The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What I have been telling you in recent lectures requires to be carried a little further. I have tried to give you a picture of the flow of spiritual knowledge through the centuries, and of the form it has taken in recent times, and I have been able to show how from the fifteenth until the end of the eighteenth or even the beginning of the nineteenth century, the spiritual knowledge that was present before that period as clear and concrete albeit instinctive knowledge, showed itself in this later age more in a devotion of heart and soul to the Spiritual, to all that is of the Spirit in the world.

We have seen how the knowledge man possessed of Nature and of how the spiritual world works in Nature, is still present in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a personality like Agrippa of Nettesheim, whom I have described in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought, we have one who was still fully possessed of the knowledge, for example, that in the several planets of our system are spiritual Beings of quite definite character and kind.

In his writings, Agrippa of Nettesheim assigns to each single planet what he calls the Intelligence of the planet. This points to traditions which were still extant from olden times, and even in his day were something more than traditions. To look up to a planet in the way that became customary in later Astronomy and is still customary today, would have been utterly impossible to a man like Agrippa of Nettesheim. The external planet, nay, every external star was no more than a sign, an announcement, so to say, of the presence of spiritual Beings, to whom one could look up with the eye of the soul, when one looked in the direction of the star. And Agrippa of Nettesheim knew that the Beings who are united with the single stars are the Beings who rule the inner existence of the star or the planet, rule also the movements of the planet in the Universe, the whole activity of the particular star. And such Beings he called: the Intelligence of the star.

Agrippa knew also how, at the same time, hindering Beings work from the star, Beings who undermine the good deeds of the star. They too work from out of the star and also into it; and these Beings he called Demons of the star. And together with this knowledge went an understanding of the Earth, that saw in the Earth too a heavenly body having its Intelligence and its Demon. The understanding however for star Intelligence and star Demonology was little by little completely lost, with all that was involved in it. What was essentially involved in it may be expressed in the following way.

The Earth was of course looked upon as ruled in her inner activity, in her movement in the Cosmos, by Intelligences whom one could bring together under the name of the Intelligence of the Earth star. But what was the Intelligence of the Earth star, for the men of Agrippa's time? It is exceedingly difficult today even to speak of these things, because the ideas of men have travelled very far away from what was accepted as a matter of course in those times by men of insight and understanding. The Intelligence of the Earth star was Man himself, the human being as such. They saw in Man a being who had received a task from the Spirituality of the Worlds, not merely, as modern man imagines, to walk about on the Earth, or to travel about it in trains, to buy and sell, to write books, and so forth and so forth—no, they conceived Man as a being to whom the World-Spirit had given the task to rule and regulate the Earth, to bring law and order into all that has to do with the place of the Earth in the Cosmos. Their conception of Man was expressed by saying: Through what he is, through the forces and powers he bears within his being, Man gives to the Earth the impulse for her movement around the Sun, for her movement further in Universal Space.

There was in very truth still a feeling for this. It was known that the task had once been allotted to Man, that Man had really been made the Lord of the Earth by the World-Spirituality, but in the course of his evolution had not shown himself equal to the task, had fallen from his high estate. When men are speaking of knowledge nowadays it is very seldom that one hears even a last echo of this view. What we find in religious belief concerning the Fall really goes back ultimately to this idea; for there the point is that originally Man had quite another position on the Earth and in the Universe from the position he takes today; he has fallen from his high estate. Setting aside however this religious conception and considering the realm of thought, where men think they have knowledge that they have attained by definite and correct methods, it is only here and there that we can still find today an echo of the ancient knowledge that once proceeded from instinctive clairvoyance, and that was well aware of Man's task and of his Fall into his present narrow limitations.

It may still happen, for example, that one may have a conversation with a person—I am here relating facts—who has thought very deeply, who has also acquired very deep knowledge concerning this or that matter in the spiritual realm. The conversation turns on whether Man, as he stands on Earth today, is really a creature who is self-contained, who carries his whole being and nature within him. And such a personality as I have described will say to you, that this cannot be. Man must really in his nature be a far more comprehensive being—otherwise he could not have the striving he has now, he could not develop the great idealism of which we can see such fine and lofty examples; in his true nature Man must be a great and comprehensive being, who has somehow or other committed a cosmic sin, as a consequence of which he has been banished within the limits of this present earthly existence, so that today he is really sitting imprisoned as it were in a cage. You may still meet with this view here and there as a late straggler, as it were. But speaking generally, where shall we find one who accounts himself a scientist, who seriously occupies himself with these great and far-reaching questions? And yet it is only by facing them that man can ever find his way to an existence worthy of him as man.

It was, then, really so that Man was regarded as the bearer of the Intelligence of the Earth. But now, a person like Agrippa of Nettesheim ascribed to the Earth also a Demon. When we go back to the twelfth or thirteenth century, we find this Demon of the Earth to be a Being who could only become what he became on the Earth, because he found in Man the tool for his activity.

In order to understand this, we must acquaint ourselves with the way men thought about the relationship of the Earth to the Sun, or of Earthly man to the Sun, in those days. And if I am now to describe to you how they understood this relationship, then I must again speak in Imaginations: for these things will not suffer themselves to be confined in abstract concepts. Abstract concepts came later, and they are very far from being able to span the truth; we have therefore to speak in pictures, in Imaginations.

Although, as I have described in my Outline of Occult Science, the Sun separated itself from the Earth, or rather separated the Earth off from itself, it is nevertheless the original abode of Man. For ever since the beginning of the Saturn existence Man was united with the whole planetary system including the Sun. Man has not his home on Earth, he has on Earth only a temporary resting place. He is in truth, according to the view that prevailed in those olden times, a Sun-being. He is united in his whole being and existence with the Sun. And since this is so, he ought as a being of the Sun to stand quite differently on the Earth than he actually does. He ought to stand on the Earth in such a way that it should suffice for the Earth to have the impulse to bring forth the seed of Man in etheric form from out of the mineral and plant kingdoms, and the Sun then to fructify the seed brought forth from the Earth. Thence should arise the etheric human form, which should itself establish its own relationship to the physical substances of the Earth, and itself take on Earth substantiality. The contemporaries of Agrippa of Nettesheim—Agrippa's own knowledge was, unfortunately, somewhat clouded, but better contemporaries of his did really hold the view that Man ought not to be born in the earthly way he now is, but Man ought really to come to being in his etheric body through the interworking of Sun and Earth, and only afterwards, going about the Earth as an etheric being, give himself earthly form. The seeds of Man should grow up out of the Earth with the purity of plant-life, appearing here and there as ethereal fruits of the Earth, darkly shining; these should then in a certain season of the year be overshone, as it were, by the light of the Sun, and thereby assume human form, but etheric still; then Man should draw to himself physical substance—not from the body of the mother, but from the Earth and all that is thereon, incorporating it into himself from the kingdoms of the Earth. Thus—they thought—should have been the manner of Man's appearance on the Earth, in accordance with the purposes of the Spirit of the Worlds.

And the development that came later was due to the fact that Man had allowed to awaken within him too deep an urge, too intense a desire for the earthly and material. Thereby he forfeited his connection with the Sun and the Cosmos, and could only find his existence on Earth in the form of the stream of inheritance. Thereby, however, the Demon of the Earth began his work; for the Demon of the Earth would not have been able to do anything with men who were Sun-born. When Sun-born man came to dwell on the Earth, he would have been in very truth the Fourth Hierarchy. And one would have had to speak of Man in the following manner. One would have had to say: First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Second Hierarchy: Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; Third Hierarchy: Angels, Archangels, Archai; Fourth Hierarchy: Man—three different shades or gradations of the human, but none the less making the Fourth Hierarchy.

But because Man gave rein to his strong impulses in the direction of the physical, he became, not the being on the lowest branch, as it were, of the Hierarchies, but instead the being at the summit of the highest branch of the earthly kingdoms: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human kingdom. This was the picture of how Man stood in the world.

Moreover, because Man does not find his proper task on the Earth, the Earth herself has not her right and worthy position in the Cosmos. For since Man has fallen, the true Lord of the Earth is not there. What has happened? The true Lord of the Earth is not there, and it became necessary for the Earth, not being governed from herself in her place in the Cosmos, to be ruled from the Sun; so that the tasks that should really be carried out on Earth fell to the Sun. The man of mediaeval times looked up to the Sun and said: In the Sun are certain Intelligences. They determine the movement of the Earth in the Cosmos; they govern what happens on the Earth. Man ought, in reality, to do this; the Sun-forces ought to work on Earth through Man for the existence of the Earth. Hence that significant mediaeval conception that was expressed in the words: The Sun, the unlawful Prince of this world.

And now reflect, my dear friends, how infinitely the Christ Impulse was deepened through such conceptions. The Christ became, for these mediaeval men, the Spirit Who was not willing to find His further task on the Sun, Who would not remain among those who directed the Earth in unlawful manner from without. He wanted to take His path from the Sun to the Earth, to enter into the destiny of Man and the destiny of Earth, to experience Earth events and pass along the ways of Earth evolution, sharing the lot of Man and of Earth.

Therewith, for mediaeval man, the Christ is the one Being Who in the Cosmos saved the task of Man on the Earth. Now you have the connection. Now you can see why, in Rosicrucian times, it was again and again impressed upon the pupil: “O Man, thou art not what thou art; the Christ had to come, to take from thee thy task, in order that He might perform it for thee.”

A great deal in Goethe's Faust has come down from mediaeval conceptions, although Goethe himself did not understand this. Recall, my dear friends, how Faust conjures up the Earth Spirit. With these mediaeval conceptions in mind, we can enter with feeling and understanding into how this Earth Spirit speaks.—

In the tides of Life,
In Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal Sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all glowing:
Thus at Time's humming loom ‘tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity wears.

Who is it that Faust is really conjuring up? Goethe himself, when he was writing Faust, most assuredly did not fully know. But if we go back from Goethe to the mediaeval Faust and listen to this mediaeval Faust in whom Rosicrucian wisdom was living, then we learn how he too wanted to conjure up a spirit. But whom did he want to conjure up in the Earth Spirit? He did not ever speak of the Earth Spirit, he spoke of Man. The deep longing and striving of mediaeval man was: to be Man. For he felt and knew that as Earth man he is not truly Man. How can manhood be found again? The way Faust is rebuffed, pushed on one side by the Earth Spirit is a picture of how man in his earthly form is rebuffed by his own being. And this is why many accounts of conversion to Christianity in the Middle Ages show such extraordinary depth of feeling. They are filled with the sense that men have striven to attain the manhood that is lost, and have had to give up in despair, have rightly despaired of being able to find in themselves, within earthly physical life, this true and genuine manhood; and so they have arrived at the point where they must say: Human striving for true manhood must be abandoned, earthly man must leave it to the Christ to fulfil the task of the Earth.

In this time, when man's relation to true manhood as well as his relation to the Christ was still understood in what I would call a superpersonal-personal manner—in this time Spirit-knowledge, Spirit-vision was still a real thing, it was still a content of experience. It ceased to be so with the fifteenth century. Then came the tremendous change, which no one really understood. But those who know of such things know how in the fifteenth, in the sixteenth centuries, and even later, there was a Rosicrucian school, isolated, scarcely known to the world, where over and over again a few pupils were educated, and where above all, care was taken that one thing should not be forgotten but be preserved as a holy tradition. And this was the following.—I will give it to you in narrative form.

Let us say, a new pupil arrived at this lonely spot to receive preparation. The so-called Ptolemaic system was first set before him, in its true form, as it had been handed down from olden times, not in the trivial way it is explained nowadays as something that has been long ago supplanted, but in an altogether different way. The pupil was shown how the Earth really and truly bears within herself the forces that are needed to determine her path through the Universe. So that to have a correct picture of the World, it must be drawn in the old Ptolemaic sense: the Earth must be for Man in the centre of the Universe, and the other stars in their corresponding revolutions be controlled and directed by the Earth. And the pupil was told: If one really studies what are the best forces in the Earth, then one can arrive at no other conception of the World than this. In actual fact, however, it is not so. It is not so on account of man's sin. Through man's sin, the Earth—so to speak, in an unauthorised, wrongful way—has gone over into the kingdom of the Sun; the Sun has become the regent and ruler of earthly activities. Thus, in contradistinction to a World-System given by the Gods to men with the Earth in the centre, could now be set another World-System, that has the Sun in the centre, and the Earth revolving round the Sun—it is the system of Copernicus.

And the pupil was taught that here is a mistake in the Cosmos, a mistake in the Universe brought about by human sin. This knowledge was entrusted to the pupil and he had to engrave it deeply in his heart and soul.—Men have overthrown the old World-System (so did the teacher speak) and set another in its place; and they do not know that this other, which they take to be correct, is the outcome of their own human guilt. It is really nothing else than the expression, the revelation of human guilt, and yet men take it to be the right and correct view. What has happened in recent times? (The teacher is speaking to the pupil.) Science has suffered a downfall through the guilt of man. Science has become a science of the Demon.

About the end of the eighteenth century such communications became impossible, but until that time there were always pupils here and there of some lonely Rosicrucian School, who received their spiritual nourishment imbued as it were with this feeling, with this deep understanding.

Even such a man as Leibnitz, the great philosopher, was led by his own thought and deliberation to try and find somewhere a place of learning where the relation between the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems could be correctly formulated. But he was not able to find any such place.

Things like this need to be known if one is to understand aright, in all its shades of meaning, the great change that has come about in the last centuries in the way man looks on himself and on the Universe. And with this weakening of man's living connection with himself, with this estrangement of man from himself came afterwards the tendency to cling to the external intellect that today rules all. Is this external intellect verily human experience? No, for were it human experience, it could not live so externally in mankind as it does. The intellect has really no sort of connection with what is individual and personal, with the single individual man; it is well nigh a convention. It does not flow out of inner human experience; rather it approaches man as something outside him.

You may feel how the intellect became external by comparing the way in which Aristotle himself imparted his Logic to his pupils with the way in which it was taught much later, say in the seventeenth century.—You will remember how Kant says that Aristotle's Logic has not advanced since his time.—In the time of Aristotle, Logic was still thoroughly human. When a man was taught to think logically, he had a feeling as though—if again I may be allowed to express myself in imaginative terms—as though he were thrusting his head into cold water and thereby became estranged from himself for a moment; or else he had a feeling such as Alexander expressed when Aristotle wanted to impart Logic to him: You are pressing together all the bones of my head! It is the feeling of something external. But in the seventeenth century this externality was taken as a matter of course. Men learned how from the major and minor premise the consequent must be deduced. They learned what we find treated so ironically in Goethe's Faust:

“The first was so, the second so.
Therefore the third and fourth are so:
Were not the first and second, then
The third and fourth had never been!
There will your mind be drilled and braced,
As if in Spanish boots ‘twere laced!”

Whether, like Alexander, one feels the bones of one's head all pressed together, or whether one is laced up in Spanish boots with all this First, Second, Third, Fourth—we have in either case a true picture of what one feels.

But this externality of abstract thought was no longer felt in the time when Logic began to be taught in the schools. Today of course this has more or less ceased. Logic is no longer specifically taught in the schools. It is rather as if there had once been a time when hundreds and hundreds of people had put on the same uniform under direction, and done it with enthusiasm, and then afterwards there came a time when they did it of their own free will without giving it a thought.

During all the time however when the Logic of the abstract was gaining the upper hand, the old spiritual knowledge was incapable of going forward. Hence we see it in its turn becoming external, and assuming a form of which examples are to be found in the writings of Eliphas Levi or the publications of Saint-Martin. These are the last offshoots of the old Spirit-knowledge and Spirit-vision.

What do we find in a book such as Eliphas Levi's, The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic? In the first place there are all kinds of signs—Triangles, Pentagrams and so forth. We find words from languages in use in bygone ages, especially from the Hebrew. And we find that what in earlier times was life and at the same time knowledge that could pass over into man's action and into man's ideas—this we find has become bereft of ideas on the one hand, and on the other hand has degenerated into external magic. There is speculation as to the symbolic meaning of this or that sign, concerning all of which the modern man, if he is honest, would have to confess that he can find nothing particular in it. There are also practices connected with all manner of rites, while those who spoke of these rites and frequently practised them were far from having any clear notion at all of their spiritual connection. Such books are invariably pointers to what was once understood in olden times, was once an inward knowledge-experience, but when Eliphas Levi, for example, was writing his books, was no longer understood. As for Saint-Martin—of him I have already written in the Goetheanum Weekly.

Thus we see how what had once been interwoven into the soul-and-spirit of man's life, could not he held there but fell a victim to complete want of understanding. The common impulse and striving for the Divine that shows itself in the feeling of man from the fifteenth to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is genuine and true. Beautiful things are to be found in this impulse, things lovely and sublime. Much that has come from these times and that is far too little noticed today has about it as it were a magic breath—the genuine spell of the Spiritual.

Side by side, however, with all this, a seed is sprouting, the seed of the lack of understanding of old spiritual truths. We have therewith a hardening, ossifying process, and a growing impossibility to approach the Spiritual in a way that is in accord with the age. We come across men of the eighteenth century who speak of a downfall of all that is human, and of the rise of a terrible materialism. Often it seems as though what these men of the eighteenth century say applies just as well to our own time. And yet it is not so; what they say does not apply to the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. For in the nineteenth century a further stage has been reached. What was still regarded in the eighteenth century with a certain abhorrence on account of its demoniacal character, has come to be taken quite as a matter of course. The men of the nineteenth century had not the power to say: Copernicus!—Yes; but such a conception of the Universe was only able to arise because man did not become on Earth that which he should have become, and so the Earth was left without a ruler, and the rulership passed over to the unrighteous lords of the world (the expression occurs again and again in mediaeval writings), these took over the leadership of the Earth—even as the Christ left the Sun and united Himself with the destiny of the Earth.

Only now, at the end of the nineteenth century, has it again become possible to look into these things with a clear vision such as man possessed in olden times; only now in the Michael Age has the possibility come again. We have spoken repeatedly of the dawn of the Michael Age, and of its character. But there are tasks that belong to this Michael Age, and it is possible now to point to these tasks, after all that we have been considering in the Christmas Meeting and since, about the evolution of Spirit-vision throughout the centuries.

Today I would like to examine certain other aspects of our subject.

I have often dealt with the genius of language, and you know from my book Theosophy that we refer to real spiritual entities when we speak of spiritual beings in an anthroposophical context. Thus “genius of language” designates the spiritual entity behind any specific language, an entity with whom man can become familiar and through whom he can receive, from the spiritual world, strength to express his thoughts which, at the outset, are present in his earthly self as a dead heritage from that higher world. It is, therefore, appropriate for anthroposophical students to seek, in the formation of language, a meaning which is independent of man because rooted in the spirit.

I have already drawn attention to the peculiar way the German language designates the beautiful and its opposite. We speak of the opposite of the beautiful (das Schoene) as the ugly or hateful (das Haessliche). Were we to denote the beautiful in the same way we would call it—since the opposite of hate is love—the lovely or loving. As it is, we make a significant difference. In German the word beautiful (das Schoene) is related to shining (das Scheinende). The beautiful shines; brings its inner nature to the surface. It is the distinguishing quality of the beautiful not to hide itself, but to carry its essence into outer configuration. Thus beauty reveals inwardness through outer form; a shining radiates outward into the world. If we were to speak, in this sense, of beauty's opposite, we would call it the concealed or non-radiant, that which holds back its being, refusing to disclose it in any outer sheath. To put it another way, “the beautiful” designates something objective. If we were to treat its opposite just as objectively, we would have to speak of concealment, of something whose outer aspect belies what it really is. But here subjectivity enters, for we cannot love what conceals itself, showing a false countenance; we must hate it. In this way the ugly calls up quite a different emotional reaction than the beautiful; we do not respond to it out of the same recesses of our nature.

Thus the genius of language reveals itself. And we should ask: When in the broadest sense we strive for the beautiful in art, what is our goal? The very fact that the German word for “beautiful” proceeds outward (as its opposite suggests a remaining within our emotions, our hate) means that the beautiful bears a relation to the spiritual outside us. For what shines? What we apprehend with our senses does not need to shine for us; it exists. It is the spiritual that shines, radiating into the sensory, proclaiming its being even in the sensory. By speaking objectively of the beautiful, we take hold of it as a spiritual element which reveals itself in the world through art. The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory-disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

Proceeding from this truth, let us consider one of the arts: painting. Recently we dealt with it insofar as it reveals the spiritual-essential through shining color. In ancient times man, by surrendering in the right way to the genius of language, showed his inner knowledge of color in his vocabulary. When an instinctive clairvoyance prevailed, he felt that metals revealed their inner natures in their colors, therefore gave them, not earthly names, but names connecting them with the planets. Otherwise people would have felt ashamed. For man looked upon color as a divine-spiritual element bestowed upon earthly substances only in the sense of our recent lectures. Perceiving the gold in gold's color, he saw not merely the earthly in that metal but the sun proclaiming itself from the cosmos in its gold color. Indeed, from the very start man saw something transcending the earthly in the colors of earthly objects. But it was only to living things that particular colors were ascribed, for living things approach the spirit in such a way that the spiritual shines forth. Animals were felt to have their own colors because in them the spirit-soul element manifests directly.

In ancient times, when man's artistic sense was not outward but inward, he painted not at all. To paint a tree green is not true painting for the reason that however well one imitates her, nature is still the essential thing; nature is still more beautiful, more vital; it needs no copy. A real painter never imitates. He uses an object as a recipient or focus of the sun, or to observe a color reflex in that object's surroundings, or to catch, above it, an interweaving of light and darkness. In other words, the thing painted is merely an inducement. For example, we never paint a flower standing in front of a window; we paint the light which, shining in at the window, is seen through the flower. We paint the sun's colored light; catch the sun.

In the case of a person, this can be done still more spiritually. To paint a human forehead the way one believes it should look is nonsense; this is not painting. But to observe how the sun rays strike that forehead, how color shows up in the ensuing radiance, how light and darkness intermingle, to capture with one's paint brush all that interplay: this is the task of the painter. Seizing what passes in a moment, he relates it to the spiritual.

If, with a sense for painting, we look at an interior view, the matter of most importance is not the figure or figures therein. I once accompanied a friend to an exhibition where we saw a painting of a man kneeling before an altar, his back toward us. The painter had given himself the task of showing how sunlight falling through a window struck the man's back. My friend remarked that he would much rather see a front view. Well, this was only material, not artistic, interest. He wanted the painter to show the man's character, and so forth. But one is justified in doing this only if one expresses all perceptions through color. If I wish to paint a human being sick in bed with a certain disease, and study his facial color in order to apprehend how illness shines through the sensory, this may be artistic. If I want to show, in totality, the extent to which the whole cosmos manifests in the human flesh color, this may also be artistic. But if I try to imitate Mr. Lehman as he sits here before me, I will not succeed; moreover, this is not the task of art. What is artistic is how the sun illumines him, how light is deflected through his bushy eyebrows. Thus for a painter the important thing is how the whole world acts upon his subject; and his means of holding fast to a transitory moment are light and darkness, the whole spectrum.

In times not so long ago one could not imagine a presentation of Mary, the Mother of God, without a face so transfigured it had passed beyond the ordinary human state; a face overcome by light. One could not imagine her clothed otherwise than in a red garment and blue cloak, because only so is the Mother of God placed rightly into earthly life; the red garment depicting all the emotions of the earthly, the blue cloak the soul element which weaves the spiritual around her; the face permeated and transfigured by spirit, overcome by light as a revelation of the spirit. We do not, however, properly and artistically take hold of these truths if we stop with what I have just described. For I have translated the artistic into the inartistic. We feel them artistically only if we create directly out of red and blue and the light by experiencing the light, in its relationship to colors and darkness, as a world in itself. Then colors speak their own language, and the Virgin Mary is created out of them.

To achieve this one must live with color; color must become emancipated from the heavy matter opposing its innermost nature. Palette colors are alien to true painting in that, when used on a plane surface, they have a down-dragging effect. One cannot live with oil-based colors, only with fluid colors. When a painter puts fluid colors upon a plane, color—owing to the peculiar relationship between man and color—springs to life; he conceives out of color; a world arises out of it. True painting comes into being only if he captures the shining, revealing, radiating element as something living; only if he creates what is to be formed on the plane out of this element. For to understand color is to understand a component part of the world.

Kant once said: Give me matter, and out of it I shall create a world. Well, you could have given him matter endlessly without his ever being able to make a world out of it. But out of the interplaying medium of color a world of sorts can indeed be created, because every color has direct relationship with something spiritual. In the face of present-day materialism, the concept and activity of painting have—except for the beginnings made by impressionism and, still more, by expressionism—been more or less lost.

For the most part modern man does not paint, he imitates figures with a kind of drawing, then colors the surface. But colored surfaces are not painting for the reason that they are not born out of color and light and darkness.

We must not misunderstand things. If somebody goes wild and just lays on colors side by side in the belief that this is what I call “overcoming drawing,” he is mistaken. By “overcoming drawing” I do not mean to do away with drawing, but to let it rise out of the colors, be born from the colors. Colors will yield the drawing; one simply has to know how to live in colors. Living so, an artist develops an ability—while disregarding the rest of the world—to bring forth works of art out of color itself.

Look at Titian's “Ascension of Mary.” This painting stands at the boundary line of the ancient principle of art. The living experience of color one finds in Raphael and, more especially, in Leonardo da Vinci, has departed; only a certain tradition prevents the painter from totally forsaking the living-in-color.

Experience this “Ascension of Mary.” The green, the red, the blue, cry out. Now take the details, the individual colors and their harmonious interaction, and you will feel how Titian lived in the element of color and how, in this instance, he really created out of it all three worlds.

Look at the wonderful build-up of those worlds. Below, he has created out of color the Apostles experiencing the event of Mary's ascension. One sees in the colors how these men are anchored to the earth; colors which convey, not heaviness in the lower part of the painting, only a darkness which fetters the watching ones to earth. In the color-treatment of Mary one experiences the intermediate realm. A dull darkness from below connects her feet and legs with the earth; while, above her, light preponderates. This third and highest realm receives her head and radiates above it in full light, lifting it up. Thus are set forth, through inner color experience, the three stages of lower realm, middle realm, and the heights where Mary is being received by God the Father.

To understand this picture we must forget everything else and look at it solely from the standpoint of color, for here the three stages of the world are derived from color not intellectually but artistically. True painting takes hold of this world of effulgent shining, of splendid manifestation in light and darkness and color, in order to contrast what is earthly-material with the artistic. But the artistic is not permitted to reach the spiritual. Otherwise it would be not “shine” but wisdom. For wisdom is no longer artistic, wisdom leads into the formless and therefore undepictable realm of the divine.

With artistry like Titian's in “The Ascension of Mary,” we feel, on beholding the reception of Mary's head by God the Father, that now we must go no further in the treatment of light; we must halt. For we have reached the limit of the possible. To carry it further would be to fall into the intellectualistic, the inartistic. We must not make one stroke beyond what is indicated by light, rather than contour. The moment we insist on contour, we become intellectualistic, inartistic. Near the top this picture is in danger of becoming inartistic. The painters immediately after Titian fell prey to this danger. Look at the depiction of angels right up to the time of Titian. They are painted in heavenly regions. But look how carefully the painters avoided leaving the realm of color. Always you can ask yourself in regard to these angels of the pre-Titian age, and of Titian too: Couldn't they be clouds? If you cannot do that, if there is no uncertainty about existence, being, or semblance, shine, if there is an attempt fully to delineate the essence of the spiritual, artistry ceases.

In the seventeenth century it was otherwise, for materialism affects the presentation of the spiritual. Now angels began to be painted with all kinds of foreshortenings, and one can no longer ask: Couldn't that be clouds? When reason is active, artistry dies.

Again, look at the Apostles below: one has a feeling that in this “Ascension of Mary” only Mary is really artistic. Above, there is the danger of passing into the formlessness of pure wisdom. If one attains the formless one attains, in a certain sense, the zenith of the artistic. One has dared to press forward boldly to the abyss where art ceases, where the colors disappear in light, and where, if one were to proceed, one could only draw. But drawing is not painting. Thus the upper part of the picture approaches the realm of wisdom. And the more one is able to express, in the sensory world, this wisdom-filled realm, and the more the angels might be taken for billowy clouds shimmering in light, the greater the art.

Proceeding from the bottom of the picture to the really beautiful, to Mary herself rising into the realm of wisdom, we see that Titian was able to paint her beautifully because she has not yet arrived at, but only soars up toward, the realm of wisdom; and we feel that, were she to rise still higher, she must enter where art ceases. Below stand the Apostles. Here the artist has tried to express their earth-fettered character. But now a different danger threatens. Had he placed Mary further down, he could not have depicted her inward beauty. If Mary were to sit among the Apostles, she could not appear as she does as a kind of balance between heaven and earth; she would look different. She simply does not fit among the Apostles with their brownish tones. Not only are they subject to earthly gravity; something else has entered: the element of drawing takes hold. This you can see in Titian's picture. Why is it so?

Well, brown having already left the realm of color, it cannot express Mary's beauty; something not belonging entirely to the realm of the beautiful would be injected. If Mary stood or sat among the Apostles and were colored as they are, it would be a great offense. I am now speaking only of this picture and do not maintain that when standing on earth Mary must be in every instance, artistically speaking, an offense. But in this picture it would be a blow in the face if Mary stood below. Why?

Because if she stood there colored like the Apostles we would have to say that the artist presented her as virtuous. This is the way he presents the Apostles; we cannot conceive of them otherwise than looking upward in their virtue. But this for Mary would he inappropriate. With her, virtue is so self-evident that we must not express it. It would be like presenting God as virtuous. If something is self-evident, if it has become the being itself, we must not express it in mere outer semblance. Therefore Mary soars up into a region beyond all virtues, where we cannot say of her, through colors, that she is virtuous, any more than we can say of God that He is virtuous. He may, at most, be virtue itself. But this is an abstract, philosophical statement having nothing to do with art. With the Apostles, however, the artist succeeded in representing, through his color treatment, virtuous human beings. They are virtuous.

Let us look at how the genius of language reflects this truth. Tugend (virtue, in German) is related to taugen (to be fit, in German). To be fit, to be able to cope with something morally, is to be virtuous. Goethe speaks of a triad: wisdom, semblance and power. Art is the middle term: semblance, the beautiful; wisdom is formless knowledge; virtue is power to carry out worthwhile things effectively.¹

Since ancient times this triad has been revered. Once, years ago, a man said to me—and I could appreciate his point of view—that he was sick and tired of hearing people speak of the true, the beautiful and the good, for anyone in search of an idealistic expression mouthed the phrase. But in ancient times these realities were experienced not externally but with complete soul participation. Thus in the upper region of Titian's picture we see wisdom not yet transcendent, radiating artistically because of the way it is painted. In the middle, beauty; below, virtue, that which is fit. What is the inner nature of the fit? Here is manifest the genius, the profundity, of the languages active among men. If we proceeded in an exterior way we might be reminded of a certain hunchback who went to church and listened to a priest describing quite externally how everything in the world is good and beautiful and fit. Waiting at the church door, the hunchback asked the priest: You said the idea of everything is good—have I, too, a good shape? The priest replied: For a hunchback you have a very good shape.

If things are considered as externally as this, we shall never penetrate to the depths. In many fields modern observation proceeds so. Filled with external characteristics and definitions, men do not know that their ideas turn round and round in circles.

In respect to virtue it is not a question of fitness for just anything, but of fitness for something spiritual, so that a person places himself into the spiritual world as a human being. Whoever is a complete human being by reason of his bringing the spiritual not merely to manifestation but to full realization through his will is—in the true sense—virtuous. Here we enter a region which lies within the human and religious, but no longer within the artistic, sphere, and least of all within the sphere of the beautiful. Everything in the world contains a polarity. Thus we can say of Titian's picture: Above Mary he is in danger of passing beyond the beautiful, there where he reaches the abyss of wisdom. Below, he comes to the brink of the other abyss. For as soon as a painter represents the virtuous, meaning that which man realizes through his own being, out of the spiritual, he again leaves behind the beautiful, the artistic. The virtuous human being can be painted only by characterizing virtue in its outer appearance, let us say by contrasting it with vice. But an artistic presentation of virtue as such is no longer possible.

Where in our age do we not forsake the artistic? Simple life conditions are reproduced crudely, naturalistically, without any relation to the spiritual, and without this relation there is no art. Hence the striving of impressionism and expressionism to return to the spiritual. Though in many cases clumsy, tentative, exploratory, it is better than the inartistic copying of a model.

Furthermore, if one grasps the concept of the artistically-beautiful, one can deal with the tragic in its artistic manifestations. The human being who acts in accordance with his thoughts, who lives his life intellectualistically, can never become really tragic. Nor can the human being who leads an entirely virtuous life. The only tragic person is one who in some way leans toward the daimonic, that is to say, toward the spiritual, whether in a good or bad sense. Today in this age when man is in the process of becoming free, daimonic man, that is man under the influence of tutelary spirits, is an anachronism. That man should outgrow the daimonic and become free is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. But as he progresses in freedom the possibility of tragedy diminishes and finally ceases. Take ancient tragic characters, even most of Shakespeare's: they have a daimonism which leads to the tragic. Wherever man had the appearance of the daimonic-spiritual, wherever the daimonic-spiritual radiated and manifested through him, wherever he became its medium, tragedy was possible. In this sense the tragic will have to taper off now; a free mankind must rid itself of tutelary spirits. This it has not yet done. On the contrary, it is more and more falling prey to such forces.

But the great task and mission of the age is to pull human beings away from the daimonic towards freedom. The irony is that the more we get rid of the inner daimons which make us tragic personalities, the less do we get rid of external ones. For the moment modern man enters into relation with the outer world, he encounters something of the nature of daimons. Our thoughts must become freer and freer. And if, as I say in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, thoughts become will impulses, then the will also becomes free. These are polaric contrasts in freedom: free thoughts, free will.

Between lies that part of human nature which is connected with karma. And just as once upon a time the daimonic led to tragedy, so now the experiencing of karma can lead to inmost tragedy. Tragedy will flourish when man experiences karma. As long as we live in our thoughts we are free. But the words with which we have clothed our thoughts, once spoken or written, no longer belong to us. What may happen to a word I have uttered! Having absorbed it, somebody else surrounds it with different emotions and sensations, and thus the word lives on. As it flies through the world it becomes a power proceeding from man himself. This is his karma. Because it connects him with the earth, it may burst in on him again. Even the word which leads its own existence because it belongs not to us but to the genius of language may create the tragic. Just in our present time we see mankind at the inception of tragic situations through an overestimation of language, of the word. Peoples wish to separate themselves according to language, and their desire provides the basis for the gigantic tragedy which during this very century will break in upon the earth. This is the tragedy of karma. If past tragedy is that of daimonology, future tragedy will be that of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if in everything artistic there is some relationship to the spiritual, you will understand that with the artistic we place ourselves, creatively or through enjoyment, in the spirit world. A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert. He does not worry about who will look at his picture or whether anybody at all will look at it, for he creates within a divine-spiritual community. Gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture. A person may be an artist in complete loneliness. Yet he cannot become one without bringing, by means of his creation, something spiritual into the world, so that it lives in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this basic connection, art becomes non-art.

To create artistically is possible only if the work has a relationship to the world. Those ancient artists who painted pictures on the walls of churches were conscious of this fact; they knew that their murals stood within earth life insofar as this is permeated by the spirit; that they guided believers.

One can hardly imagine anything worse than painting for exhibitions. It is horrible to walk through a picture or sculpture gallery where completely unrelated subjects appear side by side. Painting lost meaning when it passed from something for church or home to an isolated phenomenon. If we paint or view a picture in a frame, we can imagine ourselves looking out through a window. But to paint for exhibitions—this is beyond discussion. An age which sees value in exhibitions has lost its connection with art. By this can be seen how much waits to be done in culture if we would find our way back to the spiritual-artistic. Exhibitions must be overcome. Of course some individual artists detest exhibitions. But today we live in an age when the individual cannot achieve very much unless his judgment grows out of a world-conception permeating fully free human beings; just as world-conceptions permeating people in less free ages led to the rise of genuine cultures. Today we have no real culture.

Only a spiritual world-conception can build up true culture, the indubitably artistic.

• 1. The English word virtue, derived from the Latin vir, man, carries a similar connotation of power. (Translators)

Yesterday we discussed the nature of will in so far as will is embodied in the human organ. Today we will use this knowledge of man's relationship to will to fructify our consideration of the rest of the human being.

You will have noticed that in treating of the human being up to now I have chiefly drawn attention to the intellectual activity, the activity of cognition, on the one hand, and the activity of will on the other hand. I have shown you how the activity of cognition has a close connection with the nerve nature of the human being, and how the activity of will has a close connection with the activity of the blood. If you think this over you will also want to know what can be said with regard to the third soul power, that is, the activity of feeling. We have not yet given this much consideration, but today, by thinking more of the activity of feeling, we shall have the opportunity of entering more intensively into an understanding of the two other sides of human nature, namely cognition and will.

Now there is one thing that we must be clear about, and this I have already mentioned in various connections. We cannot put the soul powers pedantically side by side, separate from each other, thus: thinking, feeling, willing, because in the living soul, in its entirety, one activity is always merging into another.

Consider the will on the one hand. You will realise that you cannot bring your will to bear on anything that you do not represent to yourself as mental picture, that you do not permeate with the activity of cognition. Try in self-contemplation, even superficially, to concentrate on your willing, you will find that in every act of will the mental picture is present in some form. You could not be a human being at all if mental picturing were not involved in your acts of will. And your willing would proceed from a dull instinctive activity, if you did not permeate the action which springs forth from the will with the activity of thought, of mental picturing.

Just as thought is present in every act of will, so will is to be found in all thinking. Again, even a purely superficial contemplation of your own self will show you that in thinking you always let your will stream into the formation of your thoughts. In the forming of your own thoughts, in the uniting of one thought with another, or passing over to judgments and conclusions—in all this there streams a delicate current of will.

Thus actually we can only say that will activity is chiefly will activity and has an undercurrent of thought within it; and thought activity is chiefly thought activity and has an undercurrent of will. Thus, in considering the separate faculties of soul, it is impossible to place them side-by-side in a pedantic way, because one flows into the other.

Now this flowing into one another of the soul activities, which is recognisable in the soul, is also to be seen in the body, where the soul activity comes to expression. For instance, let us look at the human eye. If we look at it in its totality we shall see that the nerves are continued right into the eye itself; but so also are the blood vessels. The presence of the nerves enables the activity of thought and cognition to stream into the eye of the human being; and the presence of the blood vessels enables the will activity to stream in. So also in the body as a whole, right into the periphery of the sense activities, the elements of will on the one hand and thought or cognition on the other hand are bound up with each other. This applies to all the senses and moreover it applies to the limbs, which serve the will: the element of cognition enters into our willing and into our movements through the nerves, and the element of will enters in through the blood vessels.

But now we must also learn the special nature of the activities of cognition. We have already spoken of this, but we must be fully conscious of the whole complex belonging to this side of human activity, to thought and cognition. As we have already said, in cognition, in mental picturing lives antipathy. However strange it may seem, everything connected with mental picturing, with thought, is permeated with antipathy. You will probably say, “Yes, but when I look at something I am not exercising any antipathy in this looking.” But indeed you do exercise it. When you look at an object, you exercise antipathy. If nerve activity alone were present in your eye, everything you looked at would be an object of disgust to you, would be absolutely antipathetic to you. But the will, which is made up of sympathy, also pours its activity into the eye, that is, the blood in its physical form penetrates into the eye, and it is only by this means that the feeling of antipathy in sense-perception is overcome in your consciousness, and the objective, neutral act of sight is brought about by the balance between sympathy and antipathy. It is brought about by the fact that sympathy and antipathy balance one another, and by the fact also that we are quite unconscious of this interplay between sympathy and antipathy.

If you take Goethe's Theory of Colour, to which I have already referred in this connection, and study especially the physiological-didactic part of it, you will see that it is because Goethe goes more deeply into the activity of sight that there immediately enters into his consideration of the finer shades of colour the elements of sympathy and antipathy. As soon as you begin to enter into the activity of a sense organ you discover the elements of sympathy and antipathy which arise in that activity. Thus in the sense activity itself the antipathetic element comes from the actual cognitive part, from mental picturing, the nerve part—and the sympathetic element comes from the will part, from the blood.

As I have often pointed out in general anthroposophical lectures there is a very important difference between animals and man with regard to the constitution of the eye. It is a significant characteristic of the animal that it has much more blood activity in its eye than the human being. In certain animals you will even find organs which are given up to this blood activity, as for example the ensiform cartilage, or the “fan.” From this you can deduce that the animal sends much more blood activity into the eye than the human being, and this is also the case with the other senses. That is to say, in his senses the animal develops much more sympathy, instinctive sympathy with his environment than the human being does. The human being has in reality more antipathy to his environment than the animal only this antipathy does not come into consciousness in ordinary life. It only comes into consciousness when our perception of the external world is intensified to a degree of impression to which we react with disgust. This is only a heightened impression of all sense-perceptions; you react with disgust to the external impression. When you go to a place that has a bad smell and you feel disgust within the range of this smell, then this feeling of disgust is nothing more than an intensification of what takes place in every sense activity, only that the disgust which accompanies the feeling in the sense impression remains as a rule below the threshold of consciousness. But if we human beings had no more antipathy to our environment than the animal, we should not separate ourselves off so markedly from our environment as we actually do. The animal has much more sympathy with his environment, and has therefore grown together with it much more, and hence he is much more dependent on climate, seasons, etc., than the human being is. It is because man has much more antipathy to his environment than the animal has that he is a personality. We have our separate consciousness of personality because the antipathy which lies below the threshold of consciousness enables us to separate ourselves from our environment.

Now this brings us to something which plays an important part in our comprehension of man. We have seen how in the activity of thought there flow together thinking (nerve activity as expressed in terms of the body) and willing (blood activity as expressed in terms of the body). But in the same way there flow together in actions of will the real will activity and the activity of thought. When we will to do something, we always develop sympathy for what we wish to do. But it would get no further than an instinctive willing unless we could bring antipathy also into willing, and thus separate ourselves as personalities from the action which we intend to perform. But the sympathy for what we plan to do is predominant, and a balance is only effected by the fact that we bring in antipathy also. Hence it comes about that the sympathy as such lies below the threshold of consciousness, and part of it only enters consciously into that which is willed. In all the numerous actions that we perform not merely out of our reason but with real enthusiasm, and with love and devotion, sympathy predominates so strongly in the will that it penetrates into the consciousness above the threshold, and our willing itself appears charged with sympathy, whereas as a rule it merely unites us with our environment in an objective way. Just as it is only in exceptional circumstances that our antipathy to the environment may become conscious in cognition, so our sympathy with the environment (which is always present) may only become conscious in exceptional circumstances, namely, when we act with enthusiasm and loving devotion. Otherwise we should perform all our actions instinctively. We should never be able to relate ourselves properly to the objective demands of the world, for example in social life. We must permeate our will with thinking, so that this will may make us members of all humanity and partakers in the world's process itself.

Perhaps it will be clear to you what really happens if you think what chaos there would be in the human soul if we were perpetually conscious of all this that I have spoken of. For if this were the case man would be conscious of a considerable amount of antipathy accompanying all his actions. This would be terrible! Man would then pass through the world feeling himself continually in an atmosphere of antipathy. It is wisely ordered that this antipathy as a force is indeed essential to our actions, but that we should not be aware of it, that it should lie below the threshold of consciousness.

Now in this connection we touch upon a wonderful mystery of human nature, a mystery which can be felt by any person of perception, but which the teacher and educator must bring to full consciousness. In early childhood we act more or less out of pure sympathy, however strange this may seem; all a child does, all its romping and play, it does out of sympathy with the deed, with the romping. When sympathy is born in the world it is strong love, strong willing. But it cannot remain in this condition, it must be permeated with thought, by idea, it must be continuously illumined as it were by the conscious mental picture. This takes place in a comprehensive way if we bring ideals, moral ideals, into our mere instincts. And now you will understand better the true significance of antipathy in this connection. If the impulses that we notice in the little child were throughout our life to remain only sympathetic, as they are sympathetic in childhood, we should develop in an animal way under the influence of our instincts. These instincts must become antipathetic to us; we must pour antipathy into them. When we pour antipathy into them we do it by means of our moral ideals, to which the instincts are antipathetic, and which for our life between birth and death bring antipathy into the childlike sympathy of instincts. For this reason moral development is always somewhat ascetic. But this asceticism must be rightly understood. It always betokens an exercise in the combating of the animal element.

This can show us to what a great extent willing in man's practical activity is not merely willing but is also permeated with idea, with the activity of cognition, of mental picturing.

Now between cognition or thinking on the one hand and willing on the other hand we find the human activity of feeling. If you picture to yourselves what I have now put forward as willing and as thinking, you can say: From a certain central boundary there stream forth on the one hand all that is sympathy, willing, and on the other hand all that is antipathy, thinking. But the sympathy of willing also works back into thinking, and the antipathy of thinking works over into willing. Thus man is a unity because what is developed principally on the one side plays over into the other. Now between the two, between thinking and willing, there lies feeling, and this feeling is related to thinking on the one hand and to willing on the other hand. In the soul as a whole you cannot keep thought and will strictly apart, and still less can you keep the thought and will elements apart in feeling. In feeling, the will and thought elements are very strongly intermingled.

Here again you can convince yourselves of the truth of these remarks by even the most superficial self-examination. What I have already said will lead you to this conviction, for I told you that willing, which in ordinary life proceeds in an objective way, can be intensified to an activity done out of enthusiasm and love. Then you will clearly see willing as permeated with feeling—that willing which otherwise springs forth from the necessities of external life. When you do something which is filled with love or enthusiasm, that action flows out of a willing which you have allowed to become permeated by a subjective feeling. But if you examine the sense activities closely—with the help of Goethe's theory of colour—you will see how these are also permeated by feeling. And if the sense activity is enhanced to a condition of disgust, or on the other hand to the point of drinking in the pleasant scent of a flower, then you have the feeling activity flowing over directly into the activity of the senses.

But feeling also flows over into thought. There was once a philosophic dispute which—at all events externally—was of great significance—there have indeed been many such in the history of philosophy—between the psychologist Franz Brentano and the logician Sigwart, in Heidelberg. These two gentlemen were arguing about what it is that is present in man's power of judgment. Sigwart said: “When a man forms a judgment, and says, for example, ‘Man should be good’; then feeling always has a voice in a judgment of this kind; decision concerns feeling.” But Brentano said, “Judgment and feeling (which latter consists of emotions) are so different that the faculty of judgment could not be understood at all if one imagined that feeling played into it.” He meant that in this case something subjective would play into judgment, which ought to be purely objective.

Anyone who has a real understanding for these things will see from a dispute of this kind that neither the psychologists nor the logicians have discovered the real facts of the case, namely that the soul activities are always flowing into one another. Now consider what it is that should really be observed here. On the one hand we have judgment, which must of course form an opinion upon something quite objective. The fact that man should be good must not be dependent on our subjective feeling. The content of the judgment must be objective. But when we form a judgment something else comes into consideration which is of a different character. Those things which are objectively correct are not on that account consciously present in our souls. We must first receive them consciously into our soul. And we cannot consciously receive any judgment into our soul without the co-operation of feeling. Therefore, we must say that Brentano and Sigwart should have joined forces and said: True, the objective content of the judgment remains firmly fixed outside the realm of feeling, but in order that the subjective human soul may become convinced of the rightness of the judgment, feeling must develop.

From this you will see how difficult it is to get any kind of exact concepts in the inaccurate state of philosophic study which prevails to day. One must rise to a different level before one can reach such exact concepts, and there is no education in exact concepts to-day except by way of spiritual science. External science imagines that it has exact concepts, and rejects what anthroposophical spiritual science has to give, because it has no conception that the concepts arrived at by spiritual science are by comparison more exact and definite than those commonly in use to-day, since they are derived from reality and not from a mere playing with words.

When you thus trace the element of feeling on the one hand in cognition, in mental picturing, and on the other hand in willing, then you will say: feeling stands as a soul activity midway between cognition and willing, and radiates its nature out in both directions. Feeling is cognition which has not yet come fully into being, and it is also will which has not yet fully come into being; it is cognition in reserve, and will in reserve. Hence feeling also, is composed of sympathy and antipathy, which—as you have seen—are only present in a hidden form both in thinking and in willing. Both sympathy and antipathy are present in cognition and in will, in the working together of nerves and blood in the body, but they are present in a hidden form. In feeling they become manifest.

Now what do the manifestations of feeling in the body look like? You will find places all over the human body where the blood vessels touch the nerves in some way. Now wherever blood vessels and nerves make contact feeling arises. But in certain places, e.g., in the senses, the nerves and the blood are so refined that we no longer perceive the feeling. There is a fine undercurrent of feeling in all our seeing and hearing, but we do not notice it, and the more the sense organ is separated from the rest of the body, the less do we notice it. In looking, in the eye's activity, we hardly notice the feelings of sympathy and antipathy because the eye, embedded in its bony hollow, is almost completely separated from the rest of the organism. And the nerves which extend into the eye are of a very delicate nature and so are the blood vessels which enter into the eye. The sense of feeling in the eye is very strongly suppressed.

In the sense of hearing it is less suppressed. Hearing has much more of an organic connection with the activity of the whole organism than sight has. There are numerous organs within the ear which are quite different from those of the eye, and the ear is thus in many ways a true picture of what is at work in the whole organism. Therefore the sense activity which goes on in the ear is very closely accompanied by feeling. And here even people who are good judges of what they hear find it difficult to discriminate clearly—especially in the artistic sphere—between what is purely thought-element and what is really feeling. This fact explains a very interesting historical phenomenon of recent times, one which has even influenced actual artistic production.

You all know the figure of Beckmesser in Richard Wagner's “Meistersinger.” What is Beckmesser really supposed to represent? He is supposed to represent a musical connoisseur who quite forgets how the feeling element in the whole human being works into the thought element in the activity of hearing. Wagner, who represented his own conceptions in Walther, was, quite one-sidedly, permeated with the idea that it is chiefly the feeling element that should dwell in music. In the contrast between Walther and Beckmesser, arising out of a mistaken conception—I mean mistaken on both sides—we see the antithesis of the right conception, viz. that feeling and thinking work together in the hearing of music. And this came to be expressed in a historical phenomenon, because as soon as Wagnerian art appeared, or became at all well known, it found an opponent in the person of Eduard Hanslick of Vienna, who looked upon the whole appeal to feeling in Wagner's art as unmusical. There are few works on art which are so interesting from a psychological point of view as the work of Eduard Hanslick On Beauty in Music. The chief thought in this book is that whoever would derive everything in music from a feeling element is no true musician, and has no real understanding for music: for a true musician sees the real essence of what is musical only in the objective joining of one tone with another, and in Arabesque which builds itself up from tone to tone, abstaining from all feeling. In this book, On Beauty in Music Hanslick then works out with wonderful purity his claim that the highest type of music must consist solely in the tone-picture, the tone Arabesque. He pours unmitigated scorn upon the idea which is really the very essence of Wagnerism, namely that tunes should be created out of the element of feeling. The very fact that such a dispute as this between Hanslick and Wagner could arise in the sphere of music is a clear sign that recent psychological ideas about the activities of the soul have been completely confused, otherwise this one-sided idea of Hanslick's could never have arisen. But if we recognise the one-sidedness and then devote ourselves to the study of Hanslick's ideas which have a certain philosophical strength in them, we shall come to the conclusion that the little book On Beauty in Music is very brilliant.

From this you will see that, regarding the human being for the moment as feeling being, some senses bear more, some less of this whole human being into the periphery of the body, in consciousness.

Now in your task of gaining educational insight it behoves you to consider something which is bringing chaos into the scientific thinking of the present day. Had I not given you these talks as a preparation for the practical reforms you will have to undertake, then you would have had to plan your educational work for yourselves from the pedagogical theories of to-day, from the existing psychologies and systems of logic and from the educational practice of the present time. You would have had to carry into your schoolwork the customary thoughts of the present day. But these thoughts are in a very bad state even with regard to psychology. In every psychology you find a so-called theory of the senses. In investigating the basis of sense-activity the psychologist simply lumps together the activity of the eye, the ear, the nose, etc., all in one great abstraction as “sense-activity.” This is a very grave mistake, a serious error. For if you take only those senses which are known to the psychologist or physiologist of to-day and consider them in their bodily aspect alone, you will notice that the sense of the eye is quite different from the sense of the ear. Eye and ear are two quite different organisms—not to speak of the organisation of the sense of touch which has not been investigated at all as yet, not even in the gratifying manner in which eye and ear have been investigated. But let us keep to the consideration of the eye and ear. They perform two quite different activities so that to class seeing and hearing together as “general sense-activity” is merely “grey theory.” The right way to set to work here would be to speak from a concrete point of view only of the activity of the eye, the activity of the ear, the activity of the organ of smell, etc. Then we should find such a great difference between them that we should lose all desire to put forward a general physiology of the senses as the psychologies of to-day have done.

In studying the human soul we only gain true insight if we remain within the sphere which I have endeavoured to outline in my Truth and Science, and also in The Philosophy of Freedom. Here we can speak of the soul as a single entity without falling into abstractions. For here we stand upon a sure foundation; we proceed from the point of view that man lives his way into the world, and does not at first possess the whole of reality. You can study this in Truth and Science, and in The Philosophy of Freedom. To begin with man has not the whole reality; he has first to develop himself further, and in this further development what formerly was not yet reality becomes true reality for him through the interplay of thinking and perception. Man first has to win reality. In this connection Kantianism, which has eaten its way into everything, has wrought the most terrible havoc. What does Kantianism do? First of all it says dogmatically: we look out upon the world that is round about us, and within us there lives only the mirrored image of this world. And so it comes to all its other deductions. Kant himself is not clear as to what is in the environment which man perceives. For reality is not within the environment, nor is it in phenomena: only gradually, through our own winning of it, does reality come in sight, and the first sight of reality is the last thing we get. Strictly speaking, true reality would be what man sees in the moment when he can no longer express himself, the moment in which he passes through the gateway of death.

Many false elements have entered into our civilisation, and these work at their deepest in the sphere of education. Therefore we must strive to put true conceptions in the place of the false. Then, also, shall we be able to do what we have to do for our teaching in the right way.

[ 1 ] The rise of natural science in modern times had as its fundamental cause the same search as the mysticism of Jakob Boehme. This becomes apparent in a thinker who grew directly out of the spiritual movement, which in Copernicus (1473–1543), Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo (1564–1642), and others, led to the first great accomplishments of natural science in modern times. This thinker is Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). When one sees how his world consists of infinitely small, animated, psychically self-aware, fundamental beings, the monads, which are uncreated and indestructible, producing in their combined activity the phenomena of nature, one could be tempted to group him with Anaxagoras, for whom the world consists of the “homoiomeries.”

Yet, there is a significant difference between these two thinkers. For Anaxagoras, the thought of the homoiomeries unfolds while he is engaged in the contemplation of the world; the world suggests these thoughts to him. Giordano Bruno feels that what lies behind the phenomena of nature must be thought of as a world picture in such a way that the entity of the ego is possible in this world picture. The ego must be a monad; otherwise, it could not be real. Thus, the assumption of the monads becomes necessary. As only the monad can be real, therefore, the truly real entities are monads with different inner qualities.

In the depths of the soul of a personality like Giordano Bruno, something happens that is not raised into full consciousness; the effect of this inner process is then the formation of the world picture. What goes on in the depths is an unconscious soul process. The ego feels that it must form such a conception of itself that its reality is assured, and it must conceive the world in such a way that the ego can be real in it. Giordano Bruno has to form the conception of the monad in order to render possible the realization of both demands. In his thought the ego struggles for its existence in the world conception of the modern age, and the expression of this struggle is the view: I am a monad; such an entity is uncreated and indestructible.

[ 2 ] A comparison shows how different the ways are in which Aristotle and Giordano Bruno arrive at the conception of God. Aristotle contemplates the world; he sees the evidence of reason in natural processes; he surrenders to the contemplation of this evidence; at the same time, the processes of nature are for him evidence of the thought of the “first mover” of these processes. Giordano Bruno fights his way through to the conception of the monads. The processes of nature are, as it were, extinguished in the picture in which innumerable monads are presented as acting on each other; God becomes the power entity that lives actively in all monads behind the processes of the perceptible world. In Giordano Bruno's passionate antagonism against Aristotle, the contrast between the thinker of ancient Greece and of the philosopher of modern times becomes manifest.

[ 3 ] It becomes apparent in the modern philosophical development in a great variety of ways how the ego searches for means to experience its own reality in itself. What Francis Bacon of Verulam (1561–1626) represents in his writings has the same general character even if this does not at first sight become apparent in his endeavors in the field of philosophy. Bacon of Verulam demands that the investigation of world phenomena should begin with unbiased observation. One should then try to separate the essential from the nonessential in a phenomenon in order to arrive at a conception of whatever lies at the bottom of a thing or event. He is of the opinion that up to his time the fundamental thoughts, which were to explain the world phenomena, had been conceived first, and only thereafter were the description of the individual things and events arranged to fit these thoughts. He presupposed that the thoughts had not been taken out of the things themselves. Bacon wanted to combat this (deductive) method with his (inductive) method. The concepts are to be formed in direct contact with the things. One sees, so Bacon reasons, how an object is consumed by fire; one observes how a second object behaves with relation to fire and then observes the same process with many objects. In this fashion one arrives eventually at a conception of how things behave with respect to fire. The fact that the investigation in former times had not proceeded in this way had, according to Bacon's opinion, caused human conception to be dominated by so many idols instead of the true ideas about the things.

[ 4 ] Goethe gives a significant description of this method of thought of Bacon of Verulam.

Bacon is like a man who is well-aware of the irregularity, insufficiency and dilapidated condition of an old building, and knows how to make this clear to the inhabitants. He advises them to abandon it, to give up the land, the materials and all appurtenances, to look for another plot, and to erect a new building. He is an excellent and persuasive speaker. He shakes a few walls. They break down and some of the inhabitants are forced to move out. He points out new building grounds; people begin to level it off, and yet it is everywhere too narrow. He submits new plans; they are not clear, not inviting. Mainly, he speaks of new unknown materials and now the world seems to be well-served. The crowd disperses in all directions and brings back an infinite variety of single items while at home, new plans, new activities and settlements occupy the citizens and absorb their attention.

[ 5 ] Goethe says this in his history of the theory of color where he speaks about Bacon. In a later part of the book dealing with Galileo, he says:

If through Verulam's method of dispersion, natural science seemed to be forever broken up into fragments, it was soon brought to unity again by Galileo. He led natural philosophy back into the human being. When he developed the law of the pendulum and of falling bodies from the observation of swinging church lamps, he showed even in his early youth that, for the genius, one case stands for a thousand cases. In science, everything depends on what is called, an aperçu, that is, on the ability of becoming aware of what is really fundamental in the world of phenomena. The development of such an awareness is infinitely fruitful.

With these words Goethe indicated distinctly the point that is characteristic of Bacon. Bacon wants to find a secure path for science because he hopes that in this way man will find a dependable relationship to the world. The approach of Aristotle, so Bacon feels, can no longer be used in the modern age. He does not know that in different ages different energies of the soul are predominantly active in man. He is only aware of the fact that he must reject Aristotle. This he does passionately. He does it in such a way that Goethe is lead to say, “How can one listen to him with equanimity when he compares the works of Aristotle and of Plato with weightless tablets, which, just because they did not consist of a good solid substance, could so easily float down to us on the stream of time.”

Bacon does not understand that he is aiming at the same objective that has been reached by Plato and Aristotle, and that he must use different means for the same aim because the means of antiquity can no longer be those of the modern age. He points toward a method that could appear fruitful for the investigation in the field of external nature, but as Goethe shows in the case of Galileo, even in this field something more is necessary than what Bacon demands.

The method of Bacon proves completely useless, however, when the soul searches not only for an access to the investigation of individual facts, but also to a world conception. What good is a groping search for isolated phenomena and a derivation of general ideas from them, if these general ideas do not, like strokes of lightning, flash up out of the ground of being in the soul of man, rendering account of their truth through themselves. In antiquity, thought appeared like a perception to the soul. This mode of appearance has been dampened through the brightness of the new ego-consciousness. What can lead to thoughts capable of forming a world conception in the soul must be so formed as if it were the soul's own invention, and the soul must search for the possibility of justifying the validity of its own creation. Bacon has no feeling for all this. He, therefore, points to the materials of the building for the construction of the new world conception, namely, the individual natural phenomena. It is, however, no more possible that one can ever build a house by merely observing the form of the building stones that are to be used, than that a fruitful world conception could ever arise in a soul that is exclusively concerned with the individual processes of nature.

[ 6 ] Contrary to Bacon of Verulam, who pointed toward the bricks of the building, Descartes (Cartesius) and Spinoza turned their attention toward its plan. Descartes was born in 1596 and died in 1650. The starting point of his philosophical endeavor is significant with him. With an unbiased questioning mind he approaches the world, which offers him much of its riddles partly through revealed religion, partly through the observation of the senses. He now contemplates both sources in such a way that he does not simply accept and recognize as truth what either of them offers to him. Instead, he sets against the suggestions of both sources the “ego,” which answers out of its own initiative with its doubt against all revelation and against all perception. In the development of modern philosophical life, this move is a fact of the most telling significance. Amidst the world the thinker allows nothing to make an impression on his soul, but sets himself against everything with a doubt that can derive its support only from the soul itself. Now the soul apprehends itself in its own action: I doubt, that is to say, I think. Therefore, no matter how things stand with the entire world, in my doubt-exerting thinking I come to the clear awareness that I am. In this manner, Cartesius arrives at his Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. The ego in him conquers the right to recognize its own being through the radical doubt directed against the entire world.

Descartes derives the further development of his world conception out of this root. In the “ego” he had attempted to seize existence. Whatever can justify its existence together with the ego may be considered truth. The ego finds in itself, innate to it, the idea of God. This idea presents itself to the ego as true, as distinct as the ego itself, but it is so sublime, so powerful, that the ego cannot have it through its own power. Therefore, it comes from transcendent reality to which it corresponds. Descartes believes in the reality of the external world, not because this external world presents itself as real, but because the ego must believe in itself and then subsequently in God, and because God must be thought as truthful. For it would be untrue of God to suggest a real external world to man if the latter did not exist.

[ 7 ] It is only possible to arrive at the recognition of the reality of the ego as Descartes does through a thinking that in the most direct manner aims at the ego in order to find a point of support for the act of cognition. That is to say, this possibility can be fulfilled only through an inner activity but never through a perception from without. Any perception that comes from without gives only the qualities of extension. In this manner, Descartes arrives at the recognition of two substances in the world: One to which extension, and the other to which thinking, is to be attributed and that has its roots in the human soul. The animals, which in Descartes's sense cannot apprehend themselves in inner self-supporting activity, are accordingly mere beings of extension, automata, machines. The human body, too, is nothing but a machine. The soul is linked up with this machine. When the body becomes useless through being worn out or destroyed in some way, the soul abandons it to continue to live in its own element.

[ 8 ] Descartes lives in a time in which a new impulse in the philosophical life is already discernible. The period from the beginning of the Christian era until about the time of Scotus Erigena develops in such a way that the inner experience of thought is enlivened by a force that enters the spiritual evolution as a powerful impulse. The energy of thought as it awakened in Greece is outshone by this power. Outwardly, the progress in the life of the human soul is expressed in the religious movements and by the fact that the forces of the youthful nations of Western and Central Europe become the recipients of the effects of the older forms of thought experience. They penetrate this experience with the younger, more elementary impulses and thereby transform it. In this process one forward step in the progress in human evolution becomes evident that is caused by the fact that older and subtle traces of spiritual currents that have exhausted their vitality, but not their spiritual possibilities, are continued by youthful energies emerging from the natural spring of mankind. In such processes one will be justified in recognizing the essential laws of the evolution of mankind. They are based on rejuvenating tendencies of the spiritual life. The acquired forces of the spirit can only then continue to unfold if they are transplanted into young, natural energies of mankind.

The first eight centuries of the Christian era present a continuation of the thought experience in the human soul in such a way that the new forces about to emerge are still dormant in hidden depths, but they tend to exert their formative effect on the evolution of world conception. In Descartes, these forces already show themselves at work in a high degree. In the age between Scotus Erigena and approximately the fifteenth century, thought, which in the preceding period did not openly unfold, comes again to the fore in its own force. Now, however, it emerges from a direction quite different from that of the Greek age. With the Greek thinkers, thought is experienced as a perception. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries it comes from out of the depth of the soul so that man has the feeling: Thought generates itself within me. In the Greek thinkers, a relation between thought and the processes of nature was still immediately established; in the age just referred to, thought stands out as the product of self-consciousness. The thinker has the feeling that he must prove thought as justified. This is the feeling of the nominalists and the realists. This is also the feeling of Thomas Aquinas, who anchors the experience of thought in religious revelation.

[ 9 ] The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries introduce a new impulse to the souls. This is slowly prepared and slowly absorbed in the life of the soul. A transformation takes place in the organization of the human soul. In the field of philosophical life, this transformation becomes manifest through the fact that thought cannot now be felt as a perception, but as a product of self-consciousness. This transformation in the organization of the human soul can be observed in all fields of the development of humanity. It becomes apparent in the renaissance of art and science, and of European life, as well as in the reformatory religious movements. One will be able to discover it if one investigates the art of Dante and Shakespeare with respect to their foundations in the human soul development. Here these possibilities can only be indicated, since this sketch is intended to deal only with the development of the intellectual world conception.

[ 10 ] The advent of the mode of thought of modern natural science appears as another symptom of this transformation of the human soul organization. Just compare the state of the form of thinking about nature as it develops in Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler with what has preceded them, This natural scientific conception corresponds to the mood of the human soul at the beginning of the modern age in the sixteenth century. Nature is now looked at in such a way that the sense observation is to be the only witness of it. Bacon is one, Galileo another personality in whom this becomes apparent. The picture of nature is no longer drawn in a manner that allows thought to be felt in it as a power revealed by nature. Out of this picture of nature, every trait that could be felt as only a product of self-consciousness gradually vanishes. Thus, the creations of self-consciousness and the observation of nature are more and more abruptly contrasted, separated by a gulf, From Descartes on a transformation of the soul organization becomes discernible that tends to separate the picture of nature from the creations of the self-consciousness. With the sixteenth century a new tendency in the philosophical life begins to make itself felt. While in the preceding centuries thought had played the part of an element, which, as a product of self-consciousness, demanded its justification through the world picture, since the sixteenth century it proves to be clearly and distinctly resting solely on its own ground in the self-consciousness. Previously, thought had been felt in such a manner that the picture of nature could be considered a support for its justification; now it becomes the task of this element of thought to uphold the claim of its validity through its own strength. The thinkers of the time that now follows feel that in the thought experience itself something must be found that proves this experience to be the justified creator of a world conception.

[ 11 ] The significance of the transformation of the soul life can be realized if one considers the way in which philosophers of nature, like H. Cardanus (1501–1576) and Bernardinus Telesius (1508–1588), still spoke of natural processes. In them a picture of nature still continued to show its effect and was to lose its power through the emergence of the mode of conception of natural science of Copernicus, Galileo and others. Something still lives in the mind of Cardanus of the processes of nature, which he conceives as similar to those of the human soul. Such an assertion would also have been possible to Greek thinking. Galileo is already compelled to say that what man has as the sensation of warmth within himself, for instance, exists no more in external nature than the sensation of tickling that a man feels when the sole of his foot is touched by a feather. Telesius still feels justified to say that warmth and coldness are the driving forces of the world processes, and Galileo must already make the statement that man knows warmth only as an inner experience. In the picture of nature he allows as thinkable only what contains nothing of this inner experience. Thus, the conceptions of mathematics and mechanics become the only ones that are allowed to form the picture of nature. In a personality like Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who was just as great as a thinker as he was an artist, we can recognize the striving for a new law-determined picture of nature. Such spirits feel it necessary to find an access to nature not yet given to the Greek way of thinking and its after effects in the Middle Ages. Man now has to rid himself of whatever experiences he has about his own inner being if he is to find access to nature. He is permitted to depict nature only in conceptions that contain nothing of what he experiences as the effects of nature in himself.

[ 12 ] Thus, the human soul dissociates itself from nature; it takes its stand on its own ground. As long as one could think that the stream of nature contained something that was the same as what was immediately experienced in man, one could, without hesitation, feel justified to have thought bear witness to the events of nature. The picture of nature of modern times forces the human consciousness to feel itself outside nature with its thought. This consciousness further establishes a validity for its thought, which is gained through its own power.

[ 13 ] From the beginning of the Christian Era to Scotus Erigena, the experience of thought continues to be effective in such a way that its form is determined by the presupposition of a spiritual world, namely, the world of religious revelation. From the eighth to the sixteenth century, thought experience wrests itself free from the inner self-consciousness but allows, besides its own germinating power, the other power of consciousness, revelation, to continue in its existence. From the sixteenth century on, it is the picture of nature that eliminates the experience of thought itself; henceforth, the self-consciousness attempts to produce, out of its own energies, the resources through which it is possible to form a world conception with the help of thought. It is with this task that Descartes finds himself confronted. It is the task of the thinkers of the new period of world conception.

[ 14 ] Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) asks himself, “What must be assumed as a starting point from which the creation of a true world picture may proceed? This beginning is caused by the feeling that innumerable thoughts may present themselves in my soul as true; I can admit as the corner stone for a world conception only an element whose properties I must first determine.” Spinoza finds that one can only begin with something that is in need of nothing else for its being. He gives the name, substance, to this being. He finds that there can be only one such substance, and that this substance is God. If one observes the method by which Spinoza arrives at this beginning of his philosophy, one finds that he has modeled it after the method of mathematics. Just as the mathematician takes his start from general truths, which the human ego forms itself in free creation, so Spinoza demands that philosophy should start from such spontaneously created conceptions. The one substance is as the ego must think it to be. Thought in this way, it does not tolerate anything existing outside itself as a peer, for then it would not be everything. It would need something other than itself for its existence. Everything else is, therefore, only of the substance, as one of its attributes, as Spinoza says. Two such attributes are recognizable to man. He sees the first when he looks at the outer world; the second, when he turns his attention inward. The first attribute is extension; the second, thinking. Man contains both attributes in his being. In his body he has extension; in his soul, thinking. When he thinks, it is the divine substance that thinks; when he acts, it is this substance that acts. Spinoza obtains the existence (Dasein) for the ego in anchoring it in the general all-embracing divine substance. Under such circumstances there can be no question of an absolute freedom of man, for man is no more to be credited with the initiative of his actions and thought than a stone with that of its motion; the agent in everything is the one substance. We can speak of a relative freedom in man only when he considers himself not as an individual entity, but knows himself as one with the one substance.

Spinoza's world conception, if consistently developed to its perfection, leads a person to the consciousness: I think of myself in the right way if I no longer consider myself, but know myself in my experience as one with the divine whole. This consciousness then, to follow Spinoza, endows the whole human personality with the impulse to do what is right, that is to say, god-filled action. This results as a matter of course for the one for whom the right world conception is realized as the full truth. For this reason Spinoza calls the book in which he presents his world conception, Ethics. For him, ethics, that is to say, moral behavior, is in the highest sense the result of the true knowledge of man's dwelling in the one substance. One feels inclined to say that the private life of Spinoza, of the man who was first persecuted by fanatics and then, out of his own free will give away his fortune and sought his subsistence in poverty as a craftsman, was in the rarest fashion the outer expression of his philosophical soul, which knew its ego in the divine whole and felt its inner experience, indeed, all experience, illumined by this consciousness.

[ 15 ] Spinoza constructs a total world conception out of thoughts. These thoughts have to satisfy the requirement that they derive their justification for the construction of the picture out of the self-consciousness. In it their certainty must be rooted. Thoughts that are conceived by human consciousness in the same way as the self-supporting mathematical ideas are capable of shaping a world picture that is the expression of what, in truth, exists behind the phenomena of the world.

[ 16 ] In a direction that is entirely different from that of Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) seeks the justification of the ego-consciousness in the actual world. His point of departure is like that of Giordano Bruno insofar as he thinks of the soul or the “ego” as a monad. Leibniz finds the self-consciousness in the soul, that is, the knowledge of the soul of itself, a manifestation, therefore, of the ego. There cannot be anything else in the soul that thinks and feels except the soul itself, for how should the soul know of itself if the subject of the act of knowing were something other than itself? Furthermore, it can only be a simple entity, not a composite being, for the parts in it could and would have to know of each other. Thus, the soul is a simple entity, enclosed in itself and aware of its being, a monad. Nothing can come into this monad that is external to it, for nothing but itself can be active in it. All its experience, cognitive imagination, sensation, etc., is the result of its own activity. It could only perceive any other activity in itself through its defense against this activity, that is to say, it would at any rate perceive only itself in its defense. Thus, nothing external can enter this monad. Leibniz expresses this by saying that the monad has no windows. According to him, all real beings are monads, and only monads truly exist. These different monads are, however, differentiated with respect to the intensity of their inner life. There are monads of an extremely dull inner life that are as if in a continual state of sleep; there are monads that are, as it were, dreaming; there are, furthermore, the human monads in wake-consciousness, etc., up to the highest degree of intensity of the inner life of the divine principal monad. That man does not see monads in his sense perception is caused by the circumstance that the monads are perceived by him like the appearance of fog, for example, that is not really fog but a swarm of gnats. What is seen by the senses of man is like the appearance of a fog formed by the accumulated monads.

[ 17 ] Thus, for Leibniz the world in reality is a sum of monads, which do not affect each other but constitute self-conscious beings, leading their lives independently of each other, that is, egos. Nevertheless, if the individual monad contains an after image of the general life of the world in its inner life, it would be wrong to assume that this is caused by an effect that the individual monads exert on each other. It is caused by the circumstance that in a given case one monad experiences inwardly by itself what is also independently experienced by another monad. The inner lives of the monads agree like clocks that indicate the same hours in spite of the fact that they do not affect each other. Just as the clocks agree because they have been originally matched, so the monads are attuned to each other through the pre-established harmony that issues from the divine principal monad.

[ 18 ] This is the world picture to which Leibniz is driven because he has to form the picture in such a way that in it the self-conscious life of the soul, the ego, can be maintained as a reality. It is a world picture completely formed out of the “ego” itself. In Leibniz's view, this can, indeed, not be otherwise. In Leibniz, the struggle for a world conception leads to a point where, in order to find the truth, it does not accept anything as truth that is revealed in the outer world.

[ 19 ] According to Leibniz, the life of man's senses is caused in such a way that the monad of the soul is brought into connection with other monads with a somnolent, sleeping and less acute self-consciousness. The body is a sum of such monads. The one waking soul monad is connected with it. This central monad parts from the others in death and continues its existence by itself.

[ 20 ] Just as the world picture of Leibniz is one that is wholly formed out of the inner energy of the self-conscious soul, so the world picture of his contemporary John Locke (1632–1704), rests entirely on the feeling that such a productive construction out of the soul is not admissible. Locke recognizes only those parts of a world conception as justified that can be observed (experienced) and what can, on the basis of the observation, be thought about the observed objects. The soul for him is not a being that develops real experiences out of itself, but an empty slate on which the outer world writes its entries. Thus, for Locke, the human self-consciousness is a result of the experience; it is not an ego that is the cause of an experience. When a thing of the external world makes an impression on the soul, it can be said that the thing contains only extension, shape, motion in reality; through the contact with the senses, sounds, colors, warmth, etc., are produced. What thus comes into being through contact with the senses is only there as long as the senses are in touch with the things. Outside the perception there are only substances that are differently shaped and in various states of motion. Locke feels compelled to assume that, except shape and motion, nothing of what the senses perceive has anything to do with things themselves. With this assumption he makes the beginnings of a current of world conception that is unwilling to recognize the impressions of the external world experienced inwardly by man in his act of cognition, as belonging to the world “in itself.”

[ 21 ] It is a strange spectacle that Locke presents to the contemplative soul. Man is supposed to be capable of cognition only through the fact that he perceives, and that he thinks about the content of the perception, but what he perceives has only the least part to do with the properties pertaining to the world itself. Leibniz withdraws from what the world reveals and creates a world picture from within the soul; Locke insists on a world picture that is created by the soul in conjunction with the world, but no real picture of a world is accomplished through such a creation. As Locke cannot, like Leibniz, consider the ego itself as the fulcrum of a world conception, he arrives at conceptions that appear to be inappropriate to support a world conception because they do not allow the possession of the human ego to be counted as belonging to the center of existence. A world view like that of Locke loses the connection with every realm in which the ego, the self-conscious soul, could be rooted because it rejects from the outset any approaches to the world ground except those that disappear in the darkness of the senses.

[ 22 ] In Locke, the evolution of philosophy produces a form of world conception in which the self-conscious soul struggles for its existence in the world picture but loses this fight because it believes that it gains its experiences exclusively in the intercourse with the external world represented in the picture of nature. The self-conscious soul must, therefore, renounce all knowledge concerning anything that could belong to the nature of the soul apart from this intercourse with the outside world.

[ 23 ] Stimulated by Locke, George Berkeley (1685–1753) arrived at results that were entirely different from his. Berkeley finds that the impressions that the things and events of the world appear to produce on the human soul take place in reality within this soul itself. When I see “red,” I must bring this “redness” into being within myself; when I feel “warm,” the “warmth” lives within me. Thus it is with all things that I apparently receive from without. Except for those elements I produce within myself, I know nothing whatsoever about the external things. Thus, it is senseless to speak about things that consist of material substance, for I know only what appears in my mind as something spiritual. What I call a rose, for instance, is wholly spiritual, that is to say, a conception (an idea) experienced by my mind. There is, therefore, according to Berkeley, nothing to be perceived except what is spiritual, and when I notice that something is effected in me from without, then this effect can only be caused by spiritual entities, for obviously bodies cannot cause spiritual effects and my perceptions are entirely spiritual. There are, therefore, only spirits in the world that influence each other. This is Berkeley's view. It turns the conceptions of Locke into their contrary by construing everything as spiritual reality that had been considered as impression of the material things. Thus, Berkeley believes he recognizes himself with his self-consciousness immediately in a spiritual world.

[ 24 ] Others have been led to different results by the thoughts of Locke. Condillac (1715–1780) is an example. He believes, like Locke, that all knowledge of the world must and, indeed, can only depend on the observation of the senses and on thinking. He develops this view to the extreme conclusion that thinking has in itself no self-dependent reality; it is nothing but a sublimated, transformed external sensation. Thus, only sense perceptions must be accepted in a world picture that is to correspond to the truth. His explanation in this direction is indeed telling. Imagine a human body that is still completely unawakened mentally, and then suppose one sense after another to be opened. What more do we have in the sentient body than we had before in the insensate organism? A body on which the surrounding world has made impressions. These impressions made by the environment have by no means produced what believes itself to be an “ego.” This world conception does not arrive at the possibility of conceiving the “ego” as self-conscious “soul” and it does not accomplish a world picture in which this “ego” could occur. It is the world conception that tries to deliver itself of the task of dealing with the self-conscious soul by proving its nonexistence. Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715–1771), Julien de la Mettrie (1709–1751) and the system of nature (systeme de la nature) of Holbach that appeared in 1770 follow similar paths. In Holbach's work all traces of spiritual reality have been driven out of the world picture. Only matter and its forces operate in the world, and for this spirit-deprived picture of nature, Holbach finds the words, “0 nature, mistress of all being, and you, her daughters, Virtue, Reason, and Truth, may you be forever our only divinities.”

[ 25 ] In de la Mettrie's Man, a Machine, a world conception appears that is so overwhelmed by the picture of nature that it can admit only nature as valid. What occurs in the self-consciousness must, therefore, be thought of in about the same way as a mirror picture that we compare with the mirror. The physical organism would be compared with the mirror, the self-consciousness with the picture. The latter has, apart from the former, no independent significance. In Man, a Machine, we read:

If, however, all qualities of the soul depend so much on the specific organization of the brain and the body as a whole that they obviously are only this organization itself, then, in this case, we have to deal with a very enlightened machine. . . . ‘Soul,’ therefore, is only a meaningless expression of which one has no idea (thought picture), and that a clear head may only use in order to indicate by it the part in us that thinks. Just assume the simplest principle of motion and the animated bodies have everything they need in order to move, feel, repeat, in short, everything necessary to find their way in the physical and moral world. . . . If whatever thinks in my brain is not a part of this inner organ, why should my blood become heated when I make the plan for my works or pursue an abstract line of thought, calmly resting on my bed? (Compare de la Mettrie, Man, a Machine, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vol. 68.)

Voltaire (1694–1778) introduced the doctrines of Locke into the circles in which these thinkers had their effect (Diderot, Cabanis and others also belonged to them). Voltaire himself probably never went so far as to draw the last consequences of these philosophers. He allowed himself, however, to be stimulated by the thoughts of Locke and his sparkling and dazzling writings. Much can be felt of these influences, but he could not become a materialist in the sense of these thinkers. He lived in too comprehensive a thought horizon to deny the spirit. He awakened the need for philosophical questions in the widest circles because he linked these questions to the interest of them. Much would have to be said about him in an account that intended to trace philosophical investigation of current events, but that is not the purpose of this presentation. Only the higher problems of world conception in its specific sense are to be considered. For this reason, Voltaire, as well as Rousseau, the antagonist of the school of enlightenment, are not to be dealt with here.

[ 26 ] Just as Locke loses his path in the darkness of the senses, so does David Hume (1711–1776) in the inward realm of the self-conscious soul, the experience of which appears to him to be ruled not by the forces of a world order, but by the power of human habit. Why does one say that one event in nature is a cause and another an effect? This is a question Hume asks. Man sees how the sun shines on a stone; he then notices that the stone has become warm. He observes that the first event often follows the second. Therefore, he becomes accustomed to think of them as belonging together. He makes the cause out of the sunshine, and the heating of the stone he turns into the effect. Thought habits tie our perceptions together, but there is nothing outside in a real world that manifests itself in such a connection. Man sees a thought in his mind followed by a motion of his body. He becomes accustomed to think of this thought as the cause and of the motion as the effect. Thought habits, nothing more, are, according to Hume, responsible for man's statements about the world processes. The self-conscious soul can arrive at a guiding direction for life through thought habits, but it cannot find anything in these habits out of which it could shape a world picture that would have any significance for the world event apart from the soul. Thus, for the philosophical view of Hume, every conception that man forms beyond the more external and internal observation remains only an object of belief; it can never become knowledge. Concerning the fate of the self-conscious human soul, there can be no reliable knowledge about its relation to any other world but that of the senses, only belief.

[ 27 ] The picture of Leibniz's world conception underwent a drawn-out rationalistic elaboration through Christian Wolff (born in Breslau, 1679, professor in Halle). Wolff is of the opinion that a science could be founded that obtains a knowledge of what is possible through pure thinking, a knowledge of what has the potentiality for existence because it appears free from contradiction to our thinking and can be proven in this way. Thus, Wolff becomes the founder of a science of the world, the soul and God. This world conception rests on the presupposition that the self-conscious soul can produce thoughts in itself that are valid for what lies entirely and completely outside its own realm. This is the riddle with which Kant later feels himself confronted; how is knowledge that is produced in the soul and nevertheless supposed to have validity for world entities lying outside the soul, possible?

[ 28 ] In the philosophical development since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the tendency becomes manifest to rest the self-conscious soul on itself so that it feels justified to form valid conceptions about the riddles of the world. In the consciousness of the second half of the eighteenth century, Lessing (1729–1781) feels this tendency as the deepest impulse of human longing. As we listen to him, we hear many individuals who reveal the fundamental character of that age in this aspiration.

Lessing strives for the transformation of the religious truths of revelation into truths of reason. This aim is distinctly discernible in the various turns and aspects that his thinking has to take. Lessing feels himself with his self-conscious ego in a period of the evolution of mankind that is destined to acquire through the power of self-consciousness, what it had previously received from without through revelation. What has preceded this phase of history becomes for Lessing a process of preparation for the moment in which man's self-consciousness becomes autonomous. Thus, for Lessing, history becomes an “Education of the Human Race.” This is also the title of his essay, written at the height of his life, in which he refuses to restrict the human soul to a single terrestrial life, but assumes repeated earth lives for it. The soul lives its lives separated by time intervals in the various periods of the evolution of mankind, absorbs from each period what such a time can yield and incarnates itself in a later period to continue its development. Thus, the soul carries the fruits of one age of humanity into the later ages and is “educated” by history. In Lessing's conception, the “ego” is, therefore, extended far beyond the individual life; it becomes rooted in a spiritually effective world that lies behind the world of the senses.

[ 29 ] With this view Lessing stands on the ground of a world conception that means to stimulate the self-conscious ego to realize through its very nature how the active agent within itself is not completely manifested in the sense-perceptible individual life. [ 30 ] In a different way, yet following the same impulse, Herder (1744–1803) attempts to arrive at a world picture. His attention turns toward the entire physical and spiritual universe. He searches, as it were, for the plan of this universe. The connection and harmony of the phenomena of nature, the first dawning and sunrise of language and poetry, the progress of historical evolution—with all this Herder allows his soul to be deeply impressed, and often penetrates it with inspired thought in order to reach a certain aim. According to Herder, something is striving for existence in the entire external world that finally appears in its manifested form in the human soul. The self-conscious soul, by feeling itself grounded in the universe, reveals to itself only the course its own forces took before it reached self-consciousness. The soul may, according to Herder's view, feel itself rooted in the cosmos, for it recognizes a process in the whole natural and spiritual connection that had to lead to the soul itself, just as childhood must lead to mature adulthood in man's personal existence. It is a comprehensive picture of this world thought of Herder that is expressed in his Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. It represents an attempt to think the picture of nature in harmony with that of the spirit in such a way that there is in this nature picture a place also for the self-conscious human soul. We must not forget that Herder's world conception reflects his struggle to come to terms simultaneously with the conceptions of modern natural science and the needs of the self-conscious soul. Herder was confronted with the demands of modern world conception as was Aristotle with those of the Greek age. Their conceptions receive their characteristic coloring from the different way in which both thinkers had to take into account the pictures of nature provided by their respective ages.

[ 31 ] Herder's attitude toward Spinoza, contrary to that of other contemporary thinkers, casts a light on his position in the evolution of world conception. This position becomes particularly distinct if one compares it to the attitude of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743 – 1819). Jacobi finds in Spinoza's world picture the elements that the human understanding must arrive at if it follows the paths predestined for it by its own forces. This picture of the world marks the limit of what man can know about the world. This knowledge, however, cannot decide anything about the nature of the soul, about the divine ground of the world or about the connection of the soul with the latter for this knowledge. These realms are disclosed to man only if he surrenders to an insight of belief that depends on a special ability of the soul. Knowledge in itself must, therefore, according to Jacobi, necessarily be atheistic. It can adhere strictly to logical order, but it cannot contain within itself divine world order. Thus, Spinozism becomes, for Jacobi, the only possible scientific mode of conception but, at the same time, he sees in it a proof of the fact that this mode of thinking cannot find the connection with the spiritual world. In 1787 Herder defends Spinoza against the accusation of atheism. He is in a position to do so, for he is not afraid to feel, in his own way but similar to that of Spinoza, man's experience with the divine being. Spinoza erects a pure thought structure; Herder tries to gain a world conception not merely through thinking but through the whole of the human soul life. For him, no abrupt contrast exists between belief and knowledge if the soul becomes clearly aware of the manner in which it experiences itself. We express Herder's intention if we describe the experience of the soul in the following way. When belief becomes aware of the reasons that move the soul, it arrives at conceptions that are no less certain than those obtained by mere thinking. Herder accepts everything that the soul can find within itself in a purified form as forces that can produce a world picture. Thus, his conception of the divine ground of the world is richer, more saturated, than that of Spinoza, but this conception allows the human ego to assume a relationship to the world ground, which in Spinoza appears merely as a result of thought.

[ 32 ] We take our stand at a point where the various threads of the development of modern world conceptions intertwine, as it were, when we observe how the current of Spinoza's thought enters into it in the eighties of the eighteenth century. In 1785 F. H. Jacobi published his “Spinoza-Booklet.” In it he relates a conversation between himself and Lessing that took place shortly before Lessing's death. According to this conversation, Lessing had confessed his adherence to Spinozism. For Jacobi, this also establishes Lessing's atheism. If one recognizes the “Conversation with Jacobi” as decisive for the intimate thoughts of Lessing, one must regard him as a person who acknowledges that man can only acquire a world conception adequate to his nature if he takes as his point of support the firm conviction with which the soul endows the thought living through its own strength. With such an idea Lessing appears as a person whose feeling prophetically anticipates the impulses of the world conceptions of the nineteenth century. That he expresses this idea only in a conversation shortly before his death, and that it is still scarcely noticeable in his writings, shows how hard, even for the freest minds, the struggle with the enigmatic questions that the modern age raised for the development of world conceptions became.

A world conception has to be expressed in thoughts. But the convincing strength of thought, which had found its climax in Platonism and which in Aristotelianism unfolded in an unquestioned way, had vanished from the impulses of man's soul. Only the spiritually bold nature of Spinoza was capable of deriving the energy from the mathematical mode of thinking to elaborate thought into a world conception that should point as far as the ground of the world. The thinkers of the eighteenth century could not yet feel the life-energy of thought that allows them to experience themselves as human beings securely placed into a spiritually real world. Lessing stands among them as a prophet in feeling the force of the self-conscious ego in such a way that he attributes to the soul the transition through repeated terrestrial lives.

The fact that thought no longer entered the field of consciousness as it did for Plato was unconsciously felt like a nightmare in questions of world conceptions. For Plato, it manifested itself with its supporting energy and its saturated content as an active entity of the world. Now, thought was felt as emerging from the substrata of self-consciousness. One was aware of the necessity to supply it with supporting strength through whatever powers one could summon. Time and again this supporting energy was looked for in the truth of belief or in the depth of the heart, forces that were considered to be stronger than thought, which was felt to be pale and abstract. This is what many souls continually experience with respect to thought. They feel it as a mere soul content out of which they are incapable of deriving the energy that could grant them the necessary security to be found in the knowledge that man may know himself rooted with his being in the spiritual ground of the world. Such souls are impressed with the logical nature of thought; they recognize such thought as a force that would be needed to construct a scientific world view, but they demand a force that has a stronger effect on them when they look for a world conception embracing the highest knowledge. Such souls lack the spiritual boldness of Spinoza needed to feel thought as the source of world creation, and thus to know themselves with thought at the world's foundation. As a result of this soul constitution, man often scorns thought while he constructs a world conception; he therefore feels his self-consciousness more securely supported in the darkness of the forces of feeling and emotion. There are people to whom a conception appears the less valuable for its relation to the riddles of the world, the more this conception tends to leave the darkness of the emotional sphere and enter into the light of thought. We find such a mood of soul in I. G. Hamann (died 1788). He was, like many a personality of this kind, a great stimulator, but with a genius like Hamann, ideas brought up from the dark depths of the soul have a more intense effect on others than thoughts expressed in rational form. In the tone of the oracles Hamann expressed himself on questions that fill the philosophical life of his time. He had a stimulating effect on Herder as on others. A mystic feeling, often of a poetistic coloring, pervades his oracular sayings. The urge of the time is manifested chaotically in them for an experience of a force of the self-conscious soul that can serve as supporting nucleus for everything that man means to lift into awareness about world and life.

[ 33 ] It is characteristic of this age for its representative spirits to feel that one must submerge into the depth of the soul to find the point in which the soul is linked up with the eternal ground of the world; out of the insight into this connection, out of the source of self-consciousness, one must gain a world picture. A considerable gap exists, however, between what man actually was able to embrace with his spiritual energies and this inner root of the self-consciousness. In their spiritual exertion, the representative spirits do not penetrate to the point from which they dimly feel their task originates. They go in circles, as it were, around the cause of their world riddle without coming nearer to it. This is the feeling of many thinkers who are confronted with the question of world conception when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Spinoza begins to have an effect. Ideas of Locke and Leibniz, also those of Leibniz in the attenuated form of Wolff, pervade their minds. Besides the striving for clarity of thought, the anxious mistrust against it is at work at the same time, with the result that conceptions derived from the depth of the heart are time and again inserted into the world picture for its completion. Such a picture is found reflected in Lessing's friend, Mendelssohn, who was hurt by the publication of Jacobi's conversation with Lessing. He was unwilling to admit that this conversation really had had the content that Jacobi reported. In that case, Mendelssohn argues, his friend would actually have confessed his adherence to a world conception that means to reach the root of the spiritual world by mere thoughts, but one could not arrive at a conception of the life of this root in this way. The world spirit would have to be approached differently to be felt in the soul as a life-endowed entity. This, Mendelssohn was sure, Lessing must have meant. Therefore, he could only have confessed to a “purified Spinozism,” a Spinozism that would want to go beyond mere thinking while striving for the divine origin of existence. To feel the link with this origin in the manner it was made possible by Spinozism was a step Mendelssohn was reluctant to take.

[ 34 ] Herder did not shy away from this step because he enriched the thought contours in the world picture of Spinoza with colorful, content-saturated conceptions that he derived from the contemplation of the panorama of nature and the world of the spirit. He could not have been satisfied with Spinoza's thoughts as they were. As given by their originator, they would have appeared to him as all painted gray on gray. He observed what went on in nature and in history and placed the human being into the world of his contemplation. What was revealed to him in this way showed him a connection between the human being and the origin of the world as well as the world itself, through the conception of which he felt himself in agreement with Spinoza's frame of mind. Herder was deeply and innately convinced that the contemplation of nature and of historical evolution should lead to a world picture through which man can feel his position in the world as a whole as satisfactory. Spinoza was of the opinion that he could arrive at such a world picture only in the light-flooded realm of a thought activity that was developed after the model of mathematics. If one compares Herder with Spinoza, remembering that Herder acknowledged the conviction of the latter, one is forced to recognize that in the evolution of modern world conception an impulse is at work that remains hidden behind the visible world pictures themselves. This impulse consists in the effort to experience in the soul what binds the self-consciousness to the totality of the world processes. It is the effort to gain a world picture in which the world appears in such a way that man can recognize himself in it as he must recognize himself when he allows the inner voice of his self-conscious soul to speak to him. Spinoza means to satisfy the desire for this kind of experience by having the power of thought enfold its own certainty. Leibniz fastens his attention on the soul and aims at a conception of the world as it must be thought if the soul, correctly conceived of, is to appear rightly placed in the world picture. Herder observes the world processes and is convinced from the outset that the right world picture will emerge in the soul if this soul approaches these processes in a healthy way and in its full strength. Herder is absolutely convinced of the later statement of Goethe that “every element of fact is already theory.” He has also been stimulated by the thought world of Leibniz, but he would never have been capable of searching theoretically for an idea of the self-consciousness in the form of the monad first, and then constructing a world picture with this idea. The soul evolution of mankind presents itself in Herder in a way that enables him to point with special clarity and distinctiveness to the impulse underlying it in the modern age. What in Greece has been treated as thought (idea) as if it were a perception is now felt as an inner experience of the soul, and the thinker is confronted with the question: How must I penetrate into the depths of my soul to be able to reach the connection of the soul with the ground of the world in such a way that my thought will at the same time be the expression of the forces of world creation? The age of enlightenment as it appears in the eighteenth century is still convinced of finding its justification in thought itself. Herder develops beyond this viewpoint. He searches, not for the point of the soul where it reveals itself as thinking, but for the living source where the thought emerges out of the creative principle inherent in the soul. With this tendency Herder comes close to what one can call the mysterious experience of the soul with thought. A world conception must express itself in thoughts, but thought only then endows the soul with the power for which it searches by means of a world conception in the modern age, when it experiences this thought in its process of its birth in the soul. When thought is born, when it has turned into a philosophical system, it has already lost its magical power over the soul. For this reason, the power of thought and the philosophical world picture are so often underestimated. This is done by all those who know only the thought that is suggested to them from without, a thought that they are supposed to believe, to which they are supposed to pledge allegiance. The real power of thought is known only to one who experiences it in the process of its formation.

[ 35 ] How this impulse lives in souls in the modern age becomes prominently apparent in a most significant figure in the history of philosophy—Shaftesbury (1671–1713). According to him, an “inner sense” lives in the soul; through this inner sense ideas enter into man that become the content of a world conception just as the external perceptions enter through the outer senses. Thus, Shaftesbury does not seek the justification of thought in thought itself, but by pointing toward a fact of the soul life that enables thought to enter from the foundation of the world into the interior of the soul. Thus, for Shaftesbury, man is confronted by a twofold outer world: The “external,” material one, which enters the soul through the “outer” senses, and the spiritual outer world, which reveals itself to man through his “inner sense.”

[ 36 ] In this age a strong tendency can be felt toward a knowledge of the soul, for man strives to know how the essence of a world view is anchored in the soul's nature. We see such an effort in Johann Nicolaus Tetens (1736–1807). In his investigations of the soul he arrived at a distinction of the soul faculties that has been adopted into general usage at the present time: Thinking, feeling and willing. It was customary before him to distinguish just between the faculties of thinking and the appetitive faculty.

[ 37 ] How the spirits of the eighteenth century attempt to watch the soul in the process of creatively forming its world picture can be observed in Hemsterhuis (1721–1790). In this philosopher, whom Herder considered to be one of the greatest thinkers since Plato, the struggle of the eighteenth century with the soul impulse of the modern age becomes demonstrably apparent. The thoughts of Hemsterhuis can be expressed approximately in the following way. If the human soul could, through its own power and without external senses, contemplate the world, the panorama of the world would lie displayed before it in a single moment. The soul would then be infinite in the infinite. If the soul, however, had no possibility to live in itself but depended entirely on the outer senses, then it would be confronted with a never ending temporal diffusion of the world. The soul would then live, unconscious of itself, in an ocean of sensual boundlessness. Between these two poles, which are never reached in reality but which mark the limits of the inner life as two possibilities, the soul lives its actual life; it permeates its own infinity with the boundlessness of the world.

[ 38 ] In this chapter the attempt has been made to demonstrate, through the example of a few thinkers, how the soul impulse of the modern age flows through the evolution of world conception in the eighteenth century. In this current live the seeds from which the thought development of the “Age of Kant and Goethe” grew.

Before I start with today’s topic, I would like to make you aware that today’s discussions are the beginning of a whole series of such discussions, and that basically all subsequent topics this winter could have precisely the same title as today’s topic. The path a human being must take if he wants to attain knowledge of the spiritual world will be explored in the course of the next lectures in relation to the most diverse phenomena of human and scientific life in general and to various cultural personalities of mankind.

Allow me to start with something personal, although this topic, this contemplation, must head, so to speak, in the direction of the most impersonal, most objective Spiritual Science. Yet the path into the spiritual world is such that it must lead through the most personal to the impersonal. Thus in spite of the impersonal, the personal will often be a symbolic feature of this path, and one gains the opportunity to point out many important things just by starting, so to speak, from the more intimate immediate experience. To the observer of the spiritual world many things in life will be symbolically more important than they initially seem to be. Much that might otherwise pass by the human eye, without particularly attracting attention, can appear to be deeply important to someone who wants to study intensely an observation such as the one that forms the basis for today’s examinations. And I can say that the following—which may at first seem like a trifle of life to you—belongs for me to the many unforgettable things on my path of life that on the one hand marked the longing of today’s human beings to truly ascend to the spiritual world. Yet on the other hand, they marked a more or less admitted impossibility of somehow gaining access to the spiritual world by means, that were not only provided by the present, but were also available in the past centuries, insofar as they were externally accessible to man.

I once sat in the cosy home of Herman Grimm. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with German intellectual life will associate much with the name of Herman Grimm. Perhaps you will know the spirited, important biographer of Michaelangelo and Raffael, and might also know, as it were, that the sum of education of our time, or at least of Central Europe, or let’s say it even more narrowly, of Germany, was united in the soul of Herman Grimm. During a conversation with him about Goethe, who was so close to his heart, and about Goethe’s view of the world, a small thing happened that belongs to the most unforgettable things on my path of life. In response to a remark I made—and we will see later how exactly this remark can be of importance in relation to the ascent of man into the spiritual world—Herman Grimm answered with a dismissive movement of his left hand. What lay in that gesture is what I consider, as it were, to be one of the unforgettable experiences on the path of my life. It was supposed to be in relation to Goethe, how Goethe wanted to find the way into the spiritual world in his own way.

In the course of these lectures we will have another talk about Goethe’s path into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm willingly followed Goethe’s pathways into the spiritual world, but in his own manner.

It was far from his mind to enter into a conversation about Goethe, in which Goethe would be seen as the representative of a human being who had really brought down spiritual realities—also as an artist— from the spiritual world and then undertook to embody them in his works of art. For Herman Grimm, it was much more obvious to say to himself: Alas, with the means that we as human beings have nowadays, we can only ascend to this spiritual world by way of fantasy. Although fantasy offers things that are beautiful, great and magnificent and are able to fill the human heart with warmth; but Knowledge, well-founded knowledge was not something that Herman Grimm, the intimate observer of Goethe, wanted to find in Goethe either. And when I said that Goethe’s whole fundamental nature is based on his willingness to embody the true in the beautiful, in the art, and then attempted to show that there are ways outside of fantasy, ways into the spiritual world that will lead you on more solid and firmer ground than fantasy—then it was not the rejection by someone who would not have liked to follow such a path. Herman Grimm did not use this gesture to express his rejection of such a path, but—in a way only those who knew him better would understand—he laid in it roughly the following: There may well be such a path, but we human beings cannot feel a calling to find out anything about it!

As I said, I do not wish to present this here as a personal matter in an importune way, yet it seems to me that just in such a gesture the position of the best human beings of our age towards the spiritual world is epitomised. Because later I had a long conversation with the same Hermann Grimm on a journey that led us both from Weimar to Tiefurt. There he explained how he had freed himself entirely of a purely materialistic view on world events, from the opinion that the human spirit, in the successive epochs, would produce out of itself that which constitutes the real soul-wealth of man. At that earlier time Herman Grimm talked about a great plan that was part of a piece of work that was never realised. Those of you who have occupied themselves with Herman Grimm will know that he intended to write a ‘History of the German fantasy’. He had envisaged the forces of fantasy to be like those of a goddess in the spiritual world who brings forth out of herself that which human beings create for the benefit of world progress. I would like to say: In that lovely region between Weimar and Tiefurt, when I heard these words from a man, whom I, after all, acknowledge as one of the greatest minds of our time, I had a feeling that I would like to express in these words; ‘Today, many people say to themselves: One must be deeply dissatisfied with everything that external science is able to say about the sources of life, about the secret of existence, about world riddles—but the possibility to step powerfully into another world is missing.’

There is a lack of intensity of willingness to realise that this world of spiritual life is different from what man imagines in his fantasy. Many enjoy going into the realm of fantasy, because for them it is the only spiritual realm that exists. About 17 years ago, on the journey to Tiefurt, I met Herman Grimm, who already through his scriptures and many, many other things, had made an impression on me. Facing this personality I remembered just then that, 30 years ago, I had glanced at just the passage in one of Grimm’s Goethe lectures,¹ which he had held in the winter of 1874/75 in Berlin, and where, with reference to Goethe, he spoke of the kind of impression that a purely external study of nature, devoid of spirit, must make on a spirit like his own. Already 30 years earlier Herman Grimm appeared to me to be the kind of human being whom all feelings and emotions urge upwards into the spiritual world, but who, unable to find the spiritual world as a reality, can only perceive it in its weaving and workings as a fantasy. And on the other hand—just because he was like this—he did not want to acknowledge that Goethe himself searched for the sources and riddles of existence in a different realm, not just in the realm of fantasy, but in the realm of spiritual reality.

There is a passage where Herman Grimm speaks about something that must affect our souls today, at the beginning of our contemplations. This passage refers to something which, as I have already indicated, and although its importance cannot be denied by Spiritual Science, is regarded as an impossibility by natural science—or by a worldview that claims to stand on the firm ground of natural science. It is an impossibility not only for feeling and emotion but also for a realisation that truly understands itself. What I mean is the Kant-Laplace theory that explains our solar system as if it were made up only of lifeless, inorganic substances and forces, and as if it had clenched itself out of a giant gas ball. I would like to read to you the passage from Herman Grimm’s Goethe lectures that shows you what this world-view, which is so fascinating, so deeply impressive today, meant for a spirit like Herman Grimm’s:

As much as Goethe here prohibits reason to accept as truth more than one can indeed grasp with the five fingers of a hand, the more he grants license to the poet’s fantasy, to create out of an unconscious, dreaming force pictures of what the spirit wishes to behold. However, he sharply upholds the boundaries between both of these activities. A long time ago, already in his youth, the great Kant-Laplace fantasy about the origin and the future downfall of the globe, had gained ground. Out of the primeval, cosmic, in itself rotating world-nebula—the children learn this at school already—the central drop of gaseous matter forms itself, which later becomes the Earth and, as a solidifying ball in incomprehensible periods of time, goes through all phases including the episode of mankind’s habitation. This ball will finally crash back into the sun as burnt out slag: This is a long, but completely comprehensible process for the audience, that does not require any further external intervention for its implementation apart from the endeavour by some outside power to maintain a constant heating temperature on the Sun.

There cannot be imagined a more futile perspective for the future than the one that is being imposed on us today in this expectation as a scientific necessity. A carrion bone, around which a hungry dog made a detour, would be a more refreshing appetising piece in comparison to this latests excrement of creation—the form in which our Earth would finally pass to the Sun again. The inquisitiveness with which our generation embraces such things and thinks it believes them, is a sign of a sick imagination. Scientists of future epochs will use a lot of astuteness to explain it as a historical phenomenon of the time.

I felt it was necessary to point out such a quote, as basically it is rarely done these days. Today, when the concepts of these world-views have such a fascinating effect, and when they seem to be based so solidly on natural science, little reference is made to the fact that there are, after all, spirits who are deeply connected to the cultural life of our time, and yet relate in such a way out of their whole soul make-up to something about which countless people now say: It is obvious that things are like that, and anyone who does not concede that they are like that is really a simpleton! Yes, already today we see many people who feel the deepest longing to forge links between the soul of man and the spiritual world. But on the other side, we see only a few outside of those circles that are more deeply engaged with what we call Spiritual Science, who are busying themselves with means that could lead the human soul to what could after all be called the land of its longings.

Therefore, when we speak today about ways that are to lead man into the spiritual world, and speak so that what we say applies not only to a tight circle, but is addressed to all those who are equipped with a contemporary education, we still encounter strong resistance in a certain respect. Not only is it possible that what will be presented is regarded as daydreaming and fantasy, but it may also easily annoy many people of the present. It can actually be an annoyance to them because it deviates so much from those ideas that are currently considered valid in the widest circles, and which are the suggestive and fascinating imaginations of people who consider themselves to be the most educated.

In the first lecture it was already hinted at that the ascent into the spiritual world is basically an intimate affair of the soul and is in stark contrast to what is common for the imaginative and emotional life both in popular and scientific circles. Namely a scientist easily makes the demand that to be valid as science today, something has to be verifiable at any time and for anyone. And he will then also refer to his external experiment that can be proven anytime to anyone. It goes without saying that this demand can not be met by Spiritual Science. We are about to see why not. Spiritual Science here means a science that does not speak about the spirit as a sum of abstract terms and concepts, but as something real and of real entities. Spiritual Science therefore must contravene the methodical demands that are currently so easily established by science and world-views: to be verifiable anywhere and at all times by anyone. Spiritual Science very often encounters resistance in popular circles for the reason that in our time, even where there is an inner longing to ascend to the spiritual world, feelings and emotions are penetrated and permeated by a materialistic view.

Even with the best intentions, even if one yearns for the spiritual world, one cannot help but imagine the spirit as in some way material again, or at least imagine the ascent into the spiritual world as somehow connected to something material. That is why most people may prefer that you talk to them about purely external matters, like what they should eat or drink or shouldn’t eat and drink, or what else they should undertake purely externally in the material world. They would much rather do this than be asked to introduce intimate moments of development into their souls. But that is exactly what ascending into the spiritual world is all about.

We now want to try to map out—entirely in line with Spiritual Science’s own view—how this ascent of a human soul into the spiritual world can happen. The starting point must always be a person’s current life situation. A human being, as he is placed in our present world, lives completely and firmly in the external sensory world. Let’s try to become clear about how much would remain in a human soul, if one would disregard the concepts that the outer sense perceptions of the physical world have ignited within us, and that which has entered into us through the outer physical experiences, through eyes and ears and the other senses. And disregard that which is stimulated of sufferings and joys, of pleasure and pain within us through our eyes and ears, and what our rational mind has then combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try to eliminate all of this from the soul, imagine it away, and then ponder what would be left behind. People who honestly undertake this simple self-observation will find that extremely little will remain, especially in the souls of people of the present time. And it is just so that initially the ascent into the spiritual world cannot proceed from something that is given to us by the external sensory world—it has to be undertaken so that a human being develops forces within his soul, which ordinarily lie dormant in it. It is, so to speak, a basic element for all possibilities of ascent into the Spiritual world, that a person becomes aware that he is capable of inner development, that there is something else in him than what he is initially able to survey with his consciousness.

Today, this is actually an annoying concept for many people. Let’s take a very special person with a contemporary education, for example, what does a philosopher nowadays do, when he wants to establish the full meaning and the nature of Knowledge? Someone like this will say: ‘I will try to establish how far in general we can get with our thinking, with our human soul forces, what we can comprehend of this world.’ He is attempting in his own way—depending on what is momentarily possible for him—to comprehend a world view and to place it before him, and usually he will then say, ‘We simply cannot know anything else, because it is beyond the limits of human knowledge.’ Really this is the most widespread phrase that can be found in today’s literature: ‘We cannot know this!’

However, there is a another standpoint that works in a completely different way from the one just described, by saying: ‘Certainly, with the forces I have now in my soul, which are now probably the normal human soul forces, I can recognise this or that, but here in this soul is a being capable of development. This soul may have forces within it that I first have to extrapolate. I first have to lead it along certain pathways, must lead it beyond its current point of view, and then I will see whether it could have been my fault when I said that this or that is beyond the limit of our knowledge. Perhaps I just need to go a little further in the development of my soul, and then the boundaries will expand and I will be able to penetrate more deeply into things.

In making judgments, one does not always take logic seriously, otherwise one would say: ‘What we can recognise depends on our organs.’ For this reason, someone who is born blind cannot judge colours. He would only be able to do so, if through a fortunate operation he were to become capable of seeing colours.

Likewise it may be possible—I do not wish to speak of a sixth sense here, but of something that can be brought forth from the soul in a purely spiritual way—that spirit eyes and spirit ears can be brought forth from our soul. Then the great event could happen for us—which occurs at a lower level when the one born blind is so lucky to be operated on—so that then for us the initial assumption could become a truth: Around us is a spiritual world, but to be able to look into it, we first have to awaken the organs within us. This would be the only logical thing to do. But, as I said, we do not always take logic very seriously, because people in our time have very different needs than finding their way into the spiritual world when they hear about it. I have already told you that once, when I had to give a lecture in a city in southern Germany, a courageous person, who wrote feature articles, opened his article with the words; ‘The most obvious thing about theosophy is its incomprehensibility.’ We like to believe this man that for him theosophy’s most outstanding characteristic is its incomprehensibility. But is this in any way a criterion? Let’s apply this example to mathematics about which someone would say: ‘What I notice most about mathematics is its incomprehensibility.’ Then everyone would say: ‘Quite certainly, this is possible, but then, if he wants to write feature articles, he should be so good and learn something first!’ Often it would be better to transfer what is valid for one particular subject and apply it correctly to another.

So people have nothing left to do than either to deny that there is a development of the soul—and they can only do this by speaking a word of power—namely, when they refuse to go through such a development, or, alternatively they can immerse themselves into the development of their soul. Then the spiritual world becomes for them an observation, reality, truth. But in order to ascend into the spiritual world, the soul must become capable—not for physical life, but for the realisation of the spiritual world—of completely transforming itself in a certain relation to the form it initially has, and in a certain way becoming a different being.

This could already make us aware of something that has been emphasised repeatedly here, namely, that someone who feels the urge to ascend into the spiritual world, must first and foremost make it clear for himself time and again whether he has gained a firm foothold in this world of physical reality and whether he is able to stand firm here. We have to maintain certainty, volition and sentience in all circumstances that take place in the physical world. We must not lose the ground beneath our feet if we want to ascend from this world into the spiritual one. Doing anything that can lead our character to stand firm in the physical world is a preliminary stage. Then it is a matter of bringing the soul to a different kind of feeling and willing for the spiritual world, than the feeling and willing in the soul normally are. The soul must become, as it were, inwardly a different feeling and willing organism than it is in normal life. This brings us to that which can, on the one hand, initially really place Spiritual Science in a kind of opposition to what is recognised as ‘science’ today. On the other hand, it places Spiritual Science yet again directly next to this science with the same validity that external science has. When it is said that everything that is supposed to be science, needs to be at any time and by anyone verifiable, then, what is meant by this is that what is deemed to be science must not be dependent on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on any decisions of will, will impulses, feelings and emotions that we only carry individually within ourselves. Now, someone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, must first take a detour through his innermost soul, must reorganise his soul; at first he must completely turn his gaze away from what is outside in the physical world. Normally, a human being only turns away from looking at what is within the physical world when he is asleep. Then he does not let anything enter into his soul through his eyes, his ears, nor through the entire organisation of his senses. But for that he also becomes unconscious and is not able to live consciously in a spiritual world.

It has now been said that it is one of the basic elements of spiritual realisation for a human being to find within oneself the possibility to go beyond oneself. However, this means nothing else than to first let the spirit become effective within oneself. In today’s ordinary human life we all know only one kind of turning away from the physical world, namely when we enter into the unconsciousness of sleep. The contemplation of The Nature of Sleep ² has shown us that a human being is in a real spiritual world during sleep, even if he knows nothing about it. For it would be absurd to believe that a person’s soul-centre and spirit-centre disappears in the evening and newly comes into being in the morning. No, in reality, it outlasts the stages from falling asleep to awakening. However, what for a normal person today is the inner strength to be conscious—even if there is no stimulation of consciousness through sense impressions or through the work of the rational mind —is missing in sleep. The soul life is so turned down during sleep, that the person is unable to kindle or awaken what allows the soul to experience itself inwardly. When the human being wakes up again, events from the outside enter. And because a soul content is gifted to the human being in this way, he becomes conscious of himself by means of this soul content. He is not able to become conscious of himself if he is not stimulated externally, because his human strength is too weak for this, when he is left to himself in his sleep.

Hence the ascent into the spiritual world means an arousal of such forces within our soul that enable it, as it were, to truly live consciously within itself, when it becomes, in relation to the external world like a human being who is asleep. Basically, the ascent into the spiritual worlds demands a spurring on of internal energies, an extraction of forces that are otherwise asleep, that are, as it were, paralysed within the soul, so that man cannot handle them at all. All those intimate experiences that a spiritual researcher must experience in his soul, ultimately aim at what has just been characterised. And today, I would like to summarise something for you about the path that leads upwards into the spiritual world. This has been presented in detail by element, so to speak, by their rudiments, in my book published under the title: How to attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? ³ But today, I do not want to repeat myself by just presenting you an excerpt from this book. Instead, I wish to approach the issue from a different side, that is what the soul must do with itself to rise up to the spiritual world. One who is interested in this more deeply, can read the details in the book mentioned above. However, no one should think that what was presented in detail there can be summarised here in the same words and sentences. Those who are familiar with the book will not find that it is a summary of what has been said there, but a description of the topic from a different angle.

For a spiritual researcher who wants to direct his steps into the spiritual world, it is extremely important that much of what would lead other people directly to a realisation and a goal becomes for him simply a means of education, an intimate means of education of the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Freedom. As it is out of stock since years, it is currently not available, but hopefully a second edition will appear in the near future.⁴ This Philosophy of Freedom was conceived in such a way that it is quite different from other philosophical books of the present time, which more or less aim by what is written to share something about how things are in the world or how they must be according to the ideas of the authors. However, this is not the immediate aim of this book. Rather, it is intended to give someone who engages with the thoughts presented there a kind of workout for his thoughts, so that the kind of thinking, the special way to devoting oneself to these thoughts is one in which the emotions and feelings of the soul are set in motion—just as in gymnastics the limbs are exercised, if I may use this comparison. What is otherwise only a method of gaining insight, is in this book at the same time a means of spiritual-soul self-education. This is extraordinarily important. Of course this is annoying for many philosophers of the present time, who associate something quite different with philosophy than that which may help a human being to progress a little further—because, if possible, he should remain as he is, with his normal innate capacity to gain knowledge. Therefore, in regard to this book it is not so important to be able to argue about this or that, or if something can be understood one way or another, but what really matters is that the thoughts which are connected as one organism, are able to school our soul and help it to make a bit of progress.

This is also the case with my book Truth and Science. And so it is with many things that are initially supposed to be basic elements to train the soul to rise up into the spiritual world. Mathematics and geometry teach man knowledge of triangles, quadrangles and other figures. But why do they teach all this? So that man can gain knowledge about how things are within space, which laws they are subject to and so on. Essentially, the spiritual ascent to the higher worlds works with similar figures as symbols. For instance, it places the symbol of a triangle, a quadrangle or another symbolic figure before a student, but not so that he will win immediate insights through them, as he can acquire these also by other means. Instead, with the symbols he receives the opportunity to train his spiritual abilities so that the spirit, supported by the impression he gains from the symbolic pictures, ascends into a Higher World. Thus it is about mental training, or, do not misunderstand me, it is about mental gymnastics. Therefore, much of what is dry external science, dry external philosophy, what is mathematics or geometry, becomes a living symbol for the spiritual training that leads us upwards into the spiritual world. If we have let this affect our soul, then we will learn to understand what basically no external science understands, that the ancient Pythagoreans, under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras, spoke of the universe being made up of numbers because they focussed on the inner laws of numbers. Now let us look at how we encounter numbers everywhere in the world. Nothing is easier than to refute Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, because from a standpoint, imagined to be superior, one can easily say: There are these Spiritual Scientists again, coming out of their mystic ⁵ darkness with numerical symbolism and say that there is an inner regularity of numbers, and, for example, one has to consider the true foundation of human nature according to the number seven. But something similar was meant also by Pythagoras and his students, when they talked about the inner regularity of numbers. If we allow those marvellous connections, which lie in the relationships between numbers, to affect our spirit then we can train it in such a way that it wakes up when it would otherwise be asleep and develops stronger forces within itself to penetrate into the spiritual world.

Thus it is a schooling through another kind of science. It is also what is actually called the study of someone, who wants to enter deeply into the spiritual world. And for someone like this, gradually everything that for other people is a harsh reality, becomes more or less an external allegory, a symbol. If a human being is able to let these symbols have an effect on him, then he is not only freeing his spirit from the outer physical world, but also imbues his spirit with strong forces, so that the soul can be conscious of itself, even when there is no external stimulation. I have already mentioned that if someone lets a symbol like the Rosy Cross affect him, he can feel an impulse to ascend into the spiritual world. We imagine a Rosy Cross as a simple black cross with seven red roses attached in a circle at the crossing of the beams.

What should it tell us? One who allows it to have an effect on his soul in the right way will imagine: For example, I look at a plant; I say of this plant that it is an imperfect being. Next to it I place a human being, who in his nature is a more perfect being, but even only in his nature. For if I look at the plant, I have to say: In it I encounter a material being which is not permeated by passions, desires, instincts, that bring it down from the height where it otherwise could stand. The plant has its innate laws, which it follows from leaf to flower to fruit; it stands there without desires, chaste.

Beside him lives the human being, who certainly by his nature is a higher being, but who is permeated by desires, instincts, passions through which he can stray from his strict regularity. He first has to overcome something within himself, if he wants to follow his own inner laws as a plant follows its innate laws. Now the human being can say to himself; The expression of desires, of instincts in me is the red blood. In a certain way, I can compare it with chlorophyll, the chaste plant sap in the red rose, and can say: If man becomes so strong within himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of what pushes him down below himself, but of what lifts him above himself—when it becomes the expression of such a chaste being like the plant sap, which has turned into the red of a rose, or in other words; when the red of the rose expresses the pure inwardness, the purified nature of a human being in his blood, then I have before me the ideal of what man, by overcoming the outer nature, can achieve and which presents itself to me under the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. And the red of the rose symbolises the higher life that awakens when the red blood has become the chaste expression of the purified, instinctive nature of man, which has overcome itself.

If one does not let what is depicted be an abstract concept, then it becomes a vividly felt evolutionary idea. Then a whole world of feelings and emotions comes to life within us; we will feel within ourselves a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state. We sense that development is something quite different from the abstract thing that external science provides us with in the sense of a purely external Darwinism. Here, development becomes something that cuts deep into our heart, that pervades us with warmth, with soul-warmth—it becomes a force within us that carries and holds us. It is only through such inner experiences that the soul becomes capable of developing strong forces within itself, so that it can illuminate itself with consciousness in its innermost being—in the being that otherwise becomes unconscious when it withdraws from the external world.

It is of course child’s play to say; ‘Then you recommend an idea of something completely imaginary, of something entirely made up. But only those concepts which are reproductions of external ideas are valuable, and an idea of the Rose Cross has no external counter-image.’ But the point is not that the concepts we use to school our souls are reflections of an external reality, instead it is about concepts that are strength-awakening for our soul and that draw out of the soul what lies hidden within it.

When the human soul is dedicated to such pictorial ideas, when, so to speak, everything that it normally values as reality now becomes a cause for pictures that are not arbitrarily retrieved from fantasy, but are inspired by reality, just like the symbol of the Rosy Cross, then we say: The human being makes an effort to move upwards to the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world. This is the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ that leads us above and beyond what is immediately concerned with the physical world only.

Hence, a human being who wishes to ascend into the spiritual world works in his soul with very particular concepts in a precisely determined way, to let the otherwise external reality affect him. He works in this soul itself. When the human being has worked in this way for some time, then it will be so that the external scientists can tell him: This has only a subjective, only an individual value for you. But this external scientist does not know that when the soul undergoes such a serious, regular training, there exists a stage of inner development when the possibility for the soul to express subjective feelings and emotions ceases completely. Then the soul arrives at a point where it must tell itself: Now concepts arise within me that I encounter like I normally meet trees and rock, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world that are as real as otherwise only external physical things are, and to which my subjectivity can neither add anything to them nor can it take anything away from them.

So there actually exists an intermediate state for everyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, where man is subject to the danger of carrying his subjectivity, which is only valid for himself, into the spiritual world. But man must pass through this intermediate state, for then he reaches a stage where what the soul is experiencing becomes as objectively verifiable—to anyone with the ability to do so—as all things in the outer physical reality. Because, after all, the principle that applies to external science—for something to be regarded as scientifically valid it must be verifiable at any time by anyone—also applies only to one who is sufficiently prepared for this. Or do you believe that you would be able to teach ‘the law of corresponding boiling temperatures’ to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach him the theorem of Pythagoras. Thus it is already bound to the basic principle that the human soul must be appropriately prepared if one wants to prove something to it.

And just as one must be prepared to understand the theorem of Pythagoras—even though it is possible for everyone to understand it—one must be prepared through a certain soul exercise if one wants to experience or realise this or that in the spiritual world. However, what can be realised, can then be experienced and observed in the same way by anyone who is appropriately prepared. Or, when messages are conveyed from observations of Spiritual Science by those who have prepared their soul for this, such as, that a particular man is able to look back on repeated Earth lives so that these become a fact for him, then it is likely that people will come and say; ‘There he brings us some dogmas again and demands that we should believe in these!’ Yet a spiritual researcher does not approach his contemporaries with his realisations so that people should believe them.

People who believe that we speak about dogmas, should ask themselves, is the fact that a whale exists a dogma for someone who has never seen one? Certainly, it is explainable in this way: A whale is a dogma for someone who has never seen one. Yet spiritual research does not approach the world with messages alone. Neither does it do so when it understands itself; instead it clothes what it brings down from the higher worlds in logical forms. These are exactly the same logical forms with which the other sciences are permeated. Then anyone will be able to verify, by applying a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic, whether what the spiritual researcher has said is right. It has always been said that a schooling of the soul is necessary for someone wanting to explore spiritual facts by self-searching, whereby the soul must have gone through what is now being described here. But to understand what is being communicated, all you need is a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic.

Now, if the spiritual researcher has allowed such symbolic terms and pictures to affect his soul for a while, he will notice that his feeling and emotional life becomes completely different from what it was before.

What is the feeling and emotional life of man in the ordinary world like? Nowadays it actually has become somewhat trivial to use the expression ‘egoistic’ everywhere, and to say that people in their normal life are egoistic. I do not want to express it in this way, but prefer to say: In their normal lives people are at first closely tied to their human personality, for example, when something pleases us, yes, especially in relation to things which we enjoy of the noblest spiritual creations, things of art and beauty. The saying, there is no accounting for taste, already expresses that much is connected to our personality and depends upon our subjective stance towards things. Check how everything that can please you is related to your upbringing, in which place in the world, in which profession your personality is placed, and so on, in order to see how feelings and emotions are closely connected to our personality. But when one does exercises of the soul, like the ones described, one notices how feelings and emotions will become completely impersonal. It is a great and tremendous experience when the moment arrives in which our feeling and our emotional life becomes, so to speak, impersonal. This moment comes, it certainly comes, when a human being on his spiritual path, inspired by those who undertake his spiritual guidance, allows the following things to really affect his soul. I will now list some of these things that will affect our whole feeling and emotional life in an educational way if someone allows them to work on his soul for weeks, or months.

The following can be considered. We focus our attention on what we find at the centre of philosophical observations, on the spiritual centre of the human being, the Ego—if we have learned to rise to the concept of Ego—which accompanies all our ideas, the mysterious centre of all experience. And if we continue to further the respect, this reverence and this devotion, which can connect to the fact, that for many is certainly not a fact but a figment of the imagination,—that there is an Ego living within us!—if this becomes the greatest, the most momentous experience to keep telling yourself that this ‘I am’ is the most essential of the human soul, then mighty, strong feelings develop in relation to the ‘I am’, which are impersonal. These lead directly to an insight into how all of the world’s secrets and mysteries that float around us are concentrated, as it were, in a single point—the Ego-point— to comprehend the human being from this Ego-point. For example, the poet Jean Paul ⁶ talks about becoming conscious of the Ego in his biography:

“I will never forget what manifested in me, which I have never told anyone about, whereby I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, and of which I can tell at which place and at what time it happened. One morning, when I was a very young child, I stood under the front entrance and looked left at the woodshed, when suddenly the inner vision—I am an I—flashed before me like a bolt of lightning from the sky and since then has remained shining; there my Ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Memory errors are hardly imaginable here, and since there was no extraneous retelling, nothing could be added and mixed into the narrative about an occurrence which took place only within the veiled inner sanctum of a human being—only the novelty lent permanence to these everyday, incidental circumstances.

It is already quite a lot to feel the devotion for the concentrated crowdedness of the world-being at one point, with all the shivers of awe and with all the feelings for the greatness of this fact. Yet, when a human being feels this time after time and allows it to affect him—although it will not enlighten him in regard to all the riddles of the world—it can give him a direction entirely focussed on the impersonal and the innermost human nature.

Thus we educate our emotional and our feeling life by relating it to our Ego-beingness. And when we have done this for a while, then we can focus our feelings and emotions in a different direction and can tell ourselves; this Ego within us is connected to everything we think, feel and perceive, with our entire soul life, it glows and shines through our soul life. We can then study human nature with the Ego as the centre point of thinking, feeling and willing, without taking ourselves into consideration or getting personal. The human being becomes a mystery to us, not we to ourselves, and our feelings expand from the Ego across to the soul. We can then transition to a different kind of feeling. In particular, we can acquire this beautiful feeling without which we are not able to lead our soul further into spiritual knowledge—this is what one would like to call it: The feeling that in each thing we encounter, as it were, an access to something infinite opens up for us. If we let this appear before our soul again and again, then it is the most wonderful feeling. It can be there when we go outside and look at a wonderful nature spectacle: cloud-covered mountains with thunder and lightning. This works greatly and forcefully on our soul. But then we must learn not only to see what is great and powerful there, but we may take a single leaf, look at it carefully with all its ribs and all the wonderful things that are part of it, and we will be able to perceive the greatness and might that reveals itself as something infinite in the smallest leaf, and we will hear and feel as if we were at the greatest spectacle of nature. It may appear to be strange, yet there is something to it, and afterwards one must express oneself grotesquely; it may make a great impression when a human being witnesses a glowing lava flow ejected from the Earth. But then, let us imagine someone looks at warm milk or the most ordinary coffee, and sees there how small crater-like structures form and a similar scenario unfolds on a small scale. Everywhere, in the smallest and in the greatest is access to an infinity.

And if we steadily keep researching, even if so much has been revealed to us, there is still something more under the cover, which perhaps we may have explored on the surface. So right now we are sensing what may result in a revelation of something intensely infinite at any point in the universe.

This imbues our soul with feelings and emotions that are necessary for us, if we want to attain what Goethe has called ‘spirit eyes’ and ‘spirit ears’.⁷ In short, it is a realisation of our feeling life, which is usually the most subjective to the point where we feel ourselves as if we were merely a setting where something is happening—where we no longer consider our feelings to be part of us. Our personality has been silenced. It is almost as if we were painters and stretching a canvas and painting a picture on it. Hence, when we train ourselves in this way, we stretch our soul and allow the spiritual world to paint on it. One feels this from a certain point in time onwards. Then it is only necessary to understand oneself, and in order to recognise what the world essentially is, it is necessary to consider a particular stage in the life of the soul as solely and only decisive.

So indeed what a human being acquires in ardent soul striving becomes the deciding of truth. It is in the soul itself where the decision must be made if something is true or not. Nothing external can decide, but the human being, by going beyond himself, must find within himself the authority to behold or discover the truth. Yes, basically we can say; in this regard we cannot be entirely different from all other human beings. Other people search for objective criteria, for something that provides us with a confirmation of truth from the outside. Yet a spiritual researcher searches within for confirmation of the truth. Thus he does the opposite. If this were the case, one could say in pretence; ‘Things are not looking too good when Spiritual Scientists in their confusion want to turn the world on its head.’ Yet in reality natural scientists and philosophers don’t do anything different from what spiritual researchers are doing, they only do not know that they are doing it. I will provide you with proof of this, taken from the immediate present.

At the last conference of natural scientists, Oswald Külpe ⁸ gave a talk about the relationship of natural science to philosophy. There he came up with the idea that the human being, by looking into the sensory world and perceiving it as sound, colour, warmth and so forth, only has subjective qualities. This is only a slightly different slant from what Schopenhauer said; ‘The world is our conception.’ But Oswald Külpe points out that what we perceive with our external senses, in short, everything that appears to be pictorial is subjective. And in contrast to this, what physics and chemistry say—pressure, the forces of attraction and repulsion, resistance and so on—must be characterised as objective. So in this way we partly have to deal with something purely subjective in our world-views, and partly with something that is objective such as pressure, forces of attraction and repulsion.

I do not want to go further into the criticism that has been voiced, but only want to address the mindset. It seems so terribly easy for a contemporary epistemologist to prove that because we cannot see without our eyes, light could only be something produced by our eyes. But what happens in the external world, it is said, when one ball hits another, those forces which cause resistance, pressure and so on, must be shifted into the outer world, into space. Why do people think that? At a particular point Oswald Külpe gives this away very clearly when he speaks about sensory perceptions—because he regards these as pictures, he says; ‘They cannot push or attract each other, neither can they pressure nor warm each other. They cannot have such and such large distance in space that would allow them to send light through space at such and such speed, nor can they be arranged as a chemist would arrange elements. Why does he say this of sensory perceptions? Because he sees sensory perceptions as pictures that are brought about solely by our senses.

Now I want to present a simple thought to you, to illustrate that the pictorial nature does not change anything. Things do push against or attract one another. When Mr Külpe now observes the sensory perceptions, this world—which supposedly could neither attract nor repel—simply does not face Mr Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a mirror image. Then he really has pictures in front of him. But push, pressure, resistance and anything that is placed into this world as different from sensory perceptions, will in no other way be objectively explained than through the pictorial nature of the sense perceptions. Why is this so? Because when the human being perceives pressure, push and so on, he turns what lives within the things, into sensations of the things. Man should study, for example, that when he says that one billiard ball hits another, what he experiences as the impact force is what he himself puts into these things! And someone who is standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, is not doing anything else. He makes what lives in the soul the criterion for expressing the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than that which can be found through the development of the soul itself. So the others do the same as the spiritual research. But only spiritual research is aware of this. The others do it unconsciously, they have no idea that they do the same at an elementary level. They just remain standing on the very first level and deny what they themselves are doing. Therefore we are allowed to say, Spiritual Science is in no way contrary to other research on the truth: the other researchers do the same, yet they take the first step without knowing about it, while spiritual research consciously takes the steps as far as a particular human soul can take according to its level of development.

Once it has been achieved that our feelings have, in a certain way, become objective, then, what I have already indicated will even more certainly come about, as it is a necessary pre-requisite for progress into the spiritual worlds. This is that man learns to comprehend how to live in the world in such a way that the weaving and living of an all-encompassing spiritual regularity within the spiritual world is presupposed. In daily life man is far removed from such a way of thinking. He gets angry when something happens to him that he doesn’t like. This is quite understandable as a different standpoint must be hard won. This other standpoint consists in saying; we have come from a former life, we have placed ourselves into the situation in which we are now, and have led ourselves to what is now facing us out of the lap of the future. What approaches us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual regularity. We accept it, because it would be an absurdity not to accept it. What approaches us from the lap of the spiritual worlds, whether the world admonishes us or praises us, whether joyful or tragic things happen to us, we will accept it as wisdom-filled experience and interweaving of the world. This is something that slowly and gradually must become once more the whole basic principle of our being. When it does, our will begins to be schooled. Whereas prior to this our feelings needed to be reorganised, now our will is transformed, becomes independent of our personality and thereby turns into an organ of perception of spiritual facts.

After the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’, there occurs for man what can genuinely and truly be called inspiration, the fulfilment through spiritual facts. We must always be clear that man can attain the training of his will at a particular stage only, when his feelings are in a certain way already purified. Then his will can connect with the lawfulness of the world and he will exist as a human being only so that those facts and entities which want to appear to him, can erect a wall before him in his will, on which they can depict themselves for him, so that they can exist for him.

I could only describe for you some of what the soul must go through in silent, patient devotion, if it wants to ascend into the higher worlds. In the following lectures I will have much to describe of the evolution of the world history that the soul must experience to rise up into the spiritual worlds. So consider what has been said today as an introduction only, so that through such schooling our feeling and willing life and our complete imaginative life will develop to become bearers of new worlds, so that we will actually step into a world that we recognise as reality, just as we recognise the physical world as a reality of its own kind.

At a different occasion I have already mentioned that when people say,‘You only imagine what you believe to see,’ then it must be replied, that only the experience, the observation can yield the difference between reality and appearance, between reality and fantasy, just as this is also the case in the physical world. You must win the difference by relating to reality. For example, someone who approaches reality with a healthy thinking can distinguish a red-hot iron in reality from one that only exists in imagination—and no matter how many ‘Schopenhauerians’ may come—he will be able to tell both apart, he will know what is truth and what is imagination. Hence, man can orientate himself on reality. Even about the spiritual world he can only orientate himself on reality. Someone once said that if a person only thought about drinking a lemonade, he could also perceive the lemon taste on his tongue. I answered him, ‘imagination can be so strong that someone who has no lemonade in front of him, could perhaps feel the taste on his tongue through the lively imagination of a lemonade. But I would like to see, if someone has ever quenched his thirst with an imaginary lemonade only. Then the criterion begins to become more real. Thus it is also with the inner development of a human being. Not only does he learn to know a new soul-life, new concepts, but in his soul he collides with another world and knows: you are now facing a world that you can describe just as you can describe the outside world. This is not mere speculation, which could be compared with a thought development only, instead it is about the forming of new organs of perception and the unlocking of new worlds that truly stand before us just as real as our external, physical world.

What has been hinted at today is that contemporary circumstances made it necessary to point out that spiritual research is possible. This is not to say that everyone should immediately become a spiritual researcher. For it must always be emphasised that when a human being with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic allows the information from Spiritual Science to approach him—even if he himself is not able to look into the spiritual worlds—yet all that which arises from such messages can turn into energy and feelings of strength for his soul, even if he at first believes in Haeckelianism or Darwinism. What the spiritual researcher has to say, is suitable to speak more and more to man’s healthy sense of truth, all the more so, as it is connected to the deepest interests of every human being. There may be people who do not consider it necessary for their salvation to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other, or something like this. But all people must warm up to what can be said on the sure basis of spiritual research: that the soul belongs to the sphere of eternity—insofar as it belongs to the spiritual world, descends at birth into the sensory existence and enters again into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. It has to be for all human beings of profound interest, that the strength, which sinks more and more into the soul, is of a quality that the soul can gain certainty from it to stand in its place in life. A soul that does not know what it is and what it wants, what the essence of its nature is, can become hopeless, can ultimately despair and feel dreary and desolate. Yet a soul that allows itself to be filled by the spiritual achievements of Spiritual Science cannot remain empty and desolate if only it does not accept the messages of Spiritual Science as dogmas, but as a living life that streams through our soul and warms it. This provides comfort for all the suffering in life, when we are being led upwards from all temporal suffering to that which can become comfort for the soul from the share of the temporal in the eternal. In short: Spiritual Science can give man what he needs today in the loneliest and most work-intensive hours of his life due to the intensified circumstances of our time —or, if the strength would want to leave him, Spiritual Science can give him what he needs to look into the future and go energetically towards it.

Hence, Spiritual Science—as it arises from spiritual research, from those who want to undertake steps into the spiritual world—can forever confirm what we want to summarise in a few words that express with sensitivity the characteristics of the path into the spiritual world and its significance for the people of the present. What we want to summarise in this way is not supposed to be a contemplation on the theories of life, but one on remedies, means of strengths, tonics for life:

The Spirit World remains shut to you
Unaware of the spirit in yourself
That shines in your soul
And can uphold light for you
In world depths, on world heights! ⁹

• 1. Herman Grimm: Goethe-Lectures, Berlin 1877, 23rd Lecture, Pages 215 et seq.
• 2. Lecture GA 60 #5, The Nature of Sleep, Berlin, 24 November 1910
• 3. Now published under the title - How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10.
• 4. The Second Edition of the The Philosophy of Freedom was published not until 1918. At this occasion Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture about the genesis of this book, which is featuring as the sixth lecture of the cycle Historical Symptomatology, Dornach 1942. Newly published in Rudolf Steiner's Letters, Volume 2, Dornach 1953
• 5. This was mentioned in the earlier lecture What is Mysticism?, given on 10 February 1910, as part of The Architect House Lecture Series, 1909/1910, and was printed as part of Paths of Soul Experiences, GA59
• 6. The Works of Jean Paul, Berlin 1865, Volume 16, Page 26 et seq.
• 7. For example in Goethe’s Colour Theory, Goethean Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Volume 1, Bern 1947, Pages 107 and 262.
• 8. Oswald Külpe, 1862-1915, Philosopher and Psychologist, Epistemology and Natural Sciences, Lecture given on 19 September 1910 at the 82nd Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Medical Doctors, Leipzig 1910.
• 9. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

Dear attendees, for a number of years now I have taken the liberty of speaking from this place about the subject of spiritual science, as it will also be meant in tonight's reflection. May I be allowed to present the foundations of this spiritual science in a certain way, I would like to say, in a clear way, and then to speak in more detail about some special subjects of this spiritual science in the next reflection the day after tomorrow.

It is - and this has been mentioned frequently over the years - fully understandable to anyone who stands on the ground of this spiritual science, as it is meant here, that in our time, from the most diverse sides, not only the most manifold objections, but, one might even say, hostilities against this spiritual science are asserting themselves. Not only does this spiritual science present itself to the rest of contemporary spiritual life as something still foreign to this spiritual life today - it has that in common with everything that has been incorporated into it as a new acquisition of human spiritual culture in a certain respect - but precisely in relation to the spiritual goals of our time, this spiritual science must appear on the one hand as something quite incomprehensible, fantastic, dreamy, although on the other hand it represents something that arises from the deepest longings and, one may say, from the most urgent needs of the soul life of the present day. With this I would like to have defined, so to speak, the theme of this evening.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, differs from the outset precisely from that in a fundamental way, the continuation of which it wants to be, and it is only too understandable that it experiences hostility after hostility from that side. I am referring to the scientific school of thought of our time, because basically, spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be a continuation in the truest, most genuine sense of scientific thinking for the spirit and its secrets, its laws - a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that has left its mark on the spiritual life of the West for three to four centuries.

Nevertheless, although precisely because of this characteristic spiritual science is in no way obliged to confront the justified claims of natural science, it nevertheless differs in a certain respect from what is actually called science today from the point of view of the natural scientific way of thinking. It is just as much a science as natural research, but because it considers the objects, entities and processes of spiritual life, it must necessarily develop the scientific methods in a different way than natural science, which is limited to the senses and to the intellect (which has the senses as its basis), must do today. And so, let our attention be drawn to this fundamental difference between spiritual-scientific research and natural-scientific research.

What we usually call science today starts from that state, from that mood of the human soul, which is present in normal life, in everyday human life. We speak of what man can do by virtue of his soul, by virtue of his body, by virtue of his mind applied to the observations of the senses and to experiment, what man can do by virtue of all this, where the limits of knowledge for what has been indicated; in short, it is perfectly right to say that this scientific direction takes the human soul as it is, observes the environment of this soul and from this gains the laws of sensual-physical existence. The most important work for this science is therefore done in research, always within the activity of working itself, and what comes out of this activity is science, is a scientific result.

Spiritual research is different. Spiritual research, as it is meant here: Although, as we shall see in a moment, it is the same processes in the life of the soul that spiritual research has to undertake, which also govern external science, external scientific knowledge, but these activities of the spiritual researcher are for him preparations for his research, are for him there to prepare the soul for it, so that it can arrive at what can be called seeing. Of course, everything is meant spiritually, but if one assumes this spiritual meaning, then one can say: outer science presupposes the human soul, and these observations are based on the observation of the senses, on what the intellect has to say about the laws of existence.

Spiritual research uses all human soul powers, whether they are powers of understanding, will or feeling, to prepare what could be called the senses – in a figurative sense, of course – which then lead to direct perception , to prepare for the spiritual researcher to devote his work and efforts to preparing himself, so that he can then, as it were, access the impressions of perceptions from the spiritual world through himself.

Now I do not want to speak, not in this reflection, of abstractions, of concepts, of speculations, of a philosophy of ideas, but I want to lead directly into the facts of the soul life, which is suitable for spiritual research. All spiritual research is based on the fact that the human soul can apply to itself what is always on everyone's lips today as a scientific buzzword, that the human soul can apply to itself what lies in the word 'development'. Spiritual research starts from the premise that the human soul can undergo an inner development that brings about a transformation, a change in these soul forces, so that these soul forces become different in a certain sense. So everything that is the result of this spiritual research is not gained by simply accepting the soul in its abilities, but only comes about when, through careful preparation, the soul has transformed itself in such a way that it no longer has the sensual world around it in its direct spiritual perception the sensual world around it, but that it has another, a higher, a spiritual world around it, just as it has the sensual-physical world around it in ordinary life, which is viewed through the senses.

Now one could easily believe that some very special preparations are needed to transform the soul in this way. That is not the case, basically. What the soul has to undertake is based on things that are actually always present in everyday soul life, that belong to the most essential powers of this soul life, but which, in order to become suitable for spiritual research, must be developed into the infinite, one might say.

I will now show from a different angle, than I have often done in the past years, how the human soul, as it were, goes beyond itself, beyond its everyday point of view, in order to become an observer of the spiritual world. What it has to undertake in the intimate inner life has, as its elements, as its starting point, precisely the forces that are necessary in the most everyday life. One of these forces can be touched upon by using an easily understandable term that refers to something that is absolutely necessary in everyday life. It is what we call in this everyday life attention, interest in the things of the environment. This attention – I have already spoken about it from a different perspective in these lectures – consists in our focusing on some object in our environment, so that through this focusing it remains, as it were, in our soul life, living on in memory.

How necessary this attention is for everyday life can be seen from a very ordinary way of looking at things, which focuses on the connection between this attention and memory. Many a person will complain that their memory is either weakening or that it is in some way faulty or deficient. If one were to study – to the extent that such study is necessary for ordinary life – the connection between attention and memory, one would get over many of the things that one so often notices as defects in oneself.

I will start with a very trivial matter. Many a person cannot find an object in the morning that they still had in the evening. They have put it down with half-consciousness, not with attention. A cufflink that we put down in the evening in such a way that we harbor the arbitrary thought: You are now putting this button in this place - maybe we even think about the surroundings - in this environment. You will see, if you let these thoughts pass through your mind in the evening, that you will go directly to the place of the button in the morning, and it turns out that there is a connection between our ability to remember and what can be called attention. To a certain extent, the memory problem is an attention problem, and if we could get used to arbitrarily paying attention to things that we know need to be remembered, we would contribute an infinite amount, not only to the memory of the things in question, but we would also see that our memory is really strengthened by frequently practicing such activity, which means that the forces behind our memory would also become strong. Just as it is true that, to a certain extent, a good memory is part of an outwardly healthy mental life, it is equally true that observing what we call attention is very necessary in everyday life.

But there is another way to convince oneself of the connections between the human mental life and attention. Everyone knows – and especially those who are a little familiar with the literature on contemporary psychology – how a healthy psyche must be a coherent psyche, so that when we look back to the point of childhood that we usually remember, we must recognize the events that have occurred to us as our own. It would be unhealthy if the memory were so full of holes that we see our own experiences as those of a foreign being, when we would not recognize them as our own. In the case of diseased souls, these experiences emerge as if they were another ego.

Much could be done if, through spiritual science, one had trained oneself to be attentive to these things – one can recognize them – to be attentive to souls that show a tendency towards such holes in, let us say, their ego, their continuous memories, and one would then intervene in such a way as to strengthen and systematically strengthen interest. Much of the harm done to such souls could be averted by a certain education if one considered the connection between the life of memory, the life of the soul as a whole, and what we call attention.

What we might call attention is not attention to this or that, but the activity of attention, the activity that unfolds in the soul life while we are paying attention. For the purposes of spiritual research, this must be strengthened, increased, in intensity and without limit. This happens in what we might call the concentration of human thinking, feeling and willing, or, in general, the concentration of the entire soul life.

In our outer, everyday life, we develop attention by being stimulated by impressions from outside, by what, I might say, has a more brilliant, outstanding effect on our soul than anything else. This challenges our attention. We very rarely succeed in producing this attention through pure arbitrariness; but spiritual research must prepare for this: increasing attention to an unlimited degree through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, through intimate practice - one may say - into the unlimited.

An increase in attention is brought about in this way: If we have stimulated certain ideas, perhaps ideas that do not correspond to an external fact, but symbolic ideas that we can survey precisely, so that we know that no supernaturally conscious ideas are involved; that we take the same , quite arbitrarily, without any process forcing us, into the center of our consciousness, and then bring about such a life of consciousness as only develops in normal human existence during sleep.

During sleep, all external senses fall silent, all movement ceases, and the human being lies still in relation to his corporeality. Even the worries and concerns of life fall silent in sleep; only in normal life during sleep does unconsciousness occur. Again, I can only describe the principles here, not everything. You can find more details in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science”. But the soul can, through training, through years of exercises, produce such a mood in itself that its inner self arbitrarily silences everything in itself that otherwise only remains silent during sleep. The soul is, so to speak, in the same state in relation to outer activity and perception as in sleep, except that it is awake and thus detached from all outer life. The soul focuses solely and exclusively on the self-chosen idea with the most intense attention of all its activity. As a result, everything that the soul would otherwise use up of its energy to absorb and process the manifold impressions of the day, everything that the soul expends in energy, is now used to push itself towards this one goal of the idea. The soul life is concentrated, and something is now being created with that which even the most significant minds of human development have always regarded as the most worthy apparatus for all world exploration. What is needed now is what can be compared with the apparatus of the human soul, but I do not attach any particular importance to the comparison, with something like spiritual chemistry.

To understand why a person carries out an experiment on the soul, which is not just an inner process of imagination but a real process in the soul that actually brings about something in reality, I will use the comparison with chemistry to help us understand each other. Something is done with the soul that could be called spiritual chemistry. When we have water in front of us, its components are not necessarily recognizable externally. The chemist breaks this water down into hydrogen and oxygen. He separates the hydrogen from the water. Hydrogen has very different properties than water, properties that cannot be suspected in water as such. Just as one can only assume the properties of hydrogen in water, so too can one only assume the properties of the soul and spirit in the human being standing before us in everyday life; for just as hydrogen is bound to water, so too are soul and spirit bound to the physical body in everyday life. What I have characterized as an unlimited increase in attention to an arbitrary idea or sensation or concept concentrates the soul's powers so that this soul stands out from the physical body. Now it must be said, though, that when the soul wants to prepare itself, it must do so with patience and energy and often for years – that varies from person to person – but then the one who prepares his soul really does achieve connecting a meaning with something that can justifiably appear nonsensical to many people in the present. The spiritual researcher attains to connect a meaning in direct inner experience with the word: I now experience, I now feel in the pure spiritual-soul realm and know that in what I experience and feel, nothing lives that is connected to the physical-sensual. The spiritual researcher now knows the meaning of this word, which in ordinary life seems nonsensical, because he experiences this meaning through the direct power of the reality of what it means to have emerged from the physical body with his spiritual soul. The soul and spirit are as independent and endowed with other properties as hydrogen is endowed with other properties when it is removed from water. It is not an external process that can be compared experimentally with any external process, but it is a process that leads to the soul and spirit being drawn out. Only then does it prove its true independence, only then does it show itself in what it is in its true, own nature and what connects it to the physical-sensory for everyday life, which it uses to perceive the external world and to carry out the tasks of the external world.

The first thing that a person can experience from their physical senses is thinking and imagining. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather in the concrete facts of the inner experience of the , I do not wish to shy away from pointing out this experience, even at the risk, which I fully understand, of not being taken seriously by some people who believe they are standing on the firm ground of science. When the spiritual researcher, after years of hard work and sacrifice, has come to the point where he associates a meaning with the words: You experience and perceive things outside of your body, then at first he experiences this only in relation to thinking, which, as one can already suspect in ordinary life, one knows through spiritual science. That one must use the brain for thinking, that stops. One feels that one is inside the imagination, and one does not feel with this inner experience of the brain and nervous system, but one feels - as I said, I say this at the risk of not being taken seriously by some - that one what one is experiencing now, one feels oneself like an external object, like an inner self circling around a body located outside of oneself, if one has given it independence, and one experiences oneself circling around one's own body, one's own brain, and an important experience then occurs. One learns to recognize how ordinary thinking occurs, because in order to make progress in real spiritual research, one has to advance in stages. At first it is often a dull experience. But when you have progressed to the point where you can connect a full meaning with the word: You now live in a thinking that happens outside of your brain, human life is indeed between birth and death – so you have to return at a certain time.

You can only develop the thoughts you have outside the body with your brain when you return. This gives a very different feeling than the usual one, because you perceive the process with your brain. You start to use your brain as an instrument, you know that you have something in your brain that offers resistance, that you have to forcefully push into. A strange feeling arises when the imagination moves outside the brain and the brain begins to imagine, a feeling that can only be compared to a certain fear of now having to think again through the instrument of the brain, because one is now facing life outside oneself. You have, so to speak, got to know yourself from the outside for the first time, have learned to look back at your physical body from the outside, and the immersion imposes the necessity of working with heavy matter, plastic, so to speak, so that those experiences that you first undertook outside of this brain can now be expressed within.

In this way, a kind of emancipation of intellectual life from physical life can occur, so to speak. When this emancipation occurs, one no longer has the physical-sensory world around one. This physical-sensory world disappears at the same moment as the emergence from the physical body occurs. One has a new world around oneself, a world that can be described as the world of spiritual states. Only now can one see through what spiritual states are through direct contemplation. Something occurs that I would like to mention at this point, because I always want to progress from the abstract to the concrete in these considerations; one imagines this entering into the spiritual world wrongly if one imagines it according to the pattern of external perceptions. Here the observer stands there and the object stands there. When a spiritual researcher begins to perceive spiritual states, after having prepared himself, he must, in a certain sense, immerse his entire being in the object or being he is perceiving. Just as, in everyday life, when we experience something in our own soul, we experience this or that mood, this or that inner [affect ], how one expresses this in what is called the development of one's outlook, so one can only experience what states of mind are by imitating, as it were, with the spirit freed from the body, immersing oneself in what one perceives, really imitating in an inner play of expression the states of the spiritual outer world.

It is therefore an inner play of expression that one lives into, and one cannot say, when speaking correctly, “I have perceived an object or being of the spiritual world as if it were a being of the sensory world.” Rather, one can only say, “I have experienced in this being that which, in me, causes me to express myself with my soul and spirit in such and such a way.” In my inner expression, I emulate the peculiarity of the being in question. One becomes acquainted with an inner play of expression, in the reception of cipher-like ideas, and in a certain sense one becomes one with the being of the spiritual world. But it requires the spirit to be so sensitive within itself that the spirit expresses its own states as one otherwise expresses the states of one's own soul. An experience, in contrast to mere perception, is the beholding of the spiritual world, a becoming one with its states. This is precisely how this living into the spiritual world differs from the experience of everyday reality, which is ultimately something passive, something that one stands by, as it were, while that which allows itself to be led upwards by the will, to live into the spiritual phenomena, must certainly be in action, in activity - this inner activity, which in itself creates expression, forms. The soul must transform itself for the conditions of the spiritual world if it wants to penetrate into the spiritual world.

In this way, one experiences the conditions of the spiritual world, as one experiences forms in the physical-sensual world. But one can experience not only the conditions of the spiritual world, but also the processes, the events of the spiritual world. This happens when one leads other powers of the soul upwards from the physical body. Not only the power of imagination can be led upwards, but also another power. But then another everyday activity of the soul must be increased to infinity, and that is what can be described with a word that is a necessity in everyday life, the word “devotion”. If one succeeds in consciously developing this devotion, as it were, in the general world process, which we otherwise only develop unconsciously in sleep, when one is, so to speak, completely devoted, without doing anything oneself, to the general happening, as in sleep, when one so learns to be devoted, fully consciously while awake, to the spiritual world, then one comes to tear out, as it were, yet another soul activity of our inner life, out of the physical-sensual. This activity is the one through which we - as strange as it may sound, but it is true - experience the fruit in the outer physical: speaking, the power of speech. This power of speech, as is well known, is rooted in the activity of the brain, in the activity of the organs that ultimately lead to the larynx and so forth. This power of speech plays a completely different role than is usually believed. Most human thinking is expressed in words, so that the words run through the mind, so that, as modern science admits, for those who look more closely at things, all speechless thinking in humans also runs in such a way that they vibrate inwardly in a subtle way. The body is actually in a state of perpetual inner activity when it thinks. This activity silently repeats, so to speak, what would otherwise be expressed more robustly in the movements of the speech organs and the nervous system.

If, through careful practice, increased attention, that is, through concentration, increased devotion, that is, meditation, one arrives at the activity that the soul must expend when it speaks in everyday life, if one arrives at this activity without living it out in external speech, then one has raised a second soul power from the physical body. This elevation is somewhat more difficult than the other, but it can be attained through robust, energetic practice.

When I speak to you, my soul is spontaneously active, and that which is carried out in this activity is expressed in the outer word. If we now succeed in holding back the activity that would otherwise fade away in the word, so that it is carried out without a word and without that vibration, purely inwardly, in the soul, if, so to speak, the word “strength” is experienced inwardly in the soul, then the soul life is strengthened and invigorated the soul life inwardly strengthens itself far more than in the mere operation [separation?] of the thought from the physical-sensual, and then, through a similar spiritual chemistry, so to speak, one draws the ability to speak, the power of speech, out of the physical body, experiences it only in the soul. Once again, you know what it means to be outside of your physical body in your spiritual and mental experience and to now experience, where you cannot use your larynx to speak, where you develop these activities outside of your body, as you usually do when speaking, you now experience the ability to speak inwardly. You now experience the inner word. You experience the inner word purely spiritually.

This experience of the inner word is very closely related to the experience of the power of memory. Of course, when I say the experience of the power of memory, I do not mean what is expressed in the ability to remember, but rather what stands behind this ability to remember, what does not consciously live in everyday life, what works and remains half unconscious. When we incorporate a thought into memory, we are exercising soul activity, and this is related to speech power. This is therefore something we call the lower-soul power of memory, just as we can say the lower-soul power of speech, which we draw from ordinary speech and in which we then live as spiritual researchers. We live purely in the spirit and soul in the word, in the power of remembrance, when in ordinary daily life the memory is transformed so that we remember the everyday experiences, those where all memory is silent, as in sleep. What is left, so to speak, is what is otherwise used for memory. In everyday life, something is always used for remembering; inner strength is used to make what is happening take root in the soul life. Now that we have brought about a soul life that erases ordinary memory, this strength, which is otherwise used for remembering, is used purely spiritually, it pulses in the inner purely spiritual, recognizing literally.

So when we raise the power of speech from the physical-bodily, we not only experience states, but we can immerse ourselves in the essences of the spiritual world so that we experience what happens in them. We now develop not only a play of facial expressions, but what could be called an inner spiritual power of the gesture, [an inner gesture]. This must always be emphasized - that on which activity as a spiritual experience is based. If you want to experience a spiritual being, you have to immerse yourself in it and experience its processes, just as we accompany our own inner experiences with gestures, expressing in the gesture what is going on in our soul itself. Many people - myself included - use far too many gestures to express what is inner soul life. Just as the soul life, flowing out, branches out, so it must lead to inner gestures of spiritual and soul experience. Then one experiences processes, not just states; these are experienced through the thoughts that are raised up, the processes through the ability to speak and remember that is raised up. Then, when one experiences conditions of the spiritual world, one also experiences one's own inner conditions, and this leads deep into the nature of the human soul.

As the spiritual researcher begins to experience inner states, he connects the following with a meaningful concept: He knows why the materialistic view of the present is so difficult to refute from a purely idealistic point of view. This is because, as the materialistic way of thinking correctly asserts, everyday thinking does indeed arise from the nervous system, from the brain. For what one has in ordinary consciousness as content, as something experienced by the soul, is basically only an image of the soul.

There is not enough time to go into the arguments regarding pictoriality in detail. I will merely suggest that it is quite clear to the spiritual researcher who has come this far what ordinary feeling, will and imaginative life want. They take the form of images that emerge from the body. They emerge like the reflections of our own self when we stand in front of a mirror. The body forms what could be called a mirror for spiritual and psychological experience. However, like every image, the image is not actually complete. The image would only be complete if, when we step in front of a mirror in our ordinary lives, we had to send out forces from ourselves to shape the mirror in such a way that its material composition becomes such that it sends the images back to us. For we actually accomplish this in our body, that we first place this body with our deeper spiritual-soul in the ability to reflect back to us what we call our everyday life. We first make it a mirror in truth, it must be said, and that is the secret of the human soul life.

The spiritual researcher is led to a spiritual-soul experience that stands outside and behind the physical body, and he observes how the truly true spiritual-soul aspect first works on the body so that the contents of everyday soul experience then emerge from the body. It is as impossible for the spiritual researcher who sees through it to think that the spiritual-soul experience is only a function of the brain as it would be to think that the image we have in front of us rises up out of the mirror as a reality. With the same right one could claim: When one sees oneself in the mirror, what looks out comes out of the mirror – so that the spiritual-soul comes out of the nervous system. The reality of the soul and spirit lies behind the physical, and in truth the body is between the truly spiritual, which is its active agent, its plastic creator, and the everyday, limited to sensory experiences that in reality only take place in images. In this way one arrives at what is truly spiritual and soulful and stands behind the physical. When one arrives at this, then what one experiences as a state is quite different from what one would like to describe as the spiritual-soul through external speculation, because one is confronted with direct vision, with what the I is spiritually and soulfully in human nature. Then the doctrine of repeated earthly lives ceases to be mere theoretical knowledge. Then an expansion begins, one might say, of memory, which can then extend beyond repeated earthly lives. The complete human experience is seen through, how it unfolds not only between birth and death, but through many earthly lives and through the spiritual experiences between death and birth. That which can be called repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate experience. By developing the memory and power of speech, by transforming them into a power of knowledge and experience, past earthly lives emerge from the floods of spiritual life as reality, and the certainty emerges that the present one is also the cause of the following ones, and that between death and a new birth there is a much longer life than earthly life.

By pushing back the ordinary power of memory, the higher power of memory is awakened. When the power of memory, which otherwise only allows us to look back to birth, is eradicated, it awakens to an increased power that now extends to an understanding of repeated earth lives! This realization does not need to take on a modern spiritual truth from old religious systems. People who know nothing about the methods of spiritual research and who have superficially absorbed something of it, that this spiritual science must speak of repeated earthly lives, can very easily come to believe that some old Buddhist truth is being recycled. Such a claim is no more useful than if one wanted to claim that today only one person could prove the Pythagorean theorem by going to the [gap in the transcript].

Spiritual science has nothing to do with anything historically handed down, but only with what the mind can explore within itself at any time through the stated means. Just as one arrives at the results of science through external experimentation, so one arrives at the results of spiritual research through inner experimentation. That the results of spiritual science may appear fanciful today is hardly surprising to anyone who knows the nature of this spiritual science and how it can be applied to the spiritual life of the present time. In this sense, it must be emphasized time and again: Just as the Copernican view seemed strange, so the results of spiritual science may seem paradoxical to the modern mind. But just as the Copernican world view has become part of modern culture, so will the results of spiritual research. Certainly, the way people today approach this spiritual research is the same way they approached the Copernican worldview; and if someone back then had planned to give a lecture to present something like the Copernican worldview, which at the time also had to appear as something quite fantastic , one would perhaps have announced such a lecture back then: the Copernican world view as a surrogate for Christianity; especially because one could have believed that the Copernican world view endangered Christianity. It took a long time before people began to realize that the matter is different, and in our time one can actually have a different experience from the genuine aims of the present.

Compared to the experiences I have here, one must be touched in a pleasant way, as one could hear a Catholic theologian, who is a deeply feeling philosopher, said: Certainly a prejudiced world once opposed the Copernican worldview as if it could endanger religious life; today - and it is not I who says this, but this Catholic theologian - today the true Catholic will even know that what is being explored in the secrets of existence, what is being of the greatness of the world, can never contribute to the satisfaction of religious life, but only to the greater admiration for the greatness of the divine Creator, the more one gets to know his deeds in the development of the world. - The time will also come when one will recognize in repeated lives on earth a promotion of the Christian point of view, as today in the Copernican worldview a promotion of the Christian view. Thus I have spoken to you, as it were, of two soul powers that can be led upwards from the experience with the physical body.

There is still a third soul power that must be spontaneously led upwards on the path to spiritual research, and through this third soul power one now attains not only to the states and processes, but to the entities of the spiritual world itself, so that this spiritual world becomes, on another level, something like the natural world — not something that is spoken of in generalities, but rather as one speaks not in generalities about nature, but about individual animals, plants, stones, individual clouds, mountains, rivers, and so on.

Where the spirit does not appear before the eyes as a sum of real spiritual beings, something else must indeed be brought up from this human truth as it stands before us in everyday life. We must remember how we entered life as human beings. What distinguishes us as human beings from the other sensual phenomena on earth is that we must, in the early days, make of ourselves that which most beautifully characterizes our destiny. We enter the world as quadrupeds, so to speak; we first acquire the ability to stand upright and walk. I want to make it clear from the outset, to avoid any misunderstanding, as I have done elsewhere, that I am aware that other creatures also walk on two legs, such as chickens, for example, but the difference is that they are designed to do so from the outset, whereas humans overcome gravity by the application of an inner force that acts purely in the material world. In the first years of his physical existence, the human being makes himself into an upright being, into that being of whom those who are more deeply attuned have always known what it means to stand upright, to be able to direct one's gaze out into the universe. But the human being makes himself into this. An inner strength is applied, through which the human being actually becomes what he is destined to be.

This power does not come to our consciousness again in the course of life. In a time when our consciousness is still in the realm of dreams, we experience what, so to speak, gave us our position, our equilibrium in the world, whereby we are human beings. But we can rediscover them, and the spiritual researcher must rediscover them, these powers. These powers remain in the soul. In normal life they are only used to maintain the upright position of the human being, but then they rest. They are again brought up, and this inner soul power, when it is experienced, is something that is revealed by a will that is also being led upwards, permeated by that will, which allows our spiritual and mental experience outside of the physical body to bring us into different situations regarding the various truths of the universe. In this way one attains the following: Just as man in the physical world makes himself what he is only through his upright balance, as he, so to speak, grasps his I-being in his inner activity and power of preparation for the earth, so he grasps, when he grasps this inner activity through which he human being, when he grasps this activity in its organization, he grasps the inner truth of other spirit beings, grasps the inner essence of real spirits, experiences how other beings make themselves into their essence, as he makes himself into an essence on earth through what has been stated.

However, all these things can only be attained through a certain resignation, through a certain inner tragic mood. Much has to be overcome, and in a sense these surmountings are a kind of suffering. But if the spiritual researcher courageously goes through this suffering, then he will succeed in detaching from this suffering the inner activity that is now able not only to educate us, that gives man on earth his true outer purpose, that makes man can turn his gaze out into the universe, but also to delve into other beings, to grasp their destiny by living it, and to experience how they become what they are in their worlds in a different way from human beings on earth. Now one experiences not only conditions and processes, but the inner life of the spirit beings themselves. One enters into it by becoming one with these truths through inner mobility, through the right inner strength. Now it is a certain, but inwardly mobile physiognomy. Just as a person acquires his overall physiognomy on earth, so he emerges into the physiognomies of the other truths on this third level.

In this way one ascends to the spiritual co-experience of the spirit beings through inner play of features, through inner gestures and postures, then through inner physiognomy, through knowing the inner being of other spirit beings. In this way the spiritual world gradually becomes a true reality, and it always shows that this becoming of the spiritual world a true reality differs from the experience of the outer physical world. This is experienced in passivity. A spiritual world can only be experienced in activity, and this brings us to the point that really shows us how this spiritual science must be introduced into the spiritual cultural life of the present.

As I said, I wanted to show today how the spiritual researcher comes to his experiences. I will develop special experiences the day after tomorrow. But what can emerge from today's is that the spiritual researcher appeals to the activity of the soul, to that which the soul can only lead up from the physical-bodily in un- [gap in the transcript] activity, can experience purely spiritual-soul activity. In the immersion, which is purely spiritual-soul, in the other truths, the states, processes and the essence of these truths themselves are experienced.

All these things cannot be experienced without extending to the entire soul what is otherwise only experienced in the moral. When a person experiences inwardly in the moral sense: 'You want to do this, that is good', then the experience of one's inner duty, which must become an outer deed, is indeed the experience of the highest morality. This experience is an inner one, and it is such that the person must disregard himself, because basically all immorality comes from selfishness. Morality, however, comes from disregarding the narrow-mindedness that man places in the foreground. Just as man, through his feelings, becomes free in the moral, at least from that which he otherwise uses in everyday life, so in the life of the soul as a whole he becomes free in the experience of the higher worlds. In a certain respect, the moral life is the dark model for the higher life of knowledge.

I did not want to show by words, but by describing soul processes, what spiritual science consists of and what the relationship between spiritual life and spiritual science is. If, on the other hand, we look at contemporary life, we can truly say that this experience is not geared towards the inner life of the soul. In particular, when a person is supposed to recognize the world, he is passive today. One could substantiate with almost grotesque examples how much man likes to be passive today. It is very gratifying that you have appeared today in such large numbers, even though [gap in transcript] are connected with light images. But you will all admit that the presentations that are linked to light images are preferred to those where such promises are not made. The spiritual researcher appeals to the supersensible, the invisible, and if he also makes use of the light pictures, it is only to make something extraordinarily sensible. But humanity today is to a great extent not disposed to be won over to the spirit or to something that can be explored by appealing to the activity of the soul, but to contemplation.

Of course, in the spiritual fields that have produced the most admirable achievements, this beholding is necessary; but the spirit cannot be grasped in external contemplation. What is sensual is not spiritual. This is trivial, but it is not understood. I am not telling fairy tales. It could happen that an otherwise very meritorious contemporary philosopher recently said or presented a [monistic] idea. In an introduction in which he wanted to write about an evolution in philosophy, he said that if you read Kant and so on, you read into concepts, but that could be remedied, because today – and again, it should be noted that nothing should be said against the technical achievements of the present time , these technical achievements have their significance, their justification; but what has been said is characteristic – the philosopher says that if you want to immerse yourself in Spinoza's Ethics, it is difficult to live into the intangible concepts. So you use the movie to help! You depict how Spinoza sits there spontaneously when a thought occurs to him, how the thought expansion then occurs to the same. Then you depict the force on the one hand, which represents the expansion, then you depict the remaining orderly concept, as concepts are generally formed.

The person in question has set out to do nothing less than present Spinozian ethics through film. Thus, one might hope to see a complete cinematographic adaptation of Spinoza's Ethics, or Kant's “Pure Reason”. As I said, I am not criticizing the arts, although it seems strange when the editor says that in this way ancient metaphysical longings of the human soul can be satisfied by an art that the superficial mind usually regards as something playful. Thus, ancient metaphysical longings could be satisfied by the application of this cinematic art.

I wanted to mention this because it shows how man today has the need not to put his soul into action, not to appeal to what, out of all passivity, must go into the fullest activity, as well as what man today wants to be offered everything, that is, how he does not boldly want to achieve existence in his own activity, does not want to prove existence to himself by leading this activity in his own activity to a proof of existence, but wants to have existence proved to him from outside. The reasons why one assumes something to be must be forthcoming. This is there for the thought habits of the whole of philosophy: increasingly imaginable from the standpoint that all thinking that cannot prove that it is based on foundations of something, to which nothing has been added, that all this thinking is understood as mere fantasy.

Gradually, the goals of the present tend to declare all thinking to be fantasy that cannot prove that it has been sucked out of the material existence that presents itself from the outside. I have indicated this basic character in the goals of the present. This basic character was necessary, because only through the fact that man has enjoyed an education through the natural sciences have the great, powerful explorations of natural science come about, which has commercially and technically transformed the globe, and has also greatly increased knowledge. For this to happen, it was necessary for man to be passively confronted with the outside world. The boldness that man must develop for his inner experience is, so to speak, incorporated today into outer activity.

It is a law of human life that whatever grows on the one hand must, in a sense, wither on the other. The last three to four centuries have brought it to the point that humanity has been able to undertake such tremendously bold things as the achievements up to aeronautics. The fact that boldness was developed for the external achievements has resulted in an education in humanity that has provided inner boldness for a certain period of time, where it is necessary to grasp a spiritual that cannot be grasped if one surrenders positively, but only if one is able to surrender to this spiritual with its activity, so that one stands on the point of view: What you experience in yourself is not reality. One can never come to a real knowledge of the spirit, because the spirit only lets us actively enter into its spheres.

So, what is the basic requirement for the recognition of spiritual science is, of course, spontaneously opposed to the goals of the present. However, this too turns out to be the case for the process of becoming as a whole: just as an elastic body, when sufficiently compressed, exerts its counter-force, so too, when something is pushed to a certain point, the opposing force, the reaction, asserts itself. Anyone who can observe our age knows how in our time, already quite thoroughly in souls, without them knowing it themselves deeply, that opposite longing is present - after education in external natural science has brought it to a certain high point - the soul, as I said, longs, without often knowing it itself today, for a knowledge of that which is present behind the senses as the actual basis of all human life. To use the same comparison again: spiritual science today is at the same point in relation to the aims of our time as natural science was at the time of Giordano Bruno, who, in his insights, broke through what had been thought of as a blue celestial sphere, as a blue vault. What was significant was that Bruno said: What is up there is not a real boundary, it is only caused by the boundary that man sets for himself. What the human being recognizes must set as a boundary, that extends there. In those days, the limited world was broken through, the view was expanded into the unlimited distances of space.

But such a firmament – now a temporal firmament – is there for mere natural science, and when it asserts it from its standpoint, it is justified; only it should recognize its limitations. Such a temporal moment is what asserts itself for the external world in birth and death. Just as the physical firmament is only set in space by man himself and knowledge could be newly expanded in relation to spatial infinity, so spiritual science will do the same for the spirit, [as] what was once the temporal firmament [has been broken through] for birth and death, and teaches us to look into a temporal infinity, that is, into the eternity, into the immortality of the human soul. The opponents will still have to find the newly expanded view of the spirit today.

But just when you are considering the goals of the present, you see that on the one hand there are people for whom it seems completely outrageous and nonsensical that such things can be said as they are said in spiritual science. On the other hand, however, it can be perceived how the soul always thirsts to really get to know the world as spiritual science recognizes it as its task to explore. Much of what later emerges clearly in the soul is first present as a dark urge. The spiritual researcher sees it and knows that the very near future will find souls who will come to recognize spiritual research as the path to spiritual science.

So superficially everything speaks against spiritual science. But if one considers what is taking place in the depths of the soul, then there is a guarantee that spiritual science will truly win the hearts and souls of people. Today, people only draw from what they often say is based on the true goals of science; they do not draw the right conclusions, otherwise they could come to something that is to be said now for our understanding through a kind of metaphor.

I do not want to deal with the meaning of the great significant word that stands at the beginning of the Bible. To what extent it corresponds to a fact in human life on earth can be dealt with on another occasion. But with a tremendous view of the development of human experience, this Bible word stands before us, this Bible word, which is put into the mouth of the adversary of humanity, so to speak:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

And this indicates to both the religious person and the scientifically discerning person, when the matter is only considered in its depths, how man has been tempted in certain respects to go beyond the measure allotted to him in primeval times. Here too, it has already been discussed how this word, or rather what lies behind it, is connected with the possibility of evil and the fact of human freedom.

Thus one could say that a world view that is hallowed by tradition, which spiritual science certainly recognizes as much as anyone, that such a world view sets the word at the beginning of human development of the temptation to want to go beyond human beings in inner experience. One can say of every time that it is a transitional time. It is often said in a trivial way, but it is important, even if every time is a transitional time, that one characterizes the transitional moments in the right way, and that he who tries to penetrate into the goals of the time recognizes them even where they still remain unconscious to the souls. But whoever reveals them, whoever penetrates them, notices that today, in fact – if nothing superstitious is meant – something like an evil spirit lurks at man's side. Allow me to say what I want to say with a strong expression. [Gap in the transcript.]

The saying may seem paradoxical to some; but it is intended to express as clearly as possible, by means of an apparent [paradox], what is to be said. If we consider the transitional moments of our time, it becomes clear that much of what is believed today is a kind of seducer, not meant in the superstitious sense. But when you say something like that, using extrasensory words, you have to remember the word:

The little people never feel the devil,
And if he had them by the collar.

Again, there is something like a tempter, and it is difficult to become aware of him because one does not draw the consequences from what lies dormant in the goals of the world. Because one does not draw this conclusion, it seems paradoxical when [one] shows you the conclusion. If it were true what some materialistically minded people draw from current science, then one would have to say: Man is placed in the mere animal kingdom by what is today understood as the theory of evolution. Today, one only feels quite clever, and one thinks that one can consider the lower classes stupid when one can say: what man experiences in terms of morality and intellect is only a higher education of what appears in the animal kingdom, and the more one can associate man with the animal kingdom, the more one believes today to be scientific.

Even if a philosophy today makes the somewhat weak attempt to come up with a value system alongside it, this itself is something imperfect, because it must be said that if the consequences were really drawn from what is regarded today as a genuine scientific way of thinking, then it would consist in the fact that distinguishing between good and evil would amount to the same thing that we feel towards the laws of nature. Good and evil would arise from the human soul with the necessity of natural law. Since, if one wants to base oneself on the ground of science, as one often does, one wants to base oneself on the narrowly defined science, it is inconsistent not to draw the conclusion that man should actually be understood merely as an animal transformation, and that the moral should be classified in what is recognized as natural laws, as natural necessity. But then it follows that, just as there is no distinction between good and evil in the law of nature, there is no distinction between good and evil.

As I said, it sounds paradoxical, but it is true nevertheless; the tempter is standing there again, only due to inconsistency we do not see him, the tempter who now says the opposite of the tempter who is put at the top by the Bible. Now he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. This may seem ridiculous to some people today; it only seems ridiculous to those who do not understand the consequences that lie in some purely materialistic views of the present. So one could say that today the tempter speaks the opposite of what he did then. Back then he said:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

Man was to be elevated above himself. As a result, he stands there today, saying: You will be like the animals, you will also recognize as animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. - Just as that was a tempter's word, so is this a tempter's word, even if it is not spoken out of inconsistency. The more one will recognize – it rests in the goals of the present – how the soul, when it becomes aware of this temptress word, that the soul will then develop the longing to recognize the spirit again in its immediate form, which lifts it out of what the [gap in the transcript].

On the one hand, it [spiritual science] may be perceived as a dreamer, as something nonsensical. One can understand that. But on the other hand, it can also be seen as being called for by the deepest goals of our time, which rest in the souls. Because it is so intimately connected with all the goals of the human soul, when one stands on its ground one feels how one is in harmony with what spiritual science wants to express with clarity, how one is in harmony with the intuitions of the spirits who have always worked for spiritual science. These spirits of the past, because spiritual science is something that is only to be bestowed upon our time, have not yet tried to express in a clear way what spiritual science has to say today. But as what can be clearly expressed in a time [gap in the transcript], so the leading spirits have always felt what spiritual science is.

I had to express clearly some things that had to follow today from what is often called science, which is not followed because people are not consistent enough; the soul, familiar with the spirit and its development, has always felt this. Even if development is fully recognized as the continuous pole of our lives, something enters into this human experience with the human soul that goes beyond everything that can be observed externally as external development. And spiritual research only shows, one might say – if I may use the may use the word, which sounds dry and pedantic in the face of these things, only shows through spiritual experiment that what we call the immortal, the eternal, the truly spiritual human soul can really be experienced in detachment from the physical.

Thus, through spiritual science, man will always look at what man's dignity and man's destiny in earthly life really is. We feel when the tempter approaches, however unconsciously, however unacknowledged, and wants to tell us: Development shows man only as the last link in animal development - when he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish evil from good. In the face of this temptation, spiritual science will stand united in the good with the personalities of all times who are striving towards the spiritual light. It will hold up as knowledge to this tempter what Schiller said out of deep poetic intuitions and in which what has been considered is to be summarized. When Schiller became aware of how the similar idea emerged through Herder and Goethe, that man [is] placed at the pinnacle of the animal organization, it was clear to Schiller that such a teaching could only be properly grasped if at the same time the spirit is fully recognized in its independent significance, separate from the physical. That is why Schiller does not say what so many say today, and which, when taken to its logical conclusion, gives the tempter language, but rather, Schiller said the following – and at the same time saw humanity's true destiny – he said the following about the incarnation of man on earth, at the moment when man comes into existence:

Now dullness has lifted from animality
and humanity steps forward with a clear brow
and the lofty stranger, thought,
leaps from the wondering brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Owen Barfield

The prolonged historical event now usually referred to as “the scientific revolution” was characterised by the appearance of a new attitude to the element of sense perception in the total human experience. At first as an instinct, then as a waxing habit, and finally as a matter of deliberate choice, it came to be accepted that this element is, for the purposes of knowledge, the only reliable one; and further that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to isolate, in a way that had not hitherto been thought possible, this one element from all the others that go to make up man’s actual experience of the world. The word “matter” came to signify, in effect, that which the senses can, or could, perceive without help from the mind, or from any other source not itself perceptible by the senses.

Whereas hitherto the perceptible and the imperceptible had been felt as happily intermixed with one another, and had been explored on that footing, the philosopher Descartes finally formulated the insulation of matter from mind as a philosophical principle, and the methodology of natural science is erected on that principle. It was by the rigorous exclusion from its field, under the name of “occult qualities”, of every element, whether spiritual or mental or called by any other name, which can only be conceived as non-material, and therefore non-measurable, that natural knowledge acquired a precision unknown before the revolution—because inherently impossible in terms of the old fusion; and, armed with that precision (entitling it to the name of “science”), went on to achieve its formidable technological victories. It is the elimination of occult qualities from the purview of science that constitutes the difference between astrology and astronomy, between alchemy and chemistry, and in general the difference between Aristotelian man and his environment in the past and modern man and his environment in the present.

When two mutually dependent human relatives are separated, so that, for the first time, one of them can “go it alone”, there may be drawbacks, but it is the advantages that are often most immediately evident. By freeing itself from the taint of “occult qualities”, that is, by meticulously disentangling itself from all reference, explicit or implicit, to non-material factors, the material world, as a field of knowledge, gained inestimable advantages. We perhaps take them for granted now; but the men of the seventeenth century—the members of the Royal Society for instance had a prophetic inkling of what the new liberty promised. You have only to read some of their pronouncements. For them it was an emotional as well as an intellectual experience. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive ...”

But when two people separate, so that one of them can go it alone, it follows as a natural consequence that the other can also go it alone. It might have been expected, then, that, by meticulously disentangling itself from all reference, explicit or implicit, to material factors, the immaterial, as a field of knowledge, would also gain inestimable advantages. That is what did not happen. But it will be well to state at once that it is nevertheless precisely this correlative epistemological principle that is the basis of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. It belongs to the post-Aristotelian age for the same reason that natural science does; but in the opposite way. Thus, the parallel terms, “spiritual science” and “occult science”, which he also used, do not betoken a fond belief that the methodology of technological¹ science can be applied to the immaterial. The methodology of technological science is, rightly, based on the exclusion of all occult qualities from its thinking. The methodology of spiritual science is based on an equally rigorous exclusion of all “physical qualities” from its thinking. That is one of the things I hope this book will help to make clear.

What did happen was well expressed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he pointed out in his Aids to Reflection that Descartes, having discovered a technical principle, which “as a fiction of science, it would be difficult to overvalue”, erroneously propounded that principle as a truth of fact. (The principle in question was the necessity of abstracting from corporeal substance all its positive properties, “in order to submit the various phaenomena of moving bodies to geometrical construction”.) And of course the same point has since been made by A. N. Whitehead and others. But Coleridge could also point prophetically, in another place,² to

the necessity of a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of Life, and Intelligence (considered in its different powers from the Plant up to that state in which the difference of Degree becomes a new kind—man, self-consciousness but yet not by essential opposition) for the philosophy of mechanism which in everything that is most worthy of the human Intellect strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking clear Images for distinct conceptions ...

The necessity for such a revolution, he said, arises from the fact that, for self-conscious man, although to experience a world of corporeal substance as existing quite apart from his thinking self is “a law of his nature,” it is not ‘;a conclusion of his judgment”. That this is indeed the case hardly needs arguing today, since it has become the discovery of technological science itself. Whether we go to neurology or to physics, or elsewhere, we are confronted with the demonstrable conclusion that the actual, macroscopic world of nature—as distinct from the microscopic, submicroscopic and inferred world of physical science—is (as, for instance, the biologist, Professor Marjorie Grene, puts it in her book The Knower and the Known) “mediated by concepts as well as presented through the senses”. What is remarkable is the rapidity with which the presence of this Trojan Horse in the citadel of its methodology was detected by technological science itself, as it was progressively realised that everything in nature that constitutes her “qualities” must be located on the res cogitans, and not the res extensa, side of the Cartesian guillotine. But this is as much as to say that those qualities are, in the technological sense, “occult”; and it could be argued without much difficulty that any science which proposes to enquire into them must also be “occult”—unless it is content to do so by extrapolating into the psyche a theoretical apparatus applicable, by definition, only to subject-matter that has first been sedulously dehydrated of all psyche. Yet this last is the approach which the methodology of natural science, as we have it, renders inevitable. If you have first affirmed that the material world is in fact independent of the psychic, and then determined to concentrate attention exclusively on the former, it does not make all that difference whether or no you go to the behaviouristic lengths of explicitly denying the existence of psyche. Either it does not exist or, if it does exist, it is occult and must be left severely alone. In any case you have withdrawn attention from it for so long that it might as well not be there, as far as you are concerned. For the purpose of cognition, it will gradually (as the author puts it on page 77) has “petered out”.

Moreover this continues to be the case even after the failure of science to eliminate psyche from the knowable world has become evident. The demonstrative arguments of a Coleridge, a Whitehead, a Michael Polanyi are perforce acknowledged; but the acknowledgment remains an intellectual, not an emotional experience. The Trojan Horse certainly does seem to be there, and in rather a conspicuous way; but the necessary traffic-diversions can be arranged, and it is much less embarrassing to leave it standing in the market-place than to get involved.

There is however one experience inseparable from the progress of natural science, which is apt to be an emotional as well as an intellectual one. And that is the fact that the exclusion of the psychic, as such, from matter of science entails recognition of the limits of science. This is, of course, the opposite experience from the one that enthralled the scientists of the seventeenth century. They rejoiced in a conviction that all the boundaries had gone and the prospects opened up to human knowledge had become limitless. Whereas, more and more as the nineteenth century progressed, it was the opposite that was stressed. “Ignorabimus.” We shall never know. There are limits beyond which, in the very nature of things, the mind can never pass. One of the things heavily stressed by Steiner (in Section I and again more specifically in Section III) is the significance, from the point of view of anthroposophy, of precisely this experience, and not so much in itself as for what it may lead to. The more monstrous and menacing the Horse is felt to be, towering there and casting its shadow over the centre of the town, the more ready we may be to begin asking ourselves whether there may not perhaps be something alive inside it.

This experience can be an emotional, and indeed a volitional one, because it involves a frustrating, if suppressed, conflict between the scientific impulse, which is a will to know and a refusal to acknowledge boundaries except for the purpose of overthrowing them—and the scientific tradition, followed for the last three hundred years, which has ended in itself erecting boundaries that claim to be no less absolute than the old theological ones it did overthrow.

In developing his contention that the shock of contact with these self-imposed limits of knowledge may itself be the necessary first step towards breaching them, the author refers in particular to two German writers, F. T. Vischer and Gideon Spicker. It would be a mistake to conclude from this, or from the nineteenth century idiom of the quotations, that the theme is out of date. The boundaries are still there and are still felt. The substance is the same, whether it is Gideon Spicker pointing out that

every one, without exception, starts from an unproven and unprovable premise, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation ever gets behind this necessity, however deep it may dig. It has to be simply and groundlessly accepted ...

or Bertrand Russell, in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, conceding that the foundation, on which the whole structure of empirical science is erected, is itself demonstrably non-empirical:

If an individual is to know anything beyond his own experiences up to the present moment, his stock of uninferred knowledge must consist not only of matters of fact, but also of general laws, or at least a law, allowing him to make inferences from matters of fact ... The only alternative to this hypothesis is complete scepticism as to all the inferences of science and common sense, including those which I have called animal inference.

The abiding question is, how we choose to react to the boundaries. We may, with Russell and the empiricists, having once conscientiously “shown awareness” of them, proceed henceforth to ignore them and hope, so to speak, that they will go away; or, with the linguistic philosophers, we may flatly decline to look at them; or we may wrap ourselves in the vatic “silence” of a Heidegger or a Wittgenstein or a Norman O. Brown to be broken only by paradox and aphorism, or fall in behind the growing number of distinguished enthusiasts for metaphor, symbol and myth; or, with the scientific positivists, we may resign ourselves to the conviction that there is really no difference between knowledge and technology; we may even perhaps attempt some new definition of knowledge along the lines of the groping relativism, or personalism, of Karl Popper or of Michael Polanyi. But how far all of these are from the vision that was engendered by the scientific impulse in its first appearance among men! Steiner, as will be seen, advocates a different response, and one which, it seems to me, is more in accord with the fateful impulse itself, however it may differ from the methodology and the tradition which that impulse has so far begotten.

At intervals through the ensuing pages the reader will encounter a passing reference to, and sometimes a quotation from, the German philosopher and psychologist, Franz Brentano. Here too he may be inclined to form a hasty judgment that the book is unduly “dated” by them. But here too it is the substance that matters, and that is far from being out of date. What that substance is, it is hoped, may be sufficiently gathered from the book itself. Brentano is however so little known to English readers that I have thought it best to omit from the translation that part of it which amounts to an exegesis of his psychology. There remain two points to which I wish to draw attention here. In a short section entitled “Direction of the Psychic from the Extra-psychic in Brentano” (also omitted) the author briefly capitulates the former’s refutation of a certain influential and still widely accepted psychological fallacy: namely, that the degree of conviction with which we treat a proposition as “true” (and thus, the existential component in any existential judgment) depends on the degree of intensity—the “passion”³—with which we feel it. This, says Brentano, is based on an impermissible analogy (“size”) between the psyche itself on the one hand and the world of space on the other. If conviction really depended on intensity of feeling, doctors would be advising their patients against studying mathematics, or even learning arithmetic, for fear of a nervous breakdown. What it in fact depends on, adds Steiner, is an inner intuition of the psyche neither similar nor analogous, but corresponding in its objectivity, to the psyche’s outer experience of causality in the physical world. And this experience is considered elsewhere in the book, for instance in Sections VII and VIII.

The other point concerns Brentano’s relation to the present day. It is not always the philosopher whose name is best known and whose works are still read, whose influence is most abiding. Brentano was the teacher of Edmund Husserl, who acknowledged that teaching as the determining influence in his intellectual and vocational life; and without the Phenomenology of Husserl, with its stress on the “intentionality” or “intentional relation” in the act of perceiving, there is some doubt whether Existentialism would ever have been born. Thus, while from a superficial point of view the relation to Brentano, which certainly pervades the book as a whole, may be felt as a dating one, for anyone at all acquainted in detail with the history of western thought it can have the consequence of bringing it almost modishly up to date.

Steiner’s Von Seelenrätseln (of which what follows is a partial translation) is not a systematic presentation of the philosophical basis of anthroposophy. For that the reader must go to his The Philosophy of Freedom, or Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge, or Truth and Science;⁴ and perhaps especially the last. The Foreword to Von Seelenrätseln does in fact describe it as a Rechtfertigung—vindication—of anthroposophical methodology, but my choice of a title for these extracts came from the impression I had myself retained of its essential content after reading the whole and translating a good deal of it. Steiner’s Von Seelenrätseln was published in 1917, the year of Brentano’s death; and its longest section (here omitted) amounts, as its title, Franz Brentano (Ein Nachruf), suggests, to an obituary essay. Steiner had always, he says in a Foreword, been both an admirer and an assiduous reader of Brentano and had long been intending to write about him. The main body of the essay is thus a patient and detailed exposition, supported by quotations, of Brentano’s psychology, in which the word “judgment” is used to name that intentional relation between the psyche and the extra-psychic, or physical world, which enables it either to reject a representation as subjective or to accept it as objective. This “judgment” is an exclusively psychic activity, and must be sharply distinguished as such from both representations and feelings. As the essay proceeds, Steiner makes it clear that he sees Brentano’s emphasis on intentionality as a first step in the direction of that psychological elimination of “physical qualities”, to which I have already referred. And he suggests that the only reason why Brentano himself could not take the logically indicated second step (which must have carried him in the direction of anthroposophy) was that at the very outset of his philosophical career, following Emanuel Kant, he had irrevocably nailed his colours to the back of the Cartesian guillotine, by accepting the axiom that concepts without sensory content are “empty”. Is this why today, although we have a philosophical and an ethical existentialism, and now even an existential psychology, we have as yet no existential epistemology?

This essay is immediately preceded by a lengthy response in detail to a chapter in a then recently published book by Max Dessoir, and that in its turn by the introductory essay entitled Anthropology and Anthroposophy, which also forms the opening section of the book now presented to English readers. The arguments against including Max Dessoir über Anthroposophie seemed to me to be the same, only a good deal stronger than those against including the Brentano obituary.

Steiner felt bound to go into Dessoir’s chapter in some detail, because it echoed irresponsibly a number of flagrant misunderstandings, or misrepresentations, of anthroposophy that were current in Germany at the time. Briefly, Dessoir’s arguments are all based on the assumption that anthroposophy ignores the principles of natural science and must collapse as soon as it is confronted with them; whereas Steiner’s real argument is, as he himself formulates it in the Foreword, that “either the grounds for there being such a thing as anthroposophy are valid, or else no truth-value can be assigned to the insights of natural science itself”. What he disputed was not facts, but hypotheses which have come to be treated as facts. I have omitted the Foreword; but the argument, so formulated, is sufficiently apparent from the rest of the book.

The remainder of Von Seelenrätseln consists of eight Commentary Notes (Skizzenhafte Erweiterungen) of varying lengths, each referring specifically to a different point in the text, but each bearing a title and all of them quite capable, it seems to me, of standing on their own. Seven of them appear here as Sections II to VIII, and I have already borrowed from the eighth (Diremption of the Psychic from the Extra-psychic in Brentano) for the purposes of this Introduction.

We are left with a book rather less than half the length of the original and requiring, if only for that reason, a different title; but still with a book which I have thought it important to make available, as best I can, in the English tongue; and that not only for the general reasons I have already suggested, but also for a particular one with which I will conclude.

One of the Commentary Notes (Section VII) stands on rather a different footing, is perhaps even in a different category, from the others. At a certain point in the Brentano obituary Steiner quotes from a previous book of his own a passage in which he compares the relation between the unconscious and the conscious psyche to that between a man himself and his reflection in a looking glass. In which case the notion that the actual life of the soul consists of the way it expresses itself through the body, would be as fantastic as that of a man, regarding himself in a mirror, who should suppose that the form he sees there has been produced by the mirror. Whereas of course the mirror is the condition, not the cause, of what he sees. In the same way, the ordinary waking experience of the psyche certainly is conditioned by its bodily apparatus; but “it is not the soul itself that is dependent on the bodily instruments, but only the ordinary consciousness of the soul”. Now Section VII is, in form, a Note on this sentence; and it is somewhat odd that Steiner should have chosen a “Note” for the purpose to which he applied it. For he made it the occasion of his first mention (after thirty years of silent reflection and study) of the principle of psychosomatic tri-unity. Moreover it is still the locus classicus for a full statement of that same “threefold” principle, which, as every serious student of it knows, lies at the very foundation of anthroposophy, while at the same time it runs like a twisted Ariadne’s thread through nearly every matter selected for scrutiny. Even those readers, therefore, who are already too well convinced to feel that any “case” for anthroposophy is needed so far as they are concerned, will probably be glad to have it available in book form and in the English language. It has once before been translated—in 1925 by the late George Adams—but his version was only printed in a privately circulated periodical and has been out of print for more than forty years.

It hardly needs adding that this Note in particular will repay particularly careful study. But there is one aspect of it, and of the doctrine it propounds, to which I feel impelled to direct attention before I withdraw and leave the book to speak for itself. If Section I is the statement, Section VII strikes me as a particularly good illustration, of the true relation between Steiner’s anthroposophy and that natural science which the scientific revolution has in fact brought about. Although he criticises, and rejects, a certain conclusion which has been drawn from the evidence afforded by neurological experiments, Steiner does not attack the physiology developed since Harvey’s day; still less does he ignore it; he enlists it. It is not only psychologically (for the reason already given) but also technologically that the scientific revolution was a necessary precondition of anthroposophical cognition. And this has a bearing on an objection of a very different order that is sometimes brought against it. I was myself once asked: What is there in Steiner that you do not also find in Jacob Boehme, if you know how to look for it?

The content of Section VII (here called “Principles of Psychosomatic Physiology”) could never have come to light in the context of an Aristotelian physiology, a physiology of “animal spirits”, for example, and of four “elements” that were psychic as well as physical and four “humours” that were physical as well as psychic, no-one quite saw how. If your need is to know, not only with the warm wisdom of instinctive intelligence, but also with effective precision, you must first suffer the guillotine. Only after you have disentangled two strands of a single thread and laid them carefully side by side can you twist them together by your own act. The mind must have learnt to distinguish soma absolutely from psyche before it can be in a position to trace their interaction with the requisite finesse; and this applies not only to the human organism, but also to nature as a whole. It is the case that there is to be found in anthroposophy that immemorial understanding of tri-unity in man, in nature and in God, and of God and nature and man, which had long permeated the philosophy and religion of the East, before it continued to survive (often subterraneously) in the West in the doctrines of Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Hermetism, etc.; true that you will find it in Augustine, in pseudo-Dionysius, in Cusanus, in Bruno, in William Blake and a cloud of other witnesses, of whom Boehme is perhaps the outstanding representative. It would be surprising if it were not so. What differentiates anthroposophy from its “traditional” predecessors, both methodologically and in its content, is precisely its “post-revolutionary” status. It is, if you are that way minded, the perennial philosophy; but, if so, it is that philosophy risen again, and in a form determined by its having risen again, from the psychological and spiritual eclipse of the scientific revolution. To resume for a moment the metaphor I adopted at the outset of these remarks, it is because the two blood-relations were wise enough to separate for a spell as “family”, that they are able to come together again in the new and more specifically human relationship of independence, fellowship and love.

Just how badly is it needed, a genuinely psychosomatic physiology? That is a question the reflective reader will answer for himself. For my own part, to select only one from a number of reasons that come to mind, I doubt whether any less deep-seated remedy will ultimately avail against a certain creeping-sickness now hardly less apparent from the Times Literary Supplement than in the Charing Cross Road; I mean the increasingly simian preoccupation of captive human fancy with the secretions and the excretions of its own physical body.

A few final words about the translation. I have varied slightly the order in which the Sections are arranged and in most cases have substituted my own titles for those in the original. The German word Seele feels to me to be much more at home in technical as well as non-technical contexts than the English soul; and this is still more so with the adjective seelisch, for which we have no equivalent except soul—(adjectival). It is not however somewhat aggressively technical, as psyche is. I have compromised by using psyche and psychic generally but by no means universally. Habits of speech alter fairly quickly in some areas of discourse. Coleridge apologised for psychological as an “insolens verbum”. The same might possibly have been said of psyche in 1917, but hardly, I think, today and still less tomorrow. The mental or intelligential reference of Geist—operating towards exclusion, even from the sub-conscious imagination, of “physical qualities”—is more emphatic than that of spirit; and once again this is even truer of Geistig and spiritual. I doubt if much can be done about this; but I have sought to help a little by rather infrequently Englishing Geistig and Geist—(adjectival) as noetic. The distinctively English mind and mental sometimes appear to a translator of German as a sort of planets in the night sky of vocabulary and I have here and there adopted them both in seelisch and in Geistig contexts. And then of course there were those two thorns in the flesh of all who are rash enough to attempt translating philosophical or psychological German—Vorstellung and vorstellen. This is a problem that would bear discussing at some length. But it must suffice to say that I have mainly used representation and represent (after considering and rejecting presentation and present) occasionally substituting, where the context seemed to demand it, idea and ideation. The very meaning feels to me to lurk somewhere between the English terms—which is a good reason for using them both. Other usages are based on similar considerations and reflection. As to any habitual reader of Steiner who may suspect that I have taken too many liberties, I can only assure him that, as far as I know, I have at least had no other motive than a keen desire to do the fullest possible justice to thought-laden sentences written by an Austrian in 1917, but being read (as I hope) by an Anglo-Saxon in and after 1970.

• 1. The use of this word is not intended to imply that science, as we have it, is valuable only for the purpose of technical manipulation and construction. It does imply that its cognitive value, as “natural” science, is limited to the extent to which nature is governed by physical laws. The fond belief referred to is of course the assumption underlying the “favourite objection”, to which Section VI replies.
• 2. Letter to William Wordsworth, 30 May, 1815.
• 3. Polyani's word.
• 4. See Bibliography

[ 1 ] For an indeterminate length of time I again faced a task that was given me, not through any external circumstance, but through the inner processes of development of my views of life and the world. To the same cause was due the fact that I used for my doctor's examination at the University of Rostock my dissertation on the endeavour after “an understanding of human consciousness with itself.” External circumstances merely prevented me from taking the examination in Vienna. I had official credit for the work of the Realschule, not of the Gymnasium, though I had completed privately the Gymnasium course of study, even tutoring also in these courses. This fact barred me from obtaining the doctor's degree in Austria. I had grounded myself thoroughly in philosophy, but I was credited officially with a course of study which excluded me from everything to which the study of philosophy gives a man access.

[ 2 ] Now at the close of the first phase of my life a philosophical work had fallen into my hands which fascinated me extraordinarily – the Sieben Bücher Platonismus ¹ of Heinrich von Stein, who was then teaching philosophy at Rostock. This fact led me to submit my dissertation to the lovable old philosopher, whom I valued highly because of his book, and whom I saw for the first time in connection with the examination.

[ 3 ] The personality of Heinrich von Stein still lives in my memory – almost as if I had spent much of my life with him. For the Seven Books of Platonism is the expression of a sharply stamped philosophical individuality. Philosophy as thought-content is not taken in this work as something which stands upon its own feet. Plato is viewed from all angles as the philosopher who sought for such a self-supporting philosophy. What he found in this direction is carefully set forth by Heinrich von Stein. In the first chapters of the book one enters vitally and wholly into the Platonic world conception. Then, however, Stein passes on to the breaking into human evolution of the Christ revelation. This actual breaking in of the spiritual life he sets forth as something higher than the elaboration of thought-content through mere philosophy.

[ 4 ] From Plato to Christ as to the fulfilment of that for which men have striven – such we may designate the exposition of von Stein. Then he traces further the influence of world conceptions of Platonism in the Christian evolution.

[ 5 ] Stein is of the opinion that revelation gave content from without to human strivings after a world-conception. There I could not agree with him. I knew from experience that the human being, when he comes to an understanding with himself in vital spiritual consciousness, can possess the revelation, and that this revelation can then attain to an existence in the ideal experience of man. But I felt something in the book which drew me on. The real life of the spirit behind the ideal life, even though in a form which was not my own, had set in motion an impulse toward a comprehensive exposition of the history of philosophy. Plato, the great representative of an ideal world which was fixed through its fulfilment by the Christ impulse – it is the setting forth of this which forms the content of Stein's book. In spite of the opposition I felt toward the book, it came closer to me than any of the philosophies which merely elaborate a content out of concepts and sense-experiences.

[ 6 ] I missed in Stein also the consciousness that Plato's ideal world had its source in a primal revelation of the spiritual world. This (pre-Christian) revelation, which has been sympathetically set forth, for example, in Otto Willmann's Geschichte des Idealismus² does not appear in Stein's view. He sets forth Platonism, not as the residue of ideas from the primal revelation, which then recovers in Christianity and on a higher level its lost spiritual form; he represents the Platonic ideas as a content of concepts self-woven which then attained life through Christ.

[ 7 ] Yet the book is one of those written with philosophical warmth, and its author a personality penetrated by a deep religious feeling who sought in philosophy the expression of the religious life. On every page of the three-volume work one is aware of the personality in the background. After I had read this book, and especially the parts dealing with the relation of Platonism to Christianity, over and over again, it was a significant experience to meet the author face to face.

[ 8 ] A personality serene in his whole bearing, in advanced age, with mild eyes that looked as if they were made to survey kindly but penetratingly the process of evolution of his students; speech which in every sentence carried the reflection of the philosopher in the tone of the words – just so did Stein stand before me when I visited him before the examination. He said to me: “Your dissertation is not such as is required; one can perceive from it that you have not produced it under the guidance of a professor; but what it contains makes it possible that I can very gladly accept you.” I should now have been extremely glad to be questioned orally on something which was related to the Seven Books of Platonism; but no question related to this; all were drawn from the philosophy of Kant.

[ 9 ] I have always kept the image of Heinrich von Stein deeply imprinted on my heart; and it would have given me immeasurable pleasure to have met the man again. Destiny never again brought us together. My doctor's examination is one of my pleasant memories, because the impression of Stein's personality shines out beyond everything else pertaining to it.

[ 10 ] The mood in which I came to Weimar was tinged by previous thorough-going work in Platonism. I think that mood helped me greatly to take the right attitude toward my task on the Goethe and Schiller archives. How did Plato live in the ideal world, and how Goethe? This occupied my thoughts on my walk to and from the archives; it occupied me also as I went over the manuscripts of the Goethe legacy.

[ 11 ] This question was in the background when at the beginning of 1891 I expressed in some such words as the following my impression of Goethe's knowledge of nature “It is impossible for the majority of men to grasp the fact that something for whose appearance subjective conditions are necessary may still have objective significance and being. And of this very sort is the ‘archetypal plant.’ It is the essential of all plants, objectively contained within them; but if it is to attain to phenomenal existence the human spirit must freely construct it.” Or these other words: that a correct understanding of Goethe's way of thinking “admits of the possibility of asking whether it is in keeping with the conception of Goethe to identify the ‘archetypal plant’ or ‘archetypal animal’ with any physically real organic form which has appeared or will appear at any definite time. To this question the only possible answer is a decisive ‘No.’ The ‘archetypal’ plant is contained in every plant; it may be won from the plant world by the constructive power of the spirit; but no single individual form can be said to be typical.³

[ 12 ] I now entered the Goethe-Schiller Institute as a collaborator. This was the place into which the philology of the end of the nineteenth century had taken over Goethe's literary remains. At the head of the Institute was Bernhard Suphan. With him also, I may say, I had a personal relationship from the very first day of the Weimar phase of my life. I had frequent opportunities to be in his home. That Bernhard Suphan had succeeded Erich Schmidt, the first director of the Institute, was due to his friendship with Herman Grimm.

[ 13 ] The last descendant of Goethe, Walther von Goethe, had left Goethe's literary remains as a legacy to the Grand-duchess Sophie. She had founded the archives in order that the legacy might be introduced in appropriate manner into the spiritual life of the times. She naturally turned to those personalities of whom she had to assume that they might know what was to be done with the Goethe literary remains.

[ 14 ] First of all, there was Herr von Loeper. He was, so to speak, foreordained to become the intermediary between Goethe scholars and the Court at Weimar to which the control of the Goethe legacy had been entrusted. For he had attained to high rank in the Prussian household administration, and thus stood in close relation with the Queen of Prussia, sister of the Grand-duchess of Saxe-Weimar; and, besides, he was a collaborator in the most famous edition of Goethe of that time, that of Hempel.

[ 15 ] Loeper was an unique personality, a very congenial mixture of the man of the world and the recluse. As an amateur, not as a professional, had he come to be interested in “Goethe research.” But he had attained to high distinction in this. In his opinions concerning Goethe, which appear in such beautiful form in his edition of Faust, he was entirely independent. What he advanced he had learned from Goethe himself. Since he had now to advise how Goethe's literary remains could best be administered, he had to turn to those with whom he had become familiar as Goethe scholars through his own work with Goethe.

[ 16 ] The first to be considered was Herman Grimm. It was as an historian of art that Herman Grimm had become concerned with Goethe; as such he had delivered lectures on Goethe at the University of Berlin, which he then published as a book. But he might well look upon himself as a sort of spiritual descendant of Goethe. He was rooted in those circles of the German spiritual life which had always been conscious of a living tradition of Goethe, and which might in a sense consider themselves bound in a personal way with him. The wife of Herman Grimm was Gisela von Arnim, the daughter of Bettina, author of the book, Goethe's Correspondence with a Child.

[ 17 ] Herman Grimm's judgments about Goethe were those of an historian of art. Moreover, as an historian of art he had grown into scholarship only so far as this was possible to him under the standards of a personally coloured relationship to art as a connoisseur.

[ 18 ] I think that Herman Grimm could readily come to an understanding with Loeper, with whom he was naturally on friendly terms by reason of their common interest in Goethe I imagine that, when these two discussed Goethe, the human interest in the genius came strongly to the fore and scholarly considerations fell into the background.

[ 19 ] This scholarly way of looking at Goethe was the vital thing in William Scherer, professor of German literature at the University of Berlin. In him both Loeper and Grimm had to recognize the official Goethe scholar. Loeper did so in a childlike, harmless fashion; Herman Grimm with a certain inner opposition. For to him the philological point of view which characterized Scherer was really uncongenial. [ 20 ] With these three persons rested the actual direction in the administration of the Goethe legacy. But it nevertheless really slipped entirely into the hands of Scherer. Loeper really thought nothing about this further than to advise and to share from without as a collaborator in the task; he had his fixed social relationships through his position in the household of the Prussian King. Herman Grimm thought just as little about it. He could only contribute points of view and right directions for the work by reason of his position in the spiritual life; for the directing of details he could not take responsibility.

[ 21 ] Quite different was the thing for William Scherer. For him Goethe was an important chapter in the history of German literature. In the Goethe archives new sources had come to light of immeasurable value for this chapter. Therefore, the work in the Goethe archives must be systematically united with the general work of the history of literature. The plan arose for an edition of Goethe which should take a philologically correct form. Scherer took over the intellectual supervision; the direction of the archives was left to his student Erich Schmidt, who then occupied the chair of modern German literature at Vienna.

[ 22 ] Thus the work of the Goethe Institute received its stamp. Not only so, but also everything that happened at the Institute or by reason of this. All bore the mark of the contemporary philological character of thought and work.

[ 23 ] In William Scherer literary-historical philology strove for an imitation of contemporary natural-scientific methods. Men took the current ideas of the natural sciences and sought to form philological and literary-historical ideas on these as models. Whence had a poet derived something? How had this something been modified in him? These were the questions which were placed at the foundations of a history of the evolution of the spiritual life. The poetic personalities disappeared from view; instead there came forward views as to how “material” and “motif” were evolved by the personalities. The climax of this sort of view was reached in Erich Schmidt's extended monograph on Lessing. In this Lessing's personality is not the main fact but an extremely painstaking consideration of the motifs of Minna von Barnhelm, Nathan, and the like.

[ 24 ] Scherer died young, shortly after the Goethe Institute was established. His students were numerous. Erich Schmidt was called from the Goethe Institute to Scherer's position in Berlin. Herman Grimm then arranged so that not one of the numerous students of Scherer should have the direction of the Institute, but instead Bernhard Suphan.

[ 25 ] As to his post before this time, he had been teaching in a Gymnasium in Berlin. At the same time he had undertaken the editing of Herder's works. Through this he seemed marked as the person to take direction also of the edition of Goethe. [ 26 ] Erich Schmidt still exercised a certain influence; through this fact Scherer's spirit still continued to rule over the Goethe task. But the ideas of Herman Grimm came forward in stronger fashion, if not in the manner of work yet in the personal relationships within the Goethe Institute.

[ 27 ] When I came to Weimar, and entered into a close relationship with Bernhard Suphan, he was a man sorely tried in his personal life. His first and second wives, who were sisters, he had seen buried at an early age. He lived now with his two children in Weimar, grieving over those who had left him, and not feeling any happiness in life. His sole satisfaction lay in the good will which the Grand-duchess Sophie, his profoundly honoured lady, bore to him. In this respect for her there was nothing servile: Suphan loved and admired the Grand-duchess in an entirely personal way.

[ 28 ] In loyal dependence was Suphan devoted to Herman Grimm. He had previously been honoured as a member of the household of Grimm in Berlin, and had breathed with satisfaction the spiritual atmosphere of that home. But there was something in him which prevented him from getting adjusted to life. One could speak freely with him about the highest spiritual matters, yet something bitter would easily come into the conversation, something arising from his experiences. Most of all did this melancholy dominate in his own mind; then he would help himself past these experiences by means of a dry humour. So one could not feel warm in his company. He could in a moment grasp some great idea quite sympathetically, and then, without any transition, fall immediately into the petty and trivial. He always showed good will toward me. In the spiritual interests vital within my own soul he could take no part, and at times treated them from the view-point of his dry humour; but in the direction of my work in the Goethe Institute and in my personal life he felt the warmest interest. [ 29 ] I cannot deny that I was often painfully disturbed by what Suphan did, the way in which he conducted himself in the management of the Institute, and the direction of the editing of Goethe; I never made any secret of this fact. Yet, when I look back upon the years which I passed with him, this is outweighed by a strong inner interest in the fate and the personality of the sorely tried man. He suffered in his life, and he suffered in himself. I saw how in a certain way, with all the good aspects of his character and all his capacities, he sank more and more into a bottomless brooding which rose up in his soul. When the Goethe and Schiller archives were moved to the new building erected in Ilm, Suphan said that he looked upon himself in relation to the opening of this building like one of those human victims who in primitive times were walled up before the doors of sacred buildings to sanctify the thing. He had really come gradually to fancy himself altogether in the role of one sacrificed on behalf of something with which he did not feel that he was wholly united. He felt that he was a beast of burden working at this Goethe task with which others with higher intellectual gifts might have been occupied. In this mood I always found him later whenever I met him after I had left Weimar. He ended his life by suicide in a mood of depression.

Besides Bernhard Suphan, there was engaged at the Goethe and Schiller Institute at the time of my entrance Julius Wahle. He was one of those called by Erich Schmidt. Wahle and I were intimates from the time of my first sojourn at Weimar; a heartfelt friendship grew up between us. Wahle was working at the editing of Goethe's journals. Eduard von der Hellen worked as Keeper of the Records, and also had the responsibility of editing Goethe's letters.

[ 30 ] On Goethe's works a great part of the German “world of Germanists” was engaged. There was a constant coming and going of professors and instructors in philology. One was then much in company with them during their longer or shorter visits. One could get vitally into the circle of interests of these persons.

[ 31 ] Besides these actual collaborators in the Goethe task the archives were visited by numbers of persons who were interested in one way or another in the rich collections of manuscripts of other German poets. For the Institute gradually became the place for collecting the literary remains of many poets. And other interested persons came also who at first were less interested in manuscripts than in simply studying in the library contained within the rooms of the Institute. There were, moreover, many visitors who merely wished to see the treasures there.

[ 32 ] Everybody who worked at the Institute was happy when Loeper appeared. He entered with sympathetic and amiable remarks. He requested the material he needed for his work, sat down, and worked for hours with a concentration seldom to be seen in anyone. No matter what was going on around him, he did not look up. If I were seeking for a personification of amiability, I should choose Herr von Loeper. Amiable was his Goethe research, amiable every word he uttered to anyone. Especially amiable was the stamp his whole inner life had taken from the fact that he seemed to be thinking of one thing only: how to bring the world to a true understanding of Goethe. I once sat by him during the presentation of Faust in the theatre. I began to discuss the manner of presentation, the dramatic qualities. He did not hear at all what I said. But he replied: “Yes, this actor often uses words and phrases that do not agree with those of Goethe.” Still more lovable did Loeper appear to me in his “absentmindedness.” When in a pause I chanced to speak of something which required a reckoning of duration of time, Loeper said: “Therefore the hours to 100 minutes; the minutes to 100 seconds ...” I stared at him, and said: “Your Excellency, 60.” He took out his watch, tested it, laughed heartily, counted, and said: “Yes, yes, 60 minutes, 60 seconds.” I often observed in him such instances of absent-mindedness. But over such proofs of Loeper's unique temper of mind I myself could not laugh, for they seemed to me a significant by-product – and also charming in their effect – of the personality so utterly free from pose, unsentimental, I might say gracious, in its earnestness. He spoke in rather sprawling sentences, almost without modulation; but one heard through the colourless speech a firm articulation of thought.

[ 33 ] Spiritual purpose entered the Institute when Herman Grimm appeared. From the standpoint from which I had read – while still in Vienna – his book on Goethe, I felt the deepest sympathy with his type of mind. And when I was able to meet him for the first time in the Institute, I had read almost everything that had come from his pen. Through Suphan I was soon afterwards brought into much more intimate acquaintance with him. Then, while Suphan was once absent from Weimar and he came for a visit to the Institute, he invited me to luncheon at his hotel. I was alone with him. It was plainly agreeable to him to see how I could enter into his way of viewing the world and life. He became communicative. He spoke to me of his idea of a Geschicte der Deutsche Phantasie ⁴ which he had in mind. I then received the impression that he would write such a book. This did not come to pass. But he explained to me beautifully how the contemporary stream of historic evolution has its impulse in the creative fantasy of the folk, which in its temper takes on the character of a living, working supersensible genius. During this luncheon I was wholly filled with the expositions of Herman Grimm. I believed that I knew how the supersensible spiritual works through man. I had before me a man whose spiritual vision reached as far as the creative spiritual, but who would not lay hold upon the actual life of this spiritual, but remained in the region where the spiritual expresses its life in man in the form of fantasy.

Herman Grimm had a special gift for surveying greater or lesser epochs of the history of the mind and of setting forth the period surveyed in precise, brilliant, epigrammatic characterization. When he described a single personality – Michelangelo, Raphael, Goethe, Homer – his representation always appeared against the background of such a survey.

How often have I read his essays in which he characterized in his striking glances the Greek and Roman cultures and the Middle Ages. The whole man was the revelation of unified style. When he fashioned his beautiful sentences in oral speech I had the feeling: “This may appear just so in one of his essays”; and, when I read an essay of his after having become acquainted with him, I felt as if I were listening to him. He permitted himself no laxity in oral speech, but he had the feeling that in artistic or literary presentation one must remain the same person who moved about in everyday life. But Herman Grimm did not roam around like other men even in everyday life. It was inevitable for him to lead a life possessed of style. [ 34 ] When Herman Grimm appeared in Weimar, and in the Institute, then one felt that the plan of the legacy was, so to speak, united with Goethe by secret spiritual threads. Not so when Erich Schmidt came. He was bound to these papers that were preserved in the Institute, not by ideas, but by the historic-philological methods. I could never attain to a human relation with Erich Schmidt. And so all the great respect shown him by all those who worked at the Institute as Scherer philologists made practically no impression upon me.

[ 35 ] Those were always pleasant moments when the Grand-duke Karl Alexander appeared in the Institute. An inwardly true enthusiasm – though manifested in a fashionable bearing – for everything pertaining to Goethe was a part of the nature of this man. Because of his age, his long connection with much that was important in the spiritual life of Germany, and because of his attractive lovableness he made a satisfying impression. It was a pleasing thought to know that he was the protector of the Goethe work in the Institute.

[ 36 ] The Grand-duchess Sophie, owner of the Institute, one saw there only on special festival occasions. When she had anything to say, she caused Suphan to be summoned. The collaborating workers were taken to her to be presented. But her solicitude for the Institute was extraordinary. She herself personally made all the preliminary preparations for the erection of a public building in which the poetic legacies might be worthily housed.

[ 37 ] The heir of the Grand-duke also, Carl August, who died before he became Grand-duke, came often to the Institute. His interest in everything there going on was not profound, but he liked to mingle with us collaborators. This interesting himself in the requirements of the spiritual life he viewed rather as a duty. But the interest of the heiress, Pauline, was full of warmth. I was able many times to converse with her about things which pertained to Goethe, poetry, and the like. As regards its social intercourse the Institute was between the scientific and artistic circles and the courtly circle of Weimar. From both sides it received its own colouring. Scarcely would the door have closed after a professor when it would reopen to admit some princely personage who came for a visit. Many men of all social positions shared in what went on in the Institute. At bottom it was a stirring life, stimulating in many relationships.

[ 38 ] Immediately beside the Institute was the Weimar library. In this resided as chief librarian a man of a childlike temperament and unlimited scholarship, Reinhold Köhle. The collaborators at the Institute often had occasion to resort there. For what they had in the Institute as literary aid to their work was here greatly augmented. Reinhold Köhle had roved around with unique comprehensiveness in the myths, fairy-tales, and sagas; his knowledge in the field of linguistic scholarship was of the most admirable universality. He knew where to turn for the most out-of-the-way literary material. His modesty was most touching, and he received one with great cordiality. He never permitted anyone to bring the books he needed from their resting-places into the work-room of the archives where we did our work. I came in once and asked for a book that Goethe used in connection with his studies in botany, in order to look into it. Reinhold Köhle went to get the old book which had rested somewhere on the topmost shelves unused for decades. He did not come back for a long time. Someone went to see where he was. He had fallen from the ladder on which he had to climb to attend to the books. He had broken his thigh. The noble and lovable person never recovered from the effect of the accident. After a lingering illness this widely known man died. I grieved over the painful thought that his misfortune had happened while he was attending to a book for me.

• 1. Seven Books of Platonism.
• 2. History of Idealism.
• 3. In the essay on “The Gain to Our View of Goethe's Natural-Scientific Works through the Publications of the Goethe Institute,” in the twelfth volume of the Goethe Year Book.
• 4. History of the German Imagination.

We have established that the elements for the explanation of reality are to be taken from the two spheres of perception and thought. It is due, as we have seen, to our organization that the full totality of reality, including our own selves as subjects, appears at first as a duality. Knowledge transcends this duality by fusing the two elements of reality, the percept and the concept, into the complete thing. Let us call the manner in which the world presents itself to us, before by means of knowledge it has taken on its true nature, “the world of appearance,” in distinction from the unified whole composed of percept and concept. We can then say, the world is given to us as a duality (Dualism), and knowledge transforms it into a unity (Monism). A philosophy which starts from this basal principle may be called a Monistic philosophy, or Monism. Opposed to this is the theory of two worlds, or Dualism. The latter does not, by any means, assume merely that there are two sides of a single reality, which are kept apart by our organization, but that there are two worlds totally distinct from one another. It then tries to find in one of these two worlds the principle of explanation for the other.

Dualism rests on a false conception of what we call knowledge. It divides the whole of reality into two spheres, each of which has its own laws, and it leaves these two worlds standing outside one another.

It is from a Dualism such as this that there arises the distinction between the object of perception and the thing-in-itself, which Kant introduced into philosophy, and which, to the present day, we have not succeeded in expelling. According to our interpretation, it is due to the nature of our organization that a particular object can be given to us only as a percept. Thought transcends this particularity by assigning to each percept its proper place in the world as a whole. As long as we determine the separate parts of the cosmos as percepts, we are simply following, in this sorting out, a law of our subjective constitution. If, however, we regard all percepts, taken together, merely as one part, and contrast with this a second part, viz., the things-in-themselves, then our philosophy is building castles-in-the-air. We are then engaged in mere playing with concepts. We construct an artificial opposition, but we can find no content for the second of these opposites, seeing that no content for a particular thing can be found except in perception.

>Every kind of reality which is assumed to exist outside the sphere of perception and conception must be relegated to the limbo of unverified hypotheses. To this category belongs the “thing-in-itself.” It is, of course, quite natural that a Dualistic thinker should be unable to find the connection between the world-principle which he hypothetically assumes and the facts that are given in experience. For the hypothetical world-principle itself a content can be found only by borrowing it from experience and shutting one's eyes to the fact of the borrowing. Otherwise it remains an empty and meaningless concept, a mere form without content. In this case the Dualistic thinker generally asserts that the content of this concept is inaccessible to our knowledge. We can know only that such a content exists, but not what it is. In either case it is impossible to transcend Dualism. Even though one were to import a few abstract elements from the world of experience into the content of the thing-in-itself, it would still remain impossible to reduce the rich concrete life of experience to these few elements, which are, after all, themselves taken from experience. Du Bois-Reymond lays it down that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling by means of their position and motion, and then infers from this premise that we can never find a satisfactory explanation of how matter and motion produce sensation and feeling, for “it is absolutely and for ever unintelligible that it should be other than indifferent to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, etc., how they lie and move, how they lay or moved, or how they will lie and will move. It is in no way intelligible how consciousness might come into existence through their interaction.” This conclusion is characteristic of the whole tendency of this school of thought. Position and motion are abstracted from the rich world of percepts. They are then transferred to the fictitious world of atoms. And then we are astonished that we fail to evolve concrete life out of this principle of our own making, which we have borrowed from the world of percepts.

That the Dualist, working as he does with a completely empty concept of the thing-in-itself, can reach no explanation of the world, follows even from the definition of his principle which has been given above.

In any case, the Dualist finds it necessary to set impassable barriers to our faculty of knowledge. A follower of the Monistic theory of the world knows that all he needs to explain any given phenomenon in the world is to be found within this world itself. What prevents him from finding it can be only chance limitations in space and time, or defects of his organization, i.e., not of human organization in general, but only of his own.

It follows from the concept of knowledge, as defined by us, that there can be no talk of any limits of knowledge. Knowledge is not a concern of the universe in general, but one which men must settle for themselves. External things demand no explanation. They exist and act on one another according to laws which thought can discover. They exist in indivisible unity with these laws. But we, in our self-hood, confront them, grasping at first only what we have called percepts. However, within ourselves we find the power to discover also the other part of reality. Only when the Self has combined for itself the two elements of reality which are indivisibly bound up with one another in the world, is our thirst for knowledge stilled. The Self is then again in contact with reality.

The presuppositions for the development of knowledge thus exist through and for the Self. It is the Self which sets itself the problems of knowledge. It takes them from thought, an element which in itself is absolutely clear and transparent. If we set ourselves questions which we cannot answer, it must be because the content of the questions is not in all respects clear and distinct. It is not the world which sets questions to us, but we who set them to ourselves.

I can imagine that it would be quite impossible for me to answer a question which I happened to find written down somewhere, without knowing the universe of discourse from which the content of the question is taken.

In knowledge we are concerned with questions which arise for us through the fact that a world of percepts, conditioned by time, space, and our subjective organization, stands over against a world of concepts expressing the totality of the universe. Our task consists in the assimilation to one another of these two spheres, with both of which we are familiar. There is no room here for talking about limits of knowledge. It may be that, at a particular moment, this or that remains unexplained because, through chance obstacles, we are prevented from perceiving the things involved. What is not found today, however, may easily be found tomorrow. The limits due to these causes are only contingent, and must be overcome by the progress of perception and thought.

Dualism makes the mistake of transferring the opposition of subject and object, which has meaning only within the perceptual world, to pure conceptual entities outside this world. Now the distinct and separate things in the perceptual world remain separated only so long as the perceiver refrains from thinking. For thought cancels all separation and reveals it as due to purely subjective conditions. The Dualist, therefore, transfers to entities transcending the perceptual world abstract determinations which, even in the perceptual world, have no absolute, but only relative, validity. He thus divides the two factors concerned in the process of knowledge, viz., percept and concept, into four: (1) the object in itself; (2) the percept which the subject has of the object; (3) the subject; (4) the concept which relates the percept to the object in itself. The relation between subject and object is “real”; the subject is really (dynamically) influenced by the object. This real process does not appear in consciousness. But it evokes in the subject a response to the stimulation from the object. The result of this response is the percept. This, at length, appears in consciousness. The object has an objective (independent of the subject) reality, the percept a subjective reality. This subjective reality is referred by the subject to the object. This reference is an ideal one. Dualism thus divides the process of knowledge into two parts. The one part, viz., the production of the perceptual object by the thing-in-itself, he conceives of as taking place outside consciousness, whereas the other, the combination of percept with concept and the latter's reference to the thing-in-itself, takes place, according to him, in consciousness.

With such presuppositions, it is clear why the Dualist regards his concepts merely as subjective representations of what is really external to his consciousness. The objectively real process in the subject by means of which the percept is produced, and still more the objective relations between things-in-themselves, remain for the Dualist inaccessible to direct knowledge. According to him, man can get only conceptual representations of the objectively real. The bond of unity which connects things-in-themselves with one another, and also objectively with the individual minds (as things-in-themselves) of each of us, exists beyond our consciousness in a Divine Being of whom, once more, we have merely a conceptual representation.

The Dualist believes that the whole world would be dissolved into a mere abstract scheme of concepts, did he not posit the existence of real connections beside the conceptual ones. In other words, the ideal principles which thinking discovers are too airy for the Dualist, and he seeks, in addition, real principles with which to support them.

Let us examine these real principles a little more closely. The naïve man (Naïve Realist) regards the objects of sense-experience as realities. The fact that his hands can grasp, and his eyes see, these objects is for him sufficient guarantee of their reality. “Nothing exists that cannot be perceived” is, in fact, the first axiom of the naïve man; and it is held to be equally valid in its converse: “Everything which is perceived exists.” The best proof for this assertion is the naïve man's belief in immortality and in ghosts. He thinks of the soul as a fine kind of matter perceptible by the senses which, in special circumstances, may actually become visible to the ordinary man (belief in ghosts).

In contrast with this, his real, world, the Naïve Realist regards everything else, especially the world of ideas, as unreal, or “merely ideal.” What we add to objects by thinking is merely thoughts about the objects. Thought adds nothing real to the percept.

But it is not only with reference to the existence of things that the naïve man regards perception as the sole guarantee of reality, but also with reference to the existence of processes. A thing, according to him, can act on another only when a force actually present to perception issues from the one and acts upon the other. The ancient Greek philosophers, who were Naïve Realists in the best sense of the word, held a theory of vision according to which the eye sends out feelers which touch the objects. The older physicists thought that very fine kinds of substances emanate from the objects and penetrate through the sense-organs into the soul. The actual perception of these substances is impossible only because of the coarseness of our sense-organs relatively to the fineness of these substances. In principle the reason for attributing reality to these substances was the same as that for attributing it to the objects of the sensible world, viz., their kind of existence, which was conceived to be analogous to that of perceptual reality.

The self-contained being of ideas is not thought of by the naïve mind as real in the same sense. An object conceived “merely in idea” is regarded as a chimera until sense-perception can furnish proof of its reality. In short, the naïve man demands, in addition to the ideal evidence of his thinking, the real evidence of his senses. In this need of the naïve man lies the ground for the origin of the belief in revelation. The God whom we apprehend by thought remains always merely our idea of God. The naïve consciousness demands that God should manifest Himself in ways accessible to the senses. God must appear in the flesh, and must attest his Godhead to our senses by the changing of water into wine.

Even knowledge itself is conceived by the naïve mind as a process analogous to sense-perception. Things, it is thought, make an impression on the mind, or send out copies of themselves which enter through our senses, etc.

What the naïve man can perceive with his senses he regards as real, and what he cannot perceive (God, soul, knowledge, etc.) he regards as analogous to what he can perceive.

On the basis of Naïve Realism, science can consist only in an exact description of the content of perception. Concepts are only means to this end. They exist to provide ideal counterparts of percepts. With the things themselves they have nothing to do. For the Naïve Realist only the individual tulips, which we can see, are real. The universal idea of tulip is to him an abstraction, the unreal thought-picture which the mind constructs for itself out of the characteristics common to all tulips.

Naïve Realism, with its fundamental principle of the reality of all percepts, contradicts experience, which teaches us that the content of percepts is of a transitory nature. The tulip I see is real today; in a year it will have vanished into nothingness. What persists is the species “tulip.” This species is, however, for the Naïve Realist merely an idea, not a reality. Thus this theory of the world finds itself in the paradoxical position of seeing its realities arise and perish, while that which, by contrast with its realities, it regards as unreal endures. Hence Naïve Realism is compelled to acknowledge the existence of something ideal by the side of percepts. It must include within itself entities which cannot be perceived by the senses. In admitting them it escapes contradicting itself by conceiving their existence as analogous to that of objects of sense. Such hypothetical realities are the invisible forces by means of which the objects of sense-perception act on one another. Another such reality is heredity, the effects of which survive the individual, and which is the reason why from the individual a new being develops which is similar to it, and by means of which the species is maintained. The soul, the life-principle permeating the organic body, is another such reality which the naïve mind is always found conceiving in analogy to realities of sense-perception. And, lastly, the Divine Being, as conceived by the naïve mind, is such a hypothetical entity. The Deity is thought of as acting in a manner exactly corresponding to that which we can perceive in man himself, i.e., the Deity is conceived anthropomorphically.

Modern Physics traces sensations back to the movements of the smallest particles of bodies and of an infinitely fine substance called ether. What we experience, e.g., as warmth is a movement of the parts of a body which causes the warmth in the space occupied by that body. Here again something imperceptible is conceived on the analogy of what is perceptible. Thus, in terms of perception, the analogon to the concept “body” is, say, the interior of a room, shut in on all sides, in which elastic balls are moving in all directions, impinging one on another, bouncing on and off the walls, etc.

Without such assumptions the world of the Naïve Realist would collapse into a disconnected chaos of percepts, without mutual relations, and having no unity within itself. It is clear, however, that Naïve Realism can make these assumptions only by contradicting itself. If it would remain true to its fundamental principle, that only what is perceived is real, then it ought not to assume a reality where it perceives nothing. The imperceptible forces of which perceptible things are the bearers are, in fact, illegitimate hypotheses from the standpoint of Naïve Realism. But because Naïve Realism knows no other realities, it invests its hypothetical forces with perceptual content. It thus transfers a form of existence (the existence of percepts) to a sphere where the only means of making any assertion concerning such existence, viz., sense-perception, is lacking.

This self-contradictory theory leads to Metaphysical Realism. The latter constructs, beside the perceptible reality, an imperceptible one which it conceives on the analogy of the former. Metaphysical Realism is, therefore, of necessity Dualistic.

Wherever the Metaphysical Realist observes a relation between perceptible things (mutual approach through movement, the entrance of an object into consciousness, etc.), there he posits a reality. However, the relation of which he becomes aware cannot be perceived but only expressed by means of thought. The ideal relation is thereupon arbitrarily assimilated to something perceptible. Thus, according to this theory the world is composed of the objects of perception which are in ceaseless flux, arising and disappearing, and of imperceptible forces by which the perceptible objects are produced, and which are permanent.

Metaphysical Realism is a self-contradictory mixture of Naïve Realism and Idealism. Its forces are imperceptible entities endowed with the qualities proper to percepts. The Metaphysical Realist has made up his mind to acknowledge, in addition to the sphere for the existence of which he has an instrument of knowledge in sense-perception, the existence of another sphere for which this instrument fails, and which can be known only by means of thought. But he cannot make up his mind at the same time to acknowledge that the mode of existence which thought reveals, viz., the concept (or idea), has equal rights with percepts. If we are to avoid the contradiction of imperceptible percepts, we must admit that, for us, the relations which thought traces between percepts can have no other mode of existence than that of concepts. If one rejects the untenable part of Metaphysical Realism, there remains the concept of the world as the aggregate of percepts and their conceptual (ideal) relations. Metaphysical Realism, then, merges itself in a view of the world according to which the principle of perceptibility holds for percepts, and that of conceivability for the relations between the percepts. This view of the world has no room, in addition to the perceptual and conceptual worlds, for a third sphere in which both principles, the so-called “real” principle and the “ideal” principle, are simultaneously valid.

When the Metaphysical Realist asserts that, besides the ideal relation between the perceived object and the perceiving subject, there must be a real relation between the percept as “thing-in-itself” and the subject as “thing-in-itself” (the so-called individual mind), he is basing his assertion on the false assumption of a real process, imperceptible but analogous to processes in the world of percepts. Further, when the Metaphysical Realist asserts that we stand in a conscious ideal relation to our world of percepts, but that to the real world we can have only a dynamic (force) relation, he repeats the mistake we have already criticized. We can talk of a dynamic relation only within the world of percepts (in the sphere of the sense of touch), but not outside that world.

Let us call the view which we have just characterized, and into which Metaphysical Realism merges when it discards its contradictory elements, Monism, because it combines one-sided Realism and Idealism into a higher unity.

For Naïve Realism the real world is an aggregate of percepts; for Metaphysical Realism, reality belongs not only to percepts but also to imperceptible forces; Monism replaces forces by ideal relations which are supplied by thought. These relations are the laws of nature. A law of nature is nothing but the conceptual expression for the connection of certain percepts.

Monism is never called upon to ask whether there are any principles of explanation for reality other than percepts and concepts. The Monist knows that in the whole realm of the real there is no occasion for this question. In the perceptual world, as immediately apprehended, he sees one-half of reality; in the union of this world with the world of concepts he finds full reality. The Metaphysical Realist might object that, relatively to our organization, our knowledge may be complete in itself, that no part may be lacking, but that we do not know how the world appears to a mind organized differently from our own. To this the Monist will reply: Maybe there are intelligences other than human; and maybe also that their percepts are different from ours, if they have perception at all. But this is irrelevant to me for the following reasons. Through my perceptions, i.e., through this specifically human mode of perception, I, as subject, am confronted with the object. The nexus of things is thereby broken. The subject reconstructs the nexus by means of thought. In doing so it re-inserts itself into the context of the world as a whole. As it is only through the Self, as subject, that the whole appears rent in two between percept and concept, the reunion of those two factors will give us complete knowledge. For beings with a different perceptual world (e.g., if they had twice our number of sense-organs) the nexus would appear broken in another place, and the reconstruction would accordingly have to take a form specifically adapted to such beings. The question concerning the limits of knowledge troubles only Naïve and Metaphysical Realism, both of which see in the contents of mind only ideal representations of the real world. For to these theories whatever falls outside the subject is something absolute, a self-contained whole, and the subject's mental content is a copy which is wholly external to this absolute. The completeness of knowledge depends on the greater or lesser degree of resemblance between the representation and the absolute object. A being with fewer senses than man will perceive less of the world, one with more senses will perceive more. The former's knowledge will, therefore, be less complete than the latter's.

For Monism the matter is different. The point where the unity of the world appears to be rent asunder into subject and object depends on the organization of the percipient. The object is not absolute but merely relative to the nature of the subject. The bridging of the gap, therefore, can take place only in the quite specific way which is characteristic of the human subject. As soon as the Self, which in perception is set over against the world, is again re-inserted into the world-nexus by constructive thought all further questioning ceases, having been but a result of the separation.

A differently constituted being would have a differently constituted knowledge. Our own knowledge suffices to answer the questions which result from our own mental constitution.

Metaphysical Realism must ask, What is it that gives us our percepts? What is it that stimulates the subject?

Monism holds that percepts are determined by the subject. But in thought the subject has, at the same time, the instrument for transcending this determination of which it is itself the author.

The Metaphysical Realist is faced by a further difficulty when he seeks to explain the similarity of the world-views of different human individuals. He has to ask himself, How is it that my theory of the world, built up out of subjectively determined percepts and out of concepts, turns out to be the same as that which another individual is also building up out of these same two subjective factors? How, in any case, is it possible for me to argue from my own subjective view of the world to that of another human being? The Metaphysical Realist thinks he can infer the similarity of the subjective world-views of different human beings from their ability to get on with one another in practical life. From this similarity of world-views he infers further the likeness to one another of individual minds, meaning by “individual mind” the “I-in-itself” underlying each subject.

We have here an inference from a number of effects to the character of the underlying causes. We believe that after we have observed a sufficiently large number of instances, we know the connection sufficiently to know how the inferred causes will act in other instances. Such an inference is called an inductive inference. We shall be obliged to modify its results, if further observation yields some unexpected fact, because the character of our conclusion is, after all, determined only by the particular details of our actual observations. The Metaphysical Realist asserts that this knowledge of causes, though restricted by these conditions, is quite sufficient for practical life.

Inductive inference is the fundamental method of modern Metaphysical Realism. At one time it was thought that out of concepts we could evolve something that would no longer be a concept. It was thought that the metaphysical reals, which Metaphysical Realism after all requires, could be known by means of concepts. This method of philosophizing is now out of date. Instead it is thought that from a sufficiently large number of perceptual facts we can infer the character of the thing-in-itself which lies behind these facts. Formerly it was from concepts, now it is from percepts that the Realist seeks to evolve the metaphysically real. Because concepts are before the mind in transparent clearness, it was thought that we might deduce from them the metaphysically real with absolute certainty. Percepts are not given with the same transparent clearness. Each fresh one is a little different from others of the same kind which preceded it. In principle, therefore, anything inferred from past experience is somewhat modified by each subsequent experience. The character of the metaphysically real thus obtained can therefore be only relatively true, for it is open to correction by further instances. The character of Von Hartmann's Metaphysics depends on this methodological principle. The motto on the title-page of his first important book is, “Speculative results gained by the inductive method of Science.”

The form which the Metaphysical Realist at the present day gives to his things-in-themselves is obtained by inductive inferences. Consideration of the process of knowledge has convinced him of the existence of an objectively-real world-nexus, over and above the subjective world which we know by means of percepts and concepts. The nature of this reality he thinks he can determine by inductive inferences from his percepts.