The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, revised

Anyone who speaks today about super-sensible worlds lays himself open at once to the quite understandable criticism that he is violating one of the most important demands of the age. This is the demand that the most important questions of existence be seriously discussed from a scientific point of view only in such a way that science recognizes its own limitations, having clear insight into the fact that it must restrict itself to the physical world of earthly existence and would undoubtedly become a degenerate fantasy if it were to go beyond these limits. Now, precisely the type of spiritual scientific perception about which I spoke at the last Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement (and shall speak again today), lays claim not only to being free from hostility toward scientific thinking and the scientific sense of responsibility of our times, but also to working in complete harmony with the most conscientious scientific demands of those very persons who stand on the ground of the most rigorous natural science. It is possible, however, to speak from various points of view regarding the scientific demands of the times that are imposed on us by the theoretical and practical results in the evolution of humanity, which have emerged in such a splendid way in the course of the last three or four centuries, but especially during the nineteenth century. Therefore, I shall speak today about super-sensible knowledge in so far as it tends to fulfill precisely this demand, and I wish to speak in another lecture about the super-sensible knowledge of the human being as a demand of the human heart, of human feeling, during the present age.

We can observe the magnificent contribution which scientific research has brought us even up to the most recent time—the magnificent contribution in the findings about relationships throughout the external world. But it is possible to speak in a different sense regarding the achievements which have come about precisely in connection with this current of human evolution. For instance, we may call attention to the fact that, through the conscientious, earnest observation of the laws and facts of the external world of the senses, as is supplied by natural science, very special human capacities have been developed, and that just such observation and experimentation have thrown a light also upon human capacities themselves. But I should like to say that many persons holding positions deserving the greatest respect in the sphere of scientific research are willing to give very little attention to this light which has been reflected upon man himself through his own researches.

If we only give a little thought to what this light has illuminated, we see that human thinking, through the very fact that it has been able to investigate both narrow and vast relationships—the microscopic and the telescopic—has gained immeasurably in itself: has gained in the capacity of discrimination, has gained in power of penetration, to associate the things in the world so that their secrets are unveiled, and to determine the laws underlying cosmic relationships, and so forth. We see, as this thinking develops, that a standard is set for this thinking, and it is set precisely for the most earnest of those who take up this research: the demand that this thinking must develop as selflessly as possible in the observation of external nature and in experimentation in the laboratory, in the clinic, etc. And the human being has achieved tremendous power in this respect. He has succeeded in setting up more and more rules whose character prevents anything of the nature of inner wishes of the heart, of opinions, perhaps even of fantasies regarding one's own being such as arise in the course of thinking, from being carried over into what he is to establish by means of the microscope and the telescope, the measuring rule and the scales, regarding the relationships of life and existence.

Under these influences a type of thinking has gradually developed about which one must say that it has worked out its passive role with a certain inner diligence. Thinking in connection with observation, with experiment, has nowadays become completely abstract—so abstract that it does not trust itself to conjure anything of the nature of knowledge or of truth from its own inner being.

It is this gradually developed characteristic of thinking which demands before everything else—and above all it seems—the rejection of all that the human being is in himself by reason of his inner nature. For what he himself is must be set forth in activity; this can really never exist wholly apart from the impulse of his will. Thus we have arrived at the point—and we have rightly reached this point in the field of external research—of actually rejecting the activity of thinking, although we became aware in this activity of what we ourselves mean as human beings in the universe, in the totality of cosmic relationships. In a certain sense, the human being has eliminated himself in connection with his research; he prohibits his own inner activity. We shall see immediately that what is rightly prohibited in connection with this external research must be especially cultivated in relationship to man's own self if he wishes to gain enlightenment about the spiritual, about the super-sensible element of his own being.

But a second element in the nature of man has been obliged to manifest its particular side in modern research, a side which is alien to humanity even though friendly to the world: that is, the human life of sentiment, the human life of feeling. In modern research, human feeling is not permitted to participate; the human being must remain cold and matter-of-fact. Yet one might ask whether it were possible to acquire within this human feeling forces useful in gaining knowledge of the world. One can say, on the one hand, that inner human caprice plays a role in feelings, in human subjectivity, and that feeling is the source of fantasy. On the other hand, one can reply that human feeling can certainly play no distinct role as it exists chiefly in everyday and in scientific life. Yet, if we recall—as science itself must describe it to us—that the human senses have not always, in the course of human evolution, been such as they are today, but have developed from a relatively imperfect stage up to their present state, if we recall that they certainly did not express themselves in earlier periods as objectively about things as they do today, an inkling may then dawn in us that there may exist, even within the life of subjective feeling, something that might evolve just as did the human senses themselves, and which might be led from an experience of man's own being over to a comprehension of cosmic relationships in a higher sense. Precisely as we observe the withdrawal of human feeling in connection with contemporary research must the question be raised: could not some higher sense unfold within feeling itself, if feeling were particularly developed?

But we find eminently clear in a third element in the being of man how we are impelled from an altogether praiseworthy scientific view to something different: this is the will aspect of the life of the soul. Whoever is at home in scientific thinking knows how impossible it is for such thinking to grasp the relationships of the world other than through causal necessity. We link in the most rigid manner phenomena existing side by side in space; we link in the strictest sense phenomena occurring one after another in time. That is, we relate cause and effect according to their inflexible laws. Whoever speaks, not as a dilettante, but as one thoroughly at home in science, knows what a tremendous power is exerted by the mere consideration of the realms of scientific fact in this manner. He knows how he is captivated by this idea of a universal causality and how he cannot do otherwise than to subject everything that he confronts in his thinking to this idea of causality.

But there is human will, this human will which says to us in every moment of our waking life of day: “What you undertake in a certain sense by reason of yourself, by reason of your will, is not causally determined in the same sense that applies to any sort of external phenomena of nature.” For this reason, even a person who simply feels in a natural way about himself, who looks into himself in observation free from preconception, can scarcely do otherwise than also to ascribe to himself, on the basis of immediate experience, freedom of will. But when he turns his glance to scientific thinking, he cannot admit this freedom of will. This is one of the conflicts into which we are brought by the condition of the present age. In the course of our lectures we shall learn much more about the conflicts. But for one who is able to feel this conflict in its full intensity, who can feel it through and through—because he must be honest on the one side concerning scientific research, and on the other side concerning his self-observation—the conflict is something utterly confounding, so confounding that it may drive him to doubt whether there is anywhere in life a firm basis from which one may search for truth.

We must deal with such conflicts from the right human perspective. We must be able to say to ourselves that research drives us to the point where we are actually unable to admit what we are everyday aware of: that something else must somehow exist which offers another approach to the world than that which is offered to us in irrefutable manner in the external order of nature. Through the very fact that we are so forcibly driven into such conflicts by the order of nature itself, it becomes for human beings of the present time a necessity to admit the impossibility of speaking about the super-sensible worlds as they have been spoken about until a relatively recent time. We need go back only to the first half of the nineteenth century to discover individuals who, by reason of a consciousness in harmony with the period, were thoroughly serious in their scientific work, and yet who called attention to the super-sensible aspect of human life, to that aspect which opens up to the human being a view of the divine, of his own immortality; and in this connection they always called attention to what we may at present designate as the “night aspects” of human life. Men deserving of the very highest regard have called attention to that wonderful but very problematical world into which the human being is transferred every night: to the dream world. They have called attention to many mysterious relationships which exist between this chaotic picture-world of dreams and the world of actuality. They have called attention to the fact that the inner nature of the human organization, especially in illness, reflects itself in the fantastic pictures of dreams, and how healthy human life enters into the chaotic experiences of dreams in the forms of signs and symbols. They pointed out that much which cannot be surveyed by the human being with his waking senses fords its place in the half-awake state of the soul, and out of such matters conclusions were drawn. These matters border upon the subject that many people still study today, the “subconscious” states of the life of the human soul, which manifest themselves in a similar way.

But everything which appears before the human being in this form, which could still give a certain satisfaction to an earlier humanity, is no longer valid for us. It is no longer valid for us because our way of looking into external nature has become something different. Here we have to look back to the times when there existed still only a mystically colored astrology. Man then looked into the world of the senses in such a way that his perception was far removed from the exactness which we demand of science today. Because he did not demand of himself in his sense life that complete clarity which we possess today, he could discover in a mystical, half-conscious state something from which he could draw inferences. This we cannot do today. Just as little as we are able to derive today, from what natural science gives us directly, anything other than questions regarding the true nature of man, just so little can we afford to remain at a standstill at the point reached by natural science and expect to satisfy our super-sensible needs in a manner similar to that of earlier times.

That form of super-sensible knowledge of which I shall speak here has an insight into this demand of our times. It observes what has become of thinking, feeling, and willing in man precisely through natural science, and it asks, on the other side, whether it may be possible by reason of the very achievements of contemporary humanity in thinking, feeling, and willing to penetrate further into the super-sensible realm with the same clarity which holds sway in the scientific realm. This cannot be achieved by means of inferential reasoning, by means of logic; for natural science justly points out its limitations with reference to its own nature. But something else can occur: the inner human capacities may evolve further, beyond the point at which they stand when we are in the realm of ordinary scientific research, so that we now apply to the development of our own spiritual capacities the same exactness which we are accustomed to applying to research in the laboratory and the clinic. I shall discuss this first in connection with thinking itself.

Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measure and weight in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician, for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition of which I am here speaking replaces the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking, with a truly exact development of this thinking. It is possible here to indicate only the general principles of what I have said regarding such an exact development of thinking in my books, Occult Science, an Outline, Knowledge of the Higher Words and Its Attainment, and other books. The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him—and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people—to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought—the content of which is not the important matter—and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body—for instance, the muscles of the arms—are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be arranged so that we proceed in a really exact way, so that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem. This can be done in the greatest variety of ways. When I say that something should be selected for this content of concentration that one fords in any sort of book—even some worthless old volume that we know quite certainly we have never previously seen—this may seem trivial. The important point is not the content of truth in the thing, but the fact that we survey such a thought content completely. This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for so much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, so much plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. What matters is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is good not to entertain a prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon someone else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is good for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.

If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years, perhaps—and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, as it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years—it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain moment, then, the person has a significant inner experience: he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle—this inner activity now enters into thinking. And since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so one experiences oneself in full clarity and presence of mind in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what we now experience is experienced with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were extending a feeler—not, in this case, as the snail extends a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were extended into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have developed to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real.”

Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become, by means of this concentration, an experiential reality.

It is possible then for the person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it away; he can, in a certain sense, render his consciousness void of what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul. It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness; we need only fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has become a reality. Yet we succeed in putting aside this content of thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the powerful force needed for concentration. When we have succeeded in this, something appears before the soul which has been possible previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of time to which one's memory can return, at which point one entered consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If someone carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. This becomes a precise picture of man's life, such as appears, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock—at the moment of drowning, for instance—when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul—to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. In the super-sensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, and so on. But in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he ultimately took every step in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being whom he recognized as being in harmony with himself.

That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them to enlightenment regarding much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even if this being of oneself meets the searching eye with reproach. This state of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or Imagination.

But one can progress beyond this stage. In that which we come to know through this memory tableau, we are confronted by those forces which have really formed us as human beings. One knows now: “Within you those forces evolve which mold the substances of your physical body. Within you, especially during childhood, those forces have evolved which, approximately up to the seventh year, have plastically modeled the nerve masses of the brain, which did not yet exist in well-ordered form after your birth.” We then cease at last to ascribe what works formatively upon the human being to those forces which inhere in material substances. We cease to do this when we have this memory tableau before us, when we see how into all the forces of nutrition and of breathing and into the whole circulation of the blood stream the contents of this memory tableau—which are forces in themselves, forces without which no single wave of the blood circulates and no single process of breathing occurs. We now learn to understand that man himself in his inner being consists of spirit and soul.

What now dawns upon one can best be described by a comparison. Imagine that you have walked for a certain distance over ground which has been softened by rain, and that you have noticed all the way tracks or ruts made by human feet or wagon wheels. Now suppose that a being came from the moon and saw this condition of the ground, but saw no human being. He would probably conclude that there must be all sorts of forces underneath the earth which have thrust up these traces and given this form to the surface of the ground. Such a being might seek within the earth for the forces which have produced the tracks. But one who sees through the matter knows that the condition was not caused by the earth but by human feet or wagon wheels.

Now, anyone who possesses a view of things such as I have just described does not at all look, for this reason, with less reverence, for example, upon the convolutions of the human brain. Yet, just as he knows that those tracks on the surface of the earth do not derive from forces within the earth, he now knows that these convolutions of the brain do not derive from forces within the substance of the brain, but that the spiritual-psychic entity of man is there, which he himself has now beheld, and that it works in such a way that our brain has these convolutions. This is the essential thing—to be driven to this view, so that we arrive at a conception of our own spirit-soul nature, so that the eye of the soul is really directed to the soul-spiritual element and to its manifestations in the external life.

But it is possible to progress still further. After we strengthen our inner being through concentrating upon a definite thought content; and after we then empty our consciousness so that, instead of the images we ourselves have formed, the content of our life appears before us; now we can put this memory tableau out of our consciousness, just as we previously eliminated a single concept, so that our consciousness is empty of this. We can now learn to apply this powerful force to efface from our consciousness that which we have come to know through a heightened self-observation as a spirit-soul being. In doing this, efface nothing less than the inner being of our own soul life. We learned first in concentration to efface what is external, and we then learned to direct the gaze of our soul to our own spirit-soul entity, and this completely occupied the whole tableau of memory. If we now succeed in effacing this memory tableau itself, there comes about what I wish to designate as the truly empty consciousness. We have previously lived in the memory tableau or in what we ourselves have set up before our minds, but now something entirely different appears. That which lived within us we have now suppressed, and we confront the world with an empty consciousness. This signifies something extraordinary in the experience of the soul. Fundamentally speaking, I can describe at first only by means of a comparison what now appears to the soul, when the content of our own soul is effaced by means of the powerful inner force we apply. We need only think of the fact that, when the impressions of the external senses gradually die away, when there is a cessation of seeing, hearing, perhaps even of a distinct sense of touch, we sink into a state closely resembling the state of sleep. Now, however, when we efface the content of our own souls, we come to an empty state of consciousness, although this is not a state of sleep. We reach what I might call the state of being merely awake—that is, of being awake with an empty consciousness.

We may, perhaps, conceive this empty consciousness in the following way: imagine a modern city with all its noise and din. We may withdraw from the city, and everything becomes more and more quiet around us; but we finally arrive, perhaps deep within a forest. Here we find the absolute opposite of the noises of the city. We live in complete inner stillness, in hushed peace. If, now, I undertake to describe what follows, I must resort to a trivial comparison. We must raise the question whether this peace, this stillness, can be changed still further into something else. We may designate this stillness as the zero point in our perception of the external world. If we possess a certain amount of property and we subtract from this property, it is diminished; as we take away still more, it is further diminished; and we finally arrive at zero and have nothing left. Can we then proceed still further? It may, perhaps, be undesirable to most persons, but the fact is that many do this: they decrease their possessions further by incurring debt. One then has less than zero, and one can still diminish what one has. In precisely the same way, we may at least imagine that the stillness, which is like the zero point of being awake, may be pushed beyond this zero into a sort of negative state. A super-stillness, a super-peace may augment the quietness. This is what is experienced by one who blots out his own soul content: he enters into a state of quietness of soul which lies below the zero point. An inner stillness of soul in the most intensified degree comes about during the state of wakefulness.

This cannot be attained without being accompanied by something else. This can be attained only when we feel that a certain state, linked with the picture images of our own self, passes over into another state. One who senses, who contemplates the first stage of the super-sensible within himself, is in a certain state of well-being, that well-being and inner blissfulness to which the various religious creeds refer when they call attention to the super-sensible and at the same time remind the human being that the super-sensible brings to him the experience of a certain blissfulness in his inner being. Indeed, up to the point where one excluded one's own inner self, there was a certain sense of well-being, an intensified feeling of blissfulness. At that moment, however, when the stillness of soul comes about, this inner well-being is replaced completely by inner pain, inner deprivation, such as we have never known before—the sense that one is separated from all to which one is united in the earthly life, far removed not only from the feeling of one's own body but from the feeling of one's own experiences since birth. And this means a deprivation which increases to a frightful pain of soul. Many shrink back from this stage; they cannot find the courage to make the crossing from a certain lower clairvoyance, after eliminating their own content of soul, to the state of consciousness where resides that inner stillness. But if we pass into this stage in full consciousness there begins to enter, in place of Imagination, that which I have called, in the books previously mentioned, Inspiration—I trust you will not take offense at these terms—the experience of a real spiritual world. After one has previously eliminated the world of the senses and established an empty consciousness, accompanied by inexpressible pain of soul, then the outer spiritual world comes to meet us. In the state of Inspiration we become aware of the fact that the human being is surrounded by a spiritual world just as the sense world exists for his outer senses.

And the first thing, in turn, that we behold in this spiritual world is our own pre-earthly existence. Just as we are otherwise conscious of earthly experiences by means of our ordinary memory, so does a cosmic memory now dawn for us: we look back into pre-earthly experiences, beholding what we were as spirit-soul beings in a purely spiritual world before we descended through birth to this earthly existence, when as spiritual beings we participated in the molding of our own bodies. So do we look back upon the spiritual, the eternal, in the nature of man, to that which reveals itself to us as the pre-earthly existence, which we now know is not dependent upon the birth and death of the physical body, for it is that which existed before birth and before conception which made a human being out of this physical body derived from matter and heredity. Now for the first time one reaches a true concept also of physical heredity, since one sees what super-sensible forces play into this—forces which we acquire out of a purely spiritual world, with which we now feel united just as we feel united with the physical world in the earthly life. Moreover, we now become aware that, in spite of the great advances registered in the evolution of humanity, much has been lost which belonged inherently to more ancient instinctive conceptions that we can no longer make use of today. The instinctive super-sensible vision of humanity of earlier ages was confronted by this pre-earthly life as well as human immortality, regarding which we shall speak a little later. For eternity was conceived in ancient times in such a way that one grasped both its aspects. We speak nowadays of the immortality of the human soul—indeed, our language itself possesses only this word—but people once spoke, and the more ancient languages continue to show such words, of unborn-ness (Ungeborenheit) as the other aspect of the eternity of the human soul. Now, however, the times have somewhat changed. People are interested in the question of what becomes of the human soul after death, because this is something still to come; but as to the other question, what existed before birth, before conception, there is less interest because that has “passed,” and yet we are here. But a true knowledge of human immortality can arise only when we consider eternity in both its aspects: that of immortality and that of unborn-ness.

But, for the very purpose of maintaining a connection with the latter, and especially in an exact clairvoyance, still a third thing is necessary. We sense ourselves truly as human beings when we no longer permit our feelings to be completely absorbed within the earthly life. For that which we now come to know as our pre-earthly life penetrates into us in pictures and is added to what we previously sensed as our humanity, making us for the first time completely human. Our feelings are then, as it were, shot through with inner light, and we know that we have now developed our feeling into a sense organ for the spiritual. But we must go further and must be able to make our will element into an organ of knowledge for the spiritual.

For this purpose, something must begin to play a role in human knowledge which, very rightly, is not otherwise considered as a means of knowledge by those who desire to be taken seriously in the realm of cognition. We first become aware that this is a means of knowledge when we enter the super-sensible realms. This is the force of love. Only, we must begin to develop this force of love in a higher sense than that in which nature has bestowed love upon us, with all its significance for the life of nature and of man. It may seem paradoxical what I must describe as the first steps in the unfolding of a higher love in the life of man.

When you try, with full discretion for each step, to perceive the world in a certain other consciousness than one usually feels, then you come to the higher love. Suppose you undertake in the evening, before you go to sleep, to bring your day's life into your consciousness so that you begin with the last occurrence of the evening, visualizing it as precisely as possible, then visualizing in the same way the next preceding, then the third from the last, thus moving backward to the morning in this survey of the life of the day; this is a process in which much more importance attaches to the inner energy expended than to the question whether one visualizes each individual occurrence more or less precisely. What is important is this reversal of the order of visualization. Ordinarily we view events in such a way that we first consider the earlier and then the subsequent in a consecutive chain. Through such an exercise as I have just described to you, we reverse the whole life; we think and feel in a direction opposite to the course of the day. We can practice this on the experiences of our day, as I have suggested, and this requires only a few minutes. But we can do this also in a different way. Undertake to visualize the course of a drama in such a way that you begin with the fifth act and picture it advancing forwards through the fourth, third, toward the beginning. Or we may place before ourselves a melody in the reverse succession of tones. If we pass through more and more such inner experiences of the soul in this way, we shall discover that the inner experience is freed from the external course of nature, and that we actually become more and more self-directing. But, even though we become in this way more and more individualized and achieve an ever-increasing power of self-direction, we learn also to give attention to the external life in more complete consciousness. For only now do we become aware that, the more powerfully we develop through practice this fully conscious absorption in another being, the higher becomes the degree of our selflessness, and the greater must our love become in compensation. In this way we feel how this experience of not living in oneself but living in another being, this passing over from one's own being to another, becomes more and more powerful. We then reach the stage where, to Imagination and Inspiration, which we have already developed, we can now add the true intuitive ascending into another being: we arrive at Intuition, so that we no longer experience only ourselves, but also learn—in complete individualism yet also in complete selflessness—to experience the other being.

Here love becomes something which gradually makes it possible for us to look back even further than into the pre-earthly spiritual life. As we learn in our present life to look back upon contemporary events, we learn through such an elevation of love to look back upon former earth lives, and to recognize the entire life of a human being as a succession of earthly lives. The fact that these lives once had a beginning and must likewise have an end will be touched upon in another lecture. But we learn to know the human life as a succession of lives on earth, between which there always intervene purely spiritual lives, coming between a death and the next birth. For this elevated form of love, lifted to the spiritual sphere and transformed into a force of knowledge, teaches us also the true significance of death. When we have advanced so far, as I have explained in connection with Imagination and Inspiration, as to render these intensified inner forces capable of spiritual love, we actually learn in immediate exact clairvoyance to know that inner experience which we describe by saying that one experiences oneself spiritually, without a body, outside the body. This passing outside the body becomes in this way, if I may thus express it, actually a matter of objective experience for the soul. If one has experienced this spiritual existence one time outside of the body, clairvoyantly perceived, I should like to say, then one knows the significance of the event of laying aside the physical body in death, of passing through the portal of death to a new, spiritual life. We thus learn, at the third stage of exact clairvoyance, the significance of death, and thus also the significance of immortality, for man.

I have wished to make it transparently clear through the manner of my explanation that the mode of super-sensible cognition about which I am speaking seeks to bring into the very cognitional capacities of the human being something which works effectually, step by step, as it is thus introduced. The natural scientist applies this exactness to the external experiment, to the external observation; he wishes to see the objects in such juxtaposition that they reveal their secrets with exactitude in the process of measuring, enumerating, weighing. The spiritual scientist, about whom I am here speaking, employs this exactness to the evolution of the forces of his own soul. That which he uncovers in himself, through which the spiritual world and human immortality step before his soul, is made in a precise manner, to use an expression of Goethe's. With every step thus taken by the spiritual scientist, in order that the spiritual world may at last lie unfolded before the eyes of the soul, he feels obligated to be as conscientious in regard to his perception as a mathematician must be with every step he takes. For just as the mathematician must see clearly into everything that he writes on the paper, so must the spiritual scientist see with absolute precision into everything that he makes out of his powers of cognition. He then knows that he has formed an “eye of the soul” out of the soul itself through the same inner necessity with which nature has formed the corporeal eye out of bodily substance. And he knows that he can speak of spiritual worlds with the same justification with which he speaks of a physical-sensible world in relationship to the physical eye. In this sense the spiritual research with which we are here concerned satisfies the demands of our age imposed upon us by the magnificent achievements of natural science—which spiritual science in no way opposes but, rather, seeks to supplement.

I am well aware that everyone who undertakes to represent anything before the world, no matter what his motive may be, attributes a certain importance to himself by describing this as a “demand of the times.” I have no such purpose; on the contrary, I should like to show that the demands of the times already exist, and the very endeavor of spiritual science at every step it takes is to satisfy these demands of the times. We may say, then, that the spiritual scientist whom it is our purpose to discuss here does not propose to be a person who views nature like a dilettante or amateur. On the contrary, he proposes to advance in true harmony with natural science and with the same genuine conscientiousness. He desires truly exact clairvoyance for the description of a spiritual world. But it is clear to him at the same time that, when we undertake to investigate a human corpse in a laboratory for the purpose of explaining the life which has disappeared from it, or when we look out into cosmic space with a telescope, we then develop capacities which tend to adapt themselves at first solely to the microscope or telescope, but which possess an inner life and which misrepresent themselves in their form. If we dissect a human corpse, we know that it was not nature that directly made the human being into this bodily form, but that the human soul, which has now withdrawn from it, made it. We interpret the human soul from what we have here as its physical product, and one would be irrational to assume that this molding of the human physical forces and forms had not arisen out of what preceded the present state of this human being. But from all that we hold back, as we meanwhile investigate dead nature with the forces from which one rightly withdraws one's inner activity, from the very act of holding back is created the ability to develop further the human soul forces. Just as the seed of the plant lies out of sight under the earth when we have laid it in the soil, and yet will become a plant, so do we plant a seed in the soul in the very action of conscientious scientific research. He who is a serious scientist in this sense has within himself the germ of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. He needs only to develop the germ. He will then know that, just as natural science is a demand of the times, so likewise is super-sensible research. What I mean to say is that everyone who speaks in the spirit of natural science speaks also in the spirit of super-sensible research, only without knowing this. And that which constitutes an unconscious longing in the innermost depths of many persons today—as will be manifest in another public lecture—is the impulse of super-sensible research to unfold out of its germ.

To those very persons, therefore, who oppose this spiritual research from a supposedly scientific standpoint, one would like to say, not with any bad intention, that this brings to mind an utterance in Goethe's Faust all too well known, but which would be applied in a different sense:

The little man would not sense the Devil
Even if he held him by the throat.

I do not care to go into that now. But what lies in this saying confronts us with a certain twist in that demand of the times: that those who speak rightly today about nature are really giving expression, though unconsciously, to the spirit. One would like to say that there are many who do not wish to notice the “spirit” when it speaks, although they are constantly giving expression to the spirit in their own words!

The seed of super-sensible perception is really far more widespread today than is supposed, but it must be developed. The fact that it must be developed is really a lesson we may learn from the seriousness of the times in reference to external experiences. As I have already said, I should like to go into the details another time: but we may still add in conclusion that the elements of a fearful catastrophe really speak to the whole of humanity today through various indications in the outside world, and that it is possible to realize that tasks at which humanity in the immediate future will have to work with the greatest intensity will struggle to birth out of this great seriousness of the times. This external seriousness with which the world confronts us today, especially the world of humanity, indicates the necessity of an inner seriousness. And it is about this inner seriousness in the guidance of the human heart and mind toward man's own spiritual powers, which constitute the powers of his essential being, that I have wished to speak to you today. For, if it is true that man must apply his most powerful external forces in meeting the serious events awaiting him over the whole world, he will need likewise a powerful inner courage. But such forces and such courage can come into existence only if the human being is able to feel and also to will himself in full consciousness in his innermost being, not merely theoretically conceiving himself but practically knowing himself. This is possible for him only when he comes to know that this being of his emerges from the source from which it truly comes, from the source of the spirit; only when in ever-increasing measure, not only theoretically but practically, he learns to know in actual experience that man is spirit; and can find his true satisfaction only in the spirit: that his highest powers and his highest courage can come to him only out of the spirit, out of the super-sensible.

Dear attendees! For quite a while now, I have been privileged to give lectures here in Vienna every year on topics from what I dare to call the spiritual-scientific worldview. The friends of our spiritual-scientific world view here in Vienna have been of the opinion that, even in these eventful and fateful times, it would not be inappropriate to hold two such lectures from this spiritual-scientific field this year, and this may well be because this spiritual-scientific field scientific field touches the deepest foundations of the human soul, those foundations in which the human soul is connected with the powers we call eternal, with those powers to which Goethe's words refer: “All that is transitory is only a parable.”

A consideration from the field of spiritual science is directed in particular to those foundations of the human soul, from which arise both life's harshest disappointments and its most difficult trials, as well as the admirable deeds that are being performed in such a significant way in our time for the salvation and progress of humanity. Spiritual science, dear attendees, is based on a view of life that is by no means one of the recognized ones in our present time, a view that is completely rejected by the most educated of our educated for a variety of reasons; rejected on the one hand because it is considered to be completely contradictory to everything that scientific world observation of our time, because, on the other hand, as we shall see, it is associated in a very misleading way with the shallows of human superstition, because, furthermore, it is erroneously regarded as a point of view that takes from many people that which gives them support and security in life, the right adherence to religious belief.

I hope, dear attendees, that all three misconceptions of the spiritual scientific point of view can at least be somewhat dispelled by what today's reflection will endeavor to offer. Nevertheless, it must be said from the outset that the opposition to spiritual science, and even the accusation that it completely contradicts what is even called common sense in the broadest circles today, that all these challenges and accusations are fully understandable to the person who stands completely on the ground of this spiritual science. And so understandable, so comprehensible are they to him that he must repeatedly remind people that in the course of human development, what appears to be self-evident to a bygone age, what alone corresponds to common sense, must be replaced by something completely opposite.

We must always be reminded of such a turnaround in human development, as it has been experienced at the present time, when the newer natural science has taken possession of the human world view. At the time when Copernicus introduced a new view of the spatial universe, people had to break with everything that for centuries, indeed one can say millennia, had been considered to be shown by the healthy five senses and understood by common sense. The human soul clings to that which it has become accustomed to in its thinking and imagining, just as there are people — although this is a grotesque example — who, after moving into a new apartment, still go home thinking about their old apartment in the evenings. Just as the people in this grotesque example show how they cling to their habits of thinking, so they also do so with regard to the great world-view questions and world-view standpoints. For centuries, humanity has been educated and has become accustomed to a world-view that is opposed to what spiritual science wants to bring to the present and the future. And so today one would be more surprised if, I would say, at the first hint, someone who has not yet heard of spiritual science in the sense in which it is meant here were to immediately agree with something, than if contradiction were to arise over contradiction at such a first encounter with this spiritual science.

In my last lecture here, I tried to illuminate the paths that lead to this spiritual science. Today, because I would like to touch on what the spiritual scientist can and may feel in our fateful time, I will only be able to briefly and sketchily hint at how spiritual science comes to its insights, to these insights that are just as contested and so difficult to understand today.

The first objection that must be raised, quite understandably, precisely in the souls of the present day, which are among the most educated, is that spiritual science seems to contradict everything that has been gained on the firm ground of natural science. It is difficult to realize that spiritual science, for our time and for the immediate future of humanity, seeks to achieve for the field of spiritual knowledge, for the knowledge of the soul, what natural science has achieved for external, spatial and temporal knowledge and its application in practical human life. It is also difficult to realize that this spiritual science, when examined thoroughly, is in complete harmony with all the remarkable advances that natural science has made in the course of the last few centuries. Indeed, spiritual science does not want to be anything other than the continuation of the natural scientific world view for the spiritual realm. Precisely because it aspires to this, the method of spiritual science must relate to all human activities, especially to the most intimate human activities of thinking, feeling and willing, quite differently than the external science recognized today.

The often-asserted claim that spiritual science is not in harmony with the religious feelings of man is also based on a complete misunderstanding. On the contrary, the opposite is true. Indeed, it can be said that while external natural science has often really alienated people from religious feeling, and has led many to believe that they are particularly enlightened when they reject everything religious, spiritual science, because it also scientifically points to the soul in the spiritual, will precisely strengthen religious life in people's minds. It will lead people back to religion in the most beautiful sense of the word, while external natural science has alienated them from it.

Above all, the path that spiritual science takes to its insights will be discussed. This path is described in detail above all in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” to which I must refer, since here I can only give a few, I might say charcoal strokes to sketch the path of spiritual science.

Human thinking and human imagination must be treated in a completely different way for the purposes of spiritual science than they are for the purposes of external science and external life. How do we behave, honored attendees, when we put thinking and imagining at the service of external science and external life? We behave in such a way that we form concepts, images and ideas about what surrounds us based on what our senses show us in our environment. And we are justifiably satisfied with this external view of the world when we come to the point where our ideas and images give us a picture of what is going on outside in nature and in human life. In the ordinary course of existence, people strive for a mental image of the life of nature and of historical life. But the power of thought, which is used in the manner indicated for ordinary science and ordinary life, must be used in a completely different way when the path of spiritual science, the path of spiritual research, is followed.

It is not a matter of the spiritual researcher thinking about what the senses externally reveal to man; it is not a matter of using thought to gain a picture of an external, perceived reality, but rather of using thought like a living force that lives in the pure inner life of the soul, I would say in a self-education applied to the soul. Thought is not used as a reflection of external reality; thought is used in such a way that it is experienced in consciousness. And it is experienced inwardly in such a way that the soul focuses on this thought, focusing in such a way that it turns its attention solely to one thought or a monotonous train of thought for a long, long time, so that what is thought , but what counts is the inner effort of the soul, the inner expenditure of the soul that one has to undergo when, through inner effort, through inner concentration, one focuses all one's attention on one inner point, on one thought, on one idea.

Where ordinary science, where the thinking of ordinary life ends, that is where the work of the spiritual scientist begins. What has to be kept in mind for ordinary science is taken up by the spiritual scientific method and is, as it were, sunk like a seed into the soil of the soul. You ask your own experience the question: What does your thought do, on which you have focused your entire soul life to the exclusion of paying attention to everything else? What does the thought do when you give yourself completely to it, when you forget everything you have ever you have perceived, what your habits, your experiences, your inclinations, your passions are, when you live solely and exclusively in this thought, when you completely immerse yourself in the life of your soul?

With this spiritual-scientific method, one comes to one's own relief when one does not even take a thought that is borrowed from the outer life. With such a thought, which reflects something from the realm of outer life, one is too tempted to look at this outer truth of the thought. But in this case it is not the external truth that matters, but what the thought brings about in us and what we experience when we allow the thought to take effect in our soul as a living essence. Therefore, it is best to fix a symbolic thought, a thought that does not depict anything external, inwardly, as it were. What I mean is this: the thought 'Wisdom shines in the light' is a simple thought; it is certainly not a truth in the sense of an external science. But that is not the point. What is important is that such a thought be placed at the center of the soul's life and that all the soul's powers, as I have just described, be directed towards this thought for a certain period of time. It is only with the experience of the thought, up to which external life and ordinary science go, that research in the spiritual realm begins. If one does not associate the word with any kind of mystical concepts in the bad sense, one calls such a life and weaving in thought, which must be continued for a long, long time with patience and perseverance and inner energy, a meditation in thought, a concentration on certain thoughts. These are, so to speak, technical expressions of the spiritual scientific method.

The spiritual researcher, esteemed attendees, when describing these things, cannot help but speak like the chemist when he briefly describes the methods he uses in his laboratory to eavesdrop on these or those natural forces and phenomena. The spiritual researcher must enter into an inner laboratory of the soul, in which he searches for everything connected with our soul's happiness, with our soul's upliftment, with all the deepest soul mysteries, soul pains and soul questions. And what he experiences in this purely inner laboratory is what he alone can speak of, the experiences of what cannot be presented in external vision, before the outer eyes, but only in the intimate inner, but objective, non-subjective inner experience. The task of spiritual science is to gradually incorporate the existence of such inner, spiritual laboratory work into the spiritual culture of humanity as a solid worldview.

Every single objection raised by the scientific worldview, honored attendees, is as well known to the spiritual researcher as what can be said against his research in general. For example, the spiritual researcher knows that it can be claimed that what the soul achieves by fixing its attention entirely on dwelling on thoughts in the intimate life of the soul is only that the soul can suggest itself, that everything the soul arrives at in this way is a kind of self-suggestion. Of course, the spiritual researcher knows this, but for someone who is not familiar with spiritual science and only knows what modern natural science has to say about the methods of suggestion, it is unknown that through the special way in which the spiritual researcher, purely inwardly, with all the soul forces that he has consciously developed, in full consciousness, directed towards some thought or other, towards some inner experience - it can also be an experience of the will -, [how] this spiritual researcher lives inwardly in that part of his soul that is put to sleep in hypnotic suggestion. It is precisely that which is put to sleep in hypnotic suggestion, while the outer physical, I might say imitates the soul functions, that is developed through the method of spiritual science. Precisely those forces are drawn from the innermost soul life, over which sleep and paralysis are spread in ordinary suggestion. All methods of spiritual research work towards making inner experience independent of outer physical experience, awakening in inner experience those strong forces through which thinking, imagining unfolds a life of its own.

And when the spiritual researcher has worked in the “laboratory of his own soul” for a sufficiently long time, then - and it is not a matter of making this happen, but of waiting for it to happen, as one must wait, as one must wait with a flowering, until its growth forces have developed through the objective world context to such an extent that it flowers - then what must appear fantastic, dreamy, absurd, and paradoxical to our present way of thinking occurs.

For what is achieved in this way, dear attendees, is a complete detachment of spiritual-mental experience from physical, bodily experience. As improbable as it may seem to someone who has never heard of chemistry that the water in front of you can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by the forces of electricity or in some other way, that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, can actually be extracted from water, as improbable as it must seem to anyone who has never heard of chemistry, unlikely as it must appear to anyone who has never heard of chemistry, so unlikely must it appear, of course, to someone who does not want to engage in spiritual science, that there are such inner, I might say inner-growing, thought processes through which that in man is released that is not subject to birth and death , is not subject to external life, but passes through birth and death as the eternal part of man, that this is truly detached from physical conditions and that it is scientifically grasped in its independence, in its eternal significance, of which “all that is transitory is only a parable”.

It is obvious that especially in our time, real objections arise at every turn against what is asserted in this way. It is quite natural that someone who is, so to speak, schooled in the newer, well-founded habits of thought, comes and says: Now here, here comes the spiritual researcher and talks about the fact that there are inner methods of spiritual experience by which the soul-spiritual can be released so that it appears in its original essence and independently of birth and death, just as hydrogen appears when it is released from water, from all its properties and its entire behavior.

Can we not see that this leads into the darkest depths of superstition, when science has so thoroughly demonstrated how mental and spiritual experience is dependent on physical experience, how this mental and spiritual experience grows as the human being develops through the years from childhood onwards? The soul and spiritual experience grows to the same extent that physical functions develop. We see how the spiritual life fades again in old age, when bodily functions decline or gradually become paralyzed. Furthermore, we see – and this is precisely thanks to the great advances in psychiatric research – how the mental functions are switched off with the injury of only one part of the human brain and nervous system. Do we not realize here how everything of a soul-spiritual nature is, in the most eminent sense, only an effect of the physical-corporeal? Now the spiritual researcher comes and explains that this spiritual-soul nature can be detached from the physical-corporeal.

Yes, dearest ones, if the spiritual researcher had to rebel against the well-founded assumptions of modern science, then he would have no hope of ever introducing his knowledge into the world view of mankind, because this newer science is based on good reasons, even if it still has this or that hypothetical or unfounded assertion among its assertions today. Its whole attitude, its whole inner tendency is fully justified and leads to the greatest achievements of mankind. Spiritual science will not deny this, but will admit it just as much as every natural scientist or anyone professing natural science must admit it.

But, dear attendees, spiritual science in the true sense of the word is not based on any different ground than natural science, not even with regard to everything that natural science can talk about. When we consider ordinary thinking in everyday life and ordinary science, how does it appear to the spiritual researcher? It appears to him that this ordinary thinking, that which man can muster in thinking and imagining in ordinary life and in ordinary science, is bound in the strictest sense to the life of the human body, in the narrower sense to the human nervous system. And in so far as natural science today is already beginning to show a knowledge in this direction, which promises to give much more in the future, the spiritual researcher stands completely on the ground of natural science. But for natural science it is only a matter of ordinary thinking, of the inner power of thinking that has not yet been detached from the physical. The spiritual researcher is well informed about the thoughts of everyday life, about what can be imagined in ordinary science. All this thinking of everyday life is just as bound to the physical if it is to come to consciousness in the human being as the image that is to appear to us of ourselves is bound to the mirror before which we stand.

Spiritual science in particular recognizes, through the connections it sees when it progresses along the paths that have been described, that what has now been described as a higher power in the power of thought, and to which spiritual science can arrive at, that this is actively mirrored in the organs of the bodily life and that nothing can enter into the life between birth and death in the consciousness as that which appears to the consciousness with the help of the physicality that mirrors the soul life. Just as a person stands before the image reflected back to him by the mirror and sees not himself but the image reflected back to him by the mirror, so the soul, endowed with the power that is first discovered on the path of spiritual research, stands behind the thinking that is everyday thinking; and everyday thinking is a fleeting reflection mirrored from the life of the body. All the knowledge that natural science can provide in its field is true because it deals with that which has not yet been demonstrated as the actual power that lies behind the ordinary life of consciousness and that passes through births and deaths, which belongs to a completely different world from the one we see with our senses.

Thus it can be said: spiritual science says no to nothing that science says; it only explains that one can go beyond this natural science just as one goes beyond the hand movements of ordinary life in scientific chemistry. And anyone who wants to turn against spiritual science from a scientific point of view does not turn against it because something scientific about spiritual science is doubted, but turns against spiritual science out of pure tyranny, out of the will to accept nothing but what he likes to accept. One must artificially assume the standpoint that no one is allowed to know anything other than what one knows oneself if one wants to reject spiritual science in its claim to continue the path of natural science.

But now, dear attendees, as I said, the spiritual researcher can, to a certain extent, allow the other person, who has not yet approached spiritual research, to see into his or her “soul laboratory”. For this life in the soul laboratory of the spiritual researcher brings about many things that are not known to ordinary experience and observation either. Spiritual research is not only connected with those experiences with which external science is connected, spiritual research is connected with the deepest upheavals of the soul life, with the innermost tragedy of the soul life, with the carrying of the soul to lonely, icy heights, with the falling of the soul into terrible abysses of existence.

Certainly, dear honored attendees, the first steps of spiritual research, as indicated in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” can be taken by anyone, and anyone can thereby convince themselves of the correctness of the spiritual researcher's indications. But when one follows the path of spiritual research to its conclusion, it leads through experiences such as those just indicated. Above all, at the moment when, through the method described, one succeeds in detaching the inner power of thought from the support it has in the brain, at the moment when one's thinking in one's soul-spiritual experience rises out of one's body — I because it is literally correct — in the same moment when man's eternal powers are truly glimpsed in the soul, in this moment, a spiritual researcher feels as if, I would like to say, they could experience the growth of the plant.

Let us assume that the plant could experience, that it could experience all its own characteristics, all its own being, as it unfolds from leaf to leaf, to the flower, to the colorful flower, and then, having developed into the colorful flower, it would have to immerse itself with its entire being in the forces that form the seed, which is not at all destined for this life of the plant in the present, but is destined to carry this plant life beyond the present into the plant that will develop from this plant in the future. The plant would experience by concentrating all its powers of experience into this germ, as if, by gathering these powers together, it were developing precisely that which is like a killing, a dying off of the outer being that has developed in the leaves and in the colorful blossoms. She would experience how she would have to die herself, as what she was, so that she could live on through the seed. So the human soul must experience, if it really goes through what has just been sketched out in front of you with a few lines of charcoal.

Dear attendees, the spiritual researcher experiences how he becomes more and more absorbed in what connects his soul with what he has taken in through his thoughts. But this does not appear to him now in his soul life as if he were only experiencing something new, but as if he were now living in the forces that, through their inner peculiarity, would be killing forces for the outer life, that are connected with all that makes the outer life die, that paralyzes the outer life from day to day, from hour to hour. And so it is, as if one had stood in it in life, felt all joy, all zest in life, all justified joy, all justified zest in life, gladly applied all energy in life, and now, in order to recognize, must break out of this life, but must turn precisely to those forces that continually fight this life. One would like to say that one must leave the conviviality of life, the convivial togetherness with nature, its beauty and sublimity, and enter into solitude, where one is truly only with oneself, where one can only turn one's gaze to one's own innermost forces.

Now it might appear, esteemed attendees, that this whole process of spiritual research is highly unhealthy. But we must bear in mind that it is a cognitive process. Just as nothing in this room is changed in terms of its outward appearance by the fact that my eyes are directed towards this room and my thoughts are visualizing this room, so this knowledge changes nothing in this room. Everything that the spiritual researcher experiences is knowledge, and everything that he then beholds through his knowledge lies, unnoticed by the outer life, at the bottom of every soul life. Only through observation can the spiritual researcher be convinced of what really lives in every soul. In every soul live the powers that constantly draw on life from hour to hour, from minute to minute, from second to second, just as the plant germ draws on the present plant.

Only through this contemplation, esteemed attendees, only through this immersion in the powers that sustain life, does one become immersed in the realization of how, over and over again, that which is death is overcome. For as one sees that life is maintained by the forces being constantly active from birth to physical death, which the spiritual researcher experiences, so one also becomes convinced through spiritual research that these same forces also overcome death, which concludes physical life like a gate, and introduce man into the world of the spiritual. Spiritual science does not understand death in the way one would like to recognize it out of fear of death, out of the expectation of another life, but spiritual science recognizes it by leading the soul's spiritual powers of cognition to the of death and then sees how death works throughout a person's entire life, so that when it draws its conclusion, it can be overcome by the same forces that are always at the basis of our souls.

Yet another difficulty arises, honored attendees, for the one who thus explores the spiritual world, I would like to say again and again in an inner soul laboratory. This other difficulty is this: when thinking, when imagining, has thus detached itself from the physical, when the human being now knows: you now live in the spiritual-soul realm in such a way that you are not in your body, that you move purely in the fabric of the soul-spiritual itself, when man has developed to this degree in his inner spiritual laboratory, then he lives in soul-spiritual forces which are the least, the very least related to that which we call our memory powers. And when we consider what depends on our powers of memory, how our whole life could not exist in everyday life if we did not remember what we had experienced in the previous moment, if we did not remember in our whole life what brings coherence to our life brings coherence to our lives, when we consider what memory means, then we will be able to understand how differently those forces act on the soul that must almost stop before the power of memory, that appeal to nothing in the ordinary power of memory in everyday life.

Thus it is that at first, when the spiritual researcher reaches the point where he is truly liberated from the bodily life in his spiritual and soul life, his presentation hurries away like a dream that cannot be remembered, and only only when one continues patiently with the exercises mentioned, the exercises in meditation and concentration, does another power develop in place of the ordinary memory, which must not be involved in this. We could call this power an “inner force of habit”. We become capable of repeatedly performing, habitually, what we have thus appropriated as an inner experience. We perform the inner gesture again and again, as it were. Spiritual science cannot work on the basis of memory, but goes beyond this ordinary basic power of life, beyond memory, and imprints such habits on the spiritual-soul realm that has been freed from the physical, so that one can repeatedly carry out the inner tasks that need to be done in order to feel at one with one's free spiritual-soul realm in the spiritual world.

If I, dear attendees, may touch on something personal – just to make something clearer – then let it be this: When we talk about things that are experienced through the outer senses, then it is the case that if, for example, I have given a lecture once, I remember how I gave it, so that when I give it for the twelfth, for the thirtieth time, I present it from my inner being in a completely different way than the first, second, third time, when I have not yet fully memorized it. This is not the case when one speaks in all sincerity about matters of spiritual science, but rather, each time, through the inner gestures that have been acquired by the soul, what is the content of spiritual science must be brought forth anew. It makes no difference whether one speaks about something for the first time or for the hundredth time, because one's memory is basically more of a hindrance than a help. Of course, one can always recount from memory what one has spoken about the content of spiritual science, but the one who stands on the ground of genuine spiritual science, honestly and sincerely, feels an inner obligation to present in ever-renewed liveliness that which he himself experiences. Therefore, he must experience it again and again, for he presents it not from memory, not through knowledge, but through a skill that he has acquired.

But our entire inner soul life is changed in yet another way. When we proceed intimately in the manner described, again and again performing such inner, we can now say purely conceptual, acts of the will, through which we place simple thought-content at the center of our consciousness and become completely absorbed in it, then we also experience something through our will. But this life of the will is different from that which underlies outer actions. What underlies outer actions develops a life of the will in which the will is asleep. For the way in which the human being intervenes with his thoughts in his will – this is indeed an old riddle of philosophy, which will not be discussed further here – the connection between the thought and the outer action, is in the deep foundations of the soul life. But it is precisely into these deep layers of the soul that spiritual science must descend if it is to ascend to supersensible knowledge. And by repeatedly, repeatedly bringing to life inwardly that which is the object of meditation and concentration in thinking, by doing so again and again out of inner will, out of strong inner soul forces – repetition is important – other processes occur in the soul than those of outer action. Such activities occur in the soul that do not take place in the same way as external actions, where we always have to intervene with our thoughts, but rather those that repeat themselves with regularity, I would say internally, automatically.

This is often disturbing for those who deal with spiritual methods, that by practicing and repeatedly fixing their soul on this or that thought - but they have to do it repeatedly, patiently, patiently, energetically, persistently - it is often disturbing that the whole inner activity becomes as mechanical as breathing for the body, where we are also not aware of how the impulse of breathing intervenes. While on the one hand we lift ourselves up into the highest spiritual state of consciousness, of thought itself, which leads us to what is behind the thought, to the inner experience of the power of thought, the very tasks that we perform in perpetual repetition become as if they were mechanical, so that we gradually learn to feel how something takes place in this detached soul life, which is so peculiar to it, in rhythmic sequence, as breathing is peculiar to the body in rhythmic sequence. We experience our corporeality as external to us, and we experience our soul as being lifted out of the corporeal, but in such a way that it is as if it is in an inner action, but now faces the body with this inner action.

This, in turn, is linked, honored attendees, to what one might call: the deepest inner soul-shaking. Just as one descends into a loneliness, into a loneliness that kills all external world-witnessing, when one goes to the one side of mental power expressions, through which basically all our everyday life consists, so one descends on the other side as if to the automatic life, as to the life that takes place in us, but without our intervention. Just as we become fully active on the one hand, so active that we are not even supported by memory, on the other hand we become aware of something within us that is active by itself, which we can only look at, which we can only watch. Indeed, it is so that we feel as if bewitched, as if spellbound in such an automatism of life that goes with us through life, we feel all the faintheartedness of life, all that which shows the heaviness, the weight of life, all this can overcome us, and anyone who does not come to the stage of knowledge just mentioned with the right method and sufficient preparation can easily reach a point of complete despair in their inner life when they see what is in them.

For again, it is only through knowledge that we become aware of everything that is in us, that at the bottom of life is a life automatism, when one sees how one is placed in life and what through the human being like clockwork - but only in a spiritual way, not mechanically like clockwork - what is spread throughout the universe as the cosmic life forces. There one learns to empathize with the whole universe as one piece, as a part of this universe, but one feels in it as if one were completely alienated from oneself, as if one had become a petrification, a petrefact, in this life. Then one realizes that everything one experiences is only the realization of what is down there in the soul. And that is a perpetual struggle between what is petrified in us, as if striving for automatism, and on the other hand, as if rising into spiritual solitude for perpetual activity, an inner war, an inner life of struggle that is withdrawn from us in the sight of everyday life. What has been described is at the bottom of our soul. And from such an inner life of struggle, from a struggle that takes place in every soul, which the spiritual researcher only observes, from such a life of struggle, he draws his knowledge. And what you now find in the literature of spiritual science has been drawn from the depths of the soul, drawn from this life of struggle.

Of course, I say that anyone can go through the beginnings of spiritual research, and in this way everyone can be convinced today that what spiritual research presents is correct. But what one has to go through when one comes to decisive turning points in relation to spiritual knowledge comes from the soul's inner experiences, which are full of struggle, wild movement and tragedy. These experiences come from regions of the soul that stir up everything, everything, and one gains a respectful of life and of the wisdom that permeates life when one realizes that in everyday life, man has the grace of having a veil woven over all that is at the bottom of his soul.

But humanity is evolving, honored attendees. And the time of development in which people could only live in consciousness, deprived by a veil of that which rules and lives in the depths of the soul, these times are coming to an end, and the times are opening up in which humanity must, through the natural powers of the soul, become acquainted with that which lives and moves in the depths of the soul. Just as at a certain point in human development, people had to be disabused of the view, in line with earlier common sense, that the earth stands still and the starry sky and the sun move around it . It is within the bounds of earthly evolution that humanity must be disabused of the notion that all soul life is built upon such a foundation as that just described.

Humanity wants to recognize that the life concerns we carry with us, the life triumphs, the zest for life and suffering, the life force, the life disappointments and the life deeds we admire in our fellow human beings, that all this is achieved through a victory that takes place on the basis of subconscious soul experience. The fact that we live because forces are at work behind the world of the senses that are engaged in the most lively struggle to gain that which we rejoice in, that which gives our lives meaning, will give people invigorating soul strength in the future when they will know what must be fought for, what must be suffered, and what must be overcome in the world of the senses, through unknown powers. This will give man a living sense of his connection with the spiritual powers that stand behind the world of the senses.

And when man has an overview of the two battlefields of the life of thought, which is detached from the body, and the life of will, which is detached from the body, then he enters into that knowledge of repeated earthly lives, which today seems so fantastic to our way of thinking, although Lessing asserted it within the spiritual life of modern humanity. And he enters into the real connections of human destiny, which present us with so many riddles.

What I would like to touch on today is that when we look at life, this life appears to us with what it expresses in everyday life, as through victories and wars of unknown spiritual powers, but of recognizable spiritual powers; and so when we recognize life, we also recognize the great events of the times in a different way than usual.

We, honored attendees, are indeed standing in our fateful present in difficult events that also promise great things. The question can be raised: what effect can the things we are now experiencing – the daring deeds of courage, the daring deeds of overcoming fear of death, the noble deeds of willingness to make sacrifices – have on a soul that absorbs what spiritual research wants to give to humanity? We are not living in a small time! For months events in our surroundings have been presenting themselves to us in a way that, one might well say, has not been seen in all of human history, not in such magnitude and with such significance. If one adds up the various nationalities fighting on the side of the Central European powers, even leaving out minor tribal differences, one arrives at twenty-one different peoples from the most diverse parts of the world. And if we count the various nations fighting on the side of the Central European powers, we get, again leaving out minor tribal differences, fourteen fighting individual nations; so that we can say that over a large part of the inhabited earth, thirty-five nations, leaving out minor tribal differences, are fighting each other today. And if, from the point of view of spiritual science, we turn our eyes to that which is intervening in such a powerful historical way in our time, oh, there a very special nuance of feeling presents itself to us.

What does it actually mean that spiritual science basically only wants to be a continuation of natural science? Yes, honored attendees, what Goethe emphasized so much is that we will only arrive at a true science when we no longer look at nature, at that which visibly surrounds us, in terms of reasons of expediency, when we no longer ask, “Why does the ox have horns? So that he can gore,” but when one realizes that the ox gores because he has horns, when one regards everything in terms of cause, not in terms of expediency. If this is the peculiarity of the external world view, if the best minds have fought for this causal world view, asking about the causes everywhere, then spiritual science also stands on the ground of asking about the causes, but about the deeper causes that elude sensory perception.

In relation to what is going on around us, however, in terms of historical events, something else must develop as a counterpoint to spiritual science. If you see how the powerful play out around us, you see how humanity suffers and develops the boldest acts of heroism, then you are led by observing what human will unfolds to the feelings - you cannot prove this because it is based on a transformation of the whole life of feeling. Then one is led by the feeling to look at everything in this life in which one is placed, not in terms of how the causes prevail, but in terms of what must arise as goals, as effects, from what is fought for in hot struggle, what is achieved through great sacrifices. Just as in the life we are observing we have to look at the causes everywhere, so too in what we experience, as we experience today, we have to look at the effects everywhere. And these effects, oh, these effects, they become meaningful for us above all by enabling us to see from a spiritual-scientific point of view how what is called Central European spiritual life really forms a whole.

Oh, this Central European intellectual life, how it has basically been achieved and how it differs in its peculiarity – I do not want to make any value judgments now – from that intellectual life, from which it is now surrounded and besieged as if in a mighty fortress! For those who can grasp the spiritual connections, this peculiarity of Central European intellectual life is evident in full clarity. One can say that the blossoms reveal what is in the roots. And so let us turn our gaze, just as an example, to a flower of Central European intellectual life, to a flower that is well known to you, esteemed attendees, that you have all often let your soul dwell on, to that which, as if from all the depths of Central European intellectual life, the great spirit of modern times, Goethe, created in his “Faust”. And we shall point out only one passage in this Faust. We see Faust at the beginning of the story, having passed through life and learned everything that can be learned by ordinary thinking:

Now, alas! I have studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately theology too!
very thoroughly, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am as wise as before.

Goethe wrote this in the 1770s, during the striving and yearning of his youth. What was achieved by people in external thinking and external research at that time affected his Central European mind. Now, let us follow the course of this Central European spiritual life after Goethe wrote this scene in Faust, which has become almost trivial today, but which, if you allow it to take effect on your soul in its elementary originality, is deeply moving. Since Goethe wrote this, has been through in his soul, there have been minds at work in Central European intellectual life that have tried to penetrate to the sources of life in a truly Faustian way, with bold intellectual courage, with bold philosophical courage.

Today, the great idealistic thinkers of Central Europe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the others, are misunderstood. There is no need to go into what they created in terms of content; in the strictest sense, one can even be opposed to much of what they created in terms of content. However, one need only look at the innermost, most honest and sincere urge and path to truth , out of which they strove and which they were willing to go, and one needs only to look at how such thinkers have truly made this Faustian word come true, to expand one's own self to the self of the whole world, to witness that which is in the whole cosmos.

And so, how does a thinker who is rooted in Central European culture in the most eminent sense, like a Johann Gottlieb Fichte, stand before us? From the innermost nerve of human will and thought, from the will borne by thought, from the thought permeated by will, he seeks to grasp that in man by which man can connect himself in his own self with the eternal, divine self that rules and blows through the world. And so, as he also demanded, there was one thing in him that he lived and thought and philosophically strived for, so one that, when he was in the last hours of his feverish delirium from the illness of his wife, which she had acquired while caring for the warriors, that he received from his wife's illness, he, the most Central European of philosophers, still lived in the feverish delusion in the immediate life of his time, in the life through which Central Europe wanted to free itself from the tyranny of Western Europe, with Blücher's crossing of the Rhine, the philosopher Fichte lived. This great, powerful personality, who inwardly awakened life and strengthened his people at that time with his mighty “Speeches to the German Nation,” left his mark on his feverish fantasies.

We see them passing by, these thinkers. And we could say something similar about the others, even if we do not agree with the content of their thinking, with reference to their great and powerful striving. We see the best forces of Central European culture blossoming and passing by, the same forces that we may believe are now working in a completely different way for the benefit and progress of Central Europe on battlefields in the east and west. We see them pushing up into the spiritual light in the future.

And now we ask ourselves, honored attendees, let us assume that Goethe had still lived in 1840, had still lived at that time, when Fichte's intellectual feat, Schelling's wonderful artistic construct of the universe, Hegel's magnificent logical image of the universe had been cast over Central European culture - oh these thinkers , they truly brought philosophy in a new form to humanity and, if we consider that Fichte wrote a “natural right”, Hegel wrote a “natural right”, they also renewed jurisprudence, Schelling published a medical journal, immersed himself deeply in medicine, and theologians wanted them to be, basically, all these philosophers. But what would Goethe have done if he had started his Faust in 1840 instead of 1770? What would he have put at the beginning of the Faust saga? Certainly not this, despite the fact that these great, powerful thinkers have walked the spiritual skies of Central Europe. Despite this, he would certainly not have put:

Now, thank God, I have
studied philosophy with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel,
law and now also medicine,
and I stand here now, highly satisfied, I wise man!

No, again he would have begun in 1840:

Habemun, sch! Philosophy,
Jurisprudence and Medicine,
And unfortunately also Theology!
I have studied them all, with great zeal.
And now I stand, poor fool,
And am as wise as before.

That is what characterizes Central European culture! This Central European culture will only gradually be understood in its deepest peculiarity by those who live in it. This Central European culture is truly the expression of what is also written in “Faust”: “Whoever strives, we can redeem” - eternal striving. And when one stage of striving has been achieved, striving itself leads beyond this stage. One is born as a Frenchman, one is born as an Italian, one is born as an Englishman, and one knows what one is; but one must educate oneself to become what one is as a Central European, one must strive in one's soul not only once but continually to attain that which makes us a Central European. In this way, it becomes an individual in the highest sense, in this way it becomes one in which every human being must work directly, one that must always be achieved anew.

If I may, just to make something clear, touch on something personal, I can say that, as an Austrian, I lived in my childhood, in the sixties and seventies here in Austria, in a time when there was full opposition in Austria to everything that was going on in the German Reich, when it was still difficult for Austrians, including Austrian Germans, to look with satisfaction at what was happening in the German Reich. And then we lived contrary to that which had to be overcome first, out of German individualism, so that the Reich could be forged together, which is now fighting at Austria's side against the besiegers of the great Central European fortress.

Everything must be achieved for Central European culture. One would like to say, if the word is not misunderstood: in other nationalities, in other states, one is born into what one is; in Central Europe, one has to acquire everything – again according to a Goethean saying: “What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it to possess it.” But this gives rise to an attitude that permeates all Central European culture like a magical breath, that forges together what is Central European, even forging together all national differences, that consciously strives towards what one is. And this also guarantees that everything that has already been achieved in Central Europe must always be increased and elevated in continued striving, that the spirit of striving, I would say the Faustian mood, must be continued.

Just as Faust would have said the same thing in 1840 at the starting point of his quest as in 1770, despite so much intellectual striving having been done about Central Europe, so too is that which has already been done constantly renewed by the Central European soulfulness. And so we stand, strengthened precisely by spiritual scientific feelings, full of hope for what must develop as goal and effect from blood and death, suffering and pain, from sacrifice and offering, from our time.

Oh, honored attendees, I cannot, of course, go into all the details of our fateful time. But if that which has conquered the world in a materialistic sense in recent times could only develop out of struggle, then that which must spread out of the spiritual life of Central Europe will develop more and more over the great world, over the territories of all the peoples who today still fight against this Central Europe. It must develop out of struggle and war. And the strengthening of the soul power, it will, if we consider that we can show through spiritual science how in individual human lives that which is the substance of life develops on the basis of what is the war and struggle in the depths of the soul, as we had to describe it.

Now, in the outer life, honored attendees, people are witnesses and participants in struggles over and over again, and these struggles must be there. Just as these struggles are veiled by a beneficent veil within the soul of the individual, so we must be placed in the outer, historical life in these struggles, from which that which is the outer, historical life must develop. Just as what Greek life became for the world developed in the struggle against the mighty Persian armies, and just as what was imported from Roman and Latin culture into world civilization developed on the basis of hard struggles, so what is in Faustian striving – and this Faustian striving also goes as far as those souls that know nothing of Faust – must spread out on soil that is soaked with the blood of our noblest, in an atmosphere that is permeated with the sentiments that can only develop today in our fateful time.

It has often been emphasized, especially in Germany recently, that it is due to the developmental conditions of modern times that this war is basically only being waged for external reasons, that it is being waged so that the infinite diligence of those in external industry and external trade can be applied freely in the world. Certainly, such statements are absolutely correct and should not be opposed in any way. We are living in a materialistic age, more or less, as regards our material life, and even the most difficult sacrifices we make are for the sake of material goods. But we are sure that from this Central Europe, even if only material culture is carried out into the world, through the gates opened by the struggle in the most diverse foreign areas, if perhaps not by the fathers themselves, then by the sons of those who go out into foreign areas in industry and trade , and which is carried everywhere by those who enter into industry and commerce. Everything that grows out of that spirit, which found its flower-like expression in that Faust who wants to “stand in an open space with an open people,” and who wants to attain freedom and life only by conquering them anew every day.

And if we look at the peculiarity of this Central European intellectual life, how it has forged the nations of Central Europe, if we look at this Faustian peculiarity, then we have to say: this Central European intellectual life is called upon to give the soul to the world-earth body, to incorporate soul into the earth development of humanity. It is very remarkable that, for example, we hear from the northwest - we can hear it every day, honored attendees - that those mighty external material conquests that the inhabitants of the British Isles, for example, have made, that these - as if mocking us, insulting us in Central Europe, such words are shouted over and over again from abroad, that everything that is to be undertaken is to be undertaken in the name of freedom, of the liberation of the peoples.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot be denied that the inhabitants of the British Isles have made great conquests in the fields of external and material life. But look at what these conquests were made on account of! From 1856 to 1900, England waged 34 wars of conquest, conquered four million square miles of land, and made 57 million people new British subjects – that's over the course of about 44 to 45 years, 34 wars of conquest! The material culture that the British Empire alone could spread across the world has grown out of this. Out of blood and death, out of suffering and pain, out of numerous sacrifices, there must come forth that which, in the course of history, matures as the life-substance for humanity.

And if we want to shed light on Central European intellectual life in comparison with what spiritual science shows us for the individual, we will say: If we look at its effects, if we look at the goals that are hidden in what is watering the soil with blood today, we see that the threatened area must be reclaimed as such effects. Just as a person must continually re-conquer his body after a few years so that it may be an instrument for the soul, so too in the outer historical life must the people of Central Europe re-conquer their territory so that it is all the better equipped with the soul-like qualities through which this Central European humanity will be able to carry into the future that which is rooted in the depths of its soul life.

Oh, when we look at what we can see in the outer life of our fateful time, compared with what spiritual science says for the individual human life, then it becomes understandable not only for the mind, but for the whole heart, that we know what is being prepared for the future, because it can only be prepared through struggle and war, then we learn in a certain way - however painful it is in the individual case, which must take place around us - we learn to understand it as being in the service of the great development of humanity, in that we must feel that we are part of it with every moment of our lives. And so, through a true contemplation of individual life, the human being reconciles himself with the most fateful events that take place around him.

Allow me to summarize what I have just said in a few words, in which I express, I would like to say, what I have developed as individual results of spiritual research, in a way that is intuitive to me. I would like to express in a few words what spiritual science has to take hold of the human soul in its most intimate life, so that through this taking hold a basic feeling and a basic will can arise that understand and permeate life. What I took the liberty of saying can be summarized in the following words, which the soul strengthened by spiritual science can make the basic values of its own being:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
The realities of life
To the soul's being opens;
The key creates the soul,
When she strengthens in herself
In the struggle, the world powers
On their own grounds
With human powers lead;
When it drives out of itself
the sleep that envelops the powers of knowledge
at the boundaries of its senses
with spirit.

Dear attendees! As a continuation of the spiritual-scientific considerations that were presented here the day before yesterday, today I would like to give a continuation of what was suggested, a continuation that is intended to apply the gained perspectives to the significant question of human destiny.

In the lecture the day before yesterday, dear attendees, it was pointed out that spiritual science is entirely based on the inner work of the human soul, and I would like to briefly reiterate a few thoughts from the day before yesterday's lecture. The point of spiritual research is never, as in the other sciences that extend to the outer life and to the outer world of facts, to cultivate outwardly perceptible activities for the senses, never to carry out the outer world in any way at all, but the path into the spiritual world is an intimate path of the human soul. And one link in this path of the human soul, by which this soul prepares itself to enter the spiritual world, as was already indicated the day before yesterday, is a special way of treating what we call human imagination, human thinking.

I said: By allowing us to look into his inner spiritual laboratory, as it were, the spiritual researcher must point out that the human soul's imagining and thinking must be treated in a completely different way than they are treated in everyday life or in external science. In external science, we consider the thought, the idea, the concept that we have acquired on the basis of sensory observation or on the basis of experiment or in some other way; we consider the concept as that which we have acquired, as that which reflects the external world to us. And in that it depicts, be it processes in the external world, be it laws, natural laws or the like in the external world, we are satisfied when we have, so to speak, arrived at the thought, when we have arrived at the idea of what is going on outside, or how the external processes are connected in a lawful way.

But this is where spiritual scientific research begins, where the work of the mind, the life of the mind in everyday life or in external science ends. The point of spiritual scientific research is not to have a thought, not a thought as a reflection of the external world, but to live with the thought, with the idea in the inner soul. So that, as I have already mentioned, in this inner exercise, in this inner work of the spiritual world, it does not matter at all whether we are in the thought, in the idea, through which we practice the soul, through which we advance the soul, as it were, in higher self-education, whether we depict something external in the thought, in the imagination, whether in the ordinary sense of external science or of external life these thoughts are images of something in the external world; they can be symbols, as I mentioned. What matters is that we sink a thought into the soul, that we become completely one with that thought, that we divert all attention from what otherwise occupies us in the world, and, as it were, fix all the powers of the soul within us on this one thought.

And now we must immediately recognize, by doing this, that we are carrying out a completely different task than the tasks of ordinary science. In the tasks of ordinary, external science, we can stop when we have the thought, we can be satisfied when we have the thought. And we are convinced in ordinary science when the thought logically satisfies us, when the thought corresponds to our sense of truth; then we can stop our research work for the time being. This is not the case with the way one does spiritual research. It is never the case that you stop when you have the thought, which you place at the center of your consciousness through arbitrariness, through an inner will initiative; you basically have nothing when you have placed the thought at the center of your consciousness and directed the attention of all the powers concentrated in the soul to it. Just as one has very little when one has sunk the seed of a plant into the earth, so one has very little when one has fixed the thought in the soul. One must wait until the forces from the air, the forces from the earth, the forces from the sun and so on interact to develop the plant germ into a plant - one must wait and see what is not done by us, what is done by the cosmos, what is done by the outer world.

In exactly the same way, we as spiritual researchers must treat a thought. We must, as it were, sink it into the soil of the entire soul life and then wait and see what it becomes in it. We cannot help ourselves other than by repeating the same process of looking at a thought every day. It does not take long, minutes are enough every day, but it must be repeated every day; and it takes a long, long time. And all we can do is wait and see what becomes of this thought by devoting all the powers of the soul to it and looking at nothing else, feeling nothing else, sensing nothing else but this thought. The important thing in spiritual research is to watch something growing within ourselves. While in other research it is important to carry out a certain task and to explore the lawful connection through thought, that is, while it is about doing something that has, I would say, a beginning and an end through our own will, in spiritual research we have to watch what becomes of the growing, sprouting thought in us.

And then the time comes – earlier for some, later for others, depending on how their destiny is laid out – then the time comes when forces hidden in the soul become active and more and more active, and by applying that inner energy, which we otherwise cannot summon up in our everyday life and in ordinary science, we really bring about what can be said to truly tear our soul-spiritual out of the physical-bodily, and it leaves the physical-bodily. By expressing this thought and calling attention to the fact that it is a spiritual-scientific method, one immediately touches something in this spiritual-scientific method that completely contradicts the thinking habits of the present time. . By expressing this thought and calling attention to what spiritual-scientific method is, one immediately touches something in this spiritual-scientific method that completely contradicts the thinking habits of the present time. These thought habits of the present time cannot imagine that it is really possible for a person to find such inner strength in his soul, that his spiritual and mental self is so torn from the physical and bodily as the hydrogen is torn from the water by the procedures used by the chemist. But everything depends on whether the human being, by continuing to do what has just been described at its most elementary level, really comes to perceive another person living within him, another person who underlies our existence and who does not need to use the external senses to have a world around him, who does not need to use the mind, which is connected to the brain or the nervous system, to have an external world around him.

The world view, esteemed attendees, which corresponds to today's thinking and which often emphasizes that it stands on the solid ground of the so admirable natural science, this world view often speaks of the limits of human knowledge, it speaks of it in such a way that it says : Yes, there may be a spiritual world, a supersensible world that underlies the sensual facts and everything that can be known through the intellect, which is connected to the brain, but humans are not designed to penetrate this world. And we know that there have been philosophies over and over again in the course of human development, philosophies that have endeavored to determine the limits of human knowledge.

Basically, these limits of knowledge are only the limits of those insights that are bound to the physical and bodily. And why this is so can also be seen by the spiritual researcher if he really applies the methods described in a few strokes to his soul life. For a very peculiar phenomenon occurs when one endeavors, through ever more energetic and energetic concentration of the soul power in the indicated sense, to become, as it were, completely one with that which one has placed at the center of one's perception, one's thinking, one's entire consciousness. After a time, one notices how something really does grow inwardly, something really does contract inwardly, namely our soul-spiritual nature, which is dependent on the body. But after some time one notices that one is heading straight for the opposite extreme. Not only do all kinds of other thoughts keep coming into one's attentive consciousness and confusing one on the path one is seeking with one's soul life, but this is something that can be overcome relatively quickly. However, what the spiritual researcher encounters when he tries to develop his soul is that, while he first experiences an increase of the forces that otherwise underlie thinking - [at a certain point there occurs what could be called “a darkening, a weakening” of this inner soul force], and that which the soul experiences there is, basically, quite harrowing. For one experiences nothing less than a feeling of approaching powerlessness, a powerlessness that says to oneself: Alas, these soul powers are not sufficient to penetrate the whole extent of the spiritual world! It comes over the consciousness like a terribly paralyzing sleep. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what those philosophers do not allow themselves to approach when they speak of the limits of knowledge, but what the soul, I would say unconsciously feels when it philosophizes.

For not only that lives in the depths of the soul, of which the soul is aware in ordinary life, but down there in the depths of the soul, in the hidden depths of the soul, there lives so much that is not in everyday consciousness. And the fact that we know nothing about it does not mean that what is down there in consciousness is not effective. There, in the unconscious, is something that the spiritual researcher experiences at the moment when he has this feeling of powerlessness, of which I have just spoken. The spiritual researcher notices: there is an unconscious fear in the soul, a fear of losing the ability to perceive and understand the world. And there is no other way to overcome this fear, as soon as it becomes conscious, than to intensify the already described efforts of concentrating the soul life more and more. Then, I would say, into the empty space of consciousness, in which the power that otherwise underlies thinking and feeling had already been paralyzed, there enters that which can enter through the increased strength and inner energy of the soul life.

It was a hidden fear, one that had not come to consciousness, when Kant spoke of the limits of human knowledge. He felt that knowledge in which the body helps us cannot go beyond the realm of sensory life and the laws of sensory life. He did not want to make use of the spiritual scientific method. He called it, although he sensed that there was something like a development of the soul towards independence from the physical body, he called it: “an adventure of reason”. And Goethe gave the great, one may say the powerful answer, that one must dare to pass this adventure of reason.

Powerlessness is what one really has at the bottom of one's soul, what is always at the bottom of one's soul. And one would like to say, honored attendees, that this powerlessness at the bottom of the human soul is fully justified. For if this powerlessness were not there, then the urge of man would be invincible to use the soul-spiritual powers forever for that which leads beyond the sensory world. But the fact that we feel, perceive and recognize the world of the senses is based on the fact that we, I would say, become accustomed to our physical body, to the physical-bodily, and that we regard it as a necessity to live in relation to the world in this physical-bodily. Just as one carries out a chemical experiment in such a way that it leads to the abnormality of external nature and thereby unravels nature, so one must develop something abnormal in the soul, something abnormal for everyday life, in order to truly look into the spiritual world, I would say through inner chemistry.

And by living in the spiritual world, one certainly gets a different idea of this newly acquired knowledge than one had of all knowledge before. Yes, knowledge is something that so many people associate with the idea that one actually recognizes best when one limits oneself to the intellect and the outer senses, which basically leave us sober and cold, and which occupy only a part of our life. The moment the spiritual researcher truly enters the spiritual world in the manner described, the moment he has torn his soul and spirit away from the physical body, he is surrounded by a spiritual world just as he is surrounded by a sense world within the body. In the same moment in which the spiritual researcher truly enters this world of the spiritual, in that same moment he feels as though he has awakened in this spiritual realm. But at the same time he feels that he can no longer be with the world with only a part of his soul life, as in outer knowledge, but that he must immerse his entire being in what presents itself to him as the spiritual world.

Just as abstract, I would even say sober and dry, as the world is that only animates and occupies part of our soul as the world of ordinary knowledge, the connection with the spiritual world is just as intensely effective in our soul. One can say: in the ordinary sense of the word, intellectual knowledge of the external world cannot hurt or cause us pain. In the moment when we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we must immerse ourselves with our whole soul in the beings that belong to the world into which we are entering. Everything we recognize there makes the deepest, most intense impression on our sense of pleasure or pain, on our sense of sublimity or on our sense of oppression. Our whole being is immersed. With our whole being, we have to live with the world in which we live, whether it be full of sorrow or joy. And again, it is fear, but a secretly felt fear that does not come to consciousness, which prevents the ordinary consciousness from immersing itself in this world. Truly, one does not become poorer in world content when one approaches this spiritual world. On the contrary, honored attendees, one becomes richer in world content, because one realizes what this fear of a subconscious powerlessness is actually based on. It is based on the fact that the world is much richer, infinitely richer in its glory, in its greatness, in its inner lawfulness, than what we are only able to think when we make use of the powers that are bound to our body.

And the riches of the world are what immediately arise before the soul in an overwhelming and numbing manner when it confronts the spiritual world through inner strength. But the soul, which is bound to the physical with its consciousness, feels, despite knowing nothing about it, it feels powerless, and it wants to avoid this powerlessness out of fear, the powerlessness that exists in the face of the spiritual world. Therefore, we see how, on the one hand, people shrink back and delude themselves about the limits of knowledge, so that they say that knowledge cannot penetrate into the spiritual world at all, or, on the other hand, when they have a deep yearning for the spiritual world, they satisfy it in a completely different way than the one described. The way described is that of genuine, true spiritual research. But the way described presupposes that one is serious about freeing oneself from the physical body. This can only be achieved through increased inner soul activity, this can only be achieved through the application of an energy that is never necessary for us as inner energy in everyday life or in everyday science.

But people want to apply the very thing they are accustomed to in everyday life when they approach the higher worlds. Human consciousness, after all, feels precisely the powerlessness described, and, I might say, in a way that is quite understandable, this consciousness feels this powerlessness described precisely when it wants to confront the more intense, the richer, the more exalted world of the spirit. Therefore, man would prefer to eliminate what dwells in his body rather than exerting himself to a greater extent in order to recognize the spiritual world. The feeling of hidden powerlessness makes him come to the conclusion that precisely because he is powerless in the face of spiritual life, he must eliminate the means by which he recognizes in ordinary life; instead of developing it, he wants to eliminate it. Then he does not approach to recognize the spiritual world, to develop his inner being, but then he approaches and seeks either through some external events or by using, as one says, a medium in whom precisely the spiritual, instead of being developed, is asleep, he tries to gain knowledge of the spiritual world through the automatism of the bodily life of the medium, without his inner involvement. There is only the fearful shrinking from reliving the experience of unconsciousness. For this feeling of unconsciousness must be experienced; only by overcoming it, by consciously experiencing it, does man advance in knowledge. But in the secret feeling of this feeling of unconsciousness, it is precisely that which man wants to shut out, that which leads him to spiritual knowledge. That is why so many seek through mediums or spiritists to communicate with them from the spiritual world. It is easy to see that this search through mediums or spiritists is the extreme, the ultimate expression of the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the spiritual world.

But our time, honored attendees, needs strength, needs power, because as the outer life becomes more and more complicated and complicated by the wonderfully developing natural science, especially in its social ramifications, man, in wanting to penetrate the spiritual world, must develop ever stronger and stronger powers. That which appeals to weakness, to the exclusion of the spiritual and soul, can never have a future; it can lull and lull man to sleep in the face of what is to be brought out of the hidden depths of the soul.

Now one can imagine how much what has been said is rejected as – let me say it again – a mental laboratory process of the thought habits of our present time, how much it is rejected, one can imagine when one sees that just the opposite extreme of what has been described has become the ideal for a large part of the educated people of today. For where is the spiritual researcher led when he enters the spiritual world by the method just described? He is led to say to himself: Not only does the world of sense live in your surroundings, but a spiritual world also lives in your surroundings! And he recognizes: This spiritual world contains the causes, the foundations for the existence of the world of sense. But the ideal of very many who truly believe that, as trained and educated people, they stand on the firm ground of natural science, with which, as I mentioned the day before yesterday, spiritual science is in fact completely in harmony. But most of those people, whose nature has been indicated, who believe that they see the ideal in eliminating everything that is found in the characterized way, believe that the ideal of knowing nature is to see only mechanically interacting causes and facts everywhere, to eliminate everything spiritual from external natural processes. That is the ideal of very many who have the thinking habits of the present day.

And it is basically considered a remnant of old superstition to see anything in nature or behind nature that is spiritual; [rather, one wants to] explain as much of nature as possible only by facts that are built according to the pattern of what can be observed by the senses. In this way one wants to comprehend external physics, biology, physiology and even the processes of the soul. I hinted at this the day before yesterday.

The ideal of a knowledge that excludes everything that the spiritual researcher comes to when he applies spiritual scientific methods is the ideal of the most educated people, many of the most educated people of today. So one might say: mechanical natural order is what is taken as the basis of nature. And the counterpart to this, dear ladies and gentlemen, is the observation of human life. Once we have become accustomed to seeing nothing but mechanical order in nature, we then become accustomed to rejecting precisely what the spiritual researcher must come to. And a sum of coincidences is basically what people see in what befalls them in their lives between birth and death, in the physical life of the body.

So how does a person relate to what happens in this life between birth and death? When something happens to him that he regards as a stroke of fate, for better or for worse, his initial response to this stroke of fate is what can be called the sympathy and antipathy of the mind. Just as a person searches for causes and effects in nature outside, he basically leaves what plays a role in his destiny as a mere series, as a mere sequence of coincidences.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, since we can say that the spiritual-soul content awakened in the spiritual researcher actually slumbers in the human being in ordinary life, it must be said that even in the fully waking life, when a person is engaged in action, when a person acts in such a way that he uses his outer body and the outer sense world to carry out actions, something in the person also sleeps. And what sleeps there prevents him from seeing a connection in the process that is unfolding, in the coincidences of life. Basically, what happens to man in the context of life is the same as what happens to many people in the course of history and still does today in the face of natural facts. A person who does not study natural science sees the sun rise and set; he observes the individual positions of the sun; for him, external facts exist that occur over time and in space. Then he, with his thinking, with his science, with his methods, approaches what are otherwise external facts, and he brings coherence into this world of external facts by replacing mere staring at the facts with the coherence that is expressed in the laws of nature. Man does not bring such a connection into what he calls external life coincidences, initially, because the forces within him that mean the same for this area as the forces of cognition mean for the facts of external nature, remain dormant for ordinary life. We must apply our knowledge to the facts of external nature in order to see laws in external nature. According to ordinary habits of thinking, man is not inclined to apply to that which takes place as his fate between birth and death such inner processes as he applies to the facts of external nature. And I will now indicate the path that arises for spiritual research in order to bring a similar law into the sequence of events of fate, as external thinking brings it into the sequence of natural facts.

What we call fate, I would like to say, let us look at it only - not to say anything special about it now, but only to illustrate what I want to say later - let us look at what we call fate, first of all for the life between birth and death, for the outer life that always surrounds us, in which we are always wrapped up and which our fate imposes on us.

We can say that when we look at ourselves in any particular phase of our lives: What are we actually in this phase of our lives? Yes, we say: we are a self, we are an I; we have a certain inner soul life. But certain things in this inner soul life that lie on the surface, we learn to understand and look at quite differently when we look back at earlier phases of our lives. If, for example, after we have turned fifty or forty-five or forty years old, we allow ourselves to look back – say, to the time we went through between the tenth and the eighteenth or twentieth year – when we look back at the so-called coincidences of fate that occurred in our lives at that time, yes, when we fully realize what lies in these coincidences of fate, then we will very soon be able to say the following to ourselves: You can do something now. You are able to think in this or that way, to act in this or that way. Basically, you are nothing other than this ability, this ability to understand, this ability to act. That you understand something more or less spiritually, that you act in one way or another, that is basically what you are. Why is it you? Just think how you would be different, how you would really be a completely different inner self if the events had not occurred that you can look back on between the tenth and twentieth year. They forged you into what you became; what you became there is concentrated in your self. These events now act out of you in many ways. They have concentrated you in essence; they have formed your self. And when we study our self at a particular moment in our life, we find it, I might say, put together like the sum of an addition from the addends. One can now survey one's life in this way. It is not a matter of finding all kinds of interesting things in one's life. What in ordinary life we call self-observation does not actually lead the soul very far beyond itself. But there is a special way of developing one's soul life when one really comes to look at the experiences of fate one has with sympathy or antipathy, but when one looks at them in such a way that they are the basis for what one actually is.

It is not this insight that is important in spiritual research, but the feeling that You have found yourself as a result, as a product of your destiny! This feeling can be increasingly awakened in oneself. And now two things can come together: what one has previously awakened as a spiritual researcher through the concentration of thought, of feeling, as it has been described, what one has experienced as the emergence of the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, and the development of this feeling. They can meet in the soul, these feelings, just as in ordinary life between birth and death one is actually the result of fate.

And when one meditates in this way, when one develops this coloring, this nuance of feeling in the soul, when one concentrates more and more on how, as it were, the inner self of the human being flows out completely and into the current of our destiny, when one makes these ideas completely alive within oneself, when one comes to literally see: Yes, what you are in your inner being, as your self, you see flowing into your destiny. When this becomes very much alive, when it is repeated again and again, so that it becomes a habitual inner experience, then we indeed experience a transformation, a transformation of our soul life. We experience such a transformation, such a transformation of our soul life, that only now is it experienced as a fulfilled, complete whole, which can be called the spiritual-soul that is free from the body.

And this soul-life, this spiritual-soul life, which is free from the body, shows itself to us, honored attendees, when we continue the spiritual scientific methods, as they have been described, and shows itself to us as that which underlies our life between birth and death. It does not reveal itself by logical deduction, but by developing such an inner life as has been described, the soul, as it were, opens a spiritual eye, to use this expression of Goethe's; as if the eye had not yet developed and only developed in the course of life and then our vision opened, it is like this when we work on our inner being, that a new person arises in our inner being, a person who now stands before us in such a way that he is now not just the result of fate, as it has been stated in a trivial way for the time between birth and death, but that he really grows together with his fate.

And now something new arises; so if one has developed the soul, something arises again that can be called: the perception of a secret fear otherwise hidden in the soul. So when you let the soul, as it were by seeing it in the river of fate, snatch itself from the body, then, then you discover - not what you are as a bodily human being - but then you discover within the spiritual world, which you have already conquered in the way described, you now discover yourself. Now you discover what you never knew about yourself before, now you discover the true human being. Now you discover the human being that underlies the ordinary human being who lives between birth and death – or, for that matter, between conception and death. Now we discover the human being who descends from a spiritual world as the true cause of physical human existence, who has an attraction to what can be given to him through the ancestral line, through parents and pre-parents, who brings down the forces from the spiritual world that only form themselves through what can be given to him materially through parents and pre-parents. And now, honored attendees, a fact to which, I would say, the great modern thinker Lessing pointed with deep inner truth, now a truth becomes the realization that what is at work in our body is the result of previous lives on earth. And that what works hidden in our body, without us being able to sense it in our ordinary life, that this is like a germ that after death first enters a spiritual world and, after it has developed in this spiritual world in such a way as the plant germ must develop, it pulls itself together again, so to speak, for a new life on earth. The realization that the whole of human life proceeds in such a way that there are repeated earthly lives for man, this realization must be acquired by the soul's distinguishing itself from the physical body.

In the ordinary experience, honored attendees, one basically has only a single reference to what lives in us as a human core, which goes from life to life and always stays in a spiritual world between death and a new birth. In spiritual knowledge, one lives in this core of life, in this essence of the human being. In ordinary life, we only have a certain point of reference for this when a person falls asleep at night. Spiritual scientific observation shows that falling asleep is conditioned by the fact that what is the core of a person's soul and spirit really lifts itself out of the physical body. But because the powers are not developed, as has been mentioned today, this spiritual-soul core of being remains unconscious from falling asleep until waking up. But very often, as everyone knows, something emerges from this unconsciousness of ordinary sleep life: the chaotic, but often also very interesting, structures of the dream.

What presents itself to a person in a dream is very often observed incorrectly. Among the many dream images – I cannot, of course, go into great detail about what a dream presents, although it would be very interesting to see what one can experience there – the most interesting dreams are probably those in which someone in later life, for the dream life, the dream consciousness, sees some scene in which people appear with whom he may not have had any contact for a long time, many of whom may have died, people with whom he now enters into relationships in his dream consciousness. Whole stories can unfold. If you look at such a dream in the sense of an ordinary memory activity, you are very much mistaken. It would take too long to explain this sentence in more detail, although it can be explained in more detail.

If you want to properly assess the events of a dream that take place in the unconscious mind, you don't have to look at the content at all. These images, everything that takes place, is basically only as significant for the essence of the dream as it would be if one were to say: 'There is a sheet of paper, on it I find a vertical line, a line that goes askew from right to left, one that goes askew from left to right, and so on. In this way he would describe all the letters that are on the paper. But it is not the person who describes the letters on the sheet of paper who is relating to the paper in the right way. Rather, the only person who relates to it in the right way is the person who, having learned to read, deciphers the meaning of what the letters, combined into words, express, without even bringing into his consciousness what the letters look like. What the dream presents is, in relation to what it is in essence, really nothing but letters, which, however, are not as exact as the letters of our ordinary writing, but change with each dream. And it is a deeper realization that can look at the dream and decipher it, just as we remain unconscious of the unconscious when we read the forms of the individual letters and words; that is what is actually contained in the processes of the dream, it is more the character of the human soul core that conjures up these images.

For example, we dream that a person who has long since died tells us this or that, that he does this or that with us. We do not dream it because this image of the dream wants to tell us something special, but we dream it because our soul essence has an inner quality, an inner power, which can best be visualized in this way, can best be visualized by putting itself into a relationship, symbolically into a relationship with a person, with this person whom one has encountered in life. That which is not expressed in the dream at all, which is at the bottom of the soul as the inner strength of the soul, as the character of the soul, that is the essential thing. And if one engages in the scientific recognition of the dream experience, precisely through the method of spiritual research that has been mentioned, by perfecting it in this way, if one engages not in interpretation but in the scientific recognition of the dream experience, then one also finds in the dream experiences that something that is in a person is shaped by special circumstances - which could also be described, but which the short time available today does not allow - into such images. And spiritual research shows us that what a person has acquired in the time between death and a new birth has matured in him a life core, a life germ.

We act and think in the life between birth and death, but what we think and how we act always expresses only a part of what we are, namely the part that lives through the fact that we are in a body. Just as the essence of the other person, who has been described and discovered through spiritual science, is hidden in the everyday life of the person, so this core of being is hidden in the human being. Only through those special occasions in our particular life, in our dream life for example, does the human soul core, which is free of the body when we fall asleep or awaken and is not yet completely at one with the bodily life, reveal itself. how it is mirrored in the bodily life, with which it is still imperfectly united, and what has passed through the human being in every action, but has been stored away, what has remained, what we have not fully lived out, what we have incorporated into our inner self. In dreams, that which passes through the gate of death reveals itself, that which passes through a spiritual world to reappear in a new life on earth. However, one can only recognize it through the dream if spiritual research has preceded all of this, honored attendees!

Thus we see how, in the course of spiritual research, man not only has to experience the unconsciousness of which we have spoken, and how, in overcoming this unconsciousness, he has to find his way into the spiritual world, but we also see how man has to discover his true self first.

Now, before this discovery, man has a secret fear. For the process is the process of losing ourselves in the body as human beings, while discovering ourselves as true human beings who go from life to life. As a spiritual researcher, the human being must first get used to looking at himself outside of himself in the world; he must first get used to discovering himself in his fateful work, and by mustering the courage to overcome the fear and shyness one has of oneself, one discovers oneself in one's true self. And now you discover that this true self is the forge of that which otherwise appears to us as the result of the coincidences of life. You now discover yourself in your destiny. And a completely new feeling, a completely new experience, interweaves and surges through the soul.

We are confronted by a heavy blow of fate, a blow of fate that we otherwise only face when it causes us bitterness and suffering, when it shakes our mind and we feel unhappy under its influence. If, as a spiritual researcher, you have discovered your higher self in the way described, you say to yourself: You have gone through many earthly lives with this higher self of yours. You have lived, thought and acted in these earthly lives in such a way that you have brought with you a certain quality in your soul from previous lives. This quality of the soul adheres to you just as the magnetic force is in the magnet. This quality, this power, exerts a secret attraction on the event that has entered your life as a misfortune, just as a magnet attracts iron filings. You have sought out this misfortune for yourself!

Do we not see in life what can be, once we have gained this point of view, honored attendees? We go through life. Much, much passes our eyes, ears, minds, feelings and wills. We meet many people. Among many and many people there is one whom we, as it were, feel attracted to by mysterious forces of our being, with whom we enter into a life partnership in friendship or otherwise. Why did we do that? Because the forces that we brought with us from previous lives were seated within us, and because these forces were attracted to what lives in this person's soul, just as a magnet is attracted to iron filings. This force passed by the other person. But through this we shape for ourselves everything that we now experience together with this person as fate.

In the same way, however, we also shape our destiny by descending from the spiritual world in which we live between death and new birth to the new birth. In our physical existence on earth, there are those forces that our ancestors can give us through inheritance. We are drawn to those forces that we need according to the qualities of our soul, and we connect with them. We notice the secret bond that exists between us – long before birth, before conception – and that which can be given to us by the hereditary powers of our ancestors. Indeed, more exact spiritual research even shows us, honored attendees, that this bond has been forming long before there can be any talk of our birth or our conception.

Once logic takes the place of what is currently believed to be logic, but is in fact pure illogic, a completely different way of thinking will take hold. Today, many people say: You can see that a person who displays certain qualities in life must have inherited these qualities from his or her parents or ancestors. Spiritual science wants to come and show that the human being, as a core, so to speak, envelops the inherited qualities he has chosen for himself. According to today's thinking, we should be glad that external science has brought it to recognize how the qualities of ancestors revive in descendants, as ordinary physiology can explain.

And particularly the core of this logic is what people want to play out when they say: you can see that in genius. If you observe genius, you can see that the qualities that are concentrated in genius can be found in the parents, grandparents and so on and so forth. Genius usually occurs at the end of a developmental series. Nice logic, that! Because it is quite similar to when someone finds it particularly helpful to explain that they are wet when they have fallen into water and are being pulled out. Of course, if you are at the end of a line of inheritance, you must bear the qualities that surrounded you in the body through that line of inheritance, just as water surrounds you when you fall into a stream. But there would be real logic in the matter if one could show that what lived in the ancestors as qualities of genius would live in the descendants. Not by looking up from the genius to the ancestors, but by descending from the genius to the descendants, that would be real logic. You don't even realize how you are contradicting all logic when you proceed in this way, when you judge as it happens. Because you will stay pretty, that you always look for the qualities of genius in the descendants. One need only point out great geniuses and then show how it sometimes looks, especially with their descendants! Here one will soon find that what a person has worked for himself, what he is inside, that this is what provides the attractive force for events, for all the processes of outer life that converge in his destiny.

Thus we will be able to say: From birth to death, we bring order into the succession of our other coincidences of fate when we recognize ourselves, when we overcome our fear of ourselves and recognize ourselves in our true humanity. Because then we also recognize that we have brought misfortune upon ourselves because we want to steel ourselves against this misfortune, because we lacked a strength and the lack of this strength evoked an attribute in us that forms an attraction for precisely this misfortune.

In addition to such a worldview, which thus discovers the actual human being in destiny, comes the realization that the only reason the human being does not want to discover himself in his destiny is because he is afraid of arriving at this view. This is difficult, honored attendees, but once the truths of spiritual research have been discovered, then one does not need to be a spiritual researcher – although, as I explained the day before yesterday, to a certain extent everyone today can become a spiritual researcher by observing the rules written in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. To a certain extent, I said – but one does not need to be. Once the truths of spiritual research have been expressed, they can be understood and recognized by the sense of truth that exists in everyone, provided it is unbiased.

Just as one does not need to be a chemist to benefit from everything a chemist produces – here one does not need to understand it, only to benefit from it – so one does not need to be a spiritual scientist to find truth, because, to use a trivial word, to find truth is the benefit of spiritual scientific discoveries. Just as one can apply chemical products in life, so can one apply that which spiritual research brings, because it is there and one only needs to approach it without the prejudices that come from ordinary habits of thought, which have been sufficiently described, if one only does not approach it, it will have an effect on the natural person.

The spiritual researcher relies on nothing else, on no authority, he relies on nothing else but the fact that he discovers and explores nothing but what lives in every soul. Through his knowledge, nothing is added to reality; what he discovers lives in every soul. Therefore, it only needs to be expressed, therefore what lives in the depths of every human soul must profess what the spiritual researcher has to say.

Even if this is not yet the case today, yes, if it must seem understandable, as I said the day before yesterday, that today much more opposition, disregard, scorn and ridicule is being expressed towards what the spiritual researcher has to say, it is still true that the development in the next future will proceed in such a way that people will just be willing to acknowledge that human life in truth continues through many earthly lives, that fate becomes understandable to us when we see the higher human being prevailing even in the indicated way, in this fate. Thus men will be willing to recognize this, as they have been willing to recognize that which, as it was said at the time, “contradicts the healthy five senses,” namely, that it is not the earth that stands still and the sun that moves around and the stars that move around, but that it is the other way around, that the earth moves around the sun.

Those who come today and say, “What the spiritual researcher has to say contradicts the healthy five senses!” are on the same ground as those people who came at the time of Copernicus and said, “Well, that the sun should stand still, that contradicts the healthy five senses!” No healthy, thinking person can acknowledge that. As in those days – I have already said this here in earlier years – as in those days, when Copernicus's new teaching was accepted, Giordano Bruno came and said: Our five senses have taught us that up there is the blue firmament and under this firmament the stars revolve. But the truth is that there is no blue firmament up there, but that only the limitations of human perception set the firmament - the firmament feigns to you - while the universe goes out into infinity and embedded in the universe are the innumerable stars. Just as Giordano Bruno had to reveal the spatial firmament as a mere appearance, which is evoked by the limitations of human perception, so spiritual science must, I would say, reveal the temporal firmament of the human soul life, which is limited by birth or, let us say, conception and death. Just as there is no firmament above, there are no limits where birth or conception and death are concerned. Only human observation and human thinking in ordinary life are limited there; and this one life is embedded in the whole stream of time.

Today, esteemed attendees, we stand at precisely the same turning point in spiritual knowledge as the world stood in relation to natural knowledge when Giordano Bruno had to step forward and emphasize the deception of the outer space firmament, just as we today must emphasize the deception of the time firmament, of birth and death. But when people will understand, even without becoming spiritual researchers - because just as there are individual chemists, individual astronomers, there will always be individual spiritual researchers in the future - when people have put aside all prejudices against spiritual research, just as they have put aside all prejudices against the scientific world view, then, just as the scientific world view has flowed into the activities of our outer life, how it has, I might say, built up everything around us in our outer life in the modern world, so too will spiritual science, in relation to the life of the soul, into which we live as human beings by living towards the future, that is, into what the spiritual-scientific ideas are.

And above all, it should be noted that these spiritual scientific ideas are incorporated into our feelings and perceptions. And how different these feelings and perceptions become when they are permeated, imbued and suffused with spiritual scientific ideas, for example when we ask ourselves the question of fate. We will find fate intimately linked to what the higher part of ourselves, the actual spiritual soul that goes from birth to birth, accomplishes. Just as we see the laws of nature in the external nature as the connection of the external natural facts, so we will see our higher self, ruling in our destiny.

Of course, the question can always be raised, I just want to say that as an interjection, dear ladies and gentlemen, whether this will always continue in this way for all eternity with earthly life. Well, only as long as the earth is under the same conditions as it is now, will earthly life continue in this way. Spiritual science leads us straight back – you can read more about this in my 'Occult Science' – to very different conditions on Earth. There, the human being has also developed out of very different conditions into a life that leads him through repeated lives on Earth. And when the Earth has taken on completely different forms, there will also be completely different conditions on Earth, as physics already teaches us, then the human being will also take on completely different forms. This life on earth is an intermediate state, from one birth to the next. But as we now live this life on earth, spiritual science is what brings coherence to all our coincidences of fate, what allows us to grow together with our destiny. And it is certainly the case in our time, and I do not want it to be felt as out of place, when it is said that the difficult time that we are going through in these days, weeks and months must particularly direct our souls to such an understanding of human destiny. We see – as I mentioned the day before yesterday – how, in countless sufferings, but also in countless acts of courageous bravery, in admirable acts of sacrifice, what must be lived out in the course of history is being lived out precisely through today's events.

And how can a person who finds himself in these events feel a sense of belonging to these events, how can he feel a sense of belonging to these fateful events of our time, if he can feel how the secret bond of attraction, which has been said to emanate from his being and to prepare his destiny, has placed him precisely in this fateful time? How does one feel, growing together with such a difficult time, when one feels the growing together between the human being in the higher sense and destiny in the sense of spiritual science? And how does that trust grow, which we must have in events, when one sees the connection between the human being and his destiny? On the one hand, we see how we, with our higher self, have chosen this time as our appropriate lifetime, as the lifetime that most closely corresponds to the qualities that we have hidden in our core being, and how we have placed ourselves in this time. In this way we also gain confidence: we will have the strength to truly fulfill the demands that this time must place on us. Not through mere admonitions, not through mere coaxing, not in some sentimental way do we want to be prompted by spiritual science to have confidence, but by saying to ourselves: one thing always demands another. The qualities in our soul that have brought us into this time are connected with others that will also enable us to lead what our time lets us experience to such ends as were presented in the lecture the day before yesterday as arising from the demands of our time.

We do not rely on admonitions, not on sentimental coaxing, but on the knowledge that we can have of the forces that are there to overcome, after the forces were there that led us into the time. For man gains, when he really immerses himself in spiritual science with his soul, honored attendees, that he gains a full awareness of it: Yes, down there in your depths, there are soul forces that you know nothing about, but that can come up from these depths! Above all, man gains trust in himself, trust in the forces that are in him, in the depths of his soul. This is what lies in spiritual science itself as a strengthening soul force. And if we again take up the thread of what I allowed myself to take up the day before yesterday, of Central European culture, how it is, one might say, enclosed by its enemies as if in a great fortress, we can say: this trust is strengthened in us in yet another way.

The day before yesterday, I pointed out how this Central European culture is truly called upon to develop a very special spiritual life, and how this spiritual life can be characterized by saying that the members of other nationalities are born into their nationality; as they are born, so to speak, people stand within their nation, and when you see [how other nations emphasize the national principle], you always find it traced back to the fact that the person was born into that nation. That is precisely what is peculiar about the Central European people, that they are becoming. To use Goethe's words: “Whosoever strives, we can redeem him” — that is the motto of the Central European. To discover what one is, that is the essential thing. To discover during one's lifetime what one is as a Central European cultural being, that is the peculiarity of the Central European, the seeking, the striving.

And so we find, when we look, I would say, properly at the folk spirits of the Central European people, we find, as germinally predisposed, everywhere, the very thing that spiritual science wants to express as its innermost lifeblood, which it hopes will increasingly incorporate itself into culture. And there we see that the germs appear everywhere in the Central European cultural soul, just as it is true that the germs, if cultivated in the right way, must develop into flowers and fruits, so it is true that we may trust that will bear blossoms and fruits and that it will not be possible to prevent this Central European spiritual life from bearing these blossoms and fruits, no matter how many enemies arise against it in the east and west and north and south. For the forces lie within it, the forces do not lie in anything that comes from outside this Central European spiritual life.

So we see, to pick just a few examples, how there are people within Central European intellectual life who are completely immersed in it with all its soul forces and who, I would like to suggest, are pointing to what spiritual science in its full light wants to present to humanity. In this connection I would like to draw attention to a spirit who, especially under the present conditions, has had even less influence on Central European intellectual life, but who is truly completely immersed in it and is characteristic of this Central European intellectual life in the deepest sense: one could call him 'Goethe's deputy'. I am talking about Herman Grimm, the great art historian of the second half of the nineteenth century. I do not want to go into the peculiarities of Herman Grimm's art research, which is so misunderstood by many, today. But I would like to point out that Herman Grimm wrote wonderful novellas and also an extraordinarily significant novel, “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces) is the title.

I would like to draw attention to something in this work of art – which has not been recognized, which is contained in this work of art and which we recognize as characteristic of Central European intellectual life – in just a few strokes. I would like to highlight a few characteristic features. Herman Grimm attempts to depict the fate of people, but everywhere he feels the need to work as an artist towards what spiritual science should bring to the living scientific life of humanity, namely: to link human fate not only to what can be presented externally as events that can be pursued by the mind, but to what stands behind these events.

He has written a novella, 'The Songstress', a very remarkable novella. I mention this novella not because I want to prove something about spiritual science through a work of art, but for the opposite reason, because I want to show how someone who has immersed themselves in spiritual science can find that here an artist describes something in such a way that the spiritual researcher feels: he does not describe certain spiritual processes in a dilettantish way, but he describes spiritual processes in such a way that they correspond to what the spiritual researcher must gradually discover. In this singer, we find a portrayal of how a somewhat flirtatious but nevertheless spiritually advanced lady exerts a great attraction on a person who has to face her in life. But the lady attracts him, the one who loves her so much, and repels him again. And now the novella is constructed in such a way that the one who writes it, who gives the story of himself, is not the lover, but someone else who takes part in telling it in the first person. He says that he has become acquainted with the lady's lover, that he has seen how the lover is drawn to and then repelled by the lady, and how the lover finally comes to be completely ostracized by the lady, and how he comes to lose all comfort and all hope and all security in life. Now we see how the other man, who is his friend, later meets him on a journey, after he has already lost all confidence in life, how he takes him to his house, how he finds out about him, how he is so saddened to death that he really no longer wants to live. So this friend brings the singer herself; she is to come to the house so that the two can meet again. Meanwhile, however, the lover has arranged it so that when the two, the friend and the singer, arrive at the friend's home, the shot is fired and the lover ends his life by suicide upon their arrival. And now we see, as described in a wonderful way by Herman Grimm, how this lady is in the friend's house in the next few nights and how she experiences - after the lover has killed himself - how she experiences, in spirit form, what has passed through the gateway of death from her lover. And Herman Grimm lets us sense that what has gone out through death is actually the determining factor of fate. It is so much a part of this that precisely through the effect that emanates from the appearance of the dead person, I would say the ghostly apparition, the lady herself wastes away and finally dies.

Again, just as with the dream, I do not want to place too much emphasis on the content that is presented, but rather on the fact that here we have an artist who does not stop at the mere one-sided reality of the external sensory world and in the mere summary of the external coincidences of fate, as one says, but who tries to see the chains of human destiny in their connection with what passes through the gateway of death and also to represent it artistically.

Herman Grimm does this not only once, as he shows with his great novel “Unüberwindliche Mächte”. He shows this by letting the novel's heroine, young Emmy, experience how the one who has become the most precious thing in the world to her is murdered. He does not end up by suicide, he is murdered. She is already ill, the heroine, but with the death of her lover she now wastes away. And now Herman Grimm vividly describes how very peculiar death is, how what has passed through the gate of death plays a role in the case of the person who has been shot – he has been shot, has not ended his life by suicide – how this is still connected with the soul of the living, how it affects the living, how it forms a mysterious bond and actually causes the infirmity in this being, Emmy. And now Herman Grimm describes even that which only the spiritual researcher can understand in its full significance: he describes how the spirit form, which passes through death into the spiritual world, really rises. Herman Grimm wonderfully describes how, still in the physical body, I would say imitating head and hands and the whole figure, the spirit rises and passes into the spiritual world, in order to unite as a spirit, as the spirit of Emmy, with the spirit of her beloved friend. Here, too, Herman Grimm shows that he seeks the forces that actually play out human destiny in the spiritual world. Thus we see in this artist how the germ of spiritual-scientific deepening is present in Central European intellectual culture.

Sometimes this germ in the Central European spiritual culture comes to the fore in a very peculiar way. Just to mention one example out of the hundreds and hundreds that could be mentioned, I would like to highlight that of a German schoolmaster who once wrote a treatise on the immortality of the soul. He wanted to publish the second edition of this treatise. A friend of his published it in the posthumous writings. Strangely enough, this friend of the school director, Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, makes a very interesting interpretation in a note. He says that the school director wrote to him before his death saying that if he himself were to publish a second edition of this essay, he would have to describe what he had come up with, namely that in the life between birth and death, a spirit soul being is built up through what the person has worked for, and this passes through the gateway of death into the spiritual world.

When one sees how the way in which Central European intellectual life forms thoughts and feelings, how it tends, how it points everywhere to what spiritual science wants, how the germ points to the blossoms and the fruits, all this points to spiritual science.

And again I would like to say: This too becomes clear to us, especially when we look at the Austrian part of Central European intellectual life and cite some examples, and this too becomes clear to us, as was touched on the day before yesterday, that at the bottom of the soul there is pain and suffering and struggle and that only by conquering pain and suffering and struggle and, as we have seen today, by overcoming fear and powerlessness, is it possible for the human being to develop his life's treasure. This, too, presents itself to us in the outer life, in the whole way of striving, and this now especially, I would like to say, in the Austrian part of Central European intellectual life.

There is a spirit, a wonderfully attractive Austrian spirit, Bartholomäus Carneri. When Darwinism entered modern intellectual life, other spirits developed it in such a way that they drew the logical consequences and formed a one-sided world view, the one-sided world view of materialism. Bartholomäus Carneri wrote books such as the wonderful 'Morality and Darwinism'. Even if one does not agree with the content - because, of course, Carneri only came to a beginning and did not know spiritual science - if one goes into such a book as he wrote in the last period of his life, the book 'Modern Man', then one sees how this man, who was so rooted in Austrian Central European intellectual life, could not help but grasp Darwinism not only intellectually, but also in terms of what man carries in his mind as a moral force. And so Bartholomäus Carneri drew emotional and moral consequences from Darwinism and founded an idealism in a wonderful way based on Darwinism. One may consider this to be wrong, but this peculiar idealism of Bartholomäus Carneri is characteristic of Central European intellectual life.

And we can look at another mind that is truly characteristic, I would say, precisely for a certain state of development of Central European intellectual life, at the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling, who at the same time, as his book “The Atomism of the Will, shows that he was also a great philosopher who, in his last years, prophetically presented the mechanization of human life in his “FHomunkulus” and pointed out the necessity to overcome this mechanization of life.

However, esteemed attendees, we have not yet found the inner strength to fully feel everything that had a vital, spiritual effect in spirits such as the aforementioned Herman Grimm, Bartholomäus Carneri, and Robert Hamerling. Those who often dominate literature today have had completely different things to do. But our great fateful time will show where the great nerves of Central European cultural life lie.

There have been people who could not sufficiently delve into the greatness that lies in the characterization, but who have instead admired the greatness of a spirit that is supposed to be particularly outstanding, that has been particularly admired in recent years, and that was met with astonishment when he, as a Frenchman, spoke out so hatefully against Central European intellectual culture. I am referring to Romain Rolland, the author of the novel 'Jean-Christophe'. It is fair to say, esteemed attendees, that just as Robert Hamerling and Herman Grimm had a deep sense of reality, in that they knew that they had to seek reality in its fullness even where the senses no longer reach, as true as it is in Romain Rolland, in his “Jean-Christophe”, one might almost say hatred of reality, a tendency to grotesquely distort reality because it only wants to be looked at externally. And the much-admired novel, which in the eyes of many is supposed to be one of the greatest, “Jean-Christophe”, is, in the eyes of anyone who can feel this, who can feel the roundness and essence of a being, this novel is, in its creation of the hero, Jean-Christophe, a chaotic mishmash, mixed together from the characteristics of Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

Just as the elements of these four greats could never be combined in a person by nature, so too can this chaos never come together in a healthy artistic nature. Those who knew what Romain Rolland and his real art were like were really not surprised that this Romain Rolland so grotesquely misjudged Central European intellectual life after the war broke out. If only we could really get to the bottom of things, then many things would be understandable, especially in the present.

However, all this cannot make us despondent. It was said the day before yesterday and was also referred to again in today's lecture: that which is built on the surface of human life over an underground, over the struggle and war of opposing powers, contains fear and powerlessness, but something is built over it that must nevertheless be the courage to face life and the development of life; and so it is in the outer world as well. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the peculiarity that strikes us with such wonderful sympathy in Bartholomäus Carneri's philosophical writings has arisen in a life that has been physically and bodily heavily burdened in a paralyzed body; in a body that was paralyzed for a long time, Carneri has struggled to the insights of his noble idealism. There we see how treasures of the mind are wrested from the body. And Robert Hamerling, he lay for decades prostrate with a serious illness. Born of suffering is that which elevates people after it has been born! That which arises from suffering can be precisely that which permeates life with the highest delight and the highest joy.

When one peers into the secrets of life and discovers such peculiarities – the latter is only, I might say, particularly emphasized because it does not appear to be a coincidence – when one discovers such peculiarities, then one will find all the more in this Central European intellectual life the character that it yearns everywhere for such a deepening of the spirit as the future must demand of people. Everywhere minds are at work to find that which Goethe did not write into his “Faust” in his youth, but only later, after Goethe himself had matured, incorporated into his Faust.

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, [gavest me] everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature of a kingdom,
The power to feel and enjoy it. Not
Coldly marveling visitors you only allow,
allow me to look into her deep chest,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches and trunks, and the hill thunders hollowly as it falls. Then you lead me to the safe cave,then you show me myself, and my own heart is opened to its deep, secret wonders.

There we see, I would say, the whole gamut of human experience; already we see, in a foreboding way, the whole gamut of human experience, as it is to be opened up by what spiritual science is to explore for the human being of the future. But precisely because this Central European spiritual life has the character of striving, the character of becoming, it will strive more and more to see the related everywhere, to see a related everywhere, to also live in a related in outer nature. The spirit within man will find the spirit outside, truly recognize the brothers in the forest and meadow and in all that is alive. That is to say, the human self will expand and merge with and become immersed in the whole universe. And man will be led to the secure cave, and the mysterious wonders of the spirit's becoming and essence will open up – when he overcomes his fear through spiritual science, to find his true self in the great stream of destiny.

Oh, the forces that are set against this Central European spiritual life feeling like a single, great spiritual organism are also part of this Central European spiritual life. If I may again draw attention to something personal, not to bring up something personal, but only to clarify something, I would like to say: It is difficult for the people of Central Europe to really achieve what they have been predestined to achieve, to achieve, to grow together into a whole, because they have to achieve it through life – not through what they themselves do not strive for, through physical birth, but through the life they choose for themselves in their destiny. That is why it made a significant impression on me – and I am allowed to mention this personal thing, because I really spent half of my life in my Austrian homeland, and the other half of my life in the German Reich, and therefore, putting both on the same scale, I was really able to compare them well. I am allowed to mention such things because I have not only But I can say this because I have not only acquired intellectual but also sensitive judgment in the course of my life. It made a harrowing impression on me when I was sitting in a hotel in Weimar with Herman Grimm and the conversation, which at the time Herman Grimm directed to various really urgent and interesting things, then also came to the Austrian poet Grillparzer, this quintessentially Austrian poet. Herman Grimm said to me at the time: “Grillparzer, I can't understand him; I've been told that Grillparzer is also supposed to be a great German poet. I once passed through Munich, stayed there for a few days, and had some volumes of Grillparzer's dramas sent to me from the library. I tried – says Herman Grimm – to see if I could feel what people say, that Grillparzer is also a great poet. But it seemed to me as if Grillparzer were not a German poet at all, but as if what is in his dramas were translations from a completely foreign language. Thus spoke the honored guest, whom I myself had to describe today as a characteristic spirit, as one of the deepest and most meaningful spirits of Central European intellectual life. Therefore, he may be cited for the fact of how strong the sense of individuality is in the individual members of this Central European cultural humanity.

Even if these people of Central European civilization did not belong to different nationalities, even if they all belonged to one nation, like Grillparzer and Herman Grimm, they are so individually constituted that they can only find each other after great difficulties. This is connected with the opposing forces that are present. But the greater these opposing forces are, the greater must be the forces that are applied to shape the whole into a unified, organic whole. Then it will be in that, as in a cultural current bed, that deepening for the spiritual life can and must be found that can only be truly found within Central Europe, because this Central European spiritual life tends towards the spiritual deepening that I have taken the liberty of indicating today with a few very inadequate, but still a few strokes as the goals of spiritual science. This Central European spiritual life cannot rest until it has developed the blossoms and fruits of what lies within it as a germ.

And anyone who has learned to rely on the driving and sustaining power of inner spiritual forces knows from this inner knowledge that this Central European spiritual life, however besieged and threatened it may be and however fought and waged against it may be by its enemies, will not disappear from history until it has incorporated everything that it has to give to world culture.

And this, esteemed attendees, is still a great and mighty undertaking, for we recognize this spiritual life of Central Europe not yet as blossoms and fruits, but as a germ that must develop. And it is on the driving force of the germ that those who today seek courage and strength for our fateful days from spiritual knowledge itself build. This Central European spiritual life will not let go of what is inherent in it through minds like Goethe and all the others. Goethe has spoken a great and powerful word with regard to the unified recognition of the world as spirit and as outer physicality for those who shrink back in fear of self-knowledge and in the powerlessness to recognize the world. For them, Goethe has also spoken the right words, always finding the right words from his, I would say instinctive, spirit of knowledge, by saying, picking up on a word spoken by another, one of the fainthearted: “No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature!”

No, says Goethe, what is in man is capable, if only it is properly developed, of penetrating into the innermost part of nature and into the inner nerve of the world. Therefore, Goethe says in his powerful language, rejecting Haller's “No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature”:

I have been hearing this repeated for almost sixty years.
And I curse it, but furtively.

Haller continues:

Happy the man to whom she
Only shows the outer shell.

- namely, nature - and Goethe then says:

Nature has neither core
nor shell,
All at once it is everything.
You alone are tested most of all,
Whether you yourself are core or shell.

Central European intellectual life, however, has the task of developing the kernel into the shell in its soul everywhere. And so today, in a few words, let me summarize in a way that is in keeping with my feelings what I wanted to illustrate in today's and also in yesterday's lecture, to the effect that man is truly created not only to interior of nature, to penetrate the spirituality that permeates nature, but is also created to recognize itself in the flow of its destiny, to be reconciled with this destiny and to understand why it has grown together with the destiny of its time.

Goethe points to the same sentiment with meaningful, though simple words. He points out that what man seeks in spiritual development is indeed a mystery, but a mystery that can be fathomed. Goethe knew that the world is overwhelming, which can already justify the powerlessness of knowledge, but he also knew that this powerlessness can be overcome, that man can penetrate the veil of nature. That is why we want to conclude this reflection with Goethe's words, because they truly and sensitively summarize what is the attitude of spiritual science, what spiritual science wants to illustrate:

When observing nature, you must
always consider everything as one;
nothing is inside, nothing is outside.

Goethe says that what is hidden deep within us we find on the outside, and what we recognize as external, including the outer courses of fate - as spiritual science says - we recognize as the fates of the higher human being.

For what is within is without.
So seize without delay
Sacred public secret.

That, most honored attendees, is Goethe's attitude, that, in full development, will be the attitude of spiritual science and will be able to underlie that soul mood, that soul strengthening, which can arise from spiritual science, in difficult times, but also in such fateful times as we are experiencing today, as we are experiencing them again in our present.

Dear attendees! The things I will talk about today and tomorrow are the object of knowledge and longing that fills every human soul. On the other hand, however, they are currently the subject of of a discussion in which the pros and cons are raised in the most forceful way, and in which just as much misunderstood scientific knowledge prevails on the one hand as disembodied, but often well-intentioned dilettantism on the other. My task today is to show you that a scientific approach to the study of the human mind and soul is entirely possible, and at the same time to point out the pitfalls of dilettantism, amateurism and the like in this particular field. We will see, my dear audience, that in the field of real spiritual research, as it is meant here, it is a matter of striving for a completely new kind of knowledge, not just another field of knowledge, a kind of knowledge that neither the ordinary science of the present nor the layman has a proper concept of, but a kind of knowledge But a way of knowing that, on the other hand, is already prepared to the furthest extent in the instincts, in the unconscious impulses of the souls of our time, and of which one will most certainly - like the one who is imbued with this kind of spiritual science - in the not too distant future have a very different view than in the present.

The subject I will be speaking about today and tomorrow is, however, often dismissed as dreamy, fantastic or even worse. Anyone who wants to work their way scientifically towards this kind of knowledge, which is what I want to talk about, must, however, have experienced two prerequisites, and I am talking about experiences. One cannot approach the science in question here in the way that, as a young person, one can approach any other science after the usual preparation. If one wants to apply this science in practice, one must strive for total human knowledge using different methods. One must have fully experienced certain experiences and events.

One experience is to be undergone with that which is rightly admired today in the widest circles and by those people who understand something of the matter, because it has been brought infinitely far by people, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and in the present day. That is the scientific realization; and anyone who wants to penetrate to the spiritual science meant here must know what can be experienced in relation to the great riddle of humanity precisely from the scientific way of knowing. One must have experienced again and again, in inner struggle, how far one can come with this scientific way of knowing in relation to the highest questions of the life of the spirit and soul. And one must not, as is the case with many people, have only reached a certain limit in this field in theory. Rather, one must have reached this limit through an inner spiritual practice. Man must have reached that limit in the same way that science is limited. In its own way and method, science has achieved its results in its field, in which it has achieved such brilliant things, precisely because it has proceeded so conscientiously and precisely, so appropriately to the objects, in its method, as is always the case.

Thus, a person must have gone through all of this: how to conduct scientific research, how to penetrate the secrets of the world through the natural sciences, and how far one can go with this scientific research. But, as Bois-Reymond, the [physiologist] who was famous in the 1870s and is unfortunately much too r forgotten, rightly emphasized, he cannot arrive at purely theoretical conclusions in the study of the soul, for he must not only go through the process of research in this field logically and exactly scientifically in his innermost being, but he must also experience in his soul what is penetrating into human consciousness in this process. He must not only work his way into the field of this science from a purely scientific point of view.

And here it becomes clear – I want to describe the matter today from the point of view of the experience – that precisely when one remains firmly on the ground of natural science, one must come to certain concepts and ideas in the face of which one is repeatedly forced to admit: There one cannot go further, one cannot get through. There people's courage fails, there one stands at the boundary of experience. But it does not have to be that way. Rather, it turns out that concepts with which one brings the forces of nature to one's understanding cannot be penetrated by the scientific mode of knowledge, but remain standing and ultimately shape themselves into a spiritual reality. This spiritual reality remains standing, it does not dissolve in the human interior, it remains as a residue with which one cannot penetrate into this human interior.

I will only hint at the fact that in wrestling with these borderline conceptions, one proceeds as if, figuratively speaking, one saw again, as in a mirror, what one does and develops in scientific learning. It is indeed such a struggle when one develops one's own concepts; but one develops them in relation to the external world, just as a person standing before a mirror develops his own image by forming it through the mirror. And if one tries to penetrate further, then it is as if – to stick with the image – one were to smash the mirror. If the mirror is smashed, you no longer see anything, and so nothing remains if one tries to add to these primary concepts in the same way.

So, if you don't proceed in the right way, it is impossible to arrive at anything other than a realization where you have to stop. This occurs precisely when you don't proceed in the right way, because then you have to break the mirror, that is, the spiritual researcher must not stop at this realization. He must go further and ask himself: What is the inner experience actually like? What is it that our scientific knowledge breaks, that it is as if we wanted to break the mirror when we push further? And when the spiritual researcher then really gets involved in looking at these scientific concepts in relation to the human soul life, when he asks himself the hypothetical question: what would the human being be like if he were to make further scientific discoveries here, if he were to succeed in achieving equally brilliant results in this field, results that he could use over others, and if he were to penetrate beyond this boundary too? - then one must say: human beings would have to be organized differently, have different kinds of cognitive abilities.

But what would that mean? This last question has no bearing on present-day science. From the standpoint of its world view, the question is not asked: What would people have to be like who would penetrate into the fields in a scientific way, into which people want to penetrate in accordance with what they feel as a serious purpose in life, as a longing? We will have to go into this matter in more detail later, but for now I will just state it from the point of view of knowledge and say, quite hypothetically: If the scientific borderline conceptions could be mastered with the means by which they cannot be mastered, then either things would be such that scientific method could penetrate them, or man would be organized in such a way that he could submerge himself in this world, and then man would not be capable of developing a certain power that is closely connected with human life as it is on earth. Man would not be capable, if he were so organized, of developing love for any being or even for his fellow human beings. A person who could see through the world scientifically would be a loveless being in whom the power of love would never take hold. Man would therefore have to be different; love in its various stages up to the highest enthusiasm would be absent at all levels of human existence if, scientifically speaking, these limits did not exist.

This is experienced by the fact that, as a spiritual researcher, one is able to observe human beings so closely that one can say what a person would be like if one or other faculty were missing, if something were to be lost from the entire human organization. Therefore, it can be said that a person who could penetrate to the highest questions in the natural sciences would be a person without love, and thus a very different being from the human being on earth. Not many people today hold this view, because it is the result of many years of scientific research, but many people have an instinct for it. If I may use a paradoxical expression, I would like to say that many people have unconscious knowledge of it. Many people today already say to themselves: That which is called science today cannot bring us satisfaction; that must be sought in other ways. And these other paths are often the stomping ground of such amateur theoretical endeavors by people who say to themselves: Science cannot give me what I am seriously looking for; and they come to make progress towards the solution of these highest human questions by the path of what is often called mysticism in life. But this ordinary mysticism and all that is hidden under different names such as occultism, transcendentalism, and so on, is just as unsuitable for penetrating into the depths of human existence in true reality.

Spiritual science must, on the one hand, have the experiences at the boundary of natural science behind it and, on the other hand, the realization of the inadequacy of ordinary mysticism. And all talk about how what cannot be achieved in the usual way, in a scientific way, must be achieved by trying to experience the spiritual, the comprehensive nature of the world through inner deepening and concentration, does not change this. The one who approaches these things without prejudice, without a ridiculous layman's attitude, will soon realize in his experience that this repeated immersion in the soul, on which mysticism pins so many hopes, contributes just as little to true reality as today's knowledge of nature.

For he who has trained his mind in the natural sciences also knows how to live through what is called mystical contemplation, and knows how to look at it in the right way. He has to go through all these self-experiments, he can do them and can also look at them by doing them, and knows that he will not get any further in this way than to the form of the image of reality. But in this image there is still a great deal of human will and so much that cannot be excluded, what one has experienced so far, and other things that the subconscious holds in the depths of the soul, that mere immersion in the inner self can never provide certainty of knowledge, so that one must say to oneself: Mysticism can help you to delve into yourself to a certain degree, but not to the point of reaching the core of your own humanity, where you can grasp being itself and no longer the mere image that you feel and live.

These two ways of experiencing must be left behind, you have to have stood at these two limits - in relation to the experience of nature and ordinary mystical contemplation - and be able to say to yourself: Outer reality never fully reveals itself, because if it did, we would smash the mirror; reality does not flow into us. And with ordinary mysticism, we do not get close to reality; we remain with the image, we remain with what appears in reality, but we do not dive into it, and an abyss opens up between what outer knowledge of nature is and what mysticism reveals. Only an image remains, only the vapor of a true reality of the soul, which wells up out of reality in the light of the soul. But we cannot cross the abyss, and when we look at reality, it remains completely foreign to us. In this area in particular, the scientific method will never be able to grasp knowledge in practical experience and lead us across this abyss.

I will prove the correctness of my assertion by means of an example taken from literature. The example shows how helpless a natural scientist feels when approaching the inner life of man. This example is described in a collection that deals with these two borderline issues, in the so-called Wiesbaden Collection, Waldstein, and from this example it is quite clear what a helpless situation a natural scientist of the present day is in when he wants to penetrate into the depths of the soul using this method. The author of this writing about the unconscious self recounts: He was once standing in front of a bookshop; he is a naturalist, there are many books in the bookshop, and his eye falls on a book entitled 'On Molluscs'. This may interest the naturalist, since in this case it touches on his area of expertise, and as he looks at the title of the book 'On Molluscs', Waldstein suddenly feels compelled to smile.

Now he is himself amazed at why he has to smile, because a serious naturalist cannot be moved to smile, and looking at something as serious as the book “On Molluscs” is no reason to smile. He wants to find out why this book about mollusks seems to make him smile, and he does so very ingeniously by closing his eyes and trying to just listen. And then he hears a very distant organ grinder that he hadn't heard while he was focusing on the book about mollusks. And the organ was playing a melody that he learned to dance to ten years ago. He also didn't pay much attention to the melody when he was learning to dance, because, as he says, he paid much more attention to his steps and to his partner, but not to the melody; so at that time he didn't pay attention to the melody , now his attention was completely diverted and only a faint sound resonates in his soul, which also only faintly sounded ten years ago, and yet - this faintly dawning experience awakened in him the impression that he begins to smile in front of the solemn mollusc beech.

You can see what the person who faces this solemn thing has to say to himself: What he brings up there and out of his soul, which cannot be explained at all. The naturalist Waldstein only noticed the matter by closing his eyes and investigating, and one must say: the person who reflects on this must realize that this human memory is something quite remarkable. We have a general grasp of our ordinary powers of recollection and we can usually say what our memories relate to – for this is based on our powers of imagination. However, we can never guarantee that unconscious extraneous elements are not mixed in. Nevertheless, what is entrusted to our memory forms part of the best of our soul life. ... [Gap]

When a spiritual researcher encounters an observation like the Waldsteins', he realizes that he needs to look again in his inner experience and ask himself: How is it that ordinary mysticism, this immersion in one's own mind, cannot possibly approach a reality? Anyone who has become acquainted with the scientific conscientiousness in contemporary natural science repeatedly and intensely asks such questions and will in many cases be able to indicate how people who believe that they can draw a mighty and powerful Being into their soul through mystical contemplation are actually unconsciously repeating the sounds of a once-heard barrel organ. They say he has immersed himself in the divine being, but that is not true; a youthful impression has emerged in him and is reflected in him.

True science must be as critical as possible; but if you force yourself to truly and truly observe yourself, you will be able to tell yourself why you cannot get to the place where our being is rooted through the path of ordinary mysticism. And you come to realize that in the ordinary life of a person, you cannot aspire to reach the point where the human soul plunges into reality, because you would lack what you need to be human in this life. If you want to penetrate into the depths of reality with your ordinary life of ideas, you do something other than penetrating into your own being, and that is that you either develop your perception and what you experience, whether it be as self-awareness or as fate, or you practice mysticism and reshape what becomes memory in the depths. We would have no memory if we could penetrate to the sources of our being. And so the work we wanted to do on our way into the depths of our souls is stopped, so that what we experience spiritually can later be brought up again through memory. We must not penetrate into our selves, otherwise we would know nothing. We cannot penetrate into what our being is because we have to stop earlier.

Therefore, it is not surprising that we do not delve into it spiritually, but are stopped by our memory, and so it comes to pass that we stand before the abyss of knowledge for two reasons: because man would have to be a completely different being if he could penetrate into the knowledge of nature; he would be a being devoid of love; and the other reason is that If a person in their normal consciousness were to delve into their own inner being and immerse themselves in their own reality, they would have no memory or recall, and you know what it would mean for a healthy human life if a person had no memory. For millennia, the health of our soul life has consisted in our ability to remember.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what I had to say first, because those who want to become true spiritual researchers must have these experiences behind them. One can begin with spiritual science, but not with spiritual research, without building it on the great disappointments, on the disappointments of life, which consist in the realization that one cannot solve the riddle of life by scientific means and that one cannot cross the boundary within through ordinary mysticism... [Gap] But on the spiritual side, it – spiritual science – can only build in the same way that natural science does in the external physical realm. Spiritual science must change consciousness if it is to penetrate to the depths of human existence. Just as one does not leave water as it is when one wants to do chemical experiments, but has to change it, break it down into hydrogen and oxygen using special devices, in order to arrive at what can be scientifically investigated, so in real spiritual research one must make changes to one's inner being, one must make a make a ruthless confession of life, the earnest confession that one cannot get behind the riddles of humanity with the cognitive abilities one has in life, but that one must shape and form them until one can penetrate through them into the depths where ordinary consciousness does not penetrate.

And because that is the case, because you really don't need to develop knowledge of nature on the one hand and mystical knowledge on the other in order to penetrate the human mystery through experiments, but because you have to strive for a different knowledge, you have to make our soul different from what it usually is, this path is still widely avoided, and what this science is supposed to achieve. It is shunned just as much as Copernicanism was shunned in its time, when people still had different ways of thinking. And just as the habits of thought of that time were overcome in the course of time, and as even the opposing communities had to decide to accept Copernicanism, so the time will come when all opposition will accept what is being sought here as spiritual research, but which can only be created through the transformation of the life of the soul.

This transformation of human life is described in detail in my books, in which it is characterized in principle from a few points of view, about which those who have heard my earlier Vienna lectures are better informed. There I also said that it is not a matter of somehow transforming the ordinary everyday life of a person and making it unhealthy, but of making progress in the field of the inner experience of human existence, and that through this the soul must become something different through inner exercises and activities in a very specific direction than it reveals itself in ordinary consciousness. This can only be the case when one wants to be a spiritual researcher.

Many people believe that with this method one can transform the whole person into something else. But one cannot, one cannot be a spiritual researcher from awakening to falling asleep, because otherwise one would fill the whole person with what can lead us straight into the spiritual realm of existence. On the one hand, the human being would be shaped in such a way that his ability to remember would not function properly, and on the other hand, his ability to love would take a wrong turn. But if the soul is practised in the right way, which is what we are talking about in principle, then what I have described as a danger does not occur, but rather a strengthening of the human being occurs, because it must be emphasized again and again that everything that spiritual research can give can only be gained through spiritual research, but that one does not need to be a spiritual researcher to have the ability to understand what has been researched.

Just as not everyone can be a chemist and yet chemical knowledge rules in life, so not everyone needs to be a spiritual researcher who, through their common sense, understands how the results of spiritual research are based on truth, because it is possible for everyone to become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent and to test for themselves whether everything that spiritual research claims is possible.

The essential thing is that the soul life transforms itself in such a way that it accomplishes inner tasks that would otherwise not be possible. How to do that is explained in the books I have mentioned, but in principle I wanted to discuss it here. One can awaken the ability to detach oneself from all impressions of everyday life, an ability that one must learn, however, just as one must learn to do physical experiments, and in the same way one must be able to extinguish all impressions of the outside world for the spiritual and soul. One must be able to induce such a state of mind through inner experiments, which one otherwise induces when one is in a dreamless sleep.

But when we put ourselves in a position to sleep in this way, we must not completely abandon consciousness. Instead, our inner soul life is strengthened in such a way that when we return to our ordinary life, the full waking consciousness can be maintained, although we do not have to rely on external impressions to spark this consciousness. Supersensible awareness is a full awareness of our inner soul life, which we achieve by developing an inner activity that is purely soul-spiritual and does not play into our everyday life. The activities have to be spiritual-soul activities, and we see the inner soul life that would otherwise be used to absorb external impressions. We save the strength that would otherwise be used for perception. This is how thinking and imagining come to life, and thinking and imagining flow together.

It is a coming together within a life in which the inner self becomes conscious through having a picture in front of you that is formed by arbitrarily combining shapes, which cannot be interpreted in a bad mystical sense. But one must also be aware that the inner life of the soul will be strengthened in this way, that it will become more intense, that a different self-awareness will be evoked by imagining just as vividly as one perceives. One achieves this by practising one's soul, by completely grasping something new, by processing its image in the soul, which makes no claim to represent itself in energetic thinking and soul life. At first one senses only an inner strengthening of self-awareness. This is one side of the feeling that the human soul must unite with itself. But one also recognizes that which one has previously developed more or less unconsciously in one's inner depths, but it does not lead to making something permanent.

If nothing else were added, such an inner soul life would be completely forgotten; it would only be an experience in the immediate present, because it does not cling to the power of remembrance. Those who object to the methods of real spiritual research and science on the grounds that they too can only unconsciously call upon the power of remembrance should admit that it is precisely the power of remembrance that is excluded and does not participate. Everything that one experiences anew and that has so strengthened one's consciousness does not go down into the region of the powers of remembrance. It is something that forms inwardly but is not suitable for a person to keep within. What is experienced through spiritual research is not suitable for waking remembrance and lives only in that inner life that is awakened by the distant sounds of the barrel organ.

What I have explained here leads first to a strengthening of the inner life of the soul, to a strengthening of self-awareness. The person who practices this comes to say to himself: I can do it this way and I now know where it comes from. I have the high feeling that with my soul, when I have changed it, I can recognize the sources of life and the physical basis for it. I think that those are right who consider the ordinary life of the soul as bound to the body; I know that if one wants to arrive at this self-consciousness, which recognizes itself in this way, one must say: I do not recognize through my body. But one must first have gone through what I have described.

But one must go one step further. The one who practices the exercise I have been talking about for years of his life notices that he enters into a strange way of further exploring this self-transformation. He comes to a way of experiencing in which these images overwhelm him to a certain degree; he acquires in his soul a certain ability for pictorial representation. This is heightened fantasy, this is heightened imaginative experience. One attains imaginative experience, but one must continue to shape the soul through ever more advanced voluntary self-education. Through ever greater strengthening of the inner will, one must learn to master the inner images when they begin to want to master him. Otherwise, one would only ever see one's own images. But if you succeed in mastering them, you will also be able not only to shape these images, but also to remove them.

You also have to have this power, and you acquire it through the exercises I have described, through which you gain control over your inner formative activity. But then the soul feels different when you have really gone through these inner processes and increased your self-awareness by forming images, and when you can now erase these images. Then you are in a world that is different from the world of ordinary reality; now you are in a spiritual reality through the transformed soul life.

This can be compared to the natural development of the senses; one must see what one has developed like an inner, spiritual eye. But this is initially like a physical eye whose cornea is still cloudy. By erasing the image, one must first heal the eye before it is able to see the image. While in the past it was possible to strengthen self-awareness, now the imagination may look into another world, which cannot be revealed in any other way than this.

But one must have courage to go through such an experience of the soul if one wants to penetrate into the reality of the spiritual world. And then the following occurs: one feels as if awakened in a new world. This awakening in a new world is an experience, it is like waking up from dream-life into ordinary life, and one now knows: in dream-life one had no reality before one, but in waking-life one has the happenings of reality before one. Thus one can awaken out of the world of physical reality into the spiritual reality.

But there must also be something from the other side. In our ordinary life, there are not only perceptions and perceptions, but also feeling forces that have a certain direction in each person. They have perceptions and perceptions that need to be transformed, and the feeling powers must also be withdrawn from the external world. Through the inner concentration of life, man must be able to bring about his calmness towards the external world for all feelings and the willing life. The soul life must not be stimulated by anything that stimulates it from the external world. The will must not be directed towards anything external. Nothing external must be allowed to cause a change. The spirit must be uninvolved in the external world at the moment when it approaches spiritual research.

Then a remarkable transformation takes place in the soul of the human being; one makes the discovery that previously, in ordinary consciousness, all perceptions and ideas were delimited by our feelings. Now that memory is eliminated, now that we are outwardly calm, the feelings and will of life can penetrate into the soul, into that which we have developed; and as the soul has awakened, that which is formed in the inner soul through the repressed feelings that still slumber within, flows into it. Now an inner complement of thinking, feeling and willing arises, which are no longer the same as they are in ordinary consciousness. One has not only awakened, because in the awakening of the soul life, the outer mind also lives and reveals itself as it reveals itself through the senses in ordinary reality.

Through the transformation of the inner soul forces, through feeling and will, one can approach the things of the spiritual world. New abilities show up that would otherwise remain dormant in the soul. What I have described gives the soul the opportunity to develop such powers with which it can penetrate into the spiritual world, but only for the time in which it is doing spiritual research.

But these powers are different from the powers of ordinary consciousness, and misunderstandings arise because people do not distinguish between the soul's attitude when it is doing spiritual research and ordinary consciousness. To explore the realities of the spirit, the soul must apply what is described to itself. And people only resist this because they avoid seriously acquiring the powers that can only penetrate when applied in the right way. Then they would also see how different these abilities are from those we have in ordinary life and which we need for a healthy life. What the soul experiences, it experiences through these supersensible soul powers, not through the ordinary ones, as with the outer sense effects or mental images, which do not come about other than as remembering. What is experienced in the spirit is not a mere process of imagination, not mere fantasy, and what the spirit experiences in this way is not transformed into the ability to remember. One does not simply remember, but one must approach the experience again, and that is how this process differs from fantasy, that is how one recognizes it as the expression of real spiritual activity.

You will allow me to tie in with personal matters; but in this area there is much that has to tie in with personal matters, because spiritual research is tied to the person. I can look back with complete clarity to the moment in my life – it was many years ago – when I was able to see for the first time how, in the clouds and the sky, in short, in the external world, forces are at work that do not come from this life or from what we have inherited from father and mother, but such forces that one can say come from a life in a spiritual world that preceded our earthly life, before we connected with the forces generated by father and mother. During this life of the soul, powers are perceived and other powers, which come from previous lives, are active in the perception. One comes to such direct insight, but the most important thing is that one experiences this insight and knows that the spiritual world is also active in the ordinary consciousness, in the will and in all true perceptions. But it would be in vain to try to recall such an experience later, to bring it back to mind, if one has not done something quickly enough to be able to bring it back into one's memory later. What one must do must be done with complete clarity of consciousness, because remembering is impossible. Memory is excluded for the spiritual experience of the soul, and one only remembers something else when one is back in the ordinary life of the soul. And one can only see the experience with reversed memory and one can say to oneself: How did I come to have such a spiritual experience, what did I do, what did the soul think and feel before that it came about? How did this experience come about? One can remember that, not the experience itself, but how one came to it. One must remember that, one must go to this experience of the spiritual world by not recreating the experience, but recreating the conditions of the experience.

And when I speak to you about the conception of a lecture like today's, which is about spiritual matters, I must also say: You cannot do it as you would with ordinary lectures. I often give such lectures, but I have to say that it is extremely difficult for me to be able to hold on to such a lecture through ordinary memory. One can only prepare for it by creating the conditions under which one originally came to it, and that is what I want to tell the listeners. One wants to speak to the spiritual world and to do that one has to create the conditions. But because that is the case, it turns out that one can never count on retaining a spiritual experience in mere memory. But one can look into the spiritual world and then what one has to say comes to the fore. Those who want to see into the spiritual world must renounce the memory of the spiritual world.

This is indeed a disappointment for some. One can train oneself by practicing the powers to see into the experiences and processes of the spiritual world, but one does not remember them and is disappointed because the spiritual experiences dissolve into nothing, and that is precisely the disappointment of all beginners. But by re-establishing the conditions, one also awakens the memory in an artificial way, which is not imagination, and what was seen spiritually then remains, as a dream remains in the memory, and one sees what one has seen in the spiritual life. It comes to looking, one sees how that which itself seems to fade out and pass away, remains, one sees back into the past, but in a sense one cannot remember it.

Another thing comes up that also leads to certain disappointments for the beginner. It is the contrast to ordinary healthy earthly life, where one can develop powers that, like skill and habit, for example, are increased by certain repeated actions, and one can strengthen these powers in ordinary sensory life through repetition. In ordinary sensory life it is like that, but in the experience of the spirit it is the opposite. As paradoxical and absurd as it may sound, the more often one has a spiritual experience, the more difficult it is to bring it about again. And if you want to have the spiritual experience again and again, you have to make ever greater efforts to have it again. So you experience things in the opposite way to sensory experiences and realize that, in order to finally experience, you have to look at such experiences as quickly as possible. Because the experiences of the soul have the peculiarity of passing by as quickly as possible, they pass by unnoticed for those who have only done a few exercises and do not have the necessary presence of mind to really hold such experiences.

Many more people would have spiritual experiences if they had the necessary presence of mind. We live in the midst of spiritual life. But people do not have the presence of mind to really grasp them; and when they decide to turn their attention to them, the experience is over. Therefore, a thorough exercise is necessary, and in my books you will find how to prepare for this presence of mind, so that you are able to quickly decide in ordinary life situations, to quickly make these decisions. One must get into the habit of making the first decision definitively, and those people who unnecessarily turn every thing around in all directions and keep changing their minds, these loners of life, who muddle around even in ordinary life, they can never make quick decisions and observe mental experiences. They refrain from applying the intended exercises to such experiences. But they have to be there, because only then do the abilities arise in the soul that make the soul suitable for observing such processes. And then it will be able to give itself the answer as to why one cannot approach this mystery by the way of natural knowledge and ordinary mysticism, because this soul life between birth and death is bound to the living body, and one must look at something else that is not bound to ordinary life.

The moment one has acquired the ability to look at spiritual events that are not retained in memory – because this is bound to the body – the question that intrudes into human life and forms the human riddle is also answered. The first question is a philosophical issue, but we cannot get to the bottom of it because we only have it as an ordinary experience; yes, even if the sounds of a street organ suddenly play into our ordinary soul life and we , we can never be sure what drives them up. There is one thing that arises in our ordinary mental life and to which we must relate differently than to all the other ideas and thoughts present in this mental life. It is [...] logical and, so to speak, pure thinking, apart from such impressions of the sounds of the street organ; we can tell right from wrong. Logic is often written only for schools. But these questions cannot be answered with this school logic. If, however, we engage with these things with real logic, then we will also be able to tell, in a certain sense, what is right and what is wrong, quite apart from what is conscious and what is unconscious, what is sympathetic and what is antipathetic.

If we reach into the life of the soul in this way and ask ourselves why this is so, we only experience the answer when we observe with the described and transformed life of the soul, and only then do we realize that forces are at play in our soul that impel us to these considerations, forces that reach into our life from the life we led earlier, before our parents had produced us, forces that we acquired from the spiritual life before birth or before conception. But the one who cannot look into the thinking activity cannot think correctly about the eternal spirit that presents itself in him. Therefore, one can also say what many have already said: the transformation of the soul life happens in such a way that, so to speak, the whole soul life is transformed as if mystically, but this in a higher sense. For what would a musical melody be if memory did not play an effective role in the tones heard?

But it is not memory that plays a part in this soul life, but past reality itself. What has already passed lives again in the present of our soul life. And so, in our pure thinking, mixed with our ordinary soul life, lives the spiritual soul that was already there before we connected with matter. And when we then consider these perceptions and can make them transparent and look at the spirit through the powers of the soul, then we find the earlier earth life looking back, which can be perceived and experienced. We think human experiences that were previously limited in themselves; we see that we can look back to the eternal spirits through spiritual research.

These are the fundamental, the source points of human knowledge, which this kind of knowledge opens up to the one who searches for it, and therein lies the freedom of the human soul. The spiritual researcher who wants to talk about freedom has made the question of human freedom his main subject for decades. Decades ago I wrote a book about human freedom; in this book I showed that one has to ascend from physical strength to pure spiritual strength. This is the second question, which, like the first, is linked to thinking, the question of freedom, which is an experience for everyone but cannot be scientifically investigated. Whatever is bound to natural science will never be able to occur in freedom.

Yet everyone knows what actions are free. I have already said which actions in human life can be called free. Only certain types of actions are free: for example, when we have a being beside us that we love, for what is love in true reality of the soul? Love has different types; it can be selfish, an egoism because it is pleasant to love what is pleasant to love; but even this love can change, it can spiritualize, it can look at other beings, and then selfishness towards the beloved being is completely excluded.

Yes, I was right a quarter of a century ago when I contradicted the commonly held saying “love is blind”. That is completely wrong, because in reality it should be: “love gives sight”. Of course, only those who are able to exclude themselves, who merge with the being they love, who are capable of pursuing the various phases of love to the highest degree, only they can grasp what free actions are. We do many things out of selfishness in life, but it happens that we also perform actions for which we stand just as we do when we are with a beloved being who is sympathetic to us. We will not want to perform actions that we consider wrong before pure thinking and devotion; these actions must be done out of love. We ourselves will only act correctly if we love the spirit.

Freedom and love for action are concepts that cannot be separated, and one cannot ask: Is a person free or unfree? No, because a person is unfree in his will for actions out of necessity, out of instincts, out of the subconscious of his soul life, but he becomes free by being able to hate and love what he considers necessary to do for himself and the world. When one correctly reveals through the transformed soul powers what is needed in love and real freedom by people as a motive for their will, then one can penetrate not through mysticism, but through this transformation of soul powers into spiritual reality, and one discovers that a mysterious power dwells in man, like the germ in the plant for the next plant.

This germ also lives in the human soul; however, it is covered and the person does not have the opportunity to see it; but he has acquired the ability to look back at his intentions and desires. Then one also sees what is going on in a person when he performs acts out of love. In the life of the soul, spiritually and mentally conditioned free acts are at work. Just as a person is rooted in the present life and can perceive what he thinks correctly and incorrectly, so in the future one's earthly life will become something like it was in the past, as we pass through the gate of death and the seed planted for the future remains in us, covered by the life of feeling and willing. We see... [gap], how the germs that we planted in past earthly lives must come to life when we lay down our lives; and we will also glimpse the life before birth. We perceive life in the spirit before birth and after death by looking beyond what is bound to the organism through feeling and willing. We also see that spiritual research is not something mystical, not something that can be brought in comfortably, but it strives in those areas that are the longing areas of all people who want to awaken to life.

There is an unbridgeable abyss between what we call the life of memory and what natural phenomena have built up before us for the first time. By evoking such forces to destroy the image and retain the powers of memory, we plunge into that which must not be plunged into in ordinary life; but in so doing we gain the possibility of plunging into that world which is not intended for ordinary life. This leads us to real spiritual research; it will one day be a science, just as Copernicanism became a science when it broke with the old soul life.

It is understandable that this research is misunderstood from various sides and that it faces hostility. To the mystic it does not appear suitable because spiritual research does not do enough mysticism for him; and others believe that they must rely on natural science alone. But it will come one day, and they will see that spiritual research is a pure science. There is also fear that superstition will revive and that amateurism will occur in serious research. But that is not the case either.

I could only establish the principles, only describe the beginning of these things. But everyone has the opportunity to discover for themselves the areas that are important in practical life and certain human experiences, especially with regard to the present day, that confirm my explanations. I just wanted to say what spiritual research has to do to unlock such areas. It will be misunderstood from left and right, because for this spiritual research it is not necessary to penetrate into new areas, but to penetrate into these areas in a new way, to develop new concepts for the new reality, which are unfamiliar to most people today. But they are not completely foreign to them, because in this spiritual research there are forces that today lie dormant in the human soul, that today awaken in real human life in these difficult times. When they are brought into contact with many things that seem to come from ancient times, when old experiences are awakened in us from time to time, then those concerned know that they must long for something different from what people have offered so far.

The development of humanity must continue. The needs for this are present, we have advanced to a new science, but people do not yet know about it. But they are present, and also the further surroundings, who still deny them today, dream of them and strive in constant longing for this spiritual science, which is not a program and not an arbitrariness, because the spiritual science is only that what people actually want, what they long for, what lies dormant deep in the subconscious, and I am convinced that what spiritual science has to offer is nothing other than the satisfaction of what people long for. And neither people of the present nor people of the future can do without it.

Dear attendees! The day before yesterday, I took the liberty of speaking here about the spiritual-scientific approach to how it should lead to true reality. On the basis of these discussions, I would like to give some applications of this spiritual-scientific view of reality today, some applications in the field of human life, which, it seems to me, are of great importance for life practice, especially in our time, and certainly even more so in the future , not so much because I believe it is necessary to talk about the historical way of thinking in a larger circle, but because I think it is important to present such historical considerations for the practice of life.

The great poet and writer Goethe believed he could judge the value of the historical perspective as it was particularly evident in his time in a way that he expressed in the following words: “The best thing about history is the enthusiasm it arouses in us.” One could be forgiven for thinking that Goethe was dismissing all the possibilities that people otherwise see in historical observation when they seek to answer the recurring question of what one's presence in life is for and what one can learn from the history and behavior of people for one's practical life by observing human life.

Now, however, it must be said that the more one immerses oneself in the historical way of thinking, the more one comes to the conclusion that it can indeed, as perhaps this Goethean saying also means, be a summary of a rich life experience, a rich life wisdom. Especially in our time, one is very often led to a strange impression by the question: What can one gain from history for life? Our catastrophic present must repeatedly suggest to us that significant forces of human life are at work across the whole earth, that experiences are taking place from which we can learn an enormous amount for our lives in relation to the present. And it must also be said that some things are happening today that could give us cause for concern in relation to these questions.

Of the hundreds of cases that could be cited in this regard, I would like to highlight just one that has a certain significance with regard to the present suffering. In August, September and October of 1914, one could very often hear from people who are quite astute, who certainly have a sound judgment in the sense that one can have today – I repeat: in the sense that one today and as it has been formed from the historical and practical-historical point of view - one could therefore hear from these people at the time that this war would certainly not last longer than four, at most six months, given the prevailing conditions.

It must be said that at the time there was no reason to smile or be ironic about such a statement. It was precisely those people who had keenly followed the latest historical events in some area or other, whether economic, socio-political or otherwise, who made such statements, and these were by no means unfounded according to the results of the historical perspective. But today the anxious question arises before us: What have we had to experience in reality itself in the face of such a historically based view? And the further question may follow: What could reality still bring in terms of our lives? - One simply comes to the question: Is there a way to look at our usual way of understanding history in such a way that we can draw conclusions about the present from our immediate life practice?

I would like to give an example from a time long past, the example of a man whose name vouches for the fact that he did not make a judgment out of carelessness and unreason, the judgment of a man whose importance you will immediately recognize when I name, who in 1789 took up his professorship of history at a German university and wanted to discuss what had emerged as the conclusion that he had to draw from the historical consideration that he now had to present to his students. He said: “Perhaps the various European states have worked their way to the point where they resemble the members of a large family, who may still fight among themselves in the future, but who will never be able to tear each other apart again.”

This judgment of a mind, which he expressed in his inaugural address from the depths of his historical research on the eve of the French Revolution, certainly contains an insight from which one can say that reality is quite different from what even the most profound historian could have suspected. For when we consider what followed in Europe, we cannot say that the members of the European family can feud with each other, but not tear each other apart. And yet, Friedrich Schiller, who made this judgment, was right when he took up his professorship of history in Jena.

We see that one does not need to be short-sighted to err when it comes to applying the historical way of thinking to the practice of life. Because the way the question is formulated and the way we have been forced to apply the historical perspective and the historical way of looking at things so far, which has led to this or that result, was probably not suitable for reaching into reality with the right judgment so that this reality can be mastered in such a way that one would also come out of the historical consideration to an appropriate application of one's will in relation to reality.

Today, it cannot truly be said that this question is not extremely important, because today, when it comes to human life in human community, we can no longer embrace only a small perspective. We are in the midst of catastrophic events that have gradually taken hold of the entire earth, and the challenge is to people to not remain within the narrow confines of their own considerations, but to try to get an impulse from historical observation that could extend across the whole earth, at least in a certain direction. There is a feeling, at least in certain circles, that the old way of looking at history – I will pick out just one example, the one by Ranke – would no longer suffice for the demands of the new life.

What has emerged in this respect becomes interesting when one broadens one's perspective, and especially when the observer of history pauses and asks himself: What emerges in the life of the whole person when one looks at the way in which human history is viewed? I will select a characteristic example that can illustrate many things for us today. I will first disregard the fact that the German historian Karl Lamprecht felt how inadequate Ranke's way of thinking is, and that he has made the attempt to motivate historical events in a more inward way, to set the impulses instead of the people, and thus to consider and examine historically more, how the impulses have given rise to events over time.

Of the many things that could be considered in the case of Lamprecht, a summary is to be considered, which he gave when he gave lectures at the beginning of this century in some places in America about his way of understanding the history of his people. I know very well that today there are numerous opponents who consider Lamprecht's way perhaps mistaken, perhaps even enthusiastic. But you must admit that Lamprecht is trying to proceed in the right way by attempting to bring the inner motives and forces in human life into line with the concept of history. His intention in doing so can be seen from the lecture he has given, in which he wanted to show how he conceives the course of German history according to his way of thinking.

Lamprecht also has a special way of explaining the historical development of a people. I will only very briefly point out what Karl Lamprecht came to in the course of his long life. He says: If we look back to the first period of the historical development of the Germans, up to the third century after Christ, we find that all the soul-forces out of which the historical life and the historical interrelations of men arise are based on a certain soul-condition of our ancestors in those ancient times. This soul-condition Karl Lamprecht characterizes as the symbolizing soul-condition. From this state of mind, that social structure then arose through which life itself takes on the character of a symbol, and not only that life becomes a symbolic representation, but also when a leading personality appears, she appears with such a state of mind that one could say this personality is a symbol for the whole tribe.

This is what Karl Lamprecht found from the third to the tenth century; but then it is a completely different state of mind that emerges and makes history. It is now the subjective-typical way in which no longer the symbol is represented, no longer the personality in the symbol, but the type, the representative of the tribe and the tribal nature becomes. Customary rights now become established, and people interact in such a way that they reveal the typical aspects of these circumstances and shape them into a certain social structure.

From the eleventh to the mid-fifteenth century, in the history of mankind, according to Karl Lamprecht's way of presenting it, what he calls the conventional age occurs. No longer does something emerge from the soul and lead to a symbol or type, but individual people, out of tradition or reason, determine the leading persons or leading circles of what should regulate the whole mutual context. This leads to certain conventions and certain judgments. This is the age of knighthood, the age in which the social structure is formed through which the conventions can particularly take hold.

Now it is very strange that Karl Lamprecht places the most significant point in history in the middle of the fifteenth century, because the historical impulse begins with the fifteenth century. Lamprecht says: In the middle of the fifteenth century, the development of German history begins - and he believes that such a course can be applied to the historical development of the entire tribe, that people now no longer appear as a type or conventionally, but that people are now individuals and as such are part of the historical process and the social order. According to Karl Lamprecht, this [individual] age lasted until the eighteenth century, and then the age in which we live began, the [subjective] age, in which more and more is introduced into historical life that people experience and that does not determine them from the outside, but that touches them within. Thus more understandable elements enter into the course of historical knowledge, the educated public begins to play a role, whereas in the symbolic and conventional age one had to deal more with elementary forces that, coming instinctively from within man, influenced the will and the social structure.

From this it can be seen what Karl Lamprecht is striving for; he strives to bring into human history that which conditions the course and development of events in the human soul. He seeks to penetrate deeply into the picture of human society and believes that intensive historical research should only be a preparation for what it is all about. But it should endeavor to penetrate into the human soul in order to show how history is created from the human soul.

If we look at these attempts to observe historical developments in a certain strict way, we will find, when we follow the individual types, that they leave us highly unsatisfied in many respects, especially when we go through the individual epochs as described by Karl Lamprecht. One finds that the same concepts keep cropping up, and while he thinks that the epochs are different, he cannot grasp what he wants to grasp because he is unable to delve into reality itself. Nevertheless, this attempt is interesting because Karl Lamprecht shows us that a way must be sought to an inner consideration of history, to a spiritualization of historical research. And it is very interesting, from this point of view, to compare what another man has presented here on the basis of serious historical endeavor, who seeks to compare the history of his own people with the history of another and does so with a different kind of historical research. From this it will be possible to see how two personalities, one belonging to a particular area of human life and the second to a completely different one, relate to historical reflection.

This other personality is Woodrow Wilson, who, at the very time when Karl Lamprecht was speaking to the Americans about the history of his people, was making an attempt that led to the conclusion that he had reached from a completely different point of view, as he observed the history of his American people. Something very peculiar emerges here. It is of particular interest for everyone to observe a personality who is very distant from us in the same field as Karl Lamprecht. But with Wilson, we encounter a great peculiarity. He looks at the history of his American people, which is quite easy to overlook. But with this short period of American history, Wilson and Lamprecht are – it must be said – in a strange contrast, whereby one feels what is important to both of them.

Wilson wants to grasp what he is supposed to represent and what is characteristic for the development of the American people, and one sees how he, by continuing from one point to the next, actually manages to present the whole history of his people in an extremely plausible way. He shows how wrong all those are who apply a historical way of thinking to America according to the pattern of the way of thinking that comes from England and that they want to apply to American life, without realizing that America has shaped its life under special preconditions. Wilson wants to create pure Americanism in his own way; he points out that it is a striking phenomenon precisely in America that culture in America gradually moved from the east to the west, where it was only fully developed in later times. From the east to the west, people have moved, overcoming the wilderness, and he shows how the development of American history lies in this struggle against the wilderness, how everything that Americans have done in life has come about because the west had to be conquered from the east. American history was not made by politicians or diplomats, but by hunters who felled the trees, and by farmers who moved into the wilderness and cultivated the fields. These were also the most important questions for Americans: questions of agriculture and farming. Wilson views American history from this perspective and comes to a [plausible] solution to these questions by showing how these questions arose and why it has become necessary for this advance to move from east to west.

One has to say that one gets the impression that Wilson, in his own way, describes the history of the American people quite correctly, he knows the relationship between the things he describes and presents. You can feel how he puts something very remarkable into it by seeking to find the salient points in American history; and when he says that it is a characteristic of the American, his mobile eye, his passion to seek adventure, to situations quickly and to carry out something quickly, to do his part for his country, that all these plans should be quickly conceived and executed, then one feels with everything that is in it: He knows where the salient points are.

Woodrow Wilson also spoke about [the method] of his historical presentation in a rather interesting lecture; and I must say that I find something extraordinarily characteristic in this lecture in particular. I should also like to take this opportunity to say that, although I have now told you how Wilson describes the history of his people, Woodrow Wilson is not a personality that one could call sympathetic in any way, and not for subjective reasons, but because I believe that such a way of looking at things as Wilson uses it cannot be fruitful in our parts, even though I have to describe it as I have done today. We will come back to this later. But I don't think that anyone who has heard me speak more than once can accuse me of having formed my opinion of Wilson for some kind of jingoistic reasons, as opposed to the opinion that people here have of him. I have long since formed my opinion of Wilson from “literature” and from his advocacy of American freedom, and in a lecture in Helsingfors I also expressed this opinion in the same way as I have done today. So the war has not changed that at all. This can be proved by documents, and therefore I may well speak about his personality as I have done today.

What struck me as strange about Wilson's historical perspective is contrasted when I compare what he himself said about this historical perspective with some very dear and sympathetic explanations of a personality who was only active in a specific field of historical perspective, but who is infinitely sympathetic to me because of the special impulses that could come from her. This is the great master Herman Grimm, who long ago delivered his verdict on how history should be viewed. It is remarkable that one can take individual sentences from Grimm and insert them into Wilson's presentation without interrupting the train of thought. And that one can again insert sentences from Wilson into Grimm's essays; and one then sees that they correspond to what Wilson said.

This experiment can be done, and I consider it to be tremendously significant for the thinking of a certain type of world view and for the way of thinking of the present. It [calls itself practical] believes that it can immerse itself everywhere in all practical realities and in all concepts and is proud of how far it has come in terms of the practical view of life. And yet the present is thoroughly theoretical and stuffed full of intellectual concepts. If someone today listens to an argument from any side, he pays attention only to the content, he follows only the pure wording; this is particularly evident in the present and is very important with regard to what has been said, because everyone must realize that two people can say the same thing according to the wording, but it is quite different in terms of meaning. Theory does not yet account for everything in life, nor does mere intellectual content. But there is something in the way a personality engages with social life that is more than the content of its sentences, that is, the theory; it is how the personality in question speaks, the way it comes out of life and how it comes out, what the personality in question has to say.

And in this example, something very remarkable emerges. When I look at Lamprecht's way of speaking, and I am not speaking from a national point of view, but only from the point of view of objective science – when I look at Lamprecht's view of history, then, despite all the mistakes, I see how people struggle hard, how they struggle hard to achieve what they want to achieve. Perhaps he has fewer concepts than Wilson, but he fights, and you can tell from the way he speaks that the struggling soul acquires from sentence to sentence what it perhaps presents as a false view, but what it has gained through experience. And this is particularly the case with Herman Grimm's brilliant treatment [in the field of art]. And I say to myself, despite all objective appearances: The statements that are dear to me and that I find in Lamprecht as well as in Grimm make a completely different impression in Wilson. I ask myself, and dare to answer: everything that comes out in Wilson is as if he were instinctively driven to the right thing, but it never gives the impression that it is his experience, his striving and It only gives the impression that, although it is directed towards practical reality, it does not emerge from the depths of the soul, but as if what Wilson expresses were a self-suggestion, a kind of subconscious. I believe I acquired the right to use that expression here yesterday. Wilson does not present himself in the same way [in his view of history], as if he were fathoming the soul bit by bit, but it gives the impression as if he were receiving revelations from the depths of his soul, as if he were possessed by his teachings, as if his inner self were suggesting them to him.

It is very strange to see two personalities in historical life who are so different in this way, like Lamprecht and Grimm on the one hand and Wilson on the other. Furthermore, it is also interesting to look at other perspectives. You can't really call them historical, but you can summarize them under the historical considerations.

One could also cite other, Asian observers of life; I will just mention Rabindranath Tagore, who, among other things, has provided a comprehensive account of the spirit of Asia. He also spoke about the spirit of Japan, but something quite different emerges from his account. It emerges that this man, who, just as Lamprecht and Grimm in German and Wilson in American life, is steeped in Asian life, must be seen as an educated representative of Asian culture. If you look at this man's life, you get the impression that he wants to explore the content, the original source of Indian and Japanese life, placing less emphasis on what Japan and India have experienced in modern times and instead investigating what the actual sources are. He has a unique way of admiring human culture; Rabindranath Tagore says that there should not really be any history for his people, the human soul should remain untouched in its inner life by what moves people in the immediate present. Its mode of expression extends across the whole earth, and those who look more deeply know that our great catastrophe depends, more than one might think, not on the things on which it is believed to depend so much today, but on the spiritual impulses of the peoples dwelling across the whole earth.

This is symptomatically evident in the way in which it is presented, which seeks to stand out from the generality and to present what must apply in the life of the generality. And if we look at what is closest to us, the historical conception of Karl Lamprecht, we find that almost every chapter is characterized in the same way and in the same terms. We find that the concepts do not descend into reality. But why is that so? The answer to this question is extremely important. Lamprecht wants to observe the human soul and wants to explore how history is made out of the impulses of the human soul. To do this, he needs to understand the laws of the human soul that show us how the human soul manifests itself in social life. And there he describes the actions in such a way that it is impossible to apply them to other areas of observation that are directly related to life and to come to a correct conclusion; in a word, one finds: you don't get anywhere!

And so the question may well be raised: what it would be like if those researchers of reality, of whom we spoke the day before yesterday, whose knowledge is built up in a completely different way from natural science and mysticism, and which must first be acquired by the soul when the soul is in such a state of consciousness that it is as opposed to the ordinary state of consciousness as day consciousness is to dream consciousness – if those researchers of reality look at history from their insights? In this short time I can only give the results, but they are found through the method I described here the day before yesterday; and the following can be said first: to the superficial observer, human life proceeds in two states, sleeping and waking, and by studying the two states, sleeping and waking, one seeks to understand the entire course of human life.

But things are not that simple, and much harm has been done to the present worldview by the idea that things are much simpler than they really are. In reality, things are quite different, and even what we call the state of sleep, in which our consciousness is dulled, is quite different. Because this sleeping consciousness does not completely disappear during daytime life; it is not only present from falling asleep to waking up, but it also shows itself to the serious soul researcher in real daylight, because we are only awake for part of our soul life. We are awake for our perceptual life and for our imaginative life, but we are not awake for our emotional life and for our will life. The one who seriously studies the most important state, from waking up to falling asleep, will find that the clarity of consciousness, the strength of consciousness, that is present in relation to the life of imagination, is not present in relation to the life of feeling and is especially not present in relation to the life of will.

The way I mean it here has also been noted by other spiritual researchers and by many other thinkers who have wrestled with reality. For example, the Swabian researcher Friedrich Theodor Vischer pointed out how closely all passions, the emotional life, all affects of life in waking consciousness are related to the dream life, and we may say: our feelings are not present in the brightness of consciousness during waking life in consciousness as perceptions or thoughts, but they are only present as feelings, like the images of dreams in the sleeping consciousness; and during sleep consciousness, we remember the images when we are awake. Then the dream image lies in our waking consciousness.

Nothing of the emotional life of the dream comes through clearly to us either; we only have the idea of it in us, but what has actually penetrated into us is not the feeling that we have dreamt; for this gives rise to the illusion in us as if we had the feeling in our soul consciousness, but we do not have it, but it extends from the twilight into the light and evokes the idea, so that we often confuse what we have experienced with what we have dreamed. We also believe that it is the same with the life of the will, but in reality it is this: what protrudes from the actual volitional processes into our world of imagination is that we can form concepts and thoughts about what we do, but what is actually connected with our organization and our soul life eludes consciousness. The actual content of the will, the way it is carried out, from the beginning to the effect (to the movement of the hand, to the grasping of an object), is a thoroughly unconscious process, just as the unconscious processes are in sleep. Therefore, we must say: our waking life is not just a waking life, but also a state of the subconscious, a kind of dream life that extends into our ordinary waking consciousness.

What I have now discussed arises from truly conscientious and serious observation of the soul, at least to a certain extent in the case of ordinary psychology, of which I spoke here the day before yesterday. When the soul succeeds in penetrating into another consciousness that looks into another life, then this consciousness succeeds in arriving at a different observation of the soul. Then, in the depths of the soul, in the form of imaginations [which, however, are not our abstract ideas and thoughts, but which penetrate into life], the feeling that is coming to life awakens, then one knows that what one is brightening up is not present in full reality in the ordinary consciousness, but only in the sleeping consciousness. One must look with intense strength of feeling through this mode of cognition if one wants to bring this feeling and the subconscious of the soul before the ordinary consciousness, and one must make even greater efforts to bring up the act of will as such.

It follows that what we feel and want in everyday life, what forms the impulses for us and the soul content of all individual people, is connected and wells up in the life that unfolds between birth and death, and that these impulses carry us through life, from person to person, and we experience them in dreams or in sleep. But these are also the historical impulses, and it will be a significant insight for the historian of the future when one will recognize the character of these forces living in the people, when one will no longer believe that what occurs in history can be understood in the same way as in ordinary life, for it takes place as if in a dream, as if in the subconscious, so that it does not come to the full and clear consciousness of the human being; he simply does not know it in ordinary life.

This view, which will have to penetrate from spiritual scientific research into historical observation, and only then will historical observation be infallible, only then will it be effective and in accordance with reality. For he who wants to research history today does not think about the fact that history cannot be researched in the old way. The science of history has only emerged in the last century, during which the foundations of scientific knowledge have been developed and the method by which natural science has led to such brilliant results, by bringing humanity so far in terms of external life practice, has been developed. Historical observation has been grasped and developed according to the model that is common, correct and justified in natural science. It is regarded as a kind of ideal natural science and attempts are made to extend this way of looking at things to history as well. Lamprecht had something like this in mind in the background; he said that a way of thinking that is not intended for history is decisive for it, but that it has only emerged from the natural scientific way of looking at things.

The one who has this knowledge, which I have developed, who has recognized that this knowledge relates to daytime consciousness as daytime consciousness relates to sleep consciousness, the one who, from this point of view, looks at the course of historical activity and penetrates into the course of of historical wisdom, it becomes clear that this behavior of our soul is fully justified in relation to nature, in relation to the thought with which we gain knowledge of nature, but that this old way of looking at things is not suitable for judging the course of human life as history. But this approach to the course of historical events is also characteristic of the whole nineteenth-century way of looking at things: people do not realize that the impulses are rooted in the unconscious course of life and that they cannot be grasped with the ordinary mind. If one bears this in mind, then one comes to wonder: what must take the place of what is today?

Herman Grimm made some very correct remarks about this and he understood many things very correctly in relation to the history of mankind and felt very clearly how the spirit of science can emerge again. He thought - and he discussed this subject very thoroughly with me - that his ideal would be to look at human history in such a way that the impulses present themselves as a world-effective imagination. It is not correct that the impulses present themselves in this way, but nevertheless Grimm has instinctively come up with a very curious fact. He first asks himself: What, for example, is Gibbon's way of presenting history? Gibbon wrote the history of the decline of the Roman Empire, and his way of looking at it can be compared to the [scientific] way of knowing of the present day [it is the application of knowledge of nature to history]. Gibbon describes the decline of the Roman Empire and all the forces that worked to bring about its downfall. He does not grasp what was an emerging impulse at the time, because he cannot grasp emerging impulses with the intellect and the scientific way of looking at things. Thus he can grasp only that which does not make historical life, but only that which has arisen when historical impulses have already expired.

But history is not written in this way; historical life is transformed into a corpse, because first the impulses on which it is based must be awakened and discovered. If history is to be understood as something living, then it cannot be grasped in terms of natural history. But Gibbon never succeeded in grasping something correctly like the rising forces of Christianity, which, as living forces, extend into the history of that time. Therefore, we must be clear about how to grasp real historical forces, and we see that we have to go back to what is subconscious in human life, what plays into the mind and will in the way I have presented it. Therefore, one can never grasp [what is fruitful in history] with the usual scientific method, nor the forces that lead to the practice of life, with which one can face life and with which one can judge: life has taught us this and this.

Only the observing consciousness, in which the new kind of knowledge is immersed, is what we call the only real way of looking at history, which will no longer say that different new states will be founded that may feud with each other but can no longer tear each other apart. This is also a prerequisite for history to provide a real basis for life. It must become so, because only in this way does history flow into our lives, the historical view flows into us. We see what really was through a real historical perspective, even if it is initially as inadequate as I have described it. One can grasp the spirit only by plunging into its depths, by seizing with clear light that which otherwise remains in the subconscious; otherwise one does not touch anything with the theory, as it is imitated by the natural-historical approach; with theory one does not penetrate into real life.

One can easily test the correctness of this assertion; just try it: put a pure theorist, an astute person who can think quite well about nature and the course of human knowledge, who is a good economist and social theorist, into life, and this is the best method to destroy what is good. This can be done with a theorist in social and ethical life and it will be seen: such theoretical minds work as destructive forces; they are capable of surveying life, but never of working fruitfully because their way of looking at things is not based on a correct view of history. And Lamprecht's view of history also confirms this view.

But how the type of knowledge meant here is submerged in the real impulses, I would like to show with an example. I know that it sounds extremely paradoxical when I say this, but I have said before: what Copernicus set out in his world view was also regarded as paradoxical and ridiculous. The world view reaches into those impulses that otherwise remain unconscious. For years I have pursued this idea in lectures and said that one would then come to a fruitful practical conception of history. But I will only hint at something in principle with two examples, which should lead a little further and which also reach into everyday life.

For those who look at history, the historical epoch that extends to the middle of the fifteenth century, but begins with the seventh or eighth century BC, is offered. It is remarkable that there is a similarity in the way the human soul is formed, how the human soul becomes social through mental powers that remain essentially the same from the seventh century BC to the mid-fifteenth century AD. Only then does a rapid change occur, but we do not notice it today because our attention is not focused on it and because some people live by the saying: Just as nature does not make leaps, so too does life. But that is not true, nature and life make leaps everywhere, we just do not notice how enormous they are, and we do not focus our attention on the great turning points of life.

If you do not penetrate into the great transformation, if you cannot see it, which occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century, then you also do not see the most important thing, you do not see the difference between these two ages, one of which is the one in which we are fully immersed and which will perhaps last another hundred years. The whole of human life between the seventh and eighth centuries BC and the fifteenth century AD is such that souls develop differently than in later times. I would like to say: in that older age, the human mind is developed much more instinctively, it therefore works more correctly, as a review of that time proves, and how everything was developed then, for example Roman law, which is still of great importance today.

Only if one knows which individual ideas emerged from Roman law, from the uniquely instinctive mind, will one also understand that at that time the mind worked in the soul [like a sense]. The social structure is also highly developed in Roman life with all its characters, and instinctive mind also worked during the decline of the Roman Empire.

It was only in the middle of the fifteenth century that reason began to operate in a different sense, that consciousness of reason began to operate in its own way. This age not only begins to carry a new psychic organization within itself, but it also develops it further, and thoughts are set with full awareness of the things.

We no longer understand anything of the inner impulses of those who lived at that time because we do not consider how the laws, state institutions and state formations of that time came about. It is therefore assumed that educated humanity, which is relevant for cultural development, no longer came to these institutions through the instinctive workings of the mind. But it is precisely when we consider this picture that the depth from which human activity arises becomes apparent, and when we follow the historical documents to study the human development of peoples and the laws they have created, then we can apply the conclusion to ourselves.

I will give another example, which covers an even longer period of time. It may also seem paradoxical, especially if I could give the details in question. But there is not enough time to point out what would result from research in spiritual science, and I can only briefly mention the results in general. The age that I have just described, which is still in contemporary history, is followed, going back from the seventh and eighth centuries, by another one in which the soul was in a completely different state, but which, according to research using the methods of spiritual science, covers a much longer period of time than can be documented by our records. We come to a different epoch from the one I have just characterized, which begins with the seventh and eighth centuries BC and ends in the middle of the fifteenth century. If we look at the events of this earlier epoch from a spiritual scientific point of view, as far back as we can trace the time with our eyes and with a seeing consciousness, we come to a time that was very significant in many respects.

Today, in the sense of the old method of developmental theory, research is being conducted into historical application, which is expressed in the attempt to create an analogue. One looks at the progress of historical development, the progress of humanity [as an organism], one compares what took place in prehistoric times with infancy, later times with adolescence, and then, when you apply it from the earlier time to the present time, you come to say how we have “come so gloriously far” and how we have developed our minds compared to our ancestors. But all these analogies fall apart when we look at them through the lens of spiritual science. For then it becomes clear that people in the earlier periods of human development faced life in a completely different way than they do today.

Scientific theory has brought with it many errors and, above all, has created a certain prejudice with regard to the historical development of humanity. And no attention is paid to how the human soul has changed over time, how it has taken on a different form over the centuries. What people had in earlier times is regarded as if it all came from soul impulses that are always the same. If you believe this, you don't know how the human soul has changed, which was connected to human life in a completely different way back then. Today we only know of such a connection in the youth and childhood of a person. We know how the soul is closely connected with the development of life and how what is called spiritual development often depends on the historical course of life. But by the twentieth year this ceases for the human being; the close connection that can be scientifically traced [of the spiritual-soul with the development of the physical-bodily] ceases, and the spirit begins to develop, and this period then comes to an end by the twentieth year.

It was quite different in the early days of humanity. There were times in the history of humanity, which I have already mentioned, when the human soul remained spiritually connected to the body, quite unlike today. One result of spiritual research is that, during their lifetime, people remained dependent on bodily consciousness, except for the way they experience bodily processes, and today we are discovering certain events in human history from which we can still see today that certain ideas, which have not been examined in literary history, but which resonate in some old sages, have retained their old originality.

Then comes the second age, which can be compared with the age of man up to the age of forty, but this is already the age which has already adopted a definite culture and of which we know that the people of that time were already dependent on many conditions of life, which penetrate into their lives as ideas. And here we come to the human age, which begins with the seventh to eighth century BC; people experience the forces of the body until the age of forty, which now already allows our individuality to decline from the age of 35 onwards. If this [Greco-Roman] period is not only considered from an external point of view, but is studied in depth, we find that it is based on the fact that man experiences life with his consciousness, whether this occurs in the course of history or in the life of an individual, up to the age of forty, when external circumstances influence the spiritual life. Today, we no longer achieve this; we only experience fully up to the age of 27 or 28.

Thus history, if we follow the historical life, shows us, one might say in a few words, that humanity as such is becoming ever younger. But this means a great deal for a correct understanding of the life of humanity. At first, humanity became so old that it, as peoples, experienced in common what happens in human life up to the age of thirty, and only then came the younger age. Today, humanity lives a much younger age throughout life than in the past, and therein lies the real power that seems incomprehensible, and also the processes of human history, which seem to want to be incomprehensible to us, such as Roman law or the Greek world view, art and the social life of that time, which correspond to a much older age.

We find it understandable, however, when we know that the human experience in his soul was quite different then and that man today can no longer experience the same. Today, man is dependent on grasping with his soul that which life no longer gives him, and since the middle of the fifteenth century, man has been confronted with the necessity of grasping with the consciousness of the intellect that which life no longer gives man and which cannot be found through the inner impulses of the soul. That is why we only now understand how we have to reach into the reality of the soul's life in order to grasp the connections.

I have only characterized the general aspects in general; one can also pick out only the everyday events and then see the individual events in this light. But the picture of what is spreading around us and what I have characterized also emerges in a very strange way. We look to the Asian East, to Rabindranath Tagore, how he understands the spirit and how he views the history of the Indians and the Japanese people. He wants the old roots to remain, and does not want the foreign spirit to enter, which is different from the old spirit and enters after the period that ends with the age from the seventh to the eighth century. Nevertheless, he is a fine spiritual man of the Orient, and despite the fact that he has absorbed everything that the object itself can offer, with all its sympathies and impulses, he has his own point of view in his understanding of tradition.

If we look more closely, we see that life today has forged a common bond across the whole earth, despite the different worldviews that often clash and interfere with each other. We also see minds like Lamprecht and Grimm wrestling with what has been developing as individuals since the fifteenth century and seems more and more alive from year to year. These are the driving impulses for our spiritual and moral approach. The humanities scholar does not need to create new concepts; he finds the concepts that can be applied to the age in which we live. He is also not looking for new ideals, for fantasies; he is only seeking to grasp that in which he can truly immerse himself, and he knows that human coexistence must develop. But we say to ourselves with regard to the Orient: there is something at work that we are not allowed to participate in, because we would not get along if we thought we could imitate it in Central Europe. What occurs in the Orient and in our regions is quite different, and one understands it only if one can grasp it in the way described. But then one must say: it is as if someone develops from childhood to the age of thirty. And only from this point of view can one understand it if one wants to face these realities.

But what we encounter in America is a kind of anticipation of a state, as if a child were senile, that is, a state that is quite good for later in life but not in youth, when it is an unhealthy state; and therefore, what works in the sense of this perspective will only be conscious in his head, to which life is not actually connected. Wilson's restless eye can be compared to the calm gaze of Herman Grimm, in which the calmness of the soul is expressed, emerging from within, moving from experience to experience and connecting everything with its own breath. When a person is possessed by his inner being, then the eye does not become calm, then everything he says becomes apt, forceful. What is to be developed out of the spirit is developed out of the body. We must pay attention to this difference, we must see it if we want to understand our soul and ethical and historical work, especially in today's difficult times, when we shape through direct experiences of other soul impressions on the historical ground and create social connections. We certainly cannot accept what is Asian, nor what is American, even though it must be understood.

The European nations could also be characterized, but one must delve below the surface, and then only can one extract what are the historical impulses from those forces that otherwise work unconsciously. But if one recognizes this, then one will also have real historical considerations that give people maturity for life. And when that happens, then such discussions will no longer be considered paradoxical, and one will really have something from history that can work in one's life. Placed in life, one will be able to say that one has grown to meet the demands of one's position by being able to see life from true and full reality and not just from the surface.

It is remarkable that Goethe was the first to coin the phrase about the value of history in awakening enthusiasm. But he only wanted to describe the concept with it, because the soul concepts are not given from history, but are brought forth from the unconscious depths. However, since they are instinctive, they enter the emotional life only to sink back down into feelings and impulses; and enthusiasm will again be able to arise from that which has been seen through a true historical method of observation, and then, through feeling enthusiasm and through a true historical method of observation, we will face life for the first time. I know that today this way of looking at history sounds highly paradoxical to many, and that most people do not agree with the conclusion that correct social thinking and ethical action can arise from such a consideration, which is based on the historical consideration of the seeing consciousness. I know that today we are seen as fantasists, whose way of thinking cannot yet be easily grasped.

But I would like to ask a question: how many people before the fourteenth century could have imagined, based on the concepts of the time, that our Earth would experience such a movement as we know today? No one who lived at that time knew. We now look at many things differently, since we can see the big picture, and in the near future we will be able to see much more. This will happen often in human life, and our view of things will broaden. We will have to take into account our old sympathies and antipathies and we will see that everything that has befallen humanity will be balanced out when we understand what humanity wants, and that this cannot be linked to the way we have thought up to now.

It is important that people learn this so that humanity can develop forward. People must learn new perceptions, ideas and concepts, especially new thinking, which balances out with the earlier concepts and ideas. The former may already be the only decisive thing for some people today, but the latter will be the important thing, because it will reach into the future and be fundamental for life and it will found our life for the future. Therefore, I believe that actions will arise from such considerations and that some may still come to ideas and feelings that are still considered paradoxical, perhaps even strange, today, but which will later, albeit reluctantly, be recognized. People will come to the conclusion that we have to learn anew from one day to the next and have to familiarize ourselves with a new way of thinking, feeling and willing for the near future, in order to be able to settle into this time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exercises of the will can be characterized as follows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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