The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Many people still consider anthroposophy, for example, as an uninvited guest within a society. One behaves rather refusing at first. Other scientific currents are well-invited guests of the modern spiritual striving because of the already recognised needs of the human beings. However, if one notes that the uninvited guest has something to bring that one had lost and that can be very valuable, nevertheless, in a certain respect, then one begins to treat the uninvited guest somewhat different from before. Anthroposophy is in this situation. It has to speak of spiritual-mental goods, which in a certain respect the modern civilised humanity has lost and which it has to receive again. They got lost because humanity had a certain instinctive cognition during millennia for that what is considered there; humanity cannot retain this instinctive cognition in the same way in future, it has even lost it up to a certain degree.

Just as little humanity could adhere to the medieval astronomy, it could adhere to the old instinctive knowledge about the being of the soul and with it about the real core of the human being. In the talks that I have held here weeks ago it was my task in particular to explain how in justified way the scientific thinking has taken possession of the human souls and has influenced the whole cultural development more and more. However, this scientific cognition is not suited on the other side to unveil the secrets of his own soul being to the human being, just if it wants to remain strong in the area that is assigned to it. This scientific imagination has the peculiarity that it destroys the old instinctive knowledge of the soul as it were.

Spiritual science wants to illuminate the spiritual area consciously with controlled cognition and to bring consciously again, what the human beings have lost as instinctive knowledge. Most certainly, the human beings who feel this anthroposophy as an uninvited guest will consider it just as a very welcome guest—I hope—if they have realised that this guest brings the knowledge of a lost treasure for life.

If we consider the different representations of the human soul and its being as they have appeared in the time in which the scientific way of thinking already had an impact, we realise that two of the most important questions, which were typical of the old doctrine of the soul, have disappeared almost from the scientifically oriented view of the soul. These two main questions are the question of immortality and the question of freedom. I have spoken in the last talks to what extent the question of immortality had to disappear more and more from the horizon of modern science, and I have already said that it should be my task today to approach the soul problem from the viewpoint of an at least sketchy consideration of the human freedom.

If natural sciences extend their way of thinking to the soul, they must focus their attention at first to what extent the soul has its basis in the bodily of the human being. However, this scientific view completely depends on considering the course of the outer processes causally, also of the soul processes as they take place in time. The scientific way of thinking can consider the soul only in the closest connection with the body. However, the body completely belongs to the material coherence of the outer world. The scientific way of thinking finds laws of this coherence. Nevertheless, these laws lead away from any consideration of the human soul life.

I would like to bring in one example only, while natural sciences took possession more and more of the consideration of the soul life, they also tried to apply their laws to the consideration of the soul. There they cannot but consider how a human action, how a human will impulse, how everything that the human being undertakes from his soul flows out of his bodily experience. They must experiment in their way as they are accustomed in their scientific field, and they feel deeply contented if they find with their experiments that also the soul life does not break what is ascertained scientifically for the outer natural life. One has only to consider such a thing that physiologists have experimentally found the amount of energy which the human being or the animal have taken up with their food is the amount of energy which the human being or the animal develop if they have emotions. The biologist Max Rubner (1854-1932) experimented with animals where he could show that everything that expresses itself as power in movements, in actions of animals is nothing but calculable energy of the food that they have taken up. Atwater (Wilbur Olin A., 1844-1907) carried out experiments that show that this law also applies to the human being. Everything that we exert in the work with movement and the like can be calculated as a transformation product of that what we take up materially with food as energy and transform it into warmth and the like in ourselves.

Thus, natural sciences trace the soul life back to the so-called principle of conservation of energy. They cannot but say from their viewpoint: where should something mental intervene of its own accord in the human being, create anything new like by a miracle if one can prove that everything that is active from the human being outwardly is only a transformation product of that what the human being takes up from the world? If the human emotion is that what the body has taken up in itself, then the principle of conservation of energy is fulfilled. Nowhere a new force appears; everything that appears as energy is only something that was already there. One cannot say if the human being accomplishes a so-called free, arbitrary action, it comes out of his soul, because then as if a new force would join the forces out of the blue which are already there.

Of course, someone who has familiarised himself with scientific mental pictures feels such a thing as a closed line of thought. Because this is in such a way, anthroposophy that wants to extend scientific severity to the spiritual area has a hard time. But not from some abstract sentences, but from the whole spirit of that what I have to bring forward in these talks should arise that anthroposophy does not contradict natural sciences, but that it continues and develops these natural sciences completely, although it follows a way from the sense-perceptible area to the spiritual life.

However, it meets countless prejudices there. As an anthroposophist, one knows best of all how enchanting prejudices are and how they evoke opposition. Since “proofs,” as one knows them in the usual science and in the usual life, absolutely exist within anthroposophy; but one has to understand them different from the “proofs” of the usual science. Above all that what one wants to investigate is a given. Nobody can deny that the world of the senses puts questions to us. This is not the case with anthroposophy. There the world itself must be disclosed first, about which one has to talk. Hence, a lot of the validity of anthroposophy depends on the fact that one realises: the preparatory work in the own soul that the spiritual researcher has carried out is necessary to come into the world at which he wants to look.

In science, one works on a certain basis, and then only the intellectual activity begins. In anthroposophy, the soul has to work at first, and its work is not something that finds laws about other things, but its work is something at first by which it prepares itself to observe what it concerns in the spiritual world, actually.

There one recognises that for the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science the following must be demanded what the present acknowledges only reluctantly: if one wants to attain insight of the supersensible world, one has to develop the appropriate abilities in the soul. Then it is possible to develop abilities from the undifferentiated human soul that lead to the view of the spiritual world.

Today I do not want to go into this preparation. Today I would like to refer only to my books, in particular to my writings How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science. An Outline, in which I have shown what the soul has to carry out with itself, so that it becomes able to perceive in the spiritual world. It can attain this ability only if it makes its inner being independent from the body. Because I do not want to be repetitive, I will today not speak of how one attains such abilities. I would like only to state something of the peculiarities of this spiritual way into the supersensible area.

I would like to pronounce a truth which appears weird at first, concerning this way. The spiritual researcher must develop abilities of a path of knowledge that refers to things, which every human being would like to do the object of his consideration unless some scientific or other prejudices retain him from it. The everlasting of the soul, the nature of the human freedom and everything that is associated with it are questions for every human being. The old instinctive knowledge dealt with them. The spiritual-scientific knowledge has to go such a path of knowledge, which refers to something that everybody desires. However, the ways into this supersensible area are less popular, are almost rejected because of certain peculiarities of the human nature. There one has to consider the following in particular.

Forming mental pictures and concepts we are used to founding them on something essential that approaches us regardless of these mental pictures and concepts. We are connected as physical human beings with that which exists about which we form our mental pictures to which they refer. However, we are not immediately connected with that what the supersensible knowledge refers to. Hence, this supersensible knowledge makes use of a bigger strength of the soul than the knowledge of the sense-perceptible outside world that just is there from the start. Many people shrink from this inner strengthening of the soul life because it does not immediately refer to a being and appears as something fantastic. One can understand very well that someone who does not penetrate deeper into the matter considers the mental pictures and concepts of spiritual science as fantasy pictures because he is accustomed only to accept the mental pictures of the physical reality. However, that of the supersensible world in which the human being is interested above all must be grasped in such mental pictures of the supersensible cognition, which must be pulled out of the depths of the soul. This can happen only with stronger forces than they are necessary in the everyday life.

In the today's talk, I do not want to speak how one investigates them, but how they are in a certain respect.

The human being is used: if he forms a mental picture of something that proceeds as it were in reality, he just has a picture of something real; then he can remember it; it remains in his memory. This is a peculiarity of our usual imagining, which gives us life security, so that we can keep that, what depicts the outer world. If the spiritual researcher brings up those forces from the depths of his soul that enable him to behold into the supersensible world, he can look with the “beholding consciousness” as I have called this ability in my book The Riddle of Man. However, if he wanted to keep the beheld in mind in the same way as something of the outer sense-perceptible world, he would do a vain attempt at first. Experiences of the spiritual world, experiences that refer to the everlasting, to the immortal of our soul can be recognised with supersensible cognitive forces; but they cannot be added to the memory, they are fugitive as dreams are and are forgotten straight away.

Now you may say, may one consider this knowledge generally only as results of a fugitive dream?—One has to say, definitely yes, in a certain sense! Now the following is valid: one has to prepare the whole soul condition in a way to be able to behold into the supersensible realm; one must cause such an inner constitution every time anew so that the vision can appear. One can remember the activities that one carries out in the soul. If one has attained an insight of this or that event or being of the spiritual world, one knows which exercises one has to carry out, so that this vision can take place. Should this vision take place again after some time, one has to produce the same conditions in the soul. One can remember these conditions. What one beholds has to appear again anew. This is a big difference compared with the usual knowledge.

The spiritual researcher cannot experience something once—as paradox as it sounds—, and learn it by heart to bring it back to life again in himself like a memory.

No, if he wants to face the same spiritual being or the same spiritual event again, then he has to cause the opportunity in himself to experience it again. As weird as it sounds, if the spiritual researcher speaks of the most elementary truths—for example, during five successive days to any audience—, and he wants to speak in such a way that the spoken comes immediately from the spiritual experience, then he must do this spiritual experience every time anew. I want to express with it that one of the most important laws of our spiritual experience is: while our sensory images seem—it only seems so—, as if they could emerge later again from memory, as if they were a spiritual possession, this does not at all apply to the praxis of spiritual knowledge. One has to attain spiritual knowledge always anew.

Why do I explain just this? I would especially like to point out here that the appropriation of the spiritual-scientific way is by no means a necessity for everybody who wants to deal with spiritual science. Indeed, today it is a general aspiration to get to know to a certain degree what one should believe; and in this respect, it is justified if those who hear about spiritual science and its results ask, how can I myself conceive of such things?—However, the essentials of the relation of the human being to spiritual science are not at all that one becomes a spiritual researcher. Since the spiritual-scientific way can give life something, and the immortal life, too, only if that which appears in the vision is transformed into usual concepts. The spiritual researcher could be an ever so sophisticated being concerning supersensible knowledge, as a human being he would have nothing over any other human being because of his vision; since everything that takes place in this vision is only a way, is not the goal. The goal is to transform that what is attained with the vision into human concepts, in those mental pictures, which we have just attained in the outer sense-perceptible world even if a lot must seem to be pictorial what we express with such mental pictures attained in the sense-perceptible world.

Unless anybody wants to become a spiritual researcher, he could adopt what the spiritual researcher finds with his research. The results which he gets are clear for themselves if one is only enough unbiased. The possession of this knowledge in the usual human imagination—not in the supersensible beholding—constitutes the real treasure for life. The spiritual researcher would have nothing of his spiritual research if he wanted to indulge himself only in the supersensible beholding; this would be more transient than the usual outer sensory results. The point is that the transient vision is transformed into usual mental pictures. The soul can take them with it if it enters another spiritual life after death. You cannot take the visions as such with you, only that which the vision brings.

I have to say this once with any sharpness because even with many persons who are within the anthroposophic movement the prejudice prevails, as if a withdrawal from the outer world, from life, or a mystic deepening is important. That is not the point. The point is that one finds with certain soul exercises what applies to the supersensible world and that it can be transformed into usual human concepts. Nevertheless, it is entitled if the desire exists that everybody wants to behold into the spiritual world to a certain degree.

Literature accommodates this wish. This just corresponds to a demand of our time to believe not only, but to behold independently. However, this is not the central issue. When I have described the path of knowledge in detail with which one enters in the spiritual world, it is first to satisfy the mentioned needs, secondly, however, mainly because the spiritual researcher has to regard as a goal to give an account of how he has come to his truths.

Then, however, also that who reads such a writing as, for example, How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? or the second part of my Occult Science, can realise from the way, how the spiritual researcher describes the spiritual-scientific path that it does not concern any speculative fiction but a real entering into the supersensible world. He can realise as it were how an account is given of a reality.

This is something again that one has to add to the fact that in many respects the proofs that the spiritual researcher has to adduce have to be different from usual. The spiritual researcher has just to claim that one acknowledges the entitlement of the way that he gives bit by bit and which leads into the spiritual world. However, if he emphasises such a special peculiarity of the vision as the just suggested one is—that the beholding into the spiritual world does not at all comply with our usual soul life—, then I do this just because I want to characterise the supersensible world which you enter there.

For the usual soul life it is typical that we keep in mind what we have taken up once from the sense-perceptible world; this does not apply to the vision. While I pronounce such a thing, I point to the fact that the existence in the spiritual world is quite different from the existence in the sense-perceptible world. I state peculiarities of the spiritual world as it were; I show that one enters into a world that does not at all combine with our body as the sense-perceptible world combines with it. The sense-perceptible world combines in such a way if we perceive it with our body that we can keep the percepts in mind. The spiritual world is so far away from our body that it does not cause the changes in our body that induce memories.

This is just a peculiarity of the spiritual world that you have to consider. The right knowledge of this peculiarity is just a proof, that you are with the vision in a world that is not at all concerned with our body. That is why it is completely entitled to say, while everything that is perceived in the body causes memories more or less, that which is perceived if the soul is beyond the body, like in the vision, does not cause any memories because it is only related to our supersensible soul, not to our body.

Other peculiarities of the supersensible world are also mentioned for the same reason and in the same sense. In the usual sense-perceptible world, the matter is as follows: if you repeat a mental picture over and over again—how much educational is based on it!—, then it becomes more familiar to us, we can keep them better in mind, it combines better with our soul. The opposite is the case for what we experience in the spiritual area. As weird as it sounds, one can almost say, if I have a spiritual experience and I try to have it once again, it is not easier but more difficult. One cannot exercise to get spiritual experiences better and better.

With it something very typical is connected. There are persons who strain to get insights of the spiritual world by certain soul exercises. Forces slumbering in the depths of every soul are called that way. Thereby once a blissful, often great experience takes place, fugitive like a dream. It may not appear again for a second or third time even if the person concerned makes any effort to cause the same soul condition again. One can almost say, a right spiritual experience escapes from us if it has been there once, and we must make stronger efforts if we want to get it again.

Often those are surprised who have made the first efforts that a very significant spiritual experience does not always re-appear. I also bring in this to show how the experiences of the seer are quite different from the experiences that one has in the sense-perceptible world.

Another peculiarity is the following: you feel, while you advance in spiritual knowledge, that you have to cope with the events that face you spiritually with the ripe state of your power of imagination if you do not want to get to fantastic images. Hence, you have to realise that the preparation for the vision is of particular importance. You must already have developed a ripe and versatile power of imagination, so that you can cope with the spiritual experiences. This is again completely different from the usual sense-perceptible world. There this area of perception is spread out before us; we get more and more images of this area; we enrich our images with it. After we have had the perception, we enrich our mental pictures. With the spiritual experiences, it is just the opposite: We have first to make our mental pictures rich and versatile, so that they are prepared if we want to have supersensible experiences. This is something else than it is in the usual life and in the usual science.

With that, I wanted to indicate that the way leads us to quite different experiences and percepts in the supersensible area. Many people shrink from this other kind of perceiving, from this quite different kind of having concepts and mental pictures. Hence, spiritual science will depend, above all, on the fact that the human beings again find courage and strength to form such mental pictures that are not borne by the available sense-perceptible world.

However, mainly the scientific way of thinking develops these mental pictures. Because it has achieved great results, it has led the human beings away from the spiritual cognition for a while. Nevertheless, it will lead them back again to this spiritual cognition. Just because it points always to the material and the human beings also see through the material more and more, they will be urged to acknowledge that one has to search the spiritual in another way.

There I would like to show using certain research results of spiritual science how human knowledge will generally become something else if bit by bit the spiritual science intervenes in the pursuit for knowledge. Those listeners who listen to me more often know that I speak about something personal only reluctantly. However, I would like to indicate something because it is associated as it were with that which I have to argue: what I say now about the relation of soul and mind to the body is the result of my research for more than thirty years. Since in the spiritual area one does not obtain the things as in the laboratory one can infer from any object or any process what is to be said about it if one has developed the method. The spiritual research proceeds mainly in time. It concerns that then only one conceives of certain things if one can relate experiences with each other that are widely separated in terms of time.

The progress of the usual scientific knowledge and of the usual consciousness to the spiritual-scientific knowledge can be compared with the unmusical listening of single tones and the musical understanding of melodies or harmonies. If one hears a single tone, it is a perception just of this single tone; it is a single experience. If one wants to enter into the world of music, the single tone is to be related to other tones, and then it becomes what it is only because it is related to other tones. In the usual percipience, the soul relates to a sensory outside world. This one can compare with the perception of the single tone. In the spiritual cognition, the soul has to relate to that what proceeds in time. I want to indicate only that it is, for example, of big importance that the spiritual researcher is able to experience that which he experiences in his soul today not only as a single event of the immediate present existence but that he can relate it to an experience which maybe dates back a year as well as a tone of a melody relates to another tone of the melody if a musical conception should be there.

As one is connected by the usual percipience with the soul, with something spatial, one is connected by the spiritual experience at first with the present experience, relates it then to something that is brought up vividly from the past. One looks from an event of the past at a present experience and then from an event which is even further away. While looking within time, the soul experiences are structured, so that one may say, the usual cognition becomes something like a musical overview of the mental.

The soul is thereby not only enabled to adopt what it experiences in the body. But it relates what it experiences and remembers between birth and death—like the ear relates a tone to another in a melody—, to that which is there before birth or conception and which is there after death. However, the soul has to prepare itself for it while it relates single experiences like the tones of a melody to each other within the life between birth and death; it not only lives through the single experiences, but also extends the experience over time and experiences the different gradations, the differentiations in time like inner music.

What also appears is not only inner music, but also something that is like inner reading or listening of words where one hears not only tones which relate to other tones of melodies or harmonies, but also express a sense. Then that will originate for the spiritual researcher which I can characterise in such a way that I say, the usual scientific consideration looks at the things as one would look at a printed page if one described the form of the letters only. This method, applied to nature, is natural sciences. This is a description of the letters. The spiritual researcher learns to read. He goes adrift completely from reading letters. What he finds in nature as something supersensible relates to that what is spread out in nature before the senses like the sense of something read and heard that one takes in to the single tones that form the words, or to the single letters that are printed on paper.

However, this depends on an inner progress to which one also comes if one is not an esoteric student, but if one only grasps the concepts and mental pictures of spiritual research. One gets to know the world as it were in its real harmony; one gets to know the sense that is behind this “sounding” world, comparatively spoken.

In such a way, something has arisen to me spiritual-scientifically in the course of more than three decades that I would like to pronounce as the coherence of the mental-spiritual with the bodily that will also arise to natural sciences, which are still far away from it in the next time. Since spiritual research and natural sciences will meet each other in the middle, spiritual research from the spiritual side, natural sciences from the material side.

What I have to bring forward I have found spiritual-scientifically. However, already the modern natural sciences, physiology and biology, offer sufficient opportunity to harden completely what I have now to bring forward as a spiritual-scientific result. Considering the coherence of the soul with the body one cherishes, I would almost like to say, a fateful one-sidedness.

If you take a textbook of psychology, you will realise that you find a consideration of the nervous system as introduction. This is completely entitled from the scientific point of view. One can absolutely say, the naturalist can only relate the soul unilaterally to the nervous system. An entire consideration of life proves something else, namely that only one part of the mental experience may be directly related to the nervous system, namely only the imagining activity. So that we can say, the whole imagining activity finds—we use the term—its physical counter-image in the nervous system.

The nervous system is the physical basis of the imagining activity, but not of the emotional life. The scientific psychologists put the emotional life in second place. Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950) does not regard—rightly from his point of view—the emotional life as something independent; he speaks only of the “emotional emphasis of the mental pictures.” Every mental picture would have as it were an “emotional nuance.” This contradicts the usual soul experiences. For these the emotional life is as real as the imagining activity. It is not only any “emotional nuance” of our mental pictures, but the emotional life develops beside the imagining activity. If one relates this emotional life directly to the nervous life as the imagining activity refers to it, one commits an error. Since as the imagining activity is directly associated with the nervous system, the emotional life is directly associated with all rhythmical processes of respiration and blood circulation especially with the subtler ramifications of the rhythmical system. These rhythmical processes are the physical basis of the emotional life.

I know very well that numerous objections may arise if I pronounce such a thing. I cannot come on everything, but I would like to mention one thing only, bring in one example only how one has—indeed, much more precisely than the “exact” science—to bear down on these things if one wants to recognise them in their true figure.

There, for example, somebody could say, oh well, there comes somebody and explains amateurishly that the emotional life seizes the rhythmical processes in the body as directly as the imagining activity seizes the nervous life. Does he not know that, for example, if any musical impression takes place in us, we take it in with the ear that it is delivered at first as an image that in this living in the musical image the aesthetic experience is contained that it is nonsense to say, the feeling, which is connected with a musical impression, is not a result of the imagining activity?

I know that this objection, actually, must be generally valid for the today's mental pictures; however, it is not valid for the reality. We have only to realise that that which we take in as the sound picture with our ear is not yet the musical experience. It becomes musical experience only if the sound image is coming up to meet what reaches the brain from the ramifications of the respiratory rhythm. The rhythm of breathing, which reaches the brain, meets the sound image, which penetrates into the brain; it is the bodily counter-image of the musical impression. The whole emotional life is originally associated with the rhythmical life in our body.

Thirdly, we have the will in our soul. As well as the imagining activity is associated with the nervous life, the emotional life is associated with the rhythmical interplay of the forces which originate from the respiratory rhythm and from the blood rhythm, any will impulse is associated with metabolism. As weird as it sounds, all will processes are directly expressed in metabolic processes. I have published these scientific results in my last book The Riddles of the Soul for the first time, indeed, in a shorter form because of the present paper shortage.

However, one has to envisage that the nervous system, the rhythmical system, and the metabolic system are not next to each other in the organism. The nerves must be also nourished, of course. So that perpetually food processes take place in the nerves. Of course, all organs of the rhythmical movements must be nourished, too

Three members of the organism penetrate each other. But a precise research shows that that which is metabolism, for example, in the nerves has nothing to do with imagining but with the will process, which extends also into the imagining. Of course, if I want to imagine anything, I will imagine it; directing my attention upon the imagining is already a will process.

The embryonic state that is associated with the will is also associated with the metabolism in the nervous system. But the essentials of imagining are connected with processes which have nothing to do with the metabolism, but, on the contrary, which deal with a metabolic destruction which deal with something in the nerves that can be compared not with metabolism, but rather with a withdrawal of metabolism, with the emergence of hunger. Save that, one deals with a destruction in the nervous system that must not be confused with the destruction in the whole organism.

Such mistakes have happened. Just while I point to such mistakes, I can emphasise the characteristic of anthroposophy compared with older and even today-approved spiritual currents. Who does not know that what the new spiritual science attempts to attain with inner soul exercises which are not concerned with anything bodily, one tried to attain in former times on such ways which were much concerned with all kinds of bodily performances, with asceticism. Think only that certain mystics produced their union with the spirit by starving, by destruction of the organism. True spiritual research has nothing to do with those ways. However, spiritual research must point to the fact that a destruction that is not abnormal but normal, takes place in the nervous system if the imagining should find its expression by the nervous system. I have pointed out in the talk that I have here held weeks ago that the consciousness that one experiences in the imagining activity is associated with death. I have even pronounced the sentence: while we are imagining, we die down perpetually in the nervous system.

Only if such mental pictures are formed, natural sciences will be able to meet spiritual research. Hence, we have to say, the tripartite soul life, imagining, feeling, and willing, is connected with the whole body, not only with a part of the body; since the whole body is involved with its three organic members, the nervous system, the rhythmical system and the metabolic system. Our soul life is not unilaterally connected with our nervous system, but the whole soul finds its expression in the whole body. This is a result of spiritual science that thinking, feeling, and willing have their counterparts in the body.

However, just as these three members of the human soul life have their bodily counterparts, they have their spiritual counterparts. As imagining is connected with the nervous system, it is connected with something spiritual that can only be grasped with spiritual cognition, which I have called the Imaginative knowledge. It is the first level of spiritual knowledge, the first level of the beholding in the spiritual world.

As well as we find the nervous system as a bodily counterpart of the imagining activity, we find the imagining activity arising from something spiritual that can only be grasped with the first level of supersensible beholding with the so-called Imaginative knowledge. In a reality that appears in pictures, one can recognise what corresponds spiritually to the imagining activity. At the same time, we face what penetrates our whole existence from birth or conception until death as body of formative forces. While the substances of our physical body are substituted perpetually, the uniform body of formative forces that is at the same time the spiritual basis of our imagining activity remains to us from birth until death.

Let us consider the emotional life. To the bodily side it is connected with the respiratory rhythm and the blood rhythm; on the other side it is associated spiritually with something spiritual that can be grasped on a higher level of vision that I have called the Inspired knowledge in my writings, which does no longer need pictures, but arises without pictures in the supersensible world. However, if this spiritual origin of our emotional life is figured out with supersensible knowledge, it is not that which extends from birth to death, but which we possess in the spiritual world, before we go by birth to the bodily life with which we walk through the gate of death. Since uniting spiritually with that what forms the spiritual basis of the emotional life means: extending the vision beyond birth and death.

In such a way as our will life is associated with the metabolism of the body, it is associated with the highest that the human being can attain in vision, with that what I have called Intuitive cognition. I do not mean the usual washed out intuition, but that what I have characterised in my books as an Intuitive knowledge: I have called the real settling in the spiritual world Intuitive knowledge. This is the highest spiritual level that the human being can attain.

Now the strange appears: while the metabolism is the lowest of the body side, is that what spiritually corresponds to the will the highest that forms the basis of our being. What we have to acknowledge as the highest between birth and death, the nervous system that corresponds to the imagining activity is based on the lowest of the spiritual world, namely that what one can attain with Imaginative knowledge.

The human being realises one thing in particular if he gets to know the relationship of his spiritual-mental with this spiritual to be grasped with Intuition. However, I can characterise this only in the following way. It is not only anything that one experiences in the vision but something that every human being can experience who understands the results of spiritual research with common sense. If one accepts these spiritual-scientific results really, one gets to know what spirit is, then this means something special. This event may be described because it intervenes as something particular in the soul, this event that wakes our internal consciousness for the first time: now I know what, actually, spirit is what the everlasting is in my soul.

One can call this experience only in such a way that one says, it is an inner karmic experience. The whole human life changes possibly, gets another direction under the influence of this experience which makes known itself in the fact that we know what spirit is in us. We thereby do not need getting dull towards other karmic experiences. Indeed, we experience events in the outer life where we are on top of the world or down in the dumps. The spiritual researcher does not want to get dull towards these experiences. On the contrary, he becomes more sensitive of them because he also figures out the spiritual side of all that.

Whatever meets him in the outer life, the intervention of that what is the experience of the spirit, of the everlasting in itself is a bigger break in life, a more radical karmic situation. One recognises with it how one causes karma, because one must cause spiritual knowledge with own forces as one causes twists and turns in life, while spiritual knowledge becomes a vital question of the very first degree. This gives the understanding of the remaining human destiny, but also full understanding of Intuition. Then one notices with which the human will is associated on the spiritual side.

Then one evokes a force by such a karmic intervention in the soul life that does not only lead the supersensible cognition to that which appears in the life between birth and death, not only to that what takes place in the life between death and a new birth but to that everlasting-spiritual core that works in the repeated lives on earth. What the human being represents in his innermost core, he recognises it as associated with the impulses which have been there in former lives on earth. What he experiences now as destiny, while he performs own actions, becomes to him if the knowledge has become destiny, in such a way that he also knows it as basis of the following life on earth.

With the coherence of the tripartite soul life one gets to know the transient in the human being. With the relation of these three soul members with the spiritual one gets to know the immortal, the everlasting that goes through births and deaths, so that one surveys this entire human life which proceeds in successive lives on earth and in intermediate spiritual lives between death and a new birth. Thus, one beholds into the everlasting in the human life other than with philosophical speculations.

Not with conceptual analysis or conceptual synthesis spiritual research attempts to lead into that everlasting while it evokes the view of this everlasting. What we are as temporal-bodily beings has developed from the everlasting which consists of the Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive part, as our body consists of the nervous system, the rhythmical system and metabolism.

These are some research results about the everlasting in the human soul. The human freedom can only be attributed to this everlasting. The naturalist must stop within the transient experience: in the nervous system, in the rhythmical system that he does not at all investigate even in this respect, and in the metabolism that he confuses with the nervous life even today, while he also looks in the metabolism for the basis of the nervous life. The naturalist must stop within this material life. Hence, he also finds something for every act of volition that produces this act of volition. However, if one recognises the everlasting in the soul, one recognises that this everlasting has contents in itself which are independent of the bodily life, then that becomes reality which one experiences as freedom internally. Why?

Well, I have just explained in the last talks and in the today's one that in us a destructive process must take place that consciousness is similar in a way to death that there are death processes in the nervous system if we form a conscious mental picture. However, thereby it arises to spiritual research that not everything that belongs to the soul being is an outflow of the bodily being, but that the bodily being is only the basis of the soul experience and that this soul experience finds just its basis in the bodily life if this bodily life does not develop its growing forces, but if these growing forces are diminished. Processes of degeneration in us form the basis of the conscious soul life. Natural sciences will discover that this truth complies absolutely with the scientific results.

I point only to the fact that the nerve cells are not divisible, for example, while the reproductive cells are divisible. The typical abilities of the growing cells have just been diminished in the nerve cells and in the red blood cells for the same reason. No plant-like growing corresponds in the body to the conscious life but destructive processes. So that—where in us conscious life should develop—the bodily life must be deleted first.

Spiritual science recognises the soul life in its independence. With it, the concept of freedom gets a sense only, and it becomes completely compatible with the concept that natural sciences develop completely rightly in their area, with the concept: that our organism causes everything that appears in our actions, in our will impulses. These scientific mental pictures exist completely rightly.

Nevertheless, the organism just causes,—just because it serves as basis of the consciousness—that it annihilates its processes that it withdraws compared with the conscious processes. With it, the concept of freedom gets sense that we can characterise possibly in the following way with a comparison: the child is physically a result of the parents; but it goes adrift from the parents. If we look for the causes, we have to search them with the parents. However, if the child has grown up and acts independently, we cannot always ascribe its actions and that what it is to the parents. If the child carries out this or that, after it is thirty years old, we do not ascribe the causes to the parents. Thus, the spiritual life goes adrift from the bodily life, so that the law of the conservation of energy is accomplished after any causality. However, as with the child the cause is in the parents, and the child grows up and becomes independent, the soul life evolves into the independence from the body in which are the causes of the soul life.

With it, I have pointed out comparatively how the concept of freedom receives a sense, while we do not explain this soul life from the bodily conditions, but from the independent spiritual life that goes through births and deaths. We can ascribe freedom to this spiritual-mental being. Freedom was philosophically treated always in such a way that one spoke of either-or: either the human being is free, or he is not free. I have already shown in my Philosophy of Freedom that one copes with the concept of freedom if one envisages the independent soul life. However, this independent soul life is only gradually gained in the course of the physical human development. One cannot say that the human being is either free or is not free. One can only say that freedom is something that the human being acquires in the course of his development that he approaches it more and more. He approaches it, while he supplies the forces to the internal spiritual-mental being, which strengthen it in such a way that it can develop causality for the human action, for the human will.

This is a weird contradiction, isn't it? On one side, one states that from the body between birth and death everything has to come that the human being puts into his action; on the other side the independent free soul life is claimed.

I would like to bring to mind again by a comparison what it concerns. Let us assume that we have an air-evacuated container. The air flows into it if we open this container.

The free human decision is related in this way to an intended action. The following will already turn out by spiritual research: if the human being does not follow the impulses of his instincts, but that what I have called the purely spiritual impulses in my Philosophy of Freedom to which he has to bring himself. Then he does not let that willing immediately take place which originates from bodily causes. Indeed, the free action also takes place in such a way that bodily causes are there. However, these bodily causes are first prepared in such a way that the free concept, the free mental picture spiritually creates a void as it were, and the effect on our body follows that action which is completely conceived by our soul. As the air streams from without into the void after purely natural causes, the body carries that out according to its laws, which are now purely scientific ones, what was prepared only in it, while the free soul decision created the basis.

Tomorrow we will build on this concept of freedom, and then I will still explain it further. I wanted to show how the concept of freedom is only conceivable if one rises by spiritual research to that soul life which is independent of the bodily life. The free action only originates from the Intuitive, Inspired, and Imaginative parts of the human being.

What arises from spiritual science for the social-moral concepts that are for our tragic present of so big significance what arises for legal concepts, for the outer social life, I want to explain tomorrow. Today I only wanted to show that anthroposophy can absolutely compete concerning the seriousness and the precision of its research with natural sciences. However, I also wanted to show that for the spirit quite different ways must be taken that spiritual research itself throws its light also on nature that the whole spiritual-mental human being is assigned to the whole physical human being, his nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism. Just because spiritual science will work with natural sciences in harmony, something great will arise for the progress of humanity.

Today one often likes to refer to Goethe. I have said in the last talk here that I would like to call my spiritual science “Goetheanism” and the building in Dornach “Goetheanum.”

The young Goethe already looked at nature not as anything that can be exhausted by such mental pictures as the modern monistic or similar worldviews have them. However, Goethe already appealed as a young man to nature in his prose hymn Nature: “She has thought and is continuously reflecting.” Spiritual science does not at all struggle for words. If anybody wants to call that “nature” what consists of matter and spirit in the world and looks for the spirit in nature only, then he may call the whole universe “nature.” If he goes so far like Goethe saying: “Nature thinks and is continuously reflecting”—even if not as a human being, but as nature, then already the concept of spirit is included for such a thinker like Goethe in the concept of nature.

To those who would like to derive from this recognition of the concept of nature that the Goethean view is consistent with any view of the limits of knowledge that one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world one has to answer repeatedly as Goethe did to the very meritorious physiologist Albrecht Haller (1708-1777) who was absolutely right from his viewpoint saying:

“No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.

Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

Goethe protested against this naturalist. By his protest, he made clear that the human being can find those cognitive forces in himself that do not put the spirit as something unfathomable to him, but as something into which he can enter gradually with industrious, exact spiritual research. Since Goethe argued in old age against Haller's words on basis of a matured knowledge:

O you Philistine!

Do not remind me

And my brothers and sisters

Of such a word.

We think: everywhere we are inside.

“Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,

I grumble about it, but covertly,

I say to myself thousand and thousand times:

She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;

Nature has neither kernel nor shell,

She is everything at the same time.

Examine yourself above all,

Whether you are kernel or shell.

These words make us aware of the true Goetheanism, which acknowledges the possibility to penetrate with the human mind into the spirit of the universe and to recognise the immortality and freedom of the human nature.

Tomorrow, I would like to speak how necessary it is for our practical life to envisage such social ideas that originate from spiritual research to show that spiritual research is an uninvited guest only for those who attribute no other needs to the human being than those, which can be satisfied with the mechanistic knowledge. If one still gets to know other needs of the human being, one will also recognise the necessity of spiritual research in the social-moral area.

A basic quality of anthroposophy is the pursuit for ideas, for mental pictures, for concepts of the world that are rooted in reality in a much deeper sense than the concepts, mental pictures and ideas of the scientific worldview are. Indeed, this could seem very weird at first, because many people believe that these scientific mental pictures are rooted very deeply in reality.

However, even if one disregards what I have brought forward in the three talks I held here this year and only looks at that which reasonable naturalists have brought forward concerning what natural sciences have to say about the being of the events of nature, one will get the insight that also such natural scientists are clear to themselves that with the usual scientific ideas one cannot penetrate into the being of reality. How much just natural scientists have spoken about the limits of the scientific knowledge! I have brought forward the typical fact in the first talk that one of the most significant disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), published a basic book during these years where he shows that one cannot come close anyhow to the being of the life phenomena just with the scientific concepts, which celebrated the greatest triumphs in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As long as it concerns penetrating only into the being of nature, these limitations of the scientific images do not at all appear. Nevertheless, they appear if the human being wants to apply the soul forces that he uses to scientific cognition also to the moral-social life. What is maybe a mere error or a mere one-sidedness in natural sciences—if it is taken as a basis of the moral-social life—becomes injurious, causes minor or major disasters. One of the biggest disasters is that, in which we live during these years.

As peculiar as it will appear to somebody: someone who is able to grasp the things in their deeper coherence gets clear about that what happens now as such tragic events is associated with the inadequate moral-social ideas which prepared themselves since centuries and which showed to advantage in particular in the nineteenth century. The mere science, the mere knowledge, the mere theory corrects in painless way if inadequate concepts are inserted in it. Reality corrects at pains and disasters if actions are inserted in it, which arise from inadequate knowledge and penetrating reality.

Now we will get to apparently remote mental pictures if we want to apply the anthroposophic spiritual science to the moral-social life, remote only because they still appear very strange to the present habitual ways of thinking because of the prejudices with which one is coming up to meet them. I must take the starting point from calling attention to the fact that the consideration of the human being has become relatively one-sided just under the influence of the modern world view, so that, actually, also far-sighted naturalists attempt to penetrate not only into the pure physical side of the human being but into his whole nature.

Since only if his whole nature is considered, it can become reality in the social-moral life, can any influencing control work salutarily on the social-moral life.

It could now seem weird if anybody says, for the whole consideration of the human life it is necessary that one not only considers how the human being is active in the wake day life but that one has also to regard the other side of life, the dream life, to take the whole human being into account.

Reasonable naturalists even attempt today to come close to this dream life, while they want to consider the subconscious. However, already in case of the consideration of dreams it becomes obvious that such attempts work with inadequate cognitive means because they want to refrain from anthroposophy.

What spiritual science can show with its means leads us to the cognition that this sleep-dream life flows into the whole life of the human being much more intensely than one believes in the one-sided scientific consideration. I have to foreground a sentence which seems paradoxical even today to most people which will been corroborated, however, more and more if one goes over from abstractions to realistic concepts.

I could give a comparative psychology of the sleep of plants, of animals, of the human beings, it would turn out that it is more difficult to spiritual science than to the one-sided scientific consideration because it cannot take simple concepts as starting point and cannot encompass the whole world with them. As death of the plants, animals, and human beings is something else to the spiritual researcher, the sleep, the dream life of animals and that of human beings is different to spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds out for itself with its means that we can have our ego-consciousness only because we experience the sleep and the wake consciousness alternating in such a way as we experience the sleep as human beings. It is a trivial view that the human being must sleep because he is tired. However, already the consideration of a pensioner who visits a talk or a concert and who is most certainly not tired, but falls asleep after the first five minutes, proves adequately by experience that the theory of tiredness is most certainly not true. Only that will understand sleep who understands it as an internal rhythm as it must penetrate life and as we got to know such a life rhythm yesterday as one of the members which correspond as bodily tools to the soul being.

The human being has to spend his life as it were,—as well as the single tone can never be music but only in the interaction with other tones the impression of a melody or harmony can originate—in such a way that life condition interacts with life condition and an interaction takes place in time. Rhythmical events must form the basis of the soul life. Rhythmical events are also that which in the alternating conditions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking takes place fact.

One normally believes to understand this sleeping and dreaming condition if one considers it in such a way as it presents itself to the usual observation. However, just if one considers it in such a way, one will never get a real view of the nature of dream or sleep. Only if one can envisage the everlasting essence of the human being, one will also be able to recognise that—if the human being withdraws from the wake day life if he falls asleep and dreams—that then in him that is even more active which belongs to his everlasting being, than while awake. Save that the human being, as he is in the present world period, has developed little of this everlasting. If this everlasting does not have the basis of the bodily life as in the wake day life, if this everlasting is on its own as in sleep, that appears in this everlasting which points, indeed, to conditions that are different from those which proceed between birth and death, but points to them in such a way that the immediate perception, the immediate consideration cannot prove its nature at all.

Hence, spiritual science shows that the nature of dream, for example, is misunderstood in manifold way. One misunderstands it; one interprets dreams in the old way superstitiously if one considers the contents of a dream and is of the opinion that the dream may be prophetic. However, one also misunderstands the nature of the dream if one as an enlightened person smiles only at those who regarded something as prophetic in a dream.

Spiritual science shows that it is true that something prophetic is in the dream. In the dream that being works in us which is associated with our future in such a way that it still encloses that in us what we carry through the gate of death. The forces of our everlasting soul work prophetically in the dreams. The pictures of the dreams are memories of the past. One may say, the nature of the dream is falsified because the human being is not able to work really with that what works in the dream as his being. He dresses what he cannot realise in the pictures, which his body, certain sensory reminiscences, certain memories give him from the past life.

All that falsifies the dream and is a mask of the dream. As well as it is superstitious to think of the pictures, which appear in the dream, a healthy kernel is contained in the superstition that the dream has something prophetic. However, this prophetic cannot appear in the usual observation of the dream. The dream is just something exceptionally significant, considered spiritual-scientifically.

However, the important is something else; it is that one is of the trivial opinion that the human being lives and dreams at a certain time and at another time he is awake, fully awake. Spiritual science shows that this is a wrong opinion. The state of dreaming, of sleeping does not stop if we awake; these states continue into our wake day life; the wake day life drowns them only. This wake day life, the imagining, is as it were a bright light that outshines what remains subconscious. However, while we feel our wake day consciousness flowing in our soul, a continual dream life and sleep life penetrating the whole awake life flows subconsciously in us. We dream if we add feelings, affects, or passions to the clear mental pictures. I have pointed out in the first talk that that which spiritual science searches as coherent, was always found by single outstanding persons like with flashes and I have pointed to the great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). When he wrote his article about Volkelt's book The Dream Fantasies, he pointed out that nobody who does not understand the emotions, passions, and affects understands the nature of dream. However, one called Vischer a spiritist because of this assertion. Thus, we keep on dreaming in the usual life. Save that the pictures of the dream if we have awoken do no longer appear but that what proceeds now as feelings, affects and passions appears with the same degree of reality in us as the dream does.

In the feelings, affects, and passions lives also what lives in the imagining. Nevertheless, it lives in it in such a way as the mental pictures live in the dream. However, if we develop a feeling, a passion, we do not become aware of the pictures that form the basis as they form the basis of the dreams, but we become dreamily aware of the feeling, of the passion.

Similarly, the sleep in the wake consciousness forms the basis of the will. Why were there discussions repeatedly in the course of the spiritual human development about the nature of the will, about the free will? Why have the philosophers never agreed how actually the will lives in the human being, whether as a free or as a not free one? Because the usual wake day consciousness oversleeps that which happens in the will.

Although our mental pictures are clear during the wake day consciousness, we oversleep the real process of willing. In this will, something deepest of the human being lives, but one is not immediately aware of it.

Spiritual science now shows that it sees with the beholding consciousness into the supersensible world. With the levels of Imaginative and Inspired knowledge, it penetrates into that world which exists for the usual consciousness only in the chaotic dream world. To the human being with the usual consciousness that only emerges as distorted dreams from the world of the everlasting which works beneath the outer sense-perceptible. With the Imaginative knowledge, with the Inspired knowledge spiritual science fetches the true figure of that which lives and weaves in these undergrounds. With the Intuitive knowledge it fetches what one oversleeps otherwise, what the darkness of the consciousness covers completely.

However, you learn from it that in the human life not only that prevails what one can overview with the usual wake consciousness, but that in the human life—because dream and sleep also penetrate the wake day life—that prevails what is real, what for the usual wake consciousness is not accessible what one can only grasp with the beholding consciousness as concepts, as mental pictures. Hence, let us look at the social human life as it should be enclosed with the social, moral, political concepts and we discover that something lives in the human life that is only dreamt that is even overslept.

This is the secret of the social life and of the historical life; this is the secret of the moral-social existence. With the concepts, which come up from the habitual ways of scientific thinking and which belong completely only to the usual wake consciousness, one cannot grasp history, with these mental pictures one cannot grasp the moral-social life.

Yesterday I have pointed to the fact that spiritual science should bring back something to the human being that he has lost. For centuries, for millennia there were instinctive impulses the awareness of which spiritual science has to generate. It is interesting to envisage the intervention of modern natural sciences from this viewpoint of the human development. If one asks for these modern natural sciences and their significance only in such a way as one often does today, one gets to a completely wrong concept. One always assumes that these natural sciences have originated in such a way because just the concepts that they give correspond to reality. Someone who has insight in the matters knows that the following view is true: anybody who stands firmly on scientific ground must be a sceptic at the same time because he knows that these scientific concepts correspond to truth only superficially. These scientific concepts did not appear in the human evolution because the human being was silly and childish for millennia, as many people believe, but they have originated for a quite different reason.

If one looks back in time where one recognised nature and spirit more instinctively, the human being had concepts on one side that he applied to nature in such a way that he spoke of events of nature, of the being of nature, as if these were also something mental; and if he spoke of his soul, materialist mental pictures interacted.

Even in our words “spirit” and “soul” are still materialist mental pictures if we know these concepts historically to a T. The human being has still grown together with nature so that he did not distinguish his mental exactly from nature. The recent historical development means that the human being has gone adrift from the natural existence. Just, therefore, he has formed such concepts of nature as they show the contents of the modern scientific thinking that do no longer contain anything mental. To attain such a developmental level, the human being has developed these scientific concepts for his sake. Not because this is the only saving truth to which one got finally, but because the human being could get to a certain level of freedom, of self-determination only because he has got free from nature and has formed concepts which should enclose nature and which can give the soul nothing.

If the human being has such concepts of nature, one has to draw his attention all the more to own forces of his inside to which we have pointed yesterday. Then his self-consciousness can only awake in right way. We live in a transitional condition. Natural sciences will generate a spiritualistic conception of the soul life.

The scientific materialism has the big merit, because it divests nature of any mental to lead the human being to a high level of self-reflection.

If one looks at the development of modern natural sciences in such a way, they seem to be created for an “education of the human race” in the sense of Lessing. Then the scientific concepts have been developed so that the human being has no longer to ensoul nature mystically, as in former times, but that he gets free from any mental in the view of nature, but that he has to fetch that from the depths of his being which spiritualises this mental. Then one may regard the entitled materialism of natural sciences as something great.

One only defames anthroposophy if one says that it is anyhow in conflict with natural sciences. On the contrary, it points to the big, significant role that the scientific development has in the educational process of the human race. However, what appears as scientific mental pictures is just not adapted to grasp the moral-social life, it is not adapted to form concepts, mental pictures, or ideas from which actions can arise in the moral-social life. That which the human being overviews as nature, he overviews it in the wake consciousness.

Not such impulses form the basis of the moral-social life, of the historical experience as the wake day consciousness has them for seizing nature, but such ideal impulses form the basis of it as they appear, otherwise, only in the dreams.

Thus, spiritual science gets to the weird result that the historical life, the social life of humanity cannot be encompassed by a soul being which has built up itself with natural sciences and wants to write history after the pattern of natural sciences, wants to consider sociology after the pattern of natural sciences. Which inadequate concepts has one attempted to understand the social life with the cognitive means of natural sciences!

One needs only to remember the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who wanted to enclose anything actual in which the human being lives, also the sociological configuration of humanity. He wanted to apply the concepts of embryology to the social life, to the configuration of the moral-social life: The embryo develops in such a way that one has to distinguish in its early state the ectoderm from which the nervous system evolves, the endoderm from which other subordinate organs evolve, and the mesoderm. From these three parts, the human embryo develops gradually. In the moral-social development, Spencer also distinguishes three impulses. He says, as in the natural development ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm exist, three parts exist in the social becoming of the human being. He wants to show: as the embryo has the ectoderm, the human being develops what is militarily and politically strong from the social ectoderm; that what works and practises agriculture from the endoderm; and the commercial class from the social mesoderm. There one has a parallelism between the ranks of the social-moral life and the layers of the embryo. It forms the basis of this view that because from the ectoderm the nervous system develops also from that what corresponds to the ectoderm in the social-moral life the most valuable must develop in the state. Hence, Spencer's worldview depends on considering the actually valuable class as the military one. In it the political higher life should develop. As the nervous life originates from the ectoderm, the political, the leading class should originate from the military. I do not keep characterising this strange view of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, I only want to point to it. I could still bring in many examples how one has tried to apply scientific mental pictures to the social life and to understand it with them.

However, the peculiar is that the old instinctive cognition that enclosed mind and body, matter and spirit at the same time was a not fully conscious cognition that bit by bit changed via the scientific purely external cognition of the dead into the higher levels of cognition to which spiritual science points today: to the Imaginative cognition of the beholding consciousness, to the Inspired cognition, to the Intuitive cognition. Scientific knowledge is only an intermediate stage between the instinctive cognition and the higher cognition that I have characterised in my books The Riddle of Man and The Riddles of the Soul. The beholding consciousness just disintegrates into the Imaginative consciousness that is the lowest level, the Inspired consciousness, a higher level, and the Intuitive consciousness, the highest level. It is typical only that for the consideration of the outer world the instinctive old cognition had to change into the scientific mental pictures. After this transition the other ways of spiritual knowledge will come. The social-moral life cannot have this transition. One has attempted it; but it cannot have it.

While skipping the scientific way of thinking the instinctive cognition of social-political ideas has directly to change into the conscious cognition of the same world, which is dreamt in the history and the social life of humanity. That which humanity dreams in history and in the social life can be only consciously recognised with the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. In this area is no transition from the instinctive consciousness via the scientific one to the Imaginative consciousness. It must become catastrophic if one wants to do this transition if one wants to insert such concepts that are formed after the pattern of scientific concepts into the social order. This happened in particular in the nineteenth century up to now. Scientific mental pictures work catastrophically if they transition into actions.

The transition from the old instinctive experience that used myths to the Imaginative cognition must be direct.

Thus somebody may ask mockingly: hence, one is not allowed to believe that one can master the social, moral life with the scientifically oriented concepts, but one can penetrate this social-moral life only salutarily if one realises that one has to deepen the concepts spiritual-scientifically?

Somebody may mock; he may close his eyes to the big signs of our disastrous time. However, it is in such a way. As well as already some people begin to take notice of spiritual science, which has a say if it concerns the configuration of reality, there will be more and more people who realise that one has to turn to spiritual science if one needs lively concepts for the moral-social existence. That is why, spiritual science has not appeared in our time from arbitrary agitation in favour of single people but because of deeper historical necessities.

We do not need to point to less significant personalities if we want to envisage that which we consider here. History as the science of the moral-social life is not yet very old. One believes that it is an old science. In reality it is, as well as it is practised today, hardly hundred years old. Everybody can convince himself of it. When history appeared, Schiller (Friedrich S., 1759-1805, German poet and writer) wanted to be one of the first teachers of history. Perhaps it may be good just to bring in a great personality as an example of that what is so often said that one can learn from history for the moral-social life of the human beings. How often does one hear from people, where every judgement is demanded about this and that what one has to feel under the influence of the tragic events: history teaches this, history teaches that.

Well, let us consider these teachings of history with one of the greatest: when Schiller started his professorship in Jena in 1789, he characterised a teaching of history that had arisen to him in the following way. Schiller said in his famous inaugural speech, it was the prelude of his historical lectures: “The community of European states seems to have changed into a big family. Their members may be hostile to each other, but do no longer tear each other to pieces, I hope.”

This is the lesson that even such a great man like Schiller drew from history! One has to consider that he spoke the words that should be prophetic in 1789!

How have the European peoples tortured themselves shortly after, and what does happen today again in this Europe! What a prophet was this historian, this genius Schiller?

Why is this that way? One could bring in many examples of the fact that a conception of history of such kind, as it is usual even today, gives nothing for life. Plainly and simply because one works in such a conception of history with mental pictures which are taken from the outer reality, the object of natural sciences. These concepts are not suitable to enclose history and the moral-social effectiveness what the human beings, as well as they are in life, only dream.

History is only dreamt. If we want to have concepts that can really intervene in history, in the moral-social life, they have to be scientifically clear, but the essentials should be that they grasp that clearly which appears from the usual consciousness only in the dreams of history and of the moral-social life.

I know that it is a paradoxical truth even today that people do not experience the historical development so that this experience works in concepts of the wake day life. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that truth. Then one will recognise of which kind the concepts, the mental pictures, the ideas and ideals must be which can master this life.

The art historian Herman Grimm (1828-1901) said more often to me in conversations, if one wants to have a historical consideration that really encloses the historical, then one cannot work with such concepts as the naturalist applies them, then one has to understand history with the creative imagination of the people. He said this because he still had no concepts of Imaginative cognition.—One has to take his starting point from that what remains in the subconscious as it were; one has to bring up this only into consciousness, but into a consciousness that is different from the usual one. A notion of that what is true in this area formed the basis of Grimm's intuition.

That is why someone is very much wrong who believes to be able to encompass history or the social-political life with the concepts that developed with the scientific thinking. Since someone who figures the things out knows, for example, that the most sure means to ruin a community in relatively short time is a parliament, in which you put nothing but theorists, professors who think scientifically. Let it legislate, and then you will cause the decline of the community with such parliament. Since they will put nothing but concepts, nothing but ideas into reality that can have no reality in the historical, in the social-moral life, but must destroy this social-moral life.

Hence, the remark of Herman Grimm is very fine when he said, it is strange that the excellent historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) describing the first Christian centuries did not describe the advancing, growing Christian life but that he could only describe the decline of the old life with his concepts.—One cannot encompass the growing life with mental pictures of the wake day life but with mental pictures only which originate from the dreaming consciousness.

In recent time, these things have become particularly important because just in the nineteenth century the scientific approach tried to start its campaign of conquest also in the historical, in the social-ethical life. Only few people braced themselves against it. In particular, socialism, which wanted to be scientific, supported the emergence of this thinking most consciously.

Socialism tried to put the social-moral ideas completely into the waters of scientific consideration. Just in the recent time this extreme way appeared to consider the social-moral life only from the viewpoint of material interests, class conflicts, impulses of surplus value et cetera as it happened with Marxism.

Spiritual science does not take the view that one has to deal with either—or everywhere, but that concepts show one-sidedness as a rule. I have often enough used the comparison: if the spiritual researcher advances to concepts, so that he regards them as images of the real from different sides like four photographs of a tree from four sides, one can describe the world from a pantheistic, theistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic viewpoint.

One realises the true meaning of these things only if one looks at them as one-sided images of reality that can never enter into abstractions, but only into the living oneness with itself. Hence, you must not understand what I want to say now in such a way, as if I wanted to condemn everything lock, stock and barrel that has come up under the influence of the socialist thinking. I would not dream of that. Since this view has brought much valuable things, and it has fought its way through hard enough.

Those who are the significant official bearers of the cultural life who have to keep watch that right concepts and images originate have simply rejected for decades what has come from this side until not only the scanty concepts of the older academic socialism, but the much more voluminous concepts of modern socialism have become socially acceptable.

Such things are beyond the spiritual-scientific consideration that does not advocate anything which wants only to face up objectively to the facts. However, one has to say that this approach of the recent socialism, in particular the materialist historical view, is scientifically oriented. What are they in truth?

To the spiritual researcher is that which, for example, Karl Marx (1818-1883) has shown with urgent logic an expression of that what humanity has dreamt in social-moral impulses during four centuries up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx described the impulses of the last three to four centuries. However, these impulses did not live in the wake day images, but humanity dreamt in its impulses, in its social, moral ideas. When actually the dream was already over when actually already a social-moral order had appeared as it was in the sense of the dreams of the last four centuries, Karl Marx wrote his books about what had already become a corpse from which one should awake. That what Karl Marx wanted to put as a program, lived in the time that was before, actually, even before he was there with his thoughts. However, reality demands that now—skipping the scientific way of thinking—the social-moral ideas are filled with the higher supersensible consciousness.

Once one could grasp this instinctively. Even that about which Karl Marx wrote was still dreamt instinctively. The new time can no longer venture to dream only to experience the social-moral ideas only instinctively; it must be able to immerse them into the Imaginative cognition.

One can say of any time if one wants to be trivial that it is a “transition period.” However, it concerns what transitions. In our time, the old instinctive cognition transitions into the conscious cognition.

In the area of the view of nature, our time has entered into the intermediate stage of natural sciences.

In the social it has to find the immediate transition from the instinctive social-political feeling of the old time as it existed, for example, in the Roman Law, it has to find the transition to the creative also where the moral-social ideas intervene immediately: in the area of education. With pure knowledge concepts, one can be neither a pedagogue nor a politician, nor anybody who participates in the creation of the social life at this or that place. A time will come where one will smile at the economics, at the sociopolitical theories as one smiles today if any theorist who is called an aesthetician writes how a right opera or symphony must be, a theorist who cannot compose who can only consider a symphony or an opera aesthetic-academically who cannot create out of Imagination. One would laugh if he put that as classic example.

As weird as it sounds even today: one will consider this way what appears as economics from mere concepts of the wake day consciousness, which turned out to be so inadequate. One will smile at it as an error that was comprehensible in the scientific age. However, one will overcome it if the consideration of the social-moral life is associated livingly with the supersensible reality that brings the supersensible into the legal life, into the spiritual life, which is penetrated by social love.

One can even give in detail that someone who wants to participate in the state-social design of a community can obtain a picture of a scientific consideration only which has something artistic which itself is artistic-creative. Not aestheticians, but composers have to create operas and symphonies. Not scientifically thinking theorists can find social concepts, but those who are penetrated with concepts that are out of this living that emerges, otherwise, only in the dream impulses, in the feelings, in the affects, and passions, and in the will itself.

The social design of any community can only arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That life which penetrates the social communities, that dream life, which flows from the human being in the love of a human being to his fellow man, where love becomes duty, can experience its outer configuration only in the community under the influence of Inspired concepts of the beholding consciousness.

The legal life is still the echo of old legal concepts even today and remains so dark to the scientific view about which one messes while one looks for all possible and impossible scientific psychological concepts of the recent time,. It will be able to become creative again if it is penetrated with Intuitive knowledge.

Really, it does not concern a few anthroposophic dreamers but human beings who should become able to put themselves powerfully into life. It does not concern the foundation of single colonies of a few people who want to have a good time or to be vegetarians somewhere in a mountain area and lark about there, but this is why it concerns understanding the signs of time knowing what is really historically inevitable in the developmental course of humanity. Anthroposophy is not the hobby of single groups; anthroposophy is something that the spirit of our time demands.

Many educational rules will give way to the knowledge that one can find spiritual-scientifically from nature, from the being of the human being. The future pedagogues will have no preconceived rules. However, an understanding changing into immediate, recognising love with the growing human being will penetrate the pedagogue. He will learn things quite different from theoretical education; he will learn to stand in the full life. Hence, he will also cope with any individual being. One will understand how freedom and necessity penetrate each other in life.

One understands that the moral-social life, considered scientifically, would be in such a way, as if I had three objects here. I light up the first object; then I light up the second object, the first one gets dark; now I let the second object getting dark and light up the third one. I pursue this. While I pursue this and say, the first object was lighted up, that is the cause of the light of the second one; the second one is the cause of the light of the third one. Such an illusion, as if the first body which is lighted up from the outside worked as a cause of the illumination of the second one and the second as a cause of the illumination of the third. Such an illusion forms the basis of that historical approach which looks at the consecutive facts always as effects of the preceding facts. Thus, there is no causal coherence in the consecutive historical events as in nature. However, there is the fact that a common light illuminates the consecutive facts. One has to penetrate into this light with higher, supersensible knowledge.

What is good in natural sciences: to seize the things in detail, does not apply to spiritual. However, it does also not apply to the social-political life. To spiritual science, a description of the social-political life in detail would be as if a chess player just wanted to consider which moves he wants to do. He cannot carry out them, because this depends on the moves of the opponent. Nevertheless, one can still be a good chess player if he masters the rules of chess. One can stand his ground as a chess player. The same holds true if one wants to master life. Only in the realms of nature are defined laws. If one faces life, one has to have a skill that copes with this life. Then one must be always ready that anything of the wealth of life faces you as the opponent of chess faces the player.

Any child is like an opponent of chess to the teacher. Education will accept forms by which it makes the human being capable of life, able to penetrate into the nature of any single human being.

However, such a life in the social-political can arise only from a real cognition of that what is contained in the human lives and human beings what is dreamt there as history what is dreamt as social-political impulses. How much does one miss in this direction even today!

In spiritual science one has started studying since many years what is the nature of the Western European peoples, of the Central European peoples, of the East European peoples, which impulses really exist, how the different soul expressions are distributed geographically and historically, which impulses really exist. Only by the knowledge of the available impulses that Imagination, that Inspiration can originate which can enjoy life in the moral-social ideas, as they become prominent in the social life, in the legal life. I would like to point to a very promising start just here in Switzerland. Your fellow-countryman Roman Boos (1889-1952) has published a book about The Over-all Work Contract under Swiss Law, a book that grasps the nature of certain institutions and concepts available in the legal life for the first time.

However, one has done various attempts in the recent time to recognise from the mental-social being how the laws, how the impulses gradually take place. Thus, an American has written a very interesting book in which he wants to show that the peoples split up into two groups: One group are the ambitious, the progressive peoples, the others are the descending peoples. The American, Brooks Adams (Peter Chardon B. A., 1848-1927) describes the soul life of the ascending peoples in the following way: it arises from a basic soul quality, from the imaginative-warlike; so that the peoples who have future are gifted with Imaginative fantasy life and with warlike impulses. That is not my opinion but that of the American Brooks Adams. Those peoples who become decadent are the peoples with industry and science.

This is one-sided, of course. However, even these one-sided considerations show that one has already done the attempt to master life with really moral-social ideas. However, one cannot survey life with the concepts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences. One can survey it only if one penetrates into the supersensible depths of life. One can do this only with the beholding consciousness.

I could only give scanty indications. In single talks, I can only give suggestions, which is why one can easily disprove spiritual science. However, today spiritual science is not so happy to have countless chairs at disposal as the other sciences have. This will also come. Spiritual science can only give suggestions also concerning the social-moral ideas.

If one surveys everything at last that I have brought forward sketchily today, I would let culminate it, while I show that the community must develop under the influence of vivid moral-social ideas also in such a way that the human being can develop as a whole in this community. However, to his whole being belongs what I have explained yesterday: the independent, everlasting being about which I have said yesterday that in it the idea of freedom lives.

The highest social-moral idea is the idea of freedom. No community will realise it in itself, which does not take its starting point from supersensible ideas. Since the supersensible can only prosper where the creation of the community originates from supersensible impulses, sensations, concepts, mental pictures. The mental pictures of the usual day consciousness do not work in that life in which the social-moral ideas work. If the human being wants to work in this life, he must work into this moral-social life with another member of his being.

One may say that the great persons of the past already realised with single light flashes what it concerned. As I have pointed to Goethe in another way at the end of the last talk I would like to point again to him today at the end. He did not yet have spiritual science. However, if he looked at the historical life and wanted to figure out what this social-moral life is, which embodies itself in history, he found strange words saying, the best we can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites.

How wonderful is such remark! I said that Friedrich Theodor Vischer stated that one could not understand the emotional life if one did not understand the dream.—Goethe looks at the history of humanity, at the historical dream. He knows instinctively, intuitively that humanity is dreaming, while it lives history that the historical impulses do not enjoy life in the mental pictures but in that which enjoys life in the dream sphere of the historical experience. That is why, the best we have from history is not that “fable convenue” which you read in the history books and which we regard usually as history which gives, however, nothing but the corpse of that which develops as the stream of humanity in the social-political development.

Goethe knows: not that which you read in the history books is that which the human being has as best from history, but that which can be associated with this dream of history, as a creative quality: enthusiasm. With it, he pronounced a big truth from one side apprehensively, which must work reforming if humanity wants to overcome the catastrophic events of the present.

However, this truth can be complemented on the other side, while one points out that one cannot intervene with sophisticated concepts after the pattern of scientific mental pictures anyhow fruitfully in the social-moral life, but with concepts which are connected with life much more intimately, as the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends them.

One needs something stronger than the not creative ideas in history: one needs enthusiasm. Everything that should cause that the social-moral life can develop must arise from enthusiasm. However, from a right enthusiasm which originates if one can recognise by the connection of the single human being with the supersensible human by Imagination, by Inspiration, and by Intuition.

As Goethe could say on one side that the best we have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites, the spiritual researcher would like to add that anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into the supersensible; it tries to recognise the everlasting, the immortal, and the elements of freedom in the human life. However, the best it wants to give humanity will be that it gives enthusiasm that can develop the moral-social life.

In this direction, I wanted to give some indications and suggestions with this last talk to show that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory, but a force that co-operates from the innermost impulses of life with the energetic human life that we need in this catastrophic time.

In this talk, I would like to give a picture of that what anthroposophy has to say about the most different areas of life and to start from some of its most significant results for the knowledge of the human soul life and its relation to the bodily life.

It seems that this psychology has to deliver the bases of the most important questions of life, of the boundary questions of existence. Since, nevertheless, one cannot deny that the present cultural life only accepts scientifically established knowledge. If one deals with the big riddles of the soul life today, one does not only ask this or that denomination, but approaches the world riddles also scientifically. That is why one will also ask psychology: what has psychology to say about birth and death of the human being? What has it to say about the relation of the transient to the everlasting of the human being?

However, one has to say,: when soul science which is acknowledged even today by tradition has turned to the modern thinking, this modern soul science got more or less into cloudy waters. If one speaks of modern psychology, one has to remind of a psychologist, the late Franz Brentano (1838-1917) who wanted to dedicate his life and investigations to the knowledge of the soul life in the last third of the nineteenth century. When he published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, he said something strange. He said that one has to take a new way with reference to the soul knowledge which can justify itself towards natural sciences. Tomorrow should be talk of the fact that the way which is discussed here in this talk can justify itself towards natural sciences.

Franz Brentano attempted to approach the soul life with the same methods and way of thinking which one uses in natural sciences. Then he said, in course of time the soul science has solely considered imagining, feeling, willing, memory, attention, love, hatred, and the like. Modern natural sciences have brought to light all sorts of things, but it seems as if by the scientific way of thinking and methods psychology does not get to the big hopes—as Franz Brentano says—which already Plato and Aristotle had: the hope to gain a view of the everlasting of the human being by psychology.

That is why Franz Brentano means: if one can give ever so precise information how mental pictures follow each other how they associate in the soul with each other how they associate with feelings and will impulses, nevertheless, it is impossible to get to the real boundary questions of the soul life. Nevertheless, Franz Brentano still hoped in those days to be able to get to a psychology finally by applying scientific-methodical research that grants views into these boundary questions of existence.

The noteworthy fact is that Franz Brentano, when he published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, which was intended for three to four volumes, the next volume should already appear in the autumn of the same year and the following volumes should be published within a short time. However, nothing appeared. I have told this fact already here.

That who gets involved with the special course of development of Brentano will discover that this serious researcher could not continue this work not for outer reasons but for inner reasons. That who pursues his following articles and books will realise how this man did attempts repeatedly to penetrate deeper into the soul life, and how they failed repeatedly. Somebody who looks for an answer from the different experiences which one can do, if one approaches modern psychology, finds that Franz Brentano, as well as his whole school and almost all the other psychologies shy away from entering into a real spiritual science.

Just in scientific circles, one shrinks from giving psychology a quite different face if it should be effective again for the human being. You receive a feeling if you open yourself to the psychological literature today that in this psychology even today always mental pictures prevail, as they were used since centuries.

Psychology has not changed much of these mental pictures. In the area of natural sciences, however, something has changed, and psychology has not kept abreast of this development up to now. Only a superficial consideration of this development can ignore the most essential that quite different thoughts and ideas prevailed. One does not want to admit this. One does not want to realise even today that concepts and ideas have changed thoroughly. However, the change has only taken place in the scientific area up to now.

At first, I would like to characterise this change in such a way: one had certain mental pictures once by which one could enclose the soul life and the physical life outdoors, so that they satisfied the demands of that time. One applied the same mental pictures that one applied to the phenomena of nature also to the human soul life. Soul life and physical life were not yet so separated as they are today by the advanced natural sciences. Natural sciences themselves have sorted things out in their area. They have demanded new mental pictures by strictly scientific observation methods, in particular by art of experimenting.

Psychology has stopped mostly at the old mental pictures. That is why that which psychology offers today is strictly speaking not after something objective, but appears only as word. Mental pictures, feelings, will impulses, memory, attention, even love and hatred: indeed, one can feel that they are realities in our soul life. However, in the scientific psychology one has empty phrases for it that do no longer correspond to that which must be demanded from true science today.

Just as natural sciences had to advance to new concepts and ideas for three to four centuries, and in particular, in the nineteenth century, psychology has to advance if it does not want to remain infertile. It has to take the plunge to new starting points.

I do not want to keep up you to show how just with that what one calls thinking, feeling, and willing in psychological books does not give you anything real. I want to point to the fact only that just thereby psychology has missed its real vocation.

You all probably know that if the human being looks at those big boundary questions of existence he seldom observes the academic psychology that should give some indication of that. He does not find anything in it. He finds all sorts of, I would like to say, little portrayals, how a mental picture associates with another mental picture, how mental pictures evoke other mental pictures et cetera, but he does not find what interests him, actually. One does not want to admit in this area that just the scientific thinking if it gets along with itself does not get further in psychology that it reaches an impasse, it gets to mere empty phrases.

However, this would be the first negative step so to speak to get to a real psychology. Spiritual science follows this way. It tries to get things straight concerning the kind of the scientific mental pictures. While it positions itself positively to the scientific research, it becomes able to recognise that that research breaks off as it were if one wants to grasp the soul life. One can grasp this soul life only if one resorts to a completely transformed thinking, generally to a transformed inside. Maybe it will still last long, until in more human beings this internal boldness awakes to prepare their whole inside in order to behold into the soul. Nevertheless, if soul science should originate again in a promising and fertile way for the human beings, this step is necessary.

I will explain the details of the spiritual-scientific soul research in the tomorrow's talk. Today I want to mention only how from two sides spiritual science tries to prepare the inside of the human being in such a way that it can really behold into the soul life. One side is a special development of thinking, of imagining. One forms a quite wrong idea of spiritual science if one believes that it deals with any spiritistic or mystic method. This spiritual science will prove to be the clearest which someone can find in science today who really wants to penetrate into it. Above all it concerns of strengthening the imagining, the thinking. It concerns that we only carry out the thinking as it were as a concomitant of life and research in the usual life and in the usual science.

We open ourselves to everything in the outer life that works on the senses. We also open ourselves to that in science, which enables us to observe by experiments. We let the thoughts be inspired which lead us to the physical principles. The thoughts that originate as it were only accompanied by the outer life in the soul just prove to be insufficient if you want to behold into the soul life. They lead to nothing.

You have to experience that at first. Hence, it concerns of projecting yourself in the imagining life in such a way that you imagine solely, so that you find out internally how it is, actually, if you only think, only imagine. It is completely irrelevant what you imagine. It concerns only that—tomorrow I speak about the further details—you do this imagining and this thinking in such a way that you dedicate yourself to it meditatively. So that you just experience in this thinking what you cannot experience, otherwise, that the inside of the human being attunes itself if it follows a bare thought, if it is an imagination thought, if it is a thought taken from without.

If you really experience the thinking internally as methodically as you experience, otherwise, the outer phenomena which present themselves, then you experience something that must touch a modern human being in strange way, just if you have tried to deal with the psychological views which have come down.

Someone who settles in the meditative thinking comes into conflict with the most approved views that originated from Augustinism at first, that have gone over then to Descartes that also haunt in the present soul anew and that have slipped in any thinking which approaches the soul with old methods, with old thinking.

A proposition goes like a motto through the entire modern philosophy. This is the proposition by Descartes “cogito, ergo sum.” “I think, therefore I am.” Augustine said this already. It is that to which the thinkers have come who said to themselves: well, if the outer world presents itself to us, maybe it deceives us, maybe everything is illusionary that eyes and ears manifest to us, which cause them. There is one certainty, Augustin already said which is directly experienced, and this is the fact that I think. Since if I also doubt everything that the world manifests to me, nevertheless, I must just doubt, that is I think. Hence, I am in my thinking myself. If I doubt, I think; therefore I am, cogito, ergo sum.

I do not say all that because I possibly believe that philosophical views control the thinking of many persons or because I believe that that which the modern human being thinks about the soul is an outflow of that what these philosophers said. No, but because that what these philosophers have said is just a reflection of that what humanity has thought through centuries. Not that the human beings have learnt to think from the philosophers, but the philosophers have used concepts that the human beings knew that are to be driven from the field by the methods to which modern spiritual science has to point. This modern spiritual science, while it urges the human being to experience the thinking independently makes him realise: the more one thinks, the more one continues that with the mere thinking what one has, otherwise, only as a concomitant of the outer life, the more one comes just into unreality; not into the reality of the inner life. Before one does not acknowledge the proposition “I think, therefore I am not,” one will not get to real psychology.

It is necessary to take the step to a real psychology in such radical way that one puts an end to the view: “I think, therefore I am”—and can bring himself to realise, if we start with the thinking lively internally, we go away from the real being: I think, therefore I am not. You learn to recognise that if you put yourself more and more in the thinking; while you just strengthen the thinking, you find out: while I think, I cease being.

Actually, sleep would already disprove the proposition I think, therefore I am. Since in sleep we do not think in the sense of Augustine or Descartes, also not in the sense of Bergson or similar philosophers. Well, this is the first: taking the step to realise the unreality of the inner experience with thinking.

The second is that it is something dreadful, actually, for every human being who takes these things seriously that, while he wants to advance to the so-called self-knowledge, thinking just leads him to nothingness. Then from the second side one has to support the spiritual-scientific method. While the meditative life cultivates the thinking, the will must be cultivated on the other side. We recognise the will, actually, if we get any relation to the outside world. As well as we have the thinking more or less as a concomitant of the outer observation or of the scientific researching, we have the will as a concomitant of our acting: we experience it if we are active outside. Besides, something escapes from our observation where the will plays a quite significant role. We live in time. We all look back to the time of our birth and know that it last some time until death. We live in time. However, we live not only in time; we develop in time. That who can eye his inside calmly knows that with the help of his body, with the help of education and other means he himself works on his transformation, on his development.

We are different in every period of life, and we always work on our changing. This inner work is necessary to practise self-discipline. That means that self-education does not only take place unconsciously, but that one has to work with those methods consciously on his transformation. Thereby you recognise that this conscious transformation is a quite essential work in the will. You get to know, actually, the will if you take charge of your self-discipline.

However, this gives the soul life certain forces from two sides with which you can gain quite different starting points of a psychology than they exist generally up to now. Above all: someone who has sharpened his thinking in such a way as it is meant with these methods can consider the whole course of life different. Then only he is able to observe the former soul life really which accompanies us always. Then he can understand certain moments in this soul life and focus on them really, what, otherwise, you do not manage with any concept but with those mental pictures and soul impulses that one develops in such a way as I have stated. They can reach the inner soul life. While all the other concepts try in vain to grasp the mental.

Then one also acknowledges the unreality of our being while imagining. This is the first step that one knows that imagining is not real. As much as modern psychology may collect with the old means from the mental pictures, as much as it wants to rest upon the proposition “I think, therefore I am,” it never gets any mental reality from the thinking because we do not exist while we think because we can find that only in the thinking, which is not real with us. The unreality of thinking is the first that the human being recognises if he is able to strengthen his thinking if he wants to discipline his will.

If one looks at the feeling which psychology wants to observe, one is not able to do it. Why is that?—Just someone can answer that question who has investigated the imagining and willing as I have described. He learns to recognise that the feeling, observed with usual means, appears confused. There the unreality of thinking, here the confusion of feeling.

A third one is particularly clear if one takes such ways as I have described them: the incomprehensibility of the will. Unreality of thinking, confusion of feeling, incomprehensibility of willing.

You need only to take such books like that by Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950, neurologist, psychiatrist, Guide to Physiological Psychology. 1891), then you realise that just those who rest upon present scientific mental pictures in psychology can be blinded, isn't that so? At least they believe that one can understand something of thinking. Feeling is to them only nuancing the thinking. But the will escapes them completely. One realises that one acts. One assumes that something takes place. However, the usual concepts cannot look into that which the will really is.

One has to apply those forces that one has obtained with the mentioned methods also to the soul life. It is good to take the starting point from the feeling, not from the thinking, also not from the will. There it becomes obvious that you cannot understand the feeling if you envisage one single moment of the human life only. One can never understand that which I feel now if one considers this present feeling only. One can understand it only if one considers the Before and the After. Let me start from a concrete case.

Somebody sets himself the task to understand Goethe's feeling, for example, in 1790. One struggles, while one tries first to visualise how Goethe felt in 1790. How were his sensations nuanced to the world et cetera? If one has got ideas of it, one puts the question to himself: yes, how does this feeling of 1790 relate to his feeling 15 years ago, to his feeling after the next fifteen years?—One is urged to the right thing by the method that I have described. Finally, one is urged to look at his whole life. Psychology has to consider biographies from such a viewpoint, as I characterised it. Goethe's feeling in 1790 would have been generally incomprehensible, even to Goethe, in 1790. We only start understanding it, while we face his whole life.

If we study that carefully what manifested of Goethe's being between 1790 and 1832, we study that what worked on Goethe from his birth, in 1749 until 1790, and we try to consider Goethe's life in its effectiveness after 1790 in such a way as we are accustomed to refer scientific things to each other, to that what he experienced before 1790, then the special feeling nuance of 1790 arises. Everything that we feel at a point is an effect of our own future on our own past. One will study biographies this way in future! One will also face the single human being this way.

One will say to himself, it is strange that in that which expresses itself in the feeling already shows not only the impact of the future life, but also that of the whole past life. However, one will get the experience with such studies that some determination is necessary for such studies. Since it will belong to these methods, for example, to ask himself, how does develop the emotional life of those human beings who very soon died after that time at which one looks? There arises something very interesting for a study of the emotional life.

One will find out that that which lives in a human being in the immediate present is the pressure of his future on his past. We also have the confusion of the emotional life, the mysterious of the feeling life because we have kept the past in mind and the future is shrouded in darkness. If we deeper investigate the human being, then the next step is possibly that one also tries to familiarise himself with the imagining life. One asks himself, what imagines in the human being so that he imagines that he can resolve to have thoughts about this and that?—Nobody can answer that question who cannot observe the moment of awakening appropriately.

Just as a future psychology will not start from all sounding phrases which you now find about the feeling in the textbooks of psychology, just as a future psychology will also not start from the so-called observation of imagining, but will feel pressured into going back to a reality which is over for the usual life: the awakening. The awakening happens for the usual life at one moment. The human being goes from sleep to the wake life, and he seldom finds opportunity to bethink himself, in the jumbled way of awakening, how he has woken. However, even if he found it, he could not at all understand this with the usual imagining. He can understand it only if he soars such an image as I have described it as a result of the meditative thinking.

However, the human being stands there, I would like to say, at the abyss that he must realise something unreal in the imagining. On the other hand, this imagining is refined and strengthened. With it, the human being is only able to observe the moment of awakening.

The method, which spiritual science has in this area, enables the researcher to face such a moment in such a way as the naturalist faces the electrostatic generator or another apparatus or a phenomenon of nature. Then the moment of awakening appears to the strengthened or transformed imagining in such a way that one looks into it immediately and can say to himself, you emerge from a world that was interspersed with thoughts from falling asleep until awakening as your day life is interspersed with thoughts.

This is the great discovery that you can do. Indeed, you find tips with single psychologists everywhere that one says, even if one does not know that one dreams perpetually, one dreams perpetually. However, one not only dreams—this is the discovery, which the strengthened thinking accomplishes—, but one also learns to recognise that the wake consciousness is something else than to be filled with thoughts. This is looking at the thoughts that you have by day. You cannot look only at the thoughts that fulfil you from falling asleep until awakening because you forget that which you have experienced in sleep at the moment of awakening.

This is just an important moment where you start realising that you emerge from a life of thoughts that remains unaware to the usual consciousness, you emerge from a true sea of thoughts. Then another observation is connected with it.

Only if you can look at that sea of thoughts that also penetrate the soul if it does not have the day consciousness, you recognise why you know nothing of these thoughts in your day consciousness. Since you notice: at the moment of awakening you cannot take everything in the body what you have experienced in sleep. However, the body is the only tool of thinking. You must use the body. You cannot draw in what pervades your soul as night thoughts. The body is inappropriate to take them in.

If one has recognised which real process forms the basis there that one lives, indeed, during sleep in a spiritual world which cannot enter into the body which exists for itself—. it is just the typical that this world cannot enter—, then one can find the transition from this experience to the usual imagining and thinking.

Since the same takes place, only in pictorial way, if you get to a mental picture while you are dozing or observing the outside world. Thinking and imagining is nothing but a decreased awakening in relation to reality. We wake up if we grasp any thought. It will be the important of the new psychology that it realises that awakening not only exists if we rub our eyes in the morning from sleep, but we are awaking perpetually. Nevertheless, the force that controls our whole life just appears especially strong at the moment of awakening, in so far as we grasp mental pictures or thoughts. Thus, that force penetrates us perpetually which manifests in the awakening, in grasping thoughts.

However, thereby we also know that this grasping thoughts is correspondent to a world which cannot enter into the human organism. While we think, however, we have to reduce reality to pictures because our body urges us. Reality is not admitted at the moment of awakening. However, we also learn to recognise that we could not have these pictures of imagining unless in our body the spiritual reality existed. From there you gain the possibility, while you have progressed on one side by the awakening to the imagining, of going back from the awakening to an important moment of life, to birth, or we say, to conception. You have gained the possibility because you have awoken in yourself that soul force, which reveals that imagining is a perpetual awakening. If you have this soul force, it enables you to look back from the observation of awakening to that what one may call: entering into the physical-sensory world. About that, I want to speak more exactly in the third talk.

You learn from this fact that modern spiritual-scientific psychology is based on real observation that, however, it does not cause this observation with those observations that you already have, but with those concepts, which you have to form first. Besides, the important thing is just to acknowledge that we have pictorial existence in the imagining only and that the imagining must accept this pictorial character because the bodily life cannot directly accept the reality of the mental.

You learn to recognise that in the imagining the pictures of the whole antenatal spiritual-mental life take place, as well as at the moment of awakening the contents of thoughts appear to the soul which we have experienced from falling asleep until awakening. If we continue the observations methodically, the spiritual-mental experience appears independently which has combined with the bodily at the entry of the human being into this bodily life. There is on one side just a straight progress from the understanding of the moment of awakening to imagining. On the other side, you thereby get the ability to proceed from observing the awakening to the entry of the human being in the earthly life.

Of course, the modern human being says that he cannot realise those things that he cannot imagine them.—However, this is why it concerns just that you cannot familiarise yourself with these things with the usual imagining. This is the first great discovery that you have. You can observe the spiritual-mental life before birth or conception only if you appropriate other forces than those are which you already have.

You can recognise only by such a way, as I have indicated it, that the imagining is rooted in the spiritual. On the other side, this way also enables you to delve into the will. The will must be developed by self-discipline to another level than it has in the usual life. However, thereby something else comes about than by that which I have described up to now. Up to now, I have described the way to the mental pictures that extended the view beyond birth or conception, which leads on the other hand into the unreal of the imagining life. We get the certainty of the independence of that which reveals itself in imagining in the suggested way.

The matter becomes different if we more exactly get to know the will by self-discipline. In the meditative imagining, we make ourselves independent of the physical body. We notice this independence by the fact that the night thoughts, which the body cannot accept, transition into the consciousness that you behold how you emerge from a sea of thoughts.

Because you take charge of the will discipline, you feel more and more depending on the body. You get more and more into the body. You get to that which the outer science can never reach. It can only externally investigate the appearance of the inside, while it goes forward anatomical-physiologically. In internal way, you learn to recognise what goes forward, actually, in the body if anyhow a will impulse gains ground. It sounds extremely weird, but you get to know this bodily life in the will in such a way that you have the same experiences, which you, otherwise, only know possibly with hunger and thirst, with immediate feelings that are connected with the bodily activity.

Whereas the picture of imagining makes us more and more independent from the bodily life, the cultivation of the will induces you to experience the will really in such a way as you experience hunger and thirst. You get to the most significant feelings associated with the bodily life.

In particular, you learn to recognise how the thought that transitions in the will impulse cannot help expressing itself as something emotional with that who has developed the will as the inside expresses itself if you are hungry. As paradoxical it sounds: you experience a will thought with developed will by a feeling of hunger or thirst; you may call it as you want.

It concerns of realising the big difference between the development of the imagining life that makes us more and more independent from the nature of the bodily life, and the development of the will life that shows us, how we are connected in the usual existence just by the will with our bodily life.

But it also becomes obvious if this observation of the will really becomes internal experience like hunger and thirst that in this will something is that proves every time when a will impulse is grasped to be very similar to the moment of falling asleep. Now you learn also to recognise the secret of falling asleep, this peculiar transition to the unaware state. This is parallel for the observation with letting an impulse of thought in the will. The will decision which one grasps proves to be a kind of falling asleep that is started and not finished.

Now you get to know the opposite of that which you got to know with the development of imagining. With imagining, you find out that the spiritual-mental that you experience from falling asleep until awakening is not able to enter. That spiritual-mental which expresses itself in the will cannot leave the body with the usual waking state; it is stopped. This stopping expresses itself as the will power. If the body no longer keeps it, the moment of falling asleep occurs.

This will be the other starting point for the modern psychology: to find the coherence of will and falling asleep, of the inability to retain the spiritual-mental which then unites with the general universe by the human body, and falling asleep, as we have found the coherence of forming of mental pictures and the awakening in other way.

If you learn to recognise how falling asleep is intimately related to every will impulse, you get by the line which one has drawn in research between falling asleep and willing the internal mental force to continue the line to the other side. Because you have investigated the imagining, you got the possibility to look at the mental-spiritual beyond birth or conception. Thus you can investigate the other line in the oppose direction. You pursue the line of falling asleep up to the will. You find the relationship of the will impulse with falling asleep. Then you pursue the soul life after falling asleep with the inner power that you have thereby appropriated, and then the other side of the human existence, death, appears. Since then the intimate relationship of the will with death appears.

Natural sciences will make this important discovery in not too distant future; they will prove that what spiritual science has to ascertain from the other side. Since natural sciences will show that everything that is associated with the will impulses is associated with the formation of certain poisons, with everything that leads the human being into the same direction in which he is led if he walks towards death.

Those forces that enable the human being to unfold his will impulse are heading to death. How are they heading to death? If the imagining is a bare picture of its true reality, the will is something embryonic. We can will because we can keep a certain force in an embryonic condition.

If you imagine the seed of a plant and then the whole plant, you have the picture that you can apply to what spiritual research shows with reference to the will. Since the will is an embryonic death. Even as we awake perpetually, we are born perpetually if we think; we die perpetually if we activate our will. The force of death is in us, we lower it by the nature of our bodily life, we dismiss it for a short time while falling asleep, and the body can recover again. However, the force that we carry in us because we can unfold will impulses is the embryo of that force with which the soul walks through the gate of death.

Thus, the big boundary questions of life join the most usual mental pictures of imagining and willing. We look beyond the bodily life if we learn to understand imagining and willing. Imagining, feeling and willing have become empty phrases—about other concepts I speak in the following talk—because one does not get around to applying the real way of thinking of natural sciences, the way of observation, to the soul life.

About other things, I have to speak in the third talk. However, such mental pictures arise, which show that the feeling is a result of the whole life between birth and death, which show that imagining is a result of the life beyond birth or conception, which show that the will is the embryonic of that which we carry beyond death.

One gets to no real concept of imagining, feeling and willing if one does not start considering the whole life in such a way as I have described it today by which one gets beyond awakening and falling asleep to birth and death. However, I have to say that that thinking which is necessary to familiarise yourself with these things must have the courage to break with many things.

However, do not believe that someone who has come to such things which must rightly seem to be paradoxical, maybe foolish, to the human being of the present, especially to the scientist of the present, has not taken the matter seriously, if he experienced everything that the others also know who doubt it. Disproving this thing is easy.

I have attempted once in Prague with two public talks to disprove spiritual science at first and then to found it. Of course, disproving is much easier than founding. However, something else is much more significant. One would have to say to himself, actually, in particular in view of some things that have taken place in the very last time: spiritual science must retrain concerning many things, and not few people have forced themselves to retrain the one or the other in the last time. Must the outer compulsion induce people to retrain? Indeed, many people will retrain repeatedly by outer compulsion. However, it is a time today where it is necessary to practise a kind of self-reflection, which makes you realise that that which originates from scientific or other present mental pictures leads into the unreal in the soul. Only such an investigating of the soul forces as I have described it today can lead into the soul. You can get around to attaining that strength for this research from yourself only. On the other hand, just modern natural sciences will automatically lead somebody to spiritual science who understands the essence of natural sciences. Tomorrow I would just like to show this.

The spiritual-scientific psychology leads from the temporal of the human being to the everlasting of his soul. It will show that in future if people do not force themselves to walk on the intimated way no psychology will be there or only such a psychology that gives useless food to the soul. Energy and courage belong to this new psychology. Our time already points to the fact that now the treasures of the human inside cannot be won—while it puts the human being in an outer existence to which one will need some courage—by mere letting himself go but only by courageous advancing with such methods, which one has to search, which did not already exist.

Our contemporaries assess the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science mostly cursorily. One says that it offends the serious, conscientious method, the research way of the scientific worldview.

Indeed if spiritual science were not able to justify itself to the scientific worldview, one would have to condemn it. That is why this is one of the questions which must come up for discussion here today: how can the spiritual-scientific worldview be justified towards the present natural sciences?

Another similar prejudice that is connected, actually, intimately with the just mentioned one is that spiritual science leads to a dark mystic spiritual condition and worldview. From the today's considerations should arise that both prejudices are unfounded.

The whole way, which that research has to go through which leads to spiritual science, has to pass through two gates of knowledge above all. One cannot get into that what I mean here if one has not passed these two gates. One gate is that the spiritual researcher must really have experienced the complete scientific mindset and that he has had important experiences with this research. To most people who deal with natural sciences they are something that one has as knowledge with which one believes to be able to penetrate into these or those areas of existence.

For the spiritual researcher knowledge of nature must not remain this. For him it concerns that he has tried internally: which suitable or useless instruments are the scientific mental pictures if one wants to penetrate into the undergrounds of existence? He must have learnt as it were the handling of the scientific thinking and must have tried to apply this scientific thinking conscientiously in the most different directions whether it is good or not for penetrating into the outer nature.

Now one may say that in the area of natural sciences are personalities who dealt more or less consciously with the question: how far does the scientific research lead the human being with reference to the big riddles of knowledge?—I had repeatedly to remind of the famous speech of the great naturalist Du Bois-Reymond, to the famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature which he held in the seventies years and by which he wanted to demonstrate that just knowledge of nature must arrive at a certain border. Du Bois-Reymond explained in those days that, indeed, natural sciences can summarise the natural phenomena in certain laws and can find connections in the atomistic world behind these laws that, however, even if one imagined the ideal of this physical knowledge as fulfilled, one could never answer two boundary questions with it: what is matter?—and the other: what is even the simplest sensation, the simplest soul experience?

At these two questions, Du Bois-Reymond meant in those days, scientific consideration has to stop. Because he was of the view that scientific consideration is the only real academic one, he thought that the human being can never get to any knowledge concerning both questions, so also not to a knowledge of the human soul life and about that what is, actually, behind nature, that there are not only limits of the knowledge of nature but also limits of the human knowledge generally.

That what formed as judgement with Du Bois-Reymond and many others from a certain logical speculation the spiritual researcher has to transfer to life. The spiritual researcher must have experienced, as it were, all hopes and disappointments with the knowledge of nature. He must have opened himself to the knowledge of nature so that he attempted to overcome the obstacles of spiritual striving with it. He must have gone through the bitter experience that one just approaches, as strict and as conscientious this research is, certain points beyond which this knowledge of nature does not get. This experience must exist in the soul of the spiritual researcher.

He must have learnt to stumble against certain cornerstones with the scientific concepts that exist in nature. I could bring in many of such cornerstones. I could say the same what can be said about the concepts of energy and matter, for example. One recognises that one does not penetrate with the same methods, with the same way of thinking with which one penetrates successfully into the chemical side of nature into that which as matter and energy causes the phenomena and processes of nature. One stumbles, so to speak, against energy and matter. Finally, one has to confess: the more suitable the scientific mental pictures are in the accessible areas, the more they become unsuitable for these cornerstones.

I would like to say if one has experienced enough with these attempts, one gets to a certain questioning. Then one asks himself, why do you get to such cornerstones with the knowledge of nature?—There arises that the basic condition of stumbling against such cornerstones is located in the human organisation, in the human being himself. One notices at last: nature does not allow solving certain riddles because we ourselves have to be different if we should deserve such solutions. The line of thought that I develop here is quite different from the Kantian one. It would lead too far if I explained this difference in detail, I refer only to my Philosophy of Freedom in this context.

The spiritual researcher wants to recognise by real introspection what prevents us in the human organisation to pass those cornerstones. The same force that prevents the human being from passing these cornerstones is the force that enables us to love. This is the significant discovery, which one does on such ways, as I have characterised them yesterday. As spiritual researcher, one has to put the question hypothetically: how would a being have to be constituted—it would not be a human being—that developed such scientific views that these cornerstones would become transparent as it were to the imagining?

Such a human being would have to have a mental organisation that would not be penetrated with the force of love. Since if one investigates this peculiar soul force of love, its character is just that it suppresses the active imagining, at first instinctively, in the human being that must appear in the observation of natural phenomena or in the arrangement of experiments.

Love and scientific research must be two oppose activities of the soul life. However, the ability of loving must be in the human nature. He cannot put aside as it were the ability of loving while he is scientifically active. He can form scientific mental pictures on one side. However, that what enables him to love is also in him. It is that which reduces the imagining activity at those cornerstones as it were.

This is the first significant experience that the spiritual researcher has to get on his way. Indeed, one may say, prove this logically.—This question immediately suggests itself. The reflection, in which cases one can put such a question, actually, is less obvious. You can also not ask, why does the bull have horns or the fish fins for logical reasons? These things are still results of observation at first. The spiritual researcher can also point only to the observation that arises on the suggested way from the experiences of scientific research.

One may say, I do not want to develop my spiritual condition in such a way that I get to such experiences.—Well, you can refrain from this, of course. However, then you cannot arrogate for yourself that you have to decide anything in the area of truth. Since somebody can penetrate into truth only who has really found such cliffs and has circumnavigated them.

One has the second experience that leads to the second inner spiritual-scientific discovery if one has attained, for example, the result that I have just explained. Indeed, one does not express that on another field what I have outlined now as modern spiritual science does it in such a way. Nevertheless, people have instinctively found out for themselves that the view of nature is a useless instrument as it were to penetrate into the secrets of existence. Then they have attempted to investigate these secrets in another way, namely in the mystic way, on the way of self-experience.

Just as the spiritual researcher has well to know that which one can experience with scientific view, he has to know that well which arises from mystic contemplation. He must also have tried there whether it is possible to reach the origins of existence mystically. Those origins with which, nevertheless, the human being must be connected in any way if they concern him generally. The spiritual researcher will also experience hopes and disappointments and gets, finally, to the important result that one can attain the secrets of existence just as little on this mystic way, as on the way of the outer view of nature. He also stumbles there against a wall that is in his inside, in the mental. Again, he has the task to investigate why one does not reach the origins of existence with mystic contemplation.

To get to clearness in this area, one has to apply scientific disposition wholeheartedly. It does not come easy to anybody who strives for clearness to investigate this inside of the human being. Since this inside of the human being often proves to be rather complex to the own view. I would like to bring in an example from the scientific literature that may show this.

I would like to bring in the book The Subconscious Ego, Its Relationship to Health and Education by Louis Waldstein (1853-1915, American pathologist). This example shows like many others, how much you have to take care if you want to investigate the own soul life, and how easily you deceive yourself in this area of research.

The author tells the following. One day he stood before a bookstore. His glance fell on a book about mollusks. While reading the title, he must smile and even laugh. He has no notion at first, why. Nevertheless, this is strange that a serious naturalist sees a scientific book in a bookstore—and must laugh. Lo and behold, it comes into his head: maybe I get on why I laugh if I close my eyes.—He closes his eyes and listens. Far away, he hears quite soft tones of a melody that he had heard before decades and with which he learnt dancing.

He has not heard these tones since decades. He did also not perceive them consciously, while reading the title; but they passed his soul as it were and made him to smile. In subconscious way, his soul was induced to cherish the impressions that he had decades ago and that were rather indistinct. Since he has to admit to himself that he paid more attention at that time to the fact that he did his steps correctly while learning dancing, than that he took care of the melody itself. His thoughts were still directed upon something unimportant because he had a partner. However, all that had a lasting effect in the subconscious, and he had to smile.

However, now we take the example seriously. It is determinative of countless experiences which show how little, actually, the human being is connected in his consciousness with that what proceeds below in the soul life, how things which were forgotten for a long time sound from below but also things which one had not consciously perceived. We do not need to have looked at that what was there and still it did a certain impression and comes up at the right moment!

The conscientious spiritual researcher develops the way that is indicated here with a first step. He investigates what exists in the depths of the soul life, and then he recognises that credulous, naive mystics often fall victim to such things. These are engrossed in their inside, bring up from their inside all kinds of what they call a feeling of being one with the primeval origin of existence, but maybe these are only the transformed tones of a barrel organ! Nevertheless, maybe it comes about on the same way, as that about which I have spoken. Since the peculiar appears in the soul life that such things, which have made impressions once and continue to have an effect then, not only come up as those but in changed form as something different. Still they are nothing but a pictorial fact of that what we have experienced in such a way.

Some people believe to be able to hand down deep mysticism from their introspection, but one deals only with transformed youth impressions or as the case may be. Just in this way, spiritual science has to go forward most carefully because it should be just the clearest and not the most confused. I have already noted this repeatedly.

Thus, the spiritual researcher gets around to studying just that in the soul by which that what one has in the usual fully conscious reminiscent life is associated with all kinds of subconscious memories, transformed recollections et cetera. While the spiritual researcher advances with scientific disposition on this way, he gets to the answer of the second question: how is the mystic experience? Why does one get to something unsatisfactory only on the way of the usual mysticism?

There it becomes obvious that anything must be in the human being: as well as the force of loving must be there which delivers the scientific border, there must be something that prevents the human being from submerging in the undergrounds of his being, as the mystic wants it, with the usual consciousness. If the human being had the ability to descend completely, to pursue everything that is to be found on the way about which I have spoken, and what the mystic believes to be able to find in the human inside, then the human being would not need the other ability for life: the power of memory. The impressions, the mental pictures of life have to accumulate as it were. They are not allowed to penetrate into our core. We must have the veil before our inside which works like a mirror and from which our experiences are reflected as memories. As little as we see if we stand before a mirror what is behind the mirror, as little we see the human inside that is behind that mirror which gives rise, actually, to our memories. Thus, someone who has this second experience recognises at last that the spiritual researcher cannot use what one can attain with the usual mysticism because it proves to be transformed memories in any way if it is processed only in the usual consciousness.

Hence, there are two starting points, two experiences that must be gone through if one wants to be a spiritual researcher: the experience with the view of nature and the experience with the memories, with the transformed memories. From these experiences, one receives a certain way of knowledge. If these experiences are done seriously with all disappointments that are connected with both experiences, then such experience stands for the production of an inner force at the same time. Someone gets this force to pursue the path of knowledge in another way than one pursues it with the usual consciousness. What I have just explained is the base on which the spiritual researcher goes on working in order to develop another consciousness and to penetrate with it into the supersensible world.

I have just indicated here that it is necessary to get to another state of consciousness beyond the consciousness of the usual life and science. However, most people shrink from this demand. They prefer considering this demand as something fantastic, as something enthusiastic, and, hence, they reject the possibility of the knowledge of the higher truth or they want to approach it with the usual consciousness. It is clear from the said that one cannot arrive at any goal on both ways.

Now the nature of the way that one has to take will result from these experiences. What does one prevent from descending with the usual consciousness to the own inside? It is the memory; it is the power of memory. If one investigates everything that forms the basis of the ability to remember something, then one finds that the ability of memory is bound to the physical body.

It is a gigantic error of Bergson (Henri B., 1859-1942, French philosopher) that he means that memory, at least a part of memory, is not engaged in the human organism. Spiritual science just shows that the process of sense perception that we penetrate with thinking is integrated into the physiological so that it pushes to memory. The fact that we can remember is already in the process of sense perception that is penetrated with thinking.

However, not everything that tends to memory, to the view of nature can lead into the human inside. The question arises: is it possible to develop such an inner soul activity of imagining which does not deal with memory, which is lifted out as it were from the everyday scientific life?

Maybe because here the personal, subjective may have an objective value, I would like to interpose how I was led to the first most elementary steps some decades ago which induced me to investigate the nature of memory spiritual-scientifically.

This experience of my childhood may appear to you very insignificant. I had to observe at myself during the school hours that I did the very best progress in mathematics or geometry that I had, however, no talent to keep mathematical formulae in mind. I could also say, it was not because I could not have kept them in mind, but I had no tendency to appropriate them. If, for example, an algebra exam was done, the others did their calculations with the mathematical formulae that they had kept in mind. Against it, I had to develop these mathematical formulae ad hoc from the basic principle. That means I had always to deduce the formulae completely, and then I calculated with the formulae. Because I could not keep the formulae in mind, I had always to keep the mental pictures in mind that led to the formula so to develop something in the mental pictures that did not appeal to memory.

This was to me the starting point on that way which must induce every spiritual researcher to cultivate such inner soul work that leads then really to a changed state of consciousness, to contemplative meditation to remaining in the imagining. However, this imagining work must be in such a way that if the same should appear again it originates from the same impulse, does not repeat memories.

Perhaps you know that I hold ten, twenty, thirty talks about the same subjects sometimes at different places, but I could never hold a talk in the same way. Every talk is different because I do not keep something in mind, but because when I speak about the things they generate themselves. I do not reflect on my memory.

Do not misunderstand me; it does not come into my mind to state that spiritual research wants to blank out memories. One would make the human being useless for life of course if one removed his memory from him. One does also not remove anything from him if he develops his thinking in such a way that he carries out such a soul activity that must be generated repeatedly anew, and that does not reflect on the power of memory.

I have explained this in details in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, in my Occult Science. An Outline and in other books. However, it always results in the following: to that thinking which accompanies, actually, the outer view and must lead then to memory something else is added that does not intend to produce memories but such a thinking, which must always be produced anew.

The human being thereby associates himself emotionally with another element, than if he accepts memories only. He thereby develops an imagining activity gradually which is now really not only a concomitant of the usual life or the usual science, but is strengthened gradually by practising such mental pictures in such a way, as usually only our soul life is if we have sense-percepts.

You get to a mere imagining which is as powerful, as usually only the soul life is if it faces the outer sense-perceptible world: a thinking that is like looking, an internally produced looking that is like thinking. This can only inform you about the nature of the human life. Since now if you can have such vivid imagining, you can only compare this imagining to the usual imagining.

Then you recognise only which nature the latter has. Then you get on to say to yourself, natural sciences use such mental pictures only which are organised by their own being towards memory; they never use those mental pictures which are developed in such a way in the human being as I have characterised it.

However, if you develop such vivid thinking, you also get to that experience which breaks through as it were the mirror of which I have comparatively spoken just now, which really penetrates behind the memory and can penetrate into the human inside.

However, there it becomes obvious: if you get to that region which the mirror of memory blankets, otherwise, then you face something that affects the unprepared consciousness strangely at first. You go through an experience that you can only compare with the experience of oversaturation. You recognise that in the human being something lives that you can find only on the intimated way, which gives him an unaware antipathy to himself. Repelling forces must be there as the reflecting mirror coating reflects light. You can compare the mirror coating as it were with that subconscious antipathy or sensation of oversaturation. You do not notice that with the usual consciousness because you experience that in memory that has been reflected.

With the new developed imagining life, you penetrate down, and you have to overcome that antipathy behind the mirror of memory. You overcome it only if you still add other experiences if you not only try to develop such imagining in yourself which does not use the memory, but if you try to develop that power in yourself which exists as something useless. I mean the dreams. The spiritual researcher has to study the dreams very intensely, because the soul lives also in dreams, in an unreality, of course. Dreams have always caused the human beings to put certain questions of life.

The spiritual researcher cannot investigate the dreams as one did once after the pattern of dream books or as the modern psychoanalysis does because both do not lead to the cognition of that force which is, actually, behind the dream. If you can pursue the dreams, it always becomes obvious that the inside of the human body is involved in every dream. Anyhow, these are always bodily processes that are associated with the dreams that in a way exceed the quiet sleeping life, and express themselves in any pictorial ambiguity.

The spiritual researcher does not at all regard these dreams as they present themselves in their pictures. A psychoanalyst said to me once after a talk, anthroposophy looks at the dreams with reference to their immediate contents. We psychoanalysts take the dreams, while we want to investigate from their pictures what rumbles about there in the subconscious.—Well, I do not want to explain the thing further, but one has to answer: as the psychoanalyst does not take the dreams immediately in their pictorial nature, but wants to investigate something behind them, the spiritual researcher does it all the more, but not with inadequate means. He is clear in his mind that the same what goes forward in the soul inside can dress in quite different visions. I want to say, one climbs up a mountain in a dream and falls down on the other side, the same could happen if you dream, you have a paper before yourself in which you make a hole. The pictures that appear in the dream are only an outer disguise. Someone who looks for the picture contents of the dream will never discover the secret of that force in the human soul, which is contained in the dream.

Only somebody can figure the force out which is in the dreams who can pursue the dream how tension and relaxation or persisting tensions appear in the soul life. Then they can dress in the most different pictures. Only such a thinking, as I have described it, can penetrate into those regions of the soul life from which the confused dreams enter into the usual consciousness. Since the dreams which are behind the mirror belong to that region in the human organisation.

One submerges in the area which is behind the mirror if one submerges with the developed imagining which does not appeal to memories in the human inside. Since there you encounter the force which is, otherwise, only embryonic or imperfect in dreams in its true figure. However, the subconscious nature of the human being is something that appears in the consciousness as unaware antipathy and just causes the reflection of the memory.

Now one submerges. Only that which I have described and not the mental pictures that are associated with memories can submerge in such a way that the antipathy is overcome. The antipathy weakens our consciousness towards our inside that prevents us from crushing the mirror and from penetrating into a region that turns out, otherwise, to be unaware antipathy.

Thereby we develop a force that exists in other ways as well in life. I have already called it the capacity for love today. We learn this ability to recognise in its rudiments how it expresses itself in the usual life. If we penetrate, however, on the intimated way down into our own inside, just the force of the capacity for love increases. This is the second side of the soul life that the spiritual researcher has to develop.

He gets to the first force while he develops an imagining which is not based on memory. The other is that he develops such an inner life—and it soon appears as a will life which increases the capacity for love. While one must almost exclude the memory in the area in which one wants to investigate the spirit, the capacity for love must be increased to such a degrees about which the usual consciousness does not have any idea because it only develops love to outer beings and things as a rule but not to the spiritual that is found on the way which leads into the human inside by breaking the human memory .

Thus, the paradoxical appearing fact comes to light that that which is inevitable for the usual naturalist and the usual life, the ability of memory and the capacity for love, develops on the way of spiritual research in such a way that on the one side the imagining has to discharge into a region where it cannot count on memory, the will life, however, must discharge into a region where the capacity for love is increased.

The human being thereby penetrates into those areas that are, otherwise, behind the scientific limits. If he develops that of which I have spoken just to two sides of the human nature, he gets beyond those cliffs that exist at the cornerstones.

That what only appears, otherwise, as phenomena of nature is figured out as it were. Then, however, one does not get to atoms, to the hypothetical matter, but to the supersensible, to the spirit. You get to the spirit, which lives behind nature and in nature because one wakes up as it were. Since it is an awakening with reference to the usual consciousness what I have described.

In particular, with reference to one thing I would like to extend the comparison. Everybody with a healthy consciousness considers the dream as a sum of pictures and he knows: while he enters into the usual reality from his dreams, he leaves the imagery of dreams and enters into the sphere of existence. Thus, the spiritual researcher starts facing the world that he experiences in the supersensible consciousness. He knows: this usual sense-perceptible world becomes an imagery of the supersensible experience. The whole nature becomes an imagery of the supersensible experience as the dream world, otherwise, is an imagery of the usual sensory existence. There it becomes obvious that, actually, the development of the recent natural sciences with all their great achievements has become great only because they confined themselves to giving pictures and do not want to penetrate with their means into that what is as a secret behind the pictures.

I would like to illustrate again with a simple comparison how you get to that will which is an increased capacity for love. Then, however, one can develop this comparison further. One normally does not know that writing contains two quite different activities. Only very few people do such subtler psychological observations. If one writes, this writing does not need to be completely the same after its inner nature with reference to a certain point as with another human being. There are in particular—and this applies to the most people—such persons who write, while they form the letters in such a way that the letter is completely formed from the wrist. He has his writing this way, but it is in his organisation, it does not break away from his organisation.

I know other people who write in such a way that their writing breaks away from their organisation; they paint as it were. It is very interesting if one finds out for himself that there are such persons who paint, actually, while they write who have, actually, always a view of the letter form who draw it who live much more objectively in the letter. They do not have the forms of writing in the wrist but they draw the letters.

Usually they are such people who displayed a big capacity for love in their youth and have shown the characteristic: if they had once seen a person whom they estimated, they have also written as he did, have copied his writing. If they have started cherishing another person, they copied his writing. Thus, this ability remained to them for life that writing is, actually, like painting.

There one notices that another elementary activity of the human being can break away from him, can penetrate more into the object, and that this penetrating is just associated with the capacity for love. One will find that the capacity for love of which I have spoken just now as a development of the will for the spirit is mainly developed with such persons who have, actually, no writing conditioned by their organisation who can always write, as they want who can form the letters one way or the other. This is connected with the ability of submerging affectionately in the objective world.

Well, that what I have explained here about the elementary activity of writing can become for the human being in such a way that it also leads to higher activities. This is on the way that I have meant, while I showed that to the imagining which does not appeal to the memories those will impulses must be added which as it were grow together with the outer objectivity. That is again something that the spiritual researcher has to develop to a high degree. Then the world becomes picture to him which works otherwise robustly on the usual consciousness, while it manifests its truth, and then he breaks through to the supersensible.

Thus, something arises that I would like to characterise in the following way: there is a philosopher today whom I estimate very much from a certain side, although I can agree, actually, with nothing that he says. However, this philosopher has dealt intensely with the question, what can the scientific attitude know about the world?—He has answered this question from the most different sides. He is the philosopher Richard Wahle (1857-1937, Austrian philosopher and psychologist). He is a representative not only how many people think but also of the way to which generally the thinking of our time tends.

Richard Wahle tried to ask the modern worldviews: what can one learn from them about reality?—He got around to saying, if we look at the world after scientific pattern, we can nowhere recognise the powerful what causes the processes; but we learn only to recognise the succession of processes, one process emerging from the other. However, one does not get to know that what comes together in an event, so that the other can originate, the powerful, the primal factors, as Wahle calls them. Thus, Richard Wahle gets to the view that this modern view of nature gives no true picture of the outer world but a ghostly one. The more the ideal of natural sciences is fulfilled, the mare ghostly that becomes which exists now in the picture of nature. Richard Wahle says in his book On the Mechanism of the Spiritual Life (1906) that one can generally get to nothing but to such ghostly view.

Well, this induces him to condemn almost any philosophical pursuit. He is a philosopher, and he has a peculiar judgement not only of the present philosophy but also of the past one. However, it is a strange fact that the official representative of philosophy at a university gets to the judgement that I immediately want to state.

Richard Wahle considers what philosophy what he himself has performed in the philosophical area, and says approximately, once philosophy resembled a restaurant in which cooks and waiters dished up inedible dishes to the guests; and now philosophy is a restaurant in which cooks and waiters stand around and generally have nothing to do.—He refers to these waiters, I will say to the philosophers, in this strange restaurant of the present, and takes his starting point from the question: what can natural sciences do?—He realises the borders of natural sciences, while he looks at their ghostly being that must stick to the outside only.

He recognises the pictorial nature of any knowledge of nature. This is generally a significant phenomenon in the present spiritual life. Natural sciences are inclined to recognise more and more that they deliver, actually, pictures only that that which they call nature is only picture of something.

A conscientious scientific thinker does not get to the brainless monism, but he has to acknowledge the pictorial nature of nature. One could bring in countless documents, while one takes those considerations that try to answer the question: to what extent natural sciences are a suited instrument to recognise truth and reality.—There it is on one side in such a way that natural sciences get to their borders. The more they develop, the more their ideal is fulfilled, the more they will get just by themselves to acknowledging its pictorial nature.

From other side we have the course of spiritual research that wants to develop such a cognition, which enters the reality beyond the picture. Natural sciences show, what you can find is picture.—Spiritual science shows: while you develop a higher consciousness, you show that that what exists for the usual consciousness and for the usual science has picture nature and that you only find reality if you take your starting point from the picture nature.

How could one justify spiritual science better towards natural sciences than by the fact that spiritual science moves the human development of its own accord to acknowledge that what natural sciences have to find as result on their own terms.

Not the words, but the facts which spiritual science produces in the human soul will comply with that what originates from natural sciences. Spiritual science will thereby be justified completely while co-operating with natural sciences.

Today I just wanted to indicate this with some explanations and considerations: That which justifies spiritual science towards natural sciences is the well understood natural sciences themselves. If natural sciences get themselves right, they discharge into a point where they have to say to themselves, here we are at our borders, here something else is demanded.

Well, spiritual science will give this something else. With it, it will be justified not of its own accord, but by natural sciences towards natural sciences.

The terrible catastrophe of last New Year's Eve, the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, which will remain as a painful memory for the many who loved it, may provide occasion to connect today's thoughts about the anthroposophical knowledge and conception of the world with this Goetheanum. But a connection is all I have in view; for the lecture itself that I am to present to you is not to be essentially different in kind from those I have been permitted to give here in Basel, in this same hall, for many years past.

That dreadful calamity was just the occasion to bring to light what fantastic notions there are in the world linked with all that this Goetheanum in Dornach intended to do and all that was done in it. It is said that the most frightful superstitions were disseminated there, that all sorts of things inimical to religion were being practiced; and there is even talk of all kinds of spiritistic seances, of nebulous mystic performances, and so on.

In respect to all this, I should like today to answer, at least sketchily, the question: What is this Anthroposophy to which the Goetheanum was dedicated?

Many people were scandalized at the very name, “Goetheanum,” because they failed to consider the fundamental reason for this name, and how it is connected with all that is cultivated there as Anthroposophy.

For me, my dear friends, this Anthroposophy is the spontaneous result of my devotion for more than four decades to Goethe's world-conception, and to his whole activity. Of course if anyone studies Goethe's world-conception and what he did by considering only what is actually written in Goethe's works, and from that deduces logically, as it were, what may now be called Goethean, he will not find what gave occasion to call the Dornach Building the “Goetheanum,” But there is, I might say, a logic of thinking and a logic of life. And anyone who immerses himself in Goethe, not merely with a logic of thinking, but who takes up actively his impulse-filled suggestions, and tries to gain from them what can be gained—after so many decades have passed over humanity's evolution since Goethe's death—he will believe—no matter what he may think of the true value of Anthroposophy—that by means of the living stimuli of Goetheanism, if I may use the expression, this very Anthroposophy has been able to come into being through a logic of life, by experiencing what is in Goethe, and by developing his conclusions, in a modest way.

Now this Goetheanum was first called “Johannesbau” by those friends of the anthroposophical world-conception who made it possible to erect such a building. The name was in no way connected with the Evangelist, St, John; but the building was named—not by me but by others—for Johannes Thomasius, one of the figures in my Mystery Drama; because, above all, this Goetheanum was to be dedicated to the presentation of these Mystery Plays, besides the cultivation of all the rest of the anthroposophical world-view. But of course it was inevitable that this name, “Johannesbau,” should lead to the misunderstanding that it was meant for the author of St. John's Gospel.

Hence, I often said, I think even here in this place, in the course of the years in which the Goetheanum was being built, that for me this building is a Goetheanum; for I derived my world-view in a living way from Goethe. And then this name was officially given to the Building by friends of the cause. I have always regarded this as a sort of token of gratitude for what can be gained from Goethe, an act of homage to the towering personality of Goethe; not because it was supposed that what was originally given by Goethe would be cultivated in the best and most beautiful way in the Dornach Goetheanum, but because the anthroposophical world-view feels the deepest gratitude for what has come into the world through Goethe.

If, then, the name “Goetheanum” is taken as resulting from an act of homage, an act of gratitude, then no one, as I believe, can take exception to it. For the rest, it is quite comprehensible that anyone unacquainted with the anthroposophical world-view, when approaching the building on the Dornach hill, would be at first peculiarly affected by the two dove-tailed dome-structures, by the strange forms without and within, and so forth. But this building proceeded as an inner artistic consequence, from the anthroposophical world-view. Therefore, I shall be able to form the best connecting link with what the Building stood for, if I try first—today in a somewhat different way from the one I have employed here for many years—to answer the question: What is Anthroposophy?

To start with, Anthroposophy claims to be a knowledge of the spiritual world, which can fully take its place beside the magnificent natural science of our time. It aims to rank with natural science, not only as regards scientific conscientiousness, but it also requires that anyone who wishes, not merely to receive Anthroposophy into his mind, but to build it up, must, before all else, have gone through all the rigid and serious methods used today by natural science.

In all this the purpose of Anthroposophy is the complete opposite of what I have cited as the opinions of the world about it. With regard to these opinions, which I have given only in part, we can only be astonished that it is possible for ideas about anything to become fixed in the minds of the public, which are the exact opposite of what is really intended. For it can be flatly said that all I have mentioned as opinions of the world is not Anthroposophy, but that Anthroposophy purposes to be a serious knowledge of the spiritual world.

You well know, my dear friends, that today anything claiming to be knowledge of the spiritual world is regarded somewhat contemptuously, or at least with great doubt. The scientific education that mankind has enjoyed for the past three or four hundred years was of such a nature that in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the opinion came gradually to be held that, by means of the strict methods employed today by natural science, man can know what is presented to the senses in his environment, and also what the human intellect can deduce from sense-perception, with the help of its methods of experiment and observation. But on the other hand, knowledge of the spiritual is declined, by those very people who are firmly convinced that they stand on the strict basis of this natural-scientific world-view. For it is said, whether with a certain arrogance or with a certain despondency, that with regard to the spiritual there are barriers to man's knowledge, that with regard to the spirit man must be satisfied with concepts of belief.

Because of this there results a serious inner soul-discord for very many people who get their education from the natural science that is everywhere popularized today. The concepts of belief are handed down from ancient times. It is not known that they also correspond to concepts of knowledge which humanity attained at earlier stages, and that' these are still contained in the traditions, in what has been handed down. If they are accepted just as concepts of belief, then the soul is brought into contradiction with everything it takes in when it accepts what in our day is won for humanity and for practical life in such a rigorous way by the methods of natural science.

What is won in this way cannot really be called the possession of a small group of educated people; rather, this special mode of thought derived from natural science has already penetrated the instruction of the primary grades of school. And we might even say that the condition of soul that results from natural science, if not natural science itself, has been spread everywhere, ever farther and farther, even into the most primitive, outermost human settlements. This brings it about that many people do not know that their soul-longing is for concepts about the spiritual world similar to those they have about the natural world; but this causes in many of them, nevertheless, a discord of soul which is expressed in all kinds of dissatisfactions with life. People feel a certain inner unrest and perplexity. With the concepts and feelings they have, they do not rightly know how to take their place in life. They ascribe the trouble to all sorts of things, but the real cause lies in what I have said.

People today long for real knowledge-concepts about the spiritual world, not for concepts of belief. Such knowledge-concepts are what Anthroposophy strives for; but in doing so it must, of course, vindicate an entirely different concept of knowledge from the one we are accustomed to today. And if I am to characterize this concept, I should like to do it by means of a sort of comparison, which is, however, more than a mere comparison, and is to lead directly to the way in which Anthroposophy strives to know the super-sensible-spiritual.

Let us think first of the strange world which each of you knows as the other side of human existence, as it were, the other side of human consciousness—let us think of the dream-world. Each of you can remember the variegated, diverse, colorful pictures that appear out of the dark depths of sleep. If you observe dreams from the waking state, you will find that these are connected in some way with what one is or does while awake. Even when at times they are prophetic dreams, which is by no means to be denied, they are nevertheless connected with what the dreamer has experienced—only a natural formative fantasy acts in the most extravagant way to metamorphose these experiences. In a different way such dreams are connected with the human bodily conditions; difficulty in breathing, rapid heart-action, disturbances in the organism, are experienced symbolically in dreams in many ways.

Let us imagine for a moment, merely to develop the thought that is needed here, that a person lived in this dream-world, that he had no other world; he would never be able to emerge from this world, but' would regard it as his reality. If through some kind of outer forces, the human life took its course exactly as it does now, that we went about in the cities and did our work, but did not consciously see this work, just always dreamed, then we human beings would regard the dream-world as the only reality, just as the dreamer in the moment of the dream regards his variously decked-out dream-world as his reality» Only when we wake up can we truly form a judgment, from the waking point of view, by means of the way we are then related to the world of our environment, about the real value and significance of the dream, While remaining in the dream, we can come to no such judgment. It is only possible from the point of view of the waking life to judge to what extent the dream is related to life-reminiscences, or to bodily conditions. To form a judgment about the dream, one must first wake up.

Now the human being lives also in his will, for it is particularly the will that, upon waking, is projected into the events of the outer sense-world; man lives now in the pictures which this sense-world transmits to his soul. We have no judgment whatever about the reality, except the feeling of being in the sense-world, the feeling of union with this sense-world; and from this point of view—I might say of insertion of the whole soul-being into this world by means of the body—we at first regard it as reality, and the deceptive pictures of the dream as not belonging to this reality.

But now, especially when anyone surveys all that the pictures of the outer sense-reality give to him, certainly at some time the question will appear: How is what he himself experiences within him as his soul-spirit-being related to the transformations and the variability of the outer sense-world?

The great questions of existence present themselves when a man compares what he sees in the outer sense-world with what he feels as his own being, in his thinking and feeling, his sensing and his willing, rising out of the depths of his humanness,—those great questions of existence which may perhaps be comprised in the one question: What value, as reality, has that which pertains to the soul? This then expands to questions of soul-immortality, of human freedom, and numberless others that spring up. For one will soon feel how entirely different the experience is when looking outward and receiving sense-impressions, from that of looking inward and having soul-experiences. And from such experiences the question must of necessity arises Is it perhaps possible, through some kind of second awakening, a higher awakening, to attain from a higher standpoint knowledge about sense-reality itself, in the same way that a man acquires from the sense-reality a judgment about the dream-world, when, as a matter of course, he awakes in the morning?

When a man is convinced that the imagination of the dream can be judged with regard to its value as reality, only from the standpoint of waking life, then he must strive to gain a point of view which can in turn reveal something about the value as reality, of the higher value, of sense-experience itself.

And now the great question concerning a knowledge of spirit may be put this way: Can we perhaps wake up in a higher sense from our everyday waking consciousness? and does' there result from such second waking a knowledge about the sense-world, just as from the sense-world comes knowledge about the dream?

Now we can, of course, have a feeling about it, but exact observation gives us certainty about how the dream works. When dreaming we feel that our whole soul-life is laid hold of by vague powers. At the moment of waking, we feel that we now have control of our physical body. We feel that the extravagant concepts of the dream are disciplined by the physical body. And the reason we feel that these dream-concepts are extravagant is that, when waking up or going to sleep, there is a moment ' when we do not have the physical body completely in hand. Can a higher, a second awakening, be brought about by conscious soul-activity, in the same way that we are wrenched out of the dream, out of sleep, by the forces of the organism itself?

This question can only be answered when we test, I might say in a higher sense, whether the soul finds forces within itself for such a higher awakening; and only by finding the answer to this can a different form of knowledge-concept be produced from that to which we are accustomed today, and which leads only to one's saying with regard to the spiritual world, “Ignorabimus,” “We shall not know.”

Now we shall have to turn first of all—and Anthroposophy proceeds in this way—to those soul-forces that we already have, and ask: Can something higher, still stronger, be developed out of these soul-forces, just as the waking soul-life is stronger than the dreaming life? We may reason that even this waking soul-life of the adult person has been gradually developed from the dreamy soul-life that we had at the beginning as very little children. If we had stopped with the soul-life that was ours during the first three years on earth, we should see the world in a sort of dream-form. We have grown out of this dream-form.

This may give courage, to begin with, to seek certain soul-forces which can be developed still further than the development achieved since earliest childhood. And anyone who deals with such a problem seriously will turn first to a soul-force concerning which even significant philosophers of the present admit, as a result of purely philosophic deliberation, that it points to a spiritual activity of man which is more or less independent of the body. This is our power of recollection, residing in the memory.

Let us picture to ourselves what exists in our ordinary memory. Of course this memory is not a force with which immediately to penetrate into the super-sensible, spiritual worlds. Above all, we know that this memory is only in perfect order when we can bring to expression in the corporeal what is in the soul. But nevertheless, there is something peculiar here. Among our recollections appear pictures of experiences which were perhaps decades in the past. Something experienced in our relation to the sense-world and to ordinary people appears in varying pictures—according to one's organization—which are really very similar to dream-pictures, only more disciplined. And if our memory is good, there comes today from the soul-depths a living knowledge of what occurred years ago, and is not now before us in sense-reality. This is expressed in a very popular way, of course; but we must start from a definite point of view. So we may say: There are images in the memory which portray inwardly something which was, indeed, once present, something experienced, which is not now present.

And so the question may arise which is still vague at first, and naturally acquires significance only when one can answer it—but we shall see that it can be answered. It is this: Is it possible for anyone, by soul-spiritual work, to acquire a further soul-force, a transformation as it were of the memory-force, whereby he pictures not only what is no longer present, though it once was, but whereby he depicts something which does not exist in the earth-life at all, either through sense-perceptions or any intellectual combinations? This can be decided only by serious inner soul-work; and this soul-work consists of an inner education of the essential element of memory; namely, the capacity for imagining.

How, then, do representations come about? and how is the activity of representation accomplished in ordinary life? Well, outer things make an impression upon us. First, we have sense-perceptions; then from these sense-perceptions we form our concepts, which we carry in the memory. And we know that a certain force is required when we wish to call up a memory-concept of something witnessed in earlier years in which we were involved. But we know too that man surrenders passively to the outer world, in order to have true concepts of this outer world, to bring nothing fantastic into the pictures of it. And this passive self-surrender, assisted besides by all possible experimental methods, is right for natural science. But we can do something more than this with the conceptual life. We can try to take up with inner activity concepts of any content whatsoever—only their content must be easily survey-able, so as not to work suggestively; an idea that is difficult to survey, such as one brought up from the depths of the soul, may easily work suggestively, We now try to ponder with inner activity upon such a concept, so that we surrender ourselves again and again with our whole soul-life to this thought,

I have minutely described what I might call the technique of such surrender to an active living in representation, in my books, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science;” here I want to sketch the principle involved. If anyone devotes himself again and again to the content of an idea, quite independently of the outer meaning of the concepts he employs inwardly, upon which he inwardly rests, with which he unites himself, to which he allows his whole being to open—if anyone surrenders himself in this way to such an idea, he will gradually notice that in this inner work, in the thinking and representation, a notable aliveness is developed, an aliveness which one must first come to know before an opinion can be formed about it. But when anyone does come to know it, he begins to think somewhat as follows: A muscle we continue to use becomes stronger; in exactly the same way the thinking force of our soul-life is strengthened, if we do not surrender passively to the impressions of the outer world, but work inwardly; if in this way we again and again bring the soul-life inwardly and livingly into a certain condition with regard to an idea.

In this way we finally reach the point where the thinking—which otherwise appears shadowy, even in memory-pictures, and exhausts itself just in the mere presentation of pictures—is filled with a soul-spiritual content, just as in life we feel that we are filled with the breath, with the circulating blood. Life-force, if I may speak in this way, streams into thinking that has thus become active.

Truly, real Anthroposophy, as spirit-knowledge, is based upon intimate, inner methods of the soul, not upon any sort of necromancy? it is based upon the changing of the soul-forces of knowledge by the soul itself, making them into something different. And anyone who strengthens his thinking more and more in this way comes at last—it may be even years later—to a very special experience, an experience that may be described as follows: When we call to mind only outer objects or outer actions, we dive down to a certain depth of the soul-life, and from this depth we must then draw up the recollections. But when we actively work on our thinking in the way I have described, we finally come to the point where we know that with this thinking life we go farther down than the power of recollection reaches.

It is an important experience when we have reached the point of observing the recollections as at a certain level to which we dive down in the ordinary consciousness, and from which we bring up memory-concepts; and then when we glimpse that deeper down in the soul-life there is another level to which we have now penetrated, and from which, with our strengthened thinking, we can draw up concepts that are not the same as those to which we first submitted ourselves, but are entirely different. And while we can represent in recollections what was once present in the human life, but is no longer present, so we now learn that when we draw from this deeper level, we come to concepts that are beyond anything one otherwise ever has in life.

Through this gate of knowledge we have now penetrated into the spiritual world; and the first experience that results is this: we get a really tableau-like retrospect of our whole earth-life up to the present. We might say that in a flash—that is a somewhat extreme statement, but it is almost so—our earth-life up to this moment lies spread out in mighty pictures before the consciousness, with time changed into space, as it were. But these pictures are truly different from those we should get if we were to sit down and draw forth in recollection all that can be drawn out of our life, and should get continuous pictures of this earth-life almost to the time of our birth. This tableau is intrinsically different from the one described before. You see, in ordinary recollections the concepts are passively formed, and contain altogether not much more than our impressions from the outer world. For example, in recollections we call to mind how we met some one, the effect someone had upon us, how a friendship was formed; or again, we experience the effect upon us of some natural occurrence, what we experienced of pleasure or suffering from it, or from the influence of some one, and so on.

The content of the tableau, as I have described it, attained by strengthened, invigorated thinking, is this: A man sees himself—the way he approached another person, as a result of his temperamental qualities, or of his own character, or the desire, or the love, he had. While mere recollection gives to a man what is brought to him from outside, this memory-tableau brings to the fore what he himself has contributed to the experience, what has come out of himself. In the ordinary recollection, let us say of a natural occurrence, he has before him what this occurrence brought of pain or pleasure, that is, the effect upon him of the outer world. In the memory-tableau it would be rather his longing to be in whatever region of the earth he had this experience. The part a man himself has taken in an occurrence is what he experiences in the memory-tableau, In short, I might say that this total impression a man has of his life is diverted from the outer world, and that it contains all his activity during life. One really sees himself as a second person. When anyone has this memory-tableau, he has little impression of his physical space-body; but he feels himself within all that he has experienced, and he feels at the same time that it is all a flowing, etheric world, so to speak. And with this flowing, etheric world, which contains his own life in mighty pictures as in an onward-flowing stream, one learns at the same time that the moving etheric world of his own existence is connected with the universal etheric world. When as physical human being with his physical senses, a man confronts the outer world, he feels that he is enclosed within his skin. He feels other things as outer things. He feels a strong contrast between subject and object, to express it philosophically. This is not the case when, with strengthened thinking, one enters into what I may call the fluctuating world of the second man, of the time-man, in contrast to the corporeal, physical space-man.

We can really speak of a time-body, for a man becomes aware simultaneously of his whole previous life, and he feels this previous earth-life as moving in a universal world, like unto itself. He can say, that to the solid, dense, physical world is added a more rarified world, in which one has spent his life in flowing movement. Only now does he come to know what an etheric world is, and what man himself is as second man, as second human being in this etheric world. But with all this one has reached only the first stage of super-sensible knowledge.

It is only because one feels himself to be a spirit-soul being in a spirit-soul world that he knows from direct perception, as it were, that the whole world is interpenetrated and interwoven by a spirit-soul substantiality, which man also holds within himself, But as yet he knows no more than this. And most of all, he does not yet know of another spirit-soul world besides that one which unites him as earth-man with the surrounding etheric world.

But now we can go farther. If a man has acquired this ability to experience himself in the etheric realm, to experience the etheric world along with himself, then he can rise to another kind of development of the soul-forces.

This consists in bringing about in the soul what I might call the opposite process to the one first characterized. First we try to make the thinking inwardly very active, very much alive, so that, instead of passive thinking, we have within an active flow of forces, surging and weaving. Now we must try with the same inner force of free will to suppress again the freely soaring thought that we have put into the soul.

In the soul-exercises to which I am alluding, everything that I describe for you must be done in the same way that the mathematician works out his problems; so that it is all carried out with complete self-possession, with nothing whatever in it of false mysticism, of fantasy, even of suggestion, or anything of the kind. The exercises must be performed in the soul with the same objective coldness with which a geometric problem is solved—for the warmth and enthusiasm come not from the method, but from the results. Nevertheless, we experience the following: that when we acquire this strengthened thinking, it is difficult to dispel the representations we get by it, especially those of the previous life, with which we can be completely engrossed if we want to dwell on them. But we must develop in us the strength to disperse the images again, just as we can call them forth, by our own activity. In other words, we must acquire the faculty to extinguish in our consciousness all thinking and imagining, after having first most actively kindled it. Even extinguishing of ordinary concepts is very difficult, but this is relatively easy in comparison with the obliterating of those concepts that have been set up in the soul by spiritual activity.

Therefore this obliteration means something entirely different. And if one succeeds, again through long practice—but these exercises can be done along with the others, so that both capacities appear simultaneously—if one succeeds in producing these strong, active processes of thought in his consciousness, and then in obliterating them again, something comes over the soul that I might call the inner silence of the soul—for we must have expressions for these things you know. There is no knowledge whatever of this inner silence in the consciousness of the ordinary life.

Of the two things needed by the spiritual researcher who wants to make research in the anthroposophical way, the first is the strengthened conceptual life, the strengthened thought-life, by means of which he comes to self-knowledge in the way indicated; the other is that he must cultivate a completely empty consciousness; in which all the thinking, feeling and willing, otherwise in the soul, is silenced—but silenced only after this soul-activity has been enhanced to the highest degree. Then this silence of soul is something quite special. It represents the second stage, as it were, of spirit-knowledge; and I can describe it somewhat as follows:

Let us imagine that we are in a great city where there is a terrific uproar, and we become quite deafened by it. We leave the city, and when we have walked for some time, we still hear the roar behind us, but the noise has already become somewhat less, and the farther we go the quieter it becomes. If we finally reach the stillness of the forest, it may be that all about us will be quiet. We have experienced the whole range from raging noise to outer silence. But now I can go farther. This will not take place in outer reality, of course, but the concept is an entirely real one, when we come to what I have just designated as silence of the soul, I will for once use a very trivial comparison: We may have a certain wealth and keep spending it; we have less and less and finally nothing at all. Then our wealth is zero. But we can go still farther; we can go into debt; then we have less than nothing. We know from mathematics that one can have less than nothing.

Well, it can be the same with quiet, with silence. From the noise of the world complete silence can be restored, equal to zero. This can even become less; it can become more silent than the silence that equals zero, more and more silent, negative silence, negative quiet. And that is really the case when the strengthened soul-life is blotted out, when the silence in the soul becomes deeper than zero silence, if I may express it so. A quiet is established in the soul-life that tends toward the minus side, a stillness that is deeper than the mere silence of the ordinary consciousness.

And when we have penetrated to this silence, when the soul feels that it is removed from the world—not only when the world around it is still, but when the soul feels that the world-quiet can only equal zero, but that the soul itself is in a deeper silence than the silence of the world—then, when this negative silence sets in, the spiritual world begins to speak, really to speak, from the other side of existence.

Ordinarily, we ourselves as human beings interrupt the quiet of the world with our words projected into the air, When we have established in ourselves this quiet that is deeper than zero-quiet, this silence that is deeper than mere silence, the spiritual world begins to speak; but it is a language to which we must first become accustomed, a language utterly different from the language of words, a language formed in such a way that we gradually become accustomed to it by drawing upon our knowledge of the sense-world, of colors, of tones, in short, all that we know of the sense-world. We use this to describe the special impressions of the spiritual world according to our experiences of the sense-world,

I want to call attention to a few details. Suppose that in this inner silence of soul we get the impression of the presence of something out of the depths of spirit which attacks us aggressively, as it were, and excites us in a certain way. We know first of all that it is a spiritual experience, that the spiritual world is revealing itself. We compare this with an experience we have had in the sense-world, and learn that in the sense-world this experience has about the same effect upon us as the color yellow. In exactly the same way that we coin a word to express something in the sense-world, so now we take the yellow color to express this spiritual experience; or in another case we might take a tone to express it. As we use speech to talk about the things of the sense-world, so now we make use of sense-qualities and sense-impressions in speaking about what is spiritually received from the spiritual world in the silence of the soul.

This is the way to describe the spiritual world. I have described it in this way in my book “Theosophy” and in “Occult Science,” and the descriptions need only to be rightly understood. We must understand that for the silence of the soul there is a new language. While we have articulated speech for outward expression as human beings, something comes to us from the spiritual world which we must put into appropriate words, but it can be apprehended only in a subtle way, and must be translated into human speech by using words formed from sense-perception.

And when you have these experiences in the silence of the soul, you come to know that the world of invigorated thinking that you had at first is really only a picture,—a picture of what you see only now, for which you only now have a language, a picture by which you penetrated into the silence of the soul. The spiritual world now speaks to you through the silence of the soul. And now you are able also to efface this whole life-tableau, which you yourself have formed, which has brought the earth-life etherically before you, as by magic. This inner quiet of the soul appears now also in the personal life as you live it here on earth. The illusion of that ego which exists only in the physical body now ceases.

Anyone who holds too firmly to his ego, through a theoretical or a practical egotism, does not succeed in establishing this silence of soul in the presence of his own life-tableau. A man who combats theoretical and practical egotism comes to see that he first has this ego to enable him to make use of his body in the physical life, that the body gives him the possibility of saying “I” to himself. If he then passes from this corporeal sense of the ego into what I have described as the etheric world, where one flows together with the world, where the world is etherically united with one's own etheric being, he will no longer hold firmly to this ego. He will experience that of which this life-tableau, to which he has lifted himself, is a picture. He will experience his pre-earthly existence, in a spiritual world, before he descended through conception and birth into a physical human body,

Anthroposophy does not speak from philosophical speculations about the immortality, the eternity of the human' soul, but it tells how, through a special development of the soul-forces, one may struggle through to the vision of the soul-being before it descended to the earth. There actually appears now to the silenced soul a direct view of the soul as it dwells eternally in the world of spirit. As we look in recollection at what we have experienced on earth, as the past earth-life awakes in memory, so now, after we have learned in the soul-silence the language of the world of spirit, as I have described it, events appear that have not existed in the earth-life at all, events by which we have been prepared for this earth-life before we descended to it,

And now one looks upon what he was before he came down to the earth-life. As long as he was still beholding the life-tableau, he knew that he himself and the world are permeated and interpenetrated by moving, weaving spirit—though finer and more etheric, it is still a sort of nature-spirit, which he finds in the world and experiences as akin to himself. But now, when he looks into the pre-earthly existence, being united with what father and mother give at birth, he sees the unity of the moral world-order and the physical world-order. In this pre-earthly existence are all the forces that are prototypes of the forms produced during the physical earth-life. Here one sees that the spiritual forces reign and weave in the human body even in the physical earth-life. One marvels at the structure of the human brain as it gradually takes shape. One notices how undifferentiated this brain was when the child was born, what it became with the seventh year of life, about the time of the change of teeth. One turns his gaze upon the inner, plastic, formative forces; and does not stop short with the indefinite dictum about heredity.

We know that what the child works out in the first years of' life alone, in the plastic formation of the brain and the whole organism, is the after-effect, the imitation, of the far-reaching, universal events experienced in the spiritual world, where the soul was among spiritual beings, in just the same way that we live among the creatures of nature and human beings on earth. And one now comes to know that the spiritual world works into the physical earth-world, and that the after-effects of this pre-earthly existence are contained in all that is active in the inner organization of our being; one knows that he himself is a soul-spirit-being within the physical corporeal.

As we go farther, a third experience must be added to what I have already described, I have called attention to the necessity of first overcoming the illusion of the ego; one must overcome the ordinary, everyday, theoretical or practical egotism; and one must understand that this ego of our earth-life is bound up with the physical body, and comes to consciousness first of all in the sensations of the physical body. But there is something in the physical earth-life which, when I name it, may perhaps cause a little disturbance here and there in one's theory of knowledge, because it is usually not counted at all among the forces of knowledge, and it may be found distasteful to place it there. But it must be done nevertheless. And anyone who has come in the way described first to the invigoration of thought and then to soul-silence, will understand that it must be done. There must be added to these, as a third, a higher development, a more intensive development, of what exists in the ordinary life as love: love for people, love of nature, love of all our work, love for what we do. All the love that already exists in the usual life can be increased by doing away with theoretical and practical egotism in the way described. Love must be intensified, And when this love is increased, when the expanded love-force is joined to the strengthened thinking and the silence of soul, one comes to a third experience, Man comes now to the conscious laying hold of the true form of the ego, when he comes to know not only the pre-earthly existence, but when he now learns by means of this that an augmented love-force further energizes the other developed, strengthened forces of knowledge. He comes to an exact experience: All that has been won has nothing to do with the physical body; you experience yourself outside the physical body; you experience the world as it cannot be experienced through the body. Instead of natural phenomena you experience spiritual beings. You experience yourself, not as a natural being between birth and death, but as a spiritual being in a pre-earthly existence.

If a man has won this, and there is added to it a heightened, increased capacity of love, the possibility of dedicating himself, of surrendering himself with his whole body-free existence, to what he sees here, then there comes to him the knowledge of what exists within man in the immediate present, independent of the physical and even of the etheric body. He gets a direct view of what rests within him and goes through the gate of death into the post-earthly existence, when we enter again into a spiritual world. Because he comes to know what he is in a body-free state, he learns also of that which continues to exist, free of the body, when the physical body is laid aside at death.

You see the purpose of it all is to come to the perception of the eternity of the human soul. But in particular, one attains by means of it to the perception of the true ego, that ego which goes through birth and death, of which one cannot say that it dwells in the body, but that it rests in the body. One learns at the same time of the movement and activity of this ego in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. One comes to know it in the same way that we know the human being here in the sense-physical existence through the sense of sight. Just as a man goes about here among the things of nature, among natural phenomena, among other people, so one learns to know, I might say, how the soul moves about in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But one learns also that the soul's movement and its relations there are dependent upon an earlier earth-life. I said that one learns of the oneness of the moral and the natural; one learns that in the pre-earthly existence man is permeated not only by spiritual but also by moral impulses, While one merely perceives, during the continuance of the etheric life-tableau, that spirit streams through the whole world, one now learns that in the pre-earthly existence there pulsated through our soul-spirit-being the moral impulses which appear in the memory during the physical life, and especially in the moral predispositions» One has now come to know the oneness of the moral and the physical world.

But now, in this moral-physical world (physical only in the pictures shining up into the spirit from the physical existence)—in this world experienced by the soul in the spiritual realm, one comes to know how the soul, as man's real ego, lives in the spiritual world in conformity with the previous existence. Truly when we come to spiritual vision and escape from the illusion of the ordinary ego, then we come to know how the ego has already passed through the spiritual world between death and a new birth; we learn how it comported itself, in conformity with its former earth-life, in this world endowed with moral impulses; and we learn that it is all carried into this earth-life as an inner determination of destiny. We see this expressed in the tendencies of a person, or in the special coloring of the desire which drives a man to one thing or another in the earth-life.

This does not encroach upon freedom. Freedom exists within certain limits, in just the same way that we are free, when we have built us a house, to occupy it or not; but we will occupy it because we have built it for ourselves for a certain reason. In the same way we are still free, even though we may know that there are impelling forces in our physical body which cause us to turn this way or that in life, or to live in one way or another. On the one hand we can regard this as a destiny that we have woven for ourselves out of earlier earth-lives, out of the world through which we have passed that contains not only spiritual but also moral laws. These have permeated what we were in a former life with definite spiritual impulses, and out of these have formed the destiny for our earth-life. But we notice also, when we look at what comes from the former earth-life, in the way described, that it is the eternal in the soul that has determined our earthly destiny» After we have passed through the gate of death, and have united what is of moral or soul-nature with our soul-being, in order to bring greater harmony into our relation with the demands of the moral world—we carry this into the world and come down again into a new earth-life, with what I might call the resulting total from what we were in life and what the spiritual world has made of us between death and a new birth.

So you see the really important thing is first to develop a certain perceptive faculty, with which one can look up into the spiritual world.

You must bear in mind, my dear friends, that not everyone has the gifts of a mathematician. It is very difficult for most people even to have these geometrical concepts, that are really to be formed only in the imagination. Geometry is not a spontaneous element of nature, but we understand nature by means of it. We must first produce geometry within ourselves, and by means of geometry we create the forms which will lead us into the structure of the lifeless world. With just such inner rigor do we produce inner vision, by developing strengthened thinking, silence of soul, and love which has become a force of knowledge, so that we may apprehend the living, the sentient, the self-conscious. In the same way that we apprehend the lifeless through mathematics, we come to an understanding apprehension of the living, the feeling, the self-conscious, when we proceed in a purely mathematical way, and develop a certain kind of vision with vigor and exactness.

So we may say that anyone who is serious about Anthroposophy pursues it as if he were required to give account of the use he makes of his forces of knowledge to the strictest mathematician. The forming of mathematical concepts is elementary Anthroposophy, if I may speak thus. And when anyone has learned to develop this self-creativeness of mathematics in order to apply it to the lifeless things of the world, he gets the impulse to develop further the kinds of knowledge which will lead to the vision I have described to you. We come to know that the lifeless world has a different content when we know it mathematically—mathematics is elementary Anthroposophy—and we know the living, sentient, self-conscious world when we study it with complete anthroposophical understanding.

Therefore, what in ordinary life is called clairvoyance, or anything of the kind, must not be confused with what we have in Anthroposophy for obtaining knowledge of the spiritual world. When we call this clairvoyance—and of course we can do so—we must mean exact clairvoyance, just as we speak of exact mathematics, in contrast with the mystical, confused clairvoyance, which is usually what anyone has in mind when this word is used.

Now you will perhaps have received the impression from my description that this is difficult. Yes, it is difficult] it is not easy. Hence, many people who presume to have an opinion about what goes on in Dornach do not try to understand what appears so difficult to them, but judge according to the trivial, confused clairvoyance. And then the result is all that I mentioned at the beginning of my lecture» But the Anthroposophy with which we are concerned is an exact kind of knowledge, which can actually be understood by anyone with sound human intelligence, just as anyone can understand a picture without himself being a painter. To get Anthroposophy one must be an anthroposophical researcher; to paint a picture one must be a painter; but everything I have described can be understood by anyone with good common sense, if only he does not himself put hindrances and obstructions in the way.

To paint a picture one must be a painter; to judge it one must rely upon sound human nature. To build up Anthroposophy one must be a spiritual researcher; to understand Anthroposophy one need only meet the more or less well-given descriptions of it with his healthy, free human spirit, undisturbed by natural-scientific and other prejudices. But Anthroposophy is only in its beginning, and what I have perhaps not described very well today will be described better and better as time goes on; and then the time will come which has always arrived ultimately for anything new in humanity. How long it was before the Copernican world-view was accepted! It has nevertheless upset all concepts previously held. Today it is accepted as a matter of course, and is taught in the schools. What is considered by people today the quintessence of fantasy, of nonsense, perhaps madness, will later be a matter of course—just as it was with the Copernican world-theory. Anthroposophy can wait until it is a matter of course.

This Anthroposophy, above all else, was to be cultivated at the Dornach Goetheanum. Therefore—permit me to say this in conclusion—more than ten years ago friends of our cause conceived a plan to build an abode for this Anthroposophy, and commissioned me to carry out the plan—I was only the one to execute it—and this abode is the Goetheanum. If Anthroposophy were a theoretical world-conception, or even a mere idea of reform, what would have happened the moment the idea appeared to build a home for Anthroposophy? An architect would have been consulted who would simply have erected a building in antique, or Renaissance, in Gothic or rococo style, or something of the sort. But Anthroposophy does not work merely theoretically, merely as scientific knowledge; it passes over into the whole human being, lays claim to the whole human being. This is very soon noticed by the anthroposophical researcher.

You see when a man wants to think about outer nature, he needs his head, and if he wants to indulge in philosophic speculations, he needs it even more. What appears before the silent soul, as pertaining to the spiritual world, in the way I have described it to you, is something that appears more fleetingly. One needs presence of mind in order to take it in quickly; but one needs for it also his whole human being. The head is not enough. The whole human organization must be placed in the service of the spirit, in order to bring into the memory, into the recollection, what one sees spiritually without the body. To illustrate this, let me give a personal experience.

I have never been accustomed to prepare any lecture in just the way lectures are usually prepared; but it is my custom to experience spiritually the thoughts that appear necessary for a lecture, as one must also experience spiritually what one wishes to hold as the result of spiritual research. What is experienced in strengthened thinking and in the human soul must be conveyed into thought and for this mere head-thinking will not suffice. One must be united more intimately with the whole human being, if one wishes to express what has been experienced in the realm of spirit. There are various methods by which such experience can really be brought into the ordinary consciousness, so that it can be put into words. It is my custom, with pencil in hand, to write down, to formulate, either in words or in some kind of signs, all that comes to me from the spiritual world. Hence I have many cartloads of note-books, but I never look at them again. They exist, but their only purpose is to unite with the whole human being what is discovered in spirit, so that it is grasped not only with the head, so as to be communicated in words, but is experienced by the whole human being.

Anthroposophy does indeed lay hold of the whole human being, therefore it is in still another regard an expression of the Goethean world-conception. It is, to begin with, an expression of the Goethean world-conception, in that it was induced by Goethe's method of observing the metamorphoses, the transformations of life in the plant and animal world. In this Goethean mode of observation the thought is so alive that one can then try to strengthen it in the way I have described. But Goethe is also that personality who built the bridge from knowledge to art.

Out of his artistic conviction Goethe voiced this beautiful expression: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed. This means that Goethe knew one lays hold in real knowledge of the ruling and weaving of spirit, and then implants this into substance, be it as sculptor or musician or painter. Goethe knew that artistic fantasy is a kind of arbitrary projection of what man can experience in its pure form in the spirit.

Any knowledge which, like Anthroposophy, is rooted thus in the life of the spirit, flows of itself into artistic creativeness. It comes into artistic activity, when one knows the human being in the way I have described, and sees how the pre-earthly forces work into the earthly-corporeal existence. Then one has the feeling that the human being cannot be comprehended with the mere intellect, merely in concepts. At a certain point abstract concepts must be allowed to pass over into artistic seeing, so that you feel: Man is created by nature as a work of art.

Of course this can easily be ridiculed, for nothing seems more dreadful to people nowadays than to hear anyone say that to know something it must be comprehended artistically. But people may declaim as long as they please about the need to be logical rather than artistic when something is to be understood—if nature works artistically, then man simply does not find out about it by logic. He must pass over to artistic seeing to learn the real secrets of nature.

This is what Goethe meant when he said: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed.” And this is what Goethe meant also when, after years of longing, he reached Italy and believed he had attained his ideal of art. He said: “When I behold these works of art, I have the notion that the Greeks in the creation of their works of art proceeded by the same laws according to which nature creates, and I am on the track of those laws.”

Goethe was a personality who always aimed to transpose into a work of art whatever was comprehended as knowledge in the soul. Because Anthroposophy is of this same conviction, it was not possible simply to go to an architect and say: Build us a dwelling-place for Anthroposophy—and it would then have been built in Renaissance or antique or rococo style; our building has to be based on an entirely different conception of life and of art.

I have often compared the basic necessity here in a somewhat banal way with the relation of the nut-shell to the nut-kernel. The kernel of the nut, which we eat, is fashioned according to definite laws of form, but the shell is also made in accordance with the same laws. You cannot imagine a shell being fitted to the nut from the outside; the shell arises from the same laws of form as the kernel. So the forms of the outer visible building, what was painted in the domes, the sculpture placed in it, had to be fashioned as the shell, so to speak, of what was proclaimed within through the word, through art, spoken or sung. As the nut-shell to the nut, so this building had to be related to what was fostered within it. This was really the result not only of my conviction, but of that of many others. We have had eurythmy performances, the presentation of an art which has a special language in movement, in which the stage-picture consists of moving persons or moving groups? and the movements are not dance-movements, and not imitative movements, but an actual visible speech. We have developed here on the stage of the Goetheanum an expressive art of movement. The lines in which the human soul expresses itself harmonize in a beautiful way with the lines of the architraves, the lines of the capitals, the columns, with the whole form of the building, and with the paintings in it. What was cultivated within and the covering were one. When something was said from the platform, when what was learned in spiritual vision was put into words and sounded out into the audience-room, then what was spoken from the podium was the kernel which lived within. The artistic form had to correspond with the kernel. The style of the building in all its details had to come from the same impulse, from the same source as Anthroposophy itself. For Anthroposophy is not abstract, theoretical knowledge, but a comprehension of life, of the whole life. And therefore it becomes art quite spontaneously. It fulfils what Goethe said again: He who possesses science and art has also religion] he who possesses neither should have religion.

I might say, all that lived in the forms, all that may ever have been said or artistically presented in the Goetheanum, was intended to be comprised in a wood-carved group about 30 feet high, in which Christ, as the Representative of mankind, is portrayed in the Temptation by Ahriman and Lucifer.

This does not mean that Anthroposophy has anything to do with the forming of any kind of sect. Anthroposophy is far removed from hostile opposition to any religious conviction, or from any wish whatsoever to found a new religion. But Anthroposophy can show that real spiritual knowledge leads to the climax of religious development, to the Representative of humanity, Christ, to the incorporation of the Christ-God in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It shows also how spirit-knowledge needs the picture of this central point of all earth-evolution, the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha. Quite certainly a man becomes religiously inclined through Anthroposophy, but Anthroposophy is not the founding of a religion.

What Anthroposophy wanted to offer artistically in the Goetheanum had to come from the same impulses from which the spoken word and the song proceed. It can even be said that when anyone stepped on the platform—I want to say this in all modesty—the forms of the columns, the whole form of the inner architecture, the inside sculpture and painting—all this was like an admonition to speak in a manner that would really approach the inner being of the listeners. It was like a continuous challenge to the speaker to put his word into this building in a worthy way.

To sum up: The building was to be an outer garment for Anthroposophy, which came wholly from the spirit of Anthroposophy, but was there for physical eyes to see» There was nothing symbolic, nothing allegorical. The whole building was created in its architecture, in its sculpture, in its painting, in everything connected with it, in such a way that what was livingly grasped in spirit-vision expressed itself, not in intellectual, symbolic forms; but living ideas and mobile thoughts about the spiritual world come to artistic expression in such a way as to be directly felt and seen. There was no symbol in the whole building, and if anyone maintains that the building had a symbolic meaning, he speaks as one who knows nothing about Anthroposophy.

And so the building was for the eye what Anthroposophy is to be for the soul of man. Anthroposophy has to be that kind of spirit which knows that a longing for the unveiling of the super-sensible vibrates and quivers through present humanity; that this humanity—made what it is by its scientific education, which intends to be generally popular, and already is to a certain extent—can no longer be satisfied with traditional concepts of belief; that concepts of knowledge must come, which tend upward to the spiritual world; and that unrest and dissatisfaction of soul result from the lack of such concepts of knowledge.

Anthroposophy wants to serve the present by providing in the right way what men need to take from this present into the near future. What Anthroposophy wants to be, invisibly, for human souls, the Goetheanum wanted to be, visibly, as vestment, as home. Had the Goetheanum been only a symbolic building, the pain at its loss would not have been so great, for then one could always bring it alive again in recollection. But the Goetheanum was not for mere remembrance. It was something intended to bring tidings from the spirit to the sense-world, and like any work of art, wanted to be manifested directly to the sense-world. Therefore with the burning of the Goetheanum, all that the Goetheanum wanted to be is lost.

But it has perhaps shown that Anthroposophy wants to be nothing one-sidedly theoretical, mere knowledge; it can be and must be a life-content in all realms. Hence, it had to build its abode in a style of its own. The Spirit, which Anthroposophy places before the soul, the Goetheanum wanted to place before the eyes. And Anthroposophy must place before the human soul what this soul really demands as the innermost need of the modern time; namely, a view, a knowledge, an artistic comprehension, of the spiritual world. Souls demand this because they feel more and more that only by experiencing the whole human destiny can they discover the complete human worth.

The Goetheanum could burn down. A catastrophe has swept it away. The pain of those who loved it is so great that it cannot be described. That structure which came from the same sources as Anthroposophy, and through it willed to serve mankind, had to be built for the sense-eye, had to be made of physical material. And as the human body itself, according to my description today, is the sense-image and the material effect of the eternal spiritual, but in death falls away, so that the spiritual can be developed in other forms, so also could that—permit me to close by comparing the Dornach misfortune with what happens in the usual course of the world—so could that be destroyed by flames which had to be made out of physical substance, in order to be seen by physical eyes. But Anthroposophy is built out of spirit, and only flames of spirit can touch this. Just as the human soul and spirit are victor over the physical when this is destroyed in death, so Anthroposophy feels alive, even though it has lost its Dornach home, the Goetheanum. It may be said that physical flames could destroy what had to be built of outer physical substance for the eye; but what Anthroposophy is to be for the further development of humanity is built of spirit. This will not be destroyed by the flames of the spiritual life, for these flames are not destroying flames; they are strengthening flames, flames that give more life than ever. And all that life which is to be revealed through Anthroposophy as life of knowledge of the higher world, must be tempered by the flames of the highest inspiration of the human being, his soul and his spirit. Then Anthroposophy will continuously evolve.

He who lives in this way in the spirit feels no less the pain caused by the passing away of the earthly, but he knows at the same time that surmounting all this depends upon the realization that the spirit will ever be victorious over matter, and in matter will be transformed ever anew.

When spiritual science is discussed today in the sense in which it is meant here, one can often experience that people not only express opposing views on this or that conceptual point, but also turn against it in an almost passionate way, as if it were something that would arise from the arbitrariness of this or that person and should only be brought into the world through this arbitrariness. Anyone who has a little overview of intellectual life as it has developed up to the present day, as it has been preparing for a long time, will very soon be able to see that this spiritual science or spiritual research is not just about something that merely needs to arise from the arbitrary intentions of some mind, but something that wants to meet the urge, the longing of the time. And anyone who is perhaps able to look a little deeper into this urge, this longing of the time, will also be able to perceive, with some attention, how those impulses that lead, indeterminately and still today as if instinctively, , will in the future become ever more definite and definite, ever more significant and ever more intense; so that spiritual research, in the way it is meant here, corresponds to an urge of the times. It is the task of today's and tomorrow's lectures, which I have the honor of giving to you, to present this.

It is basically quite easy to understand that today people carry around many popular beliefs and ideas that they have constructed for themselves in order to build a world view; but they object when spiritual research wants to enter into the spiritual life of the present day and assert that, in addition to what human understanding can comprehend, in addition to what the ordinary mind, which finds its fulfillment in the comprehension of scientific research, can comprehend, that in addition to all this, there is something in man that is designated by names that are so horrible for many, such as “etheric body,” “astral body,” and “ego carrier,” so that man does not only consists of the substances of the external world, but that he should also carry within himself supersensible elements, such as the supersensible etheric body, or the astral body, which is completely supersensible and underlies the physical organization, and the carrier of the actual ego, the deepest fundamental essence of man.

It is just as easy to scoff, just as easy to construct apparent refutations from popular concepts against such knowledge; and when, in addition, spiritual scientific research wants to use its methods to explore the conditions of life and existence of human nature, wants to show that it wants to reach beyond birth and death, beyond what the senses and ordinary science can explore, then such an assertion seems to contradict everything we are accustomed to reading or hearing today.

And yet, through this spiritual research, attention must be paid to what Lessing has already more or less externally incorporated into our spiritual life; and it must be enlivened by spiritual research.

This spiritual research must show man that in his supersensible members there are powers to be found that extend beyond this earth-life; so that one has to speak not only of one, but of repeated earth-lives, so that man man, in his entire existence, has to survey his being through spiritual science: forward beyond birth, initially into his spiritual existence; then into earlier earth lives, and again into the future, into later earth lives.

For spiritual science, the entire existence of a person can be broken down into successive earthly lives, which are separated from one another by that which lies between death and a new birth: by a purely spiritual existence in supersensible worlds.

At first, modern man may have many objections to this penetration into the spiritual world; it seems quite fantastic to him. And precisely those who know the conditions and foundations of spiritual science will find it understandable that much resistance can arise in the modern soul against such assertions. And so we find among the objections the assertion: We overlook existence, and what first presents itself to our senses shows us that we have a closed world in sense existence, which can be known from within ourselves.

That was the endeavor of a number of great, serious thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century: to exert all the powers of thought to explain from within what presents itself to the intellect of man! Much has been done in the course of the nineteenth century to establish such a worldview, to give it moral supports, moral goals, and also to give comfort to the human soul from it. And it is not the worst souls that have striven for a materialistic, positivistic worldview.

This is one of the types of resistance that one encounters when talking about spiritual research or spiritual science.

The second is something that one finds in people who have a different conviction, namely that behind this sensual world lies a supersensible world, people who recognize such a supersensible world but who cannot admit that the powers of human knowledge and the possibilities of human research are suitable for penetrating into the supersensible existence.

Whether they are doubts or objections from the philosophical side, esteemed attendees, the great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte said everything necessary against all these objections many years ago, a century ago, , when he, in the way that one could say it at the time, gave lectures at the newly founded University of Berlin in 1811 and 1813 and clothed in words that which can be seen through the spirit. Right at the beginning, Johann Gottlieb Fichte said to his audience: Imagine a crowd of people who were born blind and still live as blind people, and one of them would be a seer who speaks of light and colors. Then these people would say: He is talking about something fantastic that does not exist.

From their point of view, they are right, because what can be known about a world depends on whether the person has the organ to perceive it. A supernatural world can only be admitted by someone who, as Goethe put it, has the spiritual eye to see this world as a reality.

Now, the way in which this spiritual science or spiritual research is presented in modern literature is not limited to merely presenting the results, or what has just been indicated in a few words. The literature not only presents the results of the research, but you can also find, for example, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline,” how the human soul comes to truly develop within itself the organ to look into the spiritual world. And this organ is accessible to everyone if they only go the right way.

If someone is born blind, it can be said that he may be denied the ability to recognize light and colors for life. With the spiritual eye, however, it is possible for everyone to awaken it; there are powers within everyone that are dormant.

Since today we are to speak about the “task of spiritual science for the future”, we can only briefly touch on what the goals and nature of this spiritual science itself are. Something of what is pushing towards this spiritual science is, so to speak, everywhere [decided], wherever you look, especially in the best minds of the preparing new time, the preparing spiritual future.

Among the many things that could be mentioned, let me just quote the well-known saying of Goethe, where he says, based on a long life of experience, through a penetrating observation of the reality of existence – you can find the passage in “Conversations with Eckermann” – he said: “One may have gone through many things in life, may have faced existence in many ways – in old age one will become a mystic.

And because Goethe held this view, he also had his Faust end as a mystic at the end of the second part of “Faust”, even though he also portrayed him as a practical soul.

What does Goethe actually mean when he says that people become mystics in old age? Basically, anyone can experience this by comparing the whole mood, the whole state of their soul, in their youth and then when they reach a certain age: you have gone through life, formed a certain view, certain inner views, to which you develop a very specific relationship, an emotional and sensory position.

In youth, [goals and] ideals, worldviews can gush forth – views of the world gush forth; one can have the feeling: they are there, raised up out of you. And when one looks back to childhood in particular, one can see how one cannot yet speak of how the soul and the body give rise to activity and expressiveness. What the human being can observe in himself in youth emerges from the indeterminate foundations of the soul life.

Later on, we can see that what we have achieved within ourselves emerges from the soul. But then comes the time when more and more of what is unfolding in the world around us is consciously reflected in the soul, and we know that what we have experienced is now drawing together in our soul in such a way that it can shed light on other things. You become richer inside.

How fresh you feel inside in old age indicates what kind of views you projected out of yourself in your youth. In old age, you become much more independent of the physical. One has an inner experience that every human being can have, even without spiritual science: the experience of becoming independent of one's soul, of one's physicality, of one's personality. And this inwardness, Goethe sensed it when he said that one becomes a mystic in old age. He meant: one has a spiritual form from which one can shed light on the outside world.

And if you examine, I would say, the intention of this Goethean soul, especially at this point, you can say: He felt it, as in youth, so to speak in the earlier human ages, one lives in harmony with what one is also externally, physically. The body grows, becomes stronger and stronger; all the individual functions become stronger. This happens in every life. Every human being reaches what can be called a peak in life, and every human being reaches what can be called a decline. We all feel the decline of life. But it is precisely during the decline of physical life that we feel more and more this inner richness, as we are allowed to ascribe more inner judgment to the world; we feel the inner independence from the outer decline.

If we have developed healthily, we feel that we become fuller, richer in content, when we describe the descent of life. That is where the question comes from, independently of all things, the question of what comes after death, after we have passed through the gate of death - after we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world?

The objective, independent of the personal, is precisely that you say to yourself: You accumulate a wealth in your entire life that is ever increasing. And when life has become richer and richer, more and more full of content, then it loses the body. Does what one has collected go through one's whole life, does it go into nothingness? That is the question - not the one that is caused by the fear of death, or by some subjective feeling, but when such forces become ever richer and richer, then the question arises: should they disappear into nothingness when a person walks through the gate of death? No. We can perceive in ourselves how, basically, something within us, which is our inner soul core, works on our outer, physical existence throughout our entire life. We can best recognize this when we observe the changing states between waking and sleeping and ask ourselves what occurs there.

An external, experimental science cannot answer this. But how does spiritual science answer it? We enter the human being as he falls asleep, and he feels how he becomes more and more alienated from the forces through which he moves his limbs; he feels himself escaping from the earthly-bodily. But at the moment this happens, consciousness is extinguished. Spiritual research says: something very special is happening: the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed; but what we call the astral body and the ego carrier withdraw from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up. Only the inner forces of these are not awakened; that is why the darkness of unconsciousness then spreads around the person.

Spiritual research shows that the forces in this astral body and this I-bearer of the human being, which are so weak in ordinary everyday life that the person cannot be aware of them during sleep, can be kindled.

This is done by means of real spiritual methods. It is done through what is called meditation and concentration. If a person brings it upon themselves to make themselves an instrument for the truths of the spiritual world, they can do so through meditation and concentration.

Much is needed for this. Only one example will be given here. Imagine that you have a glass that is empty and one that is a quarter full of water, and you pour water from the full glass into the empty glass, and you now imagine that that this happening does not bring about what usually happens, namely that the glass from which he pours becomes emptier, but that by pouring into the other glass, the glass from which he pours becomes fuller and fuller!

We have to form such allegorical ideas ourselves, without claiming that they are real. If a person always remains within his reason and is aware that his idea is allegorical, he can have a certain feeling about it. This can then express a higher truth, for example about human love.

Love is a concept that is virtually impossible to penetrate. But you can express individual qualities of love in symbols.

He who pours the mild powers of his love into a heart in need of love will notice that he loses none of his power of love, but that through this giving his power becomes greater and greater. He will be able to use the symbol of the glass for this love, which does not become emptier by pouring into another, but fuller.

And when man then draws together all his thoughts, concentrating them on such a symbol, when man has the patience to concentrate his soul forces again and again on such an inner life of thought, then he evokes the slumbering forces from his soul and attains a state in which he becomes a true instrument for beholding the world behind sense perception.

In this state, the human being then comes to truly experience, outside of his body, that in which he otherwise only exists in sleep; and he can bring about states that are not sleep but are similar to sleep in that he is outside of himself, having moved out of himself with the astral body and the ego. Then he is in the spiritual world. The spiritual world then reveals itself to him. The self-experiment is then also proof that he lives in the supersensible reality. And then the person realizes that he is that which does not depend on the instrument of the body, but rather forms this very form of the body.

And when this spiritual eye opens, then he notices, as the child enters the world through birth, this supersensible working and forming in man.

Only then are the things that external research brings to light explained, when we are able to notice how the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child develops out of the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child, how speech develops, how the brain develops more and more, how the upright gait is achieved.

The spiritual researcher shows who is actually the real worker in the whole process of human development.

The spiritual does not develop out of the physical, [not out of a single germ] at birth or conception, but the spiritual researcher can observe how the spiritual emerges from the spiritual world and how it first creates the physical body.

In this way, one follows the human being beyond the bounds of life, as one does in nature, as one does with plants, where one follows the germ from one year to the next; one follows the end and connects it to the beginning. One follows the germ as it develops into the plant. The spiritual researcher does not merely follow the supersensible human being in its life between birth and death, but follows it beyond the gate of death. What Goethe says, the mystical, is followed by the person who knows that what reproduces itself is the spiritual. And he sees how it becomes more and more independent and independent when the body decays.

Just as the seed remains when everything else withers and then develops into a new plant, so it is with the spirit. And while more and more of our physical shell is lost with age, this spiritual part becomes stronger and stronger, and in such a way that it has become rich through all its experiences, and is now able to do what it could not do at the beginning of life.

At the beginning of life, it has built a [certain] body. During life, one experiences that one can no longer use this in death. But in the inner soul, there are the seeds for building a new life. And by passing through the gateway of death, we can see how the forces for building a new life have grown stronger.

And so, through spiritual research, we can see how man is ready to build a new body by gathering strength between birth and death to build a new body for himself.

The spiritual researcher applies exactly the same methods that are used to observe nature externally; only he applies them in such a way that the person who wants to apply them must develop the organs for supersensible vision. Then what he explains becomes comprehensible to those who cannot yet see into the spiritual world, comprehensible from everything that is in harmony with the phenomena of external life.

Thus it becomes comprehensible that this teaching of the return of man, of the creative soul that lives in him and is not limited by birth and death, may at first seem fantastic. Then, from today, man reaches a certain point in his view of the world, to that point that is like the dawn in which Giordano Bruno stood.

How did he stand there - Giordano Bruno - when he made his knowledge independent of science? If today natural science must rely on that which is based on the external, then one need only say: Even before Copernicus, before Kepler, before Galileo, people directed their minds out into space and found the law of the world just as it took place outside their external senses; and he - Giordano Bruno - replaces the external law with his inner vision. They stopped at the sensory view, those who observed the spreading of the wide celestial spheres and saw the blue vault of heaven as resting on a disk.

What did Giordano Bruno say against this view? He said: What you see as the blue vault of heaven is only through the limitation of your eye. From every point, the eye looks into an infinite world! He said that on the basis of Copernicus. And Copernicus had not prepared a system based on sensory experience, but what Copernicus gave in his system, he had through thinking, through the inner power of the human soul.

Thus the soul must not rely on what science presents as knowledge. And on the basis of the inner powers, Giordano Bruno was able to say: What you perceive with your senses, this outer vault of heaven, is nothing more than the boundary of your vision!

The spiritual researcher says: the boundary of birth and death, and that we believe that human beings are enclosed within these boundaries, can certainly be compared with the “borders” in the sky that were assumed on the basis of sensory perception before the Copernican worldview. And just as Giordano Bruno does, spiritual science points out into the infinite vastness of the human soul. And just as the blue vault of heaven comes from the fact that the senses do not see further, so the belief that life is limited by death comes from the fact that limited vision does not see further than physical death.

Many today stand with spiritual science at the same point where natural science stood three centuries ago; and the longing of the present time, of our time, pushes against these processes. Whoever follows the course of thought in recent times sees how natural science and thinking have progressed from triumph to triumph - thinking that is linked to natural science and to external perception. Anyone who follows this path will certainly be an admirer of natural science when it comes to the development of the scientific, and nowhere is the spiritual science concerned with struggling against the wonderful successes of natural science. But when this natural science comes before your soul, then something else comes before the human being in relation to human life.

I do not want to theorize here; let us consider a specific case. It was in February 1901 when a star suddenly appeared in the sky, only to disappear the very next day. After appearing brightly lit, the next day it had hardly any perceptible light left.

No matter how right the scientific hypothesis may be, how does the scientific mind view this star? It imagines that there is a double star, that one star will collide with the other and spray and dissolve into a nebula. A bright flare-up from the collision, then a brightening, a dimming from the spraying.

And how does the scientific mind approach this strange mystery? If we think entirely in the stream of thought that has been woven through Giordano Bruno and Copernicus, then two world bodies collide. Giordano Bruno describes the view into the infinite vastness, the sun with its planets, on which beings live. Worlds collide there. Millions of creatures may perish in such a collision. All this life is founded in what is a flicker and in the spraying and is destroyed. What does science possibly tell us about what is going on up there in the external mechanical collision? There, cosmic bodies disintegrate into nebulae, and from this nebula a new solar system will form, plants will develop, later animals, human forms - until such a collision occurs again.

Such knowledge is available to the thinking that is linked to science. - One should not say anything against the greatness of this thinking. How can one not admire this thinking — what has been achieved in the nineteenth century through spectral analysis, through the advances in biology. But in addition to this, which we have just placed before our souls, there is something else that can show us how powerless all thinking is, which has just formed itself on this flashing and dispersing star event.

When we see a mother living with her child, we see her experiencing how the soul of the child works its way up; we see this mother connected with the first stages of maturation, the attempts at speaking and walking; we see her united with the child in love; we then see this mother at the child's deathbed, seeing the child die. We see the mother's grief and feel the question arise within us: Why was it born? And what is it about the soul that entered into the birth, that gave me such intimate joy, that has now disappeared into nothingness?

There we have the question of life. And we know, my dear attendees, that we encounter such questions at every turn, questions that cannot be answered by the outer senses, but that can be seen living in a corner of the soul.

And now let us look beyond what natural science can tell us about the entire world system, and we feel powerless in the face of the questions concerning the human soul. Such things cannot be dispelled by impassive staring; such things are what life repeatedly presents to our soul.

When millions of living beings are dead, perish through a collision - what science can tell us about all this coming into being and passing away of beings and what they are, it does not come close to what a human heart asks when it sits at the deathbed of a loved one and wonders about the fate of life!

If we observe the thinking and activity of the time, today, in relation to these things, a great change presents itself to us in comparison to the past. We need only go back to the time of Goethe to see how even the most enlightened researchers - apart from the French moralists - affirm something similar to the history of creation and say: It was simply the life of what is presented today as knowledge. What was in the Mosaic creation story then?

Man is in the spiritual world, and only later is the material added. This world view gave man a picture of the world in which man was already in it, and it was such that it said to this human soul: What so wonderfully enters into life belongs to the first substance of the earth - and you yourself belong to it.

And more and more, a world view is emerging in its place that only sees mechanical world events. You see a star formation disintegrate and imagine that a new world is forming, just as you imagine that a new planetary system is forming. I have often used the image of what happens when you take a certain substance, an oily substance that forms drops, cut a sheet of paper in half and push it through the large droplet as an equatorial plane, then stick a needle into the sheet of paper, start turning it, and then see how small droplets actually separate. And in this way you actually see something like a planetary system unfolding on a small scale, as it unfolds on a large scale outside. And who wouldn't believe in it?

It has only one fault: when showing something, one must not forget the most important things, one must not forget that nothing would come into being if the teacher were not there and turning! So one does not fully represent it if one forgets the main factor: the driving force! So even theoretically this “world system” has a hole.

But then it becomes completely inexplicable how this world soul can tie itself to what is developing, so that it may one day step out of its nothingness onto this scene.

And more and more, this view has developed that only the mechanical is called upon to explain the world. From ancient times until our own, it has become more and more a kind of belief that all phenomena need only be explained mechanically. The whole of human life itself has gradually become mechanical.

And so it has come about that the time has come when the soul, with its questions, stands incomprehensibly before what modern thinking is able to see, and knows of no bridge to what science says. And while the soul wonders – spiritual science has an answer!

There was a time in the nineteenth century when it was seriously believed that thoughts arise from the brain, when one spoke of thoughts as brain vibrations. How could it ever come about that movements in the brain could be directly related to thoughts? Where did all this mechanical science come from in the first place?

And so it came about that in more recent times, due to the necessary conditions of this time, the ability of the old times to look into the spiritual was lost. People did not recognize the essence of thoughts; they did not know how to look at a thought. And so one could believe that in the physical body, where the soul is embedded, alone the essence of man lies. But even if one disputes this soul away, it is still there, and it presents itself in the modern progress of the world. - Therefore, in the course of time, the urge had asserted itself to consult other effective beings than the mechanical ones.

How did an important historian and art connoisseur, Herman Grimm, face life in his time? He knew nothing of spiritual science, but he had set himself a great task, which he shared with those who wanted to listen to him. He once explained this plan to me; everything he gave us in detail was only to be part of a larger plan. He wanted to work on a great work in which he wanted to explain that it is not mechanical forces that are at work in the whole of the existence of the world, but “creative imagination”! That which is creative imagination in man is creative power outside of him - so he said.

And there was a philosopher in the nineteenth century: Jakob Frohschammer, in Munich, who sought to present this human imagination as the most essential thing. When he shows that not only the forces in which the microscopist believes today are formed in the embryo, but also suspects creative imagination as a formative force, this corresponds to the urge at that time to also find something spiritual, to turn one's gaze to the active, the creating spirit, which shows itself as going beyond arising and ceasing, in the midst of the triumphs of science. For arising and passing away is tied to the appearance of nature; while the creative spirit is that which remains.

And in our time we see how serious people feel that, although one must proceed in accordance with modern science wherever natural phenomena are concerned, the soul cannot but rise up into the spiritual that lives and permeates the world.

Today, one can observe an interesting phenomenon. In every train station bookstore, you can now get a strange book: This book, despite containing many inaccuracies, is an important phenomenon of the time; it is called: “On the criticism of time,” by Walter Rathenau. This book was written by a “practitioner of life” who sees this mechanization everywhere in scientific and intellectual life with the naked eye and who, especially in the first chapters of this book, presents a magnificent account of how human concepts have become mechanical, how social life has become mechanical.

He presents all this with the stylus of the man of sense, of the man who looks at reality. But it is precisely such a practitioner of life, who is seized by the living essence of the soul, who shows us the urge and yearning for the spiritual in our time. There you will find, for example, meaningful passages. The soul calls out for what is spiritual:

It longs for a meaning that lies beyond what can be proven [...]. The time is looking [...] for its soul.

It is looking for its soul, the time - so he thinks,

and will find it; admittedly against the will of mechanization. This epoch

—ours—

was not interested in developing the soul in man; it aimed to make the world usable and thus rational, to push back the boundary of wonder and to conceal the otherworldly —

to understand the truths.

Nevertheless, we are surrounded by mystery as ever. It emerges from every smooth surface of thought, and from every everyday experience it takes just one step

to penetrate

to the center of the world. The three emanations of the soul: love of creature, of nature, and of divinity, could not be robbed by mechanization of the individual life; for the life of the whole, it was volatilized into insignificance. Humanitarianism sank to cold pity and compulsory welfare, and yet it signifies the ethical summit of the entire epoch; love of nature became a sentimental Sunday pleasure; love of God, obscured by the regimentation of mythological-dogmatic rituals, entered into the service of interests in this world and the next and was thus suspected not only by ignoble natures.

There is probably no single path by which it would not be possible for a person to find his soul [...]. But humanity will not take any detours. There will be no prophets and no religious founders [...]. No unified art of the world will bring its soul, because art is [already] a mirror [...] of the soul, not its originator.

So a “life practitioner” speaks of the soul's yearning and longing. Much in the book is wrong; but one thing is true: those who feel this way feel that the truth of the soul is no longer spoken of in our time. Religious founders are rejected. He feels that even an exoteric teaching is no longer accepted.

But the striving of the time itself is to reconnect the soul to the spiritual.

And this longing is met by what spiritual science has to offer. Spiritual research shows that man can find within himself such an unfolding of the forces slumbering in his soul that he can directly immerse himself in what surrounds us supernaturally. And then the gaze into these vastness conquers the material.

We look out and feel not only the human body embedded in physical existence, but through it the soul embedded in spiritual existence. We expand our view beyond birth and death.

Just as natural science has broadened our view beyond the blue vault of heaven – just as natural science says: this limit that man has set for himself must be broadened, so spiritual science says: what the mechanical science, what the mechanical worldview — which only comes from limited human knowledge itself —, expanded human knowledge will go beyond that, will go beyond this boundary, just as natural science went beyond the boundary of the blue vault of heaven.

Just as spiritual science sees the urge and yearning for its soul in our time, just as “time seeks its soul”, so it will continue to develop the life of this soul, will strive for a further development of it.

A world view built on fantasy cannot endure; Herman Grimm's problem could never have been solved. But we see how, in those who have retained the freshness of this yearning of the soul, the desire arises to look out into the spiritual and soul that is outside in the world. And we know that we are part of it, just as our body is part of the material.

Spiritual science wants to give people what the soul desires. And if we ask: What will spiritual science have to do in the future? When all people who feel a longing in themselves for the soul's origin and destiny ask questions, we will point not to abstract concepts, but to the hungry souls, and seek to give these hungry souls what they clearly show they desire.

Spiritual science does not speak of vague brotherly love, but of standing by people in such a way that it wants to give what is longed for by the human soul. Then one may hear this or that objection, ridicule and worse – one will find it understandable precisely as a spiritual researcher, will be able to understand the people who, from their point of view, cannot do otherwise today than the opponents of natural science did centuries ago: holding heresy trials. Of course, they do not build bonfires anymore, but they act according to the fashions of the time: they treat people who are striving for the truth as fantasists and seek to vilify them through ridicule and blasphemy.

But that does not bother those people, because for them, the only thing that matters about the truth is that it - the truth - shows itself to the soul as justified through its own essence, and that it can indeed promote, fertilize, and elevate this life, and endure before life.

That the latter can happen will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture, which will in a sense be a continuation of today's.

With regard to the truth, it can be said that the one who presents the truth as has just been discussed can say to himself: Of course, all human striving has always been subject to error, and much of it will easily be able to creep into what the spiritual researcher seeks, even for him, as an error. He is well aware that error can creep in more easily than in the external world of the senses. But no matter — if only the mind is there to seek the truth, then even the smallest thing that happens in this field can be compared with the great things that have happened in the service of science. Whether people ridicule the truth or not is not important. For only two things are possible: either what is being spread is error – then it will be eradicated by the striving, truth-seeking mind, by the truth-seeking mind of man, for the truth-seeking human will not tolerate error – or if it is the truth, then no ridicule, no unjustified personal objections, nothing at all will be able to stop this truth, which has the power to triumph!

In world history, it is also the case that [it sometimes happens that] things [and] beings can be proclaimed. But with regard to the truth, it may be said: No matter which way you turn your back on it, no matter where people may oppose it, and however deeply the truth may be buried in the deepest shafts, all this will be overcome! For the truth has always found a way to penetrate back into humanity and be useful and beneficial and continue its triumphal march through the development of the human spirit.

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, I tried to show that the aims and essence of spiritual research, as it is meant here, correspond to the urge and yearning of the present time, that they essentially meet the needs of human souls, which have been preparing for a long time up to our present day and which are now clearly perceptible to everyone who wants to see, to everyone who just wants to understand themselves correctly. One can now, especially when considering the question of the significance of this spiritual research or spiritual science for life, for the immediate, one might say fully active life of the human being, take up yesterday's remark, because one can best understand the significance of a thing for life when one first sees certain urges and needs arising from life that this thing demands. Today, many people expect a [satisfying] worldview. Spiritual research or science will provide it.

What the soul needs when its I wants to develop its character is what many people today expect from a kind of conclusion that can be drawn from the truly advanced natural science of our time. For certain things this is certainly justified; however, an attentive observation of what is happening in our time clearly shows us how many things cannot be achieved in this way, how the life of the present so longingly, so strongly longs for a research, for the spirit.

Many facts could be cited; only one of the most recent will be presented here. On September 18 at the Naturalists' Assembly in Münster, Professor von Wettstein gave a lecture on the importance of biology, the science of life, for culture and life; that is, [he pointed out] with complete justification, how one could see in the course of the nineteenth century that a worldview should be given in a popular way that should be based on the achievements of natural science. And he emphasized how natural science has progressed steadily, and how it had to be broken by science with what was to be shown for the human soul in the materialistic age; and with full justification, he endeavored to remain calm in observing the fact and not to draw hasty conclusions about those world-view questions that may very much enter into the realm where human thinking goes astray into what is indeed unjustified.

In fact, spiritual science wants nothing more than to follow such advice in its own way and in its own field; not by arriving at the truth of life through all kinds of conclusions and circumstantial evidence of the world view from external sensual facts , but by awakening the slumbering powers of the soul, that which Goethe describes as “spiritual eyes”, observing what is behind the world of the senses, behind being in the senses in general, and with which the human soul thinks itself connected.

This is what our time and life craves. And if spiritual science is about fathoming the truth, then the way in which it can relate to life in a way that fertilizes and heals it must be such that every soul finds satisfaction. Therefore, this demand may well be made in response. And here one thing can be said: spiritual science must fulfill one thing if it is to meet the needs of life: it must have the power, independently of a certain higher education, independently of the development of this or that fact of science, independently even of a certain height of philosophical worldview, to also enter into the simplest mind that has to do its daily work as a human being and does not have time to deal with this or that individual science in a detailed way. Spiritual research must be generally accessible. In order to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to add that spiritual research must be in complete harmony with the science of the time, and must not contradict its just demands. The strictest researcher with his strictest demands may come, and spiritual science must be able to answer to him. And anyone who engages with the serious literature of spiritual science will see how this can be.

But it is also important that it brings things to light that every soul, regardless of education, can understand. And here I would like to respond, not with a theory, but with a kind of fact. I would like to mention not a fact that is taken directly from spiritual science itself, but a fact that actually points to something that happened before spiritual science emerged, but which shows how souls that long for an inclination towards the spiritual world understand each other in a remarkable way, regardless of their level of education. I will cite something that bears witness to such understanding, and which will occur to an increased degree when spiritual science becomes more and more established in the souls that need it.

Moriz Carriere, one of the most amiable and thoughtful philosophers of the present day – it can only be noted here that he was one of those who always held philosophy's idealism in high regard at a time when materialism was sweeping in over the great questions of world view – of his work on the cultural development of humanity, he not only shows how the spiritual works in the development of humanity, but also how true science can be reconciled with the genuine needs of the soul in terms of the big questions of existence, and with the relationship between world view and religion. Now Moriz Carriere himself relates a remarkable experience that he had just as he was trying to show how the spiritual works in the pursuit of human development, and how the great figure of Christ Jesus in particular fits into human development. Then he received a series of manuscript pages in the mail. They came from a simple man. His name was never known either. His name was Karl Zeuner. At a time when the waves of revolutionary life were running high, he had somehow broken the law and was imprisoned. He was thrown into prison. And now he tells how he despaired of the friends who had striven with him for external goals, of the remnants of what was left to him from the religious education of the school, how he was lonely. He recounts how he then heard a familiar song from afar in his prison. He recounts how that inspired his soul, how special powers stirred in his soul. He wrote down thoughts that gradually came to his reawakening soul in prison.

Right when you start reading these pages, you come across strange sentences, especially at the beginning. He says something like: “When I look at my own soul and then at what surrounds me, I feel in my soul the same essence that lives in all things outside, and I feel in my own soul like a part of the whole world soul.” And from there he starts to form his ideas about the course of world history, describing how the spirit in people, who have gradually developed, is active.

Why did Moritz Carriere find this so surprising? It is surprising when you compare these pages of the simple man with what Moritz Carriere wrote based on a knowledge of contemporary science and studies of the cultural development of the world. If you take his main ideas, they are almost an agreement down to the last word between the two, the simple man and the highly educated philosopher. The simple man in his solitude, who only calls upon his innermost soul forces, writes something that is the same as what the philosopher draws from the wells of learning. That is, when he comes to questions of worldview, if a person only wants to search, there is an understanding between the one who searches in his soul and the one who searches this path on the basis of comprehensive learning.

This shows us how understanding through the spirit is possible between the most educated and the simplest, most primitive soul. And if in a particular case it was possible even without spiritual science, on the basis of certain concepts and ideas, then we may say: Firstly, the promotion of such an agreement corresponds to an urge of our present life. It corresponds to the spirit of our time that souls of all stations and degrees of education should communicate about their deepest needs; and secondly, such communication will be all the more necessary when souls need not come to the spirit through concepts and ideas that they squeeze out of their inner being – which are like shadows compared to what spiritual science has to give – but through spiritual science, this will be achieved all the more.

This means that our time in particular is faced with the challenge of finding a way to achieve general understanding of the fundamental questions of existence, and we have arrived at the gateway to their practical solution through spiritual science.

This means that spiritual science is able to intervene directly in life. However, there is an objection to this spiritual science, as some people emphasize, especially when it comes to putting this generally understandable knowledge in its proper perspective. They say: Yes, but first it is taught that the one who penetrates into the spiritual world awakens the slumbering soul. And what is said in my “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” requires a long journey before one can gain insight into this spiritual life. How can one speak of general comprehensibility when only one who has transformed one's soul can penetrate it?

This objection is understandable and yet not entirely justified, because this is a necessary requirement for the spiritual researcher to establish the facts of the spiritual world for himself. The spiritual researcher can investigate spiritual facts that are important for life. He can then formulate them, express them in words, concepts and ideas, and communicate them to the general public. Spiritual training is necessary for research; but when these facts are there and, formulated in concepts, words and ideas, then even the simplest mind can understand them, anyone can understand them. Nothing more is needed than to surrender to these ideas, concepts and words without prejudice; for it is the case with these spiritual facts that when we let these ideas take effect on us, they prove themselves. They can give us everything we need from them for the purposes of practical life — the upliftment, strengthening and recovery of our health that we require from them. What true spiritual researchers can give to the world can always be tested by science! These things may not, of course, stand the test of superficial criticism, but they can stand the true test. But what more or less everyone says and feels is that they have to admit a general turning of human knowledge towards the higher world. But as soon as one goes into the details of spiritual research, as soon as one begins to describe the observations of the spiritual world, to describe what happens between death and a new birth, what is called the development of humanity, according to the impulses given by spiritual science. In short, when details are given, our contemporaries still often recoil. They seek a general indication, without this - they admit - human life, the strengthening, healthy one, could not exist. But when one goes into details, when one describes the nature and things of the spiritual world, then the same objection immediately arises: no one can penetrate up there, we cannot know anything about that. Here we are at the point, honored attendees, where spiritual science will first have to make itself understood to what are indeed expressed needs of life, but what one only wants in generalities.

Let me give you another specific example of how humanity is seeking a new answer to the needs of the soul. The former president of Harvard University, USA, spoke of it, calling it the need for a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion; spiritual science has nothing to do with forming sects; it wants to understand the old ones, wants to explore in the spiritual what the human soul needs. Our contemporaries believe that this urge for spiritual research is an urge for a new religion. Dr. Eliot has pointed out how our needs in life are pushing us towards spiritual science. Dr. Eliot, who was at the forefront of science for a long time and was president of a university, expressed the following in essence: People have always assumed that the soul is different from the body, although it is inherent in it. Everyone believes that there is in man a living, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something as fundamentally real as the body. It is the most active part of the human being and is recognized as such: and this has always been the case and will always be the case.

When one hears such words, one can conclude that even people who have a broad education have this urge and aspiration.

Many examples could be given; everywhere one will see that the spirit is indicated out of the need for life, not out of knowledge, but in a peculiar way that shows what aversion still exists to the details of how they are to be presented through spiritual science.

When someone, like Dr. Eliot, points out the needs of the time, then this reference is somewhat as if one were to say with regard to natural science: No one can deny that there is a nature, a nature that brings forth beings in space, a nature that causes events to occur in time that have a beginning and an end, and so on. Someone who points to nature in this way can be compared to someone who points to the spirit as Dr. Eliot does. But can anyone be satisfied with the fact that there is a nature with various living beings and events?

What is satisfying is that a person can go out and perceive the individual concrete entities. Not the abstract satisfies people, but the details; facts must come before our soul. What could never satisfy anyone in relation to nature is what should still satisfy many in relation to the spiritual – an empty generality, an abstraction.

But people still refuse to go into the details, the details, the facts of the spiritual world, which shine out of spiritual science just as the individual facts of nature shine out of natural science.

Spiritual science today stands on the same ground as natural science did four centuries ago, when it began to look at nature through its means. While yesterday it was pointed out that one goes into the details of natural scientific matters, today it must be pointed out that one must first get used to thinking about the details of spiritual life in the same way as about the details of natural processes; and how it is not enough to know that there are general natural products, how the natural scientist must distinguish, for example, between oats and wheat, so man will also need more and more the details of spiritual facts. Just as one cannot approach natural needs in the same way with wheat and oats, so one cannot approach spiritual needs with general references to the spiritual world. When this or that consolation is needed or when this or that character trait is to be poured into the soul, then details and facts must be given. This is the path that spiritual science has to take. And because this tendency towards the general dominates the world today, we see from the individual things that are demanded how, although people admit that their present life contains a yearning for the spirit, which has a fertilizing effect on the soul that it fills when it is satisfied, no one can say anything accurate about the most essential things, because people generally resist the individual.

From this speech by Eliot, we can also take out another sentence in which he talks about how the spiritual worldview that is being built seems to apply to all the scientific achievements of the new era, and will deal with joy and life.

He thus opposes old age, death, and so on. We have before our eyes a distancing from death and mourning, death and sin, on the part of those who tell people what the life of the soul should be when they have passed through the gate of death. Dr. Eliot demands that all this is unnecessary in the new world view, that it should be concerned with life and joy. This is entirely in keeping with the outlook of our time, which focuses on the living deed and sees reasons to make life strong and joyful. That is fully justified. It is also justified to say that the new view of life must deal with life and joy; and in contrast to this, the sentence sounds wonderful: the new world view should ignore death and mourning. There is still a weighty objection: however much human thinking does not want to deal with it, death and mourning will deal with man and show their existence to man, and life will always demand, so that one can understand it, to know something about death and its riddles, and joy will demand forces that lift us up again when mourning weighs us down.

But this is precisely the aim of spiritual science: to awaken in the soul that which brings one to the justified, certain conviction that what is human existence in its true nature is not part of the external sensual world, but is of an eternal nature, passing from life to life. And this realization of the deepest life in its individual life will only bring the knowledge of true life that Eliot demands, because as knowledge it knows how the truly living always conquers death. And this knowledge will know how to draw out of the depths of the soul the forces that arise from the spiritual and that know how to lift us up again when the outer life depresses us through grief or something else.

We can take a fact from human life, a fact from the spirit of our time, and then draw our conclusions as to what the life of the individual can get from the results of spiritual research.

Everyone experiences that their life has a youth, progresses, and that a point of culmination is finally reached, and that they then descend again. They experience how gradually withers that which they call their physical body. A superficial science has just concluded from this fact that the spiritual depends on the physical. Because the brain withers so that an external stimulus of the intellect is not possible, one draws the conclusion that the soul-spiritual withers with the physical. This is as if one concludes from the unusability of a piano that the player would no longer be there.

If spiritual science is allowed to flow in, what it knows from the spiritual world, then the soul will have powers towards old age, which intervene in life in a healing way. In my little writing about the education of the child, you can see how spiritual science also intervenes in the details of practical education. How often one hears people giving all kinds of educational advice. Those who know life are often alarmed by such general sentences and rules, and those who follow the literature attentively will see how inadequate these reformist ideas of today are for the growing human being. But when one knows from spiritual research how, under completely different conditions, the human being grows up in the different years and periods of his life, how the physical body develops up to the seventh year, how then the educational measures have a completely different effect in the seventh to fourteenth years, when the etheric body is forming, and from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, when the astral body develops. Only when one knows how these epochs in human life are differentiated, and how the human being progresses in precisely differentiated stages, only then is one able to establish such principles from the nature of the human being that truly bring forth what lies in the soul. The future will show how life can be enriched by such pedagogy, which is taken from spiritual science; for anyone who approaches life in such a way that the conditions are created for us to give the soul the forces that awaken life at certain times must then always see for himself what spiritual science can become for all people. Wherever the human being stands, he cannot only acquire theoretical knowledge. Instead, spiritual science gives the human soul truly spiritual substance, spiritual nourishment that works in the soul and is digested, if I may use the trivial expression, and always keeps the soul soft, inwardly active, full of content, and aware of itself. This is knowledge that is needed in life and will be needed more and more.

Then, when life begins to decline, when wrinkles start to appear on our faces and our hair begins to turn white, then we not only have theosophical knowledge, but, through a spiritual-scientific view of life, we carry within us a living core that is full of content, experiences itself more and more as the outer shell falls away, and the human being feels within: You lay aside the shell and the body, the physical, but within you carry the strength to go through the spiritual world, to get new strength there for building a new life. Saying this to yourself inwardly gives security.

This applies in general to all people. In a sense, spiritual science will help people more and more to overcome what must naturally arise if one does not feel the living spirit.

Another fact that is particularly important in our time is nervousness. In a certain way, everyone today feels what is meant by the age of nervousness, because it is inwardly connected with certain concepts that have been formed. How often does a person feel this or that powerlessness, this or that fault, this or that vice, in the sense of the materialistic world view, so that the person looks at his ancestors, at his line of inheritance.

In poetry, it is often depicted how a person, feeling burdened by his ancestors, says to himself: This is inherited disposition, this cannot be changed. The product of such a state of mind is weakness, desolation - no observer should fail to see how this actually makes people weak.

Today, one encounters strange experiences. Materialistic researchers, in particular, speak of the nervousness of our time, as materialistic explanations have always done. Only recently a book was published by an Austrian scholar who, curiously enough, attributes the whole predisposition with one expression: that everything in man is based on the physical and chemical composition of his organism, even his character. And if you read the book further, something strange happens: the author gives advice. You would think that you could expect some kind of remedy to be taken to help with the chemical-physical imbalance; the gentleman in question does not recommend any pills, at least not for many cases, but rather recommends strengthening the character through moral means, through all kinds of soul things!

We do not want to argue with our time in such areas. We want to focus our attention on the question: where should the things be taken from that make a person who is desolate with this or that ailment - physical-chemical conditions that make up his character - where should the means be taken to make him a fighter against his nervousness, against his neurasthenia?

Spiritual science will answer: When people realize that it was just as much a mistake to claim that the complex of characteristics of the child arises solely from the inheritance from the parents, when one draws that conclusion, it is just as much an error of observation as it once error of observation when in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth, it was said, and not only laymen but also learned researchers believed it, that higher animals, even fish, can arise from inanimate substance.

And there was a great revolution when the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi stated: Living things can never arise from non-living things. Living things can only arise from living things. With great difficulty, Francesco Redi escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The same must be said for the spiritual and soul: the spiritual and soul can only emerge from the spiritual and soul. We look back to the spiritual and soul, which is the seed in earlier times for our present life. We feel the injustice of what we carry within us as fate, as predispositions, as spiritual-soul possessions, being supposed to be only something inherited from our ancestors, and we recognize that it is rooted in the spiritual that we acquired in earlier times. Then the human being becomes aware that there is something in him besides the inherited traits. And to the extent that he recognizes this, he need not look at his inherited traits and say to himself, “I have to bear these.” No, the spiritual researcher, when he has recognized his soul core, must seek to strengthen his powers and help them develop.

In this way spiritual science will have an effect on life, making it healthy, and the individual will place himself firmly in life.

This basically indicates the other result of life research: the social. Our time has initially only the tendency - albeit justified - to study the external arrangement, how one should make this or that institution so that people can find their existence. The inner tendency brings spiritual science, how people should bring their inner being out, in order to grow into life and stand in life.

All this will include the fact that this time must become aware that it is not dealing with dead theory in spiritual research, but that life forces themselves are being awakened. As a result, the age will recognize the reality of what comes from spiritual science, will experience it, because spiritual science will grasp itself in life. Thus the human being who carries spiritual science within himself will face life in a different way, which is impossible without spiritual science, but which life will foster more and more. When the spirit, the soul, is grasped as reality, when it is realized that the soul is reality, then there will no longer be a lack of understanding for the serious fact of life that out of a healthy, powerful grasp of the soul's core, forces also flow that can protect the outer physical body from damage, weakness, and even illness.

In this respect, the view of our time is shown in the common use of a saying that is, however, increasingly dying out: “A healthy soul dwells in a healthy body,” which means that if you just make the body healthy, then a healthy soul dwells in the body. In spiritual science, this will be understood quite differently, that a healthy soul dwells in a healthy body, because the innermost soul, in its health, forms the physical life in the body. People will recognize the healing powers that spiritual science instills into the soul, although not with the means that people want to use for recognition today, because today they will look and say: There is a person who has studied spiritual science but still became ill. The answer to this is that spiritual science or spiritual research has not yet come very far in terms of its dissemination, and secondly, of course, nothing can be done directly against external damage to the physical body if this damage comes only from the physical, just as you cannot heal a broken leg from the soul.

But there is also something that we recognize through the peculiar way in which the insights of spiritual research work, that the soul transforms back to an external coexistence with existence, as it had before the alienation from nature. We see in the child, and also in the animal, an instinctive growing together with the existence of the spiritual world. We see how the animal does not eat too much, how the instinct is healthy, but we see how certain things are conditioned in the cultural human being by the fact that he is alienated from nature. Sometimes one can look at this with a shudder, how humanity is moving away from this direct experience and coexistence with existence. Just the other day I saw a person who weighed out a certain amount of food for each meal. In the current transformation into a purely mechanical science, we even treat the human stomach and digestive tract like retorts. There it remains - the mechanical - not only in science, there it goes over into the treatment of human life. In contrast to this is the stream of spiritual research. With knowledge, the human being returns to existence in such a way that he instinctively protects himself in the higher sense from that which should not be. And then, of course, the healing effect of spiritual research will have to be assessed somewhat differently than it is today.

If questions now arise, such as: How many illnesses does the healing of spiritual science actually protect us from? — is difficult to answer, because the illnesses don't come; nevertheless, it is more reasonable that man, by living in the instinct life, is protected by spiritual science from illnesses than that he has to heal himself afterwards. Thank God, it cannot be proven, because the result is that these damages no longer occur.

Thus we see how a return to nature, in the very modern sense, is brought about for life through spiritual science. Much more could be said; in the end everything would clearly indicate that spiritual science brings about healing, advancement in life, and the right place in life, in the natural context of life.

Thus not only knowledge, the most valuable possession, but significant consequences for life are brought about by spiritual science, consequences that one can only imagine when one considers them as they have been, albeit only briefly, hinted at today. But all this will come about because man will penetrate into the spiritual worlds, not only in general, but by recognizing the individual spiritual facts. Just as he speaks not only of general nature in nature, but recognizes the details, the individual minerals, the individual plants and the individual animals, so he will also recognize the spiritual world in its details. Then the spiritual nature around him will be as nature itself is meant to foster, fertilize and even sustain physical life.

Then man will feel himself embedded in the spirit as he otherwise feels embedded in the physical in the substances of nature. One will learn to feel that one lives in the spirit as one lives in the physical. Just as one feels the processes that take place outside in the universe in the physical organism, one will feel the spiritual relationships, to grief and joy, to suffering and desire, to desire and contemplation in their own world, and life will find that which promotes life and health from the spirit.

That is what can be hoped for from spiritual science, because this spiritual science is to fulfill the soul's desire to feel at one with everything that is going on in the universal spiritual realm. When man will no longer think that everything is just an event, a life, what is going on in him, and his will like a power that has no significance for the environment, when he will know that what is going on in him is as interconnected with the spiritual as with the physical of the physical body, then man will receive strength and power, health through such science health; then will man find what I sought to indicate in my drama 'The Test of the Soul', as a soul expresses this sense of security in the spiritual, that man knows himself in the spirit, experiences himself in the spirit, thinks in the spirit and really breathes in it and in this real breath of life attains a life-filled existence.

This soul health will emanate from spiritual science when it is fulfilled, when it is given through spiritual science, which is expressed in those words, where it is said what can take place in a seeking soul. What has been said today can be summarized in what a soul that feels at home in the spirit can say to itself:

In your thinking live world thoughts

— do not dwell in man merely temporarily, but are eternal world thoughts —

In your feeling weave world forces
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts
experience yourself through cosmic powers,
create yourself from will-beings.
Do not end with what is worldly remote,
through the play of thought-dreams – –;
begin in the expanses of the spirit,
and end in the depths of your own soul: –
you will find divine goals,
recognizing yourself within yourself.

For many years now, almost every winter I have had the privilege of speaking here about one or other topic from the field of spiritual science, as it is meant in tonight's reflections. And just on the occasion of my last lectures, which I was allowed to give here, I allowed myself to make the remark that when one speaks of spiritual science today in our present time in the sense in which it is meant here, one then by no means talking about anything in our time that is well known or even popular in wider circles; on the contrary, with this spiritual science one has to talk about something that is widely unrecognized and, above all, misunderstood. Indeed, this spiritual science has to fight against misunderstanding upon misunderstanding. One person may be informed about this spiritual science from second or third or sometimes even seventh or eighth hand reports and come to the conclusion that it is something like a new sect entering the world or some new attempt to found a religious community or something similar. The other comes to the opinion that this spiritual science has fantasy and 'dreaming' at its sources. Above all, it contradicts in the most eminent sense what today, as a worldview, wants to establish itself, as they say, as genuine, true science.

Perhaps I may, just on the occasion of this lecture, conclude with a few words about the misunderstandings that are currently close to us here, and may I first devote the greater part of the lecture to our topic and to that from whose field I have already been able to bring some details here for discussion, today in general, in order to then consider some special questions in the lecture on January 27 of next year.

Above all, it may be said that spiritual science wants to place itself in the spiritual life of the present, precisely as this spiritual life of the present has developed from the scientific way of thinking that has taken hold of the spiritual life of humanity for three to four centuries. And it may be said that the most serious misunderstanding is the assumption that this spiritual research can somehow come into conflict with the legitimate claims of true scientific research. From its point of view, this spiritual science will admire and fully recognize this science, and must do so if it wants to stand on the ground of true and genuine observation of humanity and the times. It will admire and recognize the great scientific achievements of our age where it is justified, will acknowledge what science has done for the transformation of our entire cultural life, will acknowledge how it is a scientific way of thinking, what is at work at every turn today and lives in our cultural assets and, in particular, what has virtually transformed all external areas of the rest of life in the course of the nineteenth century.

To what extent this spiritual science is fully included in the natural scientific series of development on the one hand, but on the other hand must go beyond its final conclusions, precisely because it draws the last and most genuine conclusions about what today is often called natural science thinking, I would like to explain this first by means of a kind of comparison, by which we simply want to communicate, but by which we do not want to prove anything special about what spiritual science has to say.

I do not want to talk about what science has achieved in terms of commercial and industrial aspects of contemporary cultural life; I want to talk about what scientific thinking has achieved. Apart from the fact that it has influenced the various cultural fields, it has contributed to a certain education of all human thinking, it has transformed the nature of the habits of thought, of the life of imagination and the cognitive needs of the human soul to a much greater extent than is usually realized. For this transformation has not only taken hold of those who have been drawn to science directly through their profession, their inclination or their interest, but of all souls; people simply think differently today than they did five or six centuries ago. We are accustomed to holding very different ideas about what we might call the reign of a sense of existence than we had in earlier centuries.

This is not something that has been arbitrarily brought about; rather, it is based on that inner necessity that had to take place in the history of mankind, just as human life must be different for an old man of sixty than for a man of thirty. These things correspond to historical laws of life, and anyone who wants to deny them must deny the inner truth of things. Those people who today are not yet seized by this change in thinking will be seized by it in the future, in difficult times, in the very near future. Thus, if we may say so, centuries of scientific education have transformed the innermost part of human thought and feeling. We may say so.

How does that which wants to shape cultural development as spiritual science relate to this transformation of human thinking over the last four centuries? I would like to illustrate this to you through a comparison. Let us look at the farmer who harvests the fruits when they are ripe. The greater part of the harvest is used as human food. But a part must be used, if life is to continue, to be sown as seed again, so that a harvest can ripen again next year.

We can compare this process in the life of nature with what has been achieved in recent centuries through scientific knowledge. The greater part of this must be used to allow human cultural life to flow broadly; it is incorporated into the important industrial achievements, into commercial life, into external social coexistence, into the individual sciences; and the individual branches of this culture flourish because the scientific way of thinking flows into them all. This part of human thought can be compared to the part of the seed that is used for human food.

But a part – and certainly not the least valuable part – of thoughts that have entered the human soul only in the last century, a part of these inner acquisitions, of what we have learned about the secrets of the existence of the world precisely through the natural sciences, can be used like the seed that goes into the field to produce new fruit. This is the part we use for what is referred to as meditation, concentration of thought. We can process this part of scientific thoughts and ideas inwardly with the soul, allowing them to take effect in our soul, to germinate there, so to speak. Under the influence of these thoughts, to which we devote ourselves in meditation, which we practise in the very innermost, most intimate soul work, we can allow precisely these scientific ideas to work on our soul in such a way that they work, weave, and bring forth sensations and feelings within it, that they practise this soul life so inwardly that this soul life not only expresses the word 'development', which is so popular today, but also comes into development itself. It is precisely the scientific way of thinking, when meditatively processed, that transforms our soul, makes our soul into something else. And it will soon become clear how, from this point of view, spiritual science is the correct continuation of the scientific way of thinking. But with regard to this spiritual science, when such considerations are employed, as is the case today, only suggestions can be given, only communications about the method of research, through which the spiritual researcher himself can devote himself to contemplation, the means by which everyone can be convinced.

Therefore, I would first like to draw attention to some of the results of spiritual science and then show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these results. These results are so at odds with what people today believe and suppose to be truth that they seem quite paradoxical, like something fantastic, like a flight of fancy for some. The spiritual researcher in particular knows how alien these results must be to many a soul of the present time, and he is least surprised when someone who wanted to be his friend walks away from him with the impression that he was talking to a fanatic. The spiritual researcher is fully aware of every reaction, even hostile confrontation, because he knows where such antagonism can come from.

Above all, spiritual research is a unique discipline in that it seeks to connect the human soul with its spiritual source in a way that is based on scientific thinking. It shows that what man carries in his soul as the deepest, innermost part is spiritual , a spiritual core; and that this spiritual core is connected with an all-embracing spiritual life of the world that lies beyond the life of the senses, and that it cannot be perceived or recognized by the ordinary human senses or by the intellect that binds itself to these human senses. But in this method of research, a tremendous difference between spiritual science and all other sciences immediately comes to light. Every other science works with the same means of thinking and looking at things, which are otherwise peculiar to man in everyday life. Just as man is, just as he develops in the normal way from childhood to later age, as he develops a certain capacity for knowledge, so he also approaches the scientific research objects of the present. And everything that such a normal person has to say forms the content of the sciences in the various fields of life.

It is quite different in spiritual research. It takes development seriously. It is based on the fact that with the powers of knowledge, with the soul faculties, which are initially inherent in people in their everyday lives, these boundaries cannot be crossed, which separate the sensual from the supersensible, the material from the spiritual; but it is based on the fact that a person's powers of knowledge, a person's soul powers, can be developed. It is serious about the word “development”. And today we will be speaking about intimate inner processes and activities of the soul, through which the soul elevates itself beyond itself, comes to develop powers of knowledge that are not those of ordinary life, but that, within this soul, which can be addressed in the soul as the true, immortal, spiritual core of the human being.

In a sense, spiritual research is not as comfortable as other forms of research; it cannot accept people as they are, but must make uncomfortable demands of them. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to transform your soul so that it is guided beyond the ordinary level through its own activity and conducts research with powers that are not present in everyday life. This is the language of spiritual research. Only these powers lead to the regions of the spiritual world and to its beings.

But then, when the soul is led out so that it grasps its own essential core as a soul, then it first comes to a truth that, in the truest sense of the word, represents the continuation of the findings of natural science, but which is still everywhere looked upon as fantasy wherever it has not been studied in detail. One comes to the truth about repeated lives, the truth that can be expressed in a nutshell by saying: What we experience and work for in this life between birth and death, we do not experience and work for only once. As we see our life, when we look back into childhood as far as we can, and as we hope for our life in relation to the rest of the life before death, we do not live only once. We go through the gate of death and live in a purely spiritual world, which can only be seen with the spirit, a life between death and new birth, and then enter with the fruits of this life, also with those that we gather between death and new birth, into a new life on earth, to which we can look in the future just as we can look back into the past on the already expired earth lives of the individual human. So we always look forward to life on earth - between birth and death - and to life that passes between death and new birth in a purely spiritual world. The way we present this truth in today's spiritual life, it seems quite naturally fantastic to the vast majority of people. But all new truths in the world have seemed as fantastic as they have appeared. It will always be the fate of new truths that at first they seem like fantasies, then they become something that can no longer be seen as different; they then become a matter of course. Then, when man beholds himself as in an extended memory, then he can also explore the connections of this spiritual-soul core, which goes from life to life, with the spiritual worlds, through which the divine-spiritual, which interweaves and lives through this life, also passes. But from that which the spiritual researcher has so fully brought to life within himself, it springs forth for man that which he needs more and more for the cultural development of our earth, especially in the present and in the future.

Thus I have presented some of the truths of this spiritual research. It now remains for me to show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these truths, that is, how the spiritual world is investigated and researched. One must not believe that this spiritual world can be investigated with the senses that we can apply to the sensory world. It is a spiritual world precisely because it cannot be perceived by the senses. It is necessary for the study of this spiritual world that man himself should make himself the instrument of investigation. All other sciences have their external instruments. Spiritual research has as its only instrument the human organism itself, which is, however, the most wonderful instrument we can find on earth. But this organism must undergo a certain transformation if it is to acquire, to use a phrase from Goethe, “spiritual eyes and ears” in order to see what is always around us in spiritual form, but which cannot be seen unless a spiritual eye and spiritual ear are developed in the human soul, which would otherwise remain dormant.

How does one develop the spiritual organs through which the spiritual world becomes visible, audible and perceptible to man? Not tumultuous external processes, not experiments that can be carried out in the same way externally as in laboratories or clinics, bring about this change, but inner soul processes that the spiritual researcher can carry out with himself if he wants to gain insight into the spiritual world. What I have to say in this description may appear to many people to be extremely mundane. But it must be said: however mundane these things appear, in their execution they are among the most difficult that a person can undertake on this earth, including all his other activities. But we are not speaking of special wonders, of some things that in their simplest form not every person would know, when one has to speak of what the spiritual researcher must develop in his soul if he wants to come to the real exploration of the supersensible. The soul forces that the spiritual researcher has to develop are always there in the soul, but only in their beginnings, as they are needed for everyday life. The spiritual researcher has only to develop these qualities to an unlimited degree. Here I must call attention to something that is not only present everywhere in everyday life, but is also necessary in the most eminent sense. It is what is called attention: the attention of the soul to these or those things, the turning of interest to these or those things, as we have them in ordinary life.

We need to pay attention to two things. Many people need to reflect – but usually they think about these things when things are no longer going well – they need to reflect on why their memory is getting worse in life. Why does memory get worse at all? If you delve deeper into the question of memory, you come to the conclusion that it is actually a question of attention. What we grasp intensely with our attention remains in our memory.

You could say something quite mundane as an introductory remark when you want to point out the importance of attention. Many a person is quite annoyed in the morning when they cannot find this or that thing that they put here or there in the evening. They have completely forgotten it. For example, they cannot find their cufflink. Why does this happen? Well, they have forgotten where they put it. He can remedy that. A sure way to help himself is to resolve not just to lay it down thoughtlessly, but to think: I am putting the button in this place, I am laying it down with will. If you also pay attention to the act from your inner arbitrariness, you will not forget it, you will surely remember the place where you put the button. This can be extended to all other memories. If only people realized that they also take into their memory everything they take into their arbitrary attention, then they would combine the attention problem with the memory problem, and a training of the memory can be summarized in a training of attention.

And there is another point to which attention must be drawn, which seems even more important. It is necessary for a healthy mental life that we are able to recognize the experiences we have had back to the point of our childhood as ours in memory. If we are incapable of this, if, let us say, at the age of thirty a person's soul life is such that he cannot recognize certain experiences that he had at the age of five as his own, then a perforation of the ability to remember occurs that is somewhat unhealthy. Only then are we healthy when we can follow our entire present self as a continuous thread. This depends on our being able to experience the events that happen to us in such a way that they line up on a thread of memory through which, as it were, our ego runs. And a person - this happens in certain mental illnesses - can, as it were, come to have a double ego in that he can have the opinion that someone else has experienced what he has actually experienced. Such things happen. Then his healthy soul life is destroyed, torn apart. Much could be achieved for the education of people in whom one can recognize in many cases that such a perforation of the ego is taking place, much could be achieved for education if one were clear about the fact that the ability to remember is intimately connected with the way we pay attention to and are interested in the things of the world. Nothing but attention — that is what belongs to the imaginative soul forces.

It is this attention that must be developed to infinity by the spiritual researcher in what is called concentration of thought. To do this, however, an ordinary, everyday soul force must be driven with tremendous inner energy and resignation to an extent that it is otherwise never driven in external life. The human being must bring himself to explore the state of mind in which he is when he is attentive; he must become aware of it when he is attentive in ordinary life. His attention is aroused by external impressions, by sensational things that have a strong effect on him. But the spiritual researcher must transform his attention so that he does not allow himself to be forced by anything external, but is able, through inner arbitrariness alone, to unfold the activity of the soul that would otherwise only be unfolded in attention.

The safest way to achieve this goal is one that is highly inconvenient for many people. In order to achieve something very safely, you have to force yourself to turn your attention to something that is as uninteresting as possible in ordinary life; something you would like to run away from, that is completely uninteresting. If you can bring yourself to treat that from which you otherwise run away with your soul in such a way that you place it at the center of your spiritual life, that you concentrate all the powers of your soul on this one thing, but in relation to the rest of your soul, through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, you come to be as in sleep, so that no eye, no ear perceives anything externally, that all the worries of life fall silent: Anyone who has silenced their entire being in this way, as is otherwise only achieved in sleep, but then does not fall asleep but focuses on something that they have deliberately placed at the center of their mental life and now turn their soul's attention to in an unlimited way, will awaken forces in their soul that would otherwise remain dormant in their soul.

This brings about what could be called – I do not particularly value the expression – a spiritual chemistry. Because when you develop your imagination and thinking, you are doing something in your own soul life that can be compared and only compared with the separation of hydrogen from water in the chemical laboratory. When we have water in front of us, it is liquid. If we separate the hydrogen from it, we have a gas that has very different properties than water. No one can see the properties of hydrogen and oxygen in the water. And no one can recognize the spiritual destiny in the person who stands before us every day. To do this, the spiritual and mental must be separated from the physical and bodily. This does not happen through external processes, but through the increase of that which may appear so ordinary to man, into the immeasurable. So that one can indeed say: “Although it is light, the light is heavy.”

There are many details that need to be observed. Here, only the principle can be stated. If the soul then increases its attention, as required, it is able, through the concentration of forces that are otherwise unconscious, to tear everything of the soul and spirit away from the physical, just as hydrogen is torn away from oxygen in the laboratory.

If you continue such inner exercises of the soul life, then the day will come when you can connect a meaning to the words that are otherwise just a phrase: Now I know that I can think even when I am not thinking with the brain; now I know that I can think and visualize even when I am not using my body; now I know what it means to leave the body and to feel and experience the soul and spiritual realm. And when someone leaves the physical body with the soul and spirit, he has completely different qualities and experiences in his inner life than a person has within his body. Just as someone says that hydrogen can be extracted from water, then hydrogen has the properties of a gas that burns, so from the point of view of an everyday materialist, one can laugh at what the spiritual researcher experiences when he reaches the point of lifting his spiritual soul out of his physical body through long, energetic exercises. It sounds like empty phrases when he talks about it. And yet I would like to describe the progress, at least in detail.

What the spiritual researcher experiences when he continues the exercises is indeed so completely paradoxical that from a certain moment on he feels: Yes, your thinking used to be such that you had to use your brain to think – but now you feel that you are actually thinking outside of your brain. He feels as if he can move like a sun in the spiritual with his present thinking, emancipated from the brain. He experiences himself in such a way that he now even knows: the way he thinks otherwise now runs almost automatically, it is bound to the brain. From a certain moment on, one acquires a very definite knowledge about it: When you are in your present state, you have to slip back into your brain if you want to use your brain again. You perceive your brain as something external to you, like you would perceive an external object, a table, a chair, next to you.

Then comes that significant experience, which makes such a significant, such a shattering impact on the spiritual life of the spiritual researcher. It must be repeated several times in life, but when it occurs for the first time in life, it is the most harrowing event that cannot be compared to anything else in life. It can occur, for example, as the following: one wakes up in the middle of sleep as if to a dream, but it is not a dream, but a spiritual reality that outshines all the rest of the reality of the day. The experience can also occur in the middle of the outer life of the day, but it does not disturb it, because true and correct preparation will never make a person fantasize. In the life of the day as well as in the life of the night, the moment may arise, which I would characterize in the following way. But it can also occur in hundreds of other ways; I will give only a typical example. Something of what is attempted to be described with words will present itself to every person who becomes a spiritual researcher. He will communicate what happens in such a way that he says: It is like a room in which he finds himself. Lightning strikes the room; he follows the lightning as if speaking to himself inwardly, he feels the elements striking his body in a flash, as if his body were being destroyed. From that moment on, he knows that he is united with the spirit without the body, he knows that man carries a spiritual and soul element within him; this is the direct experience of every person who can have the experience if he wants to. Only from that moment on do you know what the human essence is in the truest sense of the word; what lies beyond birth and death.

This experience can only be made in a spiritual way, not through external experiments. Those who demand that the spiritual be established through external experiments should also demand that some experience they had fifty years ago be extracted with some kind of powder so that it can be prepared and made visible externally. Spiritual facts are not established externally. That which spiritual researchers of all times have called “approaching the gate of death”, that is, experiencing death in the image, that is, what a person experiences in real death when his eternal core detaches itself from the physical body, is experienced in the image in the serious experience, which so absorbs the soul of the person who has already had it once, imprinting on the soul that seriousness that can be expressed and felt with the words: You were connected to the deepest core of your being, to that which, as the eternal, spiritually permeates, lives through and interweaves the world. However, this seriousness is to be lived through painfully and not without making the greatest efforts to which man is unaccustomed. Not without surrendering what is otherwise considered pleasure and joy; what one otherwise likes in life, not without giving up what one otherwise strives for in life for certain moments, one attains this purest experience, which has been spoken of and points to light in the spiritual world. Then one attains something further when one adds the following to what has just been said: One must also give up everything that one perceives as desirable in everyday life, and one must give it up in such a way that one completely renounces everything that one otherwise desires, everything that one otherwise likes, that one gives up everything that gives one pleasure, and one must not give it up in such a way that one has only a very specific self-awareness in the devotion, but in such a way that one really renounces during this devotion all such activity that we otherwise call our complete devotion to the world, which one otherwise does not really know, that one gives up no compulsion and nothing that otherwise calls us to devotion in life. This must be added, and the spiritual world, into which we have entered, senses this with what we call the spiritual state.

One should not imagine this perception in the spiritual world as being the same as the perception in the external world. The external world is presented to us in such a way that we can say: there is an object out there that I see with my eye or perceive with my other sensory organs. One can only experience spiritual states if, after devotion, one becomes one with the states. We do not experience these states from outside ourselves, but in such a way that they enter into us. We have to immerse ourselves, become one with the spiritual states that come to meet us. Therefore, when a person increases his inner thinking through attention, and when we make this thinking an organ of perception for spiritual states through devotion, then we perceive these spiritual states.

What one experiences inwardly can be called spiritual mimicry. Just as in ordinary life one unconsciously expresses one's spiritual states in facial expressions, so too, through the processes described, one becomes one with the spiritual world because one feels at one with it. As the soul experiences, it is driven to a facial expression, it becomes very active, very active, as it lives into the conditions. By experiencing the spiritual world, it undergoes something similar inwardly in a spiritual-soul way, as it is the facial expression of our face. A reliving is the perception of the spiritual world, an invisible, supersensible reliving. This reliving is attained, as it were, through this spiritual chemistry, through this detachment of the life of ideas from the instrument of the brain.

Likewise, one can detach the faculty of speech from the tool that otherwise serves language. When we speak, a certain part of the brain is externally active, which we have to use as a tool of our body, the one that specifically leads to the larynx. The one who studies the secrets of human speech knows that, even when one is thinking, finer movements take place internally than the coarser external speech movements. Now, as a spiritual researcher, one must be able to grasp the inner activity of the soul, which one otherwise expresses in speech. The mental researcher must detach it from the sound and the word; he must keep it as an inner activity, not allowing it to become a word, not shaping it into words, and he must keep it so inwardly that not even the parts of the brain that are otherwise active when speaking are used. He detaches the power of speech from speaking. He learns to keep something inwardly in his soul that otherwise vibrates inwardly when speaking. Then he does not speak, but what otherwise floods and pulses through the soul in the word is a strong power, a power through which he not only performs inner facial expressions, but also what can be called inner gestures, inner gesticulation, signs. Then not only intermediate states of the spiritual world, intermediate processes of perception, come to light, but the spiritual world itself is revealed, revealed in us, when we can imitate it in inner gestures. And only through the power of language will it be possible to imitate the processes of the spiritual world.

You can put yourself in the shoes of the beings and actions of real spirits around us. Only by living in their gestures and becoming one with them can you perceive the spiritual beings; this is how you gain knowledge of the spiritual world, but you also gain knowledge of your own sojourn in the spiritual world. When the ability to speak has been chemically detached from speaking, so to speak, the moment has arrived when memory can be extended beyond the previous life on earth, when it is realized that these are not theories; when it is known that our life did not begin yesterday, but that it is the continuation of many previous lives. From the moment we can imitate the spiritual world through the power of speech in an inner gesture, we know that our present life on earth is part of a whole chain of lives. In an inner gesture, we come to the spiritual essence that represents the eternal.

Something else has to be separated from our activity. But this is more difficult to understand. I would like to express what I mean in the simplest way. When we remember our childhood, we have to say: In our childhood we were all four-footed creatures. We walked on all fours. We straightened up through our own inner activity, which was certainly practiced, but which left no memory of its inwardness to the human being. And just imagine what the human being, as a cultural being on earth, is because he looks up into the heavenly sphere with his face! That has changed his entire direction in space. The human being has only made himself into the being that he is. To experience again in later life that inner urge that inspired us when we made ourselves into an upright being and thereby formed ourselves into a human being, that is what we should activate in our soul.

This leads us to a third power of the soul, which we separate from our bodily life. We have already used this power in the past of our present life. We no longer need it in later life, because then we can straighten ourselves up. But now we bring out the strength with which we straightened ourselves up; we apply it, we become aware of it. At that time it worked without us having caught up with it in our soul; we were content with becoming upright beings from crawling beings through the inner application of this strength. The spiritual researcher learns to recognize a wonderful soul power in this power. Through this power he is able not only to experience the spiritual through the state of thought and the gestures of spiritual beings through the detached power of speech, as in the state of thinking, but he is able to experience the spiritual beings themselves, to become one with them, as it were, to become one with the spiritual worlds, to work and weave in them. With them one learns to recognize that the human being has come to earth as a spiritual being, and by bringing these forces with him, he has become what he is as an earthly being. He has become a human being by bringing the body from a horizontal to a vertical position. Only man uses this power in the universe to change from a quadruped to a biped. If you discover this power inwardly in the soul, then you enter into the inner being of other spiritual beings that permeate and live through the world. These are beings that have different tasks to perform because they have a different purpose in the world than humans do. One gains insight into earthly conditions by concentrating one's attention, recognizing spiritual beings with their co-experiences, by unfolding in the spiritual world precisely that which gives the human being his spiritual physiognomy as a human being. Through inner physiognomy, one becomes one with the spiritual beings. Inner gestures and movements lead to the perception of processes in the spiritual world; but spiritually motivated physiognomy, as it gives the upright physiognomy to a person, leads to the knowledge of that which people can only experience and experience in the spiritual world, in association with other spiritual beings.

The paths that lead the spiritual researcher into the spiritual worlds are briefly indicated. These ways cannot be particularly popular. Today they are such that one must say that they go against one of the characteristics of the human soul: its love of comfort. This love of comfort goes so far today that the human soul only acknowledges the existence of something when it can simply passively devote itself to it. If one demands of this soul that it should first be active itself, that it should itself experience that which previously meant nothing to it, and through which it should then recognize the object in its own experience, then this goes against the complacency of today's soul, which wants to be passive, which does not want to conquer truths for itself, but wants to be given them.

Therefore, spiritual research is so aligned with the goals of the present that these goals of the present do not want to know about spiritual science, because, especially in the most spiritual sense, these goals are directed towards passivity. Spiritual science demands the development of soul powers that are based on activity and that, in their further pursuit, lead into the higher, supersensible worlds; because the spiritual can only be experienced through inner activity.

But today's man often imagines the spiritual to be mere fantasy. He imagines it to be like an external object that commands him: “I am here, you have to recognize me.” In this way, he is very far from the right understanding. The following was explained quite philosophically in a newspaper: When you immerse yourself in Kant or any other philosopher, all the concepts are so intangible that you have to think about them for a long time before you can understand them. Can our time provide a remedy for this? And precisely because of the spirit of our time, he [the author] finds that they can be made tangible. Everything should be made tangible, including the spirit. Yes, even that which every human being can know is not visible, human thinking, the thought should become visible. And how should that happen? Well, Spinoza, for example, who is said to be difficult for people to understand, who want to make everything vivid, should be approached in such a way that the cinematograph is used. Why not? You could do the following, says the person concerned. This has not been suggested as a fairy tale, but as a serious proposition based on the aims of our time. It shows how Spinoza arrives at seemingly difficult thoughts. Through the idea of the expansion of thought, it shows how the whole of ethics, up to God, are juxtaposed, culminating in the higher ideas. Cinematography could be used to illustrate Spinoza's entire ethics from individual forces. That is one of the aims of our time. And the editor of this journal, who is taking up the treatise, makes the following comment: “So we could finally hope that the ancient masters of humanity can be brought closer to people in a way that corresponds to the present day through what most people today obviously see only as a game, namely the art of film.

In this way, however, spiritual science cannot keep pace with the goals of our time. These goals of our time are geared towards passivity, and even if we were to talk for hours about the goals of our time, this passivity of the spirit is the necessary correlate in relation to what could be said about these goals in intimate terms. This much can be said.

If you look closely, you will see that the spiritual life of humanity is no different from the rest of nature. What is gained on the one hand must be taken away on the other. One has to admire the boldness of the inventions of the mind that are used in technology. Man will even conquer the unruly air; but all this is achieved with the most profound spiritual passivity.

But precisely for this reason our time is also so ripe for developing the spirit itself in its activity. Indeed, more than that, our time has the necessity of making the spirit inwardly active. The innermost moral, intellectual and emotional powers are brought forth through the habits of thinking and feeling that are gained through spiritual science. On the one hand, as a result of the education that humanity has already acquired under the influence of what is truly admirable in itself, spiritual science is seen as something paradoxical, something fantastic, perhaps even something quite different; but as a result, this opposition locks itself onto the other side. Opposition is necessary. Just as when you press an elastic ball for a long time, it finally develops that strength, which is perceived as an elastic counterforce against the pressure, so the soul must come to strong and ever stronger passivity precisely through the admirable achievements of thought, so that it longs for inner activity. Unconsciously, it already longs for this activity today. And all activity can become a power through which the soul is liberated and redeemed when spiritual research is allowed to work in the fabric of contemporary spiritual culture.

With just these few remarks, I wanted to show today how spiritual science wants to engage with the whole spiritual fabric of the present.

Looking back at what has just been discussed, it will be fully understood that spiritual science faces opposition from all sides. One of these oppositions comes from those who believe that religions or something else is endangered by spiritual science. They will not appear incomprehensible to the observer of history. For the time of Copernicus, the fact that the earth orbits the sun was just as fantastic as the fact of repeated earth lives is for our contemporaries. At that time, people believed that religion was endangered by Copernican astronomy; just as people today believe that religion is endangered again by the teaching of spiritual science about repeated earth lives.

We can be more reassured about such beliefs if we consider that when an outstanding scholar-philosopher, who was also, admittedly, active in the [cosmological] field, came to the realization that truth is invincible, he was talking about Galileo. He said that today the Church has learned to see in Galileo, in Copernicus, no longer those whom she once saw in them; but today she has learned to point out that through discoveries in the field of science, the glory of divine revelations is revealed to mankind all the more brightly. Science in the true sense of the word is to the praise of religious life, not to critically do something detrimental to true, religiously understood life.

That it is not so widely understood, that was made clear to a large number of our friends who want to start building a relatively small structure in the near future that will provide a home for spiritual science and a variety of studies. Many of these voices were instructive, which certainly sometimes spoke from a point of view that is so thoroughly imbued with what fantastic stuff, what a reverie this spiritual science actually is. Yes, it was interesting from a cultural-historical point of view when the remarks that had been made about the building in the most diverse places were also presented to me. It was interesting to look at things from this point of view as well. Indeed, one could admit that the humanities or their adherents have a little imagination, but they don't have as much as those who have occasionally written these articles.

At most, they can measure up to the article that I also received, about a spiritual researcher who is quite close to me and which states what he expresses in terms of fantasies. You can't get enough of his fantasies, and then you move on to the second section, where you are then really told, probably from the elbow, the very worst fantasies about birth, kinship, descent. Truly, even if he had some imagination, if he were inclined to fantasize par excellence [...], he would never dream up so much fantasy, especially not a fantasy about external descent, about kinship and so on.

The strangest things can be read. For example, it is said that a Buddhist temple is to be built on the site. Just as modern chemistry is far removed from what was once practiced as chemistry in distant Asia centuries or millennia ago, so too is modern spiritual science far removed from what Buddhism is. It takes more than a little imagination to talk about Buddhism. Today I have tried to explain, albeit insufficiently, what the adherents of spiritual science actually want. Perhaps some of the ideas will be able to be gained from it after all. But that will have little to do with what these spiritual researchers are supposed to be, according to the newspaper reports. One remark, which has appeared in at least thirty newspapers, has particularly caught my attention. We learn of a remarkable ability of the spiritual researchers: they can make it rain. It was emphasized everywhere that the foundation stone was laid in the pouring rain. What kind of people must the spiritual researchers be that they can order rain so that they can lay the foundation stone protected by the rain? If that were the case, they would certainly be very dangerous. But if you get to know those who make the Dornach building their own, you will recognize that they like sunshine just as much as you do; that they did not order the rain at all and did not shy away from the day. It would even have been daytime when the foundation stone was laid if some of the members who would have liked to have been there had not come on a later train. That is a more trivial explanation, which cannot be made much of, but it looks a little better if one says: These people must have certain reasons for working at night and in the rain. That was not said, but it was still in the subconscious and can be interpreted from the words. But reality is not that interesting. As for the rest, the future will show how little foundation there is for the fantastic ideas that have been spread in the outside world about this place, which is said to be a place of activity in the sense indicated in this lecture. This lecture was not given to talk about this place, but because it is being given, I may refer to it with these few words, because, so to speak, spiritual science has made an unwanted sensation in this area.

If you want to say what this building is for, yes, isn't it true that stations are built so that people can travel by train? They are built so that the machines, the trains, can drive in and out. For this, the stations must be usable. We must see as the characteristic quality of this building nothing other than that which is useful for the purposes of spiritual science, which is capable of stirring the soul when the word of spiritual science is spoken, as is necessary to bring the soul into contact with the spiritual world. To evoke the mood of the soul that is necessary in our time, to prepare the soul to receive the spiritual world, it is necessary to speak not only through the word, but also through that which is around us. What otherwise can only be expressed in words should be poured into the architecture. In the form of symbols that are truly artistic, a building should be created in the interior design that can serve the cultivation of spiritual culture in a spiritual way, just as a train station serves its material purposes in the right way. Even if the comparison is a trivial one, it is still apt.

It will be more and more recognized that what spiritual science can achieve from the human soul is connected with all the goals of the present. By appealing to the active element in the soul, to that which can only be awakened through activity in the soul, spiritual science speaks at the same time to the most important activities of the soul through the results of its research. More and more, those souls who can be active in the truest sense will desire spiritual science in the spirit. Spiritual science will appeal to soul powers that can only be taken into account from the present time onwards, but which also have to intervene in all the aims of human culture; above all in artistic life, so that just as in ancient times spiritual science developed on the one hand and art on the other from the common source of spiritual life, so here too artistic activity will go hand in hand with the current of spiritual science. And a weak beginning for this is to be given in the architecture of the site that will be built in Dornach. The architecture should speak to those who, in the longings of the soul, feel drawn to it, through the form of the same spiritual secrets, of which otherwise only in words can be actually stammered. Spiritual science has a hope. How many opponents it can grow up with in the present, that it corresponds to a necessity of the heart and the human soul, that will be seen from what it has inserted into culture. Just as scientific and religious prejudices were unable to stop Copernicanism, so the truths of spiritual science will not be hindered by the prejudices of these opposing sides. That which lies in the organism of human becoming and happening will happen with the same inevitability with which a young person matures and ripens according to an inner law. Just as this natural property is inherent in humanity, so too will this spiritual science mature. And just as natural science intervenes in and transforms the outer material life, so too will spiritual science intervene in the social, moral and spiritual conditions of the soul life. Just as we travel differently today – by rail – than we did two centuries ago, so too do longings live differently in the soul today than they did two centuries ago.

These longings must be satisfied; we can also see this from the following remarkable matter, which may be recalled again, even if something external is compared with something internal: When the first railways were to be built in Germany, the Medical College was consulted. The college replied that no railways should be built, otherwise people would suffer severely from nervous disorders when traveling on them. And if some people still want to travel, then the railways should at least be fenced in with boards so that the other people do not become dizzy. That was the judgment in 1837. The railways run all the same. That is how it is in life. And spiritual science will run through spiritual life, just as the obstacles of antagonism will want to assert themselves. Spiritual science will show precisely in those in whose hearts it is to take root how unfounded all the prejudices against it are. Science will see how in spiritual science it finds its best ally, how science, limiting itself to external matters, cannot achieve what spiritual science must give it. It will recognize that spiritual science contradicts natural science just as little as there is a contradiction for healthy thinking in the following. We can have three people standing in front of us, one and two others in front of him. The question arises: Why does the one live? Well, because he has a lung inside and breathes air in and out. Nothing to be said against that. But the other says: I know he also lives for another reason. I found him hanged eight days ago; because I cut him down, he is alive today. Everyone is right. The natural scientist is fully justified in saying that when certain qualities appear in life, we have inherited them from our parents, our ancestors and so on. He has the merit of pointing to what is given in the line of inheritance. The spiritual scientist says: what develops in the wonderful mystery of growth, that is brought by the person from previous earthly lives. There is no contradiction in this; both are true.

And with the religious concerns it will be as with the concerns about Copernicanism. The one who stands on the ground of revelation nevertheless feels united with all those minds that have grasped the truth from their point of view; what spiritual research is supposed to be, that it will become, and when spiritual research is an achievement of our time, then the people blessed by this cultural progress will have counted these spiritual goals of spiritual research as their own; as spiritual beings, they will have felt united with spiritual research, they will have grasped its point of view in relation to the spiritual world.

As with all other honest minds connected with human progress, spiritual research also feels at one with Goethe, and with his words I would like to summarize today's reflection from this point of view. To all those who are prejudiced against spiritual research, I would say this: if people believe that religion or something else is endangered by spiritual science, then the spiritual researcher, whose soul has been touched by spiritual science, knows that he is walking through the world and knows that Goethe's words are true, and that they that the one who truly allows himself to be penetrated by science and art, enters in such a way that his soul is truly religiously moved; and that only the one who lacks the gift for science and artistry in the right sense will not be religiously moved in the true sense of the word. Therefore, allow me to characterize the position of spiritual science in relation to the goals of all times and also of our time with Goethe's words, by saying with Goethe:

He who possesses science and art
also has religion;
he who does not possess those two
shall have religion.

The first two lectures on spiritual science that I was able to give here this winter were more about the way in which spiritual knowledge is acquired. They were about those forces in the human soul that generally still oppose this spiritual knowledge in our present time, are hostile to it, and the like.

This evening, I would like to take the liberty of saying a few words, even if they are naturally limited in a short lecture, about the relationship between spiritual science and various religious and social currents in our present-day culture. I may remark that, as is natural, I can only advocate spiritual scientific research, which was the subject of the first two lectures here, and that we should carefully avoid confusing this spiritual scientific research with all kinds of other currents that call themselves theosophical or similar and are active in the present day. Generally speaking, it is not pleasant to talk about such currents, but perhaps it is not necessary after these lectures. We live in a time in which the human soul, which is only a little aware of what is going on around it, must undoubtedly feel how it is increasingly being forced to step out of the instinctive life of the soul and to live more and more consciously and recognizably in that which one can call the demands of the world, namely the cultural world, on man and his soul development. We need not look back to the very early days of human cultural development to be convinced, very soon indeed, if we are unprejudiced, that in those earlier times man was able to live much more instinctively, much more, one might say, naturally, than in our own time. This is the basis for what we experience as the progressive aspect of our time. The human soul is increasingly compelled to think and imagine about what, if the expression may be used, was instilled into it by inner, soul-spiritual forces that remain more indeterminate, so that they could express themselves more instinctively.

In a genuine and true sense, spiritual science seeks to serve this human soul, which is striving for maturity and full consciousness. But since it must do so from a point of view that, at least initially, is seemingly in stark contrast to the traditional habits of thought and ways of thinking for many souls, it is, on the other hand, quite natural, as has already been emphasized, that the general consciousness revolts against what spiritual science wants to bring into the present, so that it really corresponds not only to what is present, so to speak, on the surface of the soul, but to what, in the deep longings of the soul, weaves and strives towards the human future.

For some, what spiritual science has to say must seem radically different in a much more profound sense than, for example, what was radically different in the dawn of the new spiritual life that the scientific way of thinking brought. To a much greater extent, man of today must feel that spiritual science has apparently — and this must always be emphasized — pulled the ground from under his feet, in contrast to the time when Copernicus, with his new physical worldview, shook what people had previously believed, namely that the earth, along with man, was stationary in space. That people had to accept the new truth, which was new for that time, they felt it somewhat as if the ground on which they stood quietly had been pulled out from under their feet. If one felt something physically at that time, one can certainly feel it today to an increased extent, if one wants to hold on to old habits of thinking, when spiritual research speaks of repeated earthly lives and says that the spiritual spheres can only be explored if one frees the soul from the experiences in the body. Spiritual science requires a soul observation that is free from all sense perception and free from the brain-bound thinking.

It is natural that in contrast to this, many a person feels insecure who has always sought the safe ground of human perception and observation, human philosophizing, in that the soul makes use of the senses and the intellect that is bound to the brain. For the latter, a feeling of insecurity arises, as if the ground were being pulled from under his feet, only to a much greater extent than was the case at that time in the dawn of the new spiritual life.

Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the meaning and spirit of spiritual science cannot but be repeatedly amazed at certain objections and attacks that come particularly from one side, namely from the religious denominations of the most diverse orientations. One must be all the more amazed at this, although it is understandable, since attacks also come from materialistic and other scientific sides. One must be all the more surprised by the attacks that come from religious denominations. In the face of these attacks, it must first be emphasized, albeit this has already been done, in a few words, what the actual stumbling block is for many souls when they encounter spiritual science.

Spiritual science wants to be a continuation of the scientific way of thinking in the most eminent sense, but since it deals with the spiritual realm, it must overcome this scientific way of thinking. It must, so to speak, develop in a different way what the scientific way of thinking has achieved in its field, because spiritual research deals with the realm of the spirit. Recent spiritual science shows that with the means available to man when he wants to explore the natural world and fathom the great truths of nature, he cannot enter the spiritual world with these powers and soul abilities. It is evident that no insight into the spiritual world is possible if man wishes to make use only of those soul faculties that can be developed when man, from waking to sleeping, is in the resulting state of consciousness, that man makes use of the senses of his body, of thinking, feeling and willing, for which he needs his nervous system and his brain.

That, in addition to the soul faculties that man must apply precisely in the realm of external sensual life and also in the realm of scientific research, that in addition to these faculties, other faculties slumber in the soul that can be developed if man does something to further them – this is what is objectionable for many minds of the present day. Many minds of the present time do not even consider the fact that in a certain respect a similar change takes place in miniature, in the primitive, in man in the course of his entirely natural life, as is required by spiritual research if it is to develop in accordance with it.

Every human being develops soul powers in the first years of their childhood that they could not get through life with if they remained throughout their whole life as they were in their first childhood years. The fact that we, as adults, find our way in life, that we can position ourselves in life in such a way that we develop an appropriate relationship with other people and with the world as a whole, depends on the abilities we have in early childhood being developed further, and on the abilities of childhood being raised to a higher level. Just as the forces slumbering in the human being in the first years of life are developed in such a way that the human being can orient themselves in their sensory world, so too, if the human being really wants to recognize, look at and perceive the spiritual world, a change must take place in them in later life. And through exercises, the principle of which has been explained in the last lectures and in my books Occult Science and The Threshold of the Spiritual World, and so on, through such exercises the human being is able to transform the abilities of the soul, which he naturally has without doing anything, into abilities through which he can see into the spiritual world. And this transformation is connected with the fact that man learns to really draw his soul out of the body.

In this way the human being comes to the clear concept of consciously distinguishing between two different states of life. The one state is that of ordinary waking. There one knows that one must make use of one's senses. And anyone who has even slightly penetrated the way of thinking in modern times knows that he must make use of his brain and nervous system-bound thought life in order to orient himself in the outside world. Consciousness is such that everything of the soul is directly connected with the body, that the body is contained within the soul and spirit. Through the effort of the powers of thinking, feeling and will, which the human being must develop in certain spiritual exercises, he is able to concentrate and strengthen his soul forces in such a way that the soul detaches itself from the body. He is able to truly experience that moment which is otherwise also experienced, but unconsciously: the moment of leaving the physical body. This moment is otherwise experienced - but unconsciously - when falling asleep. The person still perceives how the impressions and inner activity fade away. Slowly he then passes into unconsciousness. In a similar way, someone who has strengthened their thinking, feeling and willing by doing certain spiritual and soul exercises feels how they can make their soul so strong that it feels: I am still something even when I no longer move my hands, no longer use my eyes and ears, I am still something within myself.

These soul-spiritual exercises are based on the fact that the deeper forces are brought out, through which the soul is also something when it renounces the bodily impressions and the feeling of itself, by exerting the will in the limbs of the body. Through these exercises, the soul is able to leave the body. The body is then an external thing for the soul, like the other things outside our body. In the last lectures, I used the comparison of a spiritual chemistry: just as hydrogen is extracted chemically as water, so the soul experiences itself as a spiritual-soul being, and so it will withdraw from the body. Then it knows itself in a world of spiritual processes and entities, just as it knows itself in a world of sensory processes and entities as long as it uses the senses and the intellect, which is bound to the brain.

I have already pointed out that in the presence of some people it is still forgiven to refer to the spirit in a general way; but it is no longer forgiven when the spiritual world, in which the soul lives, is referred to in such a way that this world, like the sensory world, consists of individual, very concrete processes and entities. It is difficult to forgive when one does not dream oneself into a general, hazy, pantheistic spiritual world, but enters into a world of spiritual diversity. And yet this inner strengthening of the soul leads to it becoming free of the body, to the human being really entering into concrete spiritual worlds.

I do not wish to speak in abstractions, but rather to draw attention to what the spiritual researcher experiences in concrete terms. Through devotion to very specific thoughts that he thinks, he experiences the feelings and will impulses crowding together, and in so doing, he causes the soul to become free from the body. He experiences this, as it were, while awake, which is otherwise only experienced in a dormant and unconscious state. At first he feels how the outer sensory world, the world of colors, light and sounds, fades away as he falls asleep. Then he feels that his thoughts, of which he has rightly said, “I grasp these sensory impressions with them,” become as it were detached from him. And a new world opens up before him.

Man pours out his thoughts about the new world. And when the impressions of the sensory world disappear, then man knows: Yes, so far, where I have seen the carpet of the sensory world around me in my state of consciousness, as it were, something like a veil was woven for me. Now that this veil is gone, a new world is opening up for me. When you live consciously in the body-free soul, you not only experience the disappearance of the sensory world, but something like a veil also disappears, which is felt as if it has covered a world of the spiritual. You then experience a world of spiritual beings that emerge when the veil of the sensual tears.

When the veil disappears, one experiences beings that are one degree higher than the human soul in the order of the world. One then becomes familiar with a feeling that enriches the soul infinitely. One then feels: When you look around here in the world of the senses, you have the beings of the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms beneath you. The highest realm, which you have around you, is on the same level as you. You immerse yourself in a world that comes to you, and as a soul you know: what lies in your depths, what you are not aware of in your ordinary existence, what does not enter into your self-awareness, that is something through which you will be enriched. It is a world of spiritual beings that stand above you in the order of the world, that are not embodied in the body, but that are “ensouled” and within which you yourself are when you have become a body-free soul.

That is one thing. A second thing that comes to you when the veil of the sensual world is blown away is that you perceive what you otherwise call natural laws in a completely different way. The laws of nature, which one comprehends in the sense of being through thoughts, are no longer laws of nature when one perceives outside of the body; the thoughts are gone, they have united with spiritual beings that stand above man. What we experience in the laws of nature, which we previously perceived through thoughts, is now life itself. These are spiritual beings, which, when one has attained the relevant level of knowledge, stand before the soul of man as real as animals, plants and minerals otherwise stand before the senses of man. One familiarizes oneself with these entities, in relation to which one says to oneself: the laws of nature show us something like silhouettes, like abstractions of them. But what is present in the laws of nature when the veil is lifted are high spiritual entities. In spiritual science, these entities, which constitute the form of the laws of nature, are called the spirits of form because they instruct everything in the world to take on form through their spiritual power, out of the life of the world. Everything that exists in minerals, in animals and plants as form is the result of the activity of these entities.

When the physical body of a person is at rest, but in such a way that consciousness is maintained, when every will that only acts through limbs, that only acts through the body, when every such will is paralyzed, when it rests as it then does in sleep, when the person his physical body lies motionless in bed, when the will has been weakened by the application of soul power, but the person does not sink into unconsciousness but remains conscious, then he realizes: there is something within you that is the giver of your will, that radiates into your will. Your will is permeated and permeated by exalted spirits that permeate and interweave the world. One is tempted to call them spirits of the will. By paralyzing the will within himself, man discovers the spirits of the will.

In this way he lives into the spiritual world in the same way as when he opens his eyes at birth and becomes familiar with a world that he perceives through his senses. In this way he lives, when the ordinary conscious powers of the soul are rejected, into a spiritual world. This living into comes about through man's submerging with his own soul into the spirit, as modern natural science submerges into nature in its experiments. What has led to the great triumphs in natural science? It has separated observation from experiment. In the experiment, the natural event is detached from the immediate impression it makes on the senses. It is true that one must observe, but in the experiment one tries to penetrate into what lies behind the sense impressions in the physical. We dive down into nature, and every natural science experiment demands that what is to be seen be made independent of the subjective impressions of the senses.

Spiritual science goes to the other side. It makes the human being himself the subject of experimentation. It does not do it, as it is done in some spiritualistic circles, where experiments are done on people in the manner of observation. Spiritual science knows that man can only make himself a tool to find his way into the spiritual world. And so it shows how the physical and perceptible detaches itself from the soul-spiritual in man, and how he comes to be among spirits and souls under spirits and souls.

All this, which has now been discussed, is offensive to many minds of the present time. It is understandable that it must have this effect. Why is it so offensive? I cannot now go into what I have already mentioned in the last lectures. Only those who train themselves spiritually can perceive in the spiritual world, but in order to take in and understand what the spiritual researcher writes in books after he has researched it, one does not need to be a spiritual researcher. You have to be a painter to paint a picture, but not to understand it. It would be sad if only painters could understand paintings. In the same way, you don't have to be a spiritual researcher to understand what spiritual research has to say.

More and more, the world will realize that even if only a few people can be spiritual researchers – after all, my books explain how everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent – the world will be directly and convincingly affected by what these few have to say and by the way they express it. And the time will come when even non-spiritual researchers will crave descriptions of the spiritual world. Human souls are designed for truth, not error. To see in the spiritual world, one must consciously look into it, one must be a spiritual researcher. To comprehend, one need not look into it, one need only accept fully and without prejudice what the spiritual researcher has to say.

In this way, the human soul will be directly grasped by what the spiritual researcher has to say. In the depths of the human soul lies a hidden language. This language only needs to be developed. It slumbers in every human soul. It approaches the human soul directly and is awakened by the spiritual truths that the spiritual researcher brings from the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher is understood more and more through the intimate, profound language that the human soul has for the spirit.

Above all, in this way, the human being gets to know his own soul. He comes to know that it is possible to speak about immortality, about that which goes beyond the world of the senses, in a truly scientific way, when, through the development of his spiritual powers, he comes to find the soul core, which can detach itself from the physical and then lives on as a living being when the human being passes through the gate of death and hands over the physical to the elements.

To get to know the immortality of the soul consciously, one must follow the paths that lead to this human soul. In the ordinary person, the properties are as hidden as the properties of hydrogen in water. Therefore, he cannot approach the soul with any philosophy, not with mere concepts. He can certainly determine all kinds of things theoretically about what is called immortality, but it is only possible to speak knowledgeably about immortality when one really understands the nature of the soul. Then it will be shown that our whole life on earth between birth and death presents itself in such a way that we really develop something with what we carry in our soul, which the spiritual researcher only extracts from the body, but which always remains independent of the physical. as the natural scientist discovers the living germ in the plant as it grows from the root to the leaves and blossoms and fruits, which gradually develops and which, when the plant fades, offers the prospect of a new plant life.

In this way, the spiritual researcher senses the soul, and discovers in the human being that which grows inwardly, spiritually and soulfully in the whole of life between birth and death, and which then, as a living soul, passes through the portal of death and enters a spiritual world, undergoing the events that are spiritual and that in turn lead to repeated earthly lives. What passes through the human being in the form of a disembodied soul must go through repeated earthly lives. And what passes through death in this way is truly discovered by the spiritual researcher. But it is discovered by the fact that the ground is actually pulled from the knowledge on which one initially wants to rely. Just as Copernicus undermined the basis of the sensory evidence on which people believed they saw everything correctly, so spiritual science undermines the belief that the soul, if it only detaches itself, if it itself becomes a spiritual-soul being, can really see into the spiritual world.

This is the offensive thing about spiritual science, that it likewise repudiates all knowledge of which man is so proud and which has led to such great triumphs in external science, just as Copernicus repudiated the evidence of the senses. And this is why man recoils from this spiritual science, because it says: Not one power of knowledge, which is already there, but one that must be carefully prepared and acquired, is alone capable of looking into the spiritual world. Man recoils from this. For everything that demands of man to go further than he already is contradicts the view, often unconsciously slumbering deep in the soul, that man, as he is, is already very perfect, that he has no need at all to go beyond himself.

Spiritual science knows that it is necessary to go beyond the ordinary powers of perception, just as a child must go beyond its powers of perception if it is to orient itself in the world. Basically, we know that some children are uncomfortable when we want to lift them beyond their innate powers of perception. Children just don't have the stubbornness and resistance that people have at a later age. If you say to a person, “If you want to get close to the spirit, you have to believe in other forces than your ordinary power of perception,” then it contradicts human vanity, the belief in the perfection of the human being. But no matter how much one resists recognizing the truth of what has just been said, it is the vanity and discomfort of a new, unfamiliar way of thinking that prevents people from approaching spiritual-scientific interests.

And basically, this is what has always held back or tried to hold back all real progress in human cultural life; it is only more so in the case of spiritual science. Those who oppose spiritual research today, whether from a liberal or orthodox point of view, are truly the successors of the opponents of Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno. Just as the opponents at that time believed that everything that had previously been recognized as true by people was now being called into question and was in danger, so it is also believed today to an increased extent of spiritual science. And this, and nothing else, is actually the basis of the attacks that are made on spiritual science, particularly by religious communities. Here one must address the question: Why is it that religious communities stubbornly resist the progressive development of humanity? How could it be that in the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, certain people believed that religion was endangered by the advent of these scientific discoveries? How can it be that the successors of these people today believe that religion is endangered by spiritual science?

When one hears how the confessor of this or that religious community rebels, one might say with all the weapons at his disposal, against something like spiritual science, I am repeatedly reminded of a priest who was elected rector of a large university not so long ago. He gave his inaugural address about Galileo Galilei. He was a priest and at the same time a great scholar, an amiable scholar. He, the priest, said at the time, contrary to the views of his church community, with regard to new cultural achievements in the field of the mind: At the time when Copernicus and Galileo appeared, people who judged the matter from the perspective of their religious community in a shortsighted way believed that such discoveries would endanger the worship of God and religious sentiment. Today, we should have outgrown such beliefs. Today, it should be clear that every new insight into the great truths of existence can only serve to reveal the holiness and glory of the divine order of the world. These are the words of a man who, as a Catholic priest, understood the core of his religious community better than those who today want to be the successors of those who fought Galilei and Copernicus. That he said it in the spirit of his religious community was clear to anyone who sensed in him something that was not entirely genuine, as he held on to it throughout his life. And even in his dying hour, he held fast to what he had said. He spoke in his hour of death, saying that he wanted to die as a faithful son of his church. One must sympathize, without perhaps standing on the ground of this priest, with what true, inner connection with the core and soul of a religious community means, if one at the same time finds the possibility and ability to speak, as he does, about the progress of humanity.

Every religious community, more or less in the course of its existence, allies itself with certain views, with the insights of its time, because it has to work. Thus, as is quite natural, the Christian religion has associated itself with the ideas of the pre-Copernican world view. But the fact that it associated itself with them was an expression of its time. Those who said that religion would be endangered if something different were now known about the world view were short-sighted. Those who said: The God we carry in our hearts, the Christ with whom we feel, the religious feeling that runs through us, that will be effective, however the rest of the world view may be shaped. And it is still somewhat understandable when today's religious communities behave antagonistically towards materialistic world views that believe they are building on the basis of science, but which are usually far removed from true knowledge of nature.

But one cannot understand at all why individual representatives of these religious denominations are so terribly opposed to spiritual research, although deeply-disposed natural scientists – one need only think of Galilei, or, if one does not want to mention him, Copernicus, one could also mention a whole series of profound naturalists and scholars of the nineteenth century who really carried the call of natural science throughout the world - although more deeply inclined naturalists were basically always pious. It was said of Newton that he did not pronounce the name of God without baring his head. Those who today behave as materialists and say that the observation of nature forbids them to believe in the idea of God rely on him. Newton was so attached to it that he never bared his head wherever he was when he uttered the name of God, he, the alleged founder of the movement that today wants to be monists in the materialistic sense.

Nevertheless, one can understand how opponents can arise. From a superficial observation of nature, some may believe that science demands to deny immortality, to deny God - superficially considered, in that one has detached from sense perception that which is hidden in external nature. By refraining from this hidden knowledge and arming the senses to observe external nature, science has grown. It will always come from superficial observation of nature, from dilettantish knowledge of nature, if one believes oneself forced into atheism, into a lack of religion. This can only come from a misunderstanding of things. This can lead to those who feel religiously inclined rebelling against what arises from a non-religious observation of nature. However, spiritual science affects the mind differently than a worldview that claims to be based on pure natural science. People very quickly understand how this spiritual science works if they just open themselves up to it a little. Anyone who engages with spiritual science is presented with a set of concepts and ideas about the world and its processes to which the soul truly belongs. If you absorb these concepts and ideas, they are of a completely different strength than the ideas of external natural science. These ideas can, so to speak, solve many external puzzles, but they will no longer reach what sits in the depths of the soul. They will no longer stir the inner being into activity, they leave the depths of the soul barren. But spiritual science, with its concepts, reaches into the soul, into the mind, into the will and feeling of the soul, permeates and spiritualizes all impulses, even all affects and passions of the soul. It interweaves and lives through the whole soul. And the consequence of this living and interweaving of the soul through spiritual science is that the soul of the human being is given a religious bent. Spiritual science wants to be a real, genuine science, and has no desire to found a new religion or to compete with an old religion. It wants to be anything but a new religious sect. It wants to be a science for the soul, just as natural science was a science for the external world of nature from the moment its time had come. It wants to be scientific, but the way it approaches the soul means that the soul is tuned to religion from the outset. You can be a great natural scientist, you can get to know the full extent of natural laws, and you can be irreligious, an irreligious person. One does not become a spiritual researcher by having already prepared this or that religious sentiment, but by carrying the scientific mind and spirit upwards. But if one is attracted by spiritual science, one becomes interested in spiritual science, then one necessarily becomes a religiously minded person, a religiously minded soul.

If the religious communities of the present day were to sense correctly what is happening through spiritual science, they would not fight it so much. They would say: Thank God that a world view is emerging that gives souls a sense of religion. It will bring the soul what so many are being deprived of through misunderstood natural science. One can misunderstand natural science, but no-one will misunderstand spiritual science in an anti-religious sense. The souls of the various communities should rejoice that a spiritual power is emerging that will once again give a religious outlook to souls that have become irreligious as a result of so many things in the present day. And it is strange that this trend, which occurs in spiritual science and gives religious spirit to souls, is not felt. It is not felt because people are not at all inclined to learn from history. They have been able to fight and even burn the representatives of the scientific world view; it has prevailed. You may fight the proponents of the spiritual-scientific worldview; it will prevail. It is only surprising that the members of religious societies do not ask themselves: Must we go through the same thing with the spiritual-scientific achievements as our ancestors did with the natural-scientific ones? Could we not learn something from history after all? The fact that humanity has still not progressed far enough to learn from history, in turn, gives rise to the question: Why, for example, is there opposition to spiritual science?

It must be said that many people certainly have their conception of God, their religious feelings, but they have forgotten how to rejoice, to feel joy when a time shines forth anew that deepens these religious feelings. They are too lazy to go along with this new time because of it. Let us look at individual aspects. Spiritual science fully recognizes the Christ whom the true Christian worships. Spiritual science even deepens it, going along with the course of development of humanity, saying that all human development before the Mystery of Golgotha pointed to the event of Golgotha, that through this event a spirit that was previously extraterrestrial entered the earth to live and remain on earth with people, albeit invisibly.

Spiritual science shows that something tremendous happened at that event, to which the Bible so alludes, namely at the event at Golgotha. At that time, a spirit that had previously only worked into humanity from outside the earth entered into earthly activity through the human being as if through a gate. Spiritual science says: What was not previously in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth has been in the earthly atmosphere since that time. Christ has entered the earthly atmosphere. Spiritual science says: A cosmic being has become an earthly being. And in the man Jesus of Nazareth it lived in order to become a companion of men. Spiritual science says: The Christ, who from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth hovered around this Jesus from the outside, so to speak, entered into the depths of his soul at his baptism in the Jordan.

Now the opponents come and say: You teach a Christ idea that we cannot recognize when you claim that until the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, Jesus was merely preparing to receive the Christ, while the Bible prescribes that the Christ being was connected with the Jesus of Nazareth from the beginning. The Bible will also teach something different in this regard. It will prove the spiritual scientific interpretation right, because it can no longer do otherwise. Today, insightful translators translate a passage from the [Gospel of] Luke:

This is my beloved son, today I have begotten him.

that is, immersed in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. In the face of the all-encompassing grandeur of this Christ-idea, which can truly grasp the soul in its very depths, opponents may say that it is not Christian, that one should not present the Christ in this way, because you do not seek the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth before his baptism in the Jordan.

When you look at a child and say: From the moment the child learns to say “I”, that is, from the point in time up to which you remember later in life, from that moment on, something new has entered the child has entered into the child – will it be possible to come and say: You must not call the child, who is called Paul, Paul before the moment when the child learns to say 'I', because something significant happened at that moment? Does the fact that the significance of the baptism in the Jordan has been recognized in spiritual scientific terms, that something that previously surrounded Jesus of Nazareth has entered into his inner being and become one with this inner being, change anything about what is now Christian? No, that is the right thing, that all the conceptions of the soul, all the deep feelings, all the union with Christ Jesus, that only some Christian soul can feel, are preserved, and that something is added which, because times progress, makes the idea of Christ appear even greater, even more glorious. So when spiritual science has to say to those who approach it from a Christian point of view: what you demand to believe, spiritual science does not deny it, spiritual science admits that what you believe can be believed. Only something is added, which we believe must be added because the Christ has said:

I am with you until the end of the world.

He is alive among us, and He reveals Himself continually in the souls of people today. It is He who introduces us to spiritual science, and through Him we feel connected to spiritual science. The adherents of this spiritual teaching do not want to say: You should believe everything we ask you to believe; that is not the case. Spiritual science does not deny anything, it adds something. It does not demand that something be believed that it believes, but it does demand that what it does not believe but knows be not believed but known. It conveys that the idea of Christ grows and advances in the world. How does it do that?

Let us assume that it could have happened that, before Columbus discovered America, people would have come to him and said: There are supposed to be other areas of the earth? That cannot be possible, because the sun shines so warmly on our areas of the earth. If it had to shine on other areas, it would not have enough warmth left for our areas. But others would have said to Columbus: Of course, the sun shines on other parts of the earth as well as on ours. Those who are so weak in their conception of God that they believe this conception to be endangered when people discover a new area, a new physical fact, are the same as those who do not believe the sun is strong enough to shine on a newly discovered land. But anyone who wants to live with his Christ, who is sufficiently imbued with his religious feeling, knows that this concept of divinity, this connection with the Christ, this religious feeling will shine over all areas, physical and spiritual, that man will ever discover. Must we not conclude how weak-minded people's concept of God is, who believe that this concept of Christ is endangered because they cannot accept that in this newly discovered spiritual realm the sun of the spirit will shine as it shines in the old realm?

So it will be more and more recognized that opposition arises from religiosity that has become weak, from religiosity that has become fearful, as in the various religious denominations towards the discoveries in the field of spiritual life. We should recognize much more where we actually stand with our religious life. Do we not see that it is becoming more and more fragmented? Do we not see how all possible shades, all possible religious denominations, are spreading from the most orthodox right to the most radical left? Do we not see these representatives fighting each other more and more? If you look at these beliefs from a spiritual scientific point of view, you can ask: where do these antagonisms come from?

If you go into this hatred, many things turn out to be so weak. To mention just one example, which I have already pointed out, a few months ago a Free-Religious preacher said that children should not be taught religion because it is against nature. You just have to let children grow up on their own, so they do not come by themselves to religious ideas. It is therefore not natural for them to develop out of themselves. Therefore, they should not be taught artificially. This saying seems convincing to a great many souls through logic. But if one asks what this logic is based on, one must say that it is a weak, one-sided logic. Man is not so constituted that he can do everything new out of himself. The same logic also speaks quite precisely against a child learning to speak. Logic only needs to be sharpened a little, then we can see so clearly what is actually taking place at a deeper level. For it is not logic that is fighting against logic. What is fighting from the far right to the far left are passions, human temperaments - that is what human souls carry within them in the way of affects and passions before they are illuminated and fully enkindled by Christ. When the various groups in our present time confront each other in this way in the field of religious world view, they reveal how our fragmented time must long for what spiritual science can give it.

Spiritual science does not found a new religion. It says what it has to say about the world of the spirit, in the same way that natural science speaks about external nature. Spiritual science speaks about Christ in the way one must speak about him when one teaches the soul, which has become free, to look into spiritual realms and there find the effective Christ. Spiritual science will increasingly provide the disputing parties with the basis for their mutual understanding.

The disputing parties in religious communities today are like people who, at the time of Copernicus, argued about what he had to say about the solar system. The dispute will end as soon as there is a positive basis. The task and mission of spiritual science will be to create a positive foundation, to really say how things are in the spiritual world, about which one could only form a basis from the groping feeling of the soul's indeterminacy. And anyone who looks into the souls of human beings knows that it is a task longed for by them.

Thus spiritual science will not throw a new bone of contention into the souls of the present, but will bring about the peace that can truly live in souls by balancing them. In this way it will give shape to the striving of the human soul. These souls will thereby have a basis for combating, out of their own intuitive perception, that which, through the character of the individual, tends too much towards liberalism or orthodoxy, so that people would have to fight out of this temperament. Spiritual science will bring the positive, the truly spiritual, in contrast to what is only sensed.

And when we consider this, we will recognize how spiritual science truly relates to the various religious denominations. We might say that the individual religious parties are separated from one another by a stream that they cannot yet cross. Spiritual science is the bridge that leads across this stream. It has something to say to everyone, just as it has something to say to anyone who has looked beyond a certain radius. On the one hand, it speaks to those who have retained their faith, and on the other hand, it speaks to those whose religious feeling is seeking a new form. It shows that in the end it can unite everyone. This is how it will be with spiritual science: it has to find the positive.

And this positive aspect it has to contribute not only from the religious point of view, but also to the social currents. Oh, these social currents! When we look through these social currents with understanding, we see that people are basically quite helpless when we try to think more deeply, when we try to form ideas about a possible future for humanity in the social sphere and about the effect of these social currents.

One example among many can be cited in our present time, and in this way we can fathom from the most diverse intellectual and physical causes what the social organization has actually brought about. Sombart wrote a book some time ago to make it clear how this capitalist spirit that dominates the present has emerged. He is not a fanatical representative of the capitalist spirit. Sombart spent his whole life trying to understand what has brought man, as he now stands in economic life, into this economic life. He actually found, to a certain extent, beautiful explanations about capitalism, which has taken hold of the human soul. After the author has endeavored to gather together everything that can provide insight into what our organization has created, he concludes his book – tellingly, it is a thick book – as follows:

What will happen when the capitalist spirit has ceased to have its present resilience is not our concern here. Perhaps the giant

– by which he means the present economic order

– will then, when it has gone blind, be trained to pull a democratic cultural cart. Or perhaps it will be the twilight of the gods. [...]

Who knows?

This is how the attempt presents itself in today's current, the attempt to know how people could rise from the present economic order to a fully human existence. So strong is this “who knows” that it calls the spirit of this economic order a “blind giant”. And when we survey the various attempts to understand intellectually what is to become of our present economic system, which is not national in any way, which is taking hold of the whole earth beyond all countries, we see how, again from left and right, from radicalism and conservatism, the most diverse attempts are being made to move the whole.

Sombart's book contains certain references to what I have dared to say for many years in terms of spiritual science. He describes what has happened since ancient times to bring about the present order, how present-day humanity is determined in the field of economic life as by the command of its soul: “This you shall do, that you shall leave.” He describes how man is seized by an impersonal organism, how he is driven into the wheelwork. This observer of contemporary social life describes it vividly and with expertise. And if you look at this social life in detail, then we already have knowledge of this being seized by people who are right in the middle of this life.

Just read the autobiography of a great railroad king. You will always find the same tone, the same type of man who, for example, says:

My [...] intention was limited to acquiring enough through the construction of railways to buy a larger estate, then to retire from business and, when the opportunity arose, to accept a mandate for the House of Representatives and devote myself entirely to parliamentary work. That is what he wanted.

That's what his soul told him. He threw himself into this life. He realized: if I throw myself into this one endeavor, I'm bound to lose. Only by using these funds for a next venture, only by letting myself be dragged from one into the other, only in this way can it be done. - By plunging into a second, a third, a fourth venture and being driven from one into the other, he is driven ever more sharply into it.

Man cannot follow his own path. Anyone who looks at economic life knows that it always depends on how the affairs of the present are integrated into the objective order. Man is plunged into this objective order, seized by it, and his personal life is completely eliminated, so that Sombart can say: People have lost various things over time. If you look at today's entrepreneur, you have to say that he has given up the last thing that could still separate him from this objective economic machine. He has lost all subjective feeling and all his love for the work in the company itself. What used to be directed at completely different things has been poured into the company. Man no longer knows anything about himself, but has become homeless in his work. That is not a word of mine, but of Sombart.

This is the social current of the present: the soul is homeless in modern life, and is it only the case for those who work in leading entrepreneurial positions? No! This social spirit of the present has taken hold of everyone, so that not only the entrepreneur, but also those who work as simple laborers in the economic life do not feel connected to what they work. If, in the course of work, the question of wages or something else is a cause of disagreement, then it is not work that is at the center of interest, but the question that has been raised by our economic system. This interest is intertwined with work. This plays a role in contemporary social life. In this area, the present is certainly moving forward.

All that I have just said has not been said in order to criticize. The way things have become, they had to become – they have become necessary. But what is characteristic is what man has to say about this order. The individual human being cannot really live in a way that befits human dignity, but rather says: Today I will have to do this or that, tomorrow is none of my business; let the “blind giant” do later what cannot be known, that is none of our business. Sombart says even more. I mention him not precisely because he wrote this book, but because what he says is typical. Sombart says: This social order, this economic order has come to the point where we see it taking hold of people, making them spiritually homeless, throwing them into the wheels of industry, mercilessly throwing them in. And now a very characteristic word! He says: And what means do we actually have to counter this? Labor protection laws, homeland protection laws and the like. Means that make one shudder when they are set up. But – as he puts it – no Weimar-Königsberg doctrine of wisdom will ever change this course of the economic order. – Weimar-Königsberg [means]: a wisdom that could emanate from Goethe's or Kant's world view.

What is expressed in such knowledge? Something that should actually only surprise us when so few people today are moved by it, are disturbed by it. How do such people relate to the current social trends? It can be said that at this stage of development, individuality has become detached from people. Today, we can no longer say: the human being calculates in his business; he plunges in, it calculates, it counts, the capital flows from one place to another.

What does man say when he does not want to behave prudishly in the face of the 'fact' that it must go on and on like this? What does man say when he examines the efforts made so far to gain scientific insight into human life, to gain a worldview? Man says: No Weimar wisdom, no Königsberg wisdom will change anything. Why not? Because man shuts himself off from that wisdom that comes from spiritual science and which has quite different powers to gain access to human souls. For what is meant in Sombart's sense as Weimar, as Goethean wisdom, as Kantian wisdom, is void. But spiritual science has not only concepts, not only ideas; it is something that takes hold of the whole person and brings him back to himself.

Spiritual science alone will have the strength and power to strengthen human souls within themselves, to take hold of them in such a way that these human souls can find themselves again, after they had to lose themselves in the spirit of the economic order of the new age. This spirit of the economic order was so strong that it could make man a stranger to himself. The spirit of spiritual science will be so strong that it will take hold of the soul, that it will offer the soul its spiritual and soul home in the hustle and bustle of the modern economic order. Man has been numbed by the economic order, so that he must speak of it as of the “blind giant” of which he does not know what it will bring. Spiritual science will open the power of the soul to see, which will grip people so that it becomes their home, so that they can become glowing and spiritualized through what they do on this earth.

Such a thing can still be little understood by people of the present time. And what is not understood is most often met with hostility. If you do not understand something, you are its opponent. That is the easiest thing. Learning to understand is more difficult. Laughing and not understanding is easier. And it is precisely in the realm of antagonism that some people have gathered in relation to the building we are trying to establish as a place for the humanities. This place is already proving to be something special in what is new in our spiritual life, in that people are trying to find names for it from all possible angles of the old. Maps have already been shown on which the building is called “Anthroposophical Temple under Construction”. It will not be a temple, but a name is needed. It will be no more a temple than anthroposophy wants to be a new religion or the founding of a sect. If one wants a name, one can say: it will be a “Free University for Spiritual Science”. But for the reasons that have been given, it will have nothing anti-religious about it; it will not be an opponent of religion, but this college will have religiously minded souls within its walls. For through what has been explained, souls are so attracted by spiritual science that they are religiously minded.

But without striving for religion, religion is particularly protected by spiritual science, and souls are again led to understand and recognize the greatness of their religion. And many a soul that may have been alienated from the religious mood by education, that is, by that which lives outside of religion, will be won again for a sure conception of God and Christ through what is taught in this religious college, is shown. We do not undertake to build a church or a temple; but what we build, what we want: just as there are laboratories and cabinets for the physical, so we will build a laboratory, a cabinet for research into spiritual life. What we want will be an image of this spiritual endeavor in its entire configuration and in its entire design. Those who have envisaged what has just been said about the relationship between spiritual science and the social currents of the present will understand that something like this must come into being.

When buildings are erected on a large scale in which such a spiritual foundation extends to the last detail, to the last edge, and when the souls, strengthened by spiritual science, do not face it as something they do not understand, then the human souls who have not found their heaven on the socially configured earth will combine love with their work. Then we will not ask: What will become of the “blind giant?” but rather: What will become of this human soul, attuned to religious spiritual science? And we know: Our conception of God, our religious feeling is so strong that this soul will carry it over into the future. We do not ask: Who knows what will happen then? We see the well-founded knowledge that our soul passes through death, that this soul founds a new life for itself on earth, that it will carry what it acquires through death into the spiritual world, so that it will work from the spiritual world again before the soul reappears on earth. We do not say: Who knows what the future will bring? We seek to acquire in the present that which offers a guarantee that the future of the human soul will be such that one cannot say, through the stupefaction of social life, that man has lost his home. Rather, one will then be able to say: No matter how much the capitalist system spreads, no matter how much it numbs people, the human soul will find itself and will know how firmly it is rooted in the soil of its original spiritual life. It will not live in a world led by a “blind giant”, but in a world in which it can see and in which its economic system can also see. This will give it well-founded hope for the future, because the soul itself provides the building blocks for the construction of this hope. This may be said to the social movement.

This spiritual science will show anyone who takes even a little time to familiarize themselves with it that it is in search of the path that the human soul traverses from the beginning to the end of life. Spiritual science speaks of the path along which man walks towards his future. Spiritual science speaks of truth, not only of a truth of external impressions that arise through sensory perception, but of that truth that is experienced inwardly by the soul in such a way that it feels itself to be a spiritual citizen of the soul in that world. In that world, Christ can be found directly. Many a spirit in the present seeks the present Christ, but it only comes to yearning, it only speaks of it.

It is Christ who harmonizes. He will find the new harmony with the religion of old Europe, he will give the souls to themselves. Anyone who reflects must find that there is a spiritual connection between all things. And that which is subject to an external power today must long for the direct living presence of Christ. Spiritual science points out that the living Christ will maintain the order of the world as long as earthly time lasts. Spiritual science points to the Christ that the soul needs if it wants to feel truly strengthened, and to whom it turns in times of need and danger. Spiritual science imparts this Christ. It grasps the world in truth by allowing the soul to experience the truth. In this way, truth itself comes to life, so that the dead abstract truth is so enlivened that the whole human being is grasped by it.

While today's economic system has killed the human being and thrown him out of his homeland, spiritual science returns him to his living homeland. It has the way, the way that the soul had previously lost and had to take a different one instead. The soul seeks truth and will grasp it directly, so that it does not feel separate from life but connected to it. The path, the truth and the life shine forth for spiritual research. And just as it earnestly seeks these three, so it is also aware that it will find them. And it also finds the one who said that he is what it seeks. No matter how the opponents of this spiritual research fight it, whatever arguments they put forward, spiritual research points to the truth and the life through what lives in its adherents, who can only come to this adherence through their own power of judgment, through what lives in them and what they strive for. And so, no matter what the opponents of religious denominations may say, those who honestly and sincerely seek the path to the spiritual realm, and who strive for it in the same way as the adherents of spiritual research, need have no fear. They will find, in the right sense, in the sense in which souls must reveal it today, the one who said:

I am the way, the truth and the life.

And no matter how powerful the voices may become that rise up against spiritual research, In the knowledge that it is always seeking the Way, the Truth and the Life and is thus directly aware of the connection with the One who was the Way, the Truth and the Life, in this knowledge it becomes bold and free, but also aware of its glory, in modesty and humility it can always answer anyone – even those who say that spiritual science is looking for a false Christ – We seek the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Whatever He says, we know that we may express ourselves freely and honestly to everyone: We follow Him in our own way, which we believe gives souls their new home on earth. We follow Him, He calls us, He will lead us.

Basel, April 9, 1915

Dear attendees! It is impossible to convince someone directly or to want to convince someone with a consideration in the field of spiritual science, as it is to be undertaken this evening, and it would be naive to assume such. For spiritual science as such, as it is meant here, is in the early stages of its development, and it only wants to gradually become part of the cultural development, of the spiritual life of people. Today, the ideas put forward by spiritual science completely contradict the usual conceptions of the widest circles. And it is much more natural, I might say much more to be expected, that objections arise against things as they had to be said this evening, that these things are seen as fantasies, as dreams. This is much more to be expected than if the things were immediately approved. In particular, anyone who has become familiar with the field of spiritual science or its results will not assume that they can easily convince anyone. Rather, what is the result of spiritual science must very slowly and gradually, as has always been the case with spiritual progress in the world, become part of our thinking habits, our whole way of conceiving of time.

And so it is only too understandable, even self-evident, that from many sides – and many more sides could be cited than can be mentioned in this introduction – objections and contradictions, even ridicule and mockery, must be raised against the results of spiritual science today. Above all, the most obvious objection is that spiritual science contradicts the well-founded achievements and ideas of natural science, which has made such great and powerful advances in our time. Today's lecture will perhaps be able to shed some light on this objection in particular. But objections also arise from other quarters, and as will hopefully become clear in today's and tomorrow's lectures, I would say understandable but unfounded objections.

The religiously inclined person, the adherent of this or that religious community, easily thinks - and I say again: understandably - that spiritual science could somehow behave in a hostile or antagonistic manner towards the religious deepening and religious life of the human soul. And in particular, there will still be many people today who are convinced that spiritual science - in that it wants to lead the soul to a world that is not the world of the senses and not the world of the ordinary mind, to a world of spiritual entities and spiritual activities - must fall into all sorts of superstitious beliefs and somehow spread them among those who want to become followers of spiritual science.

In particular, I might say that certain contemporary views must be ridiculed when spiritual science asserts its most fundamental tenet, namely, that man in his totality , in his totality, is not merely that which meets our external senses, that which he appears to himself for his external senses and that which he appears for the intellect, which is bound to the brain, to the nervous system. It is quite natural that from certain points of view today not only this is seen as a reverie, but that it is also ridiculed when it is said that this physical human being, as studied by ordinary science, this physical body, as it must be considered by many today as the only real thing - I must say - is not the only thing that can be recognized in a human being, but is, this physical body, only one limb of the entire human being.

Supernatural and invisible, as it were, - that is one result of spiritual science - in this physical body and underlying it, there is a fine, spiritual human being, who, in a certain way, as we shall see, is even the actor, the producer, the originator and activator of the physical body. And when spiritual science speaks of calling this second, supersensible, invisible body the etheric body, it is, as I said, quite understandable that such a result is presented as a blind assumption, ridiculed as a fantasy. And if spiritual science cannot be satisfied unless it establishes, in addition to this physical man, the spiritual man just mentioned, but must assume a higher link of human nature in addition to this, and if from some quarters this higher link of human nature is called the astral , for reasons that we shall return to today, then, as I said, it would be almost naive to believe that such assumptions would not be ridiculed from the point of view that is often considered the only scientific one today.

In the course of our present study, we want to create a little foundation for such supersensible members of human nature by presenting to the soul's mind the way in which spiritual science can arrive at such assumptions, what the spiritual scientist has to do in order to be allowed to present such assumptions to human knowledge.

True, real spiritual science is entirely in harmony with natural science as it has developed with its wonderful results. Indeed, it not only harmonizes with it, but it even wants to be a true, genuine successor to natural scientific research for spiritual phenomena, for the phenomena of the spiritual world. And when today, with regard to the life of the soul, the radical natural scientist says: Do we not recognize that this life of the soul, as it lives and develops in man, stands in intimate connection, in relationship, with the physical phenomena? Or does it not follow from this that this life of the soul is absolutely materially dependent, like the light and warmth of the flame, on the physical, material life? When the scientist of today, I say not out of a certain irreligious feeling, but out of his most fundamental conviction, presents this, then it must be said that true spiritual science, as it is beginning to develop today, for that, what natural science really has to say in relation to what has been hinted at, does not contradict natural science. On the contrary, it is entirely in agreement with natural science on all that is the legitimate result of natural science.

If we look at the soul as it initially presents itself in life, as we go through this life between birth and death, if we look at this soul life when we see through ourselves through self-knowledge with regard to our inner soul life, we can say that this soul life takes place in thinking, feeling and willing. And basically, in these three activities of the soul life, in thinking, feeling and willing, we have the scope, the horizon of the soul life before us. And if someone who does not yet stand on the ground of spiritual science, but would have the need, I would like to say, to understand something of the human being, to assume something that goes through the gate of death and after death dwells in a spiritual world, when such a one looks at the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing that presents itself in the everyday life of man and then, for some philosophical or other reason, would say: This thinking, feeling and willing is something that has nothing to do with the material processes in the human body, and if someone wanted to save the soul of man from physical destruction or from physical nature in general , the scientific researcher would come and say: But just look, it only takes a slight injury to the nervous system for this thinking, feeling and willing to be undermined. So, just as light and warmth depend on the flame, on the fuel, so does thinking, feeling and willing depend on physical processes. If these are interrupted in any way, then thinking, feeling and willing cannot take place in the right way.

In a plausible way, physiology, psychology and medicine know how to cite all sorts of reasons to prove that thinking, feeling and willing are entirely bound to these material processes of the nervous system, to the physical body in general.

Furthermore, it is pointed out: one can see how, in youth, with the development of the physical body, the soul life also develops; how in old age, when the activity of physical processes diminishes, thinking, feeling and willing also diminish. Does the scientifically minded person rightly say: “Can't we see that what we call the soul life is only an effect of physical and material processes?” The natural scientist may ask: “Is there anything left that could be said to enter the spiritual world through the gate of death as a living inner being?”

Again and again, the natural sciences draw our attention to an age-old contradiction in the explanation of the human soul, which we encounter in Plato's wonderful dialogue on the immortality of the human soul, which is linked to the death of Socrates. There we see how Socrates objects to Simmias, to the one who says: Ah, this whole soul life of man, we can grasp it as something like a game, the sounds of a lute, and the lute is the physical human body. When the forces of physical human life unfold, it is as if the strings of the lute unfold and produce a sound and give the context of the sounds. The physical activities and material processes of the human body give rise to the soul life, and when the lute is destroyed, the harmonies of the lute also cease. But the moment that which brings about material processes in man is destroyed, that which results from the sounding of human activities also ceases, and so does the soul life.

And it may even be said, my dear attendees, if one does not start from the subjective need of human life, from the longing for a life free of the body, then it is very difficult to escape if one only has the necessary feeling for the supporting forces of present-day scientific ideas, it is very difficult to escape from what science has to say from its point of view in the direction just mentioned. It is difficult to escape from it because the reasons that have to be given for the fact that the life of the soul, as it is known, as it takes place in everyday thinking, feeling and willing, is really demonstrably dependent on physical processes. The reasons to be presented for this are weighty for anyone who is able to see through the supporting forces of these reasons, who is at all able to enter into what present-day natural science has to give for general knowledge of the world, what it has to say.

But spiritual science stands - and this must be particularly emphasized - with regard to everything that has been said so far, completely on the ground of contemporary natural science. And there is - I cannot, of course, really mention the whole range of what would have to be mentioned now - there is nothing that can legitimately be brought forward in the indicated direction from the side of natural science that true, genuine spiritual science would contradict. Genuine, true spiritual science must fully admit that this thinking, as it confronts us in everyday life, that this feeling and willing, as it confronts us in everyday life, are the results of physical and material processes of the body and must therefore be extinguished the moment the body ceases to function at death. Everything that natural science has to say about this everyday life of the soul – and that alone is what it has to say – must also be a valid premise for true, genuine spiritual science.

But now, for the first time, true and genuine spiritual science is emerging, leading to paths of spiritual research that go beyond ordinary thinking, feeling and willing and that know how to cite yet another essence of the human soul. Yes, spiritual science says that what a person experiences in ordinary life as his thinking, feeling and willing is entirely dependent on bodily processes. But behind this thinking, feeling and willing are other soul forces, soul forces that are invisible and imperceptible to the ordinary soul life and that are independent of the physical, and that go through the gate of death when the body undergoes dissolution.

Ordinary thinking, it is carried out in such a way that, in our everyday lives, we perceive things through our senses and connect our thoughts to this perception. What we do, especially in spiritual science, must be admitted in the most serious sense that all of this is bound to the material processes of the nervous system. The actual soul does not come at all in everyday life, not even to the thinking consciousness. This soul life, as we shall see in a moment, also lies behind ordinary thoughts and ideas and it is this soul life that brings about the material processes. And because the material processes take place in the nervous system, images are created by the true soul life. These images are our thoughts. These images are, so to speak, no different from the mirror image that we see when we stand in front of a mirror.

As human beings, we stand before a mirror – this is meant to be a comparison, but it should mean something more than a mere comparison – if we cannot see ourselves, we see our image. The image is only there as long as the mirror stands before us; it depends entirely on the nature of the mirror. Dearly beloved attendees, with our soul life, with our true soul life, which spiritual science is only now discovering, which does not consist of ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, we stand like the person in front of the mirror who cannot see himself; and what this person does is that he causes processes in his nervous system in the unconscious. But this is what makes the nervous system a mirror, and thoughts and ideas are reflected back from this mirror. Thoughts and ideas are only there as long as the nervous system is able to function. Just as the mirror image has no reality of its own, so what we usually call our thinking has no reality other than as an image, a real image. It depends on the soul life being mirrored in the material processes of the nervous system.

Now, that which lives in thinking, the actual soul power, which can be compared to the person standing in front of the mirror and to whom his thoughts only appear as an image, this actual soul power must first be found through spiritual science. And in earlier lectures, I have already indicated from this point how the real, underlying soul life can be recognized in the mere pictorial existence that we experience in everyday thinking and imagining; I would like to say that which is present in thinking as the underlying soul power of thinking.

I have pointed out – you can read more about this in my books, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of “Occult Science”. I can only hint at the principles of these things in the short time available to me here. I have already hinted at what then has to happen within the soul, so that what is reflected in thoughts and images in the picture becomes aware of itself, so that the life of the soul is truly grasped in that element which remains completely unconscious to it in ordinary, everyday life. What the soul has to accomplish within itself are intimate inner processes and experiences of the soul itself. If we only apply the thinking and imagining that we have in our ordinary daily experience, then we will never discover the real, supersensible soul that dwells in us and that passes through the gate of death even when the body is destroyed. For this, we have to undertake certain inner, intimate processes in our thinking, in our everyday thinking, which are called meditation and concentration of thought. I can only briefly hint at this.

While we usually follow the ordinary laws - imposed on us by the world - and let one thought follow another, in meditation and concentration, in the inner exertion and effort of thought, we try, through inner arbitrariness, to place certain thoughts, which we ourselves form or which we receive from somewhere, at the center of our attention. We try not only to let ourselves be guided by the world in terms of thinking, but to inwardly concentrate the soul's powers in such a way that these powers of the soul are directed towards a single series of ideas over a longer period of time. We endeavor to develop an inner activity of thinking, which one otherwise never develops in life, and to look with all the inner strength at a single thought; this is called meditation, concentrating on a thought.

It is not important that you merely think a thought, but that this thought is not prompted by any external stimulus, but arises from within, coming to the center of your consciousness and remaining in your soul for a long time, so that you can, as it were, survey this thought inwardly, so that your soul is directed towards it. It does not depend on what this thought says or whether it is true in relation to external appearances, but on the soul's inner focus. What matters is the soul's inner experience, what it experiences in its inwardly strengthened thought activity. It does not depend on what the soul presents. Therefore, it is better to focus on an allegorical idea that does not depict anything external. So it is important to use inner forces that one would not otherwise need for this presentation. It is then, however, necessary to have a great deal of patience and perseverance, because it sometimes takes years to develop an inner habit of thinking, so to speak, that is developed in this concentration, to such an extent that what is hidden, which lies behind thinking, which is active in thinking, as it were, but does not appear to ordinary consciousness, that this comes to consciousness. If you, and indeed often for years, in patience, energy and perseverance, I am now not just saying his thinking, but his inner powers, which underlie thinking, from the hidden, deep foundations, then you realize what it means not just to think, but to form in thought, to strengthen your inner experience in thought. What comes out of this, ladies and gentlemen, is an absolutely new experience of life, something that a person cannot have if they have not strengthened their thoughts in the way described. As I said, you can read more about this in the books mentioned; I can only give the basic principles now.

What does one find when one experiments purely in the realm of the soul and spirit? Well, dear listeners, what one finds can best be characterized by the following words: Where does ordinary thinking actually get us? If we really look at this ordinary thinking, as it develops in the human being in everyday life, with an open mind, we have to say: it gets as far as what we call remembering, as far as recollection, as far as the unfolding of memory. We have been able to point out that what actually lives in thinking stands before the bodily as before a mirror, and that what the ordinary thoughts are is reflected back by the body. But then this thinking, this imagining develops such thoughts, such ideas, which, as one usually thinks, so to speak, become ingrained in the soul life, remain there, so that later one can look back again and, without an external experience being present, what one has experienced earlier finds an echo in one's own soul life. Basically, all philosophy and all science is based on the fact that man can develop memory, that he can look back on that which is no longer present. And it is precisely with regard to that which one can call memory that the truly correct scientific conception of the world is in complete harmony with the spiritual researcher. However, one must not believe – and progressive natural science will prove this, it will prove what I will now have to explain as a result of spiritual science – one must not believe that something like a photographic image of an experience remains in the soul when it is recalled in memory. Nor should we believe that something remains in the nervous system which, when it becomes active again, has a similarity to the experiences we had years ago or even yesterday. Indeed, the ideas that people working in the field of natural science have today are still inadequate, to a certain extent. But it is precisely the direction of natural science that leads to what I am about to say.

What actually remains when we have an experience and then days or years pass and we later recall what we have experienced from the well of our memories? What remains then? Does an image remain? No.

Dear attendees, natural science in particular will prove that what remains in the body when we remember something looks, so to speak, no more like what we are remembering than the letters on a piece of paper. And we read what we remember as we read these letters. Natural science will prove that this memory bears a similarity to subconscious reading, that what remains in our memory is nothing but signs that must first be interpreted by the deeper soul life. Just as someone who would describe: There is a letter that has a vertical line, an upward line, a curve, there is a letter that has the curve ahead, then vertical lines and so on – how one does not read, but how the one who has learned to read does not describe what he on paper, but rather, through his ability to read, forms certain ideas that have nothing to do with what is on the paper, so it is with what remains as a sign in the bodily organization in relation to what we then have in the actually experienced memory. This memory is an inner reading. As I said, science will prove this, especially from its point of view. It will increasingly move away from the adventurous ideas it currently has. You will soon see that spiritual science can come to such an insight, as it has just been expressed, when other types of spiritual scientific ideas are discussed.

In this way, the human being's thinking comes to a point where it goes beyond mere perception of mirror images, to a kind of backward reading, to a subconscious backward reading. This too is a kind of mirror; but what is mirrored are only signs, not an actual image, but signs that we later evoke through what we have within us as soul power, to what the resurgence of memory then is. Let us note from this that when we weave and live in our memories, we are actually weaving and living in a truly spiritual realm. At the moment when thinking passes over into memory, a deeper, purely spiritual-soul power is already at work in this thinking; one just does not want to admit it in the ordinary way. For when we remember, we cannot conjure up the process that remained in the brain — that would be nothing more than a description of the letters. We live and weave in a real being. In a real inner experience, we are in remembrance. It is through memory that man ascends from thinking, feeling and willing, which are still bound to the body in the broadest sense, to the spiritual. And when man trains his will sufficiently, he becomes aware that when he lives in memory, he lives in the soul, in the soul that is independent of the body, in that only the signs are in the body.

When, through meditation and concentration, thinking is strengthened and enlivened in the manner described, one comes to transform this thinking itself into what it is not in ordinary life. This thinking then gains in inner activity. It is just the same with this thinking as when one stands before a mirror and makes it so active that one thereby wipes out the mirror image and then becomes aware of oneself as standing there in one's own soul-power. So it is with thinking in concentration. You extinguish the ordinary thoughts, but you awaken in the power of thinking, and then you realize: You are awakening in something that no longer has anything conditional in the body; you become aware of something completely new. You also notice the difference, which consists in the fact that ordinary thinking is completely bound to the body; if the body does not reflect the thinking back as a mirror image, it is not there. But now one becomes aware that there is a thinking that is independent of bodily experience. As I said, it is still difficult today for a person to readily admit, without the usual ideas and habits of thinking, that there really is an inner soul force that underlies thinking, and that this force becomes so aware that the person, by having this inner experience, becomes completely independent of the body. So that one can say: The thinker, by experiencing himself in the power of thinking, in his own thinking, slips out of the body and becomes independent of the body. Now he can also judge that this inner power of thinking is really something that is independent of the body. With concentration, a real process has been achieved, a soul has become something else, has become that which can know itself independent of the body.

And now, just when you have patiently and persistently and energetically done such exercises, through which you have become more and more powerful inwardly and have come to an experience, something significant occurs; an inner tragic experience occurs. I would like to say that it is like this: basically, everyone who seriously undergoes these methods of spiritual research must experience these processes. It is the case that, by concentrating and developing the soul forces on which thinking is based, we do indeed feel more and more alive inwardly. But this is only possible up to a certain point. There comes a point in the inner experience when the inner strength comes to an end, when, without exaggeration, one can say that the whole burden of an unknown world weighs on the soul. And then the possibility of experiencing this strengthened thinking disappears. One feels how this inner experience is extinguished by an unknown power. If one were to do only the exercises that I have listed so far, one would indeed come to a point through these exercises where, as if in a kind of inner, tremendous strain, one feels as if one's soul has dissolved into nothingness.

Therefore, no true spiritual scientific method can recommend for the path into the spiritual world only what has been presented to you now. Rather, other exercises must be done at the same time as this meditation, this concentration. For you have been able to see how the practice discussed so far develops and draws on the soul forces on which thinking is based. We would really enter into phenomena that would tear us apart like a tremendous resistance from an unknown power if we wanted to do this exercise in a one-sided way. In addition to this thinking, the human will must be developed, which is more the active soul power. When a person begins not only to deepen his thinking through meditation and concentration, but also to seek inner strength for this thinking, which otherwise lies hidden in the deep well of the soul life, only then does he arrive at the right thing.

Now it is of course possible - I refer again to the books mentioned - that one can also make one's life of will more and more calm and serene through intimate, inner soul-searching, that one can extract from it more and more of what the human soul's ordinary egoistic drives and passions are. But I would like to mention those exercises through which one can most surely come to an inwardly developed soul life in the same way as one comes to the development of the thinking life in the other way. There we must approach something that enters human life in such a mysterious, often terrible, but always unfathomable way for ordinary experience. This is what we call human destiny. Not that we can develop our will only in the face of fate, as it is now being presented. But it is, in a sense, a position in relation to human fate that is to be characterized now, the next way in which we can achieve this inner cultivation of the will in us.

This fate, how does it approach man in ordinary life? Well, it is often said: the blows of fate fall upon us. Something happens, and we can either be touched sympathetically or antipathetically by what happens to us; we can undertake this or that against the blows of fate, but in this life between birth and death we will feel fate as a power that shapes our lives, but to which we can only relate as to an unfathomable, mysterious power.

But if you look at this human life without prejudice, you will come to a different view of fate in ordinary life. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in this moment of life – not in the abstract, but in reality. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in reality. We can do this or that; we do this or that; we are capable of applying this or that strength, of rejecting this or that in ourselves. Let us think about how we can do this, how we have become the whole human being that we are now, how we are this. We will find that if we look back over our lives, something happened so many years ago that intervened in our lives as if by chance. If it had not happened to us, we would not have done this or that, we would not have developed this or that strength, we would not have acquired these or those inclinations. The way we are configured today is the result of what fate brought us at that time. After years, we see it quite differently. We see that fate has forged us. We couldn't even write today if we hadn't lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, when we were taught how to write.

What is it, then, that we call our self? What is it other than the result of our destiny, the result of what has flowed into us, what we now want because we want to do it, if fate had not shaped our will, forged our will, in life between birth and death? When we confront our destiny in this way, we realize that we ourselves, our ego, our self, are actually a product of this destiny, that this destiny has coagulated in our self, in our ego, just as the mass of a mineral coagulates in a crystal. We are formed out of our destiny. What we want now has coagulated out of everything that has formed our destiny.

If you live abstractly in these thoughts, they do not mean much, dear attendees, but if you look at your entire inner soul life, with the totality of your feelings and sensations, you might say, as if at something very substantial, at a fixed point, then you begin to develop certain feelings, certain sensations towards this fate. You may develop gratitude to this fate for having shaped you into what you are now, even if it has inflicted terrible and painful blows on you. But all the feelings that arise can be characterized by one common trait: you grow together with your destiny in the life between birth and death; you learn to recognize how you are a result of this destiny, how destiny is inherent in what you are. As a result, you grow together with your entire stream of destiny. What you have within you as a sense of your own identity is what you tear out of yourself and identify with intimately in the stream of fate. However, this must not remain an abstract thought, but a deep, inner experience must again be that the soul frees itself from this corporeality and now no longer feels itself as I just in its skin, but really feels itself in its stream of fate. One looks at one's destiny and says to oneself: That is you yourself; you would not be what you are if it had not been for your destiny.

Just as the power of thought frees itself from the body, as described earlier, so such contemplation - but it must take hold of the mind, the feeling, the will - frees the human being from the body and flows out into destiny.

But it does not stop there, that is the peculiar thing, but by doing the one exercise of the power of thought, which I have mentioned, and doing the other exercise, which tears him out of himself and identifies him with his destiny, he comes to stand before a truly new world. If we were to do the thinking exercise alone, we would come to the point where we say: it is as if the whole development of the world were waiting for us. But if we do the whole exercise at the same time, which relates to the will and through which an outlook on destiny can be formed, then the thinking exercise is also stimulated.

The two exercises stimulate each other and make something completely new out of the soul, tearing the soul out of the body. And while in the ordinary memory the human being must still live in his body for the images to emerge, the images of the memory of past experiences - there must indeed be signs in the physical -, we are able to develop a world of images; a completely new world that was previously unknown to us emerges. This exercise of the will must go hand in hand with the thinking exercise.

Why do I call this exercise, which is related to destiny, an exercise of the will? Because the human being comes to truly say to himself: this destiny has not just happened to me, but I have wanted it. As true as the will I develop is won from destiny, so true have I shaped my destiny out of my will. By practicing this exercise of will, the human being is able to tear his will out of himself and identify with his destiny. And so, by deepening his thinking and thereby discovering a new power of soul, a new power of thinking, and by tearing his will out of himself and developing it into a new power, the human being is able to have before him not just a world himself, but to have a world before him that he experiences in such a way that he knows, by experiencing it, that he is independent of his body, that he lives in the merely spiritual-mental.

To make us better understand each other, it should be said that man, in a certain way, knows what I have now described as a world of images that appears before man when he discovers a hidden power within himself through meditation and concentration. Man knows what I am talking about, but he knows it in a merely chaotic way, in chaotic images, in scraps of imagination. When a person sinks into sleep every day, dream images can arise from this, as is well known. But what do we have in front of us in these dream images? Now, you see, when a person lives in their dreams, as is the case in ordinary life, there is nothing special in these dreams. But when one gradually comes to discover the power of thought as a deepened power within oneself, then one knows that with the soul, with which one steps out of the body, one is now also out of the body in sleep, only one remains unconscious in the process.

One is not in one's body during sleep, one has gone out of the body with what one has discovered in the described way. But one has not developed the powers initially, so the soul remains unconscious when it is outside the body. But the dreams can emerge. They arise from the fact that the human being is bound to the body by an inner force. During waking life, the body reflects the soul life in thinking, feeling and willing. Dreams are formed from the body mirroring the soul life. In this state, the human being does not understand what is happening. Only as a spiritual researcher can one understand that during sleep one is really outside of the body. Only a spiritual researcher can understand that the body is an object for the sleeping soul outside of it. Because the human being does not yet have a full understanding of these things, they interpret everything in the context of ordinary life. Only when one's soul life deepens, as I have described, one does not come to a dream life only, not at all to a dream life only, nor to something morbid, somnambulistic, but one comes to a life that also takes place in images, but in images that one knows mean something real, that they are not mirror images.

What do these images mean? By developing the soul power on which thinking is based, one encounters something that is like a memory power that is no longer bound to bodily signs but develops freely in the soul-spiritual. It is not at all like the kind of thing we know as somnambulistic clairvoyance, but an inner life comes to meet us, which, in terms of its configuration, is the same as the power of remembrance. And now one can learn to decipher that which one recognizes as belonging to oneself, but which was within oneself without one consciously feeling it; that is this world of images. From this one gradually realizes that it is the world from which our physicality, our physical life, was first formed. One recognizes from what one is aware that it has connected with what has come to one as physical from father and mother through inheritance, what announces itself to us within this physical as our self, what has descended from the spiritual world and permeates and shapes us inwardly. We come to recognize ourselves as coming from a state that existed before our birth, a state in a spiritual world. An imaginative world comes towards us. But this imaginative world contains everything that unites with the physical materiality that we have inherited from our father and mother. This world contains the eternal soul, which now works in the physical body, which is mirrored in thinking, feeling and willing; the real soul life, which cannot be investigated by scientific methods, which lies behind all that is known as soul life in ordinary life. It is this that now also passes through the portal of death into a spiritual world. And our life is thereby directly included in the life that takes place in the spiritual world, in a spiritual existence. This becomes an experience for true spiritual research, a real inner experience.

And when the spiritual researcher has progressed so far as to apply this art of inner experimentation, he experiences not only what he now knows as his spiritual and psychological experience; he does not merely experience something that can so easily be ridiculed. he truly experiences that there is an ethereal, a finer existence, that he finds a finer body underlying his physical body, which descends from the spiritual world and returns to the spiritual world. He not only experiences this, but, just as we not only have eyes and ears, but also experience the things of the world ourselves, which stand outside of us, so we can, in the moment when we enter into our own spiritual being, come into contact with the spiritual being that underlies all being. We enter into an elementary world, into a world where spiritual experiences and processes take place that we have not known before and that underlie all physical experiences and processes. This is not philosophical speculation, it is not something imagined, of which spiritual science speaks; it is the result of the most serious research. It is true that this research is not carried out in the laboratory with external objects and instruments in external activities, but it proceeds in direct inner, intimate experiences of the soul itself. The soul-spiritual must be explored through methods that are applied to the spiritual-soul in man. Of course, great harm is being done to spiritual science by people who believe that they can already stand in this spiritual science, talking about all sorts of foolish things that can be attained without renunciation in one's soul, without work in one's soul that is much more difficult, much more renunciation than work in the outer natural sciences.

If it is repeatedly believed that someone who has applied this spiritual-scientific method to his soul can proclaim anything about the spiritual world, then one has a naive idea about these things. The work that needs to be done to explore the slightest thing in the spiritual world requires real inner exertion of the human soul. The soul must first tear itself away from the physical for the particular area it wants to explore spiritually, in order to place itself in the spiritual. And one cannot say that one can write down the rules by which the soul rises to a body-free realization in a small booklet and then say: Follow these rules and you will enter an area that leads into the spiritual world. Rather, one must say: what has to happen there changes according to the preconditions one brings with one. It cannot be grasped in individual rules, but one must recognize inwardly through direct experience: Now you are facing a real new world, a completely real new world, not a world of fantasy.

When we have reflected on our own soul and spirit and are able to see that, with our soul and spirit, we also enter a spiritual and soul world of supersensible processes, we can ask again: What happens when we then also develop our will using the example of fate? Where does the human being end up when he says to himself: My will is in the whole stream of my destiny; I say “Yes” to everything that has affected me; I myself have flowed out of what is the stream of my destiny; I am not in myself, but in the stream of destiny? When one really makes the experience of becoming one with destiny, then one comes to experience something even higher in human nature. We do not just experience what I have described, that I said it is there before birth. Rather, by developing our will, we experience a core of our being that lies very deep in our soul. And we gradually learn to recognize: Yes, this destiny, it is really the case that only the person who identifies this destiny with his or her being can truly grasp this destiny. Just as someone who has never heard of natural science cannot unravel the why when he sees lightning and thunder and other forces of nature outside in nature, as it stands before such a person quite incomprehensibly before the soul, but these processes can be explained by someone who has studied natural science, so it is with destiny using the spiritual scientific method. Something comes into fate that we ourselves are in our deeper essence. We flow out into our fate. But by flowing out into fate with our whole being, we get to know our inner soul core.

However, you then have to learn to use the knowledge you have gained to dissect this fate. Just as natural phenomena were only deciphered over centuries and centuries, you have to learn to decipher fate in order to find an inner order. Then we find that what presents itself as our destiny when we identify with it represents what we were in previous lives. And by getting to know the inner order of our destiny, we learn that this destiny is connected with earlier lives on earth. In this way, our knowledge of our life is not composed of an overview of our present life on earth, but we recognize that our destiny contains what was once or repeatedly present for us as an earthly life, which has now formed that which we have imaginatively recognized in images as our core being, so that it is revealed as it stands before us now. That which we explore through the power of deepened thinking, we learn to relate to our supersensible life before birth and after death. And that which we explore by deepening our will and destiny, we learn to understand in such a way that it refers us back to earlier earthly lives and points us to future earthly lives. As this fate melts together with the world of inner images, we know that this world of images is like a core that takes hold of our fate and carries it over into a life between death and a new birth, and in turn leads us into a new earthly existence.

In this way, we get to know a part of human nature by deepening our thinking. We learn to recognize, as it were, our etheric being, that which, as a supersensible body, underlies our physical body, as soul power. When the spiritual researcher speaks of an etheric body, this etheric body is found by a method that is just as reliable as the method used by the chemist to separate hydrogen from oxygen. Just as it cannot be seen from water that it contains a substance that burns, hydrogen, while water does extinguish fire, so too, when a person is standing in front of you, if you just look at the person with your ordinary mind, you cannot see that a supersensible person in this physical man lives and can extend his life beyond birth and death; but who can be investigated by just as certain, even if inward scientific methods, as it is the just mentioned method, through spiritual science, which rises with it to the rank of a real science. That which underlies man as an ethereal being — not speculation, not some kind of fantasy leads to this, but a real experience, an experience, however, that must first be developed.

By going even further and deepening our will, we come to grasp the astral human being – it is easy to ridicule the word, the 'astral' human being, but this word is justified, as we shall see presently, we come to take hold of the astral man, the human being who develops from life to life and who then becomes aware that he is no longer bound to his body but is connected with the whole world. In this way, the human being comes to recognize himself in his astral body, in that he is dependent on the whole cosmos, in which the laws of the stellar world prevail. Therefore, in a comparative expression, one can call this human being, who is not bound by the laws of what we experience between birth and death, but by the laws of the whole world, the astral human being.

You can see that anyone who approaches spiritual science can truly live in the belief that, with this spiritual science, we are at the end of a spiritual development. The spiritual scientist, as I have already mentioned here, is unconcerned when he is told: Yes, you are claiming something that you cannot claim at all if you use your five senses. You are well aware that this is also how it was said when Copernicus tried to make people understand that the Earth does not stand still and the Sun revolves around the Earth, but that, conversely, the Sun stands still, so to speak, and the Earth revolves around the Sun. This also went against the five senses, and it took a long time for people to adapt their way of thinking to what was a better truth than the earlier one that corresponded to the five senses.

That which is being researched from the depths of being must first become established in the understanding of people, despite the resistance of the world. The spiritual researcher is unconcerned that this will happen, but it takes time.

And in the same way, one can say: Yes, what the spiritual researcher has to present as a world that stands above the ordinary world of the senses is very different from what a person perceives in this world. It has to be different. For with regard to everything that the ordinary life of the soul contains, this thinking, feeling and willing, which science can only speak about when it becomes psychology, the spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with the natural scientist. He will not speak in a dilettantish way of an immortality that merely lives out in images, which must disappear with the mirror of the brain, with physicality in this form. But that is precisely the peculiarity of spiritual science: it agrees with natural science in all that it contains, and it never says that spiritual science must turn against natural science, because the spiritual researcher fully admits all the justified criticisms of natural science. He only discovers through his methods that which cannot be present in ordinary life, and which is nevertheless what is to be regarded as the eternal, immortal essence of man, who goes through births and deaths and through repeated earthly lives and who bears within him the character of the eternal.

When the natural scientist comes and says: From my way of thinking I must reject this, — then the spiritual researcher must say to the natural scientist: So give your reasons. Then the natural scientist gives the reason: The soul life is dependent on the brain. The spiritual researcher will say: You are right. He will agree with the natural scientist on all points. But he will say: Only then, after one has entered your territory, does the investigation of the spiritual-soul life begin, which has to do with completely different forces than those for which natural science is fully justified. Therefore, it is indeed a thoroughly understandable misunderstanding when one or the other objection is raised against spiritual science from the point of view of natural science. Spiritual science knows very well what it has in natural science. And it would be dilettantism in the field of spiritual science if it were to oppose natural science. And nor can it be said that the spiritual researcher cultivates superstition in any way.

This spiritual science leads into a real spiritual world. By discovering the real spiritual world - not the spiritual world that is dreamed up by those who only want to dream up a spiritual world but cannot find one - it actually confronts superstition. Spiritual science is precisely that which can and will heal all superstitious beliefs. Superstition flourishes where spiritual science is not accepted, yet people still want to enter the spiritual world. Spiritual science leads people into the spiritual world in a fully satisfying way and shows them the real course of a spiritual event behind the world of the senses. It shows the human being that his soul, as a spiritual being, is part of this spiritual world and that it formed the body itself out of this spiritual world before birth, with which it is part of this earthly life. But by discovering a real spiritual world, an unjustified spiritual world, as it underlies superstitious beliefs, is counteracted.

And as for the standpoint of spiritual science in relation to religion, here, too, one very often encounters misunderstandings. I will have to deal with this in more detail tomorrow in my lecture, which is intended to provide information about the building that we are constructing as a place of care for this new kind of science, spiritual science. Today, I have only allowed myself to speak to you about some of it, to stimulate your souls, certainly not with the intention of convincing you, but only to give you some food for thought.

The subject will be how spiritual science must be cultivated in a building that, in its artistic design, can truly serve as an environment for this spiritual science, and to show what is meant by the building, what is meant by placing spiritual science in the artistic endeavors of our time. In doing so, a spotlight will also be thrown on the extent to which it is unfounded when religious minds believe they have to address spiritual science as something hostile to religion. Today I would like to say only this much about it: While it is true that natural science with its ideas leads people to stray from religion, to become alienated from religious ideas, spiritual science, by showing people how the spiritual world is a reality, how the spiritual world really exists, will stimulate people's minds in such a way that even those who may consider themselves enlightened can in turn find a religious deepening.

Spiritual science cannot replace religion. It cannot dissuade anyone from their religion. This is because the task of religion is different from that of spiritual science. Religion must be cultivated alongside spiritual science. But by presenting itself as a science of the spiritual world, spiritual science does not, like natural science, lead people who want to be enlightened away from religion, but rather leads them to religion. And so those who are sincere about religious life must welcome spiritual science as the movement that can lead enlightened people to a deeper religious experience, to religious contemplation, to a true, genuine faith.

But I would like to talk about that tomorrow in connection with what I will have to say about the place of care that is to be built for spiritual science over in Dornach. But what I have tried to develop before you today as the basis of spiritual science should be something that can ultimately be summarized in a basic feeling of the human soul. For that is the peculiarity of spiritual science, that it does not merely stimulate our intellect, which is bound to the brain, but that it speaks to that which lives in every human soul, independently of all diversity. One should not think that one must become a spiritual researcher, but anyone can become one. I would ask you to read up on this in my books.

You don't have to be a spiritual researcher, but the spiritual researcher speaks to what is in every person, what lives in every human soul. He speaks to that in man which passes through births and deaths; to that which is eternal in the human soul. And what the spiritual researcher says can be understood by every human being, who just clears away the debris and obstacles in themselves that have arisen through today's habits of thinking. And that will, in a sense, be the spiritual scientific development of the future, that there will be individual spiritual researchers, as there are individual chemists, who will put what they produce through their research at everyone's disposal. There will be individual spiritual researchers who will be guided into the spiritual world by what has been described as the spiritual scientific method, and they will be able to speak about this spiritual world. But what they will say about this spiritual world will be able to be inscribed in every soul with understanding when the many prejudices that still exist today have been removed. But that will then be able to engender a new life in the soul, a life that the soul needs in the face of the ever more complicated and complex conditions of the outer world, which in the present time everywhere, wherever we look in the non-neutral countries, present such a sad picture. But even apart from such aspects: we can recognize that the soul will need these strong life forces in the face of ever more complicated and complex circumstances. Spiritual science wants to give the soul these strengthened life forces, which will stimulate an inner fulfillment and strengthening in it that can cope with everything that will flow into the soul, more than has ever been the case in the past.

And so I would now like to summarize, not in a rational judgment, but in a sentence of feeling, what I have tried to suggest to your souls through these reflections. For it is not what we intellectually retain and know of spiritual science that matters, but what is awakened in the soul as direct experiences of feeling, emotion, and mind, that is what matters.

And what should be stimulated by the words of the lecture, I would now like to let it flow together into an overall feeling that, like a result, should summarize the lecture and conclude it:

The senses of man speak to
The things in the vastness of space;
They have an effect on the human soul,
Changing in the course of time.
Experiencing itself, the soul seizes
The boundlessness of space,
The boundlessness of time,
The spirit's realm of being
In its eternal uniqueness.