The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Distinguished Participants! The spiritual-scientific considerations from which we have to start today can be brought to the fore because they can shed light on what follows. At first it will seem as if today's topic has little to do with the intention of establishing a relationship between spiritual-scientific knowledge and practical life. However, if we do not move on to those things that can lead us to the center of scientific considerations, things would remain unresolved. And this central point of scientific observation stands before us today in such a way that it is actually excluded from conventional science. For one must admit: when man looks at nature, he tries to recognize nature from his own point of view, and in so doing he is involved in all these points of view; the process of knowledge flows under his direct participation, he cannot, as it were, exclude himself. And only when we have become familiar with his involvement will we be able to look at what, in today's approach, we would like to separate from the human being, namely those phenomena from which, as they say, we want to build an 'objective picture of the world'. Today, in order to arrive at a physical world view, one wants to disregard the human being altogether; one wants to achieve the ideal that the human being does not bring anything of himself into the physical world view. But in order to fulfill such an ideal, the question must first be decided to what extent the human being is able to observe phenomena completely separately from himself. And on the other hand, the fact that, precisely when man is observed in the spirit of today's scientific view, one cannot avoid applying to man what has now been gained from this view of nature and what is supposed to be quite independent of man. Today, it has almost become the norm to introduce psychological observations, observations about the human soul life, by sending purely scientifically researched results ahead. Indeed, what can be said about the physiological results of psychology is even considered to be the most important. But in doing so, what was intended to be studied independently of the human being in its own right is itself brought back into the studies on humans. And it is no wonder that psychological studies also reach limits that are highly unsatisfactory. This has become customary in scientific observation. But it can also be said that, as a result of these habits of thought, the human being has basically been completely excluded from the observation of the world. We can say, for example, that the ideal of the astronomical approach is to stick as closely as possible to what can be expressed through measuring, counting and the like. The physical ideal has also been transferred to astronomy, and attempts are being made to arrive at ideas about the relationships between the world bodies, in which the Earth is also included, and in doing so, man is completely excluded. This is quite obvious to anyone who today considers the scientific approach in this field. He is not considered at all in any connection with that which is otherwise examined as a law.

In physics, it is quite common and perhaps even taken for granted – we will see in later lectures to what extent – that the human being is excluded. One then comes to the more organic sciences via chemistry, which should then culminate in biology and in special anthropology. But it is precisely here that the 19th-century approach has increasingly endeavored to investigate, using all sorts of methods that are very commendable in this field, how one animal form develops from another evolves from another animal form, how the simplest animal forms perfect themselves – if the term is used in a relative sense, it may well be used – how then, at the top of the animal forms, man can be observed.

But the aim of all this, which has emerged as the history of development, as the theory of descent, is to understand man by first learning to understand the laws of animal life very well, then applying those laws found in animal life to the life of man, and thinking of these laws in a modified way in order to understand man. In a particular field, this has led to a situation in which the findings from animal experiments are considered to be absolutely decisive for human beings as well. No matter how clear it may be that all kinds of theoretical objections have to be raised, what is gained in terms of biological truths from animal experiments is considered to be absolutely binding for human beings as well. In the fundamentals of therapy, what is gained from animal experiments is regarded as decisive, in a certain sense, for what is then to be recognized in man. Especially in this field, it is quite clear how, by believing that one is getting close to the animal organization, one supposes that one can also get close to the human organization, only by a certain modification of the results.

Exactly the same thing, only appropriately modified for a different field, has occurred in the field of political economy. Since the time of Adam Smith, we have theories that do not actually consider the human being as such as a social object. The fact that the human being in his totality stands within the social order is completely ignored, and it is actually not the human being who is considered, but the human being in so far as he is a “possessor”, as a “private owner” and so on. Man is not considered as a free being, in so far as freedom flows from the center of his nature, but only that which is called “economic freedom” is considered. So here, too, we see that man as such is excluded from the point of view. And one can see nothing else in this exclusion of man than a fundamental feature of all modern science.

The question now is whether, if one tends towards such an exclusion of the human being, one can thereby arrive at a somehow significant, somehow satisfying or reality-capturing characteristic of the extra-human world view that presents itself in inorganic natural science, for example. In order to throw light on this in the right way, it is necessary that we do not come to the subject of inorganic natural science directly but indirectly, and that today we familiarize ourselves with the path that can lead to such an unprejudiced discussion.

I will start from an area that is particularly characteristic because it shows anyone grounded in spiritual science the great discrepancy between a realistic view and a view that is constructed from all kinds of theoretical assumptions and yet believes it is a true reflection of reality. As I said, this area is especially characteristic because, on the one hand, it shows this discrepancy and, on the other hand, it shows how far removed today's ordinary view of science is from what spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be and how spiritual science wants to fertilize the individual specialized sciences. I am referring to the field of optics, in particular the field of color theory. Today, of course, anyone who points out the question of whether Goethe's theory of colors is justified or the theory of colors that is recognized by physics today is immediately dismissed as a scientific dilettante. Now, the essential thing about this matter is that Goethe never wanted to do any scientific research without placing the human being in the whole structure of the world. He does not want to do a scientific investigation separate from the human being; he therefore also brings all experimentation with colors to the human being itself.

Our present world view, as it is expressed in the sciences - and it is, as we shall see, entirely a world view that expresses itself in the sciences, although this is often denied - the world view that is expressed in the sciences today has strayed far from the paths that Goethe laid out, even though he is considered a dilettante in this field by so-called experts. In my introductions to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's National Literature, I have tried to express the very thing that matters in a scientific appreciation of Goethe: this particular current of scientific work as it was undertaken by Goethe. This particular current has actually dried up at the present time. On the other hand, the scientific approach of the present day – which is particularly strong in the field of inorganic natural science and in all those fields where the inorganic can be transferred into the organic – looks down on the Goethean approach. On the other hand, it is based entirely on what natural science has become through such views as Newton's. Even if Newton's views themselves are outdated in many respects, it must be said that the way of research is entirely dependent on Newton's views. And so, Goethe's theory of colors has not been continued in our accepted science, only in Newton's.

Today, I would like to provide a kind of aphoristic introduction to this topic from various points of view, which may help us to move forward.

In Goethe's view, the theory of colors is all about considering colors in connection with what is happening in the human organism itself. You only need to open Goethe's Theory of Colors to see that Goethe starts out from the physiological colors, from the behavior of the eye, which he, however, basically considers differently, one might say, than it is considered today. Today, we actually look at the eye in such a way that we think of it as being separate from the whole human organism, that we sort of isolate it from this organism, that we look at it as an optical apparatus and then try to get to know how – when this eye is taken out of the organism, when it is looked at as an optical apparatus – how the impressions on the eye, the stimuli on the eye and so on are presented. Just try to visualize how this approach actually works. If you want to clarify something in relation to the eye, if you want to answer the question: How does the eye relate to any visible object? , with this mode of observation one can hardly do otherwise than to draw the eye itself in some average on the board, to lead lines from the object to the eye and so on; then one can still ask: How do the different parts of the eye relate to that which exerts a stimulus there?

It is perhaps difficult for someone who is completely schooled in today's scientific observation to grasp what the difference is between this way of looking at things, which I have just characterized in a somewhat radical way, and the Goethean way of looking at things, and how this way of looking at things relates to the physiological-subjective way in which Goethe does his experiments. He conducts his experiments in such a way that he allows the eye to be part of the living process of the organism; he allows the eye to be, so to speak, a degree of conscious organ in the human organism during his experimentation. Thus, the eye experienced in man, the eye felt to be alive in connection with man, Goethe regarded as the starting point for his physiological-subjective color investigations.

The eye that Goethe exposed to the phenomena during his experiments cannot be drawn on a blackboard. And what Goethe then describes as phenomena in the realm of light and color cannot be drawn on a blackboard either. Goethe is therefore averse to those abstractions which today's physicist draws on the board immediately when he means anything at all in the field of colors or optics. Goethe is reluctant to draw this whole abstract system of lines. He describes what, so to speak, lives in the consciousness of any optical process.

It is only when Goethe passes over from subjective colors to objective colors, when he investigates the external physical color formations, that he actually begins to draw in the sense that today's physicist loves. The whole process of seeing in today's physicist is - at least in thought - separated from human nature, translated into the inorganic, represented in mathematical lines. In Goethe's work, life is not eradicated from the process of seeing; rather, what arises in the modified process of seeing is merely described; at most, it is given form by fixing the phenomena, I would say, with an inner, meaningful symbolism.

It is important to point this out, because it is in this approach, in this overall attitude to appearances, that distinguishes Goethean observation of nature from the way we observe nature today. This Goethean observation of nature is perhaps much less convenient than the present-day approach. For it is generally easier to draw things on the board with mathematical lines than to grasp with the mind's eye what makes strong demands on our imagination and what cannot really be drawn with sharply defined lines.

But at the same time, my dear audience, something else becomes apparent. Goethe starts from the physiological colors; I have already explained this to you when I characterized his way of coming to insights through different methods of investigation than today's methods of investigation. But then his whole approach culminates in the chapter he called 'The Sensual and Moral Effects of Color'. There Goethe goes, as it were, directly from the physical into the soul, and he then characterizes the whole spectrum of colors with extraordinary accuracy. He characterizes the impression that is experienced; it is, after all, something that is experienced quite objectively. Even if it is experienced subjectively, it is something that is experienced objectively in the subject, the impression that, let us say, the colors towards the warm side of the spectrum, red, yellow, make. He describes them in their activity, how they have an exciting or stimulating effect on people. And he describes how the colors on the cold side have a relaxing effect, encouraging devotion; and he describes how the green in the middle has a balancing effect.

He thus describes, so to speak, a spectrum of feelings. And it is interesting to visualize how a psychologically differentiated view immediately emerges from the orderly physical perspective. Anyone who understands such a course of investigation comes to the following conclusions. He says to himself: The individual colors of the spectrum are standing before us, they are experienced as entities that appear quite distinct from man. In our ordinary perception of life, we naturally and justifiably attach the greatest importance to directly observing this objective element, let us say in red, in yellow. But there is an undertone everywhere. If you look at the direct experience, it can only be separated in the abstract from what is, so to speak, an externally isolated experience of the red shade and the blue shade in the objective sense; it is an abstract separation of what is also directly experienced in the act of seeing act, but which is only hinted at, which is, so to speak, experienced in a quiet undertone, but which can never be absent, so that, in this area, one can only observe purely physically if one first abstracts what is experienced in the soul from the physical.

So, first we have the outer spectrum, and on this outer spectrum we have the undertone of the soul experiences. We are thus confronted with the outer world through our senses, through our eyes, and we cannot adjust the eye differently, except that, even if often unconsciously or subconsciously, soul experience is involved. We call what is experienced through the eye a sensation. We are now accustomed, ladies and gentlemen, to calling the sensation experienced something that is experienced by the soul – that is, an impulse that comes from what is objectively spread out and presents itself as a sensation – something subjective. But you can see from the way I have just presented this in reference to Goethe that we can, so to speak, set up a counter-spectrum, a soul counter-spectrum, that can be precisely paralleled with the outer optical spectrum.

We can set up a spectrum of differentiated feelings: exciting, stimulating, balancing, giving and so on. When we look outwards, we see the yellow; we feel the stimulating undertone of it, the active influence from the outside world. What about the experience of the soul? This experience of the soul comes from within us to meet the outer world. But let us assume that we are able to record exactly what we have experienced in relation to the red, the yellow, the green, the blue, the violet. Let us assume that we could record the feelings in such a differentiated way that we have a spectrum of feelings within us, just as we have the ordinary optical spectrum from the outside. If we now imagine that from the outside, the red, yellow, green, blue, violet, i.e. the objective, ignites the undertones of excitement, stimulation, balance, devotion , we could thus see it as something that accompanies external phenomena, so that this external phenomenon is there without us, but the accompanying spectrum of feelings is there through us. Would it be so absurd to assume that the same could happen from within, which otherwise underlies this spectrum of feelings without our intervention from the outside? Would it be so absurd that the spectrum of feelings would now be present within and that the spectrum of colors would jump out of it in the experience of the human being, which is now captured in inner images? Just as the color spectrum is there and the inner emotional experiences are added through our presence, it could also be that the emotional experiences, which can be represented in the differentiated spectrum, would be seen as the objective, the objective that is inwardly situated, and now what can be compared with the objective color spectrum jumps out as an undertone.

Now, spiritual science does not claim anything other than that a method is possible in which what I have presented to you now as a postulate is really experienced [inwardly] in the same way as it is in the outer experience where the objective spectrum is present and, as it were, extends as a veil over the objective spectrum, the subjective spectrum of feeling. In the same way, the spectrum of feeling can now be experienced inwardly, to which the color experience now connects. This can be truly experienced and it underlies what I characterized in more abstract terms yesterday as the imagination. What is an external phenomenon spread out in space can certainly be brought forth from the human being as an inner phenomenon. And just as the external phenomenon becomes more and more diluted in our knowledge, so the inner experience becomes more and more concentrated as it is absorbed by the unconsciously developed consciousness within us, as I indicated yesterday.

You just have to be clear about it, my dear attendees, that what occurs in the spiritual science meant here is by no means nebulous fantasies, as it is mostly the result of some kind of “mystical worldviews” known as reveries. What is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science is based on experiences that one does not have otherwise, that must first be developed, but that can be grasped and followed in absolutely clear concepts.

Thus we may say that Goethe has described the objective outer world just as a human being would who is half-consciously aware of the fact that there is an inner counterpart to what he is describing outwardly, and that there is an inner vision corresponding to the outer vision. Once we have familiarized ourselves with this train of thought, and if we have made an effort to experience something along the lines I have just suggested, namely to allow our differentiated emotional life to brighten to imaginations, which may then be addressed with the same words with which one designates the external phenomena - when one has risen to these things, then one is offered the prospect of an understanding of the human being, which is precisely what is missing in modern scientific views. How could one possibly arrive at an understanding of the human being if one artificially separates everything that arises in a person's interaction with the world, if one only wants to look outward and not at all inward? That, and nothing else, is ultimately what is raised as an accusation against spiritual science, especially from the scientific side, namely that it does not proceed scientifically. This is a prejudice that has arisen from the fact that from the outset only that which is separate from the human being is accepted as scientific observation, and the undertones that characterize the human element are not considered at all. As a result, one cannot find the transition to what the human being actually experiences within himself. The colors I am thinking of now, which arise from the spectrum of feelings just as the spectrum of feelings arises from the objective external spectrum, these colors are experienced in imaginative contemplation, and they form the mediation for recognizing the spiritual in the same way that the outer spectral colors form the mediation for recognizing the external sensual-physical. One could say that the surfaces of external bodies reveal themselves in the ordinary spectral colors. If I now express myself in a somewhat strange, seemingly paradoxical way, I would have to say: the surfaces of the spiritual - of course every reasonable person will know what I mean, that I do not mean some kind of sphere when I speak of a spiritual -, the surfaces of the spiritual express themselves in those colors that are evoked in the imagination from the spectrum of feelings. Instead of pursuing this thought further and saying to oneself, if outer nature is as it is, then another way of seeing must be possible, then one must try to arrive at this way of seeing – instead of saying this to oneself, and , the opponents devote themselves much more to pouring scorn and ridicule on what is called the human aura, which is nothing more than what has been brought to inner perception in another field, as here in the field of the spectrum of feelings.

But when one has become imbued with this view, my dear audience, then it has all sorts of consequences. For example, it has the consequence that one now also continues the same kind of train of thought, through which one tries to get a picture of the way in which external sensory impressions arise, to the inside of the human being, so that one can say: something is going on that one can indeed then recognize by the human being surrendering to the sensory impressions and making them his own experiences right up to the point of imagining them. But something must also take place in man when he perceives what is within him, when he therefore devotes himself to his inner being. Then something takes place that is directed inwards, just as something takes place when he directs his attention, his perception, outwards. And if you then adjust your method of investigation to this, then from there a light is also thrown on certain physiological facts, which otherwise, when they come to us as in today's science, are quite unsatisfactory for those who seek a real understanding and not just one that has been acquired.

As I said, I will illuminate things aphoristically from different angles; we will come to connections. You know that in today's science, a distinction is made between nerves that spread outwards within the human being and are supposed to mediate perceptions. These nerves are contrasted with another type of nerve, those nerves that are supposed to go from the central organs to the human limbs and so on; these nerves are supposed to have the task of conveying the will, just as the other nerves are supposed to have the task of conveying sensory perceptions. Some very nice constructions have been devised, involving the conduction of sensations to the central organ, their transformation there into volitional impulses, and the innervation of the motor nerves, which are then supposed to mediate what leads from the will to movement and the like. Certainly, the things that are cited to justify the distinction between these two types of nerves are very seductive. I need only recall what one believes, for example, can be studied in a well-known, very painful disease, tabes. One believes that, of course, all the sensitive nerves are intact, that only the motor nerves have suffered damage.

Everything that is said in this direction based on a preconceived notion about things is quite seductive. On the other hand, however, one should be suspicious, firstly, of the anatomical findings, which in no way provide any clues to distinguish these types of nerves, and secondly, of the fact that one type of nerve can be transformed into the other. If you cut one and connect a sensitive nerve and a motor nerve at the point of intersection, then these nerves can certainly be formed into a unified one. One should be perplexed by such things, which are well known, but once you have set the explanation in a certain direction, then you continue to think in that direction, and you can no longer be persuaded to really examine the matter from the beginning.

If one actually pursues what can be observed impartially as sensory and motor processes, one will in fact find no basis for making such a distinction of nerves. But if one starts not from one-sided but from total presuppositions, one will be compelled to assume inward mediation of sensation just as much as one recognizes outward mediation of sensation. Just as one recognizes the transmission of sensation through the nerve from the outside, whereby one becomes inwardly aware of some entity of the external world, so it is necessary that a consciousness be transmitted from what is inwardly located in the human organism; it is necessary that a real sensation occur of that which is inwardly located in the human organism. And if we continue the investigation in this way, we will find in the so-called motor nerves nothing other than those nerves that convey perceptions of the inside of the body in the same way that the so-called sensitive nerves convey perceptions of external entities. On the one hand, we have nerves that connect us to the outside world; on the other hand, we have nerves that connect us to our own inner world. It is quite natural that if our optic nerves are not working and we are blind, we cannot reach for an object; and if the motor - but in truth the sensitive - nerve that is supposed to convey that a limb is to perform a movement is not in us, we simply do not perceive the relevant limb, the relevant processes in the limb, and we cannot perform the movements. A truly consistent train of thought shows us that what are called motor nerves are to be imagined as sensory nerves - only as those that convey inner sensations, the sensations of one's own body, the processes within one's own body. You will see that if you really apply the idea that I have just presented to what are now quite empirically established facts, you will be able to see through everything that these empirical facts represent, without contradiction, and that anyone who really thinks consistently cannot really do anything with the theories, such as those that exist about the difference between the sensitive and motor nerves, because in reality they continually lead to contradictions.

I have hinted at something here, where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims at the perception of the human organism. It does not do this out of some kind of prejudice, but rather out of an objective consideration of the facts – only that it transforms the organ that considers these facts in such a way that imaginative perception, in the sense of what we discussed yesterday, is added to ordinary objective perception.

And if we look around again in another field of today's research, we have to say: today we have a strange thing as psychology, for example. Just look at what Theodor Ziehen calls his “physiological psychology”, but look at it with sound judgment. There you are first of all made aware of the fact that we have ideas. Then these ideas are examined in relation to their qualities, as far as the powers of observation of such a researcher go. The chains and associations of ideas are examined and so on. In a sense, then, the faculty of imagination as it exists in empirical reality is grasped. Then this psychological field of imagination, with its various processes, is contrasted with what is given by brain-nerve physiology; and it cannot be denied that to a high degree there are parallels between the structure of the brain and what emerges as the facts of the life of imagination. Now, however, the soul life does not only include representations, it also includes impulses of feeling and of the will. And now let us take a look at what this “physiological psychology” makes of feeling. It is simply stated: feelings as such - which are really a very real experience after all - are not considered at all, only the “emotional emphasis” of the life of representation is considered. It is observed how the emotional emphasis connects with the ideas, which thus connect according to the laws of association - the connection corresponds to a certain structure of the nerves and the brain structure. So these emotional emphases are an appendage of the life of ideas. In a sense, the life of ideas points to something that loses itself in the indefinite. The emotional emphasis of the life of ideas loses itself in the indefinite.

One cannot make any progress if one attempts to parallel the life of the imagination with the structure of the brain and nerves. One is forced not to move from the life of the imagination to the emotional life at all, but to regard the emotional life only as a special emphasis of the life of the imagination. So now we have lost the emotional life in the psychological view. The focus has been placed on the fact that the ideas have emotional emphasis – and then the emotional life disappears into an indeterminate X. We may be living quite intensely in these feelings, but for the modern psychologist they disappear into nothingness. Something that we identify so strongly with our human self as the emotional life is no longer to be grasped by cognition at all.

And the impulses of the will, which actually represent our real starting point for the outside world, the impulses of the will, there is no possibility at all in such a physiological psychology to even begin to consider them. For feelings, one at least begins with the life of ideas and considers them in so far as they are emotional accents of the life of ideas; but the will impulses are considered in such a way that one really only looks at what follows them from the outside. One sees one's arm move when some will impulse is present; one sees the effect of the will impulse. Thus one observes the volitional impulse from the outside. It does not occur to one to seek in any way to really arrive at the way of observing the volitional impulse.

In a certain sense, the life of ideas and the nervous life are still seen as belonging together by the modern psychologist. In a certain sense, more or less materialistically or, as a certain theory would have it, according to the principle of psychophysical parallelism, he still finds a relationship, even if it is as external as in the case of psychophysical parallelism, between the structure of the life of the imagination and the structure of something physical, but then the matter stops, then one absolutely does not go further.

Hence the hopeless theory, which is repeatedly warmed up and always refuted, of the interaction of the soul-spiritual with the physical-bodily. One does not know the real, empirical connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily. One does not examine this connection in detail, as one examines the connection between oxygen and hydrogen in detail, but one puts forward all kinds of abstract theories about it, which then, of course, can always be refuted. For it is a basic law that what is only theoretically constructed out of concepts always has as much for itself as against itself, that it can be proved as easily as refuted. The secret of much of the scientific discussion of the present time lies in the fact that theories constructed in this way can be affirmed or denied equally well. This is the case with the theory that presents itself as a thoroughly inadequate understanding of the human being. Man has simply been eliminated in the modern scientific spirit.

I have contrasted this with what has emerged for me through the organic threefoldness of the human being. It is the result of more than thirty years of research; and I was able to convince myself that what I will outline to you today - I will come back to it from different angles in the next few days - I can assure you that I have followed up the results of today's scientific research everywhere in order to verify what has emerged from pure spiritual science over the course of decades. And I would not have dared to express what I communicated about these results in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul) a few years ago, until it now appeared to me to be fully verified. One always believes that the spiritual scientist speaks only at random. In truth, spiritual scientific research demands years of work just as much as other scientific research.

What became clear to me is that only human imagination, the human field of imagination, has a structure that is connected to what we can call the nerve-sense life. Because we started from the assumption that the whole life of the soul must be connected with the nerve-sense life, we lost two links in the life of the soul. One can associate nothing with the nerve-sense life except the life of thinking. One cannot bring the life of feeling or the life of the will into direct connection with the nerve-sense life – into an indirect one, however, because feelings and will impulses are also presented; this is how an indirect connection comes about. But one cannot find a direct connection between the life of feeling and the nerve-sense life.

On the other hand, there is a direct connection between the emotional life and the course of all those processes in the human organism that are rhythmic, such as breathing, blood circulation and so on, so that we have to say: just as the life of thinking is connected with the nerve-sense life, so the life of feeling is connected with the rhythmic system.

It is interesting – I have already pointed this out in the book 'Von Seelenrätseln' – to examine the musical experience under these conditions. Anyone who has ever studied the analysis of the musical experience will know how much of this musical experience is thoroughly emotional, but how this emotionality must be related to the life of the imagination. Otherwise we could not bring differentiated melody into the musical experience; we could not even have the individual tone in its objective grasp if the imaginative experience did not come together in some way with the emotional experience in the overall musical experience. But it is emphasized again and again, and rightly so, that the main thing in the musical experience is the emotional experience. And people like Eduard Hanslik, in his book 'On Musical Beauty', go too far when they want to eliminate the emotional experience altogether and see the musical more or less only in the experience of tonal arabesques. But this musical experience must be analyzed further. Then we come to relate this musical experience, which in objectivity corresponds to something rhythmic and related to rhythm, to that which, so to speak, runs musically within us: to the processes of our rhythmic system. One can now follow in a complete way how, through the inhalation process, the cerebral fluid is pushed through the spinal canal towards the brain, how it, as it were, bumps into the brain and how it in turn swings down during the exhalation process. One can follow how the rhythm is now also modified by the modification of the breathing process in this ascending and descending cerebral fluid. And if we approach this view with the same objectivity as we do other objective views of the external world, we will come to examine how, for example, the breathing experience is modified in song. We will find something that is expressed in song as a musical experience in the breathing experience; we will find the breathing experience in the oscillating brain water. We shall then recognize the union of this rhythmic process in the human organism with the nerve-sense process in the brain, and thus recognize the interaction of the rhythmic system and the nerve-sense system. And then we shall be able to separate what corresponds to the emotional experience, which in the human organism is entirely the rhythmic system.

It is necessary to approach these things with careful analysis, then they offer the possibility of finding in the human being itself what now gives a true picture of the human organization.

Thirdly, it turns out that the impulses of the will are connected with the metabolic processes of the human organism. Just as the processes of imagination are connected with the nerve-sense processes and the processes of feeling with the rhythmic processes, so the impulses of will are connected with the metabolic processes. And one can definitely find in detail how the impulse of will, which originates in a muscle, arises from this muscle, is based on a metabolic process that takes place in this muscle.

If we consider these three systems, which represent the entire process of the human organism, in their interaction, we will have the physical-bodily counterpart, but the complete physical-bodily counterpart of the soul. We will find the soul mirrored in the human organism in thinking, feeling and willing. And then people will no longer be inclined to speak merely of an emotional emphasis of the life of the imagination, and to consider the impulses of the will only in terms of their external correspondences in the imagination, and to consider the metabolism only in terms of its material side. It is absolutely necessary to also consider the metabolism in its spiritual aspect. There it is that which corresponds entirely to the will.

You will be able to completely resolve any contradictions that may arise from these statements if you approach them in the right empirical way, because these three systems are not separate, but interpenetrate each other. The nerve is built up organically through metabolism, but is something different in terms of its nervous process than the metabolism. However, the metabolic process also works in the nerve, because the nerve must be built up and broken down organically. When metabolism takes place in the nerve, our life of imagination is permeated with the impulse of the will. And one must be as materialistically sick as John Stuart Mill or those who profess him when one speaks of mere associations of ideas - which do not exist in this abstractness - when one completely separates the element of will from the life of ideas.

From this you can see, honored attendees, how necessary it is to seek the relationship between the soul and the physical in a completely different way than is usually done today. I will give you further evidence of this in the course of the lectures. You can see what it is actually about. This is what it is about: to seek in a truly concrete empirical way the relationships of the spiritual-soul to the physical-bodily in the human being, and not just to talk abstractly about the relationships of soul and spirit, which does not give us much more in the content of the words than the relationships of an abstract soul-spirit to the physical-bodily.

But if we apply a way of looking at things that really does see the soul at work in the physical, that recognizes the soul permeating the body through and through in its configuration, and conversely sees everything that takes place in the physical realm as playing into the soul, then we can have a science that can be the basis for a rational medicine and in turn the basis for rational therapy. Here begins one of the chapters in which spiritual science has immediate practical consequences, where it appears to be called upon to find solutions for what is most unsatisfactory when one wants to have human knowledge as a basis for pathology and therapy based on today's conditions.

I have organized these first two lectures in this way mainly so that you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science is not just about fantastically constructing things, but is about providing a serious world view that includes the human being and can therefore do justice to that which, in practical terms, should proceed from the human being in one way or another, according to the two sides described here yesterday. Ultimately, it is a matter of really recognizing the human being, not just talking about him, but really recognizing him, if we want to gain a basis for what should come from the human being in ethical and social terms. In today's world, we are called upon to use our knowledge of the human being to also gain goals for practical life. That is why the subject of these lectures, which are intended to deal with the fertilization of the specialized sciences by spiritual science, had to be set in this way. And we will also see how fruitful results can be gained from such a consideration of the human being, both in technical and in social-practical respects, not only for science but also for life, because basically, if one only understands it in the right sense, true science must always serve true life.

Distinguished Audience! It has often been emphasized, and with good reason, how the division of labor, which is an external phenomenon, has had a damaging effect on the more recent development of humanity. And anyone who takes an unbiased look at the development of social life in modern times cannot help but realize the profound effect this has had on the individual human being, who in earlier times performed tasks to which he was, so to speak, also bound spiritually. Just think of the inner satisfaction that lay in the old crafts, where what one made was transparent in terms of its place in the whole context of the human environment. The door lock that was once made by the craftsman could give him joy because he could see the path it took from his hand to its destination. How different things are today, when the individual person day after day, hour after hour, produces some individual part of a larger whole, without being able to have any interest in what emerges from his hand or from the machine by means of his hand, because he is not directly connected with the path that the thing in question takes from its maker to its final destination. This division of labor, which must, as it were, tie man to something that can never be of interest to him, and which must therefore make man extremely one-sided in his entire life, this division of labor, we will still have to deal with it in particular when we study the social process tomorrow.

But, my dear attendees, there is another division of labor in more recent times. And this other division of labor – even if it is less often emphasized, yes, even if it happens that its advantages are even praised when it is mentioned – this other division of labor, it basically intervenes much more deeply in the individual human being and thus in the whole of human life. And this division of labor, which is of course justified to a certain extent – that is not to be doubted – which above all had to arise necessarily in the historical development of mankind, but this division of labor, because it has not been sufficiently counterbalanced, has in the long run an even more damaging effect on human life as a whole than the one mentioned before. The division of labor has occurred in the field of knowledge and in everything connected with knowledge: it is the division of labor in the field of science. Today, if you go through the usual training as a scientist, you can become absorbed in a specialized science. You then absorb precisely the way of thinking, of imagining certain things, that has come about through the division into individual scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines and so on. You don't just externalize, you externalize the soul. You condemn yourself, for example, to take in certain forms of ideas, to immerse yourself in the context of such ideas, and then you say that what fits into this context can be proven with strict exactness; but what is born out of a different context, you say you are not competent to judge.

But everything that man can know ultimately comes from the totality of human nature; and that in turn, which is present at the center of man as a deep soul need, strives for wholeness. Basically, when the one-sidedness becomes so strong without a counterweight, as it has become over time, it is ultimately a mutilation of the soul, from which man must suffer greatly. Such a mutilation of the soul will ultimately lead to a situation in which the bearers of spiritual culture can no longer communicate with each other. It leads to the fact that the bearer of spiritual culture in any field of expertise lives in ideas that are absolutely not applicable to another field of expertise, that he lives in ideas that immediately appear rigid and inapplicable when he wants to grasp something that lies in another field of expertise.

When we consider that all human activity and endeavor should ultimately depend on those who are trained as spiritual guides, then we must admit that under this professional mutilation of the soul life, for which a counterweight is created today to a highly insufficient extent, these personalities become unsuitable to be real spiritual guides. Today it is obvious that humanity lacks spiritual direction, that humanity lacks appropriate guidance. More than anything else, this is to blame for the catastrophic events of our time. And it is precisely out of a real, not superficial, but thorough knowledge of this state of affairs that what is being attempted in Dornach, where the Goetheanum is the School of Spiritual Science, has emerged. On the one hand, it should fully recognize the necessity of dividing and structuring all knowledge into specialized subjects, but on the other hand, it should build the necessary bridges between these subjects. In other words, it should develop one-sided personalities, as they must become through the specialized subjects, into whole personalities, into total personalities. In this way, spiritual science seeks to fulfill one of the most important tasks of our time. This School of Spiritual Science cannot take the view that the demands of the time can be met today simply by transmitting what is taught in our specialized academic subjects through all kinds of channels to the broad masses of the people.

Of course, these popular universities, popular education methods, and so on, come from the very best intentions. But can we really hope that what is done in this way under the cover of our educational institutions can have a truly fruitful effect when it is carried into the broad masses of the people, when it is realized how the one-sidedness of knowledge and of insight into the individual specialized sciences has contributed to our getting into these catastrophic times, which a certain author has characterized by saying that modern civilization must inevitably sail into its own downfall? Can we still have hope when we realize how much this one-sidedness has contributed to our catastrophes? If we see through this, we must say to ourselves: That which has worked in such a way in a small layer of humanity that it has led into catastrophe must surely lead into catastrophe if it is carried out into the broad masses of humanity. In founding the School of Spiritual Science at Dornach, this insight was the basis for the conviction that it is not only necessary to popularize today's education, to spread it out into the broad masses of humanity, but that the opposite process is also necessary: to bring a new kind of knowledge into our universities, so that something different can come from them than what one cannot really hope to popularize in a way that is particularly fruitful for the broad masses. of bringing a new kind of knowledge into our universities, so that something different can come from these universities than what one cannot really hope will have a particularly fruitful effect on the broad masses if it becomes more popular.

This may sound radical, but anyone who takes a broad view of the development process of humanity in our age will inevitably come to this conclusion through a faithful observation of the facts. I would like to discuss something specific in order to show you how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, works everywhere to avoid pigeonholing people with their concepts and ideas in any one subject area, but to educate them in this subject area in such a way that they can find their way from it to an understanding of other branches of science. Of course, one does not need to be decisive in some way in every field – under today's conditions one cannot be – but human coexistence is only possible if personalities work together in such a way that the ideas gained from the individual fields can be used to at least understand the other fields. For mutual understanding among people is what we must strive for if we want to make progress in the process of human development, which today shows so many signs of decline.

When you see a physical process, let us say how, under the influence of the warming of a body, that which the physicist says is released as heat, heat that was previously latent, that was, so to speak, hidden inside the body, when you see that and then look at the ideas that the physicist has of such a release of heat, which under certain conditions had not previously appeared externally but was bound internally to the body, then you will say: it would not occur to the physicist, when he sees heat heat, which was previously latent and now becomes free heat, to speak only of a straight-line development and to say that the appearance of the free heat is based on the fact that what was there before developed to include the free heat. One gets used to not speaking in abstract terms here, but trying to gain concrete insights into the process. Much in such processes may still be unexplained, many a hypothesis may still be needed, but one tries, at least in the field of physics, not to simply put forward such abstract ideas as “development”, but one tries to penetrate into what has actually happened when free heat from latent heat, from bound heat arises.

But if we now turn to another field, you will see how, I would say, the spirit of abstraction takes hold of people because they have not yet been able to develop what they have developed in the field of physics another field, because it has not yet been possible to bridge the gap between a subject that has already undergone a certain training and a subject that has remained mutilated precisely because of the division of labor in the field of knowledge. The fact that individual people have become so immersed in their subjects that they no longer understand each other has taken hold of the scientific community itself, and has also had a one-sided effect on science itself, because the field of inorganic science has become powerful. Let us take the developing human being. We see how a person gradually develops from early childhood, from year to year, until they are an adult. We simply follow this development in a linear way. We really speak of it as if what a person achieves in the tenth year has simply resulted from a straight line of development from what he was in earlier years. We see the appearance of soul qualities at a certain time in the development of life; in some way the human being acquires the quality of thinking; he acquires other qualities that, as it were, emerge from the depths of his inner being to the surface of life. We do not observe the connection between physical and mental phenomena as intimately as we try to do so, for example, in the physical field that I have just mentioned. But it is necessary to transfer the same spirit of concrete observation, which we apply, for example, in the physical field, to a field where the phenomena are admittedly more complicated.

But if one makes an effort to enter into the complexity of the phenomena, then one can transfer the spirit from one area to another. But then one must proceed by saying to oneself: There are epochs in human life that, in a certain way, come to a close and give way to new epochs through significant turning points. Two such epochs in human development – of course there are also epochs in animal development, but I am only talking about human development now – two such epochs are, for example, the change of teeth towards the seventh year and then again sexual maturity towards the fourteenth year. The change of teeth and sexual maturation are such turning points. Now it is a matter of really grasping, through concrete observation, what happens in the development of human life up to these turning points.

Whoever observes this faithfully will find that, initially, something happens in physical development up to the change of teeth that must certainly be intimately related to this change of teeth. It is not enough to simply observe the human being from the outside, so to speak. It must be clear that what comes to a conclusion with the change of teeth, so that something similar no longer takes place in the organism in the following phase of life, permeates the whole organism. If we follow such a fact correctly in a concrete process of knowledge, we will say: something happens from birth or conception to the change of teeth, which is connected with such formative forces that then discharge in what occurs during the change of teeth. And if we then turn to the more spiritual life of man, we will find that something equally far-reaching is taking place in the soul and spirit, just as something deeply invasive is taking place in the body with the change of teeth; we will find that, roughly at the same time in life that the change of teeth brings something to a conclusion in the body, something arises that is on the ascendant. We must learn to observe these phenomena just as we observe external physical phenomena. And if we observe them in the same spirit, we shall see that the whole configuration of the child's soul is such as to enable the child to form memories and recollections in a more conscious way; we shall see that the child is able to grasp the indeterminate, indistinct nature of his earlier ideas and perceptions and to give them sharper contours; we shall see that there is a mighty change in the whole way of thinking. to grasp in sharper contours the indeterminacy of earlier concepts, the lack of sharp contours of these concepts; one will see that a powerful change occurs in the whole way of the spiritual-soul life through the formation of concepts.

And anyone who now looks at things with a certain understanding of such processes will seek the connection between what has worked physically on the one hand, what has been discharged and has found a certain conclusion, and what arises as a new formation, as something that unfolds anew, the conditions for the emergence of which must become clear. And if he follows such concepts in reality as thoroughly and in as much detail as possible, he will come to say to himself: That which has been working in the organism until the change of teeth, that which has been working organically, that which was bound to the organism, has been released when the organism has reached a certain, a preliminary point of closure with the change of teeth. It is released, it is transformed into the power of forming images, of outlining these images, into the power of forming conscious memory images, while the earlier memory images were more unconscious. So you can see how something that used to work in the body is released and now works in the soul and spirit. And you gain an insight into how what now occurs consciously as the formation of concepts, as a process of remembering, how it previously worked organically in the organism.

In this way, one comes to understand the whole of human education and organization. One moves away from merely fantasizing and speculating about the spiritual and soul life; one comes to grasp its connection with the physical. Then one gets out of the habit of speculating and forming hypotheses in the scientific field at all. One no longer asks: What can be speculated in order to grasp the spiritual-soul? Instead, one looks, for example, at the concrete development in the organism, at how it finally, so to speak, pushes out its teeth, and one must then acknowledge how the same thing that was bound to the organism, working hidden in the organism, later becomes free. We can follow this in its soul-spiritual form by looking at the soul-spiritual itself, as it has developed in the child; and so we find the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-organic by following the things in a concrete way. One no longer constructs an abstract psychology, as is often the case today, which has little more than some word content, but one studies concretely the behavior of one to the other, and one sees how that which is present in a later stage was actually observable in an earlier stage. One arrives at a complete empiricism. In the same way, we can study the other turning point in life, that of sexual maturity. On the one hand, we observe the organic process that culminates in sexual maturity. On the other hand, we ask ourselves: What develops in the soul and spirit? What happens to the forces that are no longer needed for the formation of something organic after sexual maturity, because they have brought the organic to a certain conclusion? What happens to these forces that have been, so to speak, embedded in the organic up to that point? — That which works in the particular nature of the will impulses is present in a completely different way after sexual maturity than before. Before sexual maturity, they are absorbed in a very specific way into the organic processes. But when they are no longer absorbed in the organic processes, they do not become free. Instead, they connect to the organism in a certain more intimate way. Thus, at this turning point in his life, man becomes more master of his organism than he was before. The will integrates itself more intimately and more intensely with the organism than was previously the case.

If we understand how the soul and spirit are connected to the physical and organic, then we can – by using such concepts, which first become mobile in themselves and are thus also suitable for becoming ever richer internally, so that reality can be seen through more and more can be seen through more and more. One can then also study certain processes in the human organism, which are nothing other than the external expression of what one sees through inwardly. For example, the process of voice change, which in the male individual is connected with sexual maturity. A similar process takes place in the female individual, only it is more widespread throughout the whole organism. One only comes to a complete understanding of these processes when one sees in such a way how, through what takes place in the change of voice or in other processes in the female organism, the will energy connects more inwardly, more penetratingly with the organism. And at the same time one comes to understand how what develops up to the change of teeth culminates particularly intensely in the formation of the human head, in which the teeth are formed, while what then emerges at the time of sexual maturity takes hold of the whole rest of the organism, with the exception of the head. All this becomes immediately clear in the contemplation. And through this one attains an inner knowledge, an inner contemplation of the human being. But such an approach can, in turn, have an enormously fruitful effect on the sciences, which, after all, lead quite particularly to certain limits of knowledge, which at the same time are limits, regrettable limits, of human practical reality.

Let us consider, for example, what happens when we try to examine the medical sciences as they present themselves to us today from the point of view of what is unsatisfactory about them. I cannot go into the particularly significant details here, but I would like to point out something that is already a key question. How can we actually unite what is now our natural world view with what is called a disease process in the physical organism? Anyone who studies the disease process will have to say - and this is quite natural - that this disease process takes place according to natural laws. So in the disease process we have something that we have to understand according to natural laws. On the other hand, however, we also have something in the so-called healthy human organism that must be understood according to natural laws; at least we have a certain current of natural laws in the healthy human organism. We express what we recognize in this area of the natural organization of the human being in physiology. And we express what we can recognize in the disease process as a lawfulness, which must also be a natural lawfulness, in pathology. There must now be a bridge between physiology and pathology. It must be possible to gain some kind of insight into how one natural law behaves in relation to the other. And a natural science, or rather a natural scientific way of thinking, as we have it today, cannot lead to any understanding in this field, at least not to an understanding that can be put into practice. That is why we see how, today, the healing arts basically stand unsatisfactorily alongside pathology. I still look back to the time when, within the then Viennese school of medical science, what was then called 'medical nihilism' had taken hold. Celebrities in the field of medicine at that time actually lived in complete scepticism with regard to therapy. To a large extent, they claimed that one could only follow the processes of the diseases, that one could only speak of a more or less rational pathology, but that one could not actually speak of any connection between the intervention of the remedy and the processes of the organism. Therefore, such physicians limited themselves to observing the disease process for wide areas of disease, paying attention when it went into excess in one direction or the other, but basically they did not believe in a rational healing method. They spoke about this quite openly.

Now, of course, there is no longer such skepticism about these things, but in practice it is basically still the case. And that is why it is so difficult for a real medical science to penetrate through all the possible amateurism and quackery that can flourish precisely because it is so difficult to raise awareness of what real science actually is in this field. But this is connected with our scientific view in general. It is connected with something that one believes – rightly, but in a one-sided way – to be a part of the great scientific insights of the 19th century, something that is called the doctrine of descent. In an extraordinarily astute way, in a way that has led individual researchers to the most scrupulous methods of observation, the developmental series of organisms from the imperfect to the more perfect has been sought and placed at the top of the human being, this whole human being as he stands before us today in his organization. To a certain extent, his organism in its entirety has been regarded as a transformation of the animal organism. This has only been possible because certain inner relationships of the human organism have been the subject of completely false concepts. Naturally, I can only hint at these things. They will arise out of a truly comparative genetic-morphological approach to embryology, out of a morphological consideration of the organs, out of a truly comparative genetic-morphological approach to embryology, out of the facts of embryology, in connection with the facts of life. Today, more or less everyone has the idea that, for example, we have something in the brain that can be seen as a complicated formation of what is present in the spinal cord as a nervous organism. In a sense, what is organized in the spinal cord is seen as the original, and what is present in the brain is seen as having emerged from this spinal cord in a complicated way. You cannot interpret the phenomena in this way. If you follow the facts of embryology in an unbiased way, you will get a completely different view. One will come to the view that what is present in the brain can be traced back to such a simpler organization as is present in the spinal cord, but that the spinal cord, as the further development of which the brain is to be regarded, must be thought of as lying more or less horizontally in the brain itself — if I may put it this way. In our present brain, what is spinal cord-like as a basis for our brain - going backwards from the forehead to the back of the head - is only ideally predisposed, so that one has to imagine the brain as a transformation of this formation, which today is only present in the brain in an idealized form, while what we have today in man as the spinal cord can be seen as emerging from the same formative laws as the human brain, but remaining at an earlier stage. So when we look at the spinal cord and the brain in context, we have to say that both are based on the same formative laws, but the brain has been brought to a further stage through this formation. It is only at a later point in phylogeny that the laws of formation intervene in the spinal cord, and it does not reach the same level as the brain. Therefore, the spinal cord is to be seen as the later formation, the initial stage of which lies in an earlier period in the genesis of humanity. The brain is to be placed at an even earlier stage, and it is to be seen as more advanced, so that one must say: the spinal cord is phylogenetically the later formation, which has only remained at an earlier stage, while the brain has been brought to a further stage by this formation.

This is how one has to imagine it with much of the human organism, and this is how one has to think of the entire limb organism, so to speak, if one wants to understand its morphological riddles. The appendage organism must be seen as a later formation that has been left behind at an earlier stage. What emerges in the main formation must be placed at an earlier beginning and thought of as having arrived at a later stage of development. In a sense, one has to see in the human head what has emerged through metamorphosis, through transformation from very early ancestors, and what is present in the appendages of the human being - even if they are larger than the head - has to be seen as added limbs that have remained at an earlier stage.

When one has a clear understanding of human morphology, the first thing one does is to place it in the right relationship to the animal world. Then one says to oneself: if one goes back in the series of time, one sees that what has become of the human head is the most important transformation of its earlier organization. This can be traced back to earlier animal forms – I cannot go into the details now, so the whole thing will seem paradoxical – whereas the human form as a whole must be seen in such a way that the rest of the formation, which is attached to the head, has arisen under conditions that affect the overall form of man quite differently than the modern environment affects the overall form of the animal. Once we understand these relationships, we will relate the human form to the animal world in a completely different way than is the case today. Then, something else comes into play: when one looks at the human head and sees the particular relationships between the soft and bony parts, and compares this, especially in their position, with the relationships between the soft and bony parts in the attached limbs, then one comes to form ideas about the inner workings of the laws of formation in the human organism. And one comes to realize that the human head is not only in a continuous development, but that it carries something in itself, which one initially has to see not as an evolution, but as a devolution, as a retrogressive development, which is only maintained by the fact that this head organism is connected to the rest of the human organism and is maintained by it.

In the human head organization, we are dealing with a continuous process of degeneration, which is, however, nourished by the appendages of the head. While the head itself is organized for degeneration through its organization, we are dealing with a continuous dying in the human head. The processes that are ascending and vitalizing are one thing; the other processes are those that are held back, spread out in the line of time, which, when compressed into an instant, appear as the death of the whole organism. One could also say: what comes over the whole organism in an instant with death could be regarded, mathematically expressed, as an integral for which one seeks the relevant differential. And then one would come to find, distributed over the time line, in the differential series into which one has resolved the integral, that which takes place as a retrogressive development, a devolution in the human main organism. This devolution, however, is found to be the actual basis for the process of imagining and of sensing. We can therefore say that it is impossible to regard what underlies human growth, what underlies ascending development, as the organizing forces, and also as the basis for the processes of soul and spirit. On the contrary! Where the organism is being broken down, the soul and spirit arise precisely above the breakdown, precisely above the destruction of the organic. One cannot gain insight into the connection between the physical body and the soul in man if one does not know that what one regards as the basis of the organization must not be regarded as the basis of the spiritual-soul process. The physical body must first break down, make way, give way, so that the spiritual-soul in man can take hold.

With these few words I have only hinted at how spiritual science does indeed open up a completely organic path, one that is not built on some kind of fantasy but on a true observation of human nature, and one that penetrates to the innermost core. It is truly not the result of arbitrary assertions or vague beliefs when the spiritual researcher says: That which is spiritual-soul in man is not bound to the physical organization, but to the physical disorganization, thus to that which must give way so that the spiritual-soul can arise. It is therefore no wonder that one can follow the spiritual-mental processes in the nervous organs, for to the same extent that any spiritual-mental process occurs, it must displace the corresponding physical organization, which even manifests itself as a physical breakdown. And we will only then arrive at a real connection between the spiritual-soul and physical-bodily processes when we no longer seek the physical-bodily processes as corresponding to the soul processes, but understand them as processes of disorganization, of dissolution, of secretion. If we follow these traces of the physical-bodily excretory processes, we have the true correlate of the mental-spiritual processes; and it is precisely this that guarantees their special individuality and independence in a truly scientific way.

But if you look at this process from the inside, precisely as the process of a human being, then you will no longer be able to place physiology and pathology side by side as it is done today – you just need to pick up any well-known textbook where the individual facts are simply listed one after the other, recorded without being able to evaluate them according to their connection in the whole human organization, so that the person who is guided by the principles of such a so-called science has nothing but individual facts juxtaposed. Things are quite different. In the human organism, on the one hand, we have the anabolic processes, and on the other hand, in terms of the threefold nature of the human organism, which I mentioned in earlier lectures, we also have the catabolic processes, since every anabolic process is simultaneously permeated by the catabolic process. Thus, in the human organism, we do not have a process that runs in a straight line, but rather a process that runs in one direction and is met by another process - an ascending process, a descending process. In so-called normal, healthy life, these two processes are in a certain relationship to each other. If one asserts itself at the expense of the other, then we have to look for the occurrence of the pathological in such a fact. And if we can differentiate the view that I have explained here – and it can be differentiated for the human organization down to the smallest detail – we will be able to penetrate the diseased organism in a rational way. No longer do we face these two currents in physiology and pathology with a sense of mystery. We know that this confrontation is necessary for the human being in a certain way, but that through processes, the description of which would take us too far afield at this point, one or the other can predominate. You will find this described if you engage with the spiritual scientific literature.

I will show you this by means of a specific example of how these things, which I have now presented to you more in the abstract, assert themselves in the concrete grasp of the human organization. You can study how, for example, the epidermal cells of the human being are transformed epithelial cells into sensory cells, just as the glandular cells are also transformed epithelial cells. In this process, which indirectly reveals the connection between the sensory cells and the glandular cells, you will be able to see how what I mentioned yesterday, with regard to the sensory perception of the outside world and the sensory perception of the human interior, can be followed anatomically and physiologically in this metamorphosis of the cells themselves. And then, if you pursue this further by studying the facts that are already available today in an entirely empirical way, you will find that there is a certain process that leads from epithelial cells to sensory cells; that is one current in the organization. We can also follow this current in the opposite direction: epithelial cells – glandular cells. This enables us to gradually ascend in our consideration of the human organization to the way in which the senses are formed from the main organization and from the related organization through a certain development of forces, as if from the inside out. We have localized what can be seen in this process. But since things are not schematically localized in the human being, we have to say that they are mainly localized in the head; but they are also present in the rest of the organism, just as certain senses are spread over the whole organism, while the head preferably contains the senses. Thus we can see how human nature pushes us to develop the sense organs out of itself; other areas are more organized in the direction of developing the epithelium into a glandular state. When we see these polar opposites, we will say: when looked at inwardly – and one must look at human nature inwardly, otherwise one cannot see through it – it all rests on the fact that the current in the organization runs from the inside out one time, the other time, so to speak, in the opposite direction, from the outside in. Here we have something again that develops in the human organism in one direction or the other. And now, my dear audience, it can happen that, due to very specific conditions in areas of the human organism that are otherwise predisposed to processes that run from the outside in, these areas are crossed in an incorrect way by processes that run from the inside out. However paradoxical it may sound, it must be said that in an area of the human organism that in its normal organization is only predisposed to develop glandular tissue, the tendency can arise to lead to a predisposition for a sensory organ formation process. In a certain way, the tendency is incorporated into the epithelial formation, which is otherwise only justified in the human organism where the senses develop. Of course this can occur because, to a lesser extent, everything in the human organism is embedded in everything else; one only has to distinguish it; it can also express itself in the head, which is a counter-process to the sense-forming process. One need only bear in mind that secretory organs are asserting themselves everywhere alongside the sense organs.

But what do we actually have here? You see, we have something here that, if expressed today, seems almost fantastical, because one has to resort to concepts that today's science does not want to accept at all, because, although they are fully rooted in reality, they are quite remote. But we shall never be able to penetrate what we observe in the world if we do not take metamorphosis seriously in this way, even where what has been metamorphosed is no longer at all similar to the original, if we do not regard even there, so to speak, a developed Goetheanism as an ideal for genuine scientific work. It must be said that in a certain area of the human organism, where normally only the tendency to form glands should be present, the tendency to form a sensory organ can be deposited, which then undergoes a sensory organ formation process. And here we have looked at the disease process that can be observed in carcinogenesis, in carcinoma. I will give a concrete example, I will not be embarrassed to cite something that is still laughed at today.

But I do not want to beat about the bush in the abstract, but I want to show that in spiritual science there is something that really penetrates into what is given in the individual fields of expertise, but in a way that can only be understood in relation to today's approach if one wants to proceed courageously in recognizing, really up to the consequences of what is in the beginnings today, in empirical reality. I have not hesitated to present such details to you, of which hundreds and hundreds could be presented to you from the field of spiritual science, so that you may see that this spiritual science does not ramble and prattle in vagueness, but that it sticks to the facts, penetrates everywhere into the facts, and does not talk about soul and spirit in abstract terms, throwing foggy theories over people's heads, which are basically only interpretations of traditional word meanings. Only through the spirit can one penetrate into the individual; one really penetrates spiritually every single thing that exists in the specialized sciences.

And a pathology such as this, which finds the opposite process in the physiological process, that is, in the process of glandular formation – here as a pathological process – such a science can build a bridge to a natural law of physiology and pathology. These are the perspectives that should be provided by the truly exact science of an anthroposophically oriented world view, in addition to the conscientious observation and external precision of methods in the individual modern scientific disciplines, which should be fully recognized. But if, on the one hand, we look at the human being in terms of his ascending and descending processes, then, on the other hand, we will find not only ascending and descending processes in nature, but also ascending and descending organizations. For example, we can follow the process of plant formation. In what Goethe gave in 1790 in his attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants, only the first beginnings, the basics, are given. But if one continues to develop this method, one comes to see how this plant organization is to be viewed in its subtle subdivisions: how the flowering process takes place, what significance the polar contrast between the root, which grows downwards, and the flower and fruit, which grow upwards, has in the overall context of natural facts.

One then comes to examine, for example, how some process, say the movement of juices in the animal organism, is related to the movement of juices in the human organism. One comes to ascend from the plant to the animal organism and to see in what one encounters in the animal organization the corresponding processes in human nature. And then we also come to consider something like the contrast that exists in the process of plant formation outside of the human being and in the process in the human being. The plant builds its body on the basis of carbon. It deposits carbon in itself and separates oxygen. Man undergoes a similar process in his breathing in connection with the circulation of the blood, in the whole task of the blood circulation – but what happens there? There the carbon is bound to the oxygen, thus producing carbonic acid. We have here what is consolidated in the plant formation process, what is in a certain way external, present in the beginning in man, but which he then expels. We get a certain relationship between the plant formation process outside and that which underlies breathing in humans, which dilutes and breaks the process. And in turn, what is otherwise in the human organism is linked to breathing, and one can then compare that which is linked to the breakdown of these processes in the human organization and that which is linked to the build-up in the human organization. Let us assume that we find something in the human organism that represents a disease process in such a way as the beginning, the malformed beginning of a sense-formation process in cancer. Then, looking for what is in external nature, we can seek the opposite process. It will be possible to introduce it into the human organism by means of a remedy, and thereby have the same healing effect as the carbon has in the human organism, if I may put it this way, by supplying oxygen. It is identical. In this way one gains an inner insight into the connection between what is organized in man and external nature. One gains such insight that in what arises in external nature, one can rationally find the remedy that can serve for any corresponding process in the human organism.

All of this – you will gather this from the way I say it – is not based on phantasms; it is carried out as precisely as is possible in science. But we must work with concepts that can be flexibly applied to the various areas of reality. Our concepts must not be developed one-sidedly in certain specialized fields and then remain what is legitimately presented in the individual specialized fields; our concepts must become flexible so that we can immerse ourselves in the entire wide range of reality. Otherwise, we acquire such concepts with which we believe, in a strange way, to embrace the factual fields, but with which we in reality only remain distant from the factual fields. We have a remarkable example of this in our own time. Those who are familiar with such things will know how many theories about the ether there have been in the course of modern times; they know how attempts have been repeatedly made to characterize the ether as being sometimes rigid and sometimes fluid, depending on the phenomena that were thought to as arising from the interaction of ponderable matter with the ether, characterized the ether as sometimes rigid, sometimes fluid, until finally experiments in modern times are said to have shown that one cannot get ahead with all these old ether theories. The simple experiment that was conducted regarding certain conditions in the propagation of light – or, as it was said, in the transmission of light – this experiment is said to have shown that a special correction, a radical correction of the concept of ether, is needed. The experiment is as follows: If a light is made to flicker at a point A and this light is followed from point A to point B, then, if point B is in motion, that is, moving on, the light should arrive later than it would arrive at B according to the speed of light in physics if this point B were stationary. But what is calculated in theory does not arise in practice. And - I omit all transition links - that is where, with some intermediate links, the theory of relativity has found its roots, this theory of relativity, which now has as a result that the ether is completely abolished. But then one calculates with strange things, for example, that bodies can simply shorten themselves through the movement itself and the like. Now, you only need to study the relevant literature to see how certain concepts have become so rigid and fixed that they are then applied to reality in such a way that one believes one has grasped reality, but in fact remains extremely distant from it.

Spiritual science cannot follow such a path, which is actually formed only out of the rigidity of the concepts. Spiritual science pursues the corresponding phenomena — I mention this so that you can see how spiritual science can shine into such areas — and comes to recognize that the concept of ether is needed.

But because it does not create unjustified hypotheses, but assumes realities, the ether is revealed to it in the phenomena that are usually derived from the ether itself. On the other hand, you know that where we are dealing with an ether region, in the corresponding mathematical formula, where, in the case of ponderable matter, we insert the quantity with a plus sign for heat – but only for certain heat phenomena, those of radiant heat, of flowing heat – and that for light phenomena, for certain which then appear as chemical processes, and also in the phenomena of life, since negative signs have to be inserted into the corresponding mathematical formulas for certain quantities, which are to be modified by not only inserting negative quantities, but even by assuming the radiation from a point instead of the radiation from a periphery.

In short, spiritual science leads to an organization of the formulas in this exact scientific field, which expresses exactly what takes place between ponderable matter and the ether. One comes to an understanding of the real relationship between the so-called ether and ponderable matter. One comes to realize that if one simply uses the, shall we say, confused concept of mass in such a way that one says that one has to insert the effect of this mass or matter outwards with a positive sign, then one has to insert that which corresponds to the same in the ether with a negative sign. What is a compressive force in the one is a suction force in the other. And if we regard the ponderability of ponderable matter as a pushing force, then we must regard the imponderability of the ether as a suction force in relation to this pushing force. Then we can make do with the phenomena; then we do not need to abolish the ether and set a zero for it, but we can, as we do in another area, pass from plus to minus. I have given this example to show you that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not shrink from the fields that are strictly speaking exact science.

You see that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is called upon to restore order and to bring back to the natural order that which has been led away from its natural order in thinking, especially perhaps in those areas that are most confused today because people work with unhealthy concepts and even make seemingly epoch-making discoveries. Tomorrow, this will lead to a presentation of the views of social life. It will lead to concepts and impulses that enter into social life, into history, into cultural history, and also into linguistics - into concepts that are transformed from the rigidity in which they often remain today into liveliness. And this liveliness of concepts guarantees that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can indeed build a bridge between the individual specialized sciences. And so what is to happen between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and specialized sciences will have a very important significance for the development of humanity. The one-sidedness of the soul will be overcome, which in many cases has a paralyzing effect on the development of the personality. And when spiritual science can penetrate into the individual specialized sciences, we will again be able to have personalities on our educational paths who develop the whole human being in themselves. And that must be the case. This must be the case in particular when those who undergo a certain course of education legitimately want to place themselves as leaders in social life. And it is the spiritual that must be the guiding principle in social life. But only that spiritual can be the guiding principle in social life, can truly permeate humanity with that which leads to ascent and not to descent. Only that which, as scientifically sound, develops the whole human totality, only that can lead to such a healthy development of humanity.

Dear attendees, When one speaks, as I have done in these lectures, of the relationship between anthroposophical spiritual science and the individual specialized sciences, one is perhaps least inclined to emphasize the necessity of also mentioning the technical sciences as such, which, like the other sciences, are to be fertilized by this spiritual science – of which I have already characterized examples in the last lectures. Even if I can only sketch out these outlines, I would still like to point out how there is an important inner relationship between the spiritual science I am referring to here and what can be called the technical sciences with their practical consequences for modern life. I may refer to this – it is not meant personally, it is entirely relevant – and I already tried to do so in the early 1890s with my Philosophy of Freedom.

This “Philosophy of Freedom” is intended, first of all, as a foundation for ethical and social life. It is intended as such a foundation that is to be thoroughly modern. And if I were to characterize the meaning of this “Philosophy of Freedom,” I would have to point out the way in which it has grown out of contemporary life. It is not built on traditional philosophical presuppositions. It did not come into being in the way that much of this kind of work does, namely by presupposing some philosophical current, by becoming a follower of this or that school of philosophy and then trying to form some kind of direction that is supposed to have a certain validity but what I was trying to develop as the Philosophy of Freedom, as the ethical and social foundation of life, arose out of a very special way of thinking, which was formed first through the contemplation of modern social life. And here I must interject a few personal remarks, because they may more easily characterize what I want to say than a discussion would, and because the time allotted for these four lectures is too short for a discussion, which would otherwise be possible.

My school, my most important school, was the study of modern commercial life, which I faced every day from early childhood as the son of a minor railway official who had been introduced to everything related to railways from a technical point of view, and also to everything that was directly related to such a situation in commercial terms, even if it was perhaps from a narrow perspective at the time. Then again, I was able to continue my studies more than through any school, since for years I had to deal with the sons of people who were essentially involved in important industrial and transport sectors of the present day or the last decades of the 19th century. What I saw there in terms of thinking and feeling, I would say, what was flowing out of the forces that were incorporated into the most modern human endeavor, that demanded a certain grounding in ethical and social views of life.

When you look at life from the points of view that I have just described, you see it in those functions in which it becomes more and more detached from human subjectivity, so to speak, and in which it becomes more and more external, so to speak, technical. I would like to say that in life you are constantly confronted with what is repeatedly and repeatedly demanded as a principle in modern science. In modern science, it is postulated that phenomena should be treated entirely separately from the human being. And if we allow life to take its course, especially when technical achievements are involved, then we are primarily dealing with what takes place through the machine, through traffic and so on, with something that is very distinct from human subjectivity, that is very much only in the objective – so very much only in the objective that we can say: Here man loses his subjectivity, here much of his personality is lost, here man is placed in the objective driving wheels of life.

On the one hand, this emerged in modern scientific life in that one wanted to completely ignore in such sciences as optics or thermodynamics or similar what arises from the interrelation of the human being with the outside world, and wanted to found a science that then leaned in the last third of the 19th century towards atomistic theories, the dominance of which has by no means been overcome today. That is on the one hand. On the other hand, however, we also see that something is underlying the whole development of modern life, something that is separate from life and from the human being, from subjectivity, from the personality of the human being. In such a context, one can either thoughtlessly integrate oneself into the wheels of life, or one can believe that the old traditional beliefs and views could still provide certain ethical forces for this modern life, separated from man, and one can then demand such an objective science from certain subconscious depths, as has just been demanded in atomism, in physics, chemistry and even in biology.

But one can also come to something else. One can look at this life of modern times, which is separate from the human being, from the full, complete human sense of personality. One can feel it and sense it with all the effects it has on the human personality, and one can feel it best when one oneself acquires a technical education, when one goes through precisely those spiritual currents that are effective in technology. If I may add a personal comment: my university education was a purely technical one, not a philosophical one in some way, but a technical-scientific one. When one grows into this life, so to speak, completely separated from the human being, then, in the center of the personality, that which I believed I had to present as the other force of modern social life in the “Philosophy of Freedom” will stir. For the more, on the one hand, this technical life of modern times develops as an historical necessity (and one can certainly have an affirmative attitude towards this), the more man must, as it were, lose himself in external events, and the more must the inner reaction assert itself: to build up ethics, to build up religious feeling, too, on the innermost core of the human personality, on that which can be extracted from the conceivably deepest recess of the inner human being. And one can perhaps imagine how, on the one hand, one can be fully engaged in modern technical life and precisely for this reason say to oneself: Yes, man loses more and more of his personality there; all the more he must resort to the innermost source of his soul life, all the more he must shape out of it that which then brings light into what the personality otherwise completely discards. And from this innermost core of human life there emerged an ethical individualism — an ethical individualism, to be sure, that appeals first to a very significant social force.

Today it is very easy to criticize such ethical individualism, as it is founded in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” to the ground. Of course, one can do so if one clings to old traditions, if one does not want to counter external progress in humanity with inner progress. But on the other hand, one can also say to oneself: the stronger external progress is, the greater and stronger must be the power of inner striving in the human soul. And so one comes to say to oneself: That way of summarizing groups of people, as it was present in the old ethics, is no longer possible within modern human development, because within such summaries, man relies too much on what flows into his soul from the environment and from elsewhere to provide the ethical impulses. In our time, it is necessary for the human being to reach much deeper into his soul life in order to extract ethical impulses. But then it is indeed necessary to appeal to the power that, in the social life of man, we may call trust. This trust must become an ethical power. For only when people are called upon to appeal to the innermost core of their being, when they are called upon to draw their ethical motives from there, only then can they work together socially in freedom, yes, they will work together socially in freedom precisely when one can have confidence in this kind of sincerity, in this kind of uprightness and fertility of the human personality, then one finds, solely and exclusively, the forces that are necessary to make the social life of the present time progress in the right way.

One might say that we would have to wait a long time for people to mature to such ethical individualism. Those who say such a thing usually suffer greatly from personal arrogance, because they consider themselves mature and the others immature. But besides, theoretical consideration stops when these questions begin, because there is only an either-or. Either we go down the path of decline of our ethical and social and thus also of our technical life in the manner of Spengler, or we decide to draw those ethical impulses from the depths of the human soul that are necessary for the further progress of humanity. All the declaiming and theorizing about whether this is possible is of no value; only the will to such ethical individualism has value, because it appeals to the will that is permeated by pure thinking. And so I think that in fact the contemplation of the most modern way of life should evoke this particular kind of ethics. Therefore, I also have the idea that this ethical individualism, this freedom, should basically assert itself precisely there as a science that addresses the human being, the whole human being, who is to engage in social life, just where, on the other hand, it is seen that people are introduced to technical, commercial, modern economic life and to the other branches of life, which, by the way, are all mechanized in a modern way. Such a conception is needed alongside what has emerged from the scientific way of thinking and attitude that has developed to the point of technology. What is needed is the greatest deepening and strengthening of human life, where, on the other hand, what has been separated from the human being has been strengthened.

Therefore, it was necessary to found a philosophy that could not be like the other philosophies. These other philosophies traditionally came more or less from the old science. This old scientific approach had still retained something, one could say, of the perception of inner concepts and ideas and so on. We need only think back a few centuries to see that people did not look at nature the way we do. Whatever you want to call it, for example an “animistic worldview,” it lasted well into the 15th century and was quite common, perhaps much later — but that people always thought of something spiritual when they thought of natural entities; then, from what they thought, they were able to draw fresh principles from the details of inorganic nature and, in turn, ethical impulses from these principles. Until well into the 19th century, and even into the second half of the century, people were not yet dependent on drawing ethical and philosophical impulses entirely from within, because they still associated something spiritual with the observation of the external world and the technical manipulation of the external world, something that was also connected with the human being. The last third of the 19th century has produced a technology that demands ways of thinking that are completely detached from the human being. There is nothing more to be gained from impulses that could become ethical impulses. Therefore, these ethical impulses must be drawn entirely from the human being himself; the whole of individual ethical intuition must be placed at the center of the ethical view of the world. The age of natural science, which has been spoken of so often, demands such a purely scientific basis for ethics.

That, ladies and gentlemen, to shed some light on how there is a very real connection between what modern life is – insofar as this modern life has been shaped by science – and what this modern life makes necessary as an ethic that is strictly based on science. Now, such an ethic is only possible if one develops within oneself what I tried to characterize just yesterday: flexible concepts, concepts that are so flexible that one really does not get stuck in contexts that are completely separate from the human being, but which are capable, I might say, of turning around to embrace that which pulses from the depths of the human being as something real. But in order to make sufficient progress in such a scientific world view, many other obstacles must be overcome. Above all, it is necessary that we also find ideas, scientific laws, which have grown out of a scientific world view on the one hand and an historical, a historical world view on the other.

History, as we understand it today, is a young science. Even in the 18th century, it was something quite different. It is therefore no wonder that what we call the science of history is still poorly developed and has no inner driving force of its own. For example, people talk about the guiding ideas in history. Now, only pure intellectualism can talk about the guiding ideas in history, which believes that thoughts, as people think them, then also materialize as forces of history, that thoughts could somehow be driving forces in history. Thoughts are purely contemplative; thoughts cannot achieve anything. On the one hand, people talk about the driving powers of thought, and when they say “powers of thought”, they are already saying something that is actually a contradiction in terms. And on the other hand, they fall into the other extreme: they actually only represent what happens historically by presenting the external, material transformations of cultural life. One then goes as far as the materialistic conception of history has taken it, or one makes compromises by trying to build history out of the mere pursuit of external cultural phenomena; one then imbues this with some symbolic ideas, as many a historian of the 19th and early 20th centuries has done. But one could not yet arrive at such knowledge about how one should even attempt to arrive at ideas in this science about what actually underlies the historical development of humanity. And if one draws attention to this today – I will be drawing attention to it in a leitmotif – if one draws attention to this, then, yes, today one is still decried as a fantasist, because what is regarded as reality today is far different from what real reality is.

Today, anyone who has done a little research in this field will readily agree when it is said that the human being as a physical being must be understood in his formation by going back to embryology. And in a certain way one will then try – even though much that is unjustified has been introduced into the corresponding sciences – one will nevertheless try with a certain right to compare those forms that arise as the developmental forms of the human embryo with the forms found in the extra-human organic world; and one will then try to find a connection between the animal series and the human form. There is no doubt that much of what was called the “biogenetic law” was unjustified. But there is something in the methodological consideration based on this that is extraordinarily promising for a realistic consideration of human development. It is pointed out that One must consider the beginning of life if one wants to understand the physical form of the human being; one must consider the beginning of human life in order to understand its further development.

At best, one can only use a kind of analogy for the historical approach. This analogy has indeed been used very often. The fanciful interpreters of the biogenetic law, in particular, have also wanted to apply this law to a certain materialistic way of thinking with regard to the historical development of humanity. And so we have seen those strange views that trace back what is the content of our civilization today to the earlier developmental phases of humanity — in a way similar to the approach taken in the formulation of the biogenetic law. They said to themselves: What the child goes through leads back to very early stages of development, to very early cultures; and what is then later experienced in later childhood leads back to the later stages of development, and so on, until man has achieved what he has in the present as his civilization. This is an external analogy; and much more than is usually believed, such external analogies are present in the scientific view when we come up in the historical, because today what is not really close to man is what I would call a faithful observation of reality, an engagement with the conditions of reality. That is why the spiritual science referred to here endeavors to develop pure phenomenalism within inorganic and organic natural science and to present the processes themselves purely, without speculation, without underlying atomic or other hypotheses, as they present themselves.

Phenomenology is the ideal of scientific endeavor that is present in anthroposophy. The aim is not to move from what are basically only modifying sensations to all sorts of wave vibrations and the like, which are hypothetically assumed and speculated upon. The aim is to remain within the pure phenomena, because they mean a great deal. And all the talk about the “thing in itself” is basically unfathomable. For example, people say: Yes, but you can't see the underlying reality from the phenomena; after all, a phenomenon always points to what underlies it, and so you have to go beyond the phenomenon, that is, assume something that the phenomenon causes in interaction with human subjectivity. Those who speak in this way do not realize that they are applying a completely wrong way of thinking. I would like to characterize this wrong way of thinking by means of an analogy: the one who sees individual letters, for example S, I, F, will say that this S or I or F means nothing, they must point to something else. Those who have an overview of a written context, which also consists only of individual letters, will not relate this written context to something that lies behind it – along the lines of the atomic world supposedly lying behind sensual phenomena. will not relate this context of letters to something contrived or to something standing behind it, but he will read the context and know that, when he has the whole context, it points him to the corresponding reality.

It is also a matter of leaving these natural phenomena in their purity within the world of natural phenomena, because by learning to read natural phenomena purely, in a way that corresponds to the inner nature of the phenomena themselves, one learns to look into that which underlies reality – not by speculating about a “thing in itself” or the presupposition of some “thing in itself”, as it always underlies the atomistic theories and hypotheses. By developing the habit of pure observation of phenomena, by breaking the habit of mere speculation, of living in some hypothetical assumptions, by remaining in the inorganic and organic fields with pure observation, one develops the ability to observe in the field of human spiritual development. One then learns to see that one cannot transfer the biogenetic law to historical development by means of an analogy, but one learns to recognize that one must consider the whole human being, the whole human life – just as in natural science, if one wants to recognize something, one should not pick out one thing, but consider the totality of related phenomena. Then one is urged, for the understanding of historical life, not to go to the beginning of individual existence, as one would for the understanding of the natural life of man, but to the end. One must also consider the end. Even if it is a kind of self-contemplation, this self-contemplation is a thoroughly objective one: when one has become accustomed to observing the life of the soul as concretely as one otherwise observes the external natural life, one finds that, when one is past the middle of life has passed the age of thirty-five or forty, this life of soul, quite apart from all external manifestations, shows certain phenomena within itself – phenomena which run their course in such a way that one can truly say one is surprised by them.

The life of the soul itself takes on a certain configuration. That this is so little noticed today is due to the fact that the power of observation is little developed in youth. Therefore, such things are seen by very few people in old age. Very few people are still endowed with such a fresh power of observation in old age that they take these things into account. If you do not disregard them, you will notice how something rises up from the depths of the soul, which can be said to be like a repetition, like an inner repetition of what old cultural epochs of humanity show in terms of mental attitude and mental structure. In doing so, I am pointing to a phenomenon that is eminently important for the historian to observe. It is not necessary to do much outwardly, for it is not necessary that old people should make their signs of aging the basis of life. But it is necessary that life be observed in its entirety, and it shows itself in that we ascend in life, becoming ever older and older, that something wants to enter into consciousness that is initially similar to the way of thinking of immediately preceding cultural epochs. One becomes similar to the Greeks. And if one lives through this entire middle age, as did Goethe, for example, then under certain circumstances one can also have such a longing to live through the Greek age, as Goethe did, in whom this longing became irresistible. And if one then goes further back and observes what arises within the human being, then one comes to even earlier cultural epochs. At that age one notices that one understands all the better the special nature of the views of the even older times. And one is transported back into a prehistory of human development that is no longer recorded in documents when one considers this biogenetic law, which is now polaric. This is not carried over from natural science into human life by analogy, but is borrowed from direct observation.

If we continue to develop this path of research – I can only give guidelines – then we will come to understand an extraordinarily important guiding principle for the historical development of humanity. We come to see that there have been older cultures in which people, by simply developing their physicality, developed their spiritual and soul life right up to an advanced age, so that their spiritual and soul development was, as it were, born out of their physical development. We, in our advanced human civilization, still find ourselves dependent on our physical development in early childhood, even in later adolescence, but not anymore. In the twenties, this dependency ceases. How the child is still dependent on its physical development in its entire soul configuration! How can we observe how intimately the two are connected, and what a profoundly significant effect sexual maturity, the age of sexual maturity, has on a person's mental and spiritual development! And if we go further, we hardly even notice that something is clearly changing again, that, for example, at the beginning of the 1920s, there is a more inward dependence of the mental and spiritual on the physical. But then this connection becomes so unclear that we can say: Today it is the case that until the twenties, and in some people until the thirties, the soul and spirit remain dependent on the development of the body, but then the soul and spirit emancipate themselves, rely more on themselves, and undergo a development that is more or less independent of the physical. This was not the case in earlier ages of human life. We come back to the early ages of human development, when people, after the age of fifty, still felt into the sixties what was taking shape inwardly and spiritually in dependence on external physical development. These were the ages in which people could, as it were, still wrest from their own nature the inner experiences that one has in the declining years of life. What they gained in soul and spirit through their disintegrating bodies, these people still went through.

If I now want to express myself through a law that has yet to be formulated – even if every formulation can be challenged – I would like to say: These people of the oldest cultural ages remained young well into their fifties and sixties. If we follow this thread, we find that in Egyptian and Indian civilization there was an age when people only remained young in this respect until their forties. And the Greek-Latin age, from which we have inherited such remarkable artistic and scientific ways of looking at things, can be understood when we know how these Greeks were still so youthful between the ages of thirty and forty, because in their case the soul and spirit were dependent on their physical development until that age. Then came our age, when this only goes into the twenties. And one must realize that we can only draw on our physical development until the twenties, that at most, contemplatively - as an inverted biogenetic law - the subtle observer of life inwardly perceives what is a repetition of things humanity has gone through before. The way in which the biogenetic law was formulated – even if it is completely disputable – there is a healthy core to it. As formulated, that man in his development from birth briefly passes through what is tribal development, so it must be said that in historical life, man inwardly, spiritually and mentally, repeats the way of thinking that was the actual impulse of history at earlier ages.

Here we have the connection between the observation of spiritual life and the observation of the physical life of humanity. Here we have a science that does not develop one-sided concepts of natural phenomena on the one hand and, on the other, forms concepts about spiritual phenomena that cannot be related to natural phenomena and vice versa. There you have a unified way of thinking that, by not becoming one-sidedly materialistic or one-sidedly spiritualistic, but by encompassing the whole of reality, regards external physicality as the one current of this reality and the spiritual-soul as the other current, but considers both purely phenomenologically.

This also opens up extraordinarily promising perspectives for the individual spiritual scientific research, but one must have the courage to go to real laws in history as well. What is still often discussed today as a historical method is a way of talking around the issue, something that is not based on real ground. One finds a real foundation only when one has grown out of a phenomenalistic, a phenomenological, observation of nature, which then creates such flexible concepts that these concepts are also suitable for penetrating into the phenomena of spiritual life.

What is meant here by anthroposophical spiritual science – I must emphasize this again and again – is not amateurish dabbling. It is a form of research that carries pure observation of phenomena over from the field of natural science into the spiritual, and in this way will find precisely that reconciliation for which the best souls today are longing: the reconciliation of outer life with inner life, the reconciliation of science and art, the reconciliation of science and religious feeling. But if one simply occupies oneself with the continuation of the old, traditional religions, one cannot create what modern man demands for his religious life. Today, we need a science that is capable of penetrating into the realm of the spirit as we otherwise penetrate into the realm of nature. We need people who have the scientific courage to search, even if it is often seen as fantasy, because it is not considered to apply the same strict scientific method that is demanded for the realm of external nature to the realm of spiritual events.

That is one side of it, which follows from a human view of life for the view of historical life. The other side is that the person who gains such a view also develops this view within himself into social impulses. It is only out of such a view that the liveliness of soul life actually arises, which finds ethical impulses, but ethical impulses that are so devoted to human nature that they can also be transformed into social impulses. We cannot make our ideas so vivid with the concepts we draw from science alone that they also work as ideas if they are to underpin social action.

In a very learned contemporary book, there is a remarkable quote, which admittedly comes from a man who was not particularly learned, namely Georg Brandes, but the quote is accepted by a very learned personality. In his work, attention is drawn to why it is so difficult to teach people ethics, to teach them something, for example, about essential necessities, and this difficulty is emphasized to have a spiritual effect on social life. Attention is drawn to the fact – and this is said quite as if one fully agreed with what Brandes says – that the masses of people do not act according to reason, but according to vague instincts. Well, it is very easy to make such a statement. It is very easy to criticize what is living out, not in the life of the individual, but in the field of human interaction. It is very easy to condemn it as mere instinctive living out of some impulses, if one is not able to look at the essence of social life in a truly scientific spirit. If one is able to do the latter, then one knows: however much rationality there may be within the intellectual sphere of man, however clever people may be in the pattern of that cleverness that can be gained in the one-sided natural sciences, social life would still always contain many, many unconscious moments, so that it could still be criticized in the way Brandes does and as is found even in books on the principles of political economy.

But what is the real basis for this? The fact is that reason, which people like to talk about so much, is something that develops within the human personality, something that is suitable for looking at the world, something that is also suitable for evoking certain impulses for action from within the human being, but something that is not at all suitable on its own for bringing about social coexistence. If you believe that this inner rationality is suitable for this, then you end up with those social theories that are so common today and that do not promote life, do not sustain life, but destroy life. And such life-destroying theories, which can only shine as long as they remain criticism, but which immediately show their absurdity when they are to be introduced into real life, they often flow from that attitude that has emerged with the facts of modern scientific life, which are quite rightly perceived as a triumph. The point at issue is this: in human cooperation, even in language, there is something that permeates and warms human action and feeling, but also hates it, and that cannot be reduced to intellectualistic concepts of reason.

And on the other hand, something is asserting itself in economic life itself that appears much more complicated than what must be taken as a basis in the natural sciences. I am merely drawing your attention to everything that has occurred within economic life, everything that has occurred within political economy in the way of definitions of commodity value and commodity price, everything that has occurred in the way of definitions of the functions of value and price in economic life, and so on. In particular, I would like to draw attention to how vague and indeterminate such definitions, such characteristics of the value and price of goods, of other functions in economic life are.

What is the underlying reason for this? The reason is that it is impossible to understand the social being at all with the concepts based on mere intellectuality. What is needed is an inner education of the soul towards those modes of conception which I have described in the course of these lectures as imaginative knowledge, and then in Higher Fields as inspired knowledge. An education in such ways of thinking is necessary in order to grasp that which should now arise not from the individual, but that which should arise in the social interaction of people. And the way in which people interact socially – even if one wants to call it instinct – cannot be seen or influenced with intellectual concepts. One can only influence it with living, meaningful views of social life itself. These substantial views of social life, however, can only be opened up to the life of imagination through the imaginations that I have also described in these lectures about the other reality. Therefore, there will only be a real social science that can be the basis for social work when it is developed from the method of anthroposophical spiritual science.

You must not think that I, who am able to present what I myself can advocate today as anthroposophical spiritual science, somehow regard it as something already perfect that can remain as it is. Rather, I am talking about what is to become of this anthroposophical spiritual science, quite independently of the form it now has. It will certainly be shaped much better than it is now by those who practise it. But it must be pointed out again and again that only it can be that, with its methods, it finds such flexible concepts that these flexible concepts themselves can go, can flow on the waves of social life, can invigorate these waves of social life. And only when one can see through the social structure in this way, in direct contemplation, can it be divided into a spiritual life that needs independence, a legal life, a practical state life that must in turn be self-contained and need independence, and an economic life which must be based on associations, because an economic life can only develop when people think together, while the spiritual life can only develop when the individual is able to contribute to the social organism that which flows from his spiritual impulses.

These three areas, which today are lumped together in the unified, abstract social organism, are clearly distinguishable for a living imagination, a living view. They are lumped together only because today one does not think practically, but theorizes, because one relates to reality more or less hypothetically and, if one wants to shape that reality, one constructs hypotheses instead of pouring real impulses into that reality. Those who are inclined to hypothesize in the theoretical sciences do not come to bring fully real concepts into social life. Therefore, especially those who have ceased to think practically often regard as utopian what is found in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, which has now been republished, and in other books , in everything that is published in our newspaper, the weekly journal “Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (Threefold Order of the Social Organism), and in everything that emanates from the Federation for Threefold Order of the Social Organism. It is regarded as utopian because those people who see it that way do not themselves know how utopian they are, how they regard as utopian precisely that which is completely saturated with reality. Today, in the intellectualization of the sciences, one has come so far that one no longer senses or feels when true reality is pulsating somewhere. If we really open ourselves to what comes out of true reality, we will find that we do not need to say that decades are necessary for its realization, but we will see that it can be transferred directly into social life as soon as it is in people's heads.

This is what I wanted to say about how the ideas and impulses that arise from spiritual science can be carried into ethical, historical and social thinking and feeling, and then also into ethical and social volition. And when a person truly recognizes historical laws, when he surveys human life as it is surveyed when the phenomena of spiritual life are considered, not just the external cultural phenomena, then one learns with the character of inner necessity to recognize what has been lived in a particular age. And from this awareness of a connection with one's age, one's task for this age arises. One is imbued with one's inner life task. And today we need people who can be imbued with a real, meaningful life task.

I have been able to share only a little of what is being striven for in the field of spiritual science, and only in outline, in the sense that the individual specialized sciences are to be fertilized. You will hear again and again how individual groups are working to enrich the individual sciences, from astronomy to social insights, and how they are striving to develop this spiritual science for the individual fields in a very specialized way. Such endeavors are still only met with very limited understanding today. And especially when giving lectures like these, when one considers that here in Stuttgart, through the efforts of our Waldorf school teachers and other personalities, an attempt is being made to show how the individual scientific disciplines can be enriched by anthroposophical spiritual science and how absolutely necessary this fertilization is absolutely necessary if we do not want to go into decline but strive for an ascent, then one must also consider how such efforts are met with hostility and rejected, especially by older people who are involved in scientific life today.

And now, in conclusion, I would like to address that part of you to whom I would like to make an initial appeal, particularly in the present situation, for very specific reasons. Especially now, when anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is facing so much hostility, one hears it emphasized again and again: Why does this spiritual science not turn to science itself in a strictly scientific way? Well, a lot could be said about that. Above all, it could be said that those who express such views care little about how this spiritual science actually works in the individual scientific fields. But perhaps something else may be said. What I myself represent today in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science began in the early 1880s. At the time, I tried to introduce what needed to be said into the scientific currents in an elementary way, using viable scientific methods. I took up Goethe in an interpretation that was taken very seriously and conscientiously. Now, I have not always been met with such hostility as I am now – what I have written in reference to Goethe has often been described as something very good. But how was it received? It was received in such a way that I could not be satisfied with this acceptance. People said: Yes, some of what Goethe meant is being addressed, Goethe is being interpreted in the right way. But they did not notice, or did not want to notice, that something else was meant by it. It was not meant that one merely wanted to interpret the man who died as Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1832, but rather that one should seek in Goethe, in his world view, what can experience a continuation, what flows out when one regards Goethe as still alive today, when one develops him further. A position was to be taken on the problems of scientific, philosophical and social life.

What is often called “pure science” today was not at all inclined to do so, today when one can read in scientific works statements such as that science does not have the task of forming ethical, political or social life, for example, but only to consider all these branches of life objectively. In an age when people just want to sit down at some seat to observe the world and only accept as science what has arisen from the observation of the world, but not what passes into our soul life to become will, action, and social deed, it may seem understandable that science initially did not take a stand on what was actually meant. Therefore it was necessary that appeals be made to the larger circles of humanity, that thought be given to the larger circles of humanity, because the truth must in some way present itself to humanity. And when, out of certain intuitive perceptions, the larger circles of humanity had found their way to what is here called anthroposophical spiritual science, then people again deigned to say that what was being said was not scientific. They did it, for example, like the Jena professor Rein, who in 1918 characterized the 'Philosophy of Freedom' as a work that could only have been born out of the war period. This man only just got hold of “The Philosophy of Freedom” and found the date 1918, the year of the new edition. In his usual conscientious manner, he characterized this work, which was published in 1893, as a product of wartime thinking.

You can find many examples of such scientific conscientiousness in the present day. I could point out many similar facts to show you why I feel particularly satisfied today to see that there is now some interest coming from the younger generation in the present, even if there is not much interest from those who shine in science because of their venerable age or because they have not yet reached a venerable age. From this side, there is still little engagement with anthroposophical spiritual science, but all the more misunderstanding.

Therefore, from among those gathered here today, I would like to address those who, coming out of their student life, want to turn to this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which is certainly not to be presented to you authoritatively or dogmatically, which only wants to be taken so that it is examined. Because it is convinced that the more it is examined, the more it will be found to be well-founded. It does not shrink from exact testing; it has only to defend itself against what is truly very far removed from exact testing. If one were fainthearted, one could become discouraged in the field of anthroposophical spiritual science in the face of the inexact tests that are so prevalent in the present day. Those who represent spiritual science, as it is meant here, are not afraid of truly exact testing. It will prove itself all the more the more precisely it is tested, because it knows that it has emerged from the spirit of science.

This is what I wish to say to you today, especially to you, my dear fellow students, who are gathered here today; especially to you I wish to say that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that comes from me has arisen from a faithful contemplation of what I myself have gone through. I look back on a student life that took place at the time of the heyday of atomism, the heyday of that world view in which all optics, all thermodynamics, and so on, were based on hypotheses in which one indulged — but hypotheses that led away from the grasp of reality because they based something on mere thought, on something that was merely thought up. In many cases, people have moved away from this; today, we are realistic, especially in the field of natural science. But the fruits of thinking that have been developed there can still be seen in the historical and social sciences, and they are often partly responsible for the misery of our present catastrophic life. During my time as a student, the concepts, ideas and soul impulses were not developed by science that could then swim powerfully on the waves of social life. That is what we lack today: impulses. People get very annoyed when you talk about impulses. But the word 'impulse' should mean nothing other than what lives powerfully in the soul - in contrast to the abstract life of thoughts or ideas. It should be thoughts and ideas that arise from such an anthroposophical spiritual science, but thoughts that are imbued with full life, so that they can become ethical, religious, but especially social reality.

Anyone who has been through what has happened in our scientific development over the decades, who knows the connection between the scientific theories of the 1870s and 1880s and the helplessness of today's ethical and social thinking, truly speaks from the heart to those who are young today, my dear fellow students. He then remembers the reasons why the youth of that time was spoken to in vain. They had not yet been confronted with what has since emerged as a dazzling abundance of life, as it were, that which resounds from all sides with the words “how we have come so gloriously far” in terms of external culture. Today, however, young people see something different around them; today they see material need all around them, and in this material need they also see spiritual need. On the whole, the situation today is quite different from what it was in my youth. In those days, one was quite alone with these thoughts. Today, my dear fellow students, if you really find the way to impulses full of life, today you will perhaps be able to find understanding in quite a number of people who are shaken by the present life. Today life speaks: I need living ideas born out of science that can become ethical and social impulses. Today the world needs such leaders who can work out of the spiritual, because only this spiritual can be meaningful.

My esteemed audience, dear fellow students, those who are touched by what anthroposophical spiritual science actually wants will understand me, each in their own way. This is what fills me with a certain satisfaction when I am allowed to speak today to those to whom I actually feel very close, despite the fact that the age of life that is yours today is long behind me, dear fellow students. But anyone who has lived through these last decades with full consciousness also knows how strongly one must build on those who are still young today and who want to have a powerful effect in their youth today. One can always contribute only very little to that to which one would like to contribute a lot.

I have been able to say little in these few lectures; may this little be further developed by our local colleagues in the university courses. And may this little be valued more for its intention than for what it could become in these four lectures. But I would like to have touched the hearts of today's fellow students, I would like to have spoken to their hearts. Not only – even if in the fullest sense – from the spirit of science would I speak, but to warm hearts would I speak, for when these two things are joined together, the will for true science with the strength of brave hearts, then, my dear fellow students, then we shall make progress. If one is allowed to speak to people from such a background, then one can still have hope for a fruitful development in the near future, especially for our German people, who have been so sorely tried and are therefore perhaps particularly called upon to develop spiritually.

Answering questions

Question: Does Dr. Steiner understand “reminiscences” in the same way as “associations of ideas” when it comes to imagination?

Rudolf Steiner: If you follow what I have discussed in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, you will find that the greatest efforts are required of those who want to progress to imaginative life , especially in the direction of combating everything that is reminiscence, that is mere association of ideas, in fact, to combat everything that is drawn from the ordinary unconscious or subconscious life of the soul. In this respect, it may be said that much is well recorded in today's scientific literature. I myself have emphasized some of my own observations in the book mentioned. I will only highlight one example from a well-known publication that appeared in the Wiesbaden collection to show how such reminiscences actually work, how difficult it is to pay attention to them, and how necessary it is to pay attention to them.

A scholar - who describes the matter himself - walks past a bookshop, certainly the delight of many a scholar. And he finds - he is a zoologist - a book about lower animals, something that is certainly closely related to his immediate present life. He is surprised himself that he suddenly has to start laughing at the most serious title. He laughs – just think, a zoologist, a learned man, laughing at a learned title. He feels quite funny himself. And he tries to find out why he has to laugh like that. He closes his eyes; that helps, because now he hears a hurdy-gurdy in the distance, playing a melody to which he danced in his youth. At that time, however, he was thinking of other things, which he has long forgotten, which have long since been drawn down into the deepest depths of his soul, but now they have risen up and made him laugh at the sight of the solemn title. So something that has been in the soul for decades comes to the surface again as reminiscence.

We have to think about such things when we emphasize that the development of the imaginative life must be based on comprehensible ideas, and specifically on comprehensible ideas that can be made directly present in consciousness in all their parts. For only when one has developed the ability to bring such comprehensible ideas into consciousness with the kind of thinking that one otherwise only trains in comprehensible mathematical, geometric concepts, and when one has the will to deal with these ideas inwardly, only then does one gradually succeed in really having a practice in rejecting all reminiscences, all associations of ideas and all life in some subconscious soul content. This overcoming of reminiscences and the like must indeed first be acquired. And only then, when one has conscientiously overcome what reminiscences and the like are, is one actually able to develop that which imaginative life is, and this imaginative life proves itself by its own quality to be related to reality in just such a way as I characterized in the first lecture.

Here too, the objection is often raised – and the objections are sometimes almost typical – that something like this can only be an autosuggestion or something, the origins of which one does not suspect. Yes, you see, in the outer life too one can indulge in illusions, deceptions, and only the context of life, the whole of life as such, makes one gain a judgment about reality. So one must also educate oneself to a sure judgment in what appears to one as imaginative life. And if it is objected that it could not be the same with the imaginations as it is with some people, for whom their mouths water when they just think of or hear about lemonade, it is said that it is still not reality, even though the subjective experience of the taste of lemonade is there. Of course they have this subjective experience. If objectivity is judged only by this subjective content, one is naturally not yet ready to take from the content of the imagination that which represents it objectively, objectively spiritually. But one must still say: If one introduces something like autosuggestion into full, real life, not remaining with a cut-out piece, then the relationship to reality arises. For one can assume that people get an intense taste of lemonade when they think of lemonade, but I don't think that anyone has actually quenched their thirst with the imagined lemonade. When one progresses from a piece of reality to total reality – and this must be done in the realm of outer reality as well as in the realm of inner spiritual reality – then it ceases to be the case that one can be beguiled by mere illusions, mere autosuggestions. Recently, it has been said time and again that what is asserted as spiritual content is based on repressed imaginative life, and that what is repressed in repressed ideas would be brought to life, driven up into consciousness, and that this would lead to personifications and so on. This is how it is described, and to someone who sees through it, it sounds amateurish.

Yes, something like personifications and the like can arise in some nebulous mystics. For there are indeed some mystics who talk about all kinds of soul content and yet mean nothing other than reminiscences. It is true that some claim to have mystically experienced the unio mystica, the union with some divine within. But such experiences, which one had decades ago, can arise as reminiscences in consciousness, not only in the old form, but also in a transformed form; one can experience that what was experienced decades ago, and which has sunk into the depths of the unconscious, emerges after decades in a sublime form. What some mystics describe as the content of their experiences in mystical union need be nothing more than a barrel organ seen decades ago.

These things are carefully avoided in the truly subtle process of spiritual research, and the methods are clearly developed so that such errors can be avoided. People could also be convinced by the fact that the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here does not just tell of what is in the spiritual worlds, but also talks about the things of ordinary science just like other people. If one can talk about the subjects of ordinary science in the same way as others, then the scientists have no right to claim that the additional findings of spiritual research are mere fantasy or stem from repressed mental images.

Furthermore, with regard to the so-called inner vision, what actually comes out of true spiritual vision is not at all what the nebulous mystics believe. The nebulous mystics speak of all kinds of inner experiences. In true spiritual insight, when one penetrates down through the ordinary life of the soul, one's own material, bodily inner life is more and more filled. One really learns anatomy and physiology through inner vision and does not prattle on about some mystical secrets. One comes to know the real spiritual life by looking at the world and living with the world, not through false, introverted asceticism or through lazy withdrawal into an unworldly life, but precisely by immersing oneself in real life and thus also through a kind of self-inspection that experiences in the inner being of the human being precisely that which the nebulous mystic does not seek.

The imaginative life that is meant here does not culminate in unworldly mysticism, not in a cloud cuckoo land, not in a spirit that is sought by saying: outer reality is so bad that one must withdraw from it, true reality is in the beyond.

A true spirituality is seen in such a way that it is connected with the will to immerse oneself in life. It is therefore not alien to life, but life-friendly. It is from this overall context of life that I ask you to judge what is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science.

Question: What is the difference between monocotyledons and dicotyledons?

Rudolf Steiner: The question regarding the difference between monocotyledons and dicotyledons cannot be answered briefly. I would just like to say the following: I generally avoid answering isolated questions just like that, because this gives the impression that spiritual science is making judgments out of the blue, when in fact everything is structured in an appropriate way and is pursued from its elements. I would just like to say about this: for the spiritual scientific investigation, it is also necessary to set up a different plant system as real than the one that we find set up in many cases today. You have already seen that When I spoke of the human being yesterday, I had to point out that the human being cannot be viewed in such a way that one simply takes the whole human being and then does some kind of phylogenetic research, as is done today. Rather, one must start from the main organization of the head and trace it back, and there one must consider a complete transformation of animal forms, whereas one must consider later developments in the organization of the limbs. And yesterday I also first dealt with the morphological contrast between the spinal cord and the brain in order to show that one cannot proceed in the history of development as is usually done.

So it is also the case in botany that one starts from plant stages that are now more in the middle of the system. And on the one hand, one will look at these plant stages, which are where monocotyledons and dicotyledons split, and one will go down through the monocotyledons to the lowest plants, the fungi, algae and so and on the other side go up to the fully developed plants and so on; this will provide a system of plants that really includes in the morphological consideration the understanding of why the plants develop one organ downwards and the other upwards. In general, it will be found how two polar forces act on the plants, but in a different way on the plants of the different levels. And there we shall see that a certain force, which we must regard as running parallel to the terrestrial radius, is combined with another force, which has often been sensed in earlier times. We have only to recall the older speculations on the spiral tendency, such as those of Sprengel and others at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But these explanations are incomplete; they are multiple speculations, and what has been developed as morphology will have to be developed differently. If we proceed in this way, we will recognize why one organ is directed in one way and another in another. Efforts are definitely being made within our spiritual community to identify a plant system that will contain the information needed to explain the individual morphological phenomena. Then it will be easier to answer such questions in context from a natural arrangement than if one has to refer to them in an aphoristic way as one does today.

Question: What is the connection between the climbing plants and the heavenly bodies acting on them?

Rudolf Steiner: It is impossible to answer such questions, which necessarily require an explanation of the special nature of the influence of the heavenly bodies on plants, in an aphoristic way now. For one exposes oneself to the accusation of dilettantism if one speaks somehow about the influence of the heavenly bodies without having said in what sense this is taken. It is absolutely necessary that anthroposophical spiritual science be taken as a real method. Just as one cannot explain anything in a scientific way without going into the whole subject — as one would not, for example, expect someone who starts explaining chemistry to start with the most complicated things —, nor can it be done in the way that such attempts at explanation have been made here, and nor can such questions be answered. And one could almost believe that such questions are asked in reference to these lectures out of certain mystical inclinations, which basically should not be accommodated. You will understand me: it is absolutely essential to protect the spiritual science meant here from the accusation of dilettantism. And if such questions are answered without being put into context - they can of course be answered - then the accusation of dilettantism arises.

These questions are not even formulated in such a way that the same words can be used in answering them; they are formulated in an amateurish way. Therefore it is not possible for me to speak to them in this way. I suspect that these questions are based on something that has been heard elsewhere, because they are not in the least connected with what has been presented here about the individual tests of the relations of spiritual science to the individual specialized sciences. You must understand that it is not possible to answer these questions without having discussed the basic elements of them. It is like this: if people want to have such questions answered, then it is – I cannot put it any other way – amateurish. You must not hold this against me, but it is my job to put the scientific nature of this spiritual science in its proper perspective, and that includes its attitude. Therefore, I will not allow myself to be tempted in the future either, by those who would like to be followers but do not want to get into the subject, to expose this spiritual science to the accusation of dilettantism by talking about all sorts of things. That is the character of charlatan movements, that they talk about all sorts of things. Spiritual science also wants to be thoroughly scientific in its attitude.

Question: How does the movement of the muscle come about, since the motor nerve does not transmit the will impulse to the muscle? Is there a connection to be seen with the metabolic system?

Rudolf Steiner: I would have liked to have given the fifth lecture on this question, if possible, because it is a question that is directly related to what I have dealt with in these four lectures, only this question must be treated in the following way:

The difference between the sensitive and the motor nerves has been mentioned, more or less merely to provide direction. It has been emphasized that the so-called motor nerves are also sensitive nerves, only their task – and this can even be seen from their anatomical structure – is to sense inwardly, that is, to sense what underlies a movement process, for example, not to impulse this movement process itself, but to sense what underlies it, what happens in the metabolism – which is always part of a movement process. If you follow all this research on the nervous system and want to use the image of wireless telegraphy for it, then that is not in the sense of spiritual science, you leave that to others. Not true, in the time when telegraphy came up, all kinds of comparisons were also made from the telegraphy to compare the centripetal and centrifugal nerves with telegraphic feeders and pathways and so on. Such comparisons are not applied by spiritual science. It wants to go into the matter itself and not play with analogies.

The point is this: whenever there is a nerve pathway that appears empirically to be a supply line, say to the spinal cord or brain, and its continuation is found in the so-called motor nerve, it is always a matter of sensing inwards and outwards – let us assume, for example, a reflex movement –; what the nerve conveys is merely sensation, only either from the outside or from one's own physical interior. And the transition, which is usually regarded as the end of the transmission and the beginning of the impulsation, is merely what I would like to call a switchover, and not by taking an example from telegraphy. In this process, the whole process is experienced inwardly by the soul. We are then speaking of something very real when we say: something jumps over, just as an electric spark jumps over when I cut a telegraph wire. - This is the process that takes place in the so-called central nervous organs.

If we summarize what can be determined about the nature of the nervous system, then this will become the basis for further research into the nature of volitional impulses. It is, after all, only a hypothetical theory that what we call 'will' is in some way represented by the motor nerve, which is also a sensory nerve. Rather, the fact that we really understand the phenomena leads us to seek the relationship of the will to organs quite different from nerves. But this leads one to study precisely that which is so often treated with hostility – the higher members of human nature; one comes to see how the will cannot be understood at all if one regards it in the same relation to materiality as one regards, for example, the images in relation to materiality. In the study of the will, one then becomes acquainted with something that must essentially be viewed spiritually, while the life of imagination is really present in it in a material context. While the structures of the brain can be shown to parallel the structures of the imagination, the same cannot be said for the life of the will. However, if one wants to find the material correlates, one must look for metabolic processes, but one is led to completely different insights, which then lead upwards to spiritual contemplation. This is approximately how the answer to the question can be formulated here.

It is somewhat shocking to realize that the life of the imagination, which since scholastic philosophy has been regarded as the spiritual life in man, is so closely related in its structure to the material life of the body – although, as I have shown in these lectures, it is based only on it. But that is just how it is. On the other hand, we are led into a much more spiritual region when we consider the structures of the emotional life. There everything is so intimately connected with the rhythmic life of the body. And then one is led into the region of metabolism when it comes to the will; but in truth it is a matter of the mastery of matter through spiritual forces, which one has before one in direct contemplation when one rises up to what the will is - undeceived by the motor nerves. One sees how the will does not intervene in the material world in such a differentiated way as the life of the imagination.

I remember a discussion that followed a lecture by a real, solid materialist. He had explained the whole life of imagination from the brain, so that in the end nothing remained of the life of imagination, because he had actually only described brain processes, but described them very well, and then also drew figures on the blackboard, which in turn the chairman, who was a solid Herbartian, looked at. He then said that he was not as materialistic as the lecturer, but that if he were to draw the associations and suppressions of associations based on his Herbartian teaching, the figures would be exactly the same as those of the materialistic lecturer. So when a staunch opponent of materialism draws the structures of the representations, the same figures emerge as in the materialist, who only records what he has learned from Meynert about nerve phases, nerve centers, and so on.

From this, however, one can clearly see how similar what can be observed in the Herbartian sense as phenomena and connections between phenomena in pure mental life is to what someone who disregards this and describes the brain with Meynert's or similar hypotheses draws on the board. You cannot do that with the emotional life, and least of all with the life of the will. There you have to go to things that are made vivid, but made vivid mentally, but not in the way that what can be drawn in direct connection with material life.

Question: Why, according to the anthroposophical approach, does one suddenly have to work with opposite signs in the Einstein problem, where one passes from ponderable to ether?

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, this can be done quite without an anthroposophical approach, simply by doing things as in numerous other fields of science: one studies the phenomena. In a course I gave a few months ago to a small audience here, I showed how to look at the phenomena of so-called thermodynamics without prejudice. The aim is to try to express in mathematical formulas what is presented to us as phenomena. The peculiar thing about such expressions in mathematical formulas is that they are only correct if they correspond to the process that can then be observed, if, so to speak, what results from the mathematical formula also applies in reality, if it can be verified by reality. If you have a sealed chamber containing heated gas under pressure and you want to understand the phenomena that arise, you can apply Clausius's and other formulas, albeit in a very contrived way, but you will see - and this is also admitted today - how the facts do not match the formulas. In Einstein's theory, the strange thing is that experiments are available first; these experiments are set up because a certain theory is assumed; the experiments do not confirm this theory, and then another theory is constructed, which is actually based on imagined experiments. If, on the other hand, you try to treat the phenomena of heat in such a way that you insert corresponding positive and negative signs into the formulas, depending on whether you are dealing with conductive or radiant heat, then you will find these formulas verified by reality. However, when we proceed to other imponderables, we cannot stop at mere positive or negative signs, but must then add other conditions. We must, as it were, imagine a force that acts in the ponderable in a radial direction, and that which belongs to the realm of the ethereal, as coming from the periphery, acting only in the circular area, but still with a negative sign. And so, when we turn to other factors, we have to express the magnitude concerned differently; then we find that we arrive at formulas that can be verified through the phenomena. This is a path that anyone can take, even if they do not have an anthroposophical attitude.

But there is something else I would like to emphasize: do not think that the things I have told you in these four lectures were told to you because I was in an anthroposophical frame of mind. I told you these things because they are so. And the anthroposophical attitude follows only from the fact that one properly surveys things; the anthroposophical attitude does not precede things, but follows afterwards. One wants to recognize and understand things impartially, and then the anthroposophical attitude can follow. It would be badly ordered what I have said if one had to start from a prejudiced attitude. No, that is not the point at all. The point is to follow the phenomena in a strictly empirical way. The anthroposophical attitude must then be the last thing — even if I do not want to claim anything other than that it can nevertheless always be the best.

Question: What can be said about Schleich's works?

Rudolf Steiner: I prefer to talk about things in concrete rather than abstract terms. I have discussed many things with Professor Schleich and found that he is really very open to many ideas and has extremely interesting views on some subjects. But he cannot make the transition to the latter because he forms theories out of certain presuppositions - not out of a lack of presuppositions, but out of assumed presuppositions. Most of all, this confronted me – and I will now speak of an example – in a case he described to me; Professor Schleich described it to me before his book was published. A man came to him once who had pricked himself somewhere in an innocuous place with an ink pen, and he imagined that he had blood poisoning and would have to die during the night. He came to Schleich and wanted to have his arm amputated. Schleich looked at the arm and said: “That's not possible, it's not necessary at all, the sting is harmless, and I can't take your arm away.” The man went crazy with fear that he would die, he absolutely wanted to have his arm cut off, but Schleich sent him away. The man then went to another doctor, but he did not want to amputate the arm either. The next morning Schleich, who is a great philanthropist and humane man and, when he starts something, does not just leave it, went to the man. The man had actually died during the night. There was no trace of blood poisoning, and Schleich diagnosed: death by autosuggestion. Yes, that is easy to diagnose. But this is something completely different. It is a pity – or perhaps it was not possible – that the autopsy did not determine the real cause of death with certainty. It lay in something completely different. The man felt a certain presentiment, a certain premonition, that did not come to consciousness in such a way that one could have grasped it as a fully articulated presentiment. In the man's case, the approach of death was expressed not as some kind of physical sensation, but only in a mad fear; and the stabbing with the feather was nothing more than the man becoming clumsy and stabbing himself. And his whole behavior was nothing more than a certain presentiment; he would have died — stabbed or not. What was present was the premonition of the death living in the body, and the other was only symptomatic. One should also examine the case more closely from a psycho-physical point of view and not simply say: death by autosuggestion. - The matter was as I have now explained it, at least most likely. But this is something that Schleich did not want to be persuaded of; he stuck to his auto-suggestion, for which there is no evidence and which can only be said to be a daring hypothesis.

The same applies to other problems. Spiritual science wants to investigate everything empirically and not start from assumptions, while Schleich in particular really does have such favorite ideas in many cases. He is a witty and very humane man, but he cannot bring himself to be completely impartial and unprejudiced. But that is what must be striven for in anthroposophy, even with regard to such things that one values. And I can assure you, I appreciate Schleich's thoughts and work, which I know well; but if one asks, it must be pointed out that he always stops at something in this way. Anthroposophy wants to observe the phenomena in full impartiality in order to get to the bottom of reality, so that one can penetrate this reality with mathematical clarity.

I must again and again emphasize that it is not in the sense of any kind of sectarianism or amateurishness that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to assert itself here in Stuttgart. What is being striven for, even if it can only be done with the weakest of forces today, is genuine, true science. And the more spiritual science is examined in this way, the more it will be recognized as fully equal to every scientific method of examination. Spiritual science is not heaped with such misunderstandings out of real scientificness, as it is heaped today; its opponents truly do not fight it because they are too scientific, but - one goes after the thing -, because they are too little scientific. But in the future, we need not a drying up, but an increase, a real true progress of science, and in the end this can only be a progress that leads not only into the material, but also into the spiritual with complete precision.

Preliminary remark: In connection with the significance of the individual senses, the participant in the discussion, Dr. Hehnel (?), had pointed out the impressive example of Helen Keller, who, despite her multiple disabilities, has undergone an amazing development.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Hehnel has just raised an extremely important problem of a physiological-epistemological nature, and you will not consider it immodesty on my part if I interject a few words here, since I have to leave shortly - I would otherwise have done so at the end of the discussion. What Dr. Hehnel has said is something of eminent significance, and until these matters that have been raised here are thoroughly addressed, the problems at hand cannot be solved.

Now I would just like to point out that it was precisely this problem, which has now been pointed out in a commendable way, that compelled me, many years ago in Berlin, in lectures that I virtually titled “Anthroposophy”, to initially

AIR Art Sense Doctrine. And at the time I was obliged to abandon the book [I wanted to write about the sense doctrine], which had already been partially printed, because the material required further work. But I can say that work in this direction is in full swing within the overall anthroposophical endeavour. At the time, it was a matter of showing the different evaluation of that which is given on the one hand, I would like to say at the one pole of the human sense life, for which the sense of sight is of course particularly decisive, and how on the other hand something completely different is present - also in the experience of the human being - at the other pole of the human sense life, which now completely pushes into the motor life.

That is why I was obliged at the time to set the total number of our senses — which initially seems paradoxical — at twelve and not at the usual number that we otherwise have. If we go to the motor pole of sensory life, then we are indeed obliged not to limit this motor pole of sensory life to the sense of touch alone, but to carefully distinguish and analyze how touch, but also the sense of balance and the sense of movement, and so on, are incorporated into this motor pole of experience. These matters are still in the stage of, I would say, unstable research activity, and basically they must first be clearly formulated.

You see, my dear audience, if we stick to the one pole for which the sense of sight is particularly characteristic, we always enter a world for which we actually have no criterion of existence in our ordinary consciousness – concepts are always somewhat inadequate if we want to define them precisely. On the other hand, if you go to the other pole, you always come across certain experiences that at the same time carry the experience of being in the most eminent sense and actually, from certain physiological-psychological backgrounds, of which I have often, even very often spoken in my lectures, through preconditions that lie in all human nature, actually guarantee being.

As for those experiences that would never actually carry existence within them, at least not in the ordinary consciousness, and that lie at the other pole, I have once pointed out – it is indeed, I would say, compendiously formulated, which should actually be the subject of a [comprehensive] book – I have pointed out that only with a certain experience, which then takes place in that realm which I have called the imaginative realm, one is justified in speaking of concepts of being, that this only shows itself from the moment when one is able, in subjective experience, let us say, for example, in subjective experience of color, to carry the sense of equilibrium and movement up into the visual field, at least in suggestion. And on the other hand, it is again possible in a certain way in human experience to carry the experiences of the sense of sight down, if only, I might say, in a shadowy way, into those sensory areas that one must supplement only — as has rightly been emphasized — with one more sense: the sense of touch with the sense of movement and balance. Thus, for example, in the case of Helen Keller, when analyzed from a psychological point of view, the sense of balance comes into consideration in an outstanding way.

If these experiences are carried down, then it is possible that a case like that of Helen Keller will arise, and we will not arrive at an exhaustive characteristic of the so-called higher senses – I call them the visual senses or perceptual senses – if we are not able to carry the constructive elements that we obtain for the sense of touch into this area in a certain way. On the other hand, we must regain the ability to bring into what we call the will senses — I have often used this expression, and those who have heard my lectures will remember how I tried to extract the concepts from the human being — we must, on the other hand, bring into these will senses certain, I would say side effects from the image senses. We must be clear about the fact that without working on this field, which has been addressed here in such a commendable way, we would actually gradually come to develop a theory that would only take the pictorial out of the whole range of what is to be experimented on, and that we have to listen very carefully to precisely such things.

It is extraordinarily interesting to look at other cultural phenomena from this point of view. Consider, for example, what we produce in our pictorial art. In this age, when perspective has taken hold, the picturesque has been projected more or less solely through the sense of sight – this point in time can be easily identified in cultural history, it is not so far in the past. It was roughly in the 11th, 12th, 13th century that this transition became clearly apparent, that the painterly was first incorporated into the perspective, that is, into the ocular. If we go back further, we find that something much more universal, a human experience, underlies [the picturesque], that perspective recedes and that what man experiences, so to speak, when he immerses himself in the world with his naked senses, that is actually found in pictures. That is again a brief suggestion, and it would take a thick book to fully elaborate.

But it is interesting that someone – I can't remember his name at the moment – said with great justification: If you look at Japanese painting, you get the feeling that the vanishing point of perspective is assumed not outside but inside the human being. – In a certain way, if you paint in a more 'primitive' way, you actually do paint from the center. But then, of course, one can simply paint purely with one's eyes, and this will appear before us in a completely different way [from Japanese painting]. So one can say - and this is the crucial point that I want to emphasize very strongly in my lectures - that this object-consciousness, which I certainly do not find mentioned here as something that would be, say, a profanation, but on the contrary that this object-consciousness, which we have now finally arrived at in the course of the development of scientific research, should be taken into account everywhere, so that anthroposophy is actually founded on the condition that everything that modern science can give is taken into account. Otherwise, anthroposophy will enter into the realm of nebulous mysticism, because, on the one hand, in the development of human knowledge, we run the risk of getting lost in the senses of will, growing more and more into existence, but losing the possibility of gaining imagery from existence. On the other hand, we run the risk of living ourselves into the pictorial senses and then experiencing what Dilthey described as what would happen if we only perceived things in a fashioned way through the sense of sight. We would then have to live in a world of mere images, and we must guard against this danger by having an anthroposophy that is firmly grounded in reality.

You will have sensed that one thing emerged sharply – and rightly so – from the extraordinarily interesting words of the previous speaker: namely, that Helen Keller was able to undergo a certain spiritual and psychological development despite the fact that she lacked the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, and that the other senses, such as the sense of smell and the sense of taste, I believe, were atrophied. Nevertheless, it was possible to enable her to have a very extensive spiritual and emotional experience with the help of her sense of balance, movement and touch. And it was said that one should imagine that a person had only developed the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, but not the sense of balance, the sense of touch and the sense of movement – what would happen then? It was rightly said that what happened to Helen Keller could not happen to these volitional senses: it would not be possible, if the volitional senses were then absent, to transfer the experiences to the sense of sight.

But there is something else to be said about this, which seems to me to be extremely important and significant. It is precisely at the point, which is, so to speak, a point at an abyss, where one must pass from the pictorial to the real, where one must also pass with one's comprehension from this pictorial to the real, [and it is precisely this point that matters], and that is: A person like Helen Keller, who lacks the senses of sight and hearing and has the other senses by virtue of his or her physical organization, can exist in this world of air and soil, and even develop to a certain extent. But a person who only has the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, cannot develop on this earth in the air and on the ground, and cannot even come into existence at all – such a person does not exist within our earthly existence, it is unthinkable. This sharply defines the relationship – initially only conceptually – between the visual senses and the will senses, based on reality.

Thus an important problem has been raised in the most eminent sense, and I see it as my sole task to point out in a few words that this problem is felt within anthroposophy, and that we do not want to fall back into a nebulous mysticism by merely adhering to the higher senses, but that we want to work in full harmony with the justified spirit of scientific research of modern times.

Dear fellow students, If I attempt to present to you today something from the field of what for a number of years I have been calling anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I do so in the knowledge that this evening, in what is effectively a first lecture, I will be able to give nothing more than a few suggestions and that I am under no illusion that such a presentation will instantly create any kind of conviction. But perhaps it will be possible, after the general description that I will give, to satisfy specific wishes and to address specific questions in the discussion that follows.

In order not to take up too much of our time, I would like to address the most important point first, and that is to give a characteristic of what spiritual science in an anthroposophically oriented sense actually wants to be. It differs from what is usually called science in the method of its research. And it is convinced that, in the latest period of time, a serious and honest striving in science, if consistently pursued, must ultimately lead to its method. I would like to speak to you in a thoroughly scientific sense, since I myself truly did not start from any theological point of view, nor from any world-view questions or philosophies in the sense in which they are usually cultivated, but rather I myself started from technical studies. And out of technical studies themselves, this spiritual science presented itself to me as a necessity of our historical period of development. Therefore, I am particularly pleased to be able to speak to you this evening.

When we do natural science, in the sense of today's thinking, we first have something in front of us that extends around us as the world of sensual facts. And we then use our thinking, we use in particular our methodically trained thinking, to find laws from a corresponding pursuit of these sensual facts. We look for what we are accustomed to calling natural laws, historical laws and so on. This way of relating to the world is not something that the humanities reject, but they want to stand on the firm ground of this research. But it does its research, standing on this firm ground, I might say, by starting from the point of view of human life itself. It comes, precisely because it wants to do serious scientific research, simply to the limit of scientific knowledge, which is fully admitted by level-headed natural scientists. And with regard to what natural science can be, it is entirely on the side of those who say: In the summary of external facts, we advance to a certain level with scientific methodology, but we cannot go beyond a certain limit if we remain on the ground of this natural scientific research itself.

But then, when what is sought in ordinary life and also in ordinary natural science is achieved, only then does the goal of spiritual science as it is meant here begin. We come to certain boundary concepts by thinking about and understanding the facts around us. I am mentioning here only such limiting concepts, whether they are conceived as mere functions or as realities, limiting concepts such as atom, matter and so on. We operate at least with them, even if we do not seek demonic entities behind them. These limiting concepts, limiting ideas, which confront us particularly when we follow the scientific branches that are fundamental to technology, stand there as it were like pillars. And if you want to stop at the limits of ordinary science, you will remain standing right in front of these boundary pillars.

But for the spiritual researcher, as I mean him here, the actual work begins only at these border pillars. There it is a matter of the spiritual researcher, in what I call meditation - please do not take offense at this, it is a technical term like others - entering into a certain inner struggle, an inner struggling of life with these concepts, more or less with all the border concepts of natural science. And this inner struggle does not remain unfruitful for him.

In this context, I must mention a man who taught here in this city, at this university, in the second half of the last century, and who repeatedly emphasized this struggle that man enters into when he comes to the limits of ordinary science. It is Friedrich Theodor Vischer who knew something of what the human being can experience when he arrives at the concepts of matter, atom, natural law, force, and so on. What I mean here does not consist in brooding, but in consulting everything in the depths of our soul that has led to these concepts, in trying to live with these concepts in meditation.

What does that actually mean? It means establishing the inner discipline within oneself to be able to look, just as one otherwise looks at external objects, at what one finally has in one's soul when one arrives at such a borderline concept; I could name many others to you besides those I have just mentioned. Then, when one tries to concentrate the whole range of the soul on such concepts, abstracting from all other experiences, one makes an inward discovery. And this inner discovery is something quite overwhelming. It shows us that from a certain point in life, in our inner life, our concepts become something that grows in our soul through itself, that is different after such inner meditative work than it is when we take it only as the result of external observation. Just as we observe in the growing child how certain organs, which first appear more undifferentiated, become more differentiated, how we perceive how organs grow, so in such meditative devotion to the results of scientific experience we feel how an inner growth of the soul takes place. And then comes the shocking realization that it is not through speculation, not through speculative philosophy that one goes beyond what is called the limit of natural knowledge, but through direct experience, that is, by transforming what one has gained through thinking into inner experience of beholding.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the first step that is taken. It can be clearly felt how the method becomes quite different and how, therefore, something completely new occurs in comparison to the usual scientific method, which can be objectively recognized more than by anyone else, but also by me, in that mere thinking, mere comprehension, passes over into inner experience. And then, through consistent, patient, persistent experience in this direction, what occurs cannot ultimately be called anything other than an experience of spiritual existence. One cannot speak about the experience of the spiritual world in any other way from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For this experience of the spiritual world is not something that is innate in man. It is something that must be achieved by man. When one has reached a certain level of this experience, one realizes that our thinking, which we otherwise use to grasp our environment, is in a different relationship to our entire physical being than one is forced to assume from mere knowledge of nature.

From the mere knowledge of nature, one notices how the physical changes and transformations, with youth, with old age and so on, also change the states of the soul. With scientific thinking, one can go further physiologically. It can be shown how the nervous system and the brain actually express the structure and configuration of our thinking. And if you follow this matter consistently from one side, you can say: Yes, something emerges from something else, which of course today could only be established hypothetically, that which is thinking, that which is life in thought.

The one who has experienced this inwardly, which I have characterized as being able to be experienced, speaks differently, saying: When one walks, for my part over a soggy road or when a car drives over a soggy road, then one has the impression of furrows, of footsteps. It would obviously be quite wrong to put forward the theory, just because you don't know, that it must have been an extraterrestrial being that created these footsteps, these furrows, or to put forward the hypothesis that there are certain forces below the earth's surface that work in such a way that they have caused these footsteps, these furrows.

Thus one says – and I say expressly, with a certain right – from a scientific point of view: That which is the physiological formation of the brain is what, in the end, is expressed in the function of thinking. The person who has experienced what I have characterized does not say it that way; they say: Just as these grooves and furrows are not raised from within by the inner forces of the earth, but rather as if something has passed over them, so the physical brain has been placed in its furrows by the body-free thinking. And that which, in a certain way, when we entered physical existence through birth, changes these furrows, that is also what, descending from spiritual worlds, does the work of shaping these furrows in the first place.

In this way, it is established that the soul is absolutely the active principle, that it is what first gives form to the body. I know, my dear audience, that hundreds of objections can be raised against what I am saying, if one starts only from the intellectual-theoretical point of view. But spiritual science must point to the experience. It must point out that until this experience takes place, one is justified in believing that thought life arises as a function from the physical brain, whereas when one experiences this thought life oneself, one knows how it is active in itself, how it is substantial and moving in itself, and how it is actually active in relation to the passivity of the physical body.

So what is presented as a first initial experience is not something that is gained through a straightforward continuation of ordinary scientific methods, but only through a metamorphosis, only through a transformation of the ordinary scientific method into a method that can only be experienced, which consists not in speculation but in an inner experience.

That is one side of it. The other side of this inner experience relates more to the inner development of the human will. By looking at our lives, we can see the transformations we have undergone in life. We think back to how we were in our inner soul and outer bodily state one, five, ten years ago, and we say to ourselves: we have undergone changes, transformations. These changes, these transformations that we undergo, how do we undergo them? We passively surrender to the outside world in a certain way. We just need to say: hand on heart, how active are we in what we have initially become through the outside world? The outside world, heredity, education and so on, shapes us; and what shapes us in it continues to have an effect. As a rule, we are actually the passive ones. If we now transform this into activity, if we form out of it what one could call in the most eminent sense self-discipline, and in the way I will characterize it in a moment, then the second element is added to what we have characterized as the first element in the path of spiritual research. If one brings it to that - and this can only be achieved through methodical schooling in the sense presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other books - if one brings it to that through methodical schooling, to say to oneself, “I will plan, even if only a small part of what that is to arise in me, I will resolve that this or that quality shall become mine. And if I succeed in actually producing such a quality in me, perhaps only after years, by a strong arousal of the will, if I make of myself that which I would otherwise only passively experience in life , if I take my will, if I may express it somewhat paradoxically, into my own hands and take full control of my development – in a certain part one can of course only do so – then what otherwise is merely memory, in a certain way, also comes together to form a real area. You get a kind of overview of your life, as if you were looking at a series of things, and you then come to know the will in its true character.

While one gets to know thinking as something that actually detaches itself from the physical the more one enters into life, one comes to recognize one's will in such a way that it actually encompasses the physical more and more, permeates us more and more, flows through us, and that basically death is nothing more than a struggle of the will with the physical functions have reached a certain limit when we pass through an earlier or later death, and that then that which can no longer work our body in this way, the will, is completely absorbed in what the body does, that this will detaches itself and that an element of the soul now actually enters a real, a spiritual world when we pass away.

So it is a matter of the fact that what is usually called the idea of immortality is not pursued by any speculation of the spiritual science meant here, that basically this spiritual science completely breaks with the way in which the world usually approaches this idea. The point is that spiritual science, as a continuation of scientific research through the training of thought and will, actually manages to grasp what we carry within us, thinking and willing, in such a way that we can also grasp it when this soul, which lives in thinking and willing, lives in a disembodied way that can no longer be reached by the senses.

Of course, what I have briefly explained here will be regarded by the widest circles of our present time as something fantastic and visionary. But how could it be otherwise? Everything that comes into the world as something new and seemingly contradicts what was already there is initially regarded as something fantastic and visionary. But I do not believe that it will remain so for all time, that people will not recognize that what has been described here as the method of spiritual science, at least in two of its characteristic elements, is only a continuation, but a lively continuation, of what natural science actually achieves, but with which natural science comes up against a certain limit.

Today, when one speaks of the spirit in general, it is no longer entirely taken amiss. This was still the case in the last third of the 19th century, when a certain materialistic way of forming a world view out of scientific knowledge was used to draw the only logical conclusion of scientific thinking itself. Today it is again permitted to speak of the spirit, at least in a speculative way. But one is still very much taken aback when one speaks of the spirit in the way I have just done, because that has a certain consequence.

When one has acquired what I have called in my book “The Riddle of Man” the “seeing consciousness,” when one has acquired what arises out of such developed thinking and willing, then one knows oneself in a spiritual world through this seeing consciousness - just as one knows oneself through one's eyes and ears in a world of color and sound. In a sense, the world around us is filled with spirit. Just as the world around a person who was born blind is filled with something new when, after undergoing an operation, he begins to see colors at a certain point in his life, so it is when this seeing consciousness occurs. The world, to which one was accustomed to look upon as the world of the senses and of the combining intellect, is filled with spirituality. And the spirit becomes something concrete. The spirit becomes something that one can follow in its concrete formation. One no longer speaks of the spirit in general. When someone speaks of the spirit in general, it is as if a person were walking across a meadow where flowers are growing. If you ask him: what kind of flower is that and what kind is that, he will answer: they are all plants, plants, plants. So today we also allow people to say: behind the sensory world there is a spiritual world. But spiritual science cannot stop there. It must examine the spiritual facts in the concrete – because the spiritual world is around us just as the colored or the sounding world is – in the same way that one otherwise examines the colored and sounding world with the senses and the combining intellect. And in doing so, one acquires, above all, a very specific way of relating to the world. It is also the case that if you are born blind and suddenly gain your sight, you acquire a different relationship to the world. You first have to find your bearings; you know nothing about spatial perspective, you have to learn it first. So, of course, you also have to acquire a certain relationship, a certain position to the world when you pass over into the seeing consciousness. Then many things appear to you in a peculiar way. That is why the spiritual researcher is still misunderstood by his contemporaries.

You see, the spiritual researcher never says that what has been gained through the method of strict natural science, or what has been drawn from the consequences of these results of strict natural science, is in any way logically incorrectly followed or anything of the sort, but he is compelled to add something from his spiritual insight, which is then not merely added on, but which in many respects completely changes the results of natural science.

Take geology, for example. I will pick out one example. It is better to talk about specific questions than to use general phrases. I understand completely and was able to follow this method myself: if you examine the geological layers that lie on top of each other from what is happening around us today in the formations of rocks, in the deposits of rivers and water and so on, and then calculate - even if the subject is not always a real calculation, but only something approximate – when you calculate how long these rock layers have existed, then you get the known figures. And then, as you all know, we arrive at the beginning of the earth's development, where the earth - as is hypothetically assumed - formed out of something, out of a kind of primeval nebula or something similar. I do not need to go into this in more detail. You are familiar with all this.

But for the spiritual researcher it is so, simply because he has experienced such things as I have described to you - though only in outline, to stimulate interest, not to convince - for the spiritual researcher it is so that he must say to himself: I assume that someone is examining the changes in a human organism, say the changes in the heart every five years. I follow how the human heart or another organ changes over the course of five or ten years, what happens there. And now I calculate what I have seen, if I simply consistently deduce from what I have calculated what it was like three hundred years ago. I get a certain result, albeit purely arithmetical, of what this human heart was like three hundred years ago. The only objection to this is that this heart did not even exist at that time. Just as correct as the geological approach would be to conclude from the small changes in the human heart what that heart was like three hundred years ago, only it was not even there at that time. Equally correct – for I fully recognize that what geology reveals has at least a relative correctness – is also everything that is deduced from the geological facts for the development of the earth. But we then transpose what arises for us as a consequence of our calculation into times when the earth did not yet exist in its present form. Or we transpose what arises from our observations, which were made over a limited period of time, into an epoch that lies millions of years ahead, by calculating an end state and speaking of entropy or the like. For the spiritual researcher, this is the same as if he were to calculate what the nature of the human heart will be after three hundred years.

That is what you arrive at when you convert the ordinary scientific method into something that can be experienced. Because, you see, man is actually like an extract of the whole cosmos. In man you find - somehow changed, somehow extracted, compensated or the like - what is present in the cosmos as a law. You will ask me: Yes, how can you, a dreamer, claim that the earth has not yet existed in its present form? You must show us a way to arrive at such a claim.

I will attempt to characterize, albeit only sketchily, how one arrives at such assertions as I have put forward. One discovers, by experiencing the volition, the thinking, as I have described to you, that man really is a kind of microcosm. I do not say this as a phrase, as the nebulous mystics say, but in the awareness that it has become as clear to me as any solution to a differential equation, out of complete logical clarity. Man is inwardly a compendium of the whole world. And just as in our ordinary life we do not know only what is sensually surrounding us at the moment, just as we, by looking beyond what is sensually surrounding us at this moment, look at the image of something we have experienced about ten or fifteen years ago , how it emerges before us as something that no longer exists – but something of it is present in us, which enables us to reconstruct what was present back then – it is the same with the expanded consciousness that arises from the transformation of ordinary thinking and willing. In that man was actually connected with all that is past, only in a more comprehensive sense, in a completely different sense, in a more spiritual sense, was connected with what is past than he was connected with experiences ten or fifteen years ago, which he can bring up again from his inner being, so it is possible, when consciousness is broadened, we simply find out what was there from a cosmic memory, where we were present, and what does not live on in us for ordinary consciousness, but what lives on for the consciousness that has arisen through the metamorphosis that I have described.

It is therefore nothing more than an expansion, an increase of that power which is otherwise our power of remembrance, whereby man inwardly, simply from his own nature, which is a summary of the macrocosm, constructively resurrects that which actually was on our earth in a certain period of time. Man then looks at a state of the earth when it was not yet material. And whereas he would otherwise have to construct something from the present-day experiences of geology that was supposed to have existed at that time, he now looks at a point in time when the earth was not yet there, when it was in a much more spiritual form. He sees, by constructively recreating what lives in him, that which actually underlies the formation of our earth.

And it is the same with what can emerge in us in a certain constructive way from a future state of the earth. I know how unsatisfactory such a sketchy description must be, but you can see from it that what I characterize as spiritual science is not drawn from thin air or from fantasy.

It is, of course, something unusual. But then, once you have completed the metamorphosis of consciousness, what you constructively represent inwardly is just as clear to your consciousness as what you conjure up in mathematics or geometry, which is also constructed from within the human being.

And when someone comes and says, “Yes, but you have to assert something that all people can understand,” I say, “Yes, that is also the case, but the first thing to be considered is that the person who wants to understand something must first go through everything that is necessary to do so – just as someone who wants to solve a differential equation must first go through what will enable him to solve it.

And if someone objects on the other hand: Yes, mathematical geometry only presents something to our consciousness that we apply when we follow the reality of the external world – then I say: Yes, that is so, but if we constructively present this to ourselves, then we arrive at the conviction that it is a mere formality. If you are aware of what is being characterized, you know that it is a reality. And if someone says that this might be self-suggestion, then I say: everything that gives us the possibility of saying that something is real is only a result of experience. And when some people object that someone could be mistaken, that someone could, for example, have the vivid thought of citric acid when drinking something and if they are sensitive, they could even have the taste of lemon – I say: that is possible. But just as in ordinary life one can distinguish the mere thought of heat from the heat that comes from actually touching a hot iron, so too, through inner experience, if one has the seeing consciousness, one can distinguish between what is mere imagination, what is mere suggestion, and what is reality, because the grasping of all reality is an inner experience. And it is necessary to follow things through to the end, not to stop somewhere. Anyone who stops short of where the path should actually lead may succumb to suggestion. I therefore say: It is indeed possible, if someone is sensitive and gives themselves over to autosuggestion, to say: I have the thought of lemonade, I even feel the taste – but the thought of lemonade will not quench one's thirst. What matters is that one passes from the sensation of taste to quenching one's thirst, that one follows the path consistently. The experience must be pursued consistently, then the fact that one designates something as reality in the spiritual sense is also entirely the result of the experience. The designation of a sensual reality or reality cannot be theoretically established, but is a result of experience.

Now, dear attendees, I have characterized the spiritual science that comes to a modern, natural scientific person when they go through what life offers today. This life has truly changed extraordinarily in the last thirty to fifty years, especially through the advances in technology. When I think back to the time when the first chair of technology was established in Vienna in the early 1880s, and consider all that has happened since then, I get some idea of how much this modern man has changed as a result of everything that has been drawn into our cognitive, our moral, but especially our social life. Those who have honestly gone through this, who do not say out of some prejudice: Oh well, science can't give us anything! but who takes the view that natural science can give us a great deal, who is completely absorbed in the triumphs of modern natural science, can come to realize that what underlies the world spiritually must be grasped in the way I have tried to present to you today.

Then one looks back to earlier times in the development of humanity and says to oneself: In these earlier times of human development, people hardly spoke of the spirit at all. And the way in which they spoke of the spirit has been preserved traditionally in various religious beliefs, which, if one is completely honest and does not want to keep double accounts of life, one truly cannot reconcile with the results of ordinary natural science today. These spiritual experiences, it must be said, arise from a completely different state of consciousness in people. What we have learned through the three to four centuries in which scientific methods have been developed, what we have become as a state of mind through the Copernican and Galilean way of thinking, through Kepler, we have gone through everything that has subtracted the technical laws from the laws of nature in more recent times, through Kepler, by The entire configuration of the soul has changed, not by becoming more theoretical, but by becoming more conscious. Through the development of humanity, we have necessarily left certain instinctive states of earlier ages. And we look back at what earlier ages sensed as spirituality, which has been preserved in religious traditions, and we say to ourselves: What was there then as spirituality was grasped by human instinct. One could not say that this was dependent on such a heightening of consciousness through the methods of natural science, through the methods of social experience in modern times. People spoke in such a way that, when they saw natural phenomena, these natural phenomena, as it were, endowed them with the spirit of what they were speaking about. How did an ancient civilized Egyptian relate to the world? He looked up, followed the course of the stars, the configuration of the starry sky. He saw not only what Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler saw in this starry sky, but he saw something that at the same time revealed a spiritual reality for him. Just as, when I move my arm, a soul-active underlies this hand movement, so the human being of earlier epochs felt in what happened externally that which underlies this external event as a spiritual, but instinctively.

Then came the more recent period, the time of natural science. I would like to say that we look back on a long period of human development that did not actually reach its conclusion until around the middle of the 15th century, when people could not help but see what was around them with their senses as something spiritual at the same time. When we speak of physical states today, of solid, liquid, gaseous forms, we speak in such a way that we consider the material. Ancient man, when he spoke of what are for us today the physical states, saw them as elements, but these elements were not merely material; they were the spiritual that manifested itself in them. What surrounded man as the material world was for him just as much the external physical-spiritual expression of the spiritual-soul as the physical organism is for us an expression of the spiritual-soul - but all instinctively. This path has necessarily been abandoned in the last three to four centuries, when humanity passed over to something quite different, which then became guiding in civilization. Mankind moved on to what distinguished the observation of nature from mere observation, which is always connected with the instinctive, with the spiritual observation of nature, which is still hidden in the name 'contemplation'. Man moved on from mere observation of nature to what could be called experimental comprehension of nature.

Since Bacon and others have been working, the mere observation of nature has been replaced by the experimental comprehension of nature. We do the experiment in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet, which we then extend to the technical work. In that which we ourselves bring about as a condition for some natural event, we survey these very conditions. Through the experiment, we are in a different position than in mere observation of nature. In nature, I cannot know whether what is revealed to me, be it for my mind or for my imagination, whether that is also some totality or whether I have to delve into it, much, much deeper than the thing initially presents itself to me. In short, despite all exact observation, what I observe in nature remains before me as an unknown. When I have an experiment before me, I establish the conditions myself; I follow how one thing is evoked out of another, and what is then still unknown is basically what is actually of interest. When you design an experiment and then observe what can be observed, you are actually looking at the result of what follows from the conditions that are manageable for you. In the experiment, everything is transparent in a completely different way than what I observe in nature.

And so, little by little, people have become accustomed to regarding themselves as interpreters of nature in the manageable context of the experiment, to some extent to tracing the law of nature where they themselves can trace the conditions of its manifestation. However, this experimental method is still linked to a certain inner yearning that used to underpin knowledge through and through. In those ancient times, when there was as yet no technology, no natural science in our sense, what was regarded as science had emerged primarily from the desire to know, from the desire to recognize, to explore, “what holds the world together in its inmost being,” if I may express it in this way. Now that the experimental method has emerged, it is not only the desire for knowledge that drives us, but also the desire to recreate what nature forms. But the old desire for knowledge still lives on. We recreate what we want to see in the experiment in order to unravel nature itself through what we can see. In recent times, technology has emerged from this experimental method with a certain matter-of-factness, and with technology we have entered a new phase.

We can therefore say that in the history of human development, we first have research determined by the desire for knowledge, then the experimental method, which, however, still combines the longing of the old quest for knowledge with the recreation of nature. But if we trace the path from what can be experienced through experimentation to what happens as a result of the laws of nature that are recognized through experimentation, to what then happens through technical design, which so deeply intervene in human and social life, we have to say to ourselves: there is a third element present that passes from what we still have in recreating nature to what is now creative in man himself. This creative power – I do not believe that I am speaking to completely insensitive souls when I say the following about this creative power: the person who, with that peculiar characteristic style, with that peculiar state of soul constitution is undergoing a technical training, feels differently in this training than someone who is undergoing, for example, a theological training, which is a reproduction of the oldest methods of knowledge, or an already experimental scientific training. Those who undergo an experimental scientific training apply the mathematical, the geometrical, the theoretical-mechanical, the photometric, and so on, to what they observe there. He, as it were, recalculates nature.

One stands on a completely different level of consciousness when one first has before one that which is, as it were, completely inwardly transparent: the mathematical, the geometrical. And when one applies this not only in experiment, that is, in reproducing nature, but when one applies it in completely free creation to the design of machines. When you see that what you have experienced as mathematics, as theoretical-mechanistic chemistry, penetrates into the design of a technical structure, you experience the world in a completely different way than the mere naturalist or the theorizing technician.

What is the actual difference? One often fails to consider this. Imagine that in our ordinary, trivial lives we describe everything as “real”, even that which is not real in a higher sense. We call a rose “real”. But is a rose real in a higher sense? If I have it here in front of me, torn from the rose stem, it cannot live. It can only be shaped as it is when it grows on the rose stem, when it grows out of the rose root. By cutting it off, I actually have a real abstraction in front of me, something that cannot exist as I have it in front of me. But this is the case with every natural structure to a certain extent. When I look at a natural formation, even at a crystal, which is the least likely to exist, I cannot understand it just by looking at it, because it basically cannot exist by itself any more than the rose can. So I would have to say: this crystal is only possible in the whole environment, perhaps having grown out of a geode in the mountain formation.

But when I have before me something that I myself have formed as a technical structure, I feel differently about it. You can feel that, even feel it as something radically significant in the experience of the modern human being, who looks at what technology has become in modern life from the perspective of his or her technical education. When I have a technical structure that I have constructed from mathematics, from theoretical mechanics, I have something in front of me that is self-contained. And if I live in what is basically the scope of all technical creation, then I have before me not just a reflection of the laws of nature, but in what has become technical entities out of the laws of nature, I actually have something new in front of me. It is something different that underlies the laws of the technical structures than what also underlies inorganic nature.

It is not just that the laws of inorganic nature are simply transferred, but that the whole meaning of the structure in relation to the cosmos becomes different, in that I, as a freely creating human being, transfer what I otherwise experience from the design of physical or chemical investigations into the technical structure.

But with that, one can say: in that modern humanity has come to extract the technical from the whole scope of the natural, in that we had to learn in modern times to live in the realm of the technical in such a way that we we stand with human consciousness in a completely different relationship to the technical than to that which is produced in nature, we say to ourselves: Now it is for the first time that we stand before a world that is now, so to speak, spiritually transparent. The world of nature research is in a certain way spiritually opaque; one does not see to the bottom of it. The world of technology is like a transparent crystal - spiritually understood, of course. With this, a new stage in the spiritual development of humanity has truly been reached, precisely with modern technology. Something else has entered into the developmental history of humanity. That is why modern philosophers have not known how to deal with what has emerged in this modern consciousness precisely through the triumphs of technology. Perhaps I may point out how little the purely philosophical, speculative way of thinking could do with what has seized modern human consciousness, precisely from the point of view of technology. Today we are much more seized by what emanates from the leading currents of human development than we realize. What is now general consciousness was not yet there when there were no newspapers, when the only spiritual communication was that people heard the pastor speak from the pulpit on Sundays. What is now general education flows through certain channels from the leading currents into the broad masses, without people being aware of it. And so, basically, what came through technical consciousness has, in the course of a very short time, shaped the forms of thought of the broadest masses; it lives in the broadest masses without them being aware of it.

And so we can say that something completely new has moved in. And where a consciousness has become one-sided - which, fortunately, we have not yet achieved in Europe - where a consciousness has become one-sided, almost obsessed with this abstraction, a strange philosophical trend emerged, the so-called pragmatism of William James and others, which says: truth, ideas that merely want to be truth, that is something unreal at all. In truth, only that which we see can be realized is truth. As human beings, we set certain goals for ourselves; we then shape reality accordingly. And when we say to ourselves: This or that is real according to a natural law, we form a corresponding structure out of it. If we can realize in the machine, in mechanics, what we imagine, then it is proved to us by the application in life that this is true. But there is no other proof than that of application in life. And so only that which we can realize in life is true. The so-called pragmatism, which denies all logical internal pursuit of truth and actually only accepts the truth of truth through what is accomplished externally, figures today in the broadest circles as American philosophy. And that is something that some people in Europe have also grasped for decades, even before the war.

All those philosophers who still want to think in the old ways know of no other way to proceed with what has emerged as a newer technique, as the awareness of newer techniques, than to set the concept of truth aside altogether. By stepping out of the instinctive grasping of nature, out of the experimental recreation of nature, towards the free shaping of nature, nothing remains for them but free external shaping. The inner experience of truth, that spiritual experience of the soul that can permeate the soul, is actually denied, and only that which can be realized in the external, purposeful structures is considered truth. That is to say, the concept of truth that is inherent in the human soul is actually set aside.

Now, another development is also possible; it is possible that we will experience how something is emerging from the actual substance of technical structures, something that is no longer natural, in which there is now nothing that we can intuit, but only what we can survey. For if we cannot grasp it, we cannot shape it. By experiencing this, by thoroughly permeating ourselves with what can be experienced in it, a certain need must awaken in us all the more. This new external world presents itself to us without the inner realization of the ideas, without the inner experience of the ideas. Therefore, through this new experience, we are prepared for the pure experience of what spirituality is, of what man, abstracted from all external observation, must experience within, as I tried to outline at the beginning of my reflections today.

And so I believe that, because we have advanced in the developmental history of humanity to a view of that reality that we can survey externally, where we can no longer see any demoniacal, ghostly aspect in externality, because we have finally arrived at the point where we can no longer interpret the external sensual in such a way that we say it is opaque to us and we can assume that behind it there is something spiritual. So we must seek to find the forces for the spirit within us through the development of the soul.

It has always seemed to me that a truly honest experience of the consciousness that comes to us precisely from technology calls upon us – because otherwise what is intimately connected with our human nature would almost would otherwise be lost to us - to experience in our inner being what spirituality is, and thus to add to the one pole of transparent mechanics and transparent chemistry that which can now be attained through spiritual insight, that which can be presented to people in the spirit. It seems to me that it is necessary in our time for the spiritual insight of Anthroposophy to reveal itself for the reason that we have indeed reached a certain stage of development in human history.

And there is another factor, honored attendees: with this newer technology, a new social life has emerged at the same time. I do not need to describe how modern technology has created modern industrialism, how this modern technology has produced the modern proletariat in the form it is in today. But it seems to me that if we only want to take the standpoint of the earlier scientific method, the standpoint of that which emerges from observation, then our thoughts fall short. We cannot grasp what is truly revealed in social life. To grasp what emerges in social life from the human, it is necessary that we come to truths that reveal themselves only through human nature itself. And so I believe that Marxism and other similar quackery, which today put people in such turmoil, can only be overcome if one finds special methods that are applied as a necessary counterbalance to technology applied to the social life of human beings, and if, through this, it becomes possible to bring spirituality into the outer life, into the broad masses, because one has found this spirituality through inner experience, hard,

Therefore it is no mere accident that out of the same soil out of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose for me, there also grew, truly unsought, what I tried to present in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. I simply tried to draw the consequences for social life from what spiritual-scientific knowledge is. And what I have presented in this book emerged quite naturally.

I do not believe that without spiritual science one can find the methods to grasp how man stands to man in social life. And I believe that, because we have not yet been able to recognize social life, this life will not allow itself to be conquered by us and that we will therefore initially be plunged into chaos at the moment when, after the terrible catastrophe of war, people are faced with the necessity of rebuilding it. It is necessary to carry out what is to be carried out on the basis of spiritual laws, not on the basis of the law that a misconceived understanding believes can be based on natural laws, as is the case in Marxism and other radical formulations of social science.

So, dear attendees, I was able to give a reason for something that is actually quite personal to me, right here in front of you. And I may say: Speaking to you now, I feel transported back to an earlier time, to the 1880s, when we in Central Europe were living in a time that was felt by all to be a time of ascent. We – those people who, like me, have grown old – have now arrived at a point in time where the hopes of the springtime that emerged back then take on a rather tragic form in our minds. Those who look back on what then seemed like an invincible ascent now look back on something in which, for many people, something reveals itself that was in fact an error in many respects.

In speaking to you, I am speaking to fellow students who are in a different situation. Many of you are probably the same age as I was when I experienced that springtime hope; now you are experiencing something that is very different from the fantasies that arose from the springtime hopes of that time in the human soul. But someone who is as filled with the possibility and necessity of spiritual knowledge as the one speaking to you can never be pessimistic about the power of human nature; he can only be optimistic. And that is why it does not appear to me as something that I do not present as a possibility before my soul, that once you have reached the age at which I am speaking to you today, you have gone through the opposite path – that opposite path that now leads upwards again from the power of the human soul, above all from the spiritual power of the human soul. And because I believe in man out of spiritual knowledge, I believe that one cannot speak, as Spengler does, of a downfall, of a death of Western civilization. But because I believe in the power of the soul that lives in you, I believe that we must come to an ascent again. Because this ascent is not caused by an empty phantom, but by human will. And I believe so strongly in the truth of the spiritual science described to you that I am convinced: This will of men can be carried, can cause a new ascent, can cause a new dawn. And so, my honored audience, I would like to close with the words that first fell on my ears as a young student when the new rector for mechanics and mechanical engineering in Vienna delivered his inaugural address. At that time, for people who also believed in a new ascent, and rightly believed in it, even if only a technical ascent came later, not a social, not a political ascent. But now we are in a period in which, if we do not want to despair, we can and must think only of an ascent. That is why I say what that man said to us young people back then: “Fellow students, I conclude by saying that the one who feels honestly about the development of humanity in the face of what is to arise from all science and all technology can only say: Always forward!”

Discussion

Question: What entitles us to go beyond the limits of thinking, to leave the unity of thinking and to move from thinking to meditation?

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It seems to me that this question is about something very significant, which, however, can only be fully understood through thorough epistemological and epistemological reflection. But I will try to point out a few things that come into consideration when answering this question.

Perhaps I may draw attention to the last chapter that I added to the second edition of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in which I described the development of philosophy itself and in which I then tried to show how, at the present moment in human development has arrived at the point where philosophy, so to speak, demands of itself this going beyond of thinking about the point of view of thinking that arises precisely when one has reached the limits of the knowledge of nature. I tried to show the following at the time:

People can, if they study the methods of knowledge acquisition in detail, as the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond did, arrive at the point of view that Du Bois-Reymond expressed in his lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” at the famous natural science conference in Leipzig in the 1870s and also repeated in his lecture on “The Seven World Riddles”. I will only briefly point out that at that time Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the fact that with the application of what has been called “unified thinking” here, one comes to develop the so-called Laplacian mind, that is, to develop such thinking about matter as is possible when one seeks to grasp the course of the planets of a solar system using astronomical-mathematical methods.

If we now turn our attention, through a certain inner contemplation, to what takes place within ourselves, if we try to make the subject into the object, then it turns out that this thinking, which we develop, cannot be defined as being there to depict some external world or to combine the facts of an external world. In what is thought about thinking, I must still see a last remnant of that old teleology, that old doctrine of purpose, which everywhere asks not why but for what purpose, which does not ask how it comes that the whole organization of man or any other organism or an organ like the hand is formed in a certain way, but which asks how this hand would have to be formed for a certain purpose. This is also extended to the consideration of thinking, although today people are no longer aware of this or have not yet become aware of it. One asks: What is thinking actually for? One does not always realize this, but unconsciously one asks it. Thinking, one thinks, cognition in general, is there to draw an outer world into oneself, so that what is first outside, is then within, even if only as an image. But now, through realism, but of course spiritual realism, one can follow what thinking actually is. Then one realizes that this thinking is a completely real force that shapes us ourselves.

You see, this spiritual science of which I speak here is not an abstract theory, not something that merely wants to be a world view in ideas. Among other things, I have recently given a pedagogical course here in which I tried to apply spiritual science to pedagogy. It was a course for teachers before the Waldorf School was founded. In addition to this pedagogical course, I also gave a course that tried to take the therapeutic aspect of medicine from spiritual science and show how spiritual research can shed light on something that can never be fully understood by using only today's methods of physiology and biology. Now, I do not want to tell you something specifically therapeutic, but there is one thing I would like to mention to characterize the method. That is, in current philosophy today, there is actually only speculation about the connection between the spiritual-mental and the physical-corporeal. There are all kinds of theories about interactions, about parallelism and so on, all kinds of materialistic interpretations of the soul processes. But actually, in a certain abstraction, we always have on the one hand the observation of the spiritual-mental, on the other hand that of the bodily-physical, and then we speculate how these two can come into a relationship with each other. Spiritual science really studies methodically - but precisely with the thinking that is awakened there - how the soul-spiritual works in the bodily-physical. And even if I expose myself to some misunderstanding, that what I say is taken as paradoxical, I want to emphasize one thing:

When we observe a child growing up until the change of teeth around the seventh year, we notice that not only does the change of teeth take place, but that the configuration of the soul and spirit also undergoes a significant change. If you now think back over your own life, you will find – even if you are not yet conducting methodical research – that the sharply contoured thoughts, which then solidify into memory and reproduce themselves for the course of life, that these sharply can only be formed out of the power of thought at the time when the organism is driving out what are called second teeth – it is something that comes from the whole organism, not just from the jaw. If one pursues this methodically, one comes to say to oneself: Just as, for example, in physical processes, some kind of force, such as mechanical force, can be converted into heat and one then says: heat is released, heat appears - so in the course of human life one has to what remains in the organism – we have completely lost the expression for this – in the change of teeth, and what is then released when the change of teeth gradually takes place, what then passes from the latent state to the free state, what initially only worked internally. The second teeth have appeared; there is a certain connection of forces at work, a system of forces within, until these second teeth emerge. Then this interrelatedness of forces is released, and in its release it appears as that spiritual-soul element which then gives the sharply contoured thoughts of memory.

With this example I only want to show how this spiritual science is actually applied to areas that one does not think of today. It is a continuation of the natural sciences. It is exactly the same form of thinking that is applied when one speaks of the release of warmth. The same form, which has only just emerged, is then applied to human development, and one says to oneself: that which appears as memory, as thinking power, that pushes the second teeth out - if I may express myself trivially.

In this case, one is not speculating about the connection between body and soul, but rather one is pursuing, in a completely empirical way, as one is accustomed to doing as a natural scientist, only with more highly developed methods of thought, that which can be observed. Only the whole of what one has around one is also observed spiritually. And so one comes to speak no longer in an abstract, nebulous way about the interaction of body and soul and spirit, but one states how at a certain age a force works physically, which then emancipates itself as a spiritual-soul force at a different age. And one comes to enter with the spirit into the material, to understand the material spiritually. That is the peculiar thing, that materialism has not understood the material, that it actually stands opposite matter in such a way that it remains incomprehensible to it. Materialism has not understood matter. Spiritual science, which is meant here, advances to the understanding of the material through its spiritual method. And it was indeed extremely interesting for the doctors and medical students who attended the course for physicians to be shown how one can really get to effectively represent the spiritual and soul in the physical, how, for example, one can show how the heart, in its function, can be understood from spiritual science in a completely different way than with the methods of today's physiology or biology.

So it is a matter of developing thinking not just through some kind of fanciful elaboration, but through a real continuation, which must simply pass through a borderline or critical state. In this passage through the borderline state, thinking becomes something else. You must not say that the unity of thinking is somehow destroyed by this. For example, the power that works in ice does not become something that should no longer be when the ice melts and turns into water. And the power that works in water does not become something else when the water passes through the boiling point and through vaporization. So it is a matter of the fact that at the point that I have characterized as a point of development for thinking, this thinking power passes through such a borderline state and then indeed appears in a different form, so that the experience differs from the earlier experience like steam from water. But this leads one to understand the thinking power itself, thinking – I could also prove the same for willing – as something that works realistically in man. In the thinking power that one has later in life, one then sees what has been working in the body during childhood. So everything becomes a unity in a remarkable way.

I readily admit that spiritual science can err in some individual questions. It is in its early stages. But that is not the point. The point is the direction of the striving. And so one can say: an attempt is made to observe what reveals itself in thinking in its shaping of the human being, to observe it as a real force that shapes and forms the human organism. Thought is observed in its reality. Therefore, one can say in conclusion: Those who still look at thought in a cognitive way, asking only one question: Why is thought such that it combines outer sense perceptions? – they are succumbing to a certain error, an error that I would like to characterize for you now.

Let us assume that the grain of wheat or the ear of wheat grows out of the root tip through the stalk; the plant-forming power manifests itself and can shape a new plant out of the seed, which in turn grows into a seed and so on. We see that the formative power at work in the plant is continuously effective in the plant itself, from formation to formation, as Goethe says: from metamorphosis to metamorphosis. In spiritual science, we try to follow thinking, which expresses itself in human beings, as a formative force, and we come to the conclusion that, in so far as thinking is a formative force in the human being, a side effect also comes about, and this side effect is actually ordinary cognition. But if I want to characterize thinking in its essence according to this secondary effect, then I am doing exactly the same as if I were to say: What do I care what shoots up through the root, the stalks into the ear of corn as a formative force in the plant; I do not care about that; I start from the chemistry of nutrition and examine what appears in the wheat grain as a nutritional substance. This is, of course, also a legitimate way of looking at the wheat grain. You can also look at it that way. But if I do, then I disregard what actually flows continuously in plant formation. And so it is with cognition. In what is usually thought by epistemologists, by philosophers and by those who want to ground natural science with some kind of observation, there are the same effects that occur when thinking, which actually wants to shape us, expresses itself outwardly in a side effect. It is as if what grows in the wheat plant is only thought of as the basis for the nutrition of another being. But it is wrong to examine the wheat only in terms of this. This has nothing to do with the nature of the wheat grain. I am introducing a different point of view.

Thus, philosophy today is on the wrong track when it examines cognition only in terms of the apprehension of the external world. For the essential thing is that cognition is a formative force in man, and the other thing appears as a mere side effect. And the way of looking at it that wants to leave thinking only in the state in which it abstracts natural laws, collects perceptions, is in the same position as someone who would claim that one should not do plant biology to get to know the nature of the plant, but nutritional chemistry.

These are things that are not thought about today, but they play a major role in the further development of the scientific future, that scientific future that is at the same time also the future for such a social organization through which man, in grasping social life through the spirit, can truly intervene in this social organization. For it seems to me that this is precisely what has led to the catastrophe: that we no longer master life because we do not think that we have entered a state of human development in which life must be mastered from the spirit, from that spirit that is recognized from within and thereby also recognizes what confronts us in the external world.

Yes, my dear audience, with such things one is considered an eccentric in the broadest circles today, a dreamer, and in any case one does not expect such a person to really see through the outside world realistically. But I believe that I am not mistaken when I say: the application of spiritual science to the entire external world can be compared to the following. If someone lays down a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron, a farmer comes and says: I will shoe my horse with that. Another, who knows what kind of object it is, says to him: That is not a horseshoe, it is a magnet, it serves a completely different purpose. But the farmer says: What do I care, I will shoe my horse with it. This is how science appears today, refusing to admit that the spiritual lives everywhere in the material. Those who deny the spiritual in the material are like the man who says, “What do I care about the magnet, I shoe my horse with the iron.” I believe, however, that we must come to the realization that in all material things we have to recognize not only an abstract spiritual essence, but also a concrete spiritual essence, and that we must then be willing to study this concrete spiritual essence in the same way as we do in the material world, and that this will mean progress in cognitive and social terms for the future.

But it is easier to express speculative results and all kinds of philosophies about what the spirit is, it is easier to be a pantheist or the like out of speculation, than to follow the example of strict natural science, only with the experiential method, as I have described it, to continue the scientific research and then to find the spiritual in the material - just as one brings warmth to light, even if it does not express itself, by showing under which circumstances that which is latent reveals itself. If we apply this method, which is usually applied externally, to the internal, but especially to the whole human being, then we will understand the spiritual in the material from the inside out. And above all, that which has actually been resonating to us from ancient times and yet, for human beings, is a profound necessity, that which still resonates from the Apollonian temple at Delphi to the ears of the spirit: “Man, know thyself!” And just as philosophers and theologians have spoken of this “know thyself”, so too has the naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who was more or less inclined towards materialism. This “know thyself” is deeply rooted in human nature. And modern times have now reached a point where this “know thyself” must be approached in a concrete way.

With these suggestions, I believe I have shown that it is not a matter of violating the unity of thought, but of continuing the thought beyond a boundary point. Just as it is not impossible to bring the forces in water to a completely different manifestation after passing through the boiling point, so too, there is no sin against what is experienced in the combining thinking with the perception when this thinking is taken beyond the boundary point. It is quite natural that a metamorphosis of thinking is then achieved. But by no means has a uniformity of thinking been violated. You will not find at all that spiritual science leads to the rejection of natural science, but rather to a deeper penetration of it. One arrives precisely at what I consider to be particularly important for the development of humanity: the introduction of scientific knowledge into the whole conception of the world, which fertilizes life, but which can only be achieved by our ascending from the spiritual observation of nature to the pure experience of the spiritual, which can then also pour into our will and become a living force in us. Because it can do this, because living knowledge makes us not only wise but also skillful, I believe in a future for humanity, in human progress, if in the future more attention is paid to the spiritual in the material than has been the case so far, if the spiritual is sought in the material, which can then also be transferred to the social, so that in the future the solution of the social question will appear to us as the spiritualization of social life, as spiritualization with that spirit which we can achieve precisely as a continuation of scientific research.

Professor Dr. Th. Meyer: I am in complete agreement with Dr. Steiner that the limiting concepts of scientific knowledge are not the limiting concepts of existence and reality. I have also heard him speak with warm and moved heart of the hopes that the German people may cherish for the future despite their collapse. But I do have some doubts on the point of whether spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy will possess precisely the ability to lead to a new height to which Germany should aspire. And I think the concern lies in the following: Dr. Steiner has repeatedly emphasized that the path to the higher worlds, of which he has spoken, is achieved through vision, through a seeing consciousness, through an experience, and that this path is absolutely scientific, not imaginative. This inner vision naturally has the same status as something that is evident in logic. That is to say, what I have seen with my outer or inner eyes cannot be disputed. I see a tree and do not need to prove that the tree must be there. There is no metaphysical proof for it, it is evident that the tree is there. Dr. Steiner now claims this evidence for his inner vision. That means he sees the higher world and sees the connections of the higher world, and because he sees them, precisely for that reason this higher world is there; it is indisputable. I do not want to dispute that the higher world is evident to him who beholds it. The only question is whether it is evident to everyone, and here I have a reservation. Ever since I have known anthroposophy, it has been based on the fact that this inner vision, this seeing consciousness, is ancient, that there have long been people who rise to the height of this seeing consciousness, have long since risen to it in India. That is why anthroposophy also adopts a whole series of expressions from the Indian language. It needs Indian expressions for the various spiritual insights it imparts. But the fact of the matter is that Dr. Steiner claims that he is bringing something new. However, there were a number of Theosophical Societies in Germany and England before Dr. Steiner came on the scene. Dr. Steiner originally belonged to these Theosophical Societies, then he came into conflict with them and resigned from these associations. He just, because he came into inner conflict with them, no longer referred to his view of things as theosophy, but because his inner vision is different from the inner vision of the other theosophists, he called it anthroposophy.

Now I would like to say: If the earlier intuitive consciousness was mistaken, if Dr. Steiner was the first to bring the right thing, who guarantees me that another will not come and say: This higher intuitive consciousness that Dr. Steiner brought has not reached the ultimate goal. Another person may arrive at a quite different goal. In that case Steiner's vision becomes subjective. It is the vision of an individual. It is doubtful whether one can rely on it.

This is my concern, which arises in relation to the supersensible of the whole movement, that there is a different inner vision. There should be no discord between the different visionaries. But I do not want to conclude without expressing my sincere and warm thanks to Dr. Steiner for the many fine suggestions he has given in his speech tonight.

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not need to keep you any longer, for I will only have to point out that the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me has made a few errors in the most important point that he has raised.

First of all, I would like to start from the end and correct a few errors. The fact is not that what I have presented to you here was preceded by the teachings of other theosophical societies to which I belonged. It is not like that. Rather, I began writing my interpretations of Goethe's world view in the 1880s. At the time, they were published as an introduction to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's “Deutsche National-Literatur” in Stuttgart. Anyone who follows them will find that the germ of everything I have presented to you today lies in those introductions. You will then find that in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, in the first edition of 1894, I tried to show how man gradually develops his thinking to a certain level and how, after that, what then leads discursive thinking into intuitive thinking follows.

Then it happened, in Berlin around 1902, that I was once asked to present what I had to say about the spirit in a circle that called itself theosophical. At that time I had become acquainted with various Theosophists, but what they had to say did not really prompt me to follow with any attention the Theosophical literature that was common in this Theosophical Society. And so I simply presented what had emerged from my own intuitive research. The result was that people in England who had read my book Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life very soon translated these lectures into English and published them in an English newspaper. I was then invited to give lectures to a number of people in the society that called itself the Theosophical Society. I have never hesitated to speak to those who called upon me, whether they called themselves by this or that name, about what I had to say. But I have never advocated anything in any of these groups other than what I had to say on the basis of my own research. Thus, during the time that I belonged to the Theosophical Society, I advocated nothing other than what I have to advocate on the basis of my own research.

That I called what I presented “Anthroposophy” even then may be gathered from the fact that at the same time - not only later, when I had come to a different view from that of this society - I also presented to a different circle of people in Berlin, and I did not present a single iota of what I had to present from my research. And there I announced my lectures – so that people could not possibly be in error – as anthroposophical observations on human development. So for as long as any human being can associate me with Theosophy, for as long have I called my worldview “Anthroposophy”. There has never been a break. That is what I would like to say about it now, so as not to keep you waiting too long.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, some people say that if you study the history of philosophy, you find that philosophers - starting with Thales and going up to Eucken or others - have put forward all sorts of views and that they have often contradicted each other; how can you arrive at a certainty of knowledge? This is precisely what I set out to do in my book “Riddles of Philosophy”: to show that the matter is not so, but that what appear to be deviations in the various philosophies worthy of the name only ever come from the fact that one person looks at the world from one point of view, while another looks at it from a different point of view. If you photograph a tree from one side, what you see in the picture is only from a certain side. If you photograph the tree from a different side, you get a completely different picture – and yet it is the same tree. If you now come to the conclusion that many truly truthful philosophies do not differ from one another in that one deviates from the other, but that they simply look at one and the same thing from different points of view, because you cannot come to a single truth at all, then you realize that it is a prejudice to say that the philosophies contradict each other.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, I have shown that it is a prejudice to say that philosophers contradict each other. There are, of course, those who are in a certain contradiction, but these are only those who have made a mistake. If two children in a class solve a problem differently, one cannot say that it is therefore not certain who has found the right solution. If one understands the correct solution, one already knows what the right thing is. So it cannot be deduced from the fact that things are different that they are wrong. That could only be deduced from the inner course of the matter itself. One would have to look at the inner course of the matter itself. And it is an external consideration when one says: Steiner resigned from the Theosophical Society. First of all, I did not resign, but after I was first dragged in with all my might to present my own world view, nothing else at all, I was - perhaps I may use the sometimes frowned-upon expression in front of you - thrown out, and for the reason, my dear dear attendees, because the “other kind of truth”, namely the madness of those theosophists, prevailed. These theosophists had finally managed to present an Indian boy who was claimed to be the newly appeared Christ; he was brought to Europe and in him the re-embodied Christ had appeared. Because I, of course, characterized this folly as folly and because at that time this folly found thousands of followers throughout the world, this following took the opportunity to expel me. I did not care. At any rate, I did not believe that what one had gained through inner research seemed uncertain simply because a society that calls itself theosophical expelled me, a society that claims that the Christ is embodied in the Indian boy.

Such things should not be considered superficially, simply overlooking the specifics and saying, “Well, there are different views.” One must take a closer look at what is occurring. And so I would like to leave it to you, when you have time - but you would have a lot to do with it - to compare all the quackery that has appeared in the so-called theosophical societies with what I have always tried to bring out of good science. I say this not out of immodesty, but out of a recognition of the reality of the matter and out of spiritual struggle. And bear in mind that I myself said today: “Some details may be wrong, but the important thing is to show a new direction.” It does not have to be the case that the absolutely correct thing is stated in every detail. So someone could well say that they are looking at a right-angled triangle and getting all sorts of things out of it. Then someone comes along and says: The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You can't be sure whether it could be universally true just because he is the only one saying it. No, if it has become clear to you through an intuitive insight into the nature of mathematics that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, then a million people may say it is otherwise, but I know it is so and I will contradict a million people. For the truth has not only an external basis for agreement, but above all a basis in its inner substantiality.

Of course, anyone can check this. And I have never claimed anything other than that anyone who wants to can learn about the spiritual scientific method just as easily as they can learn about the methods of chemistry. But once the things have been researched, they can be verified by any thinking person. And so what I say or write and have written from the spiritual science can be verified by every thinking person. There will certainly be many errors in it, of course, but that is the same as with other research. It is not about these errors in detail, but about the basic character of the whole.

Have I used a single Indian expression to you today? And if something is sometimes referred to by using some old expression, then that is just a technical term used because there is no such expression in current usage. Even if I can prove the Pythagorean theorem on the blackboard or something else, can one be reproached for the fact that it was already there centuries ago? For me, it is not a matter of putting forward ancient Indian or similar ideas, but of putting forward what arises from the matter itself. Just as today, anyone who grasps and understands the Pythagorean theorem grasps it from the matter itself, even though it can be found at a certain point in time as the first to emerge, so of course some things must, but only seemingly, agree with what was already there. But it is precisely this that I have always most vigorously opposed: that what is being attempted here from the present point in the development of human consciousness has anything to do with some ancient Indian mysticism or the like. There are, of course, echoes, because instinctive knowledge found much in ancient times that must resurface today. But what I mean is not drawn from old traditions. It is really the case that what is true, what is true for me, is what I wrote down at the time when I wrote the first edition of my book Theosophy in 1904: I want to communicate nothing but what I have recognized through spiritual scientific research, just as any other scientific truth is recognized through external observation and deductive reasoning, and which I myself can personally vouch for. Some may certainly hold a different opinion, but I put forward nothing but what I can personally vouch for. I do not say this out of immodesty, but because I want to appear as a person who does not want to present a new spiritual science out of a different spirit than out of the spirit of modern science and also of newer technology, and because I think that one can only understand this new consciousness in terms of its scientific and technical nature, when one is driven by both to the contemplation of the spirit.

I ask that my words not be taken as if I had wanted to avoid what the honorable previous speaker said. No, I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to correct some factual errors that have become very widespread. But much, very much even, of what is being spread today about what I have been presenting in Stuttgart for decades is based on errors. And it seemed necessary to me, as the previous speaker commendably did, to address what was presented, because it is not just a matter of correcting what affects me personally, but also something that the previous speaker brought together with the substance of the question, to correct it through the historical.

Question: If Dr. Steiner proves just one point of spiritual science to me in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem can be proved, then I will gladly follow him, then it is science.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, who can really prove the Pythagorean theorem? The Pythagorean theorem cannot be proved by drawing a right-angled triangle on the blackboard and then using one of the usual methods of proof. That is only one illustration of the proof. The point is that anyone who wants to prove the Pythagorean theorem is put in the position of having to have what can be constructed mathematically in their mind's eye - even if only in the inner vision of the geometric space vision. So imagine a consciousness that did not have this spatial vision. He would not have the essential part of the Pythagorean theorem before him, and it would make no sense to prove the Pythagorean theorem. We can only prove the Pythagorean theorem by having the essential part of the spatial perception and spatial organization before us. The moment we ascend to another form of consciousness, something else is added to the ordinary spatial view (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) ( Only, as long as one has no conception of the configuration of space, one cannot at all arrive at the observation that leads to the proof of the Pythagorean theorem. And only as long as one has not yet made the transition from ordinary consciousness to experiencing consciousness, as I have described it, does one believe that the results of spiritual scientific research cannot be proved in the same way.

I started from the assumption that the experiencing consciousness is there first. And just as he who does not have a spatial view cannot speak of the Pythagorean theorem, so one cannot speak of the proof of any proposition of spiritual science if one does not admit the whole view. But this view is something that must first be attained. It is not there by itself. But our time demands that we decide on something completely new if we want to move towards this progress in science. And I do believe that there is still a great deal to be overcome before spiritual science is advocated in broader circles in the way that Copernicus's world view was advocated over all earlier ideas of the infinity of space. In the past, people imagined space as a blue sphere. Now we imagine that there are limits to our knowledge of nature that cannot be overcome, or that we cannot go beyond ordinary thinking. Such things are well known to anyone who follows the history of human development. And I can only say: either what I have tried to present is a path to the truth – not the finished truth – in which case it will be trodden, or else it is a path to error, in which case it will be overcome. But that does no harm. What must not be extinguished in us, not be swept away by hasty criticism, is the everlasting striving upwards and onwards. And it is only this striving that really animates what I have tried to characterize today as the path that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take.

Question: We must have the firm belief that the effort we expend will also be worthwhile. Is it at all possible to recognize spiritual life in and of itself? Dr. Steiner says that it is possible to recognize the spirit of the world, the spirit of all life and of all nature, and to come into contact with it. Is that possible with our spirit, with our thinking? I doubt it. Thought consists of images. I think in pictures.

Rudolf Steiner: If I were to go into the question, I would have to keep you very busy for a long time. I do not want that and I will not do it. I only regret that this question was not asked earlier, then I could answer it more thoroughly.

You can find in my writings everywhere those things that I hypothetically object to and that are also discussed there, so that you can find a remedy for your doubts in the literature. Here, however, I would just like to say the following: It is the case with certain people that they make it virtually impossible for themselves to get ahead of the phenomenon through preconceived notions. They point to the phenomena and then say: What lies behind them, we do not recognize. The whole of Kantianism is basically based on this error. And my whole striving began with the attempt to combat this error. I would like to make clear to you, by means of a comparison, how one can gradually come to a resolution of these doubts.

When someone looks at a single letter, they can say: This single letter indicates nothing other than its form, and I cannot relate this form to anything else; it tells me nothing else. And when I look at, say, an electrical phenomenon, it is exactly the same as when I look at a letter that tells me nothing. But it is different when I look at many letters in succession and have a word, so that I am led from looking at them to reading them. I also have nothing in front of me other than what is being looked at, but I advance to the meaning. There I am led to something completely different. And so it is also correct that as long as one only grasps individual natural phenomena and individual natural elements – elements in the sense of mathematical elements – one can rightly say that one does not penetrate to the inner core. But if one tries to bring everything to life in context, to set it in motion with a new activity, then, as in the transition from the mere individual letter to the reading of the word, something quite different comes about. That is why that which wants to be spiritual science is nothing other than phenomenology, but phenomenology that does not stop at putting the individual phenomena together, but rather at reading them in the context of the phenomena. It is phenomenology, and there is no sin in speculating beyond the phenomena; rather, one asks them whether they have something to say about a certain inner activity, not only in terms of details but also in context.

It is understandable that if one only looks at the individual phenomena, one can take the same standpoint as Haller when he said: No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature; blessed is he to whom nature only reveals the outer shell. But one also understands when someone grasps phenomenology as Goethe did – and spiritual science is only advanced Goetheanism – that Goethe, in view of Haller's words, says: “Into the innermost nature – oh, you philistine! — “No created spirit penetrates the innermost nature, blessed he to whom she shows only the outer shell.” I have heard this repeated for sixty years; I curse it, but furtively; I say to myself a thousand, a thousand times: She gives everything abundantly and willingly; nature has neither core nor shell, she is all at once. You, most of all, test yourself, whether you are core or shell."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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