The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of eight lectures given at the recent Congress at Stuttgart, Rudolf Steiner explained what effect the agnosticism of the last century had upon the whole life of humanity today. As a result of natural science agnosticism taught that humanity was only able to spin round the world a web of ‘causality’. What lies at the back, what is unknown, what cannot be reached by our senses—all this must for ever remain hidden from human wisdom; and most especially does everything psycho-spiritual withdraw itself from the reach of knowledge.

Agnosticism has seized hold of science, education and social life, and it affects millions of men who very often are quite unaware of the fact. It then lays hold of the realm of ideas, separating this from the world of true reality upon which alone humanity should have its stand; thus creating an inner division which weakens the soul forces of men. Through this division, licence is given to all the lower instincts, as we can recognize to be prominently the case in the world today. The realm of feeling also becomes unsatisfied; unfertilized by ideas it degenerates, hardens and becomes sentimental, or else it is engulfed in the life of elementary instincts. This shows itself particularly in art, which is either sweetly unreal or else is naturalistic. True art creates its own style, and true style can only come from men's supersensible experiences. Agnosticism robs us of the truths which must live in art.

Upon our will power, also, it has had an evil influence, for it has killed moral impulses and has allowed what is instinctive to become master. Thus do we find today that thinking is lax, feeling is dulled, and willing is made void through disbelief; and, as a result, what is animal in man rises to the surface. In the religious life also men feel a void, and seek support in organized streams like that of the Catholic Church, or else in some oriental direction. These, however, can no longer give to men the right content because they have their life in past ages.

In modern industry we can see an immediate effect of scientific thought. Here men do not live within what they practise. Modern systems of labour consist in ruling out the human side of man and making him into a machine.

Void also today as a fruit of disbelief are all social impulses, and all these facts work back on men and have led them to a certain ‘easy-going’ condition of their social life.

If one wishes to compare or contrast the ascending with the declining powers of the day, one observes that the life of expression is not sufficiently active and does not carry on with enthusiasm what is required. People would rather not take up any new piece of work; they prefer asking if its need is already established, rather than trying to prove its worth in life.

In the world of education, teachers try to place things before children in such a way that they need not be altered when the children grow up. But what is presented to children should be so given that it develops with the child during the course of its life.

It is in these facts that we can see how the seeds of agnosticism bear fruit in the life of man.

By giving an aperçu of his own striving and searching in his outlook upon the world, Rudolf Steiner showed how the origin of Anthroposophy can be found historically, as it were. During the period that this searching led to an individual grasp of life, during the eighties, agnosticism was there in opposition, arousing two necessary questions: Does science give to men what their souls require? and What is it that the souls of men require? Already, in 1885, Rudolf Steiner gave in his book Theories of Knowledge according to Goethe's Outlook, as an answer: We have a science which corresponds to no one's seeking and a scientific craving that nobody satisfies.

Now in Goethe we have another kind of striving. The old science was founded entirely upon nature apart from life. (In a certain way this is also true of today's science.) In his Research into the Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe developed a mode of thinking which was able to penetrate into the nature of the plant. A friend called this ‘objective thinking,’ a thinking which linked itself to the object of perception, and Goethe himself acquiesced in this idea. He could not get so far in his observation of animals and of humanity as he could in his observation of plants; in spite of this, however, he wrote his Metamorphosis of Animals, and also discovered the metamorphosis of the human skeleton.

The question suggests itself: Why could Goethe command one realm of nature and not another?

Before this question is answered we will consider the realm of knowledge in detail. What happens in a man when he gains knowledge of anything? To this question belongs the fateful one: Are.the concepts arrived at through the process of knowing (thinking) merely images through which the world processes are reflected without being affected by them? In other words, Is thinking merely formal or is it a reality?

Through our perceptions, sense-impressions enter us passively. Is anything essential added to sensory perception through thought or are we simply onlookers who are useless in the world process when we add thinking to perception? One arrives here at the whole opposition between thinking and perceiving. Sensory perception is absolutely passive. In ordinary consciousness sensory perception and thinking are always mixed up in each other, but if one separates them with firmness the one from the other, thinking is then alone actually present. One is using one's whole soul activity for thought, quite shut off from the outer impression.

In the 19th century there was the conviction that one could arrive at the purest thinking quite passively by learning from the pictures which are actually present and which are only an image of reality. By a further development of this view one is led to quite imaginary conceptions, such as that of the Ding an sich. (Kant's theory of the ‘Thing in itself.’) Opposed to this kind of thought which, on the whole, ruled philosophy and the remaining sciences, Rudolf Steiner attained the realization that the outer world does not hold the entire contents of reality, allowing itself to be reproduced as conceptions, but that man through his sensory perceptions lives only on one side of reality. And it is in order to bring into this outer world of reality what only comes forth from his inner nature that man is born into the world.

He has expressed this view in his book, the title of which already gives the meaning, Reality and Science.

In thought we possess something in which we are wide awake, in which we must actually be when it comes to pass. ‘In thinking we bring world happenings to a point,’ he says, in The Philosophy of Freedom. It is only in the process of thinking that we can reach reality. And for a true meaning of Anthroposophy we could use a motto which Goethe gives in his World Outlook: ‘To overcome sensory perception through the spirit is the goal of art and science. Science overcomes sensory perception by releasing it entirely into spirit; art overcomes the sense-perceptions when it engrafts into these the whole world of the spirit.’

In his book The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner wished to present ‘the results of spiritual observation according to the methods of natural science.’ This was the antithesis to the object of Edward von Hartmann's book, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, which presents ‘metaphysical results according to the methods of inductive natural science’. This title implies a conclusion drawn from what you perceive to what is not perceptible, and this can never lend to true spiritual knowledge. Just as facts in natural science are observable, so must psychic-spiritual facts be accessible to spiritual observation also. Through thought we can unite ourselves not only to the outer world, but also to our I-consciousness, and in I-consciousness lies human freedom. Agnostic natural science has veiled this experience and then has disowned it. But the way of observing it must be conducted differently from the way in which we observe outer nature. Instead of relying on sensory experience, as in observing nature, we must look out upon what stands before our I-consciousness, and at the same time develop our thinking just as it has been developed by the things of the outer world. Thinking itself must bring about the state of freedom, in that it is not void of contents while ceasing to rely upon sensory perception, but that it fills itself with the contents of the human soul. The methods of spiritual science are nothing else than the experience of the content which is there when the human soul loosens itself from the rivets of outer objects, and can still have the strength to experience something. The Philosophy of Freedom confines itself to investigating the human being himself as a free being in the physical world. But even here we already embark upon supersensible research, and little by little the way opens up for further penetration. Most particularly we learn thus to know the imponderable nature of the human soul; in investigating the problem of freedom we enter upon the search into what is supersensible.

We must, above all else, come to an understanding of what the impulse for freedom springs from, otherwise we do not stand on firm ground in our knowledge, but experience an undermining of it which makes us unfitted for life. For action, a philosophy of freedom is required; but, to gain this, supersensible investigation is imperative.

Whoever, during the last third of the 19th century, wished to disentangle the problem of freedom had to reckon with Nietzsche. To Nietzsche perception of the outer world was an experience of inner pain, for it was to him tainted by the conceptions of natural science. He felt that the world could give mankind no satisfaction and therefore he sought everywhere for elements in human culture which would lift him above this pain. These elements he found in two instances: on the one hand, in the art of Richard Wagner and on the other, in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Both seemed to him to be in accord with his own sympathy with the spirit of the Greeks. Later on he became a fighter against the lies of his time, a fanatic champion for the reality of the outer sense-perceptible world which caused him such anguish. Thus did he become entirely influenced by the scientific outlook upon the world. He was deeply affected by such sentences as: ‘Science ends when supernaturalism begins’ (Du Bois Raymond). What weighed on Nietzsche's soul penetrated his whole manhood. Feeling and emotion seemed to burn up his thoughts. He wanted to add inner experience to outer perceiving. This is expressed in his Zarathustra. If men remain men, then must they be overcome by pain. Therefore must they rise to be supermen. But for his supermen he had no content. When the terrible idea arose in him of the ‘eternal repetition of the same’, then came to Nietzsche the appalling tragedy of his life. He is wrecked upon the rock on which agnosticism builds its faith as absolute correct knowledge. To begin with he could still live in isolation, but our age demands that men live as social beings. Nietzsche lacked the proper weapons for his battle against agnosticism. He was never able to win a really deep relationship to modern natural science in his outlook upon the world; to him it seemed coarse and repulsive, and, therefore, he arrived at a transformation of Darwinism into the teaching of the superman. In him there lived the impulse towards an altruistic striving, but in an unhealthy organism, an organism capable of allowing him to soar to the heights, but at the same time an unhealthy one.

One must come to an understanding with Nietzsche if one wishes to understand freedom, and this is what Rudolf Steiner has done in his book Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Epoch.

In order to build up an outlook suitable to our epoch, we have to reckon with another symptom.

At the same time that the Philosophy of Freedom appeared there also came out Haeckel's Monism as a Link between Religion and Science. Rudolf Steiner saw that here was a sure ground from whence the investigator can penetrate into the spiritual worlds. All investigation must be formed on monistic lines. But what is to be understood by monism? How can nature and spirit be grasped in a monistic way? Upon these questions Haeckel, the great experimentalist, was quite elementary. From Goethe we can get a better answer. He shows that nature must be understood poetically, for art is the revealer of nature's secrets. The world is not fitted to surrender its nature to merely logical thinking.

It was in his investigation of the plant world that Goethe was especially great. One can understand why this was so if one notes that Goethe, in a certain sense, was on the road to becoming a sculptor. The leaning towards sculpture, existing in the depths of his nature, made him a modeller in his working out of his Metamorphosis of the Plant. What is plastic in plant formation he grasped through this unexpressed talent for sculpture. One cannot look plastically upon animal and human form in the same way that one can regard the plant world. This comes to expression in the fact that we are repelled by plastic reproductions of plants, which is not the case in regard to human and animal forms. The plant is really a work of art in Nature, so that one is not able to transcend its natural form, and on this account the plant does not allow itself to be reproduced in art.

In Goethe, however, there lived a restrained, hidden plastic faculty which did not culminate in him in sculpture, but which appears in his dramas. He could not give it shape in clay, but in nature he finds something which satisfies his instinct for what is plastic and this is the world of plants. In inorganic nature we measure, count and weigh, and this breaks up form. Goethe saw the plant as a unity. He saw this unity as that which Anthroposophy calls the plant's etheric body. We find this etheric also in men and animals and the sculptor aims at bringing it to expression in the sculptured form. Yet someone who, like Goethe, holds back his talent in regard to the plastic art, can through this restraint discover certain secrets in nature. In this way Goethe arrived at his doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants.

In a similar, if in a more naive, way did Haeckel look upon the animal world. In him also existed ‘imaginative thinking,’ and this he applied to animals. He spoke of the ‘soul’ in the animal world, and by this he meant that whoever during many years had watched the lower animals must perceive this ‘germ soul.’ There is consequently a certain relationship between the outlook of Haeckel upon animals (soul) and the outlook of Goethe upon plants (form).

Now it is particularly interesting to notice that Haeckel also, in a dilettante way, was something of a painter, and this proclivity gave him an understanding for what the animal world conjures to the surface as colour. He has produced the book Nature's Art Forms. He lived with colour as Goethe lived with form. What belongs to animals has a far more intimate connection with colour than what is expressed in form in the plant world. The colour of flowers belongs to what is outer, to sun and air, but with animals colour is bound up with what is of the soul, of the instincts, and so on. In Anthroposophy this is named the ‘astral body.’ Haeckel's understanding of the animal kingdom is thus connected with his latent talent for painting. He did not conduct his studies in any outward way but, like Goethe, from a latent feeling for art. Nietzsche could not press on to all this for lack of nature knowledge, and so he could not have the right relation to his epoch.

Anthroposophy maintains a due regard to this nature knowledge, and, when anything is spoken from out the springs of Spiritual Science, it must always be referred to that other fount. Agnostic methods of thinking must be put aside in all research, but what Rudolf Steiner induces is a closer agreement with Haeckel in so far as he was the first to create a philosophy adapted to our period. What Goethe accomplished for botany and Haeckel for zoology, Rudolf Steiner achieves for anthropology.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy aims to go beyond sensory perception, towards perception of things spiritual. It aims to progress from the intellectual approach—which we have to use in everyday life and in science as we know it—to other forms of soul activity, activities that permit insights to be gained into worlds that, while they are in evidence in the realm of the senses, nevertheless are not immediately accessible to the senses and to the intellect. Such inner soul activities are alive in what I have referred to in my written works as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

When the term Imagination is used, it should not be taken to mean something vague and mysterious that is arrived at by abandoning the insights to be gained by clear, reasoned thinking and instead concentrating on something dimly stirring in the soul. On the contrary, it should be taken to mean something achieved by making full use of the insights gained with the rational mind, while also developing the mind further by activating latent soul forces. Such soul activity does not come to life within the usual intellectual concepts but initially does so in a world of images. Further development should, however, bring such images to expression in concepts that are as lucid as the insights gained by the intellect. In my books, I have described the spiritual exercises that are necessary to develop soul forces that in ordinary life and for ordinary science are hidden, in order to achieve imaginative perception.

I should like to begin today by giving you a brief picture of the imaginative perception that can be achieved by the method described in my books.

This imaginative perception is not to be found in the abstract ideas formed in our ordinary logical thinking. On the other hand, neither should it be thought that such perception is a matter of mere fancy. Let us start by looking at it in quite an everyday way. Consider the type of experience a person has when memories are recalled from the dim recesses of the mind, and also when such memories come up as though of their own accord, triggered by one thing or another. Clearly picture in your mind's eye such a recalled memory, for this will also be the way in which Imaginations are alive within the soul. They are alive with the same, and indeed often much greater, intensity.

By the way they appear, by their specific content, memories reveal the nature of an experience a person may have had years ago. Imaginations on the other hand, if they are genuine cognitive Imaginations called up in the soul, will be found not to relate primarily to personal experience. They may be exactly the same in character as memories, but they relate to a world that is not accessible to the physical senses, though nevertheless entirely objective, a world alive and active within the sense-perceptible world, but not revealing itself through the organs of sensory perception.

This is how one might characterize the more external aspect of imaginative perceptions from a positive point of view. Taking the negative approach, it is possible to say what these imaginative perceptions are not. They are not a kind of vision, or hallucinations and so on. On the contrary, they develop man's soul faculties in a direction opposite to the one the soul finds itself in when subject to visions, hallucinations and the like. Imaginative perceptions are healthy soul experiences. Visions, hallucinations etc. are unhealthy soul experiences. What are the characteristic features of visionary, hallucinatory activity, the features that matter to man? One characteristic is egoity subdued, clear awareness of Self subdued.

When we approach the world that is real to our senses with healthy commonsense and perception, we do so in what may be called a clear awareness of our own egoity. All the time we are looking at the outside world in a healthy way, having a healthy regard for our position in that outside world, we need to distinguish to some extent between our Self and the content of our Self. If we are overwhelmed by the content of consciousness, of Self, so that the necessary awareness of Self is partly paralysed, unhealthy conditions will result, including those of visionary, hallucinatory activity. Anyone able to consider these issues without prejudice will know that in the sphere of healthy sensory perception we are always to some extent aware of our own egoity, and he will know that visionary, hallucinatory activity is at a level below such healthy, normal sensory experience. He will not feel the least temptation to take such reduced levels of consciousness for revelations from a world that ranks higher than the world of the senses.

A person's attitude to these things may be taken as a criterion for their understanding, or lack of understanding, of genuine anthroposophical spiritual science. Anyone thinking he can gain more valid insights into the world by visions and hallucinations than by sensory perception really cannot be said to have a true feeling for Anthroposophy. Sensory perception brings us into relationship with the outside world. Visionary, hallucinatory activity takes this relationship down to a lower level of awareness, reducing to the level of subjectivity what in sensory perception definitely takes a purer, more objective form. The content of experience gained at this lower level has arisen in an unhealthy way out of the organism itself. It pervades our sensory perception and in case of illness drives them out altogether, replacing them with something that is pathological.

Keeping firmly in mind what I have just said, it will be essential, in all circumstances and for any form of cognitive Imagination, not to tune down the relationship we have to the objective world outside us, in the sphere of the senses, paralysing it, but to tune it up and let it receive the stimulus of active life.

It is reflection on our own Self, on the I, which raises sensory perception above the level of mere visionary, hallucinatory, dreamlike experience. Having grasped this, we can also see why the spiritual scientist insists on the necessity, if cognitive Imagination is to be achieved, of doing specific exercises. Initially these will not reduce the inner intensity of our sense of egoity, but rather increase and enhance it.

This brings me to something that is most eminently necessary for the achievement of knowledge not directly accessible to the senses, something that may present a risk—not for the organism, but primarily for the mental and specifically the moral condition of man—unless all the rules outlined in my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science are observed.

The sense of egoity needs to be enhanced, reflection on the Self to become more powerful. If people do not take the preventive measures I have so often described, which will enable them to tolerate such an increased sense of egoity without taking harm morally and psychologically, an element of megalomania, delusion of grandeur, is bound to arise in the soul (I am not in this case speaking of the pathological condition).

One often sees this when people are in the early stages of doing the exercises that are to help them gain knowledge of things not perceptible to the senses. They want to skip the necessary preparations, with the result that they do not gain in humility but really develop a kind of megalomania. This has to be said openly, for surely no one who has achieved genuine anthroposophical knowledge would wish to close his eyes to the fact that such megalomania is indeed often unleashed in people who have some ulterior motive or other in declaring themselves followers of Anthroposophy. When the sense of egoity is enhanced in this way, something quite specific occurs. It is this: it is possible to increase the same sense of egoity, it is possible to make the ego much more aware of its existence, to a very much higher degree than in everyday life. How does this enhancement first of all show itself?

In everyday life, and also in everyday science, there is something I would call ‘awareness of the moment’. We need to get a clear idea of what this awareness of the moment really means. This can be done by distinguishing the way we experience an event where we are right in the here and now, an event we perceive with our senses, grasp with our intellect, of which we form concepts here and now, and to which we may also relate at this moment due to will forces being stirred. Take a good look at your soul life when it is in the position just described, and compare it with the inner state of your soul life when it is given up to a complex of memories. Consider the nature of the soul content which memory presents in the form of images. Something we experienced, say, ten years ago, in what was then the here and now, comes to experience in the present moment, though with less intensity than something we experience right now. It comes to experience as something that is objective where our awareness of the moment is concerned. Our awareness of the moment looks back through the memory concept to something we experienced ten years ago. Compare the intensity of experience in the case of a present event with that relating to a past event. Compared to our experience of the present event, how little are we involved with our total personality in something that for the moment we are only conscious of through memory images.

This changes when a person progresses to cognitive Imagination, for now experience can be managed at will, without the person being overcome by it. What happens is that the experience of egoity gradually increases to such an extent that ego experience arises for the whole of our past life, which normally is only memory, as though we were really living in those past experiences as in something immediately present. Awareness of the moment is expanded, becoming an awareness moving with the river of time. That is the first stage in the experience of cognitive Imagination. The I, the ego, is allowed to flow out into the experiences one has had in this life, from the moment of birth. When I speak of our not being overcome by such intensified experiences, I mean that anyone who advances to such a level of perception in the right way will be in a position to have deliberate control of such outflowing of the ego into the past. He will be able to determine the beginning and end of the process, in all other respects remaining the same person he was before, reflecting at the same level of everyday consciousness. There must be nothing overwhelming, and what we achieve has to be subject to deliberate choice just as much as the capacity for another form of perception, the use of any other complex of judgements in ordinary life, is subject to the deliberate choice of the person making such judgements. Otherwise there is no sound foundation to these things. It does however mean a considerable intensification of the ego when an aspect of ourselves that normally lives only in the moment is expanding its power of experience to cover the whole of one's life.

For moments of perception when imaginative perception is to be the capacity used, one does in a sense become another person, in so far as one is now not merely living in the present with a certain sense of egoity but is living within time, having completely taken time into one's experience. In normal experience only the present moment is subjective; the rest of the course of time, including all one has experienced from birth, really is objective. It will be found that when capacities for inner perception are thus systematically developed we are in fact entering into objectivity. The first way of entering into objectivity consists in entering into the flow of time in the area I have outlined to you.

In the course of this enhancement, egoity reaches a kind of culmination. What happens is that egoity first has to become enhanced through exercise, but will then, in the process of enhancement, come to a point where laws inherent in the situation cause enhancement to cease. From a certain point onwards the ego will then of its own accord come to reduce the intensity. It is only up to a certain point that the ego is able to achieve further enhancement in developing perception with regard to its inner life. After this, it will experience a decrease in its sensing of egoity, as the curve moves downwards. What happens is that the ego abandons the experience of its own concerns—which had been the first thing to develop in experiencing the flow of time—and moves out into experience that now is no longer limited to the river of its own time and into experience of the cosmic life of the universe. This is an experience that does not, in the first place, appear in the form of abstract intellectual concepts but as something we may call Imagination, because it takes the form of images. The experience is exactly of the same kind as that described for the way one comes to understand freedom in my Philosophy of Freedom, yet the content of this experience is such that the images entering into consciousness do not present a content personal to ourselves, but a universal content, just as our sensory perceptions have universal content.

It is possible in spiritual research to describe every single step, indeed even the smallest of steps, that leads from ordinary intellectual perception to the development of imaginative perception. When this imaginative perception first occurs it is—and we certainly may call it this—an inner experience of destiny. And this brings me to a point where a distinction must be made between the process of seeking knowledge of things beyond sensory perception and that of seeking ordinary knowledge, the latter today considered the only objective knowledge. The ordinary search for knowledge will in most cases proceed without disasters and sudden reversals. What the whole person, not just the brain person, experiences in the search for ordinary knowledge is very much secondary to the actual process of perception. Yes, a scientist may experience a certain pleasure and satisfaction when making a new discovery, but the pleasure felt in what has happened, in the invention, the discovery, only bears a very distant relation to the method of discovery used. Neither have other traumatic experience and sudden reversals, things we may call the tribulations of examinations and the like, anything to do with the process of acquiring knowledge. We can have those in our normal experience of making discoveries, but they have nothing to do with the process of discovery as such. Yet, on the other hand, when we progress from ordinary intellectual perception to imaginative perception, it is the whole, the complete person who is involved in experience, representing inner destiny.

Such inner destiny is experienced particularly when at some point or other in the development of such perception it happens that, having first of all had more inward experiences, still connected with the person, these experiences shift outwards, into being able to see through the secrets of the cosmos. Let me give you an example that will at the same time also—figuratively speaking—take you a little into the laboratory of the spiritual scientist. It happened quite a long time ago now. I had been going through a process of inner deliberation and assessment that specifically concerned the question as to what is the state of soul experience of someone who is forced, due to his life impulses, to become a materialist, and what is the position of a person who feels driven by his life impulses to become an idealist or a spiritualist—‘spiritual’ here being the term used in German philosophy—or how such soul constitutions acquired in the world stand in relation to each other. I tried to put myself objectively into the inner experience that fills the idealist, the spiritualist; I tried, as it were, to slip into the state of mind that can take hold of a person in this way. For this is the only way of really coming to understand the world of the soul from the inside, by being a materialist with the materialist, of one's own free will, though only for the purpose of trying it out, and on the other hand also trying out being an idealist or spiritualist in the same way. This puts one in a new relationship to the very way in which a person logically represents, in all he is, what then becomes the content of his life philosophy.

I am of course only referring to the method here. Anyone who has in honesty, with inner integrity, gone through something of the kind I have just described, will perceive karmic elements also in these specific soul states, for you come to see, in quite a different way, how people can be compelled towards materialism or spiritualism. You will cease being sharply critical in the usual sense, judging others harshly and entirely from your own point of view, and so on. Soul experience is taken to another level, it becomes different in kind.

Having gone through this for some time, one discovers that meditations like these, that take hold of the soul life, are something of a real soul process, going straight towards the development of faculties for objective cognitive Imagination. If the soul has prepared itself in the way I have described, it will have achieved a state where suddenly there will arise before it the insight needed to experience, in perception, how the movement of the sun through the Zodiac, something normally regarded as merely a physical, mechanical process, is indeed a living, cosmic, organic process. Something previously only presenting itself as a mechanism figured in the cosmos has achieved real content as an image. I have seen something new in the cosmos. Such widening of awareness in things relating to the cosmos is karmic. It shows us what it means to have strengthened the ego by carrying out certain intellectual operations with much greater intensity, and when a certain culmination has been reached to feel this ego flow out into the world, so that we then stand right in the world with our ego. This is an experience that points to a karmic element in the process of gaining such insights, a process of cognition that does indeed involve the whole person. It is this involvement of the whole person, as distinct from the ordinary process that only involves the head aspect of man, that is the true distinguishing mark. My intention here has been to show clearly that the road to cognitive Imagination is not something I would present in some vague, mystic form but a process that can be just as accurately defined as the solution of a particular mathematical problem. The capacity for cognitive Imagination acquired by such means is there in the soul in the same way as mathematical, geometrical forms are present in the soul, in great clarity and lucidity. The soul content gained is not one we give ourselves up to in a nebulous way, as a secret inner experience. It is a soul content as lucid and as much connected with a sense of our own reality being maintained as a mathematical soul content.

This has been a somewhat superficial presentation of an imaginative life coming to reside in the soul that will then lead to insights into the world which lies beyond sensory perception, in a way to be described later. It is however important always to remember that the search for such forms of knowledge and the efforts made to achieve them do not represent something arbitrary wanting to come into the culture and civilization of man as it is developing in the present day but rather something that arises with a certain necessity, out of the very development of the present age. Today, it is necessary to work in a very conscious way to achieve the imaginative perception I have described, and this will then also be able to find expression in concepts, having taken the roundabout route via pictorial imaging. In earlier periods of man's evolution this was aimed at in a more instinctive way. The progress of human evolution has been such that earlier times did not gain insight through the logical and empirical reasoning that has come to be acknowledged as the right way for us since the middle of the 15th century. In earlier times, Imaginations were sought instinctively, in a way, and were also achieved in that fashion.

At the time when spiritual vision was of this instinctive type, it was not possible to clothe it in concepts. Today we are able to express ourselves in concepts; we are able to do so through science and because of the way we are used to dealing with the inorganic sphere by forming concepts. But that is something which has arisen only from the time of Galileo and Copernicus. Before that, people were unable to use concepts in this way. The concepts used by the Greeks were something completely different. They used pictures, pictures created with lines, or perhaps also combinations of colours. Let me mention just in passing that in earlier periods of man's evolution knowledge was not handled in the same general fashion, one might say democratic fashion, as it is handled today. Instead, those who had gained insight and knowledge formed special groups, relatively small groups that it has become the habit to call secret societies and the like. Traces of these, though always misleading traces, are still to be found in all kinds of orders and similar groups. Those gaining insight shut themselves away in small groups. They carefully prepared the people they admitted to their groups, so that they might achieve such insights as were thought to be important without danger to their moral life. And symbolic, pictorial presentations were used to teach what could be experienced in instinctive Imaginations. Such images represented the body of knowledge taught in the old schools of wisdom, just as today the body of knowledge is in books, but in those days the teaching aids were entirely in the form of pictures that had their origin in the mind of man.

Now I do not want to talk to you in rather nebulous terms. Let me therefore call to mind something quite definite—one particular symbol. One symbol coming up again and again was used to depict imaginative perception of the process of cognition in man himself. The process was not described in the way a modern expert in the theory of knowledge would do so. It was beheld in a form of instinctive clairvoyance, and they represented what they saw by drawing a picture of a serpent biting its own tail. That image showed a major characteristic of the process of attaining to knowledge. But in fact the picture I have described to you is only something that came to be used later, more or less for popular presentation. The actual symbolic images were carefully guarded secrets in the groups, guarded because there was a certain desire for power, the desire to be the ones in the know while others were not in the know. The picture shown in public, of the serpent biting its own tail, should in fact be the image of a serpent that not merely bites its own tail but swallows it, as it were. As much of the tail as enters into the mouth becomes spiritualized. And then something would show itself that would need to be painted in subtler colours—if the serpent itself had been painted in strong colours—as a kind of aura for the serpent. The result was a somewhat more complex image. If we try to express it in simple words, we need to use the expression Dr Unger was using in his lecture this morning, though he actually kept apologizing for using it. (It is indeed necessary, in a way, to apologize for many things, even if they are perfectly justifiable today, when speaking on the basis of Anthroposophy.) Dr Unger repeatedly used the term ‘invert.’ Imagine you have an elastic ball and push the upper part in, so that it becomes inverted. What has been above is below, and we have a kind of bowl or dish instead of a sphere. Now imagine the inversion continuing not just as far as the bottom of the sphere but beyond it, passing through it, as it were. The sphere through which the inverted part has passed now has a halo of light around it, and this has arisen from the inverted part. It is a figure we cannot easily make a drawing of, but it represents, in simplified form, the symbol used in those secret societies to indicate the process of attaining to knowledge, to stimulate a vision of this process in the people who were to learn from such vision.

As I have said, those figures were kept a deep secret, because of a certain feeling of power. They were obtained only by achieving inner vision of a cosmic process. There was no other way of developing a sense for the inner experience and understanding of such figures. To use an expression that perhaps is a little light-weight in relation to the process concerned, I would say: Inner spiritual contents arose to give people something for which they attempted to find symbolic expression, in something that might be understood in itself. Those were fixed instinctive Imaginations.

Then, in more recent times, discoveries were made in science that in a certain sense came to be epitomized in the work of Haeckel.¹ Haeckel had a certain way of gaining an overview of whatever he was working on, a way we may indeed call brilliant. Out of the background I was able to outline to you yesterday,² he felt the need to make drawings of what his researches into animal nature showed him, i.e. everything concerned with the physical organization of the animal. If you open Haeckel's books and look at his drawings (others have of course also made drawings, but Haeckel, I would say, made them the fundamental core of his whole thinking process) showing the early stages of embryonic development, the stages by which he hoped to show that ontogeny³ is a shortened recapitulation of phylogeny,⁴ you will find drawings that would remind anyone who knows of these things of the instinctive Imaginations recorded by the wise men of the past. Haeckel studied the initial stages of embryonic development known as gastrulation, the development of a cup-like form where the cells do indeed become arranged in a way that resembles the inversion of one half of a sphere into the other. He came to visualize a hypothetical entity, the Gastraea, that was once supposed to have had that form in the course of phylogenetic evolution, a form he felt was now being repeated at this early stage of embryonic development, the gastrula stage. In other words, what Haeckel drew was supposed to be a faithful reproduction of processes occurring in the world that is accessible to our senses, faithful though obtained only through evidence of the outer senses, and perhaps slightly coloured by his imagination and expressed as a hypothesis.

I am mentioning something to you that may be of no interest whatsoever to many people today, yet it must be regarded, by anyone following the path of knowledge with integrity, as a truly outstanding fact in cultural development. Haeckel drew the outside world and arrived at the beginnings of symbolic figures that were considered highly esoteric in an earlier age, figures still preserved here and there, though very much in secret. Within certain power-hungry organizations it is considered downright treason to speak of them. In the past, these figures had emerged from inner experience; they were records of instinctive Imaginations. This means nothing less but that science has arrived at a point—in progressing to insight into processes within the animal organism—where scientists have to draw things representing external processes in the same way as long ago people drew what emerged from an imaginative life that arose freely in the soul, achieving cosmic insight by intensification of the inner life. Inner experience was used to create symbols that completely and utterly resemble those now achieved by drawing what is seen in the outside world. More and quite different ones will be found as science progresses. This is an utterly outstanding fact in the history of cultural development.

We have now reached a point in human evolution, as far as the achievement of knowledge is concerned, where empirical, outside observation of animal life forces images upon us that formerly were found in the innermost recesses of the soul. Exoteric study today yields contents that once formed part of the most profound esoteric life. Haeckel arrived at this in a wholly naive fashion. The process is a great deal more interesting if we observe it in a mind that did not so much arrive at it in naive fashion, for example, Goethe who, as I showed you yesterday, went through the stages of his cognitive experience with some awareness. In the 1790s, Goethe drew his archetypal plant for Schiller, a symbolic plant. He sketched a few lines to show what he felt to be the plant that appears in all plant forms, in metamorphosis. Schiller said: ‘That is no empiricism, that is an idea.’ Goethe's reply was: ‘Then I see my idea with my own eyes.’ Goethe was aware that he had drawn something objective, something he had seen in the plant world. How was he able to do so? In my writings on Goethe, I have on several occasions described the inner process by which Goethe was impelled to look at plant life in such a way that he arrived at this theory of metamorphosis.

In the meantime, a younger man who at one time used to visit me a great deal, has published a dissertation in Berlin—that is a few years ago now—on Swedenborg's influence on Goethe.⁵ This dissertation is one of the most outstanding literary works in our day. Such things generally disappear from sight in the great mass of unread dissertations that are published. This dissertation on Goethe's philosophy of nature in relation to Swedenborg shows how Goethe arrived at certain conceptual categories for the very reason that as a young man he had fully entered into Swedenborg's state of mind, categories that were then more or less unconsciously to lead him to his morphological Imaginations relating to the plant world. It is most interesting to look at Goethe's relationship to Swedenborg in this respect.

Where Swedenborg is concerned, the situation is that he certainly was an eminent scientist when at his peak. Until his fortieth year, he evolved conceptual categories that enabled him to proceed in a truly scientific manner, in accordance with the state of science in his day, and a scientific association is now publishing his previously unpublished scientific work as something of the greatest value. Until he reached the age of forty, Swedenborg was one of the leading, representative scientists of his day. This was because synthesizing ideas were alive in his mind that made it possible for him to present the wider contexts of natural processes. Then he fell ill, in a way, and into his sick organism poured the conceptual categories he had previously evolved for the study of nature. Certain mystical natures are now revering something in Swedenborg that is his former scientific attitude of mind metamorphosed through disease.

A healthy spiritual vision will be unable to see the spiritual worlds the way Swedenborg did. It will see nothing of the personifications, of the pictures entirely deriving from his own constitution that only need a few changes to be completely like life on earth, providing we remove a certain weightiness from it. I will not go into details about the basis of Swedenborg's illness, but in order to avoid misunderstanding let me point out that Swedenborg's achievements as a seer can nevertheless be of tremendous interest, because something has flowed into this that came from a great, far-seeing mind capable of scientific thinking. All this conceptual synthesis, as one might call it, that emerged in Swedenborg held the most tremendous fascination for Goethe when he was a young man. and Goethe evolved in a healthy way, in his morphology, in his penetration of the plant world based on characterization and scientific study, what in Swedenborg had developed into pathological visions.

This connection between Goethe and Swedenborg is of the greatest interest, for here a road was taken in a pathological direction by one person, while another, with greatest intensity, went in a direction that was healthy. And the concepts formulated by Goethe when he came to evolve his plastic vision of the plant world are already part way towards the kind of drawings or ‘paintings’ I would say, using the term very widely, that Haeckel felt impelled to use for the organic world of the animals. But Goethe was more alert. He was so alert that he followed Swedenborgianism only in so far as it was healthy. Yet Goethe, too, inevitably came to create images of the outside world in pictures that in earlier times, when men acquired knowledge in more inward ways, arose or were brought up from within. In Goethe's day, cognitive life had already reached a point, at least for Goethe and those who understood him, where it was necessary to look in the outside world for the same picture language that had formerly been found in instinctive Imaginations.

The development of man progresses, and it would be wrong to remain based on instinctive Imaginations. Life in Imaginations now has to be worked towards in full awareness, as I have described at the beginning of today's talk. The result will be as follows. Using the rational intellect, we are able to represent the inorganic world around us in measure, weight and number, to arrive at constructive concepts of a world which has its being in measure, weight and number. Moving up into the plant world, into animal nature, such intellectual analysis is not enough, for the very reason that the scientific approach has made some progress in our age. We need another form of presentation.

In dealing with inorganic nature, man uses his rational mind and lets this inorganic nature become part of his inner life and so arrives at knowledge, at insight into this world, in terms of measure, weight and number. Yet when man tries to apply to the plant world, the animal world, the same approach he is already using in his study of the inorganic world—a way not open to earlier ages with their instinctive Imaginations—he finds he simply cannot rely on a way of comprehension with mind and soul that is based entirely on intellectual concepts. Instead, we find Goethe arriving more consciously and Haeckel quite naively and unconsciously, at a form of presentation reminiscent of earlier, instinctive Imaginations. This serves to indicate that the progress that has gradually been made in the observation of nature is the very reason why, on advancing from mineral to plant, from animal to man, and to the acquisition of knowledge about the world altogether, we have to use higher levels of cognition, have to advance from our ordinary intellectual comprehension to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. More will be said about this in the following talks. It will then be obvious that there are still other healthy spheres, in addition to those frequently enumerated, which can be used to relate to present-day science, a science to which Haeckel brought a certain touch of his own. The relationship has to be a living one. It is necessary to consider this science in depth, in order to show how its own further development has made it necessary to enter into imaginative life in full conscious awareness. In what follows, an objective presentation of the sources of anthroposophical knowledge will show that when I came to evolve the anthroposophical view at the turn of the century it really was a matter of showing how it is necessary to progress from what Haeckel put forward—or at least hinted at, rather naively, in relation to outer nature—to a true spiritual science.

The point is that in the approach Haeckel developed to the study of nature only the pictures he drew had in fact real significance. In these pictures he developed all kinds of concepts. He took these concepts from his own period. I have often said, when lecturing on Haeckel, that we should take the first pages of his much-maligned book Die Welträtsel (The Riddles of the Universe), where the reality of animal nature is shown positively and constructively, and tear off the final pages, which are the greater part of the book, full of polemics. This would still leave us with a book of great value for anyone wanting to find the right way of entering into organic nature today. But the concepts Haeckel extracted from all that, the concepts presented in the part of the book I am saying we should tear off, these derive from the general conceptual approach of more recent origin. And these concepts have gradually become dead concepts as far as organic nature is concerned.

Haeckel was working with living views and with dead concepts. This is something I have often had to refer to in lectures on Haeckelism, and I therefore wrote my pamphlet Haeckel und seine Gegner⁶ This is based on the feeling that while Haeckel expressed his views in dead concepts that are not appropriate, his opponents used their own dead concepts in opposing his views. So even in those days the issue was the same as we have it today when spiritual science concerns itself with science: it would be wrong for spiritual science orientated in Anthroposophy to approach science with criticism, using dead concepts. Instead, it is necessary to take up the views science has achieved, the advances made in research into nature, and take them forward into living concepts. The knowledge gained in science should not be opposed in a dead spirit, but taken onwards to the living spirit.

• 1. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist, 1834–1919. With reference to his ‘Gastraea,’ see Rudolf Steiner's comments in his Riddles of Philosophy.
• 2. Lecture given in Stuttgart on 1 September 1921. (Translator)
• 3. Ontogeny—basically the embryonic development of the individual. (Translator)
• 4. Phylogeny—an animal's pedigree in terms of evolutionary descent. (Translator)
• 5. Hans Schlieper, Emanuel Swedenborgs System der Naturphilosophie besonders in seiner Beziehung zu Goethe-Herderschen Anschauungen. Dissertation of 16 February 1901. Berlin: G. Schade, 1901.
• 6. Haeckel und seine Gegner (Haeckel and his opponents), 53 pages, Minden i.W., 1900 Reprinted in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884–1901. GA 30. English Translation in: Three Essays on Haeckel and Karma. London: Theosophical Publishing Co. 1914.

You will have realized, from what has gone before, that imaginative perception shows some similarity to the way memory works in the human mind. One way of defining imaginative perception is to compare it to the processes going on in our memory. It will, however, be necessary to take a more penetrating look at this life of memory than is normally done by psychologists today.

Memory is very often thought to consist of thoughts becoming attached to outer sensory perceptions. The idea seems to be that we have thoughts about what we perceive with the senses—while we do so, or perhaps a little while after—and those thoughts then subside gently into a subconscious sphere, rising up again from that subconscious when suitable efforts are made are taking the form of remembered ideas. One school of philosophy has referred to such thoughts or ideas as going down below the threshold of consciousness, as it were, to come up again, crossing the threshold, when the moment is right. It is of course exactly what the lazy thinker wants: to imagine a process where ideas are first of all stimulated by sensory perception, and then, when we no longer have those perceptions, they hang around somewhere or float about in a subconscious—which of course one has never seriously thought about—to pop up again when required. Even a very superficial look at what the human soul experiences will show that this certainly is not the case.

To begin with, direct observation will show no appreciable difference between an idea arising in connection with something we perceive with our senses and one held in the memory. In the first case, the outside world stimulates the idea or concept. Something outside is perceived, an idea follows. We do of course have awareness of the process of perception, and are able to follow the process leading to the evolution of an idea if we reflect on this. But that is not really the point. It is true that when a remembered idea comes up we have no immediate awareness of what it is inside us that stimulates this idea. Yet, as I have just indicated, the point is not that we know about sensory perception, but that from one side or another—now from without and now from within—an idea is brought to mind.

It could be said, taking care to use the words properly, that in either case it is something objective that drives us to form an idea. Pursuing the process of sensory perception and ideas arising from it further, the essential point will have to be that we go through certain motions when we want to make sure we remember something, that is, when it matters to us that something we have experienced does not simply fall into oblivion, and it is important to keep it in our memory. Just consider the machinations we used when we were young to help us memorize things when it was important to memorize them. Whatever brings about memory therefore clearly goes beyond what is needed merely to form an idea. If we consider memory as such, we shall find that the ability to remember is at times reduced or else enhanced merely by the physical condition we are in, and that our organism as a whole is involved when memories arise. We shall discover that when we are in the process of forming ideas based on sensory perceptions we carry out an activity that is organic by nature. This organic activity is partly or completely concealed from conscious awareness, yet it is in fact the function responsible for memory. This is so because a concept or idea formed on the basis of sensory perceptions does not simply swirl down into the subconscious. Something else is linked with the process of forming concepts on the basis of what we perceive. The concept or idea fades. Once we have gone past the process of sensory perception that has been in the forefront of our mind, the idea will have faded; but something else has also happened within us, and this will recall the idea when the occasion arises.

Anyone able to observe mental processes will find that a remembered idea is something completely new and that it forms in about the same way as an idea based on sensory perceptions is formed. The difference is that in the one case the process is going from without to within and in the other it goes from within to without. In the one case one is clearly aware of the triggering factor being something perceived by the senses, while in the other it remains hidden from awareness, being an inner process connected with the organism. Let us simply state this fact—I have only been able to give an outline—and return to our discussion of imaginative perception.

I have described how imaginative perception is developed first of all by doing exercises that enable us to form mental images in the same way we form mental images when remembering things. These exercises have been described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in my Occult Science. They enable us to experience in images. A point is reached where such inner experience of seeing concepts in the form of images has a content that does not recall personal experience but now bears the stamp of representing a reality, a truth, not initially accessible to ordinary consciousness—a truth we may call a spiritual truth.

When imaginative perception is applied to the action I have just described, this action will appear in quite a different light. It becomes apparent how perception linked with the forming of ideas and ideas based on memory appear in relation to the ability to form images. The ability to perceive in images will above all give a specific inner experience of the forming of ideas, of thinking as such. We do not get far when we use our ordinary consciousness for reflection. Philosophical training would be necessary if one wanted to arrive at anything at all when making the forming of ideas, thinking as such, the subject of one's reflections. Anyone without philosophical training will grow impatient when required to think about thinking as such. Even Goethe considered himself lucky for never having thought about thinking.¹ It is easy to see why if we consider Goethe's nature. He was always endeavouring to achieve a vivid, plastic image—I have already referred to this in these talks. He felt like a fish abandoning the water for the air when he moved from his concrete element into this element of pure thought; there his spirit could not breathe, it being utterly against his nature.

It is however possible, and indeed necessary, to understand thinking as such. Without this, no conclusive philosophical concept can be achieved. This may not be to everybody's taste, but it certainly is the philosopher's business. Our concept of thinking activity, of the forming of concepts, is extraordinarily abstract; it is a pale notion to our everyday consciousness and we do not like to dwell on it for long. Yet to imaginative perception it becomes more concrete, more vivid and graphic; indeed I would say that now the thinking process, the forming of ideas, that previously appeared an abstract, disembodied thing, comes close to being concrete and graphic.

A statement like that should not be misinterpreted. In the first place it must really come as a surprise that something usually regarded as having nothing to do with the material world becomes more concrete when looked at in the first stage of working towards knowledge of the non-physical world—supersensible knowledge. Indeed it approaches a form that, I would say, actually bears the stamp of the material world. The picture one forms of the thinking process—for Imagination consists in receiving pictures—bears the mark of processes to do with life coming to an end, with dying. Imaginative perception does indeed show the process of forming ideas, of thinking, as one in which the material world is dying. Comparing what I have just described with something perceived by the outer senses, I think I may say that the only thing to compare it with is the process to be observed when physical death ensues for a living creature. Basically, the transition from ordinary sensory perception to imaginative perception of the thinking process is an experience of the kind one gets when sharing in a death in the physical world.

The process of gaining insight comes more alive when approaching Imagination and Inspiration, than it is in its abstract form, in ordinary consciousness. This also is the reason why advancement to supersensible perception is combined with what yesterday I referred to as inner experiences of destiny. In ordinary consciousness, the acquisition of knowledge is gone through with a certain inner indifference. We know that life normally lifts us up in delight and takes us down into pain, that we move up and down with the waves of feeling and emotion. We also know that the processes involved in cognitive thinking have an icy coldness to them, a quality that leaves us cold, making few waves in our emotions.

This does indeed change when we advance to imaginative perception. Here, the processes of gaining insight come to resemble more the processes of ordinary life, although they are entirely in the sphere of mind and spirit and have nothing to do with the physical world. A more intimate relation to the processes of perception develops, for they now arouse greater personal interest. And now, in going through this process where thinking, the forming of ideas, becomes vivid, we experience a process so vivid it is almost concrete. Making ourselves really conscious of this process, we are able to use it to gain more of an understanding of the memory process. The human organism in a way becomes transparent if one visualizes it in this way. In the first place, the thinking process has been experienced in mind and spirit, in an Imagination. The same process becomes a material image when we come to study the memory process. The reason is that a remembered idea is preceded by a form of material process similar to the process which presents as a picture to the inner eye when we apply the process of Imagination to thinking, as I have just described. It can be said that imaginative perception offers the possibility of seeing through the memory process. Continuing in our efforts to gain insight in this way, we shall indeed come to realize that Imagination itself is a process in mind and spirit similar to the process of remembering at the level of the physical body. The memory process is however individualized into the human body—if I may put it like this, made individual for our personal experiences. The process of Imagination moves away from the human body, aligning itself with similar processes that occur in the cosmos, outside the human body.

A physical process of dying is active in the organism; in return, memory concepts arise in the conscious mind. A spirit and soul element is active in Imagination. There is an actual process in the outside world corresponding to this, but Imagination is as yet unable to grasp it, because the complete process of supersensible perception consists in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But, as you can see, there are certain things in human life, such as memory, such as the processes occurring in body and soul altogether, that cannot be grasped by speculating, nor with philosophical arguments. They can only be approached by training faculties of the soul that initially are latent. That way we can get closer to them, as will be obvious also from the following.

When the life of our hearts and minds is within the sphere of ordinary thinking, the usual way of forming ideas, then our feeling with regard to such thinking processes is that it is we ourselves who let one idea follow the other. Indeed, we are clearly aware that if we do not use our minds to exercise a certain inner choice in letting one idea follow another, and if instead ideas impel one another, we should merely be the reflection of an automatic machine within us, and we should not be real human beings. In my Philosophy of Freedom I have tried to show how this feeling we have towards our ordinary thinking processes is the very source of our feeling of freedom altogether, and it is only through this that the phenomenon of freedom can in fact be grasped—in experience.

This feeling of deliberate inner choice will be lost for a time when we progress to Imagination. Imagination yields images that are experienced purely in soul and spirit and yet, as I said yesterday, have nothing to do with visions, hallucinations and the like. Exactly because they have content, these images show that they no longer permit the same freedom in linking or analysing them as the freedom we know when we put ideas together or separate them in our ordinary consciousness. Very gradually, we get the feeling that with imaginative perception we are not merely entering into pictures the way we enter into our ideas, into ideas that strictly speaking appear as individual concepts we must link up ourselves. The feeling we gradually develop is that the Imaginations are only broken up into individual detail by ourselves, and that in reality they form a whole, that a continuous force is always at work in them, as it were. We experience a presence in the imaginative sphere that only comes to conscious awareness in us through this imaginative perception. In our ordinary consciousness we really have no idea of it.

And again—if we consider ordinary life, and especially if we follow Goethe and observe how plant forms come about, noting the transition from one form to another—living metamorphosis—we shall find that this life of the plants in the material world holds within it the very thing of which the continuous force we experience evolving in the world of Imaginations is a picture. Gradually we find out that through entering into Imagination, we have worked our way through to a point where we are able to grasp the power of growth. We realize that we must reject a vital force arrived at through speculation, indeed, even more so than the mechanists.² Anything in the sphere of this vital force will never be understood by the usual thought processes, the usual philosophical speculation. It is accessible only to a higher power of understanding, and this has to be worked for. We come to realize that only the inorganic world is accessible to ordinary understanding, and that the entity alive in the growth process has to be grasped in a state of mind and soul that we shall achieve only by achieving Imagination. This power of growth lives in our organism. We are able to see through it by giving ourselves up to a life in Imagination.

It should be noted that it is really important to observe the rules I have given in my books when following the exercises that lead to imaginative perception. What is the purpose of all those rules? Their purpose is to make sure that everything done by someone working to achieve a capacity for higher understanding is done with the same inner clarity as that experienced in forming mathematical concepts. The conscious mind needs to be in the same state as when it is working with geometry, when it enters in a living way into everything that is needed to develop Imagination and also the next two stages of supersensible perception—Inspiration and Intuition. Just think of life in visions and hallucinations, which is pathological, or of our dream life, which is at least a shadow picture of something pathological, and you will see the tremendous difference between all this and a conscious mind proceeding with the clarity of mathematical thought. The steps taken to reach Imagination must never aim for a reduced level of conscious awareness. Our goal must be achieved purely in the sphere of mind and spirit and with the lucidity we know in mathematics, not with a dreamy, mystical attitude, in confusion and in darkness. Otherwise we would be unable to rise to higher powers of perception. We would sink down into forces we already possessed, the forces of growth, the inner reproductive forces of the human organism. These would be stimulated into growth, and the result would be a tendency to have visions, hallucinations, rather than imaginative perception. It is possible to see how things are related, but we must get a really clear idea of the path to imaginative perception, as it has been described.

In imaginative perception we live in a world of pictures, as I have described it. But it is in the very nature of those pictures that characteristically they are reflections of realities. We do not have the realities. Instead, we have an awareness of living in a world of pictures that are not real. And that is sound and healthy. A person who hallucinates, who has visions, takes his visions, his hallucinations, to be a reality. A person practising Imagination knows that everything he experiences in Imagination is an image—an image of reality, but still an image—and it is this knowledge that gives a person practising Imagination a state of conscious awareness that is not the usual one but has become enhanced. It is impossible for him to confuse this world of images with the reality. It will be Inspiration that carries us forward, as it were, into the reality of the world of images.

Imagination first presents a picture of supersensible reality. Inspiration shows the way beyond, to the reality. We achieve Inspiration by using a mental technique, just as meditation, concentration, is used to make Imagination possible. The new faculty acquired is one that would be anything but welcome in ordinary life, and rightly so. It will be necessary to use observation to help one get a reasonably clear awareness of what it is to forget, to throw out an idea from conscious awareness. Meditative exercises are required in artificially forgetting ideas, separating them out. This must lead to the ability to reject and, in the final instance, wipe out the imaginative life, the life in images, as we have acquired it. Anyone merely able to have Imaginations cannot yet penetrate into a spiritual reality, which can only be done by someone who has reached a point where he is able to erase these Imaginations again. These Imaginations only appear like a realization of imaginative faculties initially and have to be erased, for they are more or less something we have produced ourselves. It is a question of completely clearing the conscious mind, as it were, using the act of forgetting deliberately, applying it to the imaginative life. Then we shall come to know what it means to live in a state of fully awake consciousness, a state where no mental images are formed but where the Imagining that went before has created inner energy and has been cleared of its contents. We shall then come to know what it means to live in such a state of energized consciousness. This we must come to know, and then we progress from Imagination to knowledge through Inspiration. We shall then also know that we are touched by a spiritual reality that reveals itself in a process in soul and spirit that is comparable to breathing in and breathing out, to the rhythmical process of respiration altogether. That process consists in our taking in the outside air, working it through within ourselves, and then releasing it again in a different form, having in a way identified ourselves with it. In the same way we come to know a process in soul and spirit that consists in our being able to sense, to inhale, as it were, the inner conscious energy we have acquired into a conscious awareness strengthened through Imagination. As a result, the objective Imagination will shine forth in our strengthened conscious awareness. We inhale the spiritual world, we take it into ourselves. A rhythmical interaction with the spiritual world occurs.

In ancient India, instinctive efforts were made to attain higher perception. These instinctive efforts active in yoga made use of the breathing process, as you probably know, to make it possible to experience this actual breathing process as a process in soul and spirit, by using a physical method. In oriental yoga exercises, breathing—inhalation, holding the breath, exhalation—is controlled in a special way, and the person enters wholly into this breathing process. As a result, the soul and spirit is sucked out of the breathing process, as it were. The breathing process is removed from conscious awareness by the very fact that it is pushed in, leaving behind the soul and spirit aspect. The organization of our present culture is such that we cannot copy the process gone through in the yoga exercise, and we must not copy it. It would cast us down into the physical organization. It may be said that our soul life is no longer on the plane where the soul life of the Indian was in the past. His soul life tended more towards sensibility, ours tends towards intellectuality. And in the sphere of intellectuality, yoga breathing would present the risk of man destroying his physical organization. Living on the intellectual plane, it is necessary to use exercises of the kind that I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These exercises are entirely in the sphere of soul and spirit. They may just have a hint of the physical breathing process—though even this only rarely and mostly not at all. The essential part of our exercises to achieve Imagination lies entirely in the sphere of mind and spirit, the sphere man has experience of when working with geometry and mathematics. The work which has to be done to achieve Inspiration also has to be in this sphere.

With Inspiration, it becomes possible to gain awareness of an outside world of soul and spirit, objectivity of soul and spirit. This is connected with conscious life itself undergoing an inner metamorphosis. Man simply has to let it happen that as a physical being he goes through external growth and metamorphosis as he passes through childhood, youth, old age and very old age. Where his conscious awareness is concerned, he feels a touch of fear, a hesitation, when it comes to going through something as alive as those metamorphoses in his innermost soul content. Yet this has to be gone through it supersensible perception is to be achieved. Goethe reached a certain perfection in his perception of metamorphosis, and such perception is particularly well able to move on the plane of imaginative life. The reason is that everything subject to Imagination presents itself in living, ever-changing forms. Some form or other comes to awareness. It changes into a completely different form through transitional changes or directly—yet it is possible somehow to transpose the contours of the first figure into those of the second. It is possible to transform one into the other without making too great a jump. This stops when we approach the essential aspect of the world that has to be understood through Inspiration; it stops as soon as we approach the animal organization.

Let me try and show you what it is we have to approach as we turn towards the animal organization. Anyone studying the process of thinking as a psychologist or logician and more or less reaching a point where this can be defined can evolve a certain idea of the thinking process. Logicians, experts in the theory of knowledge and psychologists will take pride in getting such a clear, lucid, definite idea of the thinking process. They will be pleased to have achieved this, to be able to say: The process of thinking is... and now predicates (or the second term of the proposition) will follow. But let us assume someone was really pleased to develop such an idea of the thinking process and then found himself in the situation I found myself in when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom. He would need to trace the thinking process from the form in which it is active when it links up with external visual perceptions to the form in which it is active in free spirituality in the human individual, as an impulse of will, an impulse to act. In the latter case the thinking process certainly will still be recognized as pure, clarified thinking. We are able to move on from the type of thought we have studied through the sensory perceptions it linked up with, to the thoughts that are the motivation for our actions when we act as free human beings. Yet when we come to consider this particular type of thinking process, which indeed is a genuine process of thinking, it no longer agrees entirely with the definition we established for the thinking process linked to sensory perception. We are no longer able to do anything with the definition, for this form of thinking—and it definitely is thinking—no longer resembles the kind of thinking that is the motivation behind our actions; for now it is also out-and-out will force. It has metamorphosed, one might say, into its opposite, into will, has become will, is out-and-out substantive will, if I may put it like this. You see from this how flexible one has to become in one's mind when using ideas or concepts. Anyone who gets into the habit of forming concepts and then applying them can easily find himself in a situation where realities make his applied concepts utterly meaningless.

Let us assume—and this after all is actually the case where external reality is concerned—we have formed a concept of Joseph Miller in his seventh year. When we get to know him again in his fiftieth year, the concept will not help us to see through Joseph Miller properly. We have to expect a metamorphosis, something must have changed. The definition of young Miller at seven will not help us when face to face with fifty-year old Miller. Life makes a mock of definition, of sharply defined concepts full of content. It is this which causes all the misery in the many discussions and disputes that arise in life. We are really disputing from a point beyond reality, while reality makes a mock of rigid definitions and rigid descriptions. And in the same way we must also come to see how thought becomes will, and will becomes thought.

That was a case applicable to a person, and it is approximately also the case which applies when we simply want to get to know the animal organization through Inspiration. Here we cannot just speak of the type of metamorphosis Goethe spoke of in relation to the plant world, where in a way it is possible still to transform one shape into another. It will be necessary to speak of inner transitions, or—if I may be permitted to use the term Dr Unger and I were using yesterday—of inversion or involution, speaking not only of geometrical but also of qualitative involutions, to get from one thing to another. In short, we have to accept that the inner state of soul goes through a metamorphosis, that we go through a process in which our inner content of experience, content of knowledge gained, grows up, as it were.

And so it happens that, ascending from Imagination to Inspiration, we are not able to use the concepts that are quite rightly and properly used in ordinary consciousness. They will have to remain for purposes of orientation, but need to be modified when perception is addressed to the truly inner world, that is, to the spiritual nature of things. This then lifts the logical distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ out of the abstract as we advance form Imagination to Inspiration. In the world that now presents itself as a spiritual world outside us, we shall no longer be able to manage if we use the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the same way as we have learned to use them, quite rightly, at an earlier level of perception. The ideas ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ now become something much more concrete, something we now experience in the radiant Imaginations that arise in us. Where they are concerned, we cannot say ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ the way we do with reference to ideas in the intellectual sphere. At this point, more concrete ideas arise specifically in the sphere of soul and spirit; one thing is ‘sound’ or ‘healthy’, another ‘sick’, one encourages life, the other kills it. The abstract notion of ‘right’ turns into a more concrete notion, and what we are tempted to call ‘right’ is something that brings life and health into the spiritual world, while the things we are tempted to call ‘wrong’ bring disease, paralysis and death into the spiritual world.

Ideas we are accustomed to apply in physical life thus arise in a new form when we have crossed the threshold of the spiritual world, and this is because we then experience the content of these ideas at the level of soul and spirit. You will find that someone with integrity towards perception of the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception will use different terms. He will no longer juggle with terms such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ but will of his own accord come to use such terms as ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’ and the like.

I have been attempting to describe—and in the lectures that follow I shall go into these things in much greater detail—how it is possible to progress from ordinary perception to Imagination and to Inspiration, and how access is gained step by step to the true nature, that is, the spiritual nature, of the part of the world that is not accessible to the physical senses.

Let me remind you how in order to describe human actions, to understand the phenomenon of freedom when writing my Philosophy of Freedom, I found it necessary on the one hand to achieve a sharp definition of the concept of purely sensory perception and the thinking process linked to this. On the other hand I pointed out that moral impulses are Intuitions taken from a spiritual world. In my efforts to establish a realistic moral philosophy, I thus found it necessary on the one hand to present a clear definition of how perception of the outside world accessible to the senses has to be penetrated with thought at one extreme of all that is human and, on the other hand, define moral Intuition at the other extreme—on the one hand perception and recognition of physical objects, on the other, intuitive perception. If we really want to understand man as he is in this physical world, with regard to the way he perceives things with his physical senses and with regard to the way he develops his impulses to act out of the very depth of his being, then it is necessary on the one hand to draw attention to sensory perception penetrated by thought-representing reality—and on the other hand to look for a reality existing at the opposite pole, a reality arising out of pure empiricism, pure observation and experience a reality rooted in the intuitive experience of moral impulses.

It is my purpose, in presenting these observations, to show you the different levels of perception that lead to the spiritual world, ‘spiritual world’ meaning nothing more than the world that makes up the whole of reality when combined with our sense-perceptible world. We have to start with object-based perception in the world of matter, which I placed at one pole in my Philosophy of Freedom, and advance to imaginative and inspired perception. There we are touched by the spiritual truth. Then we advance to Intuition, and in Intuition we are not merely touched by the spiritual truth that is outside the physical world—I shall describe this in the lectures that follow—but live into it, become one with it.

We live in Intuition when we are at one with spiritual reality. This means nothing else but that in man as he is today, in this period of world³ evolution, perception of physical things is at one pole and intuitive perception at the other. Between these two poles lie Imagination and Inspiration. Yet if we wish to describe man as he is in ordinary life, as someone who does things, someone who is morally active, it will be necessary to look for the moral Intuition relating to this clearly defined area, the area of ethical motivation, if for no other reason but to establish a philosophy of freedom. If the basis for human actions provided out of such a philosophy of freedom is then developed to apply to the whole cosmos, we shall find Intuition realized throughout the whole cosmos, whereas normally one finds it merely in the limited field of human actions. Here in the physical world, any moral person merely joins moral Intuition to everyday perception of material things, for the simple reason that it is part of man's natural constitution to do so. Yet if we wish to arrive at true perception of the universe, if we want to ‘land’ on cosmic Intuition—if I may put it like this—which in the cosmos corresponds to the moral Intuition for man's inner life, it is necessary to pass through the two stages of Imagination and Inspiration. In other words, it is possible to describe man in terms of a philosophy of freedom. This merely necessitates arriving at the limited field of intuitive experience for human actions. Looking for a cosmic philosophy to match this philosophy of freedom, it is necessary to expand what has previously been done with reference to a limited field, by evolving the different stages of perception: object-based perception. Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

In principle, therefore, what I mean by Imagination and Inspiration lies between the first part of my Philosophy of Freedom, where I establish the reality of object-based perception, and the second part of the book, where moral Intuition is defined in the chapter on moral imagination.⁴ At the time when the Philosophy of Freedom was in the process of being written, this could only be hinted at. It was hinted at when I wrote the words: ‘The individual human being is not truly separate from the world. He is part of the world, and there is a connection with the cosmos as a whole that is a reality and is broken only in our eyes, the way we perceive it. We see this part initially as something existing by itself because we do not see the “ropes and belts” used by the basic forces of the cosmos to move the wheel of our life.’* If we want to know man only in the terms of this world, we are not aware of the direct transition from physical perception to moral Intuition.

There is something this type of description only touches on—the ‘ropes and belts’ are of course mere metaphor—and that is that there is something within man that links his essential nature to the whole cosmos. This really needs further elucidation. It would be necessary to show that, just as man is able to skip the two middle stages by an empirical approach and get from object-based perception to moral Intuition, he is also able to progress from his perceptive experience as a human being to cosmic Intuition. In his human nature, he is linked to the cosmos through ‘ropes and belts,’ that is, through spiritual entities. Yet man is only able to perceive this connection if he now goes through the intermediate stages between object-based perception and Intuition, stages that are not required for ordinary reflection. He needs to ascend from object-based perception through Imagination and Inspiration to reach cosmic Intuition.

That is how the whole of the anthroposophical science which has been evolved relates to the seed that was given in my Philosophy of Freedom. It must of course be understood that anthroposophy is something alive. It had to be a seed before it could develop further into leaves and all that follows. This fact of being alive is what distinguishes anthroposophical science from the deadness many are aware of today in a ‘wisdom’ that still wants to reject anthroposophy, partly because it cannot, and partly because it will not, understand it.

• 1. ‘How did you get as far as that?
  They say you have done well indeed.’
  ‘Ah, child, I did a clever thing:
  I never gave a thought to thought.’

  Goethe, Works published posthumously (1833), Poems.

• 2. Mechanist—someone holding a mechanical view of the unviverse.
  See also notes on page 62.
• 3. ere, Rudolf Steiner used the German world for ‘imagination’ in the everyday sense. (Translator)
• 4. Page 245 of the 12th German edition.

The most important question in modern intellectual life, a question that casts its shadow on the whole of cultural life, is one that really everybody is aware of today in their feelings; yet it can only be solved, or attempted to be solved, by a method that leads to supersensible perception—from the ordinary perception of material things to Imagination, Inspiration and finally Intuition. This most important question is one that is bound to be raised by every wholly unprejudiced soul, anyone with inner integrity who has a genuine interest in the nature of man. On the one hand the soul has to face the moral, the ethical views that may be held today, and on the other it must consider life as it is seen from the scientific point of view today, a view that is rightly given recognition. Ethical and moral life faces us with burning questions today for the very reason that this is an age when ethical questions are at the same time also social questions, and the social question is one every human being feels to be a burning question.

Let us consider how the existing world presents itself to the mind in modern thought on the basis of scientific knowledge. Genuine science, genuine study of nature, aims to understand the things in this world as they are of necessity, in their causal origins. And these causal origins, this necessity, is to be consistently applied to everything that is to be found in the order of the universe, including man. When we want to understand man through science today, we apply to him, almost as a matter of routine, the method of gaining knowledge we habitually use for natural phenomena that are outside of man. We then establish hypotheses, with greater or lesser daring, to extend what science has discovered in relation to nature as it lies before us, for our observation, to cosmic facts and the nature of the cosmos. Hypotheses as to the beginning and the end of the earth are evolved on the basis of ideas formed in science. Using this scientific approach, we come to a point where we have to say to ourselves, if we are consistent in our methods: We must not stop when it comes to the freedom of man. I have already made some reference to the problem we are facing here.

Anyone who because of a certain desire for consistency looks for a formalized, standardized system that will explain the world will find that he has to decide between the premise of freedom as something given empirically, as an immediate human experience, and on the other hand natural necessity pertaining to everything. As a result of the habits of thinking and perception in which men and women have been trained over the last centuries, he will decide in favour of nature-given necessity. He has the experience of freedom, yet he will declare it to be an illusion. He will extend the sphere of absolute necessity to the most inward and subtle aspects of human nature, with the result that man is completely held in the cocoon spun by science-determined inevitability. And the same will be done with regard to the hypothetical ideas concerning the beginning and end of the earth. The laws discovered in physics, chemistry and so on are used to develop theories such as the nebula theory, which is the Kant-Laplace theory of the origins of the earth. The second thermodynamic law is used to develop theories about the heat death the earth is supposed to suffer in the end.¹

In this way we can touch even on the most intimate aspects of human nature and the very limits of the universe by applying an approach that has undoubtedly proved fruitful in modern times when it comes to elucidating the phenomena of nature, phenomena that surround us in the world where we walk about between birth and death. But when we reflect on ourselves to some extent and ask ourselves where the true rank and dignity of man lies, what value there really is in man, we turn our attention also to the moral sphere, the sphere that is responsible for moral and ethical impulses in our conscious mind. We feel that a form of existence which is really worth calling human can only be achieved by following ethical ideas, ideas that we enter into and imbue with religious feeling. We cannot call ourselves human in the real sense of the word unless we think also of impulses within us that we call moral, impulses that then flow out into the social life. We see these impulses as bearing within them the pulse of what we call the divine element in the world order. Yet for anyone who today in all honesty takes up the point of view from which an overview can be gained of the order of nature based on mechanism and causality, on necessity, there can be no bridge from this natural order—and a certain honesty in our view of things compels us also to include man in this order—to that other order which is a moral one, the order man must consider connected with all of his rank and dignity, all of his value.

Very recently, however, a certain way of putting things has been evolved that aims to pretend that the gulf which has opened up between two essential elements of our human nature does not exist. It has been said that the term ‘scientific’ can be applied only to anything that aims to explain the world, inclusive of man, inclusive of the beginning and the end of the world, in terms of natural necessity. From this point of view, nothing is considered valid unless it fits without contradiction into the system of thought representing this natural order. Separately from this, however, a realm with quite a different kind of certainty is set up, a realm based on certainty of faith. We look to the moral light that shines within us and say to ourselves: No scientific knowledge can in any way affirm the significance of this moral realm; yet man has to find certainty of faith; he must come to acknowledge this realm out of the subjective element, so that he is in some way connected with the realm that bears within it the stream of moral imperatives.

Many people will no doubt feel reassured when they have neatly separated the things one is able to know from the things one is supposed to believe. Perhaps such a separation provides a certain reassurance in life, a feeling of certainty in life. Yet if we delve deeply enough—not with one-sided thinking but with everything our thinking can experience when it links up with the whole range of faculties in the human soul and spirit—we must arrive at the following. We shall then have to say to ourselves that if the realm of natural inevitability really is the way we have got in the habit of visualizing it in recent centuries, then there is no possible way of saving the moral realm. This has to be said because there is simply no evidence anywhere in this moral realm of a power to prevail against the realm of the natural order. Merely consider the idea which had to evolve, with a certain inner justification, out of the concept of entropy²—let me state explicitly, had to evolve—that one day all other forms of energy on earth will have been converted into heat, that this heat cannot convert to other forms of energy, that this will lead to the heat death of the earth. Honest thinking, holding fast to the thought habits of modern times and therefore the principle of causation, will be unable to say anything but that this earth subject to heat death is a vast battlefield strewn with the corpses not only of all men, but also of all moral ideals. Those must disappear into a state of non-being once heat death has come upon the earth, according to a point of view that considers natural necessity to be the only valid principle.

The feeling this engenders in a person who looks at the world with an unprejudiced eye is one that takes away his certainty of a moral world order. It inevitably causes him to see the world in a dualistic way, so that really all he can say is: The moral ideal arises from the sphere of natural inevitability like froth and bubbles, and like froth and bubbles moral impulses shall vanish. You see, the inward element which has to do with the rank and dignity of man cannot be considered something which is in being and can be incorporated in a philosophy based on recognition of natural inevitability only. As I have said, it is possible to make formal distinction between scientific knowledge and faith, yet as soon as one assumes such a certainty of faith, science has to examine it rigorously, and the result will be that certainty of faith cannot provide inner assurance as to the reality of the moral sphere.

This has an effect not only on man's theoretical ideas. In anyone who is honest about life it must have an effect on his deepest feelings. In the realm of man's deepest feelings, processes that are deeply unconscious will then have a destructive effect on the foundations of man's inner certainty, on that element in man that actually enables him not only to think of his relationship to the world as one that holds firm, but also to feel and to will it to be such. Anyone who has some understanding of how these things hang together will be able to say to himself: The devastating waves thrown up so ominously from the depths of human life in the 20th century have in the final instance arisen from the accord, the unison—though we could also say the discord—of everything individual human beings experience for themselves. This disastrous time we live in has in the final instance been born out of the innermost condition and constitution of human souls and human hearts. The type of inner conflict I have described does not stay merely at the surface of soul life, as a theoretical view. It descends to the depths from which our instinctive life, the life of conscience, arises. There, the conflict is transformed into feelings that are at odds with the order existing on earth, feelings that give rise to disorder, to asocial attitudes, rather than a potential for creating social form.

What I have said today will not be appreciated to its full extent by many people; but taking a fairly unbiased look at the way the human intellect has developed over the last few hundred years and particularly in most recent times, it is possible to foresee the moral consequences, the kind of social structure which will have to result from this conflict in human souls—and within the very near future. We shall never find the answer to the burning question as to why we live in such troubled times unless we set about finding the building stones for what in the depths of human life are our own needs.

The opposite to what I have described is the cosmic insight sought through the spiritual science of Anthroposophy by progressing through Imagination and Inspiration to Intuition. We shall see how the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is able to come to terms with the most burning question of today, the question I have just been discussing, because of the insights it believes it is able to gain by following its path. I have described the path spiritual science takes through Imagination and Inspiration. I have pointed out that the exercises which I cannot describe in detail on this occasion may be found in my books, books I have mentioned several times before. Those exercises to achieve imaginative perception will make the element of spirit and soul a conscious content in the same way as our ordinary consciousness has a content within it when it lives in memory. Behind that which arises as memory, by deliberate choice or involuntarily, lies our physical and etheric organization. Processes occurring in our physical and etheric organization are coming up into conscious awareness at that point. With the exercises described in great detail in my books, it is possible to achieve purely in soul and spirit what our physical and etheric organization does in the ordinary process of remembering. As a result, ideas will arise that in a purely formal way are similar to remembered ideas, but they relate to an objective external content, not to one based on personal experience. By practising Imagination in this way we prepare ourselves for insight into a genuinely objective supersensible world.

To advance to Inspiration, it will then be necessary not only to practise the generation of such ideas in soul and spirit, ideas similar to remembered ideas, but we shall have to direct our efforts towards forgetting in soul and spirit, removing such Imaginations from the consciousness we have now achieved. We need to practise no longer to have the Imaginations, for they are unreal, but deliberately to remove them from our conscious mind, so that we then have a conscious mind, if I may put it like this, that is to some extent empty. If we achieve this, we shall have the ability, with an ego strengthened by all these exercise processes, to find our way to the revelations of the objective supersensible world. Where our Imaginations previously have been subjective, objective Imaginations will now light up in our conscious mind. The lighting up of such objective Imaginations, Imaginations not arising out of us but out of spiritual objectivity, that is Inspiration. We are in a way reaching the borders of the supersensible sphere which reveals its outer aspect to us in those Imaginations. In the sphere of our sensory perception, we can convince ourselves of the reality of the objective outside world that provides the basis for this world of the senses. We can do this by allowing the whole human being to be active within this sphere of sensory perception. In the same way, the Imaginations achieved at this point reveal to us with the fullest power of conviction the supersensible world which they bring to expression.

It is now a question of continuing on this path of knowledge to reach a further stage. We achieve this by not merely-taking the process of forgetting so far that we rid ourselves of Imaginations, but by going yet one step farther. When we attain to the imaginative world, the first thing to show itself is our own life, the course it has taken. We then live not just in the moment in our conscious awareness but within the whole river of life, gong back almost to the moment of birth. If we are then able to progress to Inspiration, the overview we have so far had over our life from the time of birth expands, and we perceive a supersensible world out of which we have come into the physical, sense-perceptible world through birth or through conception. The field of our spiritual vision will extend to the worlds we lived through before birth or conception and which we shall live through again when we have gone through the gate of death. The prospect of the supersensible world to which we belong opens up through insight gained in Inspiration.

It is possible to take our efforts beyond the point where we get rid of Imaginations containing details from within the horizon of the Imaginative world. We may forget the Imagination of our whole being as a human person, that is, discard, if we gain strength to do so, eradicate all we have experienced from birth what has become the collective content of our ego, and also what has been added as our horizon expanded to include a spiritual world. This will not weaken the ego but indeed strengthen it, through self-forgetting. And it will gradually take us into the reality of the spiritual world, the world above the one perceptible to the senses. We live into union with the reality of this spiritual world. We come to see our vision of repeated earlier lives as something showing us the ego at different stages. And once we have gained the ability to forget the ego at its present stage, that is, to shut out its imaginative content, we come to see the eternal ‘I’ or ego.

The things Anthroposophy speaks of are not derived out of any kind of blue haze of mysticism. It is possible to define every step along the way to every single insight. This way is one that is not external; it is an inner one throughout. It also is a way that leads to comprehension of a reality that is genuinely objective, though beyond sensory perception. By achieving genuine intuitive insight in this way, we come really and truly to see through our thinking, the actual process of forming ideas in everyday life, a process we apply to all our sensory perceptions. We arrive at the full, the whole reality of a process which to a certain degree can also be conceived of, empirically conceived of, in the way I have tried to describe in my Philosophy of Freedom. There I attempted to draw attention to pure thought, to the thinking processes that can also be alive within us before we have joined this particular part of our thinking with some external perception or other to make the full reality. I have drawn attention to the fact that this pure thought process as such can be perceived as an inner soul content. Its true nature, however, can only be recognised when genuine Intuition arises in the soul on its path to higher knowledge. Then we are able to see through our own thinking process, as it were. It is only through Intuition that we enter into our own thinking process, for Intuition consists in entering with our own being into something that is supersensible, in immersing ourselves in this supersensible element.

We then come to perceive something which it is again a kind of cognitive destiny to experience. We experience something quite tremendous as we enter through Intuition into the nature of cognition. We come to know how we are organized as human beings in terms of matter. We know how far our physical organization extends. And we also perceive through Intuition that it goes as far as providing a counterbase, the foundation, as it were, on which thinking can develop, and that the material processes as such need to be broken down at all points where true thinking occurs. To the same extent as material processes are broken down it is possible for something else, for thinking, the forming of ideas, to occupy the place where material elements have been subject to destruction.

I know all the objections that can be raised against the words I am now saying, but intuitive perception leads us to see, with regard to the physical sphere, that where thinking processes develop, material vision will perceive mere nothingness. It leads us to say: When I think, I am not—for as long as I regard material existence, normally considered the form of existence that counts, the only valid form of existence. Matter must withdraw first in the organism and make room for thinking, for the forming of ideas; that is when this thinking, this forming of ideas, sees a possibility of unfolding in man. At the point, therefore, where we perceive thinking in its reality, we perceive degradation, destruction of material existence. We gain insight into the way matter turns into nothing.

This is the point where we have reached the limit of the law of conservation of matter and of energy. It is necessary to recognize the limits of this law relating to matter and energy, so that we may take courage and contradict it where necessary. It will never be possible for anyone to see through the essential nature of thinking in an unbiased way, at the point where matter destroys itself, if they regard the law of conservation of matter to be absolute; if they do not know that it applies in the sphere of what we can survey externally in the field of physics, chemistry etc.. but that it does not apply at the point where thinking appears on the scene in our own human organization. If it were not necessary to present such insights to the world today, for certain underlying reasons, I would not expose myself to all the derision and objections that are bound to come from those who, conditions being as they are, consider the law of conservation of matter and of energy to be absolute, to be applicable throughout.

On the one hand therefore Intuition reveals to us the relationship of thinking to ordinary matter as it surrounds us in the physical world. On the other hand. Intuition also reveals to us the relationship of Inspiration, of the Inspiration that pertains to the spirit, to the sphere of human feelings, to the rhythmical life of man. In the sphere of nerves and senses, physical matter is destroyed. As a result the sphere of nerves and senses can provide the basis for ideation, for thinking. The second system in man is the rhythmical system. At the level of the soul, man's feeling life is connected with this in the same way as the thinking life is connected with the sphere of the nerves and senses. The relationship between the objective world outside man—which we are approaching through Inspiration—and man himself shows us that through Inspiration we become aware of a cosmic entity that extends its activities into us in the same way as the sense-perceptible world extends into us through ideation. This inspired world comes in specifically through the breathing process, the rhythms of which continue also into the processes occurring in the brain and in the rest of the organism.

We then come to know the element which lives within man as rhythm. Matter is not killed here in the same way as it is in the thinking process, but life is paralysed, so that it needs to fan itself into flame again and again. The usual, purely mechanical breathing rhythm is based on an inner rhythm which in a certain dualism splits itself into the physical process of respiration and the soul process of feeling. We perceive the unity of this feeling process, in the soul on the one hand and the physical rhythms of our respiration on the other, as something which has objective existence in Inspiration and can be penetrated by Intuition. In short, we can come to perceive the whole way in which the world of feelings and man's rhythmical element belong together, come to perceive that here the material element is not cancelled out completely as in the nerves and senses, but that the material element is partly paralysed. So we gradually come to see through man. We look at the feeling life of man and see something there that can exist only because life is partly paralysed again and again, in rhythmical sequence, and has to fan itself into flame again.

A second, important element in the nature of man is thus revealed when we perceive the way enlivening and paralysing processes act in concert. We see the significance of everything that is rhythmical in man, and how it is connected with man's essential being as a whole, in body and soul. As we come to perceive this second element in man, it will however become clear to us that man bears within himself a real force that is in rhythmical interplay with an external force that lies in the supersensible sphere. We see, as it were, an inner and an outer force swinging to and fro. In a similar way it is possible to perceive man in his metabolism and limbs.

Ascending to Inspiration, to Intuition, and Imagination, we perceive in soul and spirit the real forces that normally are unconsciously at work in man. Our usual object-bound perception only provides formal elements; we are merely looking on at a world, as it were. Anything we achieve through Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration however is first of all an independent product of our inner soul, but in supersensible perception we relate it to something that is objective in man, so that we are finally able to see how the human will acts when we act ethically. Having first of all realized that pure thought represents matter being broken down and that it altogether has to do with processes of death, processes effecting involution, we come to realize that everything that has will-like soul qualities has to do with processes of anabolism (building up)—with growth processes. The processes of growth and anabolism, the processes of organization and reproduction in us, reduce our normal conscious awareness for the depths of the human organization, and the will rises from those depths of human nature, depths our ordinary consciousness does not reach. Our thinking lives in a sphere where death enters in; the will element lives in the sphere of growth, of healthy development, of bearing fruit.

It is then possible to perceive, out of Intuition, how out of metabolism and through the will—which at this point however is motivated by pure thought—matter is pushed to the place in the human organism where it is to be broken down. Thinking activity as such breaks matter down: the will builds it up. It does it in such a way, however, that initially the building-up process remains latent in the human organization in the course of life as it moves towards death. But a building-up process is present. When we achieve truly independent moral Intuitions in our moral intentions, as described in my Philosophy of Freedom, we are living a life, on the basis of our organization, where transformed matter is, through will activity, put in a place where matter has been destroyed. Man develops inner creativity, building-up processes. In other words, within the cosmos we see nothingness getting filled with newly formed elements in the human organization, in an absolutely material sense. This means nothing else but that in consistently following the path of Anthroposophy we reach the point where purely moral ideals effect cosmic creation within man, to the point of materiality.

We have now discovered, in a way, where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises that ensures its own reality, out of human morality, because it bears this within itself, itself creating it. When we then come to see the outside world in the light of this Intuition, the mineral kingdom first of all shows itself to be in the process of being killed, in a process of decay. This is a process we have come to know well in the material process that corresponds to our own thinking process. We therefore come to see how this process of decay takes hold also of plant and animal life. There we are not thinking in terms of heat death—though within certain limits this does apply—but looking at the disappearance of the whole mineral-permeated world that is all around us. We see the world we realize to be based on causal necessity as one that is perishable, and we see the world we build up out of pure moral ideals arising on the basis of that other world which is dying. In other words, we now perceive how the moral world order relates to the world order of physical causality. A morally pure will is the element in human nature that overcomes causality in man himself and therefore also for the whole world.

If one takes an honest look at the explanation of nature based on causality, there is no place in the world where it is not valid within its particular sphere. And because it is valid there must be a power that destroys its validity. This power is the moral sphere. The moral sphere, recognized out of man's whole nature, holds within itself the power to break through natural causality, not by effecting miracles, however, but in a process of evolution. The element which within the individual human being thus presents itself as the destroyer of causality will only gain significance in future worlds. Yet we perceive the reality of the human will as it enters into alliance with pure thought. This provides us with the most wonderful fruit of life achieved through the scientific approach used in Anthroposophy—a glimpse of man's significance within the cosmos—and we also gain a feeling for man's rank and dignity within the cosmos.

Things are not merely connected in the world the way we often imagine them to be on the basis of the abstract concepts we use. No, they are connected as something real. One real and most important thing is the following. Not everyone is of course able today to advance to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. One thing, however, which we take with us through all these stages of cognition, even as spiritual scientists, is the thinking process in which one thought evolves from another with an inner necessity. This form of thinking is one every human being is able to experience if he enters into it without prejudice. And this is why all the findings of spiritual science, once they have been made, can also be verified by applying pure thought to them, because the spiritual scientist takes this pure thinking with him into all the elements of the ideas he forms.

In the context of everything I have presented to you, one very particular element evolves in the human soul in conjunction with what in the first place may be taken merely as an affirmation of anthroposophical spiritual science. Other ideas formed by man are derived from external perceptions or based on such external perceptions. The external perceptions provide the support for that life of ideas. There are however people today who on the basis of the thought and philosophical habits of very recent times absolutely refuse to accept that anything could possibly come to man that does not have the support of external perception. We shall end up with abstractions that have no relation to life if we refuse to accept that man is also able to understand matters of essence if only he will give himself up to his own pure thinking that organizes itself and concretely arises out of itself. It has to be accepted that he will then be able to take in the concepts gained through spiritual science, through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, concepts which the philistine will say are figments of the imagination and do not represent reality.

The philistine is too lazy to enter with his thought into the reality the spiritual scientist reveals through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Yet this reality is intimately bound up with the nature of man. We need to achieve the ability to take in anthroposophical concepts, concepts that have no correlative in the outside world perceptible to the senses, concepts we have to experience in freedom in our mind. The feeling, the attitude of mind we need for this will bring a new essential nature to our whole being.

Once spiritual science enters into cultural life it will be seen that because what is perceived in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition is a living entity within man himself—as I have indicated—the living essential being of man is taken hold of directly by spiritual science, and man is able to go through an inner metamorphosis and transformation by taking it in. He will be richer within himself. We are able to feel how he is made richer by letting an element enter into him that cannot be kindled by the outer physical reality. Full of this element, which streams through the whole human being, we then turn to our fellow men. We now gain an insight into man that we have not had before, and above all we gain love for our fellow man. Love of humanity is what the insights gained in anthroposophical spiritual science directed towards the supersensible sphere can kindle in us, a love of humanity that teaches us the value of man, that makes us aware of the rank and dignity of man.

Perception of the value of man, inner awareness of the dignity of man, will activity in love of humanity—those are the most beautiful fruits of life that can be made to grow and ripen in man when he lets the discoveries made in spiritual science enter into experience.

Spiritual science then acts on the will to the effect that the will is able to attain to what in my Philosophy of Freedom I have called moral Intuitions. And something tremendous comes into human life, for these moral ideals are Filled with what otherwise is love, and we are able to become men acting in freedom, out of the love our individual personality is capable of. With this, spiritual science is approaching an ideal that also arose in the time of Goethe, though u was Goethe's friend Schiller who put it most clearly. When Schiller really entered into Kantian philosophy he took in a great deal from Kant with regard to theoretical philosophy. When it came to Kant's moral philosophy, however, he was not able to follow Kant. In Kant's moral philosophy, Schiller found a rigid concept of duty, presented by Kant in a way that makes it appear as a force of nature, something with compelling effect on man. Schiller had an awareness of human value and the rank and dignity of man and could not accept that in order to be moral man had to be under spiritual compulsion. It was Schiller who wrote the beautiful words: ‘I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately do so from inclination, and it often vexes me that I am not a virtuous man.’³ For to Schiller's mind, Kant postulated that one really had to try first of all and suppress all partiality felt for a friend, and then do whatever one did for him out of a rigid notion of duty.

Schiller felt that man's attitude to morals had to be different from that presented by Kant. As far as it was possible to do so in his day, he defined his concept of this in his letters Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Training of Man in Aesthetics), aiming to show how duty has to descend and become inclination, and how inclination has to ascend, so that we develop a liking for what is the content of duty. Duty, he said, had to descend and natural instinct to ascend in a free human being who, from inclination, does what is right for the whole of mankind. If we look for the roots of moral Intuitions in human nature, if we look for the actual impulse, the ethical motivation in those moral Intuitions, we find love, a love become most pure so that it attains to the spiritual. Where this love becomes spiritual it absorbs into itself the moral Intuitions, and we are moral human beings in so far as we love our duty, in so far as duty has become something that arises out of the human individuality itself as an immediate force.

It was this which moved me to present a definite antithesis to the moral philosophy of Kant and to do so out of Anthroposophy in my Philosophy of Freedom. Kant's thesis⁴ was: ‘Duty! Great and sublime word, you have nothing in you of what is favoured, of flattery, but demand submission ... you establish a law ... before which all inclination must fade into silence, even though it run counter to it.’

If man had such a notion of duty he could never grow upwards into the spirit, to become the free originator of his moral actions within his innermost being. In such an endeavour to comprehend human nature on the basis of a genuine understanding of man in Anthroposophy, I countered this rigid concept found in Kantianism with the one you find in my Philosophy of Freedom: ‘Freedom! Gentle and truly human word, you hold within you all that is morally favoured, what does most honour to my humanity; you make me subservient to none, you do not merely establish a law, but wait to see what my moral love itself will come to recognize as law, seeing that it feels unfree in the face of any law imposed on it.’

That is what I felt I had to say in my Philosophy of Freedom, to propose that the moral element appears to the fullest degree in accord with the rank and dignity of man when it is one with man's freedom, rooted in true love of humanity. Anthroposophy is able to show how this love of duty in the wider sense becomes love of humanity and therefore the true leaven in social life, which we will be considering next. The tremendous, burning social question that today presents itself to us can only be fully understood when we make an effort to grasp the relationship between freedom, love, the nature of man, spirit and natural law.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner's reply to a question on the subject of entropy (after a lecture given on 12 Nov. 1917 in Zurich) in Anthroposophie undakademische Wissenschaften, Europa Verlag, Zurich 1950, p. 179 ff.
• 2. Entropy—in thermodynamics a quantitative factor used to define the thermal state of a system. (Translator)
• 3. From Schiller's Xenien (Gewissensskrupel)
• 4. The thesis Kant presents in relation to duty in his Critique of Practical Commonsense is: ‘Duty! Great and sublime word, you have nothing in you of inclination, of flattery, but demand submission, yet you do not threaten with what would arouse natural antipathy or fear in the mind in order to stir the will, you merely establish a law which finds its own way into heart and mind and yet against our will gains reverence (though not always adherence), before which all inclination fades into silence, even though it run counter to it.’

The imaginative, inspired and intuitive perception I have attempted to describe to you presents to man the findings of supersensible investigations that guide him towards his own essential nature. It needs to be emphasized, however, that it is not a question of achieving Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as such. These are just tools for research in the supersensible world, in the same way as scales, units of measurement, are used in the physical world. It is a question of developing these research tools in spiritual science in such a way that we take our starting point from something which is already present in our ordinary consciousness, in our everyday consciousness, in the consciousness on which ordinary science is based. We must, however, find the right way of rising to this ordinary consciousness with its potential for genuine ideas free from sensuality, ideas the mind is able to grasp. All it needs is to bring higher life into an element left unregarded in ordinary consciousness, and this will open the way to supersensible worlds. Anyone wishing to become a spiritual scientist himself must above all see to it that he holds in full awareness to the same element which is also needed for genuine research in the physical world, if such research is to yield results that are in accord with reality.

What I have just told you really applies only to the present age. This epoch in human evolution, which started in the 15th century, has advanced to scientific research as such, and in handling this type of research has also established concepts in human consciousness that can be developed and given life in the way I have indicated. In earlier times quite different methods had to be used. Some hint of this has been given in references to the yoga system, etc., but these older ways can no longer be ours. Just as the things an adult person does in life cannot be the same as those a child achieves, so the means used by civilized 20th century man cannot be the same as those used in the ancient Eastern and Greek cultures.

We have to start from pure thought, free from sensory elements, as I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Freedom. This sensation-free thinking is best developed—and this may sound paradoxical—by entering into the study of nature based on the scientific approach I have already referred to in these evening lectures. It was not without purpose that I spoke of Haeckel's approach, despite the fact that this has its faults, which I am able to see and admit. This is a particular method of immersing oneself in the evolution of animal and human life. If we strictly apply the discipline spiritual research has to demand with regard to the sense-perceptible world—living interaction of pure perception and pure thought—the results we arrive at for the organic world as it presents itself to external, sense-based empiricism are exactly those arrived at by Haeckel's method. To create a vivid picture of what is achieved by this approach, where external observation is penetrated with methodical thought, we must proceed as follows. We cannot in that case produce all kinds of speculations out of some kind of abstract thinking about a ‘vital force’ of the kind produced by neo-vitalists.¹ Nor can we speculate on the basis of pure concepts as to whether there is a supersensible principle or some such thing behind the things we perceive outside us, when using our senses. No, we have to stick to the world of facts the way Haeckel and his followers did. Spiritual science specifically demands that the study of external nature must be limited to this area, limited in this sense, otherwise speculation about outer nature leads to nebulous mysticism. Inevitably I shall be accused of materialism. Such accusation may also be given a special twist by saying that I did previously present things from the materialistic point of view but later abandoned this approach. There can be no question of this. Such objections are foolish, coming from people who take a very literal view and are unable to enter into the whole spirit of spiritual-scientific research. It is exactly by limiting ourselves to phenomenology in the study of nature that we are in a position to practise the inner renunciation in our thinking activity which is necessary if we are not to follow some nebulous mysticism but consider the phenomena as they present themselves in the physical world. We shall then come to use thought activity merely as an instrument, a method of working, I would say, in our study of the outside world. In no way would it serve as some form of constitutive principle, but as something that can go no further in any statement made with regard to the sense-perceptible world than determine an order among the phenomena of that outer physical world so that it reveals its own secrets, which is of course entirely in the Goethean sense. In practising such renunciation we shall come up against the limit set in this field of research. At this point we do not embark on philosophical speculation, coming up with all kinds of ideas as to a transcendental element that is to be revealed. Instead, we begin to experience the inner struggles and conquests that will not induce speculative thought but instil an elixir of life into thought, as it were, so that thinking activity now becomes transformed into the perceptions which then appear in our Imaginations. Thinking will then be able to reach the world which it can never reach through speculation, but only by metamorphosis into supersensible perception.

It is only by using such means to gain insight that man really comes alive to himself. It is by starting from exactly this type of thinking and by keeping it with him throughout that the spiritual scientist has to take everything he sees in imaginative perception and reduce it to the form of a pure idea. Then anyone will be able to follow what he presents in the form of ideas, provided they pay the right kind of attention to ordinary consciousness. Even the highest results obtained by the spiritual scientist can therefore be verified, and only lazy minds can insist that it is necessary to enter into the spiritual world oneself in order to verily those results.

When the results of Imagination are revealed, man's soul perceives—and I have already described this in these lectures—everything encompassed within his life from the time of birth as one cohesive stream. The ego grows beyond the here and now, sensing and experiencing itself within the whole river of life, from the time of birth. As man advances to Inspiration, the world he lived in before birth, or before conception, opens up before him, and this is also the world he will live in when he has gone through the gate of death. In this way, the immortal element that is part of man's life becomes the object of his perception. In Intuition, finally, the prospect opens up of repeated past earth lives. The things anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of may therefore be defined as such that the individual steps needed to achieve these results are stated in every case, and that the results are verifiable, as I have said, because they have to be expressed in thought forms that are accessible to everyone.

Initially, therefore, man is presented with the discoveries made in anthroposophical spiritual science that relate purely to human nature. As we begin to find ourselves, as we learn to express in summary form what we experience in our spirit, in our ego, we arrive at the whole of our self opened out and spread out, the self that encompasses temporality and eternity. We are able to do so by making the findings of spiritual science our own. That is how man finds himself, and it is for the time being the most significant outcome in quite general human terms. At the same time, however, the whole of man's consciousness is expanded. The findings made in spiritual science arise from thought processes that have been enlivened and re-formed and because of this also have an enlivening effect on human souls when taken into those souls and tested for their truth. As a result, human consciousness gains a new kind of insight into the world. Let me first of all briefly describe two of the life fruits arising out of this very expansion of consciousness, out of its intensification.

Today, we face the burning social question. The elements which influenced social life right to the present day arose from indefinite and subconscious human instincts. Men established social systems that arose as though by a law of nature, out of all kinds of instinctive backgrounds. This is evident to anyone able to review social life with an unbiased mind. We are now living in an age when such instinctive contingencies in the social organism of humanity are no longer adequate. Just as the individual husbanding of resources became tribal economy, national economy and finally world economy, so the thinking applied to economics had to become more and more conscious. For modern man the necessity has arisen to consider the potential relationships between people involved in the economic sphere and altogether what goes on between people who have to get along together in social life. It has to be admitted that these are complex issues. When the need arose to progress from instinctive to clear consciousness in this field, attempts were made to do this from the point of view which has come to be the scientific way of thinking over the last centuries. I think there is no need here to pay homage yet again to the scientific approach that evolved as the proper one to explore the secrets of external nature. Where the secrets of external nature are concerned this method which has arisen from the teaching of Copernicus, of Galileo, has certainly proved fruitful. Mankind has got well used to this method in the course of recent centuries, using it to bring clarity into a system of nature but dimly perceived with the aid of the senses.

Then the necessity arose to get a clear picture also of human relationships in social life. It is not surprising that people first of all applied the skills acquired in the study of external nature to these human relationships. That is how our views on economics and social economics have arisen, ranging from those merely promulgated from professorial chairs to what millions upon millions of people have come to believe, and finally to Marxism. I have discussed this in my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage.² Efforts were made to understand how capital has its functions, to analyse labour as a factor in the social context, and the effects of the circulation, production and consumption of goods. All these things form part of a highly complex situation, and the whole thing presents itself to the soul in living processes, I would say, with infinite potential. Even the best of scientific methods will not be adequate for the processes discernible here, and it is because they have not been adequate and nevertheless have been persisted with in the effort to penetrate the social life that we are today finding ourselves in such a wretched situation on the widest scale, for the whole world. Anyone wanting to go deeper than the surface and penetrate to the depths of our social problems will of course realize that they have to do with what I have just tried to present to you. Social forms cannot evolve out of the kind of thinking that has proved effective in science. The kind of thinking however that works its way through to Imagination, taking hold of something objective and coming to expression as something that is alive and astir rather than at rest—a process offering infinite potential within a relatively narrow sphere or also covering a large area—such a process will penetrate this changeable life that has to do with capital, labour, economics, etc. It will be able to come to grips with what is alive in the social order of man, and that really is not surprising, for the things to be discerned in the life of mankind do after all arise from within man. The inner life of man is the life of soul and spirit, or at least it is governed by soul and spirit. When we come upon the social order we therefore come upon something spiritual. No wonder it needs spiritual methods to penetrate social issues.

Ladies and gentlemen, forgive me if I bring a personal note into this now—but it was this which gave me courage to look for the spirit where it reveals itself in the immediate intercourse of man's social life. I did so on the same basis on which I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom, my Theosophy and my Occult Science—an Outline. That is how I came to take the road that led to my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage. I speak with a personal note, but behind this personal note lies my objective conviction as regards the way man can gain insight into the social order, an order that he must create very consciously today, which of course means out of the spirit. That is the one thing.

The other—I am merely giving examples of the life fruits yielded by anthroposophical research, and I could give many such examples—the other thing I want to mention is something we may encounter when considering the human organism. We see this before us in the first place in its outer form. The enveloping part of this outer form hides the internal organs. In physiology and biology we study the morphology, the structure, of these inner organs. There is no other way so long as we stay within the context of science as we know it today. In reality, however, the lungs, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys, all the organs of man are not as they present themselves to the eye when it looks at them in their enclosed form, in a structure that on the whole, I would say, is in the resting state, particularly in so far as we perceive them with our senses. No, these organs merely pretend to have such a configuration, for in the living human being the individual organs are constantly alive and stirring. They are anything but organs at rest in a finite form, they are living processes. In fact, we should not really speak of a lung, a heart, of kidneys and a liver. We should speak of a heart process, the sum total of heart processes, the sum total of lung processes, the sum total of kidney processes. Everything that goes on there is in a constant process of metamorphosis, though this is so much shut away that the whole may well be taken for a fixed form, and indeed has to be taken as such from an external point of view. From a view that only sees this form, a form that really only reveals the outer aspect, we need to advance to the living process, to something that fundamentally speaking changes into something else at any moment in these organs, to whatever it is that really gives rise to the process of life out of these organs. This cannot be done by using our senses; we can only achieve it through an inner vision that is alive and astir, and this is given in imaginative perception.

Social processes are such by nature that they run away from us in their complexity, as it were, when we approach them with scientific concepts, and the processes in our lungs, heart, liver, kidneys are such that they really hide their inner nature if we apply those ordinary scientific concepts to them. We penetrate into those processes that have shut in upon themselves through Imagination. On the one hand. Imagination is able—if I may put it in such ordinary terms—to run after those volatile complex social processes. On the other hand it is able to resolve the resting form falsely apparent in human organs into the ever changing life of organic processes. These are then perceived directly, not arrived at by speculation or deduction. For in scientific research based on the senses, thinking has to limit itself to what presents itself in the phenomena. Beyond that it has to transform itself into a living, supersensible view. It is only then that it enters into the reality of what goes on there, hidden from sensory perception also where individual organic processes are concerned.

This is the way to achieve fertilization of science-based medicine, a discipline given full recognition by spiritual science. We can achieve this with what spiritual science is able to add to that science-based medicine. Spiritual science does not wish to ally itself with quackery, with the mystery mongers in therapeutics. No, in this field, too, spiritual science wants to take into account all genuine research, genuine findings based on sensory perception, but it wants to take them further, to those secrets of life that we also need to uncover if we want to enter into the wholeness of life. Such penetration will then yield fruits again for life itself as we meet it in sickness and health, or in human community life. It will make it possible to perceive the fruits of life that arise out of the perception gained in Anthroposophy of elements beyond the world of the senses.

All this then comes together in something I should like to define as follows. People often think that materialism can be overcome by abandoning the whole world of matter to the outside world, in a way saying goodbye to it in one's mind and then ascending into an abstract spiritual sphere, into ‘cloud-cuckoo-land,’ and mystery-monger around there. They consider material life as something inferior which we must rise above. Oh yes, if we do this we shall rise to a state of mind that is very pleasant to be in, a kind of Sunday pleasure for man's spirit after the rough weekday work we devote ourselves to in the material world that we do after all inhabit. That is not the soil on which genuine anthroposophical science can be established. Anthroposophy aims to grasp the spirit in such a way that once it has got hold of it in its working, its creative activity, it can follow it right down into the finest tendrils of material life. It is important for a spiritual science of the kind I am speaking of to do more that establish that in addition to a body consisting of brain, lung, liver and so on man also has a soul and a spirit. That would not take us far beyond talking around things in mere words, for it leads to abstract notions of the world which we inhabit between birth and death. The aim of spiritual science is to immerse itself in everything with the spirit it has taken into itself, to say how spirituality, something essentially spiritual, is active in every single human organ, how the essential nature of lung, liver, stomach, etc. is comprehended in the spirit, how spirit and soul are present everywhere in the whole of the human organism, directing the light of the spirit to every single cell, so that there shall be nothing that is not illumined with the light of the spirit. Then it is no longer a question of matter on one side and spirit on the other; then a unity has arisen, joining what in abstract terms is seen as spirit on the one side and matter on the other. And the same applies to the social life.

We must let the spirit enter right into reality, and ourselves enter into reality with it. Then the human soul achieves profundity and the ropes and strings I have spoken of in these evening lectures³ enter into man's awareness. These are the ropes and strings that stretch from the innermost being of man to the innermost nature of the cosmos, the spiritual connection between man and cosmos and, as we become conscious of them, a living flowing movement arises, an inhalation and exhalation of the cosmos, I would say. Something which otherwise is grasped only in theory, in abstract concepts, becomes living experience within free spirituality; it becomes transparent as only ideas can be and on the other hand also as alive as only life itself is, and as free as only the freest of actions can be, yet wholly objective, though in this case the objective element has to be grasped in free spirituality. This is why it is necessary to enliven the faculties that normally fight their way to the surface unconsciously in man, enliven them out of this spiritual research, this insight into the spirit.

People who are artists justifiably feel a certain aversion when it comes to the usual academic studies. And modern aesthetics, evolved out of the thinking of more recent times, a form of thinking habitual to science, is also something artists avoid—justifiably so, for it is something abstract, something that leads away from art rather than into it. Spiritual science does not lead to such abstract concepts. It brings to life what to begin with was merely concept, idea, and this in turn enlivens the other faculties of man. This is why the soil from which this spiritual science is growing is also able to produce genuinely artistic work, in a truly natural way. The art we cultivate at Dornach—tomorrow I will be showing some samples of this in pictures—and anything else drawn from the same soil from which spiritual science has arisen, eurythmy for instance⁴—has nothing to do with translating some idea or another into an artistic approach. No, it is merely the soil that is the same, this soil being the living creativity of the whole human being.On one occasion he will evolve ideas and that will be one branch; another time the other branch, the artistic one, will arise from the same root. That is also why I have always felt extremely uncomfortable when tendencies to produce allegories, to symbolize, emerged within the anthroposophical movement. Anything artistic will have to arise from the same source as Anthroposophy, but it is not Anthroposophy translated into art. And so a particular life-fruit is brought forth in the sphere of art, like those briefly referred to in the field of social life and in medicine.

If we consider how man is there brought together with what is immortal and eternal within him, with the forces that give him form out of the spiritual world, we will also understand why the insight in experience and experience in insight gained through Anthroposophy also has to do with deeper religious feeling. In an age which has grown so indifferent to religion we need fundamental religious forces again. We need ways that lead to the areas of spiritual experience where fertilization may be found for man's artistic work, for everything to do with the value and dignity of man. Such fertilization comes from the centre that is God. It is a perversion of the truth to ascribe sectarian tendencies to Anthroposophy, for it certainly has no such intentions. It is a perversion of the truth to believe that it wants to be a new religious foundation. It does not want to do any such thing, for the simple reason that it is endeavouring to understand the progress of human evolution the way it really is. Here we must say that the divine powers that fashioned the world and guided the evolution of man were in earlier times understood in accord with men's capacity to understand. We need to progress to different metamorphoses of perception and of motivations; we need to make our souls appreciate the eternal in accord with the thinking of modern times. Of course, spiritual science will not be speaking of a Christ other than the Christ who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. But spiritual science has to speak of the qualities of insight and perception which it considers necessary in the 20th century, also where the Christ event is concerned. People who base themselves on some particular confession may feel afraid that the ground will be taken from under their feet by Anthroposophy. They have to be asked again and again: Is someone who is all the time afraid that the truths of Christianity may be diminished really someone who truly professes Christianity? Or is it the person who knows that however many millions of discoveries are made on the basis of the physical world, the soul or the spirit, these can only make the genuine truths of Christianity appear to the soul in even greater glory? No one would ask why there is nothing in the Bible about America, and someone who might have wanted to raise objections to the discovery of America by basing himself on the Bible would have been just like someone who today wanted to fight the views put forward by anthroposophical spiritual science by basing himself on the Bible.

It is necessary to take an honest look at these things and think them through in honesty. Otherwise the element contained in denominational religion must always be a drag on genuine research. Yet if genuine research penetrates to the spirit in the way anthroposophical spiritual science wishes to do, it will yield the very life fruit that consists in new life coming to the religious element in the human soul. We need to bring the findings made in our researches in the different worlds into harmony with the element which represents our religious awareness and feeling. And we do not take anything away from the religions when we try to establish harmony, justifiable harmony, a harmony based on insight, between their truths and what has been shown to be the quality of knowledge in different epochs. Our age in particular shall also have this life fruit out of anthroposophical work, a deepening of a religious life which has grown indifferent. When this fruit ripens, it will be from this direction that the warmth and enthusiasm will come which we need if we are to make progress as Christians in this time of decline. Any insights we gain into social life, into the human organization, anything we may produce in the sphere of art: all this can only further the evolution of man if there is the warmth of man's innermost nature and his creative power behind it. This is to be found in the truly religious feelings of mankind.

Opposition to these spiritual scientific researches is particularly powerful at the present time. This is profoundly bound up with the fact that contact has gradually been lost with reality. On the one hand, attention is directed to a nature which has had all spirit removed from it, so that modern science is not able to perceive it in its true complexion but only in its outer form perceptible to the senses. On the other hand, attention turns to the spiritual world, perhaps in mere certainty of feeling—I spoke of this yesterday—but here men are unable to get beyond abstract concepts. All of this has its root in the fact that people have gradually grown too lazy to want to grasp the spiritual in spiritual freedom, in free spiritual experience, in inner activity. Yet that is the only way in which the spiritual can be tracked down in every nook and cranny of the material world. Science finds its truths by very close adherence to outer events, basing them on experience, on experiment. No effort is made to think beyond what random experiments, random observation reveal, and a habit has developed of replacing the former dogma of revelation—as I put it in my earliest writings⁵—with the dogma of evidence, evidence of the outer senses. As a result we have grown dissatisfied in our heart of hearts. Within the soul's capacity for experience, we have got out of the habit of gaining the objective experience that is independent of anything in the outer world; we do not have free inner experience. This free inner experience is what we must seek above all else if we want to achieve genuine spiritual research. It is also what people are now resisting most strongly.

I would like to give you an example, not with the intention of using a recently published essay to settle accounts in these lectures with regard to some objection or other which has been raised against spiritual science in the light of Anthroposophy. No, it is not my intention in these lectures to deal thus directly with any particular opponent, least of all with what has been said in the essay I am referring to. The writer of that essay is dealing with something quite different from anthroposophical spiritual science, about which he knows nothing. He has tried to analyze it on the basis of hearsay and after glancing at perhaps a single book and hearing certain reports, in perfect sincerity—this one has to admit—and to the best of his ability. I do not want to discuss the points that essay makes with regard to spiritual science. I merely want to consider the issue in the light of cultural and contemporary history. This extraordinarily distinguished author⁶ refers to the exercises he has been told I describe, exercises to enable man truly to take the path to the spiritual world in his soul life. And he has obviously also heard or read that the initial, very elementary exercises consist in spending five minutes in reflection on a neutral object. A thought is held on to in genuine inner freedom, when one is under no compulsion and merely follows something one has willed oneself. To indicate what really matters I therefore said one could use a pin or a pencil, for the object one was thinking of was irrelevant.

It is not a matter of becoming absorbed in the thought content, but of the thought process being held on to for five minutes, the thought process being transferred to the sphere of free activity. We are not used to keeping our thinking activity within the sphere of free activity in ordinary life. Turning our thoughts to an object we want to rivet attention on that object; we keep it in our thoughts for as long as it holds our attention. It will never be possible to enter into spiritual science in this way. On the contrary, such an approach turns us aside more and more from supersensible study and intuition.⁷ It is quite typical for a person who insists on continuing in the decline that shows itself in the present time to say: ‘I could not manage that at all at present; and I am afraid, yes, I am afraid, that however much I try to overcome myself I shall never learn it. On the other hand I have been accused of being so engrossed in an object that held my interest that for more than five minutes the rest of the world no longer existed for me.’

That is exactly the opposite path. If we get so engrossed in an object that the rest of the world no longer exists for us, we are given up to that object, we have relinquished our freedom to that object. That is the essential point: to take an object that does not rivet our attention, and keep that object in awareness for five minutes out of inner strength and freedom. It therefore is enormously typical when someone says: T think I prefer to leave such a faculty to people who have nothing in their lives that holds sufficient genuine interest for them to keep their attention for five minutes.’

This is a famous man of the present age, and there is so much that holds his attention, keeping him unfree, over and over again, for five minutes and probably more—let us assume this, to give him his due—that he never gets to a point where he is able to hold a thought complex in his mind for five minutes. This he intends to leave to people who are not as enthralled with the outside world as he is. It also shows him to be completely bound up with the modern point of view, the modern way of thinking and feeling which has evolved and which I have defined for you tonight. That is a long way from the essential aim of spiritual science which is to enter with one's mind into the sphere of free thought activity.

Another example I have given of the way man may enter into such a sphere of independent thought is the meditation on the Rose Cross I have described in the second part of my Occult Science. You can look it up there, how the exercise should be done. The author I am referring to had the following to say on this: ‘The cross does not infrequently come before my mind's eye, without volition’—so again it does not come when called to mind in freedom, but involuntarily—‘but it is not a black cross, say of polished ebony, but an absolutely ordinary crude gallows tree, a dirty grey in colour. No circlet of seven radiant red roses hangs on this cross, but a cadaverous man, sorely beaten, who is going through the tortures of death, and indeed the tortures of hell.’

So you give an exercise that is designed to lead to inner freedom of thought, and this person can think of nothing else but what comes to mind under the powerful compulsion of his whole upbringing, out of the whole of his life habits, and he even considers this to be the acceptable, the right thing. With such an attitude of mind it will never be possible to reach what spiritual science really has to offer. That man had no need to refer specifically to the cross I spoke of in my Occult Science. It could, for instance, have happened to him that someone somewhere spoke of the cross formed by the transom and mullion in a window, describing this to him. And in that case, too, he might have said: ‘You have no right to speak of that cross in the window, for what comes to mind for me is not a cross formed by transom and mullion and painted a reddish brown, say, but always a black cross that is a crude common gallows tree’ and so on. And if someone were to try and tell the man how a cross is used in analytical geometry, the cross formed by ordinate and abscissa, he would stop them from doing so. Even if Einstein were to draw the abscissa and ordinate for him, he would conceive of nothing else but his crude gallows tree. We must consider these things with regard to their true content and it will become obvious what forces are present in our time that lead in directly the opposite direction to what is such an urgent necessity today with regard to social issues, religious and scientific issues—as I hope, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have been able to see.

It is not surprising, then, that the author in question also says something else that is indeed most curious. I have presented the Akashic Record, as I have called it,⁸ as something through which man tries to develop his thoughts to such an extent that he is able to survey cosmic evolution through inner activity. What I had to depend on was that when such things are described they are received in an inner soul state that is kept alive, with this soul state elevated in free spirituality to what is open to supersensible perception. But this man said the following: ‘And—believe it or not—I do not even find it difficult to abstain. Even if Dr Steiner were to present me with an illustrated special edition of the Akashic Record, I would not bother to read it.’ Well, this man seems to imagine an illustrated special edition of the Akashic Record may be presented to him, so that he can be sure to stay passive, so that there would be no question of anyone counting on his inner soul activity.

It certainly is necessary for anyone wishing to participate in working on the powers for a new beginning coming into our time to view such things dispassionately, without antipathy, seeing them as they are—all the elements of transition and decline. Many people stand there and are not even aware that they have these powers of transition in them, and a great many others rush after them—thousands and thousands of people. They are keen to follow such passive religious natures because they want to remain passive, because they do not want to take hold of the one thing that is so essential: objectivity, the essential nature of objectivity—that is, to take hold of the supersensible in free spirituality. That requires an active inner soul state, a free inner soul state.

That is what I want to say in conclusion, summing up: Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to foster supersensible insights, insights that lead to the kind of results I have briefly defined these last few days. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to lead up to dead concepts that tell us only of a dead outer reality. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to limit scientific work, the discovery of truth, to the kind of results an abstract intellect gathers like wilting leaves from the outer reality perceptible to the senses, wilting leaves that dry up as they are translated to the human soul and in drying up paralyse man's inner strength.

Anthroposophical spiritual science wants its findings to be true life fruits, not wilting leaves, life fruits that may become spiritual nourishment for the living soul, just as the circulating blood provides nourishment for the body. For this to be possible, spiritual science needs to breathe the air of freedom. Perception has to be taken into the spiritual atmosphere of freedom, a freedom that is able to awaken the greatest depths of the human soul and make them perceptive, and at the same time also awaken them to the ability to act in genuine freedom, act in a way that may establish harmony, social harmony among men. Certain things will have to happen in the social organism that of necessity must arise from the present and into the immediate future. In the final instance this has to arise from what man attains to in full conscious awareness and free perception, is able to experience in his innermost soul as the independent life fruit of such perception, and is able in turn to bring into human society as a whole, in social action. This will lead to mankind out of the present and into the immediate future through powers that are not those of decline but of a new beginning; it will lead mankind to a new element that is human, healing and creative.

• 1. Concerning ‘vital force,’ vitalism and neo-vitalism, see for instance Ansprachen und Vorträge Rudolf Steiners im zweiten anthroposophischen Hochschulkurs (Talks and lectures given by Rudolf Steiner as part of the second course given at the School of Anthroposophy) 3–10 April 1921, Berne 1948, p.99 ff. GA76.
• 2. Die Kernpunkte der socialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkciten der Gegenwart und Zukunft by Dr Rudolf Steiner, early April 1919. Includes his ‘Aufruf an das deutsche Volk und an die Kulturwelt’. GA 23. English: Towards Social Renewal. Tr. by F.T. Smith. Rudolf Steiner Press.
• 3. See footnote to page 45.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbarer Gesang, 8 lectures, 1924. GA 278. Engl. Eurythmy as Visible Music. Tr. by V. and J. Compton-Burnett. Rudolf Steiner Press. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache. 15 lectures, 1924, GA 279. Engl. Eurythmy as Visible Speech. Tr. by V. and J. Compton-Burnett and S. anc C. Dubrovik. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1956.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner; Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung. GA 2. Engl. The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. Tr. by O. Wannamaker. Anthr. Press & Rudolf Steiner Publ. Co. 1940.
• 6. Christoph Schrempf wrote a letter to the publisher Eugen Diederichs which was published in volume 13, No. 6 of the journal Die Tat (Jena, September 1921).
• 7. Rudolf Steiner here used the term ‘Anschauung’, which in philosophical terminology is ‘intuition’.(Translator)
• 8. Rudolf Steiner. Aus der Akasha-Chronik. GA 11. English: Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria. Translated by K.E. Zimmer. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1971.

This is the 7th of 8 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Stuttgart, in 1921. It is also known as: The Gulf Between a Causal Explanation of Nature and the Moral World Order. The title of this series of lectures is: Anthroposophy, Root and Fruit. The lectures were published in German as: Anthroposophie, ihre Erkenntniswurzeln und Lebensfruchte. Mit einer Einleitung ueber den Agnostizismus als Verderber echten Menschentums. This lecture appears in the book: Fruits of Anthroposophy.

The most significant question in the spiritual life of our time, which casts its shadow over the whole of our culture, is of such a nature that it already affects every man's feeling life to some extent. Yet its answer can only be found on the path leading from ordinary objective knowledge to super-sensible cognition by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Each soul must ask himself this significant question, when, in genuine concern for the being of man, he contrasts, with a complete lack of bias, the conception of the moral, ethical life that is possible today, with the interpretation of life that stems with good reason from a natural scientific world conception. What is more, in our day the question of morality is of the greatest urgency because we live in that period of time when what is ethical is at the same time social, and today every man experience the urgency of the social question.

Let us consider what the soul learns about existence in conformity with today's thinking as it is shaped by natural science. In the attempt to reach a true natural science, man is led to consider the objects of the world in their necessity, in their causal connections. This results in a world outlook which must necessarily extend these causal connections to comprise everything that is within the world order, including man. Today, in so far as we wish to understand man by means of natural science, we take it as a foregone conclusion that we apply that same cognition that we are accustomed to use when considering natural appearances outside man, and we then attempt to extend in more or less audacious hypotheses, what natural science has learnt from what is lying nearest to us, that we are able to observe, to cover world facts and world beings. We construct hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the world, out of our natural scientific theories of knowledge. Then we come with this natural scientific knowledge to the point where if we are consistent we must say, ‘We may not come to a halt before human freedom.’ I have already indicated this problem.

A man who seeks a strictly uniform explanation of the world, simply out of a desire for consistency, and has to decide between assuming a freedom which is really given empirically in immediate human experience, and that all-powerful natural necessity which must be deduced from what mankind has learned through established ways of thinking and knowing, will opt for natural necessity. He will declare the experience of freedom to be an illusion, and will extend the area of natural necessity to include the most intimate experiences of the human being, so that mankind will be fully enmeshed in the web of natural necessity. And in the same way he will assess in the light of this hypothetical world conception the nature of the beginning and the end of the earth. He takes those laws and interconnections produced by physics and chemistry etc., and builds out of them such hypotheses as the nebular hypothesis, that is, the Kant-Laplace theory of the beginning of the earth. Then, out of the second principle, the teaching about mechanical heat, he constructs hypotheses about the heat death in which the earth will perish.

In this way one can extend into the most intimate details of the human being, as well as to the boundaries of the world-all, the contemporary explanation of natural appearances, as they surround us in the world in which we wander between birth and death, without disputing its fruitfulness. But then, if we reach a certain degree of self-perception, we ask ourselves, “In that case, wherein lies the dignity of man, wherein exists true human worth?” Here we come to the point where we turn our gaze to the moral world, to that which seems to be an ethical, moral impulse. We feel that it is only in carrying out a moral ideal, permeated with religious fervour, that we can achieve an existence fully worthy of mankind. We could not call ourselves fully human if we did not think that motive was active in us which we describe as ‘moral’, which streams into the social life, and seems to be inwardly vibrating in us with what we call the Divine in the world order. But for a modern man who in all honesty adopts the viewpoint from which he surveys mechanical causality, the necessary order of nature, there is no bridge leading from the natural order, which according to a certain way of knowledge must include man himself, to that other order, which is moral, and which is bound up with what man must consider to be his entire dignity, his entire worth.

In most recent times, to be sure, a certain expedient has been devised in order to bridge this chasm which has opened up between the two components of our human make-up. It has been said that we can only regard as truly scientific that which will explain the whole world in terms of natural necessity, including man, and including the beginning and the end of the world. And from this standpoint scientific validity is given to nothing that cannot be absorbed without contradiction into a thinking spun out of this natural order. But yet, a realm has been established with an entirely different kind of certainty, with the certainty of belief. Man looks within on that which shines in us as a moral light, and says to himself. “No scientific knowledge can guarantee in any way the significance of this moral sphere, but man must find within himself a certainty of belief. He must recognise out of the Subjective that in a certain way his Being is connected with that realm which is permeated with moral necessity.”

At first, many people may well find reassurance if they discriminate clearly between what man can know and what he can believe, and can persuade themselves that this separation gives a certain comfort, a feeling of security in life. But if we probe deeply enough, not with a partial thinking, but with all that thought can experience if it unites itself with the full power of the human soul and spirit, then we must come to the following conclusion: if the realm of natural necessity is as man has grown accustomed to consider it in the course of the last hundred years, then in the face of this there is no possibility of preserving the realm of morality. This must be said, because the moral realm simply shows nowhere the power to be a match for the realm of natural order. We need only consider how the thought must arise with a certain inner justification out of the contemplation of heat entropy—I say expressly, must arise—that once all the remaining earth forces have changed into heat, this heat cannot change itself back into any other force, and that then the earth as such will succumb to what is called ‘the heat death.’ Thus there is no possibility for an honest thinker who must hold fast to the current way of thinking about natural causality, other than to say to himself: of this earth which has succumbed to heat death there remains a huge field of corpses, not only including all men but with them all moral ideals. They must disappear into the lifeless, if, in recognising the sole validity of natural necessity we accept that the earth is to succumb to ‘the heat death.’

For a man who faces the world without prejudice, this reflection produces an experience that even takes from him the certainty of a moral world order, and above all leaves him in a situation where he must see the world as split asunder, so that he can only say to himself: “Moral ideas rise up out of natural necessity like foam bubbles, and like foam bubbles, they vanish.” For, according to natural necessity, what is connected in the innermost being of man with human worth and dignity cannot be acknowledged as having real existence. How shall I say? Granted that one accepts a formal division between knowledge and belief, yet, even if one has already found a certainty of belief, against the necessary exactions of science, certainty of belief can give no inner guarantee for the reality of what is moral.

This not only affects man's theoretical ideas. If a man intends to live honestly, he must work with it into his deepest world experiences, and there take hold of it through events which lie deep in the subconscious, disturbing that which gives inner security, which makes it possible for a man to have a stable connection with the world, not only by means of thinking but also through experience. And a man who has a feeling for such connections could say to himself: What is called up in such an uncanny way out of the depths of human life in this twentieth century, like a devastating wave, proceeds when all is said and done out of the harmony—or one could say the disharmony—of all that the individual has experienced about himself. For our frightful catastrophic time is born finally out of the innermost condition of the human heart and soul. Such an inner division as I have described to you does not appear only on the surface of the soul-life, as a theoretic world-conception. It sinks down to the depths out of which comes the instinctive life, the life of conscience. And so this dichotomy throws up into the world-order discrepant feelings, disorder, producing a framework for what is unsocial rather than fostering what is more truly social.

Certainly, many men do not yet give full weight to what I have described today. But the consequences can already be foreseen, if we follow with only a little lack of prejudice the trend of human spiritual development in the last centuries, and especially in very recent times, and see to what moral exhaustion, to what kind of social form this division in the human soul must lead in the very near future. An answer will never be found to the burning question, ‘Why do we live in such distressing times?’ if one does not try to seek the foundation man has need of in the depths of human life itself.

Confronting what I have here described is that knowledge of the world which may be striven for through anthroposophical spiritual science, by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We shall see how anthroposophical spiritual science enables man to come to terms with what I have shown today to be the most urgent problem of the present and the near future, and what precisely in this way it seems to him that he will be able to know. I have shown you the path which spiritual science takes by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. I cannot give each exercise here in detail, but you can find this in my books which I have often mentioned here. I have drawn attention to the way in which each exercise on the path to imaginative knowledge gives the soul a conscious content in the same way as our everyday consciousness is impregnated with a content when it lives in memory. Behind what rises up in the form of memories, consciously or unconsciously invoked, lies our physical and etheric organisation. What takes place there, rises up into consciousness. What our physical organisation produces in our ordinary memory is brought about in a purely soul-spiritual way through carrying out the exercises given in my books. Through them one reaches ideas, which in a purely formal way are like memory ideas, but which refer to an outer objective content, not to an entirely personal experience. By this means we prepare ourselves through Imagination for the knowledge of a truly objective spiritual world.

Then, in order to reach to Inspiration, we must not only practise in a soul-spiritual way the production of ideas which are like remembered thoughts, but we must work in such a way that the spirit-soul also practises forgetting, to some extent, as it were throwing out these imaginations from the consciousness which has been now attained. We must practise no longer having, yes, the unreal imaginations. We must deliberately distance them from our consciousness, so that, if I may so express it, this consciousness has a certain emptiness. If we reach this stage, then by means of all these practices we are able to strengthen the Ego to the point where we find ourselves within the manifestations of an objective, super-sensible world. In place of the former subjective imaginations, objective imaginations light up in our consciousness, and this lighting up of such objective Imaginations which in fact do not come from ourselves, but from spiritual objectivity, this is in reality Inspiration. We reach right to the boundary of the super-sensible, that reveals itself to us in its outer appearance through these Imaginations. Exactly in the same way as in our sense-perceptible world, if we only let the whole man be active in sense perception, we convince ourselves through the reality of this sense world, of the underlying objective outer world, so now the Imaginations we have attained give us plenary conviction of the super-sensible world whose expression they are.

Now it is a question of pursuing this way of knowledge to the next stage. This we reach in that we not only push the forgetting so far that we throw out the Imaginations, but we go yet a stage further. When a man reaches the Imaginative world, he sees first his own life in its progression. He lives consciously not only in the moment, but in the whole of his life as far back as to his birth. If he is then able to go still further back, through Inspiration, then he extends his survey to the life before birth, as far as to the perception of a super-sensible world out of which he came into the sense world through birth or conception. The spiritual field of vision extends over that world which we have lived through before birth and conception and shall live through when we have gone through the Portal of death. This prospect of the super-sensible world to which we belong is reached by means of Inspired cognition.

If we now strive even further, not only to expunge those Imaginations whose details remain within the horizon of the Imaginative world but also to wipe out the imagination of our whole life as man, that means, if we have acquired the forces to thrust out what is united with our Ego through the experiences we have had since our birth, and what is also added to it through the fact that the horizon has widened to include a spiritual world, then we have reached the stage not of weakening our Ego, but, just through forgetting ourselves, of first really and truly strengthening it. And through this we come gradually into the reality of the spiritual, the super-sensible world. We ourselves live together with the reality of the super-sensible world. We reach the point of recognising the appearance of previous earth lives as something which our Ego shows us at different stages. Then, if we have developed the capacity to forget this Ego in its present stage, that means, to thrust out its imaginative content, we reach the stage of perceiving the eternal Ego.

The matters discussed by anthroposophical spiritual science are not drawn out of some blue haze of mysticism, rather the way to reach this particular knowledge can be indicated step by step. It is in no sense an outer way. It is inward in its entire journey, but it is such that it leads to the perception of a truly objective yet super-sensible reality. And in that we raise ourselves in this way to real intuitive knowledge, we first obtain a true insight into what is in fact our own thinking, our ideation, that we employ in ordinary life, with which we mix our sense-perceptions. One reaches to full, complete reality when to a certain extent one can create an idea for oneself, an empirical idea, in the way I have attempted to describe in my book The Philosophy of Freedom. There I have tried to make known that pure thinking, that very thinking that can live in us before we have fully united the thinking with some outer perception. I have shown that this pure thinking itself can be perceived as an inner soul content. But what is in accordance with its being first lets itself be known when true intuition enters the soul through the higher way of knowledge. Then a man can certainly penetrate into his own thinking. Then he lives for the first time within his own thoughts, by means of intuition, for this intuition arises through the fact that a man lives within the super-sensible with his own being, that he plunges into the super-sensible.

And so one learns to recognise something, the experience of which is a kind of destiny of knowledge. One experiences something that is full of potency, if one lives intuitively in the Nature of knowing. One understands then how man is organised materially as man; one learns to know to what extent this material organisation is in control; but one perceives also through intuition that this control only extends so far as to serve as a support, at most a ground out of which thinking can unfold itself, but that the material process itself must be broken down where true thinking appears. To the same degree in which the material events can be reduced can that gain ground in us which now occupies the place where matter is destroyed, that is, thinking, ideation.

I know all the objections that can be brought against the proposition that I put forward here, but intuitive knowledge leads one to realise that in the place where thinking unfolds itself a nothingness of material can be seen. It leads one so far as to say, ‘In that I think, I am not, if I allow the material being, that as a rule man regards as authoritative, to be considered the only being to have validity.’ First matter must withdraw itself from the organism and make room for the thoughts, the ideas, then these thoughts and ideas can develop within man. Thus, in that place where we perceive thinking in its reality, we see the destruction of material existence. Therein we perceive how matter goes over into nothingness.

Here is where we stand on the boundary of the laws of the conservation of matter and energy. One must recognise how far these laws of matter and energy extend, so that one can summon up the courage to contradict them when this is necessary. One can never penetrate the nature of thinking in an unprejudiced way to the place where matter destroys itself, if one acknowledges the law of conservation to be absolute, if one does not know that what prevails in the sphere which we survey outwardly in the physical and chemical fields etc., is yet not valid where our thinking takes place on the platform of our human organisation. If it were not necessary out of a certain basis to place this knowledge before the world today, one would not expose oneself to all the mockery and objections that must come quite understandably from those who, according to well-known hypotheses, regard the laws of the conservation of matter and energy as absolute, valid without exception.

But just as through Intuition one learns to know the relationship between thinking and the matter which surrounds us in the physical world, so through intuition one learns to recognise the connection of Inspiration, that Inspiration which is so powerful in Spirit, with the human feeling and rhythmic system. In the nerve-sense being physical substance is annihilated. By this means the nerve-sense system can be the basis for thinking, for ideation. The second system in man is the rhythmic system. With this the feeling life is psychically connected, as is the thinking life with the nerve-sense system. The connection of the objective world outside man which we approach through Inspiration shows us that through Inspiration we become aware of a World Being which plays into us as the sense world plays into us through thinking. This inspired world plays into us through the breathing process, which carries its rhythm right into the brain processes and into the rest of the organism.

Now one learns to recognise what lives within the human being as rhythm. This will not destroy matter, as in the case of the thinking process, but it will retard life so that it must for ever stimulate itself anew. The usual purely mechanical breathing rhythm provides an inner rhythmic basis for this retardation and renewal, which is certainly a two-fold process of breathing and feeling. When the soul-feeling events unite with the physical breathing rhythm we perceive this union as an Inspiration, as a Being which lives objectively in Inspiration and can be perceived through Intuition. In short we learn in this way to recognise the whole connection between the feeling and the rhythmic system in man. We recognise that here a complete annulment of matter does not take place as in the nerve system, but there is a damping down of matter. Thus we learn step by step to ‘see through’ the human being. And in this way we look into the feeling life of man and see what can only be there through the fact that in the rhythmic events life can always be held back and will stimulate itself anew.

Thus we see a second power working in the human being, in that we perceive the harmony of the slowing down and the renewal of life. We see the significance of man's entire rhythmic life, and how it is bound up with his whole being, body and soul. And as we survey this second element in man, it will certainly become clear to us that man bears in himself a real force, which is in rhythmic interchange with an outer force active in the super-sensible. And we could also survey in a similar way the metabolic limb system. In that we raise ourselves to Inspiration, Intuition and Imagination we see, soul-spiritually, what is active in man as a real though unconscious force. Our customary objective knowledge gives us only the forms. Through it we are as it were only observers of the world. That, however, which we reach through Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration we have first as a free inner soul product, obtained from super-sensible knowledge, from something which is objective in man, through which we can see clearly how the human will works in moral deeds. If we have first recognised that pure thinking involves a breaking down of matter, and is connected above all with a death-bringing process, through and through a process working in matter in a backward direction, then one comes to the point of being able to recognise that everything which appears as soul-willing is connected with the up-building processes, the processes of growth. These growths, these up-building processes, the activities of the organs and the reproductive process in us, damp down our ordinary consciousness of the depths of the human organism, and the will arises out of those depths of the human being to which the ordinary consciousness does not reach. Thus, as thinking lives in the death process, willing lives in what is growing, thriving, fructifying.

We then perceive further, through Intuition, how out of the digestive system, through the will when it has its motive in pure thinking, substance in the human organism is pushed into the place where the breaking down process takes place. Thinking as such breaks down, but willing builds up. Indeed this building up activity is such that from the beginning of life right up to death this process is latent in the human organism. An up-building process is certainly there. In that we bring our moral motives, in the sense of my The Philosophy of Freedom to true, free moral intuition, we live such a human life that, out of its organism, through the will process substance is placed where substance has been destroyed. Man becomes inwardly creative, inwardly up-building. In other words, we see within the cosmos, in the human organism, nothingness filled with new creating in a fully material sense. This means nothing else than that in so far as a man consistently follows the way of anthroposophical knowledge he reaches the stage where within man the pure moral ideals are world-building forces reaching right into materiality.

Here we have certainly a place where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises out of human morality which guarantees its own reality since it bears itself within itself, since it creates itself. And then we learn through Intuition really to know the outer world. We see how the mineral kingdom is caught up in a death-bringing process, a wasting-away that we have well learned to recognise as a corresponding process in our own thinking. And in the same way we learn to recognise how this wasting-away process draws into itself plant and animal life. Then we do not look to a heat death (an idea which has validity within certain limits, but is somewhat one-sided), but we look to the wasting-away of the entire world, which is permeated with minerality, and which is all around us. We see this, which we recognise as the world of causal necessity, in its transitoriness, and we recognise the world which we build up out of pure moral ideas as that which arises from the ground of the other, dying world.¹ In other words, we now recognise how the moral world is connected with the world order of physical causality. We have in the pure moral will of the human being something which conquers causality in man, and therefore for the whole world.

Whoever thinks honestly about the causal explanation of nature finds in its domain no place in the world where it does not prevail. And because it prevails, a power must arise which destroys its validity. This is the moral world, recognised within the general nature Of man, which contains within itself the power to break through natural causality, not, to be sure, through working miracles, but through a course of development. For that which finds a place within the human being where causality can be destroyed, sets itself there within him as a means of destroying causality. It is of prime significance for the world of the future. Nevertheless, we now see here the reality of human willing which enters into an alliance with pure thinking. For through it we obtain—and this is the most beautiful life fruit of anthroposophical scientific knowledge—an insight into the value of man in the cosmos, through which we also can feel the dignity, the high office of man within the cosmos.

Things in the world are not so interrelated as with our abstract ideas we often think they are. No, they cohere as realities, and one powerful reality is the following. It is true that not everyone today is able as yet to attain to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But as spiritual investigators we take with us through all these stages of knowledge that thinking which develops one thought out of another with inner necessity. This thinking each man can experience now if he will give himself freely to it. And it stems from this, that the results of spiritual knowledge, when once they are found, can always be proved afterwards, by means of pure thinking, since the spiritual investigator takes this pure thinking into the whole of his life of ideation.

Knowledge of human worth, feeling for human dignity, willing in love for humanity: These are the most beautiful life fruits nurtured in man when he assimilates what is bestowed on him by spiritual science.

For this spiritual science works through the will, so that it can reach up to what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as moral intuition. And its power streams into human life as the moral ideal. The moral intuitions are gradually permeated with what indeed is love, so that we can become men who act freely out of love springing from our individuality. Thereby Spiritual Science approaches an ideal stemming from Goethe's time. It spoke most clearly through his friend Schiller. When Schiller familiarised himself with Kantian philosophy, he learnt much from Kant about theoretic philosophy, but he could not always accept Kant's moral philosophy. In this Kantian moral philosophy Schiller found a numbing conception of duty, presented by Kant in such a way that duty seemed to stand there in its own right as a natural power, working compulsively on man. Schiller experienced the worth and dignity of man, and would not accept the idea that to be virtuous a man must submit to spiritual compulsion. Schiller gave utterance to this beautiful saying: ‘Gladly do I serve my friend, yet, alas, I act from inclination, so it often vexes me that I am not dutiful.’ For in the Kantian sense, Schiller meant, one must even try first to suppress all liking for one's friend, and then do what one does for him out of a rigid conception of duty.

That the connection of man with morality must be other than this, Schiller revealed as far as it was possible to do so in his time, in his Letters concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, where he wished to show how duty must sink down so that it becomes inclination, how inclination must rise up so that the content of duty becomes congenial. Duty must sink down, natural instinct must rise up in free men, who do out of their inclination what benefits the whole of humanity. And in that man looks for where moral intuition is rooted in the human being, in that he looks for what is the real driving, ethical motive in moral intuition, he finds it at its highest in love purified by spirit. There, where this love has become spiritual, there it draws into itself moral intuitions; and a man is moral because he loves duty, because it is something that comes out of the Individuality itself as a directly active power.

It was this that brought me, in The Philosophy of Freedom, to place against the Kantian moral philosophy a direct antithesis drawn from Anthroposophy. The Kantian thesis says: ‘Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name, that dost embrace nothing charming or ingratiating, but requirest submission,’ thou that ‘settest up a law ... before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly work against it.’

Through such a conception of duty man can never be so spiritualized in his inmost being that he becomes a free creator of his moral activity. Out of this attempt to penetrate the human being by means of anthroposophical knowledge of man, I placed in my Philosophy of Freedom against this stiff Kantian idea what you find there: ‘Freedom, thou friendly, human name, beloved of all who are virtuous, in thee is contained what my humanity values most, which makes me servant to none, thou who settest up no law, but awaitest what my virtuous love itself will recognise as a law because it feels itself unfree against every law that is forced upon it.’

So I believed I must speak in The Philosophy of Freedom of how moral human worth shines out in fullest splendour when it is one with human freedom, and is rooted in true human love. For one can show by means of anthroposophy how this love of duty can become in the widest sense love for mankind and therefore, as we will further consider, can become a true ferment in the social life. What arises today as the most urgent, the most hotly discussed social question can only be resolved if man bestirs himself to recognise the connection between freedom, love, the human being, spiritual and natural necessity.

• 1. See Man as Symphony of the Creative Word, Lecture VI, penultimate paragraph. Ed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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