the cause of sleep? Anyone who claims this is refuted by life itself. Anyone who claims that people only need to sleep because they are tired is already refuted by looking at himself or considering how the often not at all tired pensioner falls asleep in his chair in the afternoon, even though he is not at all tired. And it is especially refuted when he considers when most sleep occurs: not when one is most tired, but in childhood one sleeps most. Things must only be considered correctly.

Spiritual science now shows that during the ordinary state of sleep as well as during the dull state of consciousness of the child, those forces that are used for conscious experience are sent into the organism and work there. The forces that we use from waking to sleeping to form perceptions, sensations and so on, these same forces work on us during our sleep, but in such a way that the used up bodily forces are replaced, restored. There they regenerate us, repair what is worn and used up, that is, they form, they shape. While they deform in the waking day life, dissolve the design, and while the waking day life consists precisely in the fact that we dissolve the design, sleep is there to restore the form, that is, to work directly on the human structure. Because we often use our powers of consciousness during sleep to build up certain decayed powers, these powers elude us and we sink into unconsciousness. Because at the beginning of life, before the moment occurs that we can later remember, we use the same forces that live in us and fill our consciousness to refine and shape the brain organization and blood circulation in the first years of childhood, they therefore elude the conscious ego. The self is present during childhood, and it is a strange thing today when the way the self first appears is considered decisive for the study of the human being. Again, a grandiose logical error! |

Today you can go through entire works in which it says: We see how self-consciousness arises, how it is formed in man. You cannot imagine anything more wrong than this, and in every other field you would strictly reject such a consideration, as you would, for example, reject someone who would only gain knowledge of a clock by paying attention to how the clock is created. This is not the case in any other field. In the same way, when it comes to self-awareness, one should show, when one wants to trace how representations arise, how grandiose mistakes are made in this regard. This can only be done by someone who engages with things in a more precise way, from a spiritual-scientific perspective. Otherwise, it cannot be recognized. The way we experience our sense of self and self-awareness is such that our gradual knowledge of the self and how it develops has nothing to do with the reality of the self itself. Rather, because the self, the human being, continuously develops from the times when it is not yet conscious in the child to the times when it is then consciously experienced, we cannot say: it is not there! It is there, shaping the human being in his finer structure. Yes, much more: it shapes the human being in his connection with the whole of human life, which we only notice when we enter into human life in a more or less selfless way.

In the usual way in which people look at life, they can say about their fate: this or that happens to me. One of them I find pleasant, the other unpleasant; one of them I regard as good luck, the other as bad luck; one of them as an acceleration, the other as a deceleration of my life. But that is only a superficial consideration, because a person could convince himself that at every moment of his life he is nothing other than his concentrated destiny. What is it that makes me speak to you now? It is my concentrated destiny. It is my life experiences that speak to you, and I am nothing but my life experiences, my destiny. If I wanted to extract my destiny, I would have to cut a piece out of myself. Man is what he has made of himself, what his destiny is, what he is at a given moment. We cannot separate our self from us, from our destiny, and see the self as something different in terms of content from destiny.

Now, however, we see that we are placed in a certain context of life as a child, and that we are not only determined by our abilities, by our self, even if we are not yet aware of it, by our self working on our blood circulation, and by developing very specific talents and so on, but we also see that we are placed in a specific national context, that we are children of a specific pair of parents, grow up in a specific climate and have to live together with these or those people. This is how we see ourselves as destined for our whole life. If we examine what we can consciously pursue and address as our destiny, it is self-evident that we must address this as the destiny connected with our ego, as we are placed in a life through our circumstances, which is either laborious and laden, or surrounded by caring hands. Not only our later destinies are connected with what we have done ourselves, but also the blows of fate that come to us from the unconscious, and which we cannot follow with our consciousness.

Thus we are led to the spiritual and soul essence of man, which contains within itself all the systems of forces that developed the brain, shaped the blood system and so on, and thereby determined us. But we are also determined by fate by the same I, which places itself in a particular context of life. In the field of nature observation, everyone admits this when they say, for example, “When I look at an Alpine plant, I know that it belongs to the whole Alpine nature, and that is why the Alpine plant cannot grow in the plains.” What everyone admits in the observation of nature need only be transferred to a spiritual-soul core of being. Then one will see that the spiritual-soul core of one's being, which provides its physicality with very specific abilities, is adapted to its physicality on the one hand, seeks out this physicality, enters into it, but on the other hand also seeks out its destiny.

If this destiny is perceived as hard and then one is told: you have created this yourself, you have brought it with you through your spiritual and soul essence. If you ascribe the blame for the hard fate you feel to the person as a whole, then this feeling is based on a short-sighted observation. A deeper principle judges differently, and we can understand how it judges if we take an example from life to illustrate it. Let us imagine a young man who, because his father was wealthy, lived in such a way that he lived out of his father's pocket and did not have much to worry about. Then his father loses all his wealth through some misfortune, and the son can no longer live as he did before. He may say: What a bitter fate has befallen me! How unhappy I am! But if he learns something, if he is huffed and puffed by life and has become an able person, will he say the same when he is fifty years old? No, but now he might say: That twist of fate was quite good for my personal life, because otherwise I might have become a good-for-nothing; my father's misfortune contributed to my happiness.

What can be said from the standpoint of eighteen years of age is not particularly far-sighted; at fifty years of age we shall see further. That which is the deeper principle of life in us seeks misfortune, seeks adversity and misery, because it is only by overcoming the obstacles in adversity and misery that we have developed ourselves further towards a happiness and have become something that we would not otherwise have become. Seen from a higher vantage point, and as soon as we admit that a deeper core of being lives in a person, which passes from life to life and makes it necessary for us to look at life from a higher vantage point, much immediately presents itself to us as understandable.

If we can look at a person in such a way that, as they age, they develop a system of forces within that is directed towards a new human being who is virtually independent of what the person has developed externally from their previous life or from the circumstances of his present life, and when we see how he carries an inner tension of forces through the gate of death, then we can say: This person cannot possibly enter into existence again immediately after death. Why not? What would happen if he did enter existence again immediately? He would still find the outer environment similar to the one he has just left and from which he wanted to free himself by developing the inner core of his soul. Just as the inner soul-core has no direct relationship to itself in the sense of immediately wanting to be “itself” again, so too man cannot embody himself again immediately after death, for he would grow into himself. But this means that the inner soul-core can only re-embody itself after a certain time. During this time it lives in a purely spiritual atmosphere, not in the physical world. What has developed as a spiritual core, in the same way that a plant germ develops within the stalk, leaves and blossom, lives in a spiritual world, and will only feel drawn to to outwardly embody that which it has developed only when different conditions have arisen; that is, when the earth has changed so that the human being grows into different conditions so that he can continue to develop.

That is why so much time passes between death and the next birth, so that, for example, we are not born again into the same language area and so that the other circumstances around us have also changed. We know that conditions on the outer earth change over the centuries and millennia. But what has happened in the meantime, purely externally in culture, we learn through teaching, through education. So we step out of a certain epoch with our spiritual and soul cores, with the forces that we wanted to free, and wait until new conditions on earth are brought about. But what we have not been able to participate in during the intervening period, we have to catch up on through education and teaching. Therefore, education and teaching must be added to what we have in the way of special aptitudes and abilities, which we bring up from the fruit of earlier lives.

In the relatively short time available to me, I was unable to develop anything other than what could be called a way of looking at the human soul in such a way that this observation is, on the one hand, strictly scientific, but, on the other hand, sees something real in these spiritual and soul experiences and that it is seen how, in fact, in the person as he lives before us, what occurs in a next life is already developing as a germ, which draws on the forces of heredity as well as the forces of the environment to develop further.

A world view such as that arising out of spiritual science can have an eminently healing influence, not only on the theoretical questions of life, but also on strength and security and on the power of life. Of course, anyone who does not want to familiarize themselves with spiritual science will not understand that a healthy outer life is in many essential respects conditioned by a healthy soul life, that the healthy soul life radiates its forces into the physical body, and that when the soul is desolate and cannot draw out of its own depths that which fills its consciousness with satisfaction, then the dissatisfaction, the incoherence, the mystery of the soul life is imprinted in nervousness and so on as an unhealthy influence right into the physical body. Those who do not understand this may experience it. Life poses the greatest riddles, and in cases that are meaningful to everyone, what can be expressed by asking: Where else do certain symptoms of a life that is not satisfied with itself come from, if not from the fact that the soul life is not healthy, not complete, and therefore does not radiate health to the body? But anyone who is willing to consider the healing influence of a healthy soul life on the body will also be able to say the following: If in our time we repeatedly point out the inherited characteristics and, for example, with regard to what we feel as a predisposition to illness in us, repeatedly say to this or that person: “We have inherited this from our ancestors, we cannot change it”, then this thought means something that must weigh heavily upon our innermost soul life and must mean a depression of the soul life, which will very soon exert an unfavorable influence on the outer life of the body and must be felt by the person concerned as something depressing that cannot be changed because it lies in the purely physical line of inheritance. But anyone who, on the basis of spiritual science, can gain the conviction that what lives in him is not just a combination of inherited traits and inherited powers, but something that goes from life to life as a spiritual-soul core, can, if spiritual science is not just a theory for him but something that can constantly remind himself that, in spite of all inherited traits and powers, his spiritual and mental core lives, from which he can draw the strength to become a victor, no matter how much the line of inheritance may point to decadence.

The consciousness that can be gained from spiritual science not only answers life's riddles that are theoretical, but answers all questions that reach the whole mind as riddles that we must have answered in order to live in our soul. If we know nothing of that spiritual-soul core that hurries from life to life, then we feel oppressed and weak under the yoke of heredity. We only feel strong and vigorous and live as spiritual-soul beings when we stand upright in the constitution of our spiritual-soul core and can say: The powers of our spiritual-soul core are inexhaustible, for they alone are the sum of what is given to us in the line of inheritance, and through them we can bring what appears to be doomed to decline, from the center of our soul, to ascend again. In this way, the solutions of spiritual science are written into life itself. Only then will spiritual science bear its true fruit, when it can be integrated in this way into the whole of the soul's attitude and mood, and when we become strong, not just clever, through spiritual science. But we also become more proficient in our thinking, especially with regard to certain finer distinctions in life, and we gain in strength and judgment for a finer conception of life.

Just one example of this! When those who like to attribute everything to heredity examine any significant person in relation to his line of ancestors, they may well say: “You can see that of what this person shows in himself, in one ancestor this quality is found, in another that quality.” And then it is said: This has added up and been inherited, and then the inherited traits have merged into a soul being. — One then coins the sentence: So you can see that genius stands at the end of a line of inheritance and has been inherited from one's ancestors.

Expressed in this way, a thought is, so to speak, crossed. For who would have proved anything by this line of thought? One would only have proved something if one could show that the genius was at the beginning of a line of inheritance, but not if it showed itself at the end of it. For if it occurs at the end of a line of ancestors, this proves nothing other than, if one may say so: if a man has fallen into water and comes out of it, he is wet. It only proves that he has passed through a certain element and has absorbed something from it, just as a person is wet when he is pulled out of the water. If one wanted to prove something through the line of inheritance, one would have to show that genius is at the beginning and not at the end of a line of inheritance. But one will leave that alone, because the world speaks against it.

To put the questions correctly and answer them everywhere, that is what follows from spiritual science. Then one will realize that spiritual science does not contradict natural science, but also that a scientific answer to the great riddles of life is not enough. The greatest wisdom will probably be drawn from spiritual science when one day all human education can be placed in the light of spiritual science, when man grows up in such a way that his growth means becoming aware of the spiritual-soul core.

Then the spiritual-soul core of the being will grow with the human being between birth and death in such a way that not only does the soul enter into reality with the full content of which was spoken earlier, but that the soul also becomes aware of the second I, that germ that concentrates more and more. Then the consciousness will pass into another form of life. Then man will indeed see the time approaching when the hair turns white, the face wrinkles and the strength of the bodily organs diminishes. But he will then look up at what he has seen growing from youth, which is the remainder and inheritance of a previous life, and will feel as one feels with a plant germ when the falling leaves announce the end of the plant's form, but the germ grows stronger and stronger. Thus man will feel himself as the germ of a new life and say to himself: What falls away from you must pass through death, for you cannot remain in that; for it must be something else that can be your covering, you must build yourself another body, for you have already prepared it within you. Man will feel the life ripening within him, which he will have to live through again in distant times.

That the repetitions of life are not without beginning or end, and how the question will be answered as to what extent these incarnations of the human essence have a beginning and an end, will be answered later.

When man thus regards life as the germ of a subsequent life, he will also see how this again develops a germ. Then he does not cling to a doctrine of immortality, which he examines philosophically, as it were, but then he puts life to life, which he sees flourish and thrive, and imbues himself with the consciousness of immortality, because he knows that a new germ of life must arise from every life. In the ever-growing and hope-inspiring spiritual and soul life germ, man answers the questions about the riddle of life and death. He answers them not only theoretically, but in a living inner experience he grasps, comprehends, and experiences immortality. He does not merely say, “I have grasped immortality,” but he grasps the soul in its essential nature as a being that cannot be other than immortal, because out of every life it develops a new germ of life. Man beholds inwardly the maturing of this new germ of life. Therefore we may say: spiritual science does not only answer the question about the riddle of life and death in theory, it does not only give a theoretical certainty, but it can inwardly transform our life in such a way that we gather strength and feel what goes from life to life by grasping immortality, and thus go through all lives.

In this way, theory is transformed into life practice, the immortality puzzle into an understanding of the question of immortality itself. This is always the best fruit of spiritual science when it transforms itself from mere contemplation into something that then lives within us. And it may be said that when spiritual science is grasped by man in this sense, then it is not only something that makes him understand something, but something that sinks into his own soul like a life force and lives in him.

Therefore, we may summarize today's reflection by saying that spiritual science teaches us by also vividly verifying for the human soul what a view of the whole rest of the world teaches us, the great contemplation of the perpetual transformation of life, but at the same time also of the permanence in all change that shows itself to us over and over again; it teaches us the eternal in all that is temporal. As if written in iron tablets, the great law of life is graven on our soul: Everything that lives in the universe lives only by creating the germ of new life within itself. And the soul surrenders only to aging and death in order to mature immortalized into ever new life!

Among the accusations that are currently being made against spiritual science and spiritual research, one of the most significant is that these spiritual science or spiritual research would be in opposition to the well-established results of natural science, the natural science that is rightly called the pride of our present spiritual life, indeed of our entire present cultural life. Should the accusation be substantiated that spiritual science and spiritual research intend to oppose these established results of natural science, then, it can be said, spiritual research would truly be in a bad way. Not only would its possibility of finding access to the understanding and heart of the modern human being be in doubt, but its very justification would be in question. Therefore, in addition to everything that has been said in the previous lectures about the relationship between spiritual research and natural science, today this particular episodic consideration may be added about the relationship between spiritual research and natural science, before the next time we look at a figure who is only accessible to spiritual science in the eminent sense: the figure of Jakob Böhme.

Spiritual research, as it is meant here in these reflections, undoubtedly presents itself as something that often appears new in the face of the habits of thought and spiritual aspirations of our time, as something that falls outside the usual ways of thinking, the modes of representation of contemporary spiritual life. And the question suggests itself: how is it that precisely at a time when the educated person who is interested in spiritual questions at all places all hope in what science can give – how is it that at such a time this spiritual science wants to gain recognition, that it places itself in the middle of the triumph of scientific thinking?

Perhaps the easiest way to answer this question is to take a brief look at intellectual life in the last third or perhaps the second half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when not only did scientific research rise to its zenith, experiencing victory after victory, but it was also the time when hopes grew ever greater that all possible information about the meaning of what can be called spirit and spiritual life would come from the natural sciences. Anyone who was fully aware of the intellectual life in the last third of the nineteenth century, or let us say, anyone who was able to let the great hopes of this intellectual life of the nineteenth century take effect on them, for example in the eighties nineteenth century, could not fail to notice how questions were coming from all areas of scientific research, questions that seemed to force all human thought to be placed on a new footing that broke with the old. Only one point will be emphasized. In the 1770s and 1780s, anyone interested in intellectual life could become acquainted with what was more or less new in the field of natural science at the time, for example, the mechanical theory of heat. Those who were familiar with natural science recognized that something like the mechanical theory of heat was an enormous achievement of the human mind. But perhaps we are less interested in the point of view of such a person than in the point of view of someone for whom the question of spiritual knowledge was of primary importance. What did such a person see?

Such a person might have noticed that among the many sensory impressions that assail the human being when using his senses, there is the sensation of what is called heat or, let us say, heat and cold. Like color, like light and like sound, warmth is, after all, also a sense impression. Through his senses, man feels that the world around him is in a certain state of warmth, and he perceives this warmth first as an impression on his sensation. At that time, as has just been mentioned, it was considered a fact proven by research at that time that what man calls warmth, what he believes to be the case, and what he perceives as being spread out in space, permeates bodies and affects beings, that this objectively out there in nature is nothing other than the movement of the smallest parts of the body. So you could say to yourself: When you put your hand into lukewarm water and perceive a certain state of warmth, this sensation of a state of warmth is only an appearance. What appears to you as an immediate impression is only an appearance, it is only an effect on your organism that is caused by something outside. It is only a small kind of movement; you do not perceive the movement. The smallest parts of water are active, but you do not perceive the activity, the movement. Rather, because the movement is so fast, you do not perceive it as such, but it gives you the impression of warmth. When books appeared at that time, such as “Heat, considered as a form of motion,” it was considered a great achievement of the time, and we younger people at that time had to study how the smallest molecular parts move in a liquid, in a gas gas, bumping into the walls, colliding with each other internally, and it was clear that what is going on internally is, in sensation, what gives the appearance of what is called heat. From there, a certain habit of thinking emerged, a certain way of looking at natural phenomena, and I myself still remember how, when I was a little boy, my school principal, enthusiastic about this scientific achievement of his time , regarded all natural forces, from gravity to heat and chemical and magnetic forces and so on, as mere appearances and saw the truth in those movements, in those fine states of motion inside the body. That school director, Heinrich Schramm his name was, saw gravity, the force of falling, for example, only as a movement of the smallest parts of the body. In the light of such a view of nature, there was indeed something that could lead one to say: So everything “real” is just, let us say, space extended to infinity, matter situated in this space and divided into the smallest parts, and the movements of this matter! And the hope could well arise that, just as heat, electricity, magnetism and light could be explained as a fine activity of the smallest particles of matter, so too would one day the activity of thinking, the activity of the soul, be able to be explained as a fine activity of that matter which composes the human or animal body.

There then followed a number of phases in the development of the scientific-theoretical way of thinking. For example, in the 1880s, if you were a physicist, you had to understand light and the whole world of colors as a kind of glow and study infinitely complicated, fine movements and motions within matter and the ether. Then, in the course of the 1880s, it became apparent that people were becoming skeptical of these fine motions and limited itself more to considering the phenomena, the facts, as they present themselves, to express them through the calculation, to describe them, and not so much to speculate about what is supposed to be imperceptible, but only supposed to underlie everything: about the finer activities of matter and ether. That was more in the field of physics.

In the field of physics, there was no real possibility of getting out of the habitual thinking that arose when one considered these fine movements of matter in relation to something that was supposed to make it possible to grasp the spirit in its immediacy. Something was holding us back, so to speak, from the natural sciences, from looking at the spirit in the way that was asserted in the last lectures here. In addition, there were quite different things. Anyone who was involved in the development of natural science at that time was not only confronted with what has just been characterized, but also with the repercussions of all that had been revealed, for example, by the great discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann in the first half of the nineteenth century, through which the smallest parts, the cells, were found within the plant and animal organism. This did not prove the reality of atoms and molecules, but the organic forms were reduced to their smallest building blocks, to cells whose forms were only accessible to the microscope. Then there was the fallout from what was associated with the name Darwin, and one was further under the impression of the great deed of Ernst Haeckel, who in the 1860s had extended Darwin's theory to include humans.

Thus, a scientific approach was adopted that started with the simplest things in the plant and animal world and observed how, from the imperfect to the more perfect beings and up to to man, the individual organs themselves arose in such a way that, by comparison, one could, as it were, determine the process by which the individual organs, which were more complicated, developed from the simpler ones. An enormous amount of material was collected. The breadth and scope of this material was so great that, for example, in the 1870s, one of the most important comparative anatomists of the present day, Carl Gegenbaur, was able to say in his “Comparative Anatomy” (1878) that, especially in the last few decades, an enormous amount of individual knowledge had been collected that showed how related living beings are in terms of their organs, and that one had to wait for the possibility - so Gegenbaur thought - to raise knowledge to “insight”; and he promised himself from the Darwinian method that it would be possible to show what the comparison of the organs of the highest living beings with those of less perfect beings would irrefutably reveal, that there is also a so-called physical descent of the perfect living beings from the imperfect ones. Thus, as it were, the chain was seen to close in the evolution from imperfect living beings to more perfect ones, even up to man, and it could be said that the most complicated being we know, the human body, arises through a kind of summation of those forces and activities prevail even in the simplest creatures, and even through a summation of the forces and activities in inanimate nature itself, the most complicated being we know, the human body, would ultimately come into being.

Enormous hopes were pinned on this scientific ideal. In fact, at that time it was difficult to distinguish between what were scientific facts and what was thought or speculated into the facts, because for anyone who thought deeply, a distinction between facts and theories did indeed exist. The difference was that one could say to oneself: If one proceeded as carefully and subtly as Darwin himself, especially in his earlier years, one would find an enormous amount of material on the mutual relationships and points of comparison between the individual living creatures, from the imperfect ones of the animal and plant kingdoms up to man. But there is a difference, one could say, between what emerged as a fact from the similarity of the external structure and from the similarity of the internal processes, and what could only be imagined: the hypothesis, the assumption of the descent of the perfect living beings from the imperfect ones, because this descent could not be traced according to the facts known so far. One had before one the sum of living beings, more perfect and less perfect. But for anyone who could think thoroughly, descent as such always remained only a hypothesis if one wanted to remain on scientific ground. But the material was impressive.

The results of scientific research penetrated deep into the soul, sometimes with a shattering effect due to the magnitude of the insights that could be gained. In addition, there were many other things. Today's introductory lecture must refer to many individual aspects. For example, reference must be made to the tremendous discovery made by Helmholtz in the field of light phenomena and the effects of light on the human organ of sight, and also made by Helmholtz in relation to sound and tone phenomena and the effect of sound and tone on the human ear and the human organ of hearing. In this way, knowledge of the visual process, which had previously remained mysterious, was acquired. We also learned to recognize what happens in the ear, for example, what a complicated miracle, one might say, a piano-like apparatus is located in the ear. In place of much of what previously seemed merely imagined, there now came a more precise knowledge of the structure of the human organs. One could say to oneself: What appears on the outside as mere movement and activity is transformed — such a transformation, as we have just seen, essentially resulted from the mechanical theory of heat — by the wonderful workings in the organs, in relation to the perceptions that live in the soul. And the inner life of the soul is ultimately built up from what our organs shape out of the workings of matter and space.

In many cases, the whole spiritual process that took place in the souls at that time can actually be described by saying that the souls were stunned by everything that was found there, both on a large and on an individual scale. One had to say to oneself: an earlier time knew nothing of all this. Many traditions about the human soul life seemed obsolete now that one was only beginning to study the effect of matter and its movements on the human organism, to study it scientifically in the true sense of the word.

For the spiritual scientist, the whole thing was, let us say, less important because of the details than because one had to admit: in order to enter into the wide perspectives that are opened up into a world of pure fact, something is needed that one does not initially believe to be present in the old considerations of the soul or spiritual life. In many souls that experienced all this in the last third of the nineteenth century, the following feeling arose, for example. These souls could say to themselves: Of course, in the old days many things were thought about the big questions, for example, about the change from sleep to waking and back, about the question of the immortality of the human soul, about the questions of life and death, about the origin of existence, and so on. But if we compare the entire methodical way of thinking, the entire way of conducting spiritual research in those ancient times, from which such traditions of soul research arise, and compare it with the strict, conscientious way of modern scientific research, then what has come down to us from those ancient times simply falls short of the strict and conscientious method of today's scientific research. Even if the spiritual researcher was not affected by the results of natural research, and perhaps was not even carried away by the results, the one thing that had a tremendous effect on the spiritual researcher was the rigor of scientific thinking, the conscientiousness, the tremendous sense of truth in scientific thinking.

In the face of such facts, anyone who was at all concerned with science, whether natural science or the humanities, had to develop the urge that can be characterized as follows: Science in the most serious sense of the word, which can set the tone for the spiritual life of the present day, can only seek its salvation in the strict thinking, in the truly conscientious research that can be learned from natural science. Such an urge gradually transforms itself, and also had to transform itself, into a kind of scientific conscience in the spiritual-scientific researcher. One could say to oneself: Certainly, as in all ages, so also in modern times the soul has the urge and the impulse to get to know its own nature and essence, and above all to get to know the processes that reach beyond birth and death. But only that which presents itself in the form of a scientific way of thinking can make an impression on the culture of our time for those who look clearly and impartially. One certainly saw many things about all kinds of psychological questions that one would like to say today — appear on the spiritual market. One saw many things that were and are truly quite far removed from conscientious methods of thinking developed through natural science; but one could say: Such things may sometimes make an impression here or there for a while, due to the carelessness and convenience of contemporary thinking make an impression here and there for a while, but such an impression cannot endure, for even the most casual will eventually ask themselves: What can conscientious thinking, trained in natural science, say to that which has supposedly been researched about the spiritual world?

Thus, the need arose for the soul researchers to conduct research entirely according to the model of natural science. One might say that psychology, the doctrine of the soul by Franz Brentano, who has already been mentioned here, is a kind of ideal that has not been fully realized, a psychology that was intended to fill many volumes. But of all these volumes, only one appeared, the first, in the spring of 1874. And although it was promised that the next volume would appear in the fall of the same year, it has not appeared to this day.

Brentano did not proceed according to the pattern of those psychologists of whom it was said last time that they completely exclude the great questions, for example, about the nature of the alternation of sleep and waking, the question of the immortality of the human soul, and the like, but he wanted to treat all these questions entirely according to the pattern of strict scientific methodology. He failed. And why did he fail? Franz Brentano could never bring himself to take the path that has shown itself to be necessary for the present precisely because a mind like Brentano's failed after he did not want to take it. This path has been characterized in the past lectures and especially last time. From this path it was shown how it alone is suitable to lead us into the higher regions, into the spiritual regions of existence, into that which also reaches beyond birth and death. Franz Brentano could not bring himself to go this way. That one must go this way if one wants to reach an end, a goal, he has literally proved negatively by the fact that his psychology stopped at the first volume, which has nothing to do with any of the great questions just mentioned, that he could not yet approach the great questions, as he wanted to.

I have tried to give you a picture of the spiritual life of the 1880s, the period in which anyone seeking access to the spiritual realms would have found themselves. If one allowed everything that has been mentioned to take effect, one could not so easily be satisfied with the then emerging, initially sporadic products of the burgeoning spiritual science. I will only point out, how a work like “Esoteric Buddhism” by A. P. Sinnett came at the same time into the middle of not only scientific research itself, but also into the scientific education of the time.

I do not want to discuss the title question, that here Buddhism has nothing to do with the Buddha and with Buddhism as it is meant as a religious confession, but note that with this book, which in German-speaking areas in the eighties years of the nineteenth century, was initially an overview of world phenomena, of the great course of cosmic events and also of the questions that arise in connection with the nature of man, as well as in the relationships beyond birth and death. What was communicated in this book could at first seem striking. For anyone who turned their gaze to spiritual things could, as such, agree with much of what was written in Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” in a certain respect. Much of it did not contradict what one could and was allowed to think, even if one stood strictly on the ground of natural science. But there was one thing that contradicted the scientific education of the time, one thing that made it impossible to simply accept this book as an interesting product of its time: the way in which the book was presented, the way in which it summarized things and the way in which these things were, for example, sources, was in no way justified before the strict scientific education and truthfulness, and that a person educated in natural science, no matter how much he agreed with the individual results and messages of this book, had to feel repelled by the whole way of presenting them.

The same applied to many other works that appeared in this field. It was even the case with the book by A. P. Blavatsky, who was justifiably famous to a certain extent, that appeared at the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s: “The Secret Doctrine”. Anyone who had to do with these things could say to themselves: There is profound knowledge and insight into spiritual things in this book, but the whole way of presenting it is so chaotic, so mixed up with scientific dilettantism, which is particularly evident in the refutation of scientific theories and hypotheses, that those who have been scientifically educated cannot go along with this book at all.

Thus, two things emerged, so to speak: for someone who had a heart and mind for the existence of a spiritual world, on the one hand there was the scientific way of thinking, the whole scientific way of conceiving things. He could use it to develop his scientific conscientiousness, to free himself from all dilettantism, if he seriously engaged with it. But he could also learn from it how to conduct rigorous research into the factual, and how, through such research, to arrive at verified results that really intervene in life, that are not only foundational for a theory but for the facts of life. On the other hand, however, he could say to himself: But where one seeks to gain something for a spiritual interpretation of life's phenomena from natural science itself, where natural science tries to do so through itself, little can be squeezed out of it for the spiritual, and the less so the more rigorously it proceeds in the realm of the factual. Therefore, someone in such a position had good reason to look back a little at the history of the development of mankind. There he could learn that, even if one disregards spiritual-scientific research, something is gathered together in the various spiritual documents of the peoples and epochs, something purely externally documentary lies there that encloses a grandiose spiritual core of knowledge, which, if one looks at it more closely, is not to be taken lightly take it lightly, but the more one delves into this compilation, the more it offers in the way of insights into spiritual life, even if one cannot approach the way it is presented, or even the way it must be found according to this way of presentation.

Only for those who approach the subject superficially can what ancient Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom contains be no more than a collection of human musings. Those who delve deeper will not find musings, but will actually see how plausible ideas about the nature of the spirit and its effectiveness are contained in these things in a variety of forms that look grotesque to today's world. And just as with Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom, this turns out to be particularly true for ancient Indian wisdom, as far as it has been handed down. Of course, one will not be able to see something like Indian wisdom with the grandiose, significant impression that it must make on everyone, for example, with the eye of a modern philosopher like Deußen, but one will have to immerse oneself in it without prejudice in terms of certain spiritual connections that are obvious from within. But one thing is striking: from the way the whole is presented, it is evident that spiritual knowledge of the kind that we encounter here is not gained in the same way and by the same method as our present-day research methods, by which natural science strides from triumph to triumph. If one is open-minded enough to confidently recognize natural science on the one hand and, on the other, to how a spiritual achievement and spiritual work from ancient times resound, then one will be able to let the overwhelming insights into the spiritual life sink in, and at the same time one will see how completely different the methods must have been with which those spiritual-scientific insights were gained in ancient times.

Now spiritual research itself shows us how very differently that which we can properly call, for example, ancient Indian wisdom, is gained. This wisdom reveals insights that penetrate deeply into the essence of things. We find that this wisdom was not gained through external observation, not through the kind of thinking we call natural science today, but through a kind of soul self-knowledge similar to the one we have been able to characterize here for modern times. Yoga methods, methods of self-education of the soul, were used. These led the soul to see and perceive and recognize not only in the way one perceives and recognizes in ordinary everyday life, but to feel that higher powers of knowledge are emerging within it, which can see into the spiritual worlds that open up around us if we only open up the organs for them within us. But for our existence within the physical life, everything that confronts us as soul activity is, in a certain way, bound to the instrument of the physical body. And now spiritual research shows us how the ancient Indian research was itself connected to the instrument of the physical body in a different way than our present research, as it is common practice in science. Today, science conducts research through the senses and through the mind, which is connected to the instrument of the brain. What did the yoga method lead to? What it brought him to can only be briefly indicated here, because we only want to orient ourselves about the relationships between natural science and spiritual science.

Yoga method initially led people to a certain extent to switch off the brain's thinking instrument, even to switch off everything that the rest of the higher nervous system conveys. In the yoga methods, the instrument of that strictly inward vision was made precisely that part of the human nervous system which today appears to us in science as a subordinate part, but which is in the strictest sense bound up with the workings of the human organism itself, that which we call the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous system. Just as our present-day scientific research is connected with the higher nervous system, so these ancient methods of enlightenment were connected with the nervous system that we today even regard as a lower one, in a sense. But because this subordinate nervous system is connected to the forces of existence and the life forces and is intimately related to that through which the human being is immersed in the divine-spiritual existence, because it is thus related to the sources of human existence, one recognized not only the penetration of the human organism by spiritual forces, but just as one looks with the eye into the worlds of light, so with the instrument of the sympathetic nervous system one looked into the spiritual worlds, beholding concrete facts and entities in them. Anyone who is able to understand how a person who is able to penetrate into his own depths, even to the instrument, is able to relate to the universe also understands how that ancient oriental wisdom has come to us. If we follow the old wisdom, we find it discovered everywhere, coming to the surface of human thought through ancient methods of research, through ancient yoga methods. We find the most diverse wisdoms among the most diverse peoples, and by merely occupying ourselves with them, we penetrate more and more into their depths and recognize how people came to have them in those times when they knew relatively little about today's physical astronomy, anatomy, physiology, and so on. The ancient wisdom of India did not know as much as we do today about the workings of the human physical body, but it was possible to place oneself in the position of the organism by applying the deeper-lying nervous system. And it was the same with other peoples.

Now, by letting one's gaze wander, so to speak, over everything that was effective as such old wisdom up to the sixth century BC, one can penetrate as far back as, for example, ancient Greek times. There we find, apart from everything else, an outstanding thinker, a thinker who has been misunderstood just as often for the good as for the bad: Aristotle, who was active only a few centuries before the founding of Christianity. He still seems strange to us today. If we take him at his word, then we find in him, first of all, in many fields, something of what is today called natural science. For in the old wisdoms, natural science in the modern sense is not present. Even in the nineteenth century, people who wanted to stand strictly on the ground and only on the ground of natural science spoke in the most laudatory terms about what Aristotle had contributed to natural science. So we find in Aristotle the starting points of what can be called scientific research even today. In addition, we find in his works a well-developed doctrine of the human soul.

We shall not go into the details of his psychology, but merely point out how Aristotle's doctrine of the human soul relates to what has been handed down from ancient times about the human soul and its connection with the great spiritual worlds. One can only understand what Aristotle wrote about the soul if one realizes that all this is given to him as a tradition of ancient, primeval thinking, gained in the way just described. Aristotle is no longer familiar with the research methods of ancient times; they are foreign to him. But what he was able to say about the structure, the organization of the human soul, about the difference between what is bound to the physical body and thus to death and what, after death, participates in a spiritual life in eternity, what Aristotle is able to say about all this, that is like something handed down from ancient times, which he knows in terms of content, which he has received in such a way that he could say: it makes sense to my mind. But he only knows the individual parts, what he calls, for example, the vegetative soul, the spiritual soul, and so on. But how the individual parts are connected with the spiritual world, that he no longer knows. He can enumerate the parts, describe them rationally and classify them, and make them plausible to the intellect, but he can no longer show how these parts of the human soul are connected with the spiritual world.

Aristotle's way then passed over to later times. Natural science became more and more developed. Of course there was the medieval low and the new dawn of natural science at the beginning of the modern age, but if we disregard that, we can say that natural science became more and more developed.

What is the basis of man's relationship to science and to the objects of science? If we consider what it would mean for the individual human being if he were alone with his senses, if he could not open his senses and, as it were, attach them to the realms of nature that are poured out around us, what would individual human life be without its integration into nature? Let us look at the matter very fundamentally. We could perhaps squeeze our eyes if we could not connect them with nature, and would thereby be able to have something that would be like a shining of the inner light. But compare the poor inner life in the whole physical world, which man could only have through himself if he could not connect with the realms of nature. Compare it with the rich life that opens up when man opens his eyes and the other sense organs to the riches of nature and its impressions. We are human beings not only by living within ourselves, but by opening the organs to the riches of nature that are poured out around us, and by interacting with these riches. If we knew only what the eye, what the other sense-organs can produce for themselves, how poor in content we would be as human beings here in the physical world! Compare this with what the life of the soul gradually became in the times when natural science was just emerging and leading from triumph to triumph.

In relation to the life of the soul, what Aristotle had given was, so to speak, continued. They only occupied themselves with the observation of the phenomena of the soul itself. But this is the same as allowing the senses to be active only within themselves - and up to our time, official soul science has done it that way. Up to our time, the content of official soul science is nothing other than what can be compared to the mere inner activity of our sense organs or our brain when the brain's thoughts are not directed out into the world. But we have already seen in the previous lectures how, through the methods of spiritual science, and this was also the case with the old spiritual science, the soul is attached to spiritual realms above, which are just as concretely and internally structured as the realms around us in the physical world, to which the sense organs are attached.

These spiritual realms, these very concrete spiritual facts and entities, were not accessible for a certain period of time, which was precisely what allowed external scientific research to mature. As a result, knowledge of the soul's life became increasingly impoverished because of the lack of a spiritual perspective that provided concrete confirmation of the spiritual world. At best, the soul was still investigated in its inner life, as Franz Brentano did in the 1870s, as you can see for yourself in his “Psychology”. But his research is like investigating the eye only in terms of what it can do by itself, and not in terms of what it can do when it is directed towards the facts of nature.

Now it may be said that precisely because of the ever more precise examination of the physical processes of the human being, the view was diverted from the spiritual worlds with which the soul is connected. — On the one hand, the soul is connected with these spiritual worlds, which it enters when it has passed through the gate of death, or when it enters another world through sleep. But the soul is connected to the physical world through its organs, through the entire nervous system and through the entire blood circulation. The fact that natural science has become more and more significant in its methods has directed people's attention to the connection between the soul and the physical world. The results of natural science were so magnificent in this respect that it completely filled people, for example, with how the soul lives out in its connection with the bloodstream and so on. Every new triumph of natural science was in a sense detrimental to directing the gaze of the soul to the connection with the spiritual world.

Nothing else applies either. If you want to get to know a clock, you will get to know it poorly in its entirety as an organism if you say: “There I see how the hands of the clock move forward, there may be a little demon inside that moves the hands forward.” If someone who says something like this still felt so exalted above someone who merely studies the mechanism of the clock,

you would be laughed at, because you only get to know the clock if you really study its mechanism. And it is a different matter again to get to know the spiritual life of the watchmaker or the person who invented the watch through the mechanism of the watch. You can go both ways: examine the mechanical operation of the clockwork and get to know the human train of thought that led to the invention of the watch. But it would be nonsense if someone wanted to infer the existence of demons that set the whole clockwork in motion.

This was gradually lost to mankind for the study of mankind, which in the case of the clock would correspond to the tracing of the ingenious mechanism back to the thoughts of the inventor. For it would correspond to the human soul to trace thoughts back to the entities of the spiritual world. In natural science, on the other hand, it went triumphantly from fact to fact, which corresponds to the clockwork. It is interesting to note that the knowledge handed down from ancient times is usually lost to mankind in those epochs in which a particular piece of knowledge can be precisely investigated by natural science. It is remarkable that at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, we see that the philosopher Cartesius still had a certain idea that something similar to a spirit in the human being works from the heart to the head, to the human being's head. Cartesius still speaks of certain spirits of life that are not of a physical nature, but whose forces play between the heart and the head. Then we see how such knowledge increasingly disappears in the spiritual life of humanity.

Those who wonder why this is so can get the following answer. We see that, historically, at the same time as this disappearance of knowledge of spiritual processes related to the heart, the knowledge of the physical organism of the heart and of blood circulation emerged. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we see first the English physician Harvey publishing his discovery of blood circulation, and Marcello Malpighi in Bologna, as an anatomist, showing for the first time the blood circulation of the frog, how artful the whole blood circulation is. Thus, attention was drawn to the sensory process. Knowledge of spiritual facts was, so to speak, pushed down by the exact knowledge of the sensory process. While it is a triumph for natural science that Francesco Redi, born in 1624, formulated the proposition that contradicted many assertions of earlier times, “everything alive comes from living things.” While this proposition is a triumph, we can say: By reducing the organic to its germ, to the physically indeterminate organic germ, humanity lost sight of how the spiritual itself, independently of the organic germ, intervenes in evolution. Humanity lost its understanding of the spiritual germ. It was step by step. The more science advanced, the more the view of the spiritual world was lost.

Such things are not just coincidences, nor are they something that can be blamed or criticized, but they are necessary developmental processes in the shaping of humanity as a whole. That is how it has to be. Often, while one thing rises and develops upwards, another thing goes down. What we today admire in natural science, indeed recognize as necessary, presents itself to us, if we are true connoisseurs of natural scientific development, in such a way that we say: spiritual science has not the slightest reason to fight natural science in any way, provided it keeps within its limits, nor has reason to complain about the one-sidedness of natural science. For it is only by refraining from mixing all kinds of speculation into scientific research and instead keeping one's gaze calmly fixed on physical and sensory processes that the great achievements of science have been achieved to date. Yes, one can see, especially at the dawn of the newer spiritual life, how only through resistance to Aristotelianism, and also to the justified content of Aristotelianism, such minds as Galileo or Giordano Bruno came to their successes, by refusing to mix anything into their research other than what spread out before their senses and was instructive enough.

Today, the humanities researcher must confront the natural sciences researcher in such a way that he says: the more natural science research itself is kept pure from all speculation and all philosophy, the more one turns one's gaze purely to the facts and does not invent all sorts of spiritual essences, but only takes what one can actually research, the better it is for natural science. The spiritual scientific researcher in particular would like to advocate keeping the scientific facts pure of all scientifically or spiritually speculated talk. Therefore, on the one hand, one can be a spiritual scientific researcher today and, on the other hand, advocate the authenticity and soundness of scientific research. And it is only a prejudice to believe that the spiritual researcher has to turn against natural science.

It is a different matter when there are numerous theories that are already approaching spiritual science and that one would like to derive from natural science theories. In this case, the natural science researcher himself enters the path of spiritual science, in which he is, in most cases, only very little familiar. But one thing remains, even for spiritual science and spiritual research, from natural science knowledge: that is the conscientious method, the conscientious sense of truth, which we have already characterized in the past lectures and also characterized, and which is to remain with the facts.

How do these facts arise? We have seen that through the fact that certain powers unfold in the human soul, which from this soul also reveal the connection with the higher worlds, just as the senses reveal the connection with the physical world. Just as the senses are meant to fathom the facts of the physical world and leave them at that, not to distort them by speculation, so it is important not to philosophize and speculate about the results of clairvoyant observation, but to take the strict standpoint of the facts here too. Then one stands quite firmly on the standpoint of spiritual science, but quite similarly in its field, as one stands firmly on the ground of natural science in relation to it. That is the kind of spiritual science as it is represented here.

This is the only thing that can be the subject of a spiritual research that feels responsible for the spiritual needs of our time. And this is also the case with strict scientific research into the facts that are available to spiritual science, which is immediately apparent when science, understanding itself, reaches its limits.

This again, purely from the facts, gives rise to very strange results. I would just like to remind you of what results when we take the views of the great naturalist Du Bois-Reymond, as expressed in his speeches. Perhaps the most significant speech was the one on the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which he gave at the forty-fifth meeting of German naturalists and physicians in Leipzig on August 14, 1872. There is a passage in it – and I still remember the deep impression this passage made on me as a very young person when I first heard the speech – a passage that roughly says: When we have a person before us in their waking life, science cannot say anything about how sensation, perception, desire, passion or affect arise from the activity of the smallest parts of the brain. “What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the original, not further definable, undeniable facts for me: “oh feel pain, feel pleasure; I taste sweet, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see roses, and the certainty flowing just as directly from it: ”so I am?” — It is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not care how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they lie and will move.

Du Bois-Reymond considered it impossible to understand the soul life in a natural scientific way in the waking state of man. Therefore, he said: When we have the sleeping human being before us, in whom the life of sensations, of perceptions, desires, affects, passions has been extinguished, then we can explain the sleeping human being scientifically; then we have something before us that we can call an inner organic activity. But as soon as this organism is awakened and life, sensation, desire, imagination, etc., are infused into it, it is different. Then this life, this soul content, cannot be explained scientifically from what the scientist can recognize. Sleeping man, Du Bois-Reymond believes, is scientifically comprehensible, but not waking man.

That is one side of the story. On the other hand, read the more recent treatises on the nature of sleep: you will find it admitted everywhere that natural science, so to speak, knows nothing about the reasons for sleep, that it knows nothing about the sleeping person, who, according to Du Bois-Reymond, should be fathomable after all. On the one hand, we see indications of the brilliant progress of natural science, but we also see it admitting its limitations by admitting that the waking human being with his or her soul life cannot be scientifically understood. On the other hand, however, we have, as in our days, the confession that man's sleep cannot be explained to this day. Why not? Not because sleep belongs to those areas where the spirit plays into ordinary life, because we cannot explain sleep if we cannot explain waking.

In one of the first lectures of this winter semester, I pointed out how, at best, a mechanism can be conceived scientifically that automatically, after a certain period of time, causes the urge to switch off consciousness and sensory activity in order to eliminate fatigue. But as I said, if we want to limit ourselves to the fact that sleep is brought about by a kind of independent process in the organism that happens automatically, then we have no explanation for the reindeer that did not work but still takes its afternoon nap, nor do we have an explanation for the sleep of the small child that sleeps the most. On the other hand, I have pointed out that sleep can only be explained if we assume that in the sleeping person we have only the physical body and the etheric body lying in bed, and that when they fall asleep, a spiritual element, namely the astral body and I, moves out of the human being's being. What happens when, during sleep, the soul-like part of the human being is, as it were, outside the physical body and the etheric body? We will talk about these things in more detail. Today, only the following should be mentioned.

As the soul-like part goes out of the physical body and its animator, something is evoked that is opposed to the waking activity of the soul. In its waking activity, the soul is active. No limb moves without the soul knowing it. At the very least, representations are evoked without the soul making use of the brain as an instrument. The soul must be active in the waking state. The opposite is the case in sleep. We can say that the soul enjoys its own body in the sleep-life. If we proceed according to spiritual research, we have, according to the difference, soul activity and soul enjoyment in wakefulness and in the state of sleep, and we understand the interrelation between soul work and soul activity and soul enjoyment, which must pour into soul activity if it is to continue in an appropriate way. Now it is no longer the reindeer taking its afternoon nap that confounds us, although it is not at all tired, but we know that the soul, when it enjoys its body, can exaggerate, and that one can sleep when one is not at all tired. We understand it when we know how, in certain constitutions, the enjoyment of the bodily can be experienced to an exaggerated degree.

All this can be understood if we know how to explain sleep from a spiritual scientific point of view. That is to say, there is an area in which natural science believes itself to have unlimited sway, and where spiritual science has only so much to say, namely that spirit permeates everything, including natural processes. But then there begins an area where there is no longer anything that science can investigate. There are facts, but they are facts that can only be seen when the seeing is not a sensual seeing but a supersensible beholding. If spiritual science proceeds with the same conscientiousness and becomes accustomed to thinking as strictly in its field as natural science in its, then it cannot come into conflict with natural science. But with that, spiritual science stands on ground that in many respects contradicts what has gradually emerged in the course of humanity's spiritual life.

Thus we see how those who can be regarded as forerunners of genuine spiritual research, Goethe for example, had to fight against what was opposed to spiritual research activity. We see it most clearly when we look at how Goethe once defended himself against Kant. It was Kant who first sought to determine how the knowledge that has emerged in modern times is bound to the instrument of the brain, how it must be limited to external experience and cannot penetrate into the depths of the world with which our spiritual and soul life is connected. Hence Kant's strict boundary between “science” and what he calls “belief”; and for Kant, higher realms are only accessible through belief. Therefore, he replaces knowledge about a world of eternity or of the divine-spiritual with a belief that is to be based on the “categorical imperative”. Thus, he decrees that what should be knowledge in spiritual science is mere belief. But Goethe says in his beautiful essay on “Contemplative Judgment” with reference to Kant: “If one can already feel one's way in the intuited sense into a spiritual region in which the divine-spiritual is rooted, from which the moral arises, why should the human spirit, when it rises into this spiritual region, not also really pass the adventure of reason? For Kant called it a “daring adventure of reason” when man wants to penetrate into regions in which, according to Kant, knowledge cannot exist. For Western thinking, the question is: how do you get from science to the humanities? The fact that you do not have to fight science, but that you fully recognize it, yes, you can be a loyal recognizer of its successes, nevertheless, you can expand human knowledge to those areas, according to the model of scientific research, with which the soul is connected in its spiritual foundations in those impulses that give it life even after it has left the physical body and is preparing for a new form of a later physicality.

It will be the task of true spiritual research to increasingly move away from the unjustified mocking or refutation of the legitimate claims of science in our time. Of course, this will depend on spiritual research being recognized only as justified if it is familiar with the state of scientific research at present, and if it therefore does not act in an amateurish way against what can be legitimately demanded from the scientific education of the present day. But just as the natural scientist cannot stop at investigating only the inner nature of the eye, the ear, the sense of warmth, and so on, but must direct what the senses are able to experience within themselves outwards to the rich concrete environment of the physical, so the soul must be recognized by the soul living together with that with which it is connected in the spiritual, and that only begins where scientific research has its limits.

This is precisely the relationship between natural science and spiritual science, but it also offers the possibility of real continuity and peace and mutual understanding between natural science and spiritual scientific research. If what has already been said in this respect in the previous lectures is combined with what I was able to sketch out today about the relationship between scientific and spiritual scientific research, it will be possible to gain understanding for the legitimacy of spiritual scientific research, and also for the possibility of spiritual research to stand on an equal footing with natural science in our time. And it may be hoped that the justified objections and the justified doubts which still exist on the part of natural scientists today will gradually disappear when natural scientists see not only all kinds of confused stuff, as well as arbitrary assertions and superstition, in the field of spiritual research, but how spiritual research is well acquainted with what the present-day scientific education demands.

If this happens, then spiritual research will appear more and more justified before the scientific conscience of the present, and then, from what arises within the facts of spiritual life, one will gradually be able to understand that spiritual research is really possible and really justified, and that the objections against spiritual research actually belong to an area in relation to which one can say something similar to what Goethe once said in relation to another area, namely in relation to rising above all ignorance and all illogic.

In summarizing the relationship of the spiritual researcher to those who appear as enemies of spiritual scientific research, I would like to end with a few words that are comparative and remind you of something that Goethe once said in reference to something quite different. Goethe was thinking of an old Greek doctrine and exposition on motion, which, however, still influenced much of more recent philosophy. This doctrine says: If any object moves, it can be observed as being at rest at every moment, and at every moment, even at the shortest point in time, it is at rest. It is at rest, even if only for a moment. Thus there could be no such thing as “movement,” because at every moment a moving body is at rest and therefore has no movement. Such is the Zen conclusion of movement, and such is how Greek thought came to haunt us until recent times.

Goethe found this objection to movement very strange, and he once said the beautiful words:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

I cannot help but think of this saying when I see how much has been said in recent times to the effect that 'spirit', what you call 'spirit', is the result of purely material activity, material processes and movements; that spirit arises from matter. Just as movement, in the sense of what has just been said, only emerges from rest and is nothing real, so spirit is nothing real apart from matter.

If, in the sense in which we are attempting to penetrate into the spiritual world in these reflections, one tries to gain knowledge of the spiritual and thus really enters into the nature of what the spiritual is, then one may well describe what spiritual scientific research brings to light about the spirit in its relationship to opponents and enemies of spiritual science enemies of spiritual science, then, with a slight alteration of the words of Goethe just quoted, one might perhaps describe it in the following way, and with this I would like to summarize today what I have to say about the relationship between natural science and spiritual science:

Adversity may arise,
But thou shalt remain calm, remain cheerful!
And even if they deny the spirit,
Thou shalt not brood over it,
And in the end thou shalt prove them right:
Their spirit is in a bad state indeed.