The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From an awareness that was as much borne of rich experience as of deep artistic experience, Goethe coined the eloquent word:

When nature begins to reveal her secrets, one feels an irresistible yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art.

A true understanding of what is meant by such a statement makes it difficult to want to talk about art. Goethe also said that art is the mediator of nature's secrets, but that one should not talk about it through words. On the other hand, one must talk about what can flow from the artistic. I don't want to talk about it the way official science talks about it, but rather like one talks about a dear friend, where one has the need to say what one has to say out of sympathy, out of love.

The artist has an aversion to art history or even to art criticism. When you try to penetrate it, it becomes all too understandable that the artist is afraid to have what he experienced with art burned or singed. If you assume a moral original sin, then you have to assume two original evils for art. One is the taste to create in art only for the senses. Those who do this will reject the spiritual in art. The other is that an equally unrefined taste wants to represent the abstract, the merely conceptual. This symbolic art is no more supported by the artistic than the sensual is. The art of ideas leads to a straw-like, papery representation of the ideal. Both are aberrations from true art. What leads to true art must be grounded in something in the human being. It must also be something that arises from human freedom in human will.

Many see art only as a luxury, not as a condition of daily existence. I would like to recall what I said about the dream life eight days ago, about the relationship between the dream life and the imagination. During sleep, the soul is separated from the body. Through spiritual science, the otherwise dormant consciousness can become so strong that the person perceives the spiritual world, that he not only experiences dull things during sleep, but also undergoes the most diverse entities and experiences. One can say that the dream life comes from the soul approaching the waking life, but not absorbing it.

The polar opposite of the dream life is the soul's inclination towards artistic imagination and artistic creation. It is incorrect to assume a direct relationship between the two, but one can point from one to the other. In the dream it is the soul removed from the body, in artistic creation the soul is in the body – thus the other way round. Here the soul seeks a relationship with the spiritual; it wants to reach out to the spiritual, to the eternal, the imperishable, as in a dream to the corporeal, the temporal. These are two polar opposites. Just as the soul half awakens to the physical body in a dream, so too to the spiritual in artistic fantasy.

Just as sleep can be without dreams, so the artistic element can be added to ordinary life out of freedom, but it can also be left out.

There are moods in life. You visit a friend, are received in a red room, he does not come right away, you expect something; then he comes, tells all sorts of banal stuff, you are disappointed because you were expecting something solemn; that's how it is in the subconscious. Or in a blue room, you are disappointed in the deepest sense of the word because you find that he talks like a wheel. In your subconscious, you expect him to leave you alone in a blue or violet room. But he talks. I'm deliberately choosing grotesque examples. Or at a banquet where the dishes have a reddish tint, you expect that when people eat, they are not only hungry but also gourmets. If the dishes are blue, you expect them not only to eat, but also to have a pleasant conversation. Or you meet a lady on the street who has a frizzy head and are disappointed if you find that she is not snappish. From a lady in a pleasant blue dress, you expect her to be measured; if she is not, you feel lied to. These are inner secret moods, undertones that permeate life. There is a sensual, supersensible element that, in our emotional life, is comparable to dreams and remains hidden from our consciousness, just as the activity of the sleeping person's will includes the element of will.

A supersensible essence is integrated here, and it does not matter whether it is called the connective tissue or the etheric body.

The individual organs differentiate the human being in such a way that the supersensible connecting element no longer resonates so uniformly. The human being experiences as a whole human being what is only seen through the eye. This does not come to light in ordinary consciousness. We can give it nourishment, which satisfies it, like the senses. This is particularly evident in music.

I have shown that the life of imagination is bound up with the nervous system, but the life of feeling is bound up with the whole rhythmic experience. This is more closely related to the sense of hearing than to the other senses, to the sense of feeling, even to the sense of imagination, to thinking. There is an inclination in man to keep focusing on the sense of hearing.

In every healthy, complete human nature, there is a constant urge to bring up in a healthy way what leads to vision, not to physical vision. The vision wants to come up, it appeals to free will, it does not exert any force, but it is there. The artist has a constant tendency towards the visionary, which wants to be satisfied. But it remains latent. What can satisfy it? It is always present, even if a person has only sensory perceptions. But it cannot be satisfied with that. When the musical element strikes the ear, the whole supersensible person takes it in, and so the visionary urge is satisfied.

The same applies to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, which can lead one into deep, natural secrets: the green leaf transforming itself into the petals of a flower and so on.

When we look at the human being, we can see it falling apart in different ways, for example into the head and the rest of the organism. This can become the head. Just as Goethe sees the whole in the leaf, we can see the whole in every part of the human being; the whole can emerge from every part.

The moving life in nature wants to be grasped by the visionary power.

Music cannot recall anything that is in external life; everything must be demystified by music. In the other arts, everything that belongs to the senses must be accounted for, but music does not need that.

The whole person must first be demystified. All artistic creation is like a demystification. You have to get life out of the surface, you have to bend once or twice what is otherwise dead in the surface, as in life only demarcates itself, [in the painterly the color], for example the red-yellow. A barbarian says: How does it remind us of what is, when the blue-violet merges into the line? But that's how you get into the form, through the red-yellow into the movement, also into the movement in the limbs. Red and blue are not just colors, they desire something. All barbaric taste says: What does it represent? But the artist only reveals something that was in the soul. Everything artistic has an expressionistic element in it.

What stands before us as nature we cannot achieve by imitation; it stands before us only as a larva. Critics are like someone standing behind us as we eat and saying how the food tastes.

The “Group” in Dornach is the artistic expression of the theory of metamorphosis. Here, the attempt has been made to depict the representative of humanity asymmetrically, and to show how the rest of the organism wants to become entirely head. This cannot be achieved by merely caricaturing a head, but only by doing so from the inside out.

Another approach has been tried, in which the head seeks to become the rest of the organism, in which the head pours itself out over the whole organism, a dissolution, a harmonization. Such things evoke a slight horror today, as the Copernican worldview did until 1827 among an influential authority. But that cannot stop the course of development.

A change has taken place with regard to art, for example, in relation to the position of the works of art by Raphael and Michelangelo. One no longer tries to resonate with them, one has a kind of awareness that they must be related to a bygone era and a different consciousness. What one does with regard to today's artists is more closely related to the soul. One would like to accompany Raphael and Michelangelo back to other times, where they were different as artists; one would like to accompany today's artists directly. Such artists have a feeling, as Goethe had, that if one seeks truth, one must seek it in art. If you want to paint a lady today as she is, she will look like a lady in a state of trismus, which is what every photograph looks like. You have to kill and then recreate with what you might call humor, an inner drama; you not only have to kill a pretty woman, you have to abuse her. Perhaps it is part of the artistic essence that the pedant is appalled, that the philistine condemns it as unnecessary. It already sounds so terrible when one says, as if in a civil servant's office, that art should be put in the service of life.

Art is so integrated into the education of life that art is not a servant of life, but is meant to beautify it, and since it is the path to the spiritual, it also imbues life with reality.

One is only able to intervene correctly in social life if one approaches it as the artist approaches his material. New forces constantly want to be incorporated into life; an artistic element should live in everything. When deficiencies arise somewhere, it is because the artistic element in man has been lost. People believe they have found program points and consider them to be the most divine ideals. But all this social talk is of no use, has no foundation, cannot fertilize. Nowadays, people found associations, give them statutes, take up excellent program points, and believe that they can master life with them. But it is all abstract. It is much more important to put the right person in the right place, only then one must not always think that the nephew is the right person.

What wants to gain strength in life is what is in the underground, that wants to be demystified. You can't do that in the abstract. Art can only fertilize life if you strive to find life in art.

A sensual-supernatural lies in art. A person who does not dream does not know about the connection. A life without art resembles pedantry and philistinism. Art must not correspond to necessity, but to human freedom. People do not take into account that the human being has a say in this, that there is a freedom. Man must say: Nothing external can push me towards art, but I myself declare that it is necessary.

Dear attendees! It is not an external occasion that leads us to treat the two most significant questions of the human soul and spiritual life in this context today, the question of human freedom of will and the question of the immortality of the soul. Rather, it seems to me that the real inner knowledge of the human being's supersensible personality reveals a natural inner connection between these two significant human riddles in such a way that one must shed light on the other.

All you have to do, dear attendees, is take a closer look at the recurring philosophical and other endeavors of very astute minds throughout human development in order to get closer to these two human questions. And you will see that a purely philosophical consideration, as it is usually understood, cannot approach what actually wants to approach the human being with these questions that take root so meaningfully in every single human mind. I myself, esteemed attendees, if I may mention this by way of introduction, have been dealing with the question of human freedom of will for decades. It has been a quarter of a century since I attempted, in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom', to point out, at that time in a purely philosophical-scientific form, those points through which one can at least approach this question of human freedom. What I expounded then, a quarter of a century ago, I would say in an abstract, philosophical way, I would like to ground in a spiritual-scientific way in tonight's reflection, in the spiritual-scientific way in which it was meant through the long years in which I was also able to give lectures here in Munich every year on anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Now, perhaps only someone who has wrestled with what the natural scientific worldview has to say about these riddles of humanity today, and who has wrestled with it to such an extent that he realized in the course of his struggle where the scientific approach must actually fail, especially when it comes to the deepest human questions such as these, which everyone will admit from the outset must lead to what can be called human self-knowledge.

Now, dear attendees, let me say, figuratively, by way of introduction, what difficulties must actually be assumed from the outset when it comes to human self-knowledge. Figuratively speaking: the eye can perceive the visible things around it; the eye can perceive the visible things around it precisely because it cannot see itself. Anyone who thinks up this image will find it understandable that the difficulty of human self-knowledge must lie in the fact that, although one will be able to see other things with all the organs available to a person for their knowledge, one's own self can be seen spiritually as little as the eye can see itself.

Now, in the case of the eye, it is possible for another person to examine it physiologically, anatomically or in some other way; but a moment's reflection shows that this cannot be the case with regard to the actual self of the human being, which more or less everyone senses in their subconscious as a supersensible being. One person cannot observe the invisible supersensible that rules in us in the same way that another personality can observe the human eye.

However, another image can be used. We can see our own eye when we look in the mirror. This only leads to the fact that we then do not see with the eye the whole life-filled content of this eye, that which must actually live in the eye in order to make it an organ of vision and a mediator of spiritual knowledge of the external world. Only an image of the eye can show itself to us when we look at the eye in the mirror.

I have presupposed these images in order to lead, I would like to say, approximately through some ideas to what should be the core of today's reflection. If self-knowledge is to occur at all in the human being, nothing else is possible than for the human being himself, not another, to step out of the human existence in which he usually dwells and to learn to look at himself from the outside. In saying this, however, something is expressed that is actually a scientific abomination in the widespread contemporary world view, but it will most certainly become established in human thinking, just as the Copernican world view has become established. It is only unfamiliar today, which, as in the past, should come to our minds today. That man can step out of his self, so to speak, can face himself in reality, seems to most people today an absurd thought.

Now, the spiritual researcher is obliged not to proceed in the same way as one proceeds in another scientific investigation. In this scientific approach, when it is done in a popular way, one usually gives results; the spiritual researcher is not in a position to merely cite such results. He must, especially when dealing with such a fundamental question as today's, indicate the path above all, to which he wants to refer when he wants to demonstrate certain research results that have proven to be important and essential in every human life. Therefore, in the first part of today's meditation, my task will consist primarily in showing how the spiritual researcher approaches the human being, in order to recognize what is meant by freedom of will and the immortality of the soul. I would like to reflect on the sense of stepping out of one's usual human existence and observing oneself from the outside, as in a mirror, whereby one can of course assume – and I will say this right away – that one does not initially have the lively person in front of them, but perhaps only an image, as the eye has an image in the mirror.

But before I begin these considerations about spiritual-scientific methods, I would like to at least cite an example that is suitable for showing how the natural-scientific approach to the present, which is fully recognized by spiritual science, always and everywhere endeavors to approach the questions of human self-knowledge, but how precisely this scientific observation, when it is good in its method, when it proves unsuitable for what is scientifically excellent, how precisely it proves unsuitable for approaching the true human self.

By way of introduction, an example that is treated in a work by Ludwig Waldstein in “Das unterbewusste Ich” (The Subconscious Mind), which is part of an excellent collection of books published in Wiesbaden, deals with borderline issues of mental and nervous life. This is a scientific work through which the author wants to get to what lives in man, and as a natural scientist it is self-evident that he approaches it with a truly scientific method, as does the humanities; for the humanities cannot allow itself to approach man through mystical reverie and fantasy either. Spiritual science must place itself on such a strict foundation, even if it must proceed differently than any natural science can or will do.

Now, Ludwig Waldstein gives a remarkable self-observation – but this example could be multiplied by hundreds and thousands – he says of himself: He once stood in front of a bookshop, looking in. His eye fell on a book about molluscs. It was natural for the naturalist to let his gaze rest on the title page of this book. But as he looked over this title page, he couldn't help but smile. He cannot explain how it is that he, who is a naturalist, must surely find this book a serious matter, that he must begin to laugh. He wants to find out why a book title makes him laugh. He tries to find out by closing his eyes. And lo and behold, by closing them, he hears the melody of a barrel organ in the distance, playing exactly the same thing that was played to him decades ago when he danced his first quadrille as a very young man; when he looked at the mollusc book by title, he had no idea why he had to laugh, because the sound of the organ was quite fading away. He would not have noticed it if he had not closed his eyes.

So he realized, first of all, that one can make certain statements about one's own mental life without actually knowing, unless one investigates particularly, how one comes to make such revelations of the self as one's smile; then secondly, he has realized that decades ago, but only very quietly, this melody on the barrel organ made an impression on him, but only a half-dreamy one; for he knew himself that at the time he had not paid much attention to it. Nevertheless, the sound of the organ, heard so softly and fading away, has remained connected in the subconscious mind, and now, when it echoes even more softly, it mingles with the soul's life as a reminiscence and causes a revelation that must first be investigated.

At best, purely scientific methods can only approach what lies behind such a fact, but one cannot get close to the true essence. One will have to ask oneself: What actually lives in this subconscious soul life, what floods up in an indefinite way, asserts itself and can deceive one about what is actually present in the soul life? And many people who are not attentive to such things, as they have been mentioned, experience something coming up from their soul life that particularly interests them, something they consider a special revelation. They feel they are the bearers of a great revelation, and yet this great revelation may be nothing more than something similar to the fading tones of the barrel organ. For it could easily have arisen through some kind of association of ideas that the man who stood in front of the mollusc book when the sounds were heard softly, that this could have connected with something else.

And lo and behold, there are already people in the present day who are suited to this, if not the naturalist – such a person might have believed it if perhaps the sounds of the barrel organ had connected, well, let's say, with the idea of the music of the spheres, which could also have been that he would have been honored in this case, to divert his gaze from the book to the sublime music of the spheres. It can easily happen to someone who is a prejudiced mystic that they mistake the notes that resonate from an organ grinder heard decades ago for the music of the spheres or for other spiritual revelations.

From this it can be seen that real spiritual research must be something that exercises all due caution to exclude what flows through the human soul in such an indeterminate way and can arise in an inexplicable way that is easily led astray by all kinds of illusions. We have to realize that a variety of things are flooding in and, if we consider what human memory is, we should actually soon be able to think of all the individual possibilities, from the usual dry, sober recollection of something specific that we can survey, to the vague reminiscences of the sounds of a barrel organ, which we might not even get behind if we don't close our eyes and explore the matter. Spiritual science must be aware that everything that can deceptively approach human beings must be methodically processed by it; that it is incumbent upon it to approach the human self with strictly methodical work, especially with regard to the fundamental questions of human self-knowledge.

And here I may draw attention to the fact – as I said, a quarter of a century ago I already tried to shed light on human freedom of will – I may draw attention to the fact that two things flood into the human soul life, which one can start with in contemplation.

Particularly when one wants to get deep inside the human being, something may flood in an indeterminate way that we may not be able to follow at all – I have pointed out such things very clearly in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” – but nevertheless, such surging and surging up in the human soul life can be found, and one comes to realize that This surging up and down is connected with our organization, and it truly does not require any very deep self-observation to see to what extent even bodily processes and dispositions determine what surges through the soul from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. Freely arising images come and go, associating with others. That is what constitutes our soul life.

But one thing floods into this soul life, which is clear to every philosopher, clear to every human being when he reflects on it, but which is not always brought to consciousness in the right way. One thing floods in that can become a fundamental riddle, however simple it may appear, and that is: we do not just let the images that want to socialize in our soul flood in and out in any way. We could not carry our lives through the world in an appropriate way if we wanted to give ourselves over to the play of images. We always do something very specific. We let something flow in this imaginative life that determines the ideas according to right and wrong ideas; we let powerful thinking, dominated by logic, flow into our imaginative play, and even if one does nothing more than a very superficial self-observation, one will discover that there is a radical, fundamental difference between simply abandoning oneself to the play of imagination and the self-active domination of this play of imagination by thinking, which is determined by right or wrong.

As simple and primitive as this may be, it must actually be the starting point of any healthy self-reflection. We have to say to ourselves: we can only get out of this game of imagination, in which all sorts of illusions can play a role, if we become aware that all possible false, erroneous ideas also run through determinable laws of our human nature and organism, but that what intervenes in what is so scientifically and necessarily determined by the organism, correct and incorrect thinking, cannot come from the same game of ideas, this is simply shown by healthy self-observation. I have explained this in more detail in the book cited.

That is one aspect of the question: What actually floods into our soul life when we apply logical thinking, or perhaps, better said, right and wrong thinking, true-to-life thinking, to the arbitrary game of ideas? That is one question. Let us take it as the basis for today's reflections.

The other question is this: in our actions, in our deeds, in all the ways in which we lead our own lives into the social, moral, and ethical existence of humanity, a healthy self-observation shows that our drives and desires, which underlie our will impulses, assert themselves first. But anyone who does not stop at some prejudice will realize that at least in terms of action, in terms of doing, in terms of moral conduct, one can approach what can be characterized in the following way – and this is the other point that leads us to the life riddles we are discussing today: Certainly, the vast majority of human actions are based on instincts, desires, on some kind of constitution of the self; but there are still such actions – at least we approach them, which, because we are imperfect human beings, we can never fully carry out; we consider them at least as an ideal. We know that a person is only worthy of humanity if his actions approximate to the way I am about to characterize them. It is conceivable that we are not determined by some urge, but by the contemplation of what is to happen through us, in the rarer cases, of course, to what we are to do. It is a special feeling, a special sensation, that we can develop in response to what is to happen through us.

Of course, we will rarely be able to have this feeling, but we have it within us as an ideal and we are constantly approaching it. Something in the outside world can make such an impression on us that we say to ourselves: a change must occur, something must happen, and then, if we want to get to the bottom of it with healthy self-observation, when we say something like that to ourselves, there is nothing else to compare it to but the feeling we have when we are confronted with a personality that stands independently outside of us and that we love selflessly.

Twenty-five years ago, it seemed particularly important to me to protest in a philosophical book against a widespread prejudice. This prejudice is summarized in the words: love is blind. I have asserted: love gives sight. It leads us into that into which we cannot enter if we remain closed up in our selfishness, if we are able to give ourselves up so completely in our own self that we live with our perceptions, with our feelings, in the other person, and therefore live, because we have the greatest reverence for the independence of the other being, which we do not want to change through our love. That is not a complete love that wants to tinker with the other being that it loves, that wants the other being to be different, but that is the right love, that one loves the being for the sake of that being, so that the lover goes out of himself.

Just as we can have the feeling of love towards another person who is completely separate from us, whom we love just right when we are aware that he is separate from us, that we , that we love him for his sake, not for our own, if we have this feeling, then it is undoubtedly the ideal of love, that love of which I believe, precisely, that it is not blind, but that it gives sight. And this love can also be developed in relation to an action, in relation to what is to be done, if we devote ourselves purely to the contemplation of this action. Among the manifold actions that flow from our instincts and desires, there are also those in which we at least approach the impulse to perform what one undertakes purely out of love for the action.

Here is the other point that I characterized in my Philosophy of Freedom, where I said: The one who now considers the idea of freedom soon comes to realize that an action can only be free if it arises from the impulse of love for the action. This is, to be sure, at first to be accepted only as an observation; but this observation provides the possibility of at least initially forming an idea about what a free action can be. One comes to realize that one is not authorized to describe other actions as free. And the only question that arises is whether it is possible for such actions to enter into human life, whether it is possible for actions out of love to be realized in human life. If we can acknowledge that actions out of love can be realized in human life, then we may not call man free in relation to his entire being; but we can say that man is approaching freedom to the extent that he is increasingly transforming his actions so that they become actions out of love.

But now, when we have these two things before us, which I have characterized, we cannot understand them by merely considering them externally and conceptually. We can only understand them by using spiritual scientific methods, which I will now describe.

I have given a detailed description of what the soul has to go through in order to truly look into the spiritual world as one looks with physical eyes into the sensual world. I have characterized this in my various books. Today, however, I want to draw attention to a point that is particularly suitable for shedding light on the two questions that have been characterized. I have pointed out that the first step of spiritual knowledge can be called imaginative knowledge, imaginative observation of the environment. This is not present in ordinary consciousness at first. By imagination I do not mean something that arises only from fantasy, but something that leads not into a physical, but into a spiritual reality. This imaginative knowledge is the first step; if the term were not so misused by superstition, one could say it is the first step to true clairvoyant knowledge. However, I want to say that it is the first step of the seeing consciousness, as I have called it in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man).

I will now describe how one can reach this first stage of looking into the spiritual world. The first step is to exclude everything that could come from, let us say, the barrel organ that one heard decades ago. Everything that may arise in our consciousness in this way, through reminiscences, through memory reflexes, however hidden, must be excluded if one wants to enter the path into the spiritual world. Therefore, it is necessary to place something in the consciousness that does not come through the free play of ideas, but that comes into consciousness in the way it otherwise enters consciousness when we say: some idea, which also flows from our organization, is wrong or right. Just as thinking that is truly self-reliant and concerned with right or wrong enters into the life of the soul with its own content, so anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher must attune their consciousness to such content that cannot deceive because it is comprehensible.

What do we mean by such straightforward content? Straightforward content is that which either someone else or one has put together in such a way that at the moment one takes it into consciousness, one is quite clear about it: this compilation of pictorial content – in the case of pure thoughts because they can always be colored by reminiscences — of images that you have formed yourself or that have been formed for you by others, into consciousness, whose composition you can clearly see. What matters is to devote oneself patiently, energetically, calmly to such images, which one has put together in this way. In such images, it does not matter whether they express something real – for it is not the meaning of these images that is important, but rather what kind of inner soul activity one develops by devoting oneself to such images.

Let us say, for example, that someone devotes themselves to the idea that one is convinced from the outset is a merely pictorial idea, but such pictorial ideas must be increased; they devote themselves to the idea: “Spirit of the universe shines from the sun”. Certainly not something that can be called “real” in any sense, but something that can be grasped in its composition, where one can become aware of how the soul is engaged in something like this. Those who, in the course of human development – and there have always been such people in closed circles – have been concerned with showing people the way to the spiritual world, they have carefully worked out such pictorial representations, and if you look into the literature on this subject, you will be able to see for yourself that certain circles, which want to train those who join them for the path into the spiritual world, perhaps keeping silent about some things for certain reasons; but they keep the most intense, most energetic silence precisely about what they have put together in terms of ideas that the soul is to delve into in order to come to imaginative knowledge. And they consider at the moment when such ideas are revealed, it is necessary to replace them with others. Why?

Now, imagine that someone joins a circle that tells them that the way into the spiritual world is to be shown to them. First of all, images are presented to them that they have never thought of before, or at least not yet, and to which they devote themselves in completely new soul activity. They must not have been presented to him before. But once published, they reach people through many channels. They should approach people for the first time. It should not be possible for any reminiscences or the like to have an effect. It should be clear that the soul approaches the matter directly.

When one patiently and persistently absorbs such, especially pictorial, representations and becomes aware of how one has to work inwardly to keep these images in one's consciousness over and over again, to surrender to them in a way that can be described as true meditation , then one becomes aware that a stronger inner strength is needed for such inner soul activity than for ordinary thinking, in which the course of the external world of perception guides us, in which we can passively surrender to the external world of perception.

A greater effort is necessary when we devote ourselves to certain ideas in certain areas of imaginative knowledge that have no external correlate; but this still needs to be further developed. The human being must be able to look at nothing, through no sense, of anything that he perceives with his senses, and be devoted to such a conception, which he overlooks, where he is only aware of what is in the immediate present as limited soul activity in him, where nothing can come in from any reminiscences.

A remarkable thing happens. What is to be experienced here often requires years and years of work. We usually imagine that spiritual science is something that anyone can develop from some concepts. No, spiritual science is no easier than the natural sciences that figure as physiology, chemistry, biology, anatomy, history, but spiritual science requires devoted work that is much more difficult than any work of any external science, if spiritual science is really to lead into the spiritual world, if it is not to be a mystical game.

What happens is that you first really discover that you are more and more immersed in your self in a way that you have not been immersed in before; you first notice more and more – you just have to experience it – that you become independent of what you otherwise experience through your body, you become more independent in your activity. Those who have not experienced this cannot really look at it critically; but those who have experienced it know that just as water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, it is equally true that the inner experience of the self can be separated from what is otherwise experienced in waking consciousness from waking to sleeping only with the help of the physical organization.

One now gets to know what it means to live in the spirit. This sense of self, this self-awareness, becomes richer. Otherwise, self-awareness is concentrated in a point that we call the self; but now it becomes richer, and the further we penetrate into this imaginative knowledge, the richer it becomes. But one thing becomes clear in the end: however far one takes this imaginative knowledge, it does not yet lead directly into a spiritual world. That is the important thing. Just as an eye that does not look at the world does not lead to a world, so mere imaginative meditative meditation does not lead to the spiritual world. One does not devote oneself to this imaginative meditation in order to recognize something outside, but to strengthen and empower the self. And that begins at a certain point of inner development, when this self no longer feels physical, but spiritual, in its inner experience.

This must be experienced. In order for this experience to take place correctly, it is necessary, dear attendees, that the person learn to distinguish between what I have now characterized as imagination, on the one hand, and mere vision, on the other. Vision is always conditioned by the body; for spiritual science it forms nothing that can be used in any way, for it wells up out of the bodily organization, however hidden this upwelling may be in its origin. Man is not consciously involved in the coming about of the vision. Spiritual science does not seek anything of that kind.

Nor does spiritual science seek that which is mere fantasy; for that which he practices in the characterized way does not remain a fantasy, but condenses and becomes inner reality. From a certain point of development, one no longer can string image after image, but the images string themselves. You realize that with this inner experience in the imagination, little by little it becomes the same as it is in the world with objects. You can place a chair on a table - that corresponds to the external lawfulness, but you cannot let a chair float in the air. The external things in their mutual relationships require that we submit to the external laws if we want to act with them. Thus, by developing imagination, one comes at a certain point to the realization that one can no longer string images together in any old way, but that one must place one thing next to another with the same necessity with which one places a chair on a table. One experiences inner spiritual necessity.

This is a significant point on the path of spiritual research. However, it is necessary to be aware of every point of this inner process of searching for the imagination. Anything that could lead to hypnosis or suggestion must be excluded. During meditation, one must be present step by step. It would be nonsense to seek spiritual science through crystal gazing or looking at shiny objects. This would lead to the opposite of the soul mood that must be sought in order to immerse oneself in the spiritual world with full consciousness.

This mood of the soul, of which I have just spoken, is still little known in the widest circles today. It will become known in that humanity will be able to do nothing other than what is already an unconscious urge, an unconscious drive in countless people today, in that humanity will come to demand to penetrate the highest questions of the soul's life in a different way than has been possible until now. But then, when one has developed this imagination in a certain way, perhaps after a long time, quite methodically inwardly, one must pass over to something that I would describe by saying: one must make the imagination transparent.

In relation to the imagination, one is in the following situation, in a situation as one would be in relation to an eye that is clouded; one does not see through it. One has imaginations in order to strengthen one's self-awareness spiritually, to actually attain it spiritually. What one gains for oneself is initially the consequence of imaginative life; but one is, as it were, blind to the spiritual environment. The imaginations are not yet transparent; just as the eye must be transparent in the vitreous humor so that the external world can be seen, so the imaginations must be formed transparently. We can achieve this by progressing more and more not only in forming the imaginations, but also in inwardly experiencing them.

At a certain point in one's development, one gains the ability not only to summon the imaginations into consciousness, but also to remove them again, to suppress them in any way one likes. But then not only to suppress them, but by suppressing them, they are gone. But something else takes their place. The imagination has prepared you, has merely prepared your own self for something else to enter it. If you are able to make the imaginations transparent, then you see how you can see through the vitreous humor of the eye to the visible object, into the spiritual world, you arrive at spiritual vision.

Imaginations that have become transparent! They allow the revelations of the spiritual world to reach the soul, and I will mention the stage of knowledge that arises there. One need only think of what I am characterizing here, not of superstitious ideas, not of ideas laden with prejudice. I will mention the stage of knowledge that arises there, after one has gained so much from the imagination, by relying only on the soul-spiritual, outside of the body, that one has arrived at being able to sustain oneself spiritually; when one can then exclude the imaginations, then what one can call enters, one is inspired inwardly by the spiritual world.

The inspired realization, that is the second stage. And it occurs in such a way that we are able to suppress the image that we ourselves have created, and that through the work of suppressing this image, the inspiration, the spiritual revelation, which speaks to us from the spirit of the world, occurs. In this way, it is different from any ordinary memory, from any ability to remember. The human being suddenly sees what his ability to remember actually is, because he has now excluded it, because he now has a clear overview of how the cause, the image that he himself has formed, is connected to inspiration. That which otherwise reigns in us subconsciously, as with the barrel organ, now approaches us in a new form. We notice within us: the ordinary memory is not there in moments of spiritual research, but it has been transformed into something else, into the gift of inspiration.

Of course, on such an occasion I must note that a person cannot be a spiritual researcher from morning till night, that it is not a matter of me describing a perpetual state into which a person is supposed to come, but rather I am describing how one enters the spiritual world through research. Of course, the things I have described here are most often corrupted when they enter the world through society, because all kinds of errors occur within societies. The most absurd ideas are often spread about what is meant. The point is to show the way into the spiritual world. And just as one is not a chemist all day long from morning to evening, but only when doing experiments at the laboratory table, so one is only a spiritual researcher when carrying out what I have described, when one finds the transition from an image, the imagination, to inspiration.

And now, when you have risen to the possibility of inspiration, the world presents itself to you in a new light. Now it is not sensory perceptions that surround us – we have suppressed those – but a spiritual world presents itself to our spiritual eye, to use this Goethean expression in a varied way. And now you can go back to the questions that confront you enigmatically in ordinary life. Having learned what inspiration is, one can now confront oneself with what I characterized earlier, namely, that correct or incorrect thinking flows into the mere play of ideas. Once you have risen to inspiration, if you examine your soul life with the clarity that is now possible, if you get to know, with the help of imagination and inspiration, the difference between the ordinary play of ideas and memory, and that which radiates into ordinary consciousness from the point of view of what is right or wrong, then one comes to a very remarkable result, then one comes to answer oneself to what actually approaches the human being, what flows into the soul as logically correct or incorrect thinking. This only reveals itself in its true form before inspiration.

What flows into the soul is already contained in what connects, descending from a spiritual world, with what we physically bring from father, mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on in physical inheritance. By looking back through inspiration to our soul-spiritual being, which we have lived through before we entered into physical life through conception or birth, which we have lived through in a purely spiritual existence, by looking back through inspiration, we become aware: the impulses lie in there, not at all in our organization, which we have received through birth.

In our immortal part, which descends into the physical world through conception or birth, lie the impulses for right or wrong thinking. And it turns out that the human being introduces right or wrong thinking into that which depends on the play of ideas of his bodily organization because he has not a conscious inspiration - he only becomes conscious of it through the processes I have described - but an unconscious one. “Right” or ‘wrong’ comes into our soul life from our prenatal life through a subconscious or unconscious inspiration.

We also have inspiration in this ordinary life, but not in ordinary consciousness. Every time that which allows us to decide whether a thought is a correct or incorrect judgment flows into our play of ideas, we are not at all determined by our ideas, which are bound to our organism, but the cause goes back to our immortal part, which has united with our mortal part. The causes of our correct thinking lie before our birth; we are always inspired human beings, it is only in the unconscious that we are just that.

What I have just explained is first considered from a spiritual and psychological point of view. But the time will come when, because the foundations already exist in today's natural science, anyone who really studies physiology, biology and anatomy will come to the conclusion that, precisely when one is able to properly survey the physiological and biological facts of the human being, then a full confirmation of what I have discussed can also be found from a natural scientific point of view. In this regard, one must simply say: the scientific approach of the nineteenth century and up to now, however meritorious it is, has oversimplified things, and above all has oversimplified the development of the human being. Yes, when one carries out something like what I am about to briefly mention, then one really feels how spiritual science can only come into its own when it is possible for it to work in a laboratory-like, clinical way, just as ordinary official science works today.

Spiritual science is not opposed to natural science, only to the interpretation that natural scientists give to their own facts. I can only cite certain results. For me, they are the results that have emerged over the past 30 to 35 years from my study of contemporary biology, physiology and anatomy. If you approach this work more carefully than the Darwinists and evolutionists of the nineteenth century did their work, you come to the conclusion that in the case of humans – we will ignore the animals for now, we don't have time for them today – it turns out that in the case of humans, this evolution that natural science has actually included in its concepts is only present for part of human nature – only for a part, that is the strange thing – only to some extent for the trunk organization, not for the head organization and not for the limb organization.

If you really want to understand human development, you have to divide the human being into three parts: a head person, a trunk person and an extremity person. The facts are all there, principles only exist in spiritual science in order to consider these facts realistically and appropriately. The strangest thing then comes to light when one observes progressive development, when one sees development as a progression from imperfect structures to perfect ones. The head of the human being, the brain organization, is not only present in progressive development, it is also present in the way that the human being presents himself in ordinary life, in a retrogressive development. In relation to his head, the human being is at the same time developing backwards. I could talk for hours, then it would turn out that today this can be proven in a strictly scientific way. Study the scientific facts in this area, but study them not as we do today, but really in depth. Do not remain a scientific dilettante, as many researchers are, but become a real expert in the strictest sense, by engaging with what is there.

Then it turns out – for example, if you look at the human eye, it must not be presented in relation to the facts as if, for example, the animal eye were only more perfect in the human eye. No, in certain animals you will find certain organs inside the eye, such as the xiphoid process, which are more intimately connected to the blood muscle system than in humans. In humans, the eye is simplified compared to the eyes of various animals. It is in retrogression, not merely in progressive development. And so, precisely when one proceeds carefully, one could now show that the human head organization and everything connected with it is in retrogressive development, that something is being withdrawn that is connected with the sprouting, growing, and thriving of life. Development collapses into itself.

This is a very interesting fact that will bridge the gap between natural science and spiritual science. After all, what is the meaning of this collapse of development? Well, if the development in the head were to take place in the same way as in the trunk of the body, in a straight line, it would not collapse in on itself, so to speak, then the imaginative life of the human being could not occur, then the human being could not unfold his spiritual and soul life. Development retreats, it makes space. A correct scientific observation shows it: development makes space. Where the physical is held back, the spiritual comes to the fore.

Superficial scientific observation leads to materialism. Deeper scientific observation leads to the recognition that development is pent up precisely in the main brain, that it makes room and that where physical development, the spiritual soul, no longer reaches because it is pent up, it enters there. From the rest of the organism, what determines the arbitrary play of ideas floods up. That which, through unconscious inspiration, intervenes in this life in a regulating way before birth, can creep into the main organization of the head. Unconscious inspiration is present. The prospect of the immortal, of that which is only connected with the mortal, presents itself to us when we penetrate with spiritual scientific research into something that is present in people, that philosophy has been looking at for decades but cannot understand because it shrinks back from entering into the real spiritual world. When inspiration reveals to us what right or wrong thinking is, then we enter the realm where the human soul comes to us as the immortal, as that which unites with the mortal.

The other point, esteemed attendees, leads, I would say, to the opposite. Another strange thing is present, an unconscious inspiration, I said, on the one hand, which brings itself into the human organization in that this organization is in regression in relation to the human head. The reverse is the case with the human organization in relation to the human limb structure. Again, a very careful study of the purely scientific facts would confirm what I am about to say. Just as the head is in a state of regression, the organization of the extremities in humans is in a state of overdevelopment, goes further than normal development, exceeds the point of normal development, goes beyond it. The person who is only able to properly and physiologically observe arms, hands, legs, feet with their appendages anatomically-plastically towards the inside of the organism knows that the human organization goes beyond itself, that the is not just a regression, not even just normal, but leaps beyond the point of normality, so that more comes to light in this development than what is included in the trunk organization within the limits of normal development. Seen spiritually, this presents itself in such a way that for this observation, which I have just characterized, what is connected with the limb organization presents itself as recognizable and accessible only to the imaginative life. Imaginative life and imaginative knowledge are confronted with something when we look into the human organization of the extremities with a truly clear and insightful consciousness. We encounter something that the human being has within them that can fall between birth and death. They can have more within them because their extremities are, in a sense, super-organized.

Allow me – we are not children, after all – to approach this idea, which is somewhat difficult, by means of a comparison. In doing so, we must not look at the extremities only in terms of what is completely external, but we must also consider them in terms of their continuation towards the interior. In relation to the purely physical, what then presents itself? It presents itself that the organization of the extremities is intimately related, already physically – but the physical comes into consideration for us only comparatively – with that through which the human being also goes beyond himself physically. In the case of women, observe the connection between the organization of the arms and that of the breasts. Consider the connection with the rest of the limb organization, with sexuality, and you will recognize that in relation to the physical constitution, the constitution in overdevelopment works through that which is connected with the limb organization. Physically, the human being first develops something that is not included in his individual life, that goes beyond it. It is the same on the soul-spiritual level.

That which is connected with the purely physical organization of the extremities, which is overdeveloped, can only be achieved through imagination. And what can be attained there in imagination belongs just as little to the human personality, enclosed between birth and death, as in the physical sense the child belongs to the human being as an individuality. That which arises as imagination belongs to the human being when it has stepped through the gate of death. What announces itself by entering into what emerges spiritually and soulfully in the overdevelopment of the limb organization is carried through the gate of death. But what is present, dear Reader, is not only connected with love in the physical sense, it is connected with love in the spiritual and soulful sense at all, because the human being goes beyond himself.

This is where the second point comes in. As already indicated, by developing something within his individual personality that only acquires its significance when it passes through the gate of death; by developing something that leads his perishable being passes through the gate of death into the region where his immortal self continues to develop, man lives in something that is not connected with his egoity, with his immediate selfhood, but goes beyond it.

He can assert this in a special way. Twenty-five years ago, I called what I am now hinting at, as arising from inspiration, in pure thinking, when it occurs not only in logical but in moral ideas, when man acts from moral ideas, I called it intuitive thinking. And what now occurs when a person becomes aware that something lives imaginatively within him, I have called moral imagination. By becoming aware of how, as it were, at one end there is unconscious inspiration and at the other unconscious imagination, he becomes aware of his own immortality. But in ordinary life this is only unconsciously or subconsciously present; but it is there. And it is present in the unconscious inspiration through the right or wrong, also in the moral ideas that arise before our spiritual eye, it is present when we go beyond ourselves in love, as I have described it, to an act that goes beyond our egoism, develop strength.

Here we come upon something very remarkable about human beings. When what is otherwise only unconsciously or subconsciously present, the unconscious imagination that is so closely connected with it and can only work in love, as I have described, and the intuitive or inspired thinking, which shines in from one side, illuminating the imagination, when this thinking, which is not drawn from mortal man but from immortal man, and the imagination, which remains unconscious in ordinary life but which, through our loving actions, instinctively approaches the person, when these two work together, but from the immortal man, and the imagination, which remains unconscious in ordinary life, but which, through our loving actions, instinctively approaches man; when this instinctive love, which is the instinctive expression of the imagination described, seizes man, and seizes him in such a way that he asserts what inspiration shines into him before his birth, then the immortal works on the immortal in man, then the idea works from the immortal as it experiences itself before birth, together with the immortal as it unconsciously arises in the imagination and as it enters the spiritual world through the gate of death.

Thus, human actions are possible in which the immortal, which only reveals itself after death, already interacts here in life as a force with the free idea, which enters our human personality through inspiration from the immortal before birth as an impulse. That is then free action. This free action is present in man, of that man is conscious. One can only recognize freedom when one knows that the unconscious imagination that prepares our life after death works together with the unconscious inspiration that, as a force from the life before birth, resonates in our soul. By instinctively carrying out such actions as his immortal self performs, man carries out free actions. And the fact that a person is aware of free actions is a reflection, a mirage of what rests in the supersensible personality deep within the human being as an immortal. As I explained 25 years ago, man is not so free that one can say: he is either free or unfree, but he is both free and unfree in his ordinary actions. He is on the way to freedom. But one does not become aware of freedom unless one becomes aware of the immortal essence of man.

Today, in conclusion, I would like to summarize in two sentences what I have brought out of the spiritual-scientific consideration of free action and soul immortality before you, what I have tried to show: that one cannot understand freedom without recognizing immortality, and one cannot recognize immortality without looking at the consequence of real immortality, freedom. The immortal man is a free man; the will that comes from immortality is a free will. Man approaches these free actions with his ordinary actions. Mortal man is on the way to freedom. By elevating the immortal more and more within himself to a conscious being, mortal man becomes aware of his freedom. Man is born to freedom, but he must educate himself to realize freedom.

Dear attendees! With regard to the historical life of humanity and the understanding of this historical life, as it was striven for in its time and is still striven for in our time in much the same way, Goethe made a significant statement that can force one to reflect. He said that the best thing about history is the enthusiasm it arouses. If one is accustomed to seeking in Goethe's sayings the result of his deep experience of life, his wisdom, then this saying in particular can certainly give rise to much reflection. And if one that one can have in relation to what is called historical knowledge, if one goes to certain experiences, then one certainly comes to an insight that can lead to what Goethe might actually have meant.

Historical knowledge – it may be said that, especially in the course of the last century, great human acumen, great scholarly care and conscientiousness have been applied to it. And it is not a frivolous criticism of the historical judgment that people have acquired when I point out how little, especially in tricky cases, what is called history to this day serves when it comes to gaining a judgment from history, as such a judgment demands of us in real, true life. In our catastrophic times, every thinking person is often confronted with considerations that suggest to him the question: What does historical knowledge say about the truly far-reaching events of this or that day, which are so frequent after all, what does historical knowledge say?

I would just like to give an example, by way of introduction, of how truly not to be taken lightly and not to be considered merely as theorists, but as very serious people who believed that they could form a truly sound judgment from the study of history. At the beginning of this catastrophic period of war, have come to the conclusion that this world-cataclysm could not last longer, in view of the general conditions which have developed in the social and moral life of mankind, and which have been recognized by the study of history. They thought that this catastrophic clash of humanity could not last longer than four to six months. This is what people who, in a sense, had already formed a justified judgment from history and who were also quite close to practical life thought in August, September and so on in 1914. And what did reality, what did life say to this judgment? This can certainly make one think, it can certainly draw attention to whether the historical approach, as one is accustomed to, is in fact suitable for forming a judgment, how reality seriously challenges such judgments.

Yes, esteemed attendees, I would like to mention another similar one – hundreds and thousands of examples could be given in this direction – I will mention another one that was given by a personality whose genius no one can doubt; a personality who felt called upon to ask himself the question: What does history say about human life in modern times? This question was posed to him when he took up his university professorship, and this personality who made this judgment is none other than Friedrich Schiller. And what judgment did Friedrich Schiller give when he felt compelled to instinctively express the effect of historical study on his soul in his inaugural lecture? Schiller said, back in 1789: History teaches that the peoples of European humanity have finally emerged as one big family, within which there may well still be these or those differences, but within which it could never again happen that they tear each other apart.

This judgment was delivered by none other than Friedrich Schiller, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the great clashes in Europe that followed. And if you add to that what has happened to this day, then Friedrich Schiller's judgment is also shown in a peculiar light. One can say: Because perhaps Goethe, in his wisdom, looked deeper into human life and existence, he did not seek what history, as it confronted him, could offer in a judgment that could be learned, but rather, Goethe sought the fruit of history, perhaps for good reasons, in an impulse that goes deeper in man than into the mind, deeper than into the outer intellect. He sought the fruit of history in the seizure of the whole soul with enthusiasm.

And perhaps today's reflections can be suitable to develop and expand this judgment of Goethe and to show it in all its reality. For I would like to base today's reflections on the question: What does science, which we have been accustomed to considering as history, offer in comparison to what reality demands of us? One could say: Precisely when we consider life in its various forms, this life in its various forms perhaps indicates in a meaningful way something extraordinarily instructive in a deeper sense by what has emerged as a historical judgment itself.

Therefore, I will start from the perspective and way of thinking of two historians, observers of history, who in their mental peculiarity are as far apart as can be imagined; but the present day really does demand a way of looking at things that is different from the kind that only wants to dwell on what can be grasped in the surrounding area, to the extent that you can see the church tower of the place. The events of today, of the immediate present, however, demand of us that we broaden the horizon of our consideration to include the whole earth, and so I would like to preface my today's consideration with that which two very different personalities had to think about history in a particular case in a particular field.

The first personality is the late Karl Lamprecht, a retired professor of history at the University of Leipzig. He summarized what he had to say after a lifetime of research devoted to the history of the German people in a short extract – which is why it is so instructive. He had summarized what he had to say about the developmental forces of his people summarized it in the way he believed he had to summarize it, especially for a foreign population, for a foreign audience; for I base this consideration on the lecture he held in 1904 at the World's Fair in St. Louis and at the invitation of Columbia University in New York. Karl Lamprecht spoke there about the driving forces behind the development of the German people from the beginnings that the historian can penetrate, the first Christian centuries, to the present.

And I would like to parallel this form with the way of presentation that a mind has given, which has grown out of Central European folklore and that which experiences this Central European folklore as its history. I would like to parallelize this with the peculiar way of thinking of another man, who is also a historian in a certain sense, with the way of thinking of Woodrow Wilson, who spoke almost at the same time about the same subject, but with reference to his American people. I cannot think of anything more characteristic for those who want to gain insight into the way history is sought on earth today than what results from comparing the historical view of their own people in these two personalities.

Karl Lamprecht attempts to go beyond the old English and Rankean views of history, which rely only on external documents. He tries to turn his attention to the inner driving forces of historical development, to that which cannot be found merely in external records, but which can be found if one wants to penetrate into the soul life of the people, seeking the deeper forces that condition historical development. Karl Lamprecht comes to many interesting conclusions. He says: If we look back at the earliest development of the German people, we find that by the third century A.D. a peculiar kind of emotional power and its effects had developed in the soul of this people. If we examine the various areas in which these powers were expressed in this ancient time, whether in the , in the military, in the state, in the social sphere, in the artistic sphere, in a primitive way, as it was then, one must say: the people of the German nation lived in such a way back then that they shaped their social life and their social work out of a certain symbolist, emblem-forming disposition. Not only did they try to depict world events in symbols in primitive art, they also lived from person to person in such a way that the symbolic nature shaped these experiences. For example, one identified with the leaders of the people, seeing in these leaders of the people symbols of the whole nation, and this, says Karl Lamprecht, meant that at that time what can be described as the military-comradely principle emerged in the moral, in the social togetherness.

Then, Karl Lamprecht believed, what lives as an inner impulse in historical becoming is replaced by another form of emotional power, which then comes to shape the configuration of German development up to the eleventh century. This symbolist, symbol-forming emotional nature is replaced by the typifying one. Now it is no longer imagination that is at work, but reason. It attempts to find types in the individual phenomena, representatives of a whole, not symbols, but types; even in the individual personality who is leading, one sees the type for the other people. Military-comradely life changes, while this disposition changes, into a more cooperative way of living together, where the rational, the reasonable, already has more influence on the imaginative, also in the social, moral structure of human coexistence. But the impulses are still elementary, primitive, arising from the will in this time.

Then, according to Karl Lamprecht, we can see very clearly an age in which quite different impulses prevail in the soul forces. It begins in the tenth or eleventh century, continues until the middle of the fifteenth century, and I would ask you to bear in mind that Karl Lamprecht's historical instinct led him to set the middle of the fifteenth century as the end of what he begins in the eleventh century and calls the conventional age. Whereas in the past the moral and social structure of human beings was shaped out of certain necessities, he argues, consideration is now entering into the structure, although the old remains: conventions. Contractually, cooperative life is formed between person and person, society and society, which differentiates people even less, creates powerful differences through this conventionality, and divides people into classes; knighthood and urbanity, knighthood and bourgeoisie develop under the influence of conventional impulses. Landlordry and serfdom emerge as a social-moral structure in relation to the manorial system and the lease relationship, which were already present earlier. But in the social-moral, the social configuration of the relationship of domination and the relationship of servitude is structured by this purely externally necessary configuration in the ownership structure.

Then Karl Lamprecht, by always also observing how the various artistic achievements emerge from the same impulses, finds that what he now calls the individualistic age begins in the middle of the fifteenth century. Now, he says, the assertion of the individual comes first. Before that, the individual works more out of the whole, out of the whole that is grasped in conventions, for example in the last [era]. Now the individual asserts himself and in the individual gradually, namely, the rational, the intellectual element. And it is quite interesting – to a certain extent – how Karl Lamprecht shows for individual areas of life how this understanding comes up with the intellectual from the mid-fifteenth century. It is quite interesting when Karl Lamprecht goes into this area in detail. For example, when he shows how the diplomatic and political relationships between different people in earlier ages arose out of elementary impulses of will and feeling, whereas now the diplomatic and political is submerged in intellectualism and begins to be determined by the intellect. Karl Lamprecht then allows this age to last until about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Then he begins the era that, in his opinion, continues to the present day and in which we ourselves are living: the subjective era, the individualistic era. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the human individual remains on the scene; but this individual does not yet act through his internalized powers. Subjectivity, inwardness, first appears around the middle of the eighteenth century and then constitutes the actually decisive factor in the impulsive forces of the development of the German people. This subjectivism is particularly evident in the great, classical achievements, and so on, and so on.

I cannot go into the details. I just wanted to point out how, in the present day, the old historical view of Ranke and others has given rise to the endeavour to grasp inwardly what is alive in the course of historical development. It must be said that one is highly unsatisfied in many, many respects when one allows Karl Lamprecht's way of looking at things to take effect on oneself. It often gives the impression of a chaotic, confused presentation; but one sees in it the direct personal and most intimate struggle with certain forces that are sought, that are to be realized in that which then externally reveals itself as historical becoming. One has the feeling that someone is searching, but is not yet able to find what he is looking for due to the given time conditions.

If we now compare this kind of personal search by the German scientist with Woodrow Wilson's approach, something extraordinarily interesting emerges. I do not wish to be misunderstood, either way. I do not want what I say to be interpreted in a one-sided chauvinistic way, nor do I want to leave any doubt as to how I actually feel about Woodrow Wilson with regard to what I have to say. I have, dear ladies and gentlemen, characterized the whole nature of Woodrow Wilson before it was as obvious to characterize him as an opponent as it is today, namely long before the events that occurred in July 1914 In a series of lectures which I delivered in Helsingfors before the war, I pointed this out at a time when everything was still full of admiration for this new, great world view of Wilson's, even in our country. What is not admired in this day and age, if one is not pushed aside by some circumstances? When people were still admiring the greatness and novelty of Wilson's world view, I pointed out how limited, how narrow-minded, how incapable of penetrating the true impulses of reality the way of thinking of this personality in particular is, and how infinitely regrettable it is that the impulses of the times have truly not placed a way of thinking of such limitedness in a most important post of modern times for the benefit of humanity. I do not believe, therefore, that I am misunderstood if I attempt in an objective manner to characterize that which is now to characterize in its own way that which, like Karl Lamprecht for his people, Wilson has said for his Americans.

It must first be noted that this lecture, which Wilson gave on the development of the American people, provides a remarkable piece of powerful insight into the way the Americans have developed historically. Curiously, Wilson shows how the perspective he has acquired for the development of his people leads him to the salient points where it becomes clear to him how the American has become American historically. So let me also briefly characterize that.

Wilson points out that those who have completely false views about the development of the Americans are those who, like the English who settled in America's east, look at this development of the American people. Wilson rejects this English way of looking at things; he also rejects the one that comes more from the southern states; he points out that what has made the American an American, what is at the heart of the history of the American people, lies in what emerged when the American East advanced against the West , when this mixture of peoples, formed from Scandinavians, English, Germans, Russians, Latin peoples and so on, when this mixture of peoples moved from the east to the American west, that which had not yet been cultivated, cultivated, overcame the old wilderness. Not what was brought from Europe, but what was appropriated in the struggle with the wilderness by a mixture of peoples, that is the starting point, that made the American, whom he, as one can feel, accurately describes, with his adventurous spirit for everything that quickly arises and is quickly seized upon, with the homelessness that awakens plans that are not tied to a homeland but can be carried out anywhere, and so on, and so on. The cattle driver, he says, not the statesman, the woodsman, the hunter, not the statesman, is what the American has produced from the mixture of peoples in the advance from the east to the west in the course of the nineteenth century.

And his portrayal is, it must be said, accurate for this American people. He presents all the details that are otherwise usually viewed differently and that form the content of the social and moral history of America, of the United States, in the light of this approach. The tariff question, the land distribution question, and even the slave question – he shows that all three of these most important questions took on their particular form, their social and moral structure, through what he calls the conquest of the West from the East.

You could say: a powerful judgment! But it is precisely this judgment that is very instructive, and you have seen from the words I have mentioned before that, in my way of looking at things, Wilson is not a particularly likeable personality; but nevertheless, as I delved deeper and deeper into what actually underlies his way of thinking, something very peculiar presented itself to me. I had to ask myself: What about the peculiar impact of Woodrow Wilson's historical judgment? I tried to remember, to compare with the historical judgment of a personality whom I particularly appreciate and who has grown out of the latest phase of German intellectual life, I tried to compare Wilson with the peculiar way of his sentence formation and so on with Hermann Grimm, who only looked at history in terms of artistic phenomena. But he himself once explained to me, when I spoke to him personally, how he actually had in mind a comprehensive historical view that really, as far as he was able, wanted to go into a kind of intellectual grasp, intellectual consideration of the world of facts. I had to compare – the subject itself demanded it – some of Wilson's work with some of Hermann Grimm's.

The strange thing turned out to be that I was extremely surprised: some sentences could be taken as they stand in Wilson, could be taken and translated, and translated over into works by Hermann Grimm. According to their wording, they fit well. And conversely, one can take sentences as they stand in Hermann Grimm and translate and place them in Wilson's treatises. They fit in. The sentences are interchangeable. This peculiar fact presented itself to me, turned out. All the more reason to go into the psychological underpinnings, which are at issue here. In Hermann Grimm's work – and the same can be seen in Karl Lamprecht – there is a personal struggle for historical judgment. Everything that such personalities say is individually, personally experienced and fought for, is a direct personal experience in the inner struggle with the meaning of the facts. You get this feeling when you look at things quite objectively. What about Wilson? Especially where he judges so accurately, the matter is quite different. I am not afraid, because I believe that after my lecture the day before yesterday, I cannot be misunderstood with such remarks in terms of terminology. I am not afraid to use an expression that is very often interpreted in a superstitious sense, but certainly not by me, but in a strictly scientific sense, as I showed the day before yesterday. With Wilson, when you penetrate into the structure of his sentences, into the wording of his sentences, you have the insight: what he says, he does not say in the immediate struggle of the individual personality with the matter, with the object, but says it as if he this view as if he were possessed by an unknown power, as if possessed by something to which the soul is only remotely connected, which dawns in the soul from special irrational depths, whereby one is not completely aware of what one is possessed by. And I must say: when you take the accurate judgment that Wilson gives about the American national character from this development of his historical view, one feels, I would say, the exterior of the American, which he indicates there, something of this obsession with judgment. The “rapid mobility of the eye”; compare this, if one may say so, with the extraordinary calmness of the eye of a human observer such as Herman Grimm or other Central European human observers, who, although they fight with all their souls for their judgment, for their judgment, but who reflect the calmness in the eye, which has nothing of that mobility of the eye through which that which the soul is obsessed with, and also the other characteristics, which Woodrow Wilson means.

From such an example, dear attendees, we can learn something extraordinarily important for the present. Our present, of course, considers itself to be so extraordinarily practical, considers itself to be so akin to reality and realistic in its judgment; but our present is in fact excessively theoretical in a certain respect; for it is mostly clear about this: When two people say something with the same wording, they are saying the same thing. Nevertheless, you can be as different as possible by saying things that have the same wording. You only get to the reality of people when you are able to see the right reality behind the thing I just mentioned.

Those who establish a position of confession or opposition only on the basis of wording no longer meet reality. Today, if you want to go along with the impulses that the times demand of us, you have to develop something deeper in your soul than the mere intellectual and rational assimilation of a wording. Today, wordings no longer form the content of world views, because such a wording can be fought for in every single idea of the individual soul. Then, through the way it is said, it must be possible to become a participant in what is going on in the soul. Or such a wording can make the soul obsessed; then again one must be able to look deeper into some things that are empty and barren, even if, as is strikingly the case with Woodrow Wilson and Hermann Grimm, the sentences are interchangeable. And perhaps in no other field than where the present is viewed historically can one have such experiences.

It is interesting that the German scholar Karl Lamprecht is pushed by a certain instinct to base historical observation on spiritual forces; but he leaves something unsatisfied. Why? He is left unsatisfied because he turns to the soul study, the official soul study, by which he is surrounded in the present. He turns to the soul researchers who have emerged from the ranks of official philosophy today. He asks them: What goes on in the soul of the individual human being? That is already the new thing. But he starts from a great error. Even if one were to assume, which of course the spiritual researcher cannot assume, even if one were to assume that the official psychology or soul science practiced today is more than mere dilettantism compared to the real insight into the soul life, it would still not be possible to do what Karl Lamprecht tried out of an estimable instinct, but with which he must fail. He tries to make himself clear: what does the psychologist say about the development of the individual in relation to his soul? And then he applies what comes to light in the soul development of the individual in today's official psychology to his entire German nation.

A strangely enigmatic characteristic emerged, one that distinguished the different eras but indulged in endless repetition. If we wish to recognize the basis of this, we must point to something that can certainly be regarded today as paradoxical, perhaps as fantastic, perhaps as a mere reverie, but which must penetrate into the historical way of looking at humanity if history is really to become for life what it is believed to be for practical life. If we consider the individual human being in the development of his soul with that which enters into his ordinary consciousness, we do not stand at all in the realm that contains the driving forces in historical becoming. For why? That which works and lives from person to person in the moral, historical, and social togetherness does not live in the ordinary consciousness of the human being.

We can only come to terms with what is at stake here if we truly bring to mind a thought that I have often mentioned. In the ordinary, trivial consideration of life, one is of the opinion: the human state of consciousness alternates between the two great phases of daily waking life and nocturnal dull sleeping life, where consciousness is pushed back into the dullest possible twilight. But this is only a superficial way of looking at it. In truth, anyone who delves deeper into the conditions of inner human life and its revelations, using the means that I presented here the day before yesterday as imagination, inspiration, in short, as means of visual penetration into the spiritual world , that what we call dream life, what we call sleep life, does not merely occupy the human senses from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, but that it extends into our waking life.

Even when we are awake, we are only awake, dear attendees, with regard to our perceptions, our imaginative or mental life. We are not fully awake to our emotional impulses. These emotional impulses are down there in the depths of our soul life. What we experience of our feelings while awake, what we bring into our ordinary consciousness, are only representations of our feelings, and these are to our feelings as the memories of dreams we have when we wake up are to the dreams themselves. Feelings are no brighter, no more manifest in our soul than dreams themselves. By leading an emotional life, we lead it in the element of dreaming. And only by imagining our emotional life do the waves of this emotional life break from the subconscious into the conscious.

And even in the impulses of the will! If you remember how I dealt with it from a different point of view the day before yesterday, even in the impulses of the will, one has to say: There the human being not only dreams, but there the sleep life in all its dullness continues in the actual element of the impulses of the will in the daytime consciousness. What does a person know, by having the idea of what he will do, how this idea is realized only in his hand movement! What does he know of the mechanism of this hand movement, of the transition of the will's idea into the hand movement! This is overslept in the depths of consciousness. Thus the life of dreams and sleep continues in its impulses in the waking life, and it does not express itself particularly in the individual human life; for man is so concerned with his individuality that his life of conception and of perception is of importance for him, for his development, for that which stands clearly before his soul stands clearly before his soul; but when man works for man, when man learns to know and love man, when man acts for man, then it is not the impulses of perception and thinking recognition alone that work, but what leaps from man to man out of dream-like feeling, out of sleeping volition. In social and moral life, there is an element that works through all of humanity, especially through a humanity that belongs together, which is dreamt, which is overslept, an unconscious element.

Dear attendees, to express such a truth in abstracto, as I have just done, is of course relatively easy. If it is introduced into the true contemplation of life, it requires a strictly scientific approach. But this strictly scientific approach leads to something completely different from the historical consideration, as we have been accustomed to in school so far, which, as I have shown you in the introductory words, is so inadequate in the most important cases of life assessment. Once we have recognized, in its full significance, that what pulses as historical, moral, and social life in humanity must be considered as it directly works, like dreaming, like sleeping, we will realize that History must become something other than what has been understood by it so far and than even Karl Lamprecht understood it, because he wants to consider the soul of the individual and now apply that which lives in the waking consciousness to the historical consideration. No history comes of it, because one does not approach the dreamy and sleepy impulses of the event with it. And one comes to it least of all when one does what has been done more and more in the course of the nineteenth century, when one, which has led to such great, such powerful results for natural science, which have also been fully recognized by spiritual science completely appreciated by spiritual science, if one wants to apply the scientific way of thinking to history, this scientific way of thinking, which is, after all, a result of the intellectualism of modern times.

The greatness of the modern study of history has been seen precisely in the fact that one has begun to look at everything scientifically, that one has begun to place historical development in the same light in which natural phenomena occur to us and in which natural phenomena are rightly viewed. Here, too, Hermann Grimm made a very significant remark out of a deep instinct, although he did not recognize the significance because he was not a scholar of the humanities and also rejected the humanities. He made a remark about the way history is viewed. He pointed to a typical nineteenth-century observer of history like Gibbon, with his history of the decline of the Roman Empire. And he said it was strange that this Gibbon, who, in the spirit of the natural sciences, wanted to link the events of historical life according to cause and effect, that for the first centuries of the Christian development of the Occident in the Roman world, he actually only finds the decay forces, while he simply lets the rising, sprouting, sprouting life, which comes over the world in the emerging Christianity, in the emerging impulses of the Mystery of Golgotha, fall between the lines, without even realizing it.

Herman Grimm did not know that there was a deep necessity underlying this. Just try to apply the scientific approach, the adherence to facts that can be grasped by the intellect, to the consideration of the individual, individual human life, which is right here and also good for directing the individual life, not [true], to historical becoming. And one will see, especially with a thorough and proper examination of historical life, that one can only find in history that which leads to decline in history, and that one can never find, through the way in which natural science is emphasized as a way of thinking, anything other than the products of history's decline, that one can never find through it the sprouting, sprouting forces, because for ordinary consciousness they remain below the threshold of consciousness and must first be brought up from the dreaming and sleeping through the forces of imagination, inspiration and so on, as they were described the day before yesterday here as the method of spiritual science.

If natural science is particularly illuminated by what can come from spiritual science, history will only be able to be written at all, will only be able to be found in its essence, when one decides to apply the spiritual scientific method. What Karl Lamprecht instinctively wanted, what he felt out of a very deep Central European spiritual need, will only become reality when one passes from the ordinary knowledge of ordinary consciousness to the spiritual knowledge of historical becoming in the way just characterized.

Dear attendees, anyone who gets to know life, who acquires the ability to understand life from spiritual science, knows that looking into the emerging forces of life, into that which is future-proof and future-oriented in life, can never come from the mere intellectual, theorizing, present-day mode of thought, which is brilliant for natural science. It is a somewhat radical statement, but one that can be fully justified: the human being is at the center of reality and must shape reality through his actions; he must place himself with what reason and intellect give him and what can make him great in science in social and moral action. If he wants to regulate it, if he wants to give it a structure, even if it is only in the external commercial or banking sector, he is bound to fail. If you try to put together a parliament, any kind of society that is called upon to give social structure to humanity, from brilliant, ingenious representatives of scientific intellectualism, which is so good for the natural sciences; such parliaments of such scholars will most certainly ruin the social order, because they will only be able to give those impulses that can serve to wither and decay.

One would come upon many of life's secrets if one were to observe life so full of life. Many uncomfortable truths would come out of it, but reality is so serious that it must also be viewed seriously, that one must know what kind of mental strength one has to deal with reality. If this were realized, much of what is today called amateurishness and what is today called fantasy and dreaming would be recognized for what it is: imbued with reality, akin to reality, and called to intervene in reality where the theorist of today, the scientific thinker of the Wilson type, only has the banal, so-called ideals of peoples, so-called principles of interstate treaties, and so on, and so on, as all the theoretical, impractical, self-abrogating stuff is only called; where such a purely theoretical personality sets something unreal, there must enter into a time that demands such seriousness from us as today.

Dear attendees! I will not shrink from developing at least a few points here before you, showing how what I developed yesterday as the consciousness of vision can truly be immersed in reality, and how this leads to a consideration of history. I will only be able to develop the initial, very elementary ideas today, since I cannot speak until midnight and beyond; but you will see from this how, admittedly, there is an instinctive desire for such a historical perspective in individual minds like Karl Lamprecht's, but how there is no awareness that, in the field of historical perspective in particular, one must move on to a real, spiritual-scientific way of looking at things. I have pointed out that, out of a correct instinct, Karl Lamprecht assumes the mid-fifteenth century to be a significant dividing line in the modern development of the German people. And since, in fact, the German people are placed in modern times as a representative people out of objective knowledge — I say this not out of chauvinism — one can study the demands of the impulses of modern times especially in the German people.

But Karl Lamprecht does not go beyond an instinctive observation; otherwise he would not have equated this profound point, this turning point in historical development in the mid-fifteenth century, with turning points in the eleventh century or even with one in the eighteenth century. But anyone who penetrates deeper than Karl Lamprecht into historical becoming will notice that – although this is only ever reflected in external events – a mighty leap, a mighty change in the current of development occurs in the depths of life around the mid-fifteenth century. And the beginning of this same European current, which ends around the middle of the fifteenth century and gives way to certain impulses in which we still stand, in the beginnings of which we actually stand, the beginning of this current, which ends with the middle of the fifteenth century, lies roughly in the seventh or eighth century BC.

From the seventh or eighth century BC to the mid-fifteenth century, European life had a unified moral, political and social configuration. All facts and impulses worked out of an inner spiritual fact, which I, because I must describe it briefly here, would like to describe by saying that it works as it works from person to person in historical development because during this time people are still dominated by a certain instinctive way of using the intellect. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, beginning with the seventh or eighth century BC, the soul life of human beings was, in a sense, homogeneous, shaped in a unified way, but in such a way that the intellect, which is grasped and experienced individually today, worked like an instinct; and all events, all that which human beings wanted, all cultural All these things can only be understood in this time if one can enter into this special way of the soul's activity, where the intellect works instinctively, where reflection does not yet play a major role, where events happen elementary from the human breast, which can only happen now when the human being has long deliberations behind him.

And in the mid-fifteenth century, what replaces the instinctive intellectual soul – in spiritual science, one can also call it the emotional soul – what replaces the instinctive what can be called the consciousness soul, where everything has to pass through the individual consciousness, where the human being has to place the concept, the thought, everywhere, where the instinctive no longer works so fundamentally in his soul. Everything that has happened since the middle of the fifteenth century – I can only hint at it here in rough outlines – can only be understood if one has the first foundation, if one really has this turning point that I have indicated. There you have one point of view – I can only give guidelines – I will give another point of view, which is, however, regarded by people of the present time as even more fantastic, that it is deeply rooted in a truly scientific way of thinking, not in a dilettantish way, but in a way that is difficult to achieve, the existence of which most people still have no idea. This will be recognized in the course of time, just as it has been recognized that not the old world view of the pre-Copernican era, but the Copernican world view is the appropriate one for more recent times.

Ordinary historical research into documents already leads back quite a long way today compared to earlier times; but we only arrive at an understanding of the developmental history of humanity, an understanding that can arise from comparing the various earthly developmental epochs, when we can go much further through the seeing consciousness, through the insight of the seeing consciousness into the development of humanity, than historical documents can provide. Of course, this will naturally be dismissed as fantasy – that may be – but it is nevertheless true that what I described the day before yesterday as the three foundations of true, non-fantastical, non-superstitious clairvoyant consciousness in imagination, inspiration and intuition, that this is added to by following the development of humanity on earth from within, by looking inwardly. Then, not guided by external documents but examining the life of the soul through inner spiritual vision, one goes further back than the seventh or eighth century BC. One goes back to a time that took hold a few millennia earlier. One goes back to those periods of time that follow that significant catastrophe in the earth's history, which geology reports as the Ice Age, which various folk traditions report as the Flood, which of course must be dated much further back than tradition says; one goes back into ancient times, into which no external document, no literary monument, but into which spiritual vision reaches - today I can only hint at the results - one comes back into an ancient past, where a culture existed from which that which emerged later, but in a much later time, existed as the culture of ancient India. Sanskrit literature reports on this, but it is a later product than what I actually mean here in the development of mankind. One goes back to an age in which the human soul worked under completely different conditions.

It is a prejudice today that the human soul has not changed since the time when it can be observed. Oh, it has changed so much. If you go back with a spiritual scientific view to the first period after the great glacial epoch of earthly development, which reached its peak in particular in ancient Indian culture, you encounter a completely different kind of mankind, from which impulses must have emerged that are quite different from those of later times; we encounter a type of human being that remained capable of development into old age in a way that we are only capable of development in the first years of childhood. We are capable of development so that we experience - we still experience it in dullness - what occurs at the change of teeth, for example. We experience the physical in the soul. How does the young person experience sexual maturity, the physical body in the spiritual soul! But in our time, this ends in the twenties. Certain precocious children – one dare not even say this today – even believe that this dependency of the spiritual soul on the physical body ends. It is believed that one is even more mature at twenty for writing “below the line” than at twenty. The dependency on the physical body also lasts until then. But then it stops. I do not mean the external dependency that occurs in the fatigue of the body, in the greying of the hair, in the wrinkles of the face - that is external dependency.

But in that ancient epoch of which I am now speaking, a person experienced such dependency until the age of fifty, which today is only experienced in childhood. Everyone who was there as a young person knew that you experience something new when you get old. That was something very significant, because from about the age of 35 onwards, a person's development takes a downward turn, with physical development entering into decline.

Now, the experience of the decline of the physical is not as we experience it today, but the inner experience, the way one experiences sexual maturity, is a special inner development in relation to the spiritual. It is precisely the spiritual that gives us this experience of physical decline. And by experiencing the physical in this oldest epoch, this physical in that older epoch was particularly suited to develop in the soul in an immediate, elementary, natural way. Just as we today only remember the different stages of our childhood and youth, so in this most ancient time, the human being was suited to experience special spiritual-soul experiences inwardly, the echo of which can be clearly perceived in later ancient Indian literature and culture.

Then came another age. There was already a decline. Man was only in this way with his spiritual-soul in connection with the physical-bodily, only until the last forties. Then came the third age after the great ice age. There man was only capable of development in the way I have indicated until the last thirties. And then came the age that began in the seventh and eighth centuries before the Christian era, of which I said that the mind still worked instinctively, because the ability to develop dawned on the whole of human life until the mid-thirties. During this Greco-Roman period, humans remained capable of development.

Then there was a decline, and for our time – one can calculate such things, but I can only present the results here – the 27th year is approximately the limit up to which the soul and spirit go along with the physical and bodily. In spiritual science, I call what I have just explained the process by which humanity becomes ever younger. Humanity remains, so to speak, youthfully fresh, growing and flourishing in older times well into old age; it retained its developmental forces well into old age. I call this process by which humanity becomes ever younger.

As you can see, if we look at the real laws of historical development on a large scale, we cannot consider the psychology, the soul science, of the individual human being, as Karl Lamprecht does; because the soul in humanity's development, in the times when people did what Karl Lamprecht wanted, they did it in such a way that they said: well, in ancient times humanity is in childhood; then it comes of age and then into mature age; then it becomes old. The opposite is true for the study of reality. Humanity remains young from the earliest times to the highest age, that is, it reaches a high age in youthful freshness and becomes ever younger and younger with its decisive powers, that is, it comes more and more to development, which depends on youth, which no longer gives anything to old age.

One must therefore apply a completely different method and psychology of soul observation if one wants to elevate what is otherwise experienced in the dream world, even in the sleeping state of human beings in their historical and moral development. And only when we study the pulsating depths of the human soul, when we truly get to know the driving forces of evolution, only when we study human evolution and delve into the individual facts, only then will we arrive at a vital and realistic view of historical life.

I would like to mention just one event. Those of you in the audience who have been coming to my lectures here every winter for years – it has been 14 or 15 years – know how little inclined I am to go into personal matters in these lectures; but here the personal is often also appropriate. If I may mention something personal, it may be the following: I myself tried to remain objective with regard to the greatest historical events of the coming into being of the earth, to remain as objective as was at all possible. I started out with no prejudice. And after decades of research, I found the law of this historical coming into being of the earth's humanity, as I have described it, this law of the aging of humanity, in regard to which one must say: There was an age when humanity was capable of development until the age of fifty, until the age of forty, then until the age of thirty, and so on, and in Greek times it was capable of development until around the age of thirty-five. In the seventh and eighth centuries, then, to the 34th, 33rd year, then back to the 28th year. We are roughly in the middle of the fifteenth century. There the instinctive knowledge of the mind ends in the human soul.

Now I said to myself: There comes a point in time when humanity stands in the middle of its development, when the development of humanity stands at a particular point. Once, in this Greco-Roman age, humanity was on the verge of growing older and older and younger and younger. 33 years old; a new impulse had to come if humanity was not to lose its connection with the spiritual world. For this spiritual world opens up to man especially when he sees within himself in his spiritual and soul experience the physical and bodily decay, as it was in ancient times. This spiritual impulse came. It is to be deepened through the newer spiritual science. For that which the human being can no longer draw out of his bodily form, the spirit must give him through spiritual-scientific knowledge as spiritual, in order to keep him capable of development up to the highest age. But for this to happen, a special impulse had to come at a particularly important moment in history, when humanity, going down from above, had reached the 33rd year. And strangely, the greatest symbol in human development is the new impulse of Golgotha, the Christ impulse. The greatest impulse for the development of the earth comes from the 33-year-old Christ Jesus in the 33rd year of humanity. I did not set out, dear attendees, to look at the Christ impulse first and to place it artificially. I knew nothing of this being placed in this way. This law presented itself to me first, as I have explained it before, and then I had to see the Christ impulse in the light of this law.

When one looks at it this way, one first recognizes how spiritual science does not lead to a superficiality, to a shallowness of religious life, but truly to a deepening of religious life, to that deepening which sinks this religious life so deeply into the human development of reality. I just wanted to mention this because you so often encounter the following: people criticize you, well, whether you speak of religious life in spiritual scientific lectures or whether you don't speak of it. What don't they criticize! If one does not speak of it, they say, spiritual science has no religion, no Christianity; perhaps this only arises because this spiritual science, in a deeper sense, understands a certain commandment that also exists:

Thou shalt not take the name of the divine being in vain! (Ex 20:7)

If one does not speak the name of Christ or God in every sentence, it is said that spiritual science leads away from religious life. If one does speak the names, people regard it as an attack because they all feel called upon to speak about religious life. You can't please people. But that is not the point. Those who get to the very heart of spiritual science can see how it can only lead to a deepening in all areas, including religious life. And how is moral, social and historical life grasped, which proceeds in such a way that its impulses do not even penetrate into consciousness? But we live in an age where awareness must arise, where what could remain unconscious in earlier times must emerge into consciousness. We can look back to those ancient times of human development, when the dream-like, the sleeping in human impulses was experienced in a different way. Then, historical life was lived out in consciousness in myths, legends and fairy tales.

Those who understand how to appreciate such things know that fairy tales and myths, in the external sense, do not contain any truth in the way that history is viewed today; but in a deeper sense, they contain the historical impulses that people otherwise dream about and ignore. By developing his myths, legends and fairy tales, man placed himself in the moral, social and historical context of his fellow human beings, and in his own way brought to consciousness in a pictorial way what is actually at work in historical, social and moral life.

Today, of course, we cannot invent myths and fairy tales; but we must use spiritual scientific imagination and inspiration to bring up from the depths of the human soul what would otherwise remain subconscious. We must recognize that when one person stands morally face to face with another, there is a kind of subconscious clairvoyance in this confrontation. And what the spiritual researcher recounts is only a raising of the subconscious, the dream-like, but in human actions to revelation coming, into consciousness.

In this way spiritual science has a hand in the investigation and deepening of reality. And this spiritual science corresponds fundamentally to what the instinctive consciousness has been striving for in our spiritual life. One has only to think of a spirit like Lessing and his “Education of the Human Race”, or of the great and significant impulses for the study of history that were given by Herder. Much of this has been forgotten. In my book “The Riddle of Man” I have pointed this out, and also pointed to a forgotten current in German intellectual life. But this forgotten current in German intellectual life will resurface; for in it lie the seeds of a spiritually appropriate view of reality.

Such a spiritual view of reality is particularly needed in history. Then the real impulses, which no intellectualism, no scientific observation, no Wilsonianism can bring to the study of humanity, will enter into the study of humanity. It will be realized that that which is revealed in history, that which is revealed through man, goes deeper to the soul than that which merely seizes the head, that which merely seizes the intellect and which rightly celebrates such glorious triumphs in scientific knowledge. But with this one cannot master reality. One will understand why a history educated in the natural science pattern had to make such mistakes as even Schiller made, as the people of our time have made in relation to the great world catastrophe.

In our time, we are called upon to form our judgments about the development of the earth. We must not shrink from deepening these judgments, we must grasp what Goethe means, what underlies Goethe's words when he says that history cannot be learned intellectually, but that history when we immerse ourselves in it so deeply that we bring the subconscious into consciousness and place it in the human context, we develop ideals that enable us to cope with current situations. False prophecies will not arise in our consciousness, but the strength will arise wherever we are placed in life; we will know how to grasp the context of the facts and will be able to act out of natural necessity. Then we will not be taken in by false prophecies, all kinds of predictions and the like, but by real prophetic, that is, future-proof, future-oriented action, which we will come to know through the study of history.

History must first come into being and will only come into being when people come to a spiritual-minded view of reality. Then history will also develop true moral science, then history will be what can give man the best in the first place, namely the right enthusiasm for life, an enthusiasm that is full of understanding, that penetrates into reality, and that meets the right thing in the right place. And such a thing is demanded by the life of the immediate present. The life of the immediate present teaches many things; it also teaches that we must meet the demand for a true view of history.

[Dearly beloved attendees!] There is no doubt that a direct feeling in the human soul admits that man can present two questions as particularly significant: about the freedom of will and [about] the immortality of the soul.

There is an intimate connection between the two questions, and it is no mere coincidence if we want to consider them side by side today. In a sense, for just as long as there has been a human striving for knowledge, as long as there has been a striving for a world view, there has also been a particular effort to get to the bottom of these two questions. They are also the pivotal points of philosophical endeavor. But how much contradiction there is in this area!

Anyone who considers these two questions from the point of view of spiritual science will notice why the usual intellectual endeavor, despite all the ingenuity deployed, cannot arrive at a satisfactory solution. In our scientific age, people also want to gain insight into these questions through scientific knowledge. But despite all the admiration one must have for the successes of the natural sciences, they do not come close to these two questions.

These two questions point to a deeper self-knowledge. In doing so, all the difficulties of self-knowledge become apparent. Nevertheless, what is at stake here is a question of time - and yet scientific insight fails, for example, when it comes to the question: What is it that leads a person's true self through this life?

The question of the scientifically minded scholar, the question that he must ask himself, also concerns self-knowledge: What happens in thinking, feeling, and imagining? In his book, The Subconscious Mind, Waldstein explains this. He recounts how he stands in front of a bookstore and looks at the displays. He is a scientist himself. By chance, his eye fell on a scientific book “On Mollusks” - that was the title - and to his astonishment he discovered that it made him smile. He asked himself: Why am I smiling? What surges in my self? He closes his eyes and pays attention to everything that is going on around him. In the distance, he hears the sounds of a barrel organ playing dance music, which he had previously not heard and which only now comes to his attention because he has closed his eyes. When he first heard that music, he was still young and did his dance steps to its melody. Now, as he looks at the book title, this melody and its memory unconsciously mingle with the surging gears of his soul. He only became aware of it when he closed his eyes – and yet he had unconsciously smiled!

From this you can see that there is much, much in the depths of the soul that one does not need to know about otherwise. Much comes up that we call memory and so on, that we do not understand, that belongs to the subconscious. When you think about all this, you actually have to despair of really getting to know what is in the human self. Other examples can be found in 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. These examples show how careful one must be when approaching the question of human self-knowledge. In this consciousness, soul surges are at work that one cannot foresee. For its exploration, natural science is inadequate – it gets no further than vague memory factors, the scope of which we cannot even begin to fathom.

A completely different approach from the usual one is needed to gain this knowledge. One must seek another knowledge that lies dormant in man. For the time being, it is still difficult to make this clear to others. It is even more difficult than when the clarity of the Copernican worldview was introduced, which also demanded a complete rethinking.

The first requirement will be that something like the sounds of the barrel organ enters into spiritual-scientific knowledge. The consequence is: the striving for knowledge that is not accessible to such deception.

Spiritual science strives for knowledge that has nothing to do with ordinary memory. In order to recognize, it must exclude not only external perception from consciousness, but also the power of memory itself. It must show that one can go back to deeper layers that lie even deeper than memory – to dig into the depths of the soul that lie deeper than ordinary memory. The human soul attains such knowledge. The first thing to strive for in order to enter the spiritual world is imaginative knowledge.

Why is self-knowledge only attainable through this path? When we look into the external world with our eyes, we see everything around us. The eye does not see itself, and that is precisely why it is able to perceive other things. It is similar with the human self. It can see the things of the environment, but not itself at first. Another can see the eye. There is no possibility that the human self is examined by others. The human self must step out of itself, beside itself. This is necessary for self-knowledge. It must leave the body in which it usually lives. The human eye can see itself - namely in the mirror. But what then?

It lacks what permeates it with life – the essential. It is a mere image of the eye. Imaginative self-knowledge strives for something similar. It demands a stepping out of the personality. What is then looked at is related to the life-filled, spiritualized human being like an eye in a mirror. Hence the term imaginative, that is, image-knowledge.

We cannot suddenly enter the spiritual world. Serious striving is necessary for this, and it is only through the image that we enter into the spiritual world. The usual soul exercises must be carried out first in order to strengthen the whole soul life, to make it more intense than it is in everyday life.

For these exercises, one should therefore choose ideas that are as straightforward as possible, and preferably ones that are not reminiscent of memory or experience. It should not be a case of “immersing oneself” in memories or the like – not a “tuning of the organ grinder”.

Therefore, it is right to oversee meditation with full consciousness; to know how to form the idea. Because it depends on the applied soul power, it is good to take such meditations that are an image. The consciousness should be allowed to rest.

There have always been schools that teach such ideas. However, this deep secret has been kept for the simple reason that these ideas should not be heard and read everywhere, they should not be carried as a memory in the soul, but for the first time these images should be presented to the soul in meditation. Imagination lives in such ideas. You have to do them for years. One often thinks that the natural sciences are difficult, but spiritual science is easy. But it is not so. Those who know both know how difficult spiritual exercises are, especially when they are to lead to more incisive results, much more difficult and serious than the natural sciences. One should not be deceived by all these things.

Finally, through continued practice, one acquires a real power in pictorial representations. The soul learns to live in a world of images that is just as intense as the external sensual impressions. However, one must strictly distinguish this from all visions and hallucinations, which, although mysterious, are effluents of the bodily organization.

Spiritual science, however, deals with an inner activity that is independent of all bodily organization. One increasingly enters into a soul life where the body cannot have a say. In the imagination, memories still play a role.

But then comes the most difficult task of all! When, after years of practice, one has finally penetrated to this imaginative or pictorial knowledge, one has achieved nothing more than a certain self-education. For this world of images – and this would be a great mistake – has not the slightest connection with the objective spiritual world. One must realize that one has now only achieved an invigoration of the human self. One has incorporated a spiritual eye, but one cannot yet see with it! One feels one's self in a kind of spiritual experience, but without the help of the body as before.

The next task is to make this world of images, which now comes of its own accord, transparent. The first task was to create this world of images, the second task is to remove it again, to make it transparent, so that one has nothing but the different experience of the self. But one carries within oneself the passage through the imaginative world, what has been achieved through it. A new world is now revealed around the person. This world shows some characteristics that prove that a special experience is taking place.

Everyday consciousness leads to memories. What one learns in the spiritual world must first be translated into ordinary ideas if one wants to communicate them or remember them. One cannot remember what happened. If you want to experience the same thing in the spiritual world again, you have to make the same spiritual efforts, go exactly the same way as the first time, in order to perceive the same thing again. This disappoints many a beginner. They may well have psychic experiences soon. But they will not soon become a source of life for them either, because they are so easily forgotten and new efforts are needed to experience the same thing.

If I may give another personal example: most people always believe that if I have given a lecture several times, it should become easier and easier for me over time because it would have been memorized almost verbatim. But that is not the case at all. On the contrary. The content must always be taken from the spiritual realms anew.

There is something else to be considered here: when we live in the ordinary world, we practice many things by repeating them, and that makes it easier for us over time. In the spiritual world, it is just the opposite. If you have seen a being or a fact, it is more difficult to see the same thing the next time. The being or fact flees from you because you have already seen and experienced it. The next time you have to make a greater effort to experience it again. And thirdly, presence of mind is necessary for this: if you want to hold on to the experiences you have in the spiritual world, you need presence of mind – because they occur and have immediately disappeared again. Those who turn everything over in their minds before making a decision are ill-prepared. You have to quickly grasp a situation and act on it. And once you have acted, you should look back on it without regret, even if the matter is not successful. This state leads to presence of mind, and this is necessary for those who want to enter the spiritual world. Then it comes to you as inspiration - and only with inspiration do you face the spiritual world.

The third stage is intuition. Here the human being not only comes into contact with the spiritual world, but once one has passed the first and second stages, one is united with the spiritual as one lives in the physical body. One must completely immerse oneself in it, completely forget oneself. Namely, one must forget one's everyday consciousness – and most people have such a terrible, unconscious fear of this. Only when one emerges from intuition does one have full awareness of what one has experienced in ordinary life. One must go through this self-forgetfulness with courage, through dying to the self. Only when one enters into the spiritual world in this way can one approach such questions as we want to discuss today, because these are questions of the supersensible nature of the human being.

A quarter of a century ago, I approached these two questions philosophically in an unusual way – in The Philosophy of Freedom. I tried to make them acceptable even to those who want nothing to do with Theosophy.

The first pivot, which ties in with nature, is human thinking, which is a wonderful mystery. You do not notice much of it, otherwise you would already be on the way to the supersensible.

In the free play of ideas, there always lives – and this must be taken into account – the one pivotal point of the human soul: we have to admit that, from our own organization, we understand the play of ideas, associations and so on, but we cannot grasp the interplay with scientific ideas, thinking, the logical distinction between “right” and “wrong” in thinking. Free actions can only be those that approach with true or untrue, that do not arise from human thinking - intuitive moral intuitions that approach thinking, like the impulse of whether the thought is false or true.

The second crucial point: actions arising from drives are not free. The hidden reasons for this lie in the human organization. Other reasons can be distinguished from some actions. We have to understand this form of action. What happens when we love someone? We usually say: love is blind. No – I say: love is giving. It discovers deeper qualities that escape the other person when they immerse themselves in the other, forgetting themselves and their egos. Connected with this love is the fact that one cannot fall into the trap of which selfish love so easily falls: wanting to reform the loved one, criticizing them, wanting to remodel them. Real love intuitively embraces what is loved; it does not want to change it at all, but to leave it as it is. It only wants to live itself over into the other being - it does not want to reshape it according to its own nature.

The same can also happen in relation to an action. If I have the purest love for an action, without egoism, then I do this action out of the impulse of love - that is a free action. Anyone who goes this way, doing the actions for their own sake, is on the way to freedom.

One can approach these two pivotal points of human life with spiritual knowledge. What is it that reaches into the soul? If we have the opportunity to confront this thinking with our intuition, we make the [shattering] discovery: what stimulates us, what is accepted as “true” or rejected, does not come from our body, but is [is] inspired in unconscious inspiration. It is unconscious inspiration that plays into it. What is that? What is inspiring us? What inspires us is what the soul experienced before birth, before conception by our parents. This provides forces that become an unconscious inspiratory directing force.

Spiritual science must deepen and strengthen many a notion. The research into immortality to date simply continues the life in this world. Spiritual research asks differently: Is not the life in this world the continuation of a spiritual life before? All that is of the soul comes from a spiritual world. Below the threshold of consciousness lies the source of spiritual directing power. This life makes the idea of immortality necessary – there must be a continuation of a previous spiritual life. Immortal forces are hidden behind the spiritual forces. Therefore, one should not and need not go against scientific facts. One should only penetrate deeper. The natural scientist conducts research into material processes. Spiritual science wants to build a bridge from these to the spiritual facts behind them. Biologically, we ask ourselves: What happens in the brain while we have mental images? With spiritual science, we can approach this question. We discover what is also based in the sense organs in terms of the spiritual. While we imagine, a process of starvation takes place in the brain - partially in the brain and in the nervous system. When the main organism partially starves, we experience an unconscious inspiration.

The eyes of some animals show a sword-shaped bridge. Another consciousness is based on this. In humans, this has regressed, it is much simpler; many things die as development progresses, many things are regressed.

As soon as the head reaches its highest level – thinking – the sprouting must give way, must make way for the soul. At its highest level, it diminishes, declines, and must give way to the spiritual-soul. The head is in regression, hence the influence of the prenatal – in the fiftieth year this has an effect.

With another part of our body, the extremities, the reverse is the case. While the head is in a state of regression, the extremities are an organism that transcends itself in its development. It finds its continuation inwards, and here too over-development extends. That the extremities and the sexual organs belong together is shown in women by the overdevelopment of the arms, legs and breasts; there is something creative in these, bodily transcending itself.

After the inspirations, new imaginations arise. The outer extremities are a symbol for man's entry into the outer world through his moral or immoral influences. These unconsciously affect man even before death; they occur in a case when man acts in such a way that his actions are intuitive moral actions, and when, on the other hand, the unconscious intuitive intuitions... [of prenatal life and the imagination of post-mortal life come together], then man relates to the outer world by acting.

The inspirative prenatal life and the intuitive post-mortal life together make up the “moral imagination” or the free action of man. It consists of intuition and love.

What can be set free in a person? The supersensible personality. The immortal soul is the same in the genuine love of the free deed. What is free in a person? The immortal soul. What does the knowledge of the immortality of the soul give to life? Freedom.

Thus, soul immortality and freedom are a necessity; they are not an either-or, but a both-and. But the acquisition of freedom must be the free deed of man!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees! I am well aware that there are many personalities who, based on their education, are called upon to judge and who will not find what I will venture to present this evening scientific, and that the various reasons and objections to the spiritual science meant here must actually have been exhausted by those who represent them, I would say, from their own nature. Due to the limited time available, I cannot go into objections today. In fact, if I do not want to be too verbose – I would actually have to give a whole series, a cycle of lectures – I can only give a brief, cursory sketch of what the essential goal of the spiritual science just mentioned is.

I would like to draw attention to just one thing from the outset: that what is most unusual, what most often gives rise to objections to what is presented here, is that it is not about the expansion of any kind of scientific or other knowledge or other knowledge in any direction, in the way that this knowledge already is, but that it is a matter, dear honored attendees, of developing a completely different kind of knowledge instead of, or rather in continuation of, the one that people are accustomed to according to our present-day consciousness of time. This spiritual science wants to show that the usual, familiar knowledge is not suitable for penetrating into the reality of the world in which the fundamental and most meaningful questions about the human being are rooted, the questions about human immortality and human freedom.

But there is another factor that must be taken into account if we are to arrive at the right kind of spiritual science. This is that in order to penetrate to a different kind of knowledge that can only penetrate into such questions as those mentioned, in order to penetrate to this knowledge, one must first have had, with one's whole soul, with one's whole knowledge and other human struggles, must have had two-sided experiences, not just experiences that are otherwise recognized as experiences of knowledge, but experiences that are really connected with human development in its deepest, most meaningful sense. Experiences that, so to speak, bring people together with everything that leads them to the limits of reality in the loneliness of knowledge, and so on, and so on.

So these experiences are two-sided, honored attendees. The one who wants to advance spiritually must first have experienced what can happen in our soul in the face of the desire for knowledge when it appropriates, in one way or another, the knowledge of nature that has reached such a high level of development and such tremendous perfection in our time, or at least in such a way that it can have an experience of what knowledge of nature reveals to the soul, what it gives it. I can only indicate and characterize natural knowledge. I am not inclined to belittle natural knowledge in any way. Those who enter into spiritual science will see that it recognizes natural science, especially in the form that corresponds to the new era.

Knowledge of nature is suitable for penetrating to a certain degree into reality. But this knowledge of nature comes to certain areas where it has to develop concepts, and in the face of these concepts, what the soul has in its deepest depths as a goal of knowledge usually fails. Such concepts are already the concepts of matter as the carrier of material existence, as they are handed down to us through observation of the senses.

You may be aware of the amount of honest, conscientious, and serious thought that has gone into such ideas in order to arrive at their meaning, such as the idea of matter or force and the like. But anyone who not only tries to speculate, to philosophize about such ideas, but who follows with his soul everything that the soul can muster to form such ideas out of experience and thought, comes to say to himself: It is in the nature of the human organization to form such ideas, to form such alternating in the changing world and then leave it at that, not to penetrate any further, because – as I said, I can only give results, you can find the rest in my books – because man is forced to put these ideas forward in order to have, so to speak, a backing to develop the other life, namely the life of knowledge.

What is the situation with these images? It is like a mirror. You stand in front of a mirror, dear ones, and see yourself in it. The mirror is necessary for you to see yourself in it. Certain images in our organization are necessary for us to arrive at other images. They are there like a mirror of the soul. If we want to penetrate into these ideas in the same way as we usually do into our external reality, it is as if we wanted to break the mirror to find out what we see in it. This is actually the case with all borderline ideas in the knowledge of nature.

If you wanted to continue in the same way, you would be in the same situation as if you wanted to break a mirror to find out what is behind it and what causes you to see yourself in it. This is also the experience that one has when reflecting on what is taken for granted in philosophy. If one wants to penetrate behind the surface of things through philosophy and speculation, it is like breaking a mirror to discover what one will not find behind it.

Now, for someone who sees something like this in the direct experience of the soul, the significant and important question arises: What is it about human nature that we must inevitably come up against such limits, that we must indeed place something in front of us that we can use as a counterweight, that we do not break, to put it figuratively, but simply have to leave in our everyday consciousness? Where does that come from? When one investigates this question, one arrives at a meaningful human soul experience, a secret of the soul; one arrives at recognizing how something in human life, in the whole human organization, is connected with this mirroring nature of our knowledge of nature. One can answer spiritually researched questions of the soul life to a certain extent.

What would human soul life be like if it were not like this, if we did not have this mirror in front of us? One would have to miss an element in this human soul life that is absolutely necessary for this human life, for human existence between birth or conception and death. If human knowledge were such that it could disappear into this borderline perception, then the human soul would have to do without the possibility of grasping in love that which it can only see in the mirror through its emotional life. The nature of the mirror, which is connected with our outer sensuality, is at the same time that which ensures that we do not face external reality in a coarse and unintimate way, but rather that our thoughts fail at the moment when they kill love in a dry and sober way. We must be organized in such a way that we cannot go further on the path of ordinary sensory knowledge or its dissection than we can, so that we do not lack the ability to love.

I would like to make this very clear: the fact that we are limited to these two sides is what makes us capable of love, and so the spiritual researcher comes to realize through direct soul experience that knowledge of nature cannot lead to true reality, because delving into ordinary knowledge, into this true reality, causes the ability to love to dry up in man. This is the first experience one has when on the path of spiritual science.

What I have told you now is described in more detail in my book 'The Riddle of Man'. It arises as a direct, real experience; that is one thing. There are very many people who have not quite clearly or more or less intuitively realized that knowledge of nature does not lead to the depths of human soul life, or to spiritual existence at all. Such people have doubts about the knowledge of nature and then turn to another kind of knowledge. This other kind of knowledge gives the second experience I have to talk about, which must be preparatory for the spiritual researcher. The first is the failure of knowledge of nature, the second is the failure of another kind of knowledge, which very many people seek at the moment when they often only instinctively doubt knowledge of nature. That is mysticism. Mysticism is to be understood only in the sense that I myself will characterize it.

Mysticism in the ordinary sense is understood to mean immersing oneself in one's own soul life with the means available in everyday consciousness. One wants to remain there, but one tries to turn one's attention away from the sensual world, one tries to become blind and deaf to it, so to speak, to sink down into what one can experience in one's own soul life. This mystical knowledge is described by many as very satisfying, since the path of the external does not lead to the secrets of existence, does not lead to the core. What is called philosophy is a hybrid. Many branches of philosophical knowledge tend towards what I call mystical here, others towards knowledge of nature. Anyone can gain knowledge by immersing themselves if they let Meister Eckehart or other mystics take effect on them.

The experience shows that by diving into the depths of the soul life with the ordinary consciousness, whether it is meant more or less scientifically, mystically or religiously, one also comes to unsatisfactory results in this way, as in the external way of knowing nature. If we are honest, if we are fully conscious, if we are not a dreamer or a fantasist, we will always be able to say to ourselves on the mystical path of higher self-knowledge: Something intrudes into what one experiences inwardly in contemplation, something that is connected with the subjective experience, that does not penetrate below the foundations of the subjective human will, something colored by what one gives shape to, and in the end one says to oneself: Even in this way, one does not go further than images, very meaningful, often inwardly shattering images perhaps, that arise from an intimate coexistence with the core of the world, but actually only images. One learns to recognize the pictorial character as a mystical experience, especially when one wants to penetrate mystically into human experience with full real deliberation.

And so we are confronted with a certain limit here as well. What is it in the human organization that makes it necessary for us to come up against a limit even with mystical knowledge? What would a person lack if, following the ideal of certain mystics, they were able to immerse themselves in the depths of their soul in such a way that they collided with the essential core of existence, where the core of our soul life also lies? Just as we previously lacked the ability to love, so now another soul ability would be unable to be our own if we were able to penetrate to the core of our own existence and that of the world through mystical contemplation; a meaningful, indispensable soul ability would not be there, that is the ability to remember. On the path that leads us to the core of existence with everything we experience in the world, we would not be able to encounter in our soul the power that makes us capable of remembering as human beings. We have to keep our imagination, our perception, our feeling and our will separate through our organization, because the ability to remember is placed in the middle of them. By immersing ourselves in ourselves, we must be able to remember.

We see, two already harrowing experiences are there from which the spiritual researcher must start, and the spiritual researcher must have the courage to say to himself: These are essentially the two ways in which one can somehow penetrate with the ordinary consciousness. He must also have the courage to reshape this ordinary consciousness, to give it a different character, to awaken, as it were, from this ordinary consciousness a different, higher consciousness, which relates to the ordinary consciousness as the ordinary consciousness relates to the sleeping consciousness. We know how the soul struggles for the strength to make a distinction between what is in reality and what is in dreams. It is necessary to awaken from the ordinary consciousness that we need for our knowledge from morning to evening to a higher consciousness, and only in this higher consciousness can we experience what is connected with the real riddles of the human soul.

Just look at the question of immortality, esteemed attendees. Today it is really placed in the quest for knowledge of people, and since people today have become accustomed to making scientific demands on such questions, no longer wanting to be satisfied with the traditional way, it is a scientific task to discuss such questions as the question of immortality. A great many people are mistaken. Many try often to somehow prove, more or less philosophically or more or less amateurishly, that something lives in the human being that outlasts death, but that is not enough, dear attendees.

One must realize: anyone who can only provide evidence that something survives death has actually done nothing special for the question of immortality. Because the question at hand is whether, when a person has discarded his physical body, a high level of consciousness is still associated with his soul essence without him living physically. All the rest are subordinate questions. For example, whether some ethereal fluid, a nebulous being, lives on as the soul, cannot interest the human being if he cannot penetrate to the realization that the continuation of life is conscious, that consciousness is possible without the organization of the body; for it is clear to spiritual science and natural science is clear that our ordinary consciousness, the everyday one, is so intimately linked with the physical life organization that one can only speak of a functioning, a powering of this ordinary consciousness when this consciousness is carried by the bodily organization.

It is therefore incumbent upon the spiritual researcher to show that consciousness is possible without physical life. Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to point out to you, so to speak, for the sake of context, some things that can support us in understanding what I am about to show, such as the knowledge of nature, even if it honestly strives to do so, can only get to a certain point in relation to the human soul and cannot go beyond it. I could give hundreds and hundreds of examples that would point in the same direction. I will give an example from literature, so that it can be verified, an example that you can find under the title 'On the Subconscious Self' by Waldstein, which was published in Wiesbaden. Waldstein cites an experience through which a kind of limit of scientific observation is revealed to him, but to the spiritual researcher much more.

He was once standing in front of a bookseller's shop window as a naturalist. His eye fell on a book that showed the title “Mollusken”. The naturalist had to smile when he looked at the title page, but was not aware of any reason to smile when he read the title of the book “Mollusken”. So he takes the following recourse to get to the bottom of the matter. He closes his eyes and pays close attention to what he can now hear, and in the distance he hears a hurdy-gurdy, which is barely playing a melody, to which the observer, who has to smile, learned to dance in very early years; he is aware that he did not pay attention to the melody at the time, only to the steps he had to learn and to what he experienced with his partner; but after decades, when he stands in front of the mollusc book, the reminiscence comes from the depths of his soul. That sound, which was not clearly absorbed at the time, comes up in the soul and causes a smile.

The spiritual researcher must pay particular attention to such things, because they show the caution that must be exercised. Many a person believes himself to be a mystic and experiences this or that through delving into the soul. What comes up is often only the long-gone organ tone, which one takes only for a deeply mystical experience, because such things also transform themselves.

Many examples could be given where mystics, who consider themselves to be very profound, tell you all kinds of things about inner experiences that take them to the boundary of the spirits and are nothing but an old hurdy-gurdy. But it is precisely in such experiences, dear attendees, that one finds the whole meaning of what human memory is. You may know that we cannot develop our self-awareness without memory. Self-awareness is very closely related to the continuous ability to remember. But the ability to remember is also one that is very often connected with the subconscious, with the so-called unconscious soul forces of our soul life. It is therefore particularly important to bear in mind that spiritual science, which seeks to penetrate into the reality of the spirit, is clear from the outset that everything that is connected with the ordinary ability to remember does not lead to knowledge of the spiritual world at all. The fact that we recognize that we are led to a certain limit, beyond which we must go if we want to enter the spiritual world, results in very specific difficulties, which are such that many people say: What a spiritual researcher says is unbelievable. This is said because what he says is very far removed from the usual thinking that people are accustomed to.

People are accustomed to thinking in such a way that everything that is carried by memory radiates into their entire mental life. I said that the spiritual researcher must have the courage to develop a different way of knowing. He can achieve this in two ways. By making himself capable of leading such a soul existence that, with the connection of memory for a period of time – you cannot be a spiritual researcher all day long – develops such strength in his soul that it determines the soul, sets it in motion, but without the ability to remember being used. How is this ability attained? It is attained through a very specific kind of meditative life. This is a kind of inner contemplation, but under very specific conditions. In our ordinary everyday consciousness, the soul power is at work in that we perceive the outer world and form our ideas about what comes to our attention. In sensory perception and in the life of imagination, that which connects us to reality on one side brings about revelation.

Those who do certain soul exercises, which are suitable for combining into one, in a sense, what is otherwise drawn together in perception and imagination, arrive at a completely different way of imagining, of knowing. To do these exercises, one must try to bring into consciousness such images that can be surveyed as completely as possible. To do this, it is necessary to be quite sure that these images cannot be drawn from ordinary or subconscious memory. Those who want to do the exercises would do well to seek advice or look for them in the literature of spiritual science. You can do it approximately, and that will lead you to your goal, but you have to make sure that you fully understand what is present in your consciousness. However, it does not have to be abstract thoughts that are symbolically connected to external reality; they should not depict anything superficial, because what is an external image is linked to memory. For example, we have to let the idea of the flooding light be present in our consciousness. And if you keep coming back to such exercises, if you bring it to the point where the whole power of the soul can concentrate in meditation on such ideas, which you fully grasp, where you are quite clear about them: only where there is no memory of what you have put together in the present will it work its way into consciousness – a kind of thinking will immediately come that at the same time encompasses what the soul has to establish against the external perceptions. One becomes blind and deaf to them, but one performs the same activity that is otherwise performed in external perceptions.

In this way one arrives at an imagination that works with the means of perception, at a kind of union of the power of perception and the power of thought. And when this is developed more and more, one notices: something arises in the soul that was not there before. You get to know new sides to people that have been slumbering in the depths of the soul, you learn to go beyond the ordinary way of thinking in the human soul nature, but the realization that 'time becomes space' occurs, the strange thing is that you can look back on what you have experienced. Ordinary memory, which is tied to ordinary day-consciousness, shows: the experience has passed; we present the experience anew by having it again in memory; we cannot look back on the experience.

When one has done such exercises, the past is present; one looks into time, a new soul ability arises, a new reality. If one is able to see the spiritual in the sensual, before one discovers that what only appears as past in the ability to remember, what can always be seen spiritually, is there, then, dear ones, one can have penetrated to this new kind of cognitive ability, then one arrives at feeling more and more, which can be described as a new self-awareness.

This new self-awareness must be experienced if one is to have even a rough idea of it. Some people rightly find lectures on spiritual science more difficult than others because our words are only shaped for the sensual and therefore our words are not very suitable for the supersensible. However, the spiritual researcher is forced to use words in a different sense than the ordinary one. He must use words through gestures, must point to what is going on in the soul. Words are gestures of the soul. He must count on the receptivity of every human soul that rests in the unconscious. In this way one arrives at a new kind of self-awareness. Only now does one get a true-to-life idea of what it means to experience oneself in one's soul and spiritual life independently of the physical organization. Why? Just as you have the table outside of you, so in this experience you have your own bodily organization outside of you. You experience yourself very certainly in a self-awareness that is independent of the bodily organization.

Now, however, a second exercise is necessary. At first, when you do such exercises, you only gain this self-awareness, and in it you feel constrained, trapped in a soul existence. It is as if you knew you had eyes, but they did not have the transparent glass liquid. You then feel the eyes within you, but you do not feel connected to the objective world through the eye. So self-awareness awakens first; but you feel as if you are in a mental haze, but you do not feel connected to the mental outside world. You know you are in it, but self-awareness must first become transparent. One arrives at this through further exercises. When one develops such thinking, which is at the same time a form of perception, one soon recognizes that one plunges into a world of images; one does not just have the new self-awareness as a basis for experiences, but lives in a world of images. It just flows towards one, but one becomes opaque in one's self-awareness.

You now have to acquire the ability to suppress the images that are flooding in through further exercises. You achieve this by strengthening your will more and more. Strengthening the will – which is usually directed outwards – in such a way that it is now directed towards one's own development, towards practising strict self-education, for example, towards seeing clearly what one has experienced, towards directing the will inwards, towards suppressing perceptions and images, towards becoming master of them in the new self-awareness; this makes it transparent and reaches the point of seeing only - although this only gives the experience - the truly spiritual world, which is just as truly there before the human soul as the world of colors is before the eye, the world of sounds before the ear. This is a world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, to which we belong with our soul being just as we belong with our physical body to the external world perceived through the senses.

That is the way to reach the spiritual world on the one hand. This must be an experience that is based on the lack of results of mere natural science and mere mysticism. One comes to grasp the world as pure spirituality, so that one then retains a view of what I have called the past, that which lives in time. It is quite natural that one broadens one's view, extending it beyond the limits of birth or conception. As man searches up to his ancestors, looking up, so he looks through his inner soul to spiritual research, to what lived and breathed in the spiritual world before man became aware of the world. The spiritual researcher proceeds differently than the natural scientist; the spiritual researcher must show a way, not results like the natural scientist.

I have described the path that the human soul must take in a strictly regulated way in order to recognize the prenatal, spiritual, and soul aspects within itself. All speculations about immortality must ultimately lead to unsatisfactory results if one seeks the immortal as a goal to strive for. You cannot, all speculation fails. In the one path, you find the prenatal soul that lives in us and truly comes from the spiritual world, like what lives in us physically from our parents. This momentous experience becomes particularly harrowing for the soul when this soul comes to truly understand how this prenatal life, this spiritual, soul existence, is connected to the things we otherwise have around us in our ordinary consciousness.

I do not like to talk about spiritual research, about personal experiences. But all these things are personal experiences that have been taken to the point of objectivity. I must confess that one of the most harrowing experiences of my inner soul life in this area was when I once, I would say, beheld with the human thinking, the imagining, as I had practiced it as described, our prenatal human soul existence, purely spent in the spiritual world. The prenatal soul experience reveals itself through the experience. If you manage to shape your exercises more and more so that there is possibly nothing abstract about them, but rather you live completely into the image, if you manage to awaken the way you live to such liveliness, as otherwise only the experience of sensory perception is, if you live so vividly in the soul as otherwise only in sense perception, then, however strange it may be for today's thinking, the intuitive knowledge comes, then the previous earth life is experienced, the prenatal, purely spiritual life is experienced, which penetrates through the last of the thoughts, the spiritual reality, which was already its physical reality before. When a person, through the strengthening of his soul life, is able to think so powerfully that, although he perceives nothing externally, his thinking nevertheless sees the truth of the past life with the same vividness with which he otherwise looks at flowers and plants, their color and their growth, that is staggering.

A property of this clairvoyant insight, this seeing insight, is precisely the following. They have seen that a kind of insight must be developed that does not appeal to the ability to remember. Once the spiritual researcher has such an experience, he cannot remember in the ordinary sense. It is a present experience, the memory ceases. The exercises lead the spiritual researcher to the point where the memory is not appealed to even when his ideas arise; nor can he ever rely on the ordinary memory through which he looks into the spiritual world. If we want to have a second corresponding view of the spiritual world, we must not remember the view itself, but the path we took to it. This is what is terribly disappointing for beginners. They first come to spiritual experiences through exercises as set forth in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. They then believe they have it as a lasting possession, but one cannot remember it and repetition is always difficult because one has to make greater efforts to have the spiritual vision again.

I have described certain exercises to you, through which the soul comes into a completely different state, through which a different kind of knowledge is developed, through which one becomes able to look into the eternal of the human soul. Something else is connected with these exercises. When one has really gone through the preparatory paths, experienced the limitations of natural knowledge and mysticism, when one has really gone through all this in one's soul, one comes to the point where one gradually says to oneself: You still have to make more efforts to come to a completely different kind of soul organization. You then have to progress further by developing the exercises into something that, in a sense, enlightens you about certain things, an inner experience that is connected to other experiences you have in nature knowledge and mysticism. One feels separated from what is inwardly pure in the body – in mysticism – the basis of thinking, feeling, willing, and imagining. That is the peculiar thing. When one does such exercises, one is also brought closer to material life, and by seeing through it, one's spiritual life is clarified.

We have certain concepts of what imagination is, of how we form ideas. But how many conscientious investigations have been made to discover how this thinking, which has perceptions, is connected to the body? Through the exercises I have described, one comes to be, so to speak, closer to one's soul, mind and physical body.

Imagination is experienced in a different way, dear audience. By developing ideas and thoughts, the brain experiences a hunger, and then you experience that it was truly too simplistic a conception of how popular Darwinism views the human organization. It is not so; man is a complicated being, and there are certain states of equilibrium and disequilibrium between his individual organs. If they are capable of thought, our brain will certainly come into such a state that it is in retrograde motion, that it hungers, and without the brain, while the other body is in normal nutrition, is less nourished, is in greater hunger, no alert thought life can develop.

This is also connected with something that can always be verified. Certain people who seek mystical experiences in the wrong way begin to starve themselves. They want to starve the whole body and also starve the brain, which is already hungrier than the other limbs. Through purely spiritual exercises one comes to the realization that the feeling of hunger is necessary in the human brain organization. This leads to the realization that the soul and spiritual life can truly live and exist in its independence through our brain nerves, because we do not develop the life of the organ for thinking and imagining; we degrade it and interrupt the life of the organ. What constitutes animal physical life, we must degrade, not develop, in order to have thoughts and ideas. In the nervous system, space must be made for independent, spiritual, and soul life. Science will come to this very soon. The beginnings are already there that the physical organization of man itself is such that one must admit the independent spiritual soul life. The brain undermines the sprouting life, making room for the development of the spiritual.

The other thing is to get to know the other pole of the human organization. Just as brain life is one pole – see the last chapter on the “Soul Mysteries” – the other pole is the life that is connected with its ability to move as physical life with its will. Man is not organized as simply as ordinary natural science believes. While the brain is atrophied in waking life, another pole of its organization is overdeveloped. The sprouting, burgeoning life beyond the normal limit is what is connected with the extremity of things, with arm, hand, foot, leg. But not only with the outer feet, legs, but also with the continuation into the inner being.

What is connected with this other pole of human organization is not felt in the same way as in the feeling of hunger, but is felt in oversaturation, in survival. It is felt in such a way that, while the human being, in his bodily and nervous life, as it were, returns to the normal organization of his trunk life, he has waking visions and perceptions as a result. The outer organs are overgrown. One need only see the anatomical and physiological connection between the extremities and the other human organs to recognize the physical connection with human reproductive capacity. This corresponds to a spiritual-soul element. The nerve organ is experienced as normal malnutrition.

In the will organ lives as spiritual-soul that which, if it is to be developed, is developed in such a way that one does different exercises. They consist of subjecting the emotional and will life to rules, as was done earlier with the life of perception and imagination. If one looks at something that is not usually looked at in everyday life, then the goal is achieved. One can remember with full clarity what one has experienced; in one's memory, one perceives what one has experienced, including other thoughts that one has had; one does not remember moods or states of mind in the same way.

But this must be trained. Man must train not only those soul abilities that otherwise lead to memory, but also the overview of such things, such as saying to oneself: I was once 17 years old and must be able to visualize the soul conditions that I had at that time. The moods of the soul come up again; one finds how one can follow such moods between birth and present life, one overlooks one's moods. Something develops – one can compare it to inner soul music. Just as in music the preceding tone blends with the following tone, so earlier soul moods resonate in a peculiar way into later ones, and later ones also resonate back into the earlier ones. One recognizes how one develops, how the earlier parts of one's soul life bear fruit later. One must look at oneself in that way in which one otherwise does not look at oneself, what lives in man like the germ that lives in future years, will live in this year's plant. What lives in man goes beyond his individuality, the other link of immortality that goes beyond death. One must recognize immortality as one recognizes the second side. Just as one recognizes the first side through imagination and perception, so one can only see what one becomes in the afterlife by developing one's emotional and will life. This is how one develops other will abilities.

The ability to remember must be suppressed while one is a spiritual researcher. While we have to suppress it in spiritual science, only looking at the present, suppressing memory, the ability to love, the emotional and volitional life will increase inwardly; in the moments where the human being wants to penetrate into the spiritual world after death, his greater capacity for love will also be developed, and it must be developed, otherwise the human being would look into the spiritual world as a guest, and that would be evil. The capacity for love is increased, the capacity for memory recedes.

Twenty-five years ago, I began to philosophically explore the ability to love in connection with the problem of human freedom. At the time, in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I had to break, so to speak, with the popular sayings regarding love. It is always said that “love makes people blind”; I believe I can rightly assert that true love ability makes people clairvoyant, leads people right into the depths of the loved one. However, ordinary love is very often only connected with a certain selfishness. We love another, foreign being, but we often want to have it differently, find fault with it, we want to make of the being what we wanted to see. That is not yet love, which is actually worthy of the highest sense of the name. It is only truly present when one forgets oneself.

The spiritual researcher must take self-forgetfulness so far that self-awareness is developed outside the body. This increases the ability to love, and we come to not only really see through the other human being in selfless love with clairvoyance, but also to perform actions that do not come from our urges, instincts, or what we desire, but rather come from pure love for the action, from the insightful love that an action must happen, that we completely exclude ourselves when we want to. If we act only out of love for the action, then we approach such an ability of love, which still has to be increased by practice – [see my] “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”. One arrives at developing a soul ability that is capable of truly seeing. Man also has something in him spiritually, soulfully, that also goes beyond the physical, that which passes through the death of man.

One can only understand human immortality by really understanding the other state of consciousness, by experiencing in a certain way every day, the consciousness that is not dependent on the physical organization, that becomes independent of the physical experience. It looks at conditions before birth, after death, because it knows itself in an elevated self-awareness outside the body. In this way, the eternal essence of the human being is seen together with insight into the pre-birth and after-death.

The soul must be explored in two directions if the human being wants to see immortality. Immortality cannot be seen scientifically by expanding and broadening one's knowledge, but by acquiring a new way of knowing. It should be noted that this only applies to those times when a person wants to engage in spiritual research. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from awakening to falling asleep; one devotes oneself to it intermittently, for moments that one creates in full consciousness. Then one finds those times when one is in the spiritual world in such contrast to one's ordinary consciousness, as one's daytime consciousness is in contrast to one's sleep consciousness.

It must be emphasized that this is never the right way to spiritual research, when a person, in a self-satisfied, egotistical way, tries to bring into their ordinary life, into the life of their duties, of healthy thinking and healthy coexistence with people, what should only apply in moments when they are devoting themselves to spiritual research. Just as we need to sleep well so that we can live during the day and develop a healthy, conscious life, so we need to live responsibly, fully consciously, mindful of our obligations in ordinary life, not in a false abstraction from life, not in fantasies, in frippery with which one might adorn oneself. A healthy life in the world of the senses is just as necessary for a healthy contemplation of the spiritual world as healthy sleep is necessary for a healthy day life.

It is not necessary for everyone to become a spiritual researcher, although it can be seen in the books mentioned that everyone can convince themselves of the truth of what I have stated today, that everyone can quickly acquire spiritual research skills today. One can, but does not have to. If you put aside all prejudices and want to do for this matter what humanity had to do to accept Copernicanism, you will also develop thinking habits that are quite natural to people and through which common sense can understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, although you cannot prove whether an astronomer is right. You can't do that here either.

This spiritual research, as described here, is something that the present must truly assimilate in the near future. This spiritual development could learn from the unspeakably bitter experiences of the last three or four years, where we can go with our old familiar ideas. Today, far too many people are still too lazy to ask themselves how much part our ideas, which are no longer suited to contemporary life, play in our catastrophic times. In the knowledge of nature, man has such ideas: spiritual, ethical, social and political ideas. If we want to apply the model of knowledge gained from nature to social, ethical and political life, man can only do so if he rises in spirit to grasp the laws that prevail in the spiritual world. For the most important questions in life, for that which the most severe and most deeply invasive events demand, thoughts are necessary that delve into reality, but not just into sensual reality, which is one that is imbued with spirit everywhere. Those who deny that another spiritual world lives within our world, as one looks at it, make the same mistake as those who say that a horseshoe is a horseshoe, and it is in reality a magnet.

Thus spiritual research discovers spiritual reality in the world that is available to us, and through this we learn to intervene in the full reality. But this has become most necessary in our time. We must consciously experience, and allow people to experience, that impulses from our ethical and social history are also interventions. Therefore, spiritual research emphasizes that humanity has struggled to achieve what it calls logical thinking. Today, many people can think logically. But thinking in accordance with reality is what will have as great an impact on human spiritual development as Copernicanism once did. Even if what the spiritual sciences have to say has, in a sense, lasting significance, the spiritual researcher may also, especially in today's world, say what he has to bring out of the deeper reality as a result of the times, which has always been between the lines. We must look to the past, especially to the very recent past. It stands before us questioningly, telling us images, thoughts, ideas, impulses of will; it shows us through events that it has outlived itself. We must look to the future, which we can only master by standing in a different way in the place where we stand through destiny. We must look into the future by looking at the full reality, so that by seizing it we may seek to penetrate the historical, ethical life of mankind as it must be penetrated, as man must intervene. The spiritual researcher may say that he wants to serve human knowledge, human life in time, where such difficulties are being experienced as now, and still he adds hope, he believes that he can serve our difficult time and the difficult future of humanity in particular.

Notes

Those who are familiar with anthroposophical spiritual science are well aware of the numerous objections that our contemporaries have to what is to be presented here. Not only must an expansion of the type of knowledge be sought, but a completely different kind of knowledge, and it is against this kind that the objections arise.

You have the idea of free action, but this freedom does not arise from the organization. You have a sense of freedom that would be a lie, or we would have to go beyond our organization to get to the bottom of freedom. Where do you get with materialistic knowledge? To certain limits. There must be these limits, for example, the idea of matter and force. We need these limits, we need these ideas. But we must come to the point where, when we follow these concepts, we destroy the scientific concepts. We have to place these concepts like stakes, and reality is reflected in them. These concepts are mirrors. Those who want to get behind these concepts with scientific concepts would act like someone who would smash the mirror to find the thing-in-itself behind it.

Once you have experienced this, the question arises: why is it that we set ourselves limits? Man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself these limits as he is between birth and death. A common power should be wrenched out of the soul, and that is the ability to love. Such a being could not love anything that lives in a physical body. The way we have to set limits for ourselves is closely related to our organization.

Because this has always been there, people have come to a different pole. They sought mystical knowledge within themselves. One thinks that one can find within oneself what cannot be found outside through the senses. But there, in one's own inner being, one also comes up against limits. What I have told you about self-awareness becomes denser and denser, but it is also only an image. So there too you reach limits. The futility of ordinary mysticism becomes apparent: you also reach limits. This is because man would not have to have a soul power to come to the image, to the limit, in ordinary mystical contemplation. This is the power of recollection, memory. If one were to break through this barrier, then the ability to remember would cease. One could not remember oneself in the right way, one loses the thread of memory of one's own self.

Outwardly: the ability to love; inwardly: the power of memory, which prevents us from breaking through the barriers to the outside world, to the inside.

Louis Waldstein: “The Subconscious Mind” - barrel organ tones. That which becomes part of the subconscious mind over the years changes over time, and so that which arises in the mystic as an inner vision and beauty is like the transformed tones of the “barrel organ”. Neither ordinary knowledge of nature nor ordinary mysticism can lead to the supersensible. The transformation of these powers of knowledge is necessary to reach the supersensible. One has to search in such a way that the forces through which the boundaries are created are transformed, so that one focuses on these forces and transforms them, so that they no longer create boundaries.

In honest self-knowledge, ask: What happens in the soul when we know nature? There is perception, lively and intense, when we only perceive. When we form ideas, perception is more shadowy. This is connected with the power of memory. What is weakened in the idea produces the power of memory. We always think when we perceive. We must distinguish thinking from remembering and creating ideas. One sharpens thinking for meditation by not allowing thinking to pass over into memory. Thinking that becomes images, that is meditation. Leave out everything that is abstract and never leads into the supersensible. Such thinking, the meditative, leads to memory, to recollection, it leads to imagination. That is not yet knowledge.

If you continue this exercise, you will see images pop up inside you. You then have to develop the strength to suppress these images. Then a significant spiritual experience follows. You become more self-aware. You lie in the dark night, open your eyes, but see nothing in the darkness, hear nothing in the silence. Then, with the self in the night, what you have experienced arises. It is not remembering, but looking back on the experiences that the soul has gone through, which it has descended from the spiritual into the physical. It now experiences the experiences of the soul in the supersensible. The poet says: “Time becomes space.” The events remain in time, time becomes space. One sees the supersensible of one's own soul on this path.

Those who are beginners in this matter experience disappointment in themselves. They cannot remember, that is, they can remember what they once experienced, but it does not come up with the same validity and vividness; on the contrary: there must be no memory of such experiences. The soul must make the same effort, even more than the first time, to have such experiences again and again. One more thing: such experiences come in a flash. Those who deliberate for a long time in everyday life, who dither over a decision for a long time, prepare themselves poorly for such supersensible experiences.

The other pole of the supersensible world is in the time after death. Just as the ability to remember must be weakened for the first pole, so the ability to love must be increased for the second pole.

We want to do something different with what is around us in every moment. Man must transform this will. He must permeate his life with his will. What were you like in your seventeenth or eighteenth year? How did your unconscious will work? One must strive for this, one must take hold of this will, make it conscious. An increased ability to love must come from it. This is how one enters the afterlife.

This is how one arrives at the realization that the human being is rooted in the supersensible. A chasm opens up between outward and inward experiences. The knowledge of the supersensible world can fill this chasm.

The human being is a threefold creature: a head, trunk and limb being.

Stenographic transcription

The subject we are about to discuss, ladies and gentlemen, is one that many consider to be beyond the reach of human knowledge. Not only because of this prejudice, but also because of another circumstance, objections arise mainly against what is to be said, which, from a certain point of view, are still quite understandable today, even if perhaps not justified. In order to approach the supersensible realm, one must strive not only for an expansion of ordinary human cognitive ability, but, based on certain prerequisites, which will be discussed in a moment, one must strive for a completely different kind of knowledge, a completely different way of knowing than one has already become accustomed to today. After all, it is precisely this kind of knowledge that is opposed.

However, dear honored attendees, it turns out that right at the beginning of spiritual scientific research, one must proceed from such a different kind of knowledge in relation to the supersensible. For the actual researcher of the supersensible proceeds from two experiences, not from mere logical considerations, but from two experiences. These experiences tie in with man's yearning for knowledge, with two main inner drives for knowledge, I would say, but which have been pushed very much into the background by official spiritual science in recent decades, so that when we talk about soul science, we can actually see how these two, I would say, root questions of human knowledge have been eradicated.

These two root questions are, firstly, how is the human soul itself rooted in the supersensible? There is, of course, nothing else, dear attendees, than what is called, in a broader sense, the question of immortality. And the second root question of human existence is the question of freedom. When one touches on this question, one immediately realizes that it is truly not just human desires, or the trivial fear of death, that bring man to these questions, but that there may be quite scientific starting points that lead to these profound questions of the human mind and the human urge to explore. The first thing is that actually every human being is pushed to ask himself: What are you actually, what is actually that which you call your self-awareness? If a person then tries to become clear to himself in a somewhat more developed self-knowledge, in a very lively way, what he can actually grasp with self-awareness, then he must say to himself: This self-awareness actually appears to me as a mere thought, and yet, it must be more than a mere thought, what surges up in self-awareness from the depths of the human soul.

A philosophical saying of a very, very brilliant thinker, Descartes, in which this thinker indicates how he became convinced of the certainty of self-awareness as a reality, has become very well known. The saying “I think, therefore I am” has become very well known. And many, many people believe that they can anchor the reality of self-awareness in this saying. But for every human being, dear attendees, this assertion is refuted every day, because no one can deny, when they look at the experiences of the soul with an open mind, that at least for the time between birth and death, what underlies the human self must also be different between falling asleep and waking up, when the person is not thinking. All sleep refutes Descartes' saying “I think, therefore I am”, because I am also when I am not thinking. One must take such objections in their entirety.

But the saying proves something quite different. It proves something truly not to be taken lightly, that however hard one tries to get to the bottom of it with ordinary knowledge, what actually announces itself in one's own self, in the soul self, one cannot get at anything other than thoughts, at a thought image. In ordinary consciousness, one attains nothing for self-awareness other than a mental image. If one goes through all other beings, [one finds]: Only the animals that are closest to humans [...] for them it will very soon turn out that what they experience is based in reality on their organization and the like. Man himself must say to himself in self-observation: precisely what I call the center of my being, I cannot grasp with ordinary consciousness other than as a thought, as a mere image; an image arises, and nothing other than an image. And ordinary consciousness does not yield a reality for this image. Reality must be sought by other means than through ordinary consciousness, through ordinary knowledge. Otherwise there would have to be an image of something, not a reality.

Not in the ideas that I do not have inwardly, dearest present, are all the feelings, all the inner impulses, the yearnings for knowledge, that lead man to seek how, since it cannot be attained in the sensual, the human self is anchored as reality in the supersensible. Not the fear of death alone, not the desire to continue to exist after death or to have a supersensible being, but the realization that there is an image for which one finds no reality in ordinary life, drives man into the supersensible in the face of this question. Otherwise he would have to say to himself: 'An image arises in your soul for which you have no reality'.

The second is what inevitably arises in the consciousness of human action. It is there, but it cannot be explained, no reason for it can be found in the human physical organization. It is the feeling that we have as... [illegible] that we are a free being. Freedom can be derived in theory, it is present in human consciousness, but it never ever reveals itself from the human organization. The human organization only allows us to explain scientifically that everything that flows out of it as an action flows out of necessity. If we have an awareness of freedom with regard to our own actions, then this free awareness cannot come from the sensual-physical reality, and only if one has the courage to make the right admissions about such things can one say to oneself: either you live in something conjured up by your consciousness, with a sense of freedom, which would be a lie, or you have to look for reality outside the physical-sensory reality of your organization, in the supersensible, from which the sense of freedom of your soul arises.

Thus, esteemed attendees, I have presented to you that which drives man not merely out of dark feelings, but out of very scientifically-based considerations to approach the question of the supersensible. The one who then approaches these questions will, from the scientific perspective that is meant here, have to rely on two experiences. They are usually only accepted as cognitive experiences. Spiritual science accepts them as experiences of the whole... [illegible] human being, as such experiences that are undergone by the whole extent of our soul. The first of these experiences is the one that is explained by scientific knowledge. I have already made the following comment here: spiritual science is not at all hostile to natural knowledge, but is perhaps more imbued with the full significance, the full essence of the very fruitful modern natural knowledge. But spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not merely accept this scientific knowledge, as the natural scientist himself does or as those people who want to form a world view out of their scientific appreciation do, but spiritual scientific research must experience with the whole soul: What can scientific knowledge give? Where does scientific knowledge lead?

It turns out, and I am not just saying something that can be logically deduced, but I am characterizing what is experienced by someone who is scientifically asking with his whole soul: Where do you end up with other scientific knowledge? It turns out that every scientific finding must come up against certain limits. These limits must be established through scientific knowledge. Now I could cite many such ideas that must be presented as limiting ideas of scientific knowledge, where one must simply remain at the mental level, one must present them like stakes, like boundary stakes, and say to oneself: Here you simply set these boundary stakes. You must not make the same as ordinary scientific knowledge. In this way, the idea can enter, as can thoughts, with a scientific error. I could certainly cite the atoms straight, other straight, but I need only refer to the most common scientific idea, the idea of substance and force. We need them if we want to recognize scientifically, but we have to put them there.

If we want to understand what we mean by substance and force in the same scientific way that we understand other natural laws, then we would immediately come to the feeling, by having to experience things, that we are destroying scientific knowledge itself. We can no longer maintain what we otherwise assert scientifically. We need this boundary. - Why? Yes, we realize that we put this boundary in front of us, just as we put a mirror in front of us in which we see ourselves, and only by putting this boundary in front of us does it reflect back to us what we have as a scientific idea. If we did not place it, we would have no mirror, and if we were to strive to get at what is called the thing in itself, then our endeavor would be like that of someone who says: My image in the mirror comes to meet me; I want to know what is behind the mirror and conveys the image to me, so I have to smash it so that I can see what is behind it. Thus, anyone who wants to cross the boundary of natural science removes themselves, using the example of the natural sciences themselves. The whole endeavor to get behind the essence of sensual things, with which one... [gap] itself, like the... [gap].

I have only given a brief description, but this is an experience that one must gain, that is gained by the one who again asks himself the question: What must you do scientifically to achieve that supersensible borderline... [illegible] comes to you, that forms the basis for this fruitful modern scientific knowledge? You have to set certain limits for yourself, you have to let them stand, so that the other is penetrable for you. If you have experienced this, dear audience, if you have gone through in your soul what I have just characterized, and I just want to describe and suggest today, that is, speak of experiences, if you have experienced this, then the question arises in the soul: Yes, do we want to, do we have to, if we want to understand the world scientifically, set ourselves limits? And then one comes to the conclusion that man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself such limits. Man would have to be different, then he would no longer be this human being that he has to be for the period between [birth and death]. For it is connected with a very significant power of the soul that we have to set ourselves such limits by observing nature.

Once you understand what is actually going on, what arises in you is something tremendously significant. A certain strength would have to be torn out of our soul if a person were to be so constituted that the knowledge of nature offers him no limits. What would have to be torn out of the soul is the capacity for love. A being that does not come up against limits with knowledge of nature could not have within itself the ability to love anything while living in the physical body. Anyone who sees through the whole of the human being must say to themselves: the part of our being that is directed towards nature must set itself limits because this part of the human being is bound to another part that is able to love. We would not be able to love if we did not have a capacity for knowledge of this kind, which must set itself limits in our experience of nature. The same power in the soul that urges us to set such a mirror boundary, that urges us not to penetrate certain boundaries, is the same power that makes us capable of love. This part is connected to our whole being, to how we are here in the body as human beings, that we have a limited knowledge of nature.

What I have now explained to you is an experience that one can have in the knowledge of nature, but many of our contemporaries have already unconsciously had this experience, it lives in that part of consciousness, and what dawns in dark feelings is not only seen, but it is there, and because it is there in so many people, has always been there for many people, so many people seek to come to the sources of existence in a different way, to come to that which lies beyond the boundary, since supersensible knowledge must come to rest, and then they come to the other pole of human striving. They say to themselves: What we cannot find outside in the sense world, we seek through immersion in our own inner being. And there these people search with the ordinary power of consciousness, with the ordinary power of comprehension and imagination, in short, with the ordinary power of knowledge that they simply have when they are awake, to sink into their inner selves. This is called mystical insight and is understood to mean an immersion in the soul with the ordinary power of life. One thinks that one can find what cannot be found externally in the world of the senses.

And lo and behold, if one is only sincere and honest, which, of course, many mystics are not, then one comes up against a limit with this mystical insight as well. The direct experience [he] yields again: you have to descend into your own interior, but you will find nothing other than always your self, but your self in such a way that you can feel, by seeming to grasp your self, that you do not grasp yourself in your reality, /between the lines:] as I have [dis]cussed. The image becomes denser and denser, but it remains an image, it does not ascend to reality. And in the end you realize that by trying to ascend into the interior in the usual mystical way, you do not arrive at the supernatural, but at the inner sensual, and thus at a limit. And if you are honest, you realize that this comes from the fact that almost always something subjective, something that comes from within yourself, interferes with this contemplation of the inner self, and that you do not grasp something objective, but only flicker through yourself, penetrate into yourself once, so that the self becomes denser and denser. That is the second experience, the futility of ordinary mysticism dawns on you.

This in turn raises the question: where does this limit come from? This limit, you realize it little by little, by trying to gain psychic knowledge through the mystical path. It comes from the fact that man, as he is between birth and death, needs an inner soul strength that he could not have if he could simply dive down into his own self through mystical contemplation. If a person had unlimited knowledge of nature but lacked the ability to love, he would need an additional soul force if he wanted to achieve this through mystical contemplation. Why he wants to... [illegible]? What would have to be missing is something that is usually... [illegible], that is the ability to remember, the ability to remember. By immersing ourselves in our inner selves, we only reach the soul power that reflects back to us the knowledge, events and experiences of our life between birth and death. An inner mirror reflects these experiences back to us. If we were to break through this mirror inwardly, then we would enter the supersensible, but we must not break through it in the ordinary way, otherwise our ability to remember would have to be broken, and what does healthy human life depend on this ability for?

Let us just consider that in those people in whom this ability has been broken, their entire self-confidence does not work. Those who cannot remember the past in their lives more or less lose their way and go astray in life. The pathological [phenomena] in this direction are well known. Outwardly, the human being has to sit in front of himself, unable to transcend what he cannot transcend because of his ability to love. Inwardly, he has to be aware of a boundary to his inner contemplation, because the ability to remember must work within. Therefore, dear attendees, it is that one cannot gain any knowledge of the nature of the human soul through external research of that which is there... [illegible], in our time in the natural scientific observation has acquired such great merit, one has also tried to use memory, natural scientific observation to enter one's own interior.

I would like to mention an example from literature, I could mention hundreds of others, but so that it can be verified, from literature. In the very commendable Wiesbaden [publishing house, the Wiesbaden Collection, in the series] on [marginal questions of] the nervous and mental life, the following was reported in a [writing] about the subconscious self of man by Louis Waldstein. A story is told, a story in which he, the author, expresses himself about the uncertainty of self-knowledge. Waldstein apparently experiences the following: He was walking on a street and passed a bookstore. He looked at the books that were on display. There he found a book about mollusks. Of course, this can interest the scientist, but lo and behold, he is not so much interested in the book about mollusks, but rather he had to smile.

Now just think, a naturalist who sees a new publication about mollusks and has to smile. It is not the slightest reason to smile at such a title. What does Waldstein do? He wants to find out why he laughed, closes his eyes so as not to be disturbed in what he sees, in his thoughts, closes his eyes to see how he came to smile. And then he hears a hurdy-gurdy in the distance; he did not hear it when his eyes were open. The hurdy-gurdy plays the melody that he heard decades ago, but did not even pay attention to because he was interested in other things at the time: the melody that taught him how to dance. At the time, he was more interested in the charms of his partner and the steps he had to take, so he only half listened to what the hurdy-gurdy was playing. So it made only a very weak impression, but now, decades later, when the hurdy-gurdy... [illegible] strikes up the tune again, it makes him smile.

Can it not be seen from this, honored attendees, that there is much down there in our soul that is very much beyond the reach of ordinary life? The subconscious memory is added to the conscious memory. In the course of our ordinary lives and for our ordinary consciousness, we cannot possibly know what experiences we have gone through that are stored in the depths of our souls. And these experiences change in the course of life, and so one can meet some mystic who believes he is being honest and says: From the depths of my soul have arisen ideas about a supersensible world, ideas of glory and grandeur. It need not be anything other than what he heard decades ago, the organ grinder, who only partially gained influence over individuals. Just as Waldstein laughed at the book, what was transformed into the mood of the soul at the time could be transformed after decades in such a way that the most sublime idea emerges from this mood. Man must be so constituted that the experiences he has gone through between birth and now rebound down there. Therefore, the experiences that take place down there, [the mood], are never in any way decisive, but one must always be clear about the fact that what one could bring up from such mystical contemplation are nothing more than the transformed tones of the hurdy-gurdy, and some of what is recorded in mystical depths, about which... [...] is not only the result of the imagination, but the transformed sounds of the hurdy-gurdy, and that leads [...] to the realization that even if one can immerse oneself inwardly with ordinary mysticism, one cannot come to the source of the [inner] human being.

These are starting points, these are experiences that show that neither ordinary knowledge of nature nor ordinary mysticism can penetrate into the inner self. If he, [the person], has these experiences that I have described, then they give him the strength to search in a completely different direction and in a completely different way, because from these experiences the spiritual researcher gains the strength to search in a different way and in a different way, and to do that, on the one hand, courage is needed. Inner soul courage, dear audience, not to stop at all at what the experiences of ordinary consciousness are, the experiences that rightly guide us in everyday life, that rightly guide us in ordinary science , but to transform this consciousness so that dormant powers arise that are effective in a different way than those that want to enter into ordinary natural science and ordinary mysticism.

Not just the use of the ordinary power of knowledge outwardly and inwardly, but the transformation of it, the attainment of a new kind of knowledge is necessary to penetrate into the supersensible life, and precisely the two starting points, which are sure starting points for a supersensible knowledge, thus also have indications of how to search for it. One must search in such a way that one already focuses on those powers, that soul ability, through which the two boundaries are evoked, and that one brings about the transformation of the soul life in such a direction that these two soul powers can no longer give boundaries.

I have described, dear ones present, what the spiritual researcher has to do, how he has to struggle through intimate soul experiences if he wants to achieve this transformation with this faculty of knowledge, in all my writings... [illegible]. There you can read about the individual soul experiences that the researcher of the spirit and soul has to struggle with if he wants to gain knowledge. Today I want to point out, from a very special point of view, the way in which the soul has to gather itself in order to really enter the supersensible, in order to be able to cross the two boundaries that one has experienced in the way I have described. First of all, it is important to ask oneself in honest inner self-knowledge: What actually happens through the soul when it is engaged in the knowledge of nature?

What happens through the soul can be expressed through two abilities. What I am saying now can be explained very thoroughly and deeply scientifically. Of course, because spiritual science is still in its infancy, I have to express the question here in a more popular way: the abilities that a person applies when he turns to nature can be grasped as perceptual abilities. We perceive by turning to nature, and then we receive an impression through it. So we know that when we have perceptions, the perception is vivid, intense, it takes up our full attention, as if the outside world were living in us through the perception. But we also know that when we turn away from the perception and imagine the perceived, that then this imagination of the perception is less vivid, less intense, that it is more shadowy.

Does it make sense in the life of a human being, esteemed attendees, that when we turn away from perception, the imagination becomes more shadowy? Yes, it is connected to the fact that we have memory. If we want to have perception, then we have to restore a connection to the thing that causes the perceptions, we have to live together with the thing in all its liveliness. However, if we have an idea of the thing, this living together is weakened, and that which is weakened is the power that causes the memory. Please take this into account. Because we not only perceive, but also think and imagine in relation to external, sensory reality, we can retain memories.

Now the spiritual researcher must develop a different faculty of imagination, a different faculty of thought, than the ordinary one. This faculty of thought, which he must develop, he can only develop when he becomes aware in real self-knowledge of what perception actually consists of. We never merely perceive, we always think while perceiving, only we do not focus our attention on the thought process, but on perception. And it is precisely this thinking that we develop with perception, and we must distinguish it from the thinking that we develop afterwards from memory, from the thinking that merely presents. And then, when you have come to recognize how you are inside consciousness with your power of thought, then you also come to strengthen thinking itself through practice - and the practice itself is described in the books mentioned - making it lively. You sharpen mere thinking, without taking away its clarity, for meditation.

What is meditation? Meditation is a thinking that does not dissolve into memory, but is so strengthened through inner soul exercise that it proceeds as vividly as only consciousness [perception] otherwise does. Such inwardly content-filled thinking, a becoming-image of thinking, that is meditation. Therefore, it is good to train oneself to... [illegible] that one rejects all abstract thoughts – they do not lead into the supersensible – [but] that one takes up pictorial thoughts that are after-images of external sensory perception,... [illegible].

When you develop this kind of thinking, you have a very strange experience in relation to it, an experience that is extremely surprising at first. If you keep pictorial thinking present in your soul through meditation and practice, you will find that this thinking initially leads to something that cannot immediately become memory. It only leads to a feeling of being strengthened in one's self-awareness, to always powerfully guiding one's own self-awareness to what I have called the imaginative consciousness. This imaginative consciousness does not initially lead to any insight, only to a sharpening of self-awareness. What was previously an image now feels itself within the self-awareness. This... [illegible] has an effect on you... [illegible] by virtue of the fact that you have attained it through pictorial, meditative thinking.

If you continue this exercise for a while, you will experience that at first you see image after image emerging in your soul; as if by itself, the soul becomes capable of letting imagination arise within it. Then you have to gain the ability to suppress this imagination. So you have to develop two abilities in the soul: a thinking that is as vivid as only the outer consciousness is usually, and then again the ability to suppress it. Because often, when you progress in meditation, it is very dependent on the inner soul experience. I will describe this experience of the soul to you more pictorially, because what arises in this field must be described pictorially, since it is experienced through the power of pictorial thinking. If you continue such exercises, which must be intensified, you will gain the power to suppress your imagination and, at first, have nothing but self-awareness steeped in reality. Then, finally, you will be able to compare the state of mind you enter into with lying in the night: you open your eyes; you could see if it were not for the darkness. There is also silence all around, you hear nothing. But while you are lying there in the darkness of the night, the memory of what you experienced during the day comes to mind, and you remember not only that you were the one who experienced it, but also what the ego experienced during the day. One does not merely experience oneself as oneself at night, but the world one experiences. One would like to compare this with... [illegible] experience that [occurs on the path I have described.

If you have done that exercise, [see my] books, [a] sufficient period of time, [you have] brought it to having strengthened self-awareness enough for imagination, and then to have the strength of mind that the imagination in turn is suppressed... [illegible] can, then this, what arises in the state of mind, is not memory, but looking back. Just as in the comparison I made, it was looking back at day experiences, so now it is looking back at the experiences that the soul went through in the spiritual before it descended from the spiritual and united with the bodily existence that it received through the physical marriage of father [and] mother and the two inheritance currents. The soul experiences the intensified self-awareness that arises from imaginative consciousness, but not in the present. Instead, one must go back and experience oneself in the spiritual realm, in prenatal life, and with this experience of oneself, experience the spiritual world. Just as in sleep one experiences through memory what one has experienced during the day, again the self with its surroundings, so one experiences the spiritual, the supersensible of the soul with the supersensible environment, through the soul process that I have just described.

This labor initially eliminates the conscious faculty of memory. The poet expressed this intuitively when he said: Time becomes space. Having soared to such a capacity for knowledge, born out of imagination, one no longer has ordinary memory in this state, but one has a retrospective view of the spiritual experiences in the supersensible world that remain. What one has experienced there remains for spiritual contemplation, as when you are making a path, you look back at the objects you have passed, and there they are, the events remain in time. This is noticed when one learns to look at them in such a supersensible vision. Time becomes ideal space. One sees back into the spiritual state of the soul in prenatal life. In this way one really sees into the supersensible of one's own being through a transformed knowledge.

This must always be emphasized again: on the path of ordinary knowledge, there is no insight into the supersensible; this insight must be acquired in such a way that the soul develops strength, which... [not only] in a completely different... in memory, but to have something that stands as a retrospective faculty. Anyone who is a beginner in the field of supersensible knowledge, who has not undergone enough such training, can, in some cases, very soon come to certain supersensible insights. It is not even... [illegible]. But afterwards he suffers an inner [...] disappointment: that he cannot recall through ordinary memory what he has experienced, that it has passed, and that he has to go through all the events [...] [illegible] two to three times more difficult than the first time. Because he would not remember something, but approach the same mental images of reality; just as we, when we want to have an experience in the sensory world as perception, must approach the thing again, [as we] are not satisfied with memory, so memory is never enough for us for spiritual experiences. We have to do the same event. The beginner has the feeling: I had the experience; it would be a lasting one, but it does not last, it is lost to memory. The experiences of the supersensible world are quite different from those of the sensory world.

I would like to emphasize yet another characteristic of this supersensible experience. It consists in the fact that, while having the experience, one must quickly look up, therefore unfold one's attention, in order to become aware of the experience supernaturally, because it quickly passes by. There are many people who often have unique supernatural experiences, they also have them, but are not attentive because the experience will already be over when they begin to be attentive. These experiences pass by so quickly. Therefore, the training that one must undergo also includes training for presence of mind. The person who, in ordinary life, already acquires presence of mind in the face of certain experiences makes himself suitable to observe the supernatural. The other does not. The one who, on the other hand, mulls over every decision in his mind, wants to do this and that and cannot bring himself to make a quick decision and stick to that decision... [illegible] and to trust his reason, [he] does not learn to force himself to such a state of mind, he prepares himself poorly to observe supersensible experiences.

So far, I have described to you how one can gain an insight into the supersensible world in the prenatal sense. The spiritual researcher cannot, as some philosophers do, simply take the question of immortality as a unified whole with ordinary knowledge and start from there. He must first point to the prenatal life, as I have described, reaching from the supersensible to the roots of the soul before it has been conceived. The other thing, ladies and gentlemen, is that people grasp the other pole of immortality, which actually still interests people today... [illegible]. That is, they grasp the pole that leads beyond death, into the life that a person has as a soul when they have passed through the gate [of death]. [Stenograph breaks off.]

You hear repeatedly if one talks about anthroposophy that it originates from the fantastic inspirations of single personalities. Many people at least judge that way who fancy themselves as capable. However, one has to say from the start that this anthroposophic spiritual knowledge wants to cover a research field that contains the most important interests of the human life generally. Hence, isolated attempts were done repeatedly at all times to cultivate this field. But one must say that these were mostly only light flashes in our time which were cast on this field by this or that outstanding personality who contemplated the human spiritual life. These light flashes with which one always has the sensation that they come from quite different origins of the human being than the knowledge that refers to the outside sense perception.

Unsurprisingly, an unaware cognitive instinct makes the human beings illuminate this field by such light flashes repeatedly, because on this field there are the most important soul riddles which the human being has to face over and over again with his feeling, thinking and willing. The human being has to feel: if he does not take a position to these questions, it has an effect on his soul that you can compare with a kind of bodily illness. The soul life becomes banal; it feels exposed to all kinds of “addictions”—I would like to say—if the doubts, the uncertainties emerge concerning these questions. However, in our times the human beings were less eager to satisfy their desire for knowledge, which arises from such impulses, with spiritual food. Who did not know the fashion of those who could afford it to visit the most different sanitariums where, actually, for many people nothing was extinguished but that desire for knowledge of which one liked, actually, to be unaware in the usual life. What the human beings searched in sanitariums and similar institutions, were, strictly speaking, only suggestions with which they did not want to be present, so to speak, with their souls and which should meet those mysterious desires about which I have just spoken and which one does not want to satisfy spiritually.

A picture repeatedly emerges to me if I have to contemplate such questions. When I was—to visit somebody—in a sanitarium just at a time when the different guests were passing and when I found out for myself after the conversation and the sight of single patients that that who mostly needed recovery of his nervous system was the doctor in charge. The others needed much less recovery of their nervous systems than the doctor in charge needed.

On this field, single persons who dealt more intensely with questions of the spiritual life have cast single light flashes that arose to them from the depths of their souls. Besides, one thing always became known that would run like a red thread also today through the considerations of this evening. The fact that in the human being, as he walks on earth today, another human being sleeps and rests who is not perceived due to the conditions of the usual life because he sleeps quieter in the usual human being than dream images exist in him which emerge and disappear.

However, one thing always struck just spirited persons when they found out for themselves how this second human being rests in the usual human being: they could not conceive this sleeping human being without bringing him together with death in any way. More or less instinctively, the one or the other personality recognised that just as the phenomena of the outer sense perceptible physical life are associated with the laws of existence, of growth, of birth and so on, this second human being sleeping in the first is associated intimately with death, with fading. You notice that it is a great, important moment for persons of knowledge if they have to think the higher human being in the usual human being associated with the forces of death.

Such a personality is the philosopher and psychologist Karl Fortlage (1806-1881). I want to take an important statement as starting point that he did in a course of eight psychological lectures in 1869. In these lectures, you can find the following, quite important place:

 “If we call ourselves living beings and attribute a quality to ourselves which we have in common with animals and plants, we inevitably understand by the living state something that never leaves us and always continues in sleep and in the wake state in us. This is the vegetative life of nourishing our organism, an unaware life, a sleeping life; it is outbalanced in the breaks of waking by the life of consumption. The brain makes an exception here because this life of nourishing, this sleeping life, is outbalanced in the breaks of the waking by the life of consumption. In these breaks the brain is exposed to prevailing consumption and gets consequently into a state which would bring about the absolute weakening of the body or death, if it extended to the other organs.”

After Fortlage has come to this strange statement, he continues this consideration with the following, profound words: “Consciousness is a little and partial death, death is a big and complete consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.”

You realise that such a light flash, emerging from the depths of the soul, illuminates the coherence of death and consciousness what accompanies us during our wake life always and makes up, actually, the human being. Fortlage gets to an idea of the relationship of death and consciousness, realising that that which seizes all human beings at once at the moment of death works in microcosm if we unfold our consciousness during the wake life. Every conscious act is in microcosm the same as death is on a large scale. So that—as to Fortlage—the real death if it occurs is the emergence of an enclosing consciousness, which puts the human being into a supersensible world, while he is put into the physical world if his soul needs the physical body between birth and death.

Fortlage wrote many volumes on psychology. However, such light flashes appear only now and again in his writings. The remaining contents of his writings even deal with that which one finds so normally today in psychology: the association and course of mental pictures, the emergence of desires and so on, briefly, with all those questions on which one ventures solely in psychology and which are far away from that what, actually, interests the whole human being in psychology, which are far away from the main questions of freedom and immortality.

The considerations of this evening deal with the question of immortality while in some weeks here I hold a talk about freedom from the same viewpoint.

Even if Fortlage is concerned with the subordinate questions in his vast psychological research, and in such a way that this kind of activity cannot lead to the highest questions, at least, such light flashes are found with him. However, one reproved him for it. Eduard von Hartmann reproved Fortlage sharply that he would have left the path of science introducing such a coherence into the strict science as that of consciousness and death.

Well, one may say, not only Fortlage but also many personalities produced in single light flashes something of knowledge that refers to this characterised second human being sleeping in the sense-perceptible human being. However, these were isolated light flashes.

Anthroposophy has the task now to systemise, to make methodical that what has come up instinctively in single light flashes like manifestations of higher knowledge from the depths of the human soul, so that that which originates from it can place itself as a fully valid science beside the modern natural sciences. However, it is necessary that that who wants to form an opinion about anthroposophy casts off some prejudices that easily result from certain advantages of modern science.

I had to say, the human being whom spiritual science considers is something sleeping in the normally waking human being. From it, however, it is explicable that everything that refers to this second human being is generally drowned as it were at first in our consciousness by the sensory experience and the needs of our personal life. If in this usual life now and again such light flashes appear, they disappear faster than a dream does. No miracle, hence, that most people once say to themselves after the absolutely entitled judgement of our time: indeed, what emerges there from the soul and will manifest of this low sounding sleeping human being, this does—if it appears with those who call themselves spiritual researchers—the impression of something dreamish, fantastic. Our time does not want to get involved with such phantasms. It has rapidly finished its judgement: nonsense, this is something that has arisen from the imagination of single ones.

However, something else could be right. How would it be if it were right that one could get such weak images as they exist in dream of that what lives in the human being beyond birth and death what is the everlasting of the human nature compared with the transient? If this held true, one would have to renounce either any knowledge of the everlasting in the human being if one did not want to recourse to images of imagination or dream life, or one would have to bring the logical discipline into this world that usually seems to be fantastic, the sense of methodical research that one applies to the sense-perceptible world. One has to raise the images with certain soul forces, so that they do not only scurry like dreams, but also become as distinct and impressive as the images of the usual consciousness are.

Is anyone able to do this? Today it is difficult to bring home to a human being that one is able to do it even in scientific sense because today one regards natural sciences as the only science that has a strictly reasonable methodology. If one distinguishes other sciences, one accepts them, actually, only as far as they are founded methodically after the pattern of natural sciences. One has to say for certain fields: what natural sciences have brought up in modern times as mental pictures, showed that it must be that way if they want to control the area which is assigned to them. However, one must also say that one cannot approach the everlasting life of the human being with these mental pictures.

These images cannot be appropriate to the same extent to solve the riddles of nature and the riddles of the human soul. To the latter one has to add something else. Which means must be applied to make the soul so strong that it can bring up the mental pictures which rest sleeping below in our consciousness and can apply the strict discipline and methodology of thinking to them, about which I have spoken in particular in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. As in former talks, I want again to emphasise some viewpoints of these writings. One gets no idea of the approach of the spiritual researcher what he has to do, actually, to behold into the spiritual world with his soul if one does not realise what one can experience as a whole human being with the suitable desire for knowledge at certain limiting points of knowledge to which just the modern natural sciences lead.

Modern natural sciences give that who dedicates himself to them not only explanations, which nobody admires more than the spiritual researcher does, of the outer physical course, of various things which have an impact on the practical life, but natural sciences give that who dedicates himself from certain viewpoints an inner education of the soul life. More than one was able in former stadia of scientific cognition, today one is prepared to spiritual research cognitively, actually, just by natural sciences. One should not be restricted by that what natural sciences have to say about the outside world in their own field.

One should rather be able to soar an inner discipline of the soul life by the way one does research in nature. The mental pictures that natural sciences deliver can explain the outer nature only; after their contents, they have nothing to say about the spiritual life. But while one applies them devotedly, they educate that human being by the way who is able to take care of that what goes forward in him, of certain inner living conditions which bring along him to receive a concept, an inner experience of that soul life beyond the body.

I know very well that this concept—living with his soul beyond the body—is for many people the summit of nonsense today. However, this never minds. Everybody can convince himself that the inner experience gives him the certain insight of the life beyond the body if he goes through such soul exercises as I have indicated them in my writings or as I want to pronounce them, in principle, here.

One can experience especially important things if one just arrives at that boundary area of cognitive life to which natural sciences lead so often. You know, many people speak of the big boundary questions of cognition. One speaks of the fact that the human soul comes to a border if it wants to know about whether the world is infinite or limited spatially or temporally, if the soul wants to know whether it is subject to an irresistible constraint in all its actions or whether it is free.

Indeed, these are the highest boundary questions. Du Bois-Reymond put such boundary questions in his famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature, about the seven world riddles. You can experience the deepest impression if you feel out of the pain of a person longing for knowledge how such a person stands at such a boundary place.

I could bring in many examples. Such an example is contained in the writings of the famous aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). If one reads his writings, one has often to stop with that what he experiences at such boundary places of cognition. He wrote a nice treatise on a book that the philosopher Johannes Volkelt (1846-1930) had written about the dream fantasies.

In this treatise that reproached Vischer that he had mixed with the spiritists, Vischer states such a place where he shows what he had experienced at the boundary places of cognition. He said, it is most certain that the human soul cannot be in the body; however, it is also most certain that it is not beyond the body. Here we have such a boundary question, which is paradoxical, because it has an entire contradiction in itself, as those are which one meets just always then when one delves devotedly in strict natural sciences, in life generally. The soul cannot be in the body; however, it can also not be beyond the body!—Why does one get to such contradiction?

At such border places where such contradictions appear, the scientific cognition is not at all helpful and it is most annoying if one believes that it helps something. Then, however, most people are soon ready with their judgement. They simply say in such a case, well, up to here just the human knowledge reaches; we are not able to get further.—However, it is not that way. Because Vischer had the prejudice, he experienced the contradiction only. However, he did not experience what one can do to get further with his soul at such border places. Here the usual cognition must stop and a particular experience of the soul has to begin. Here you must be able to forget as it were what the images of the usual life are because they lead you just to this border place only. You must be able to experience this here. Here you must be able to struggle with that what faces you if you let yourself in for such a contradiction. One should experience such contradictions with the whole soul. Then something new faces the soul like from spiritual depths that it cannot experience without this experience of such contradictions.

One has formed mental pictures of how, for example, lower animals that still have no senses develop senses in contact with the outside world. An inner life existed; it is confronted with the outer world, adapts itself to the outer world, and experiences the impulses of the outer world. While before the life pulsates in the organism and then everywhere stumbles against the sensory outside, it develops, we say, a sense of touch. First, it is a kind of internal tunnelling, then bumping against the borders of the externally spatial. Nevertheless, the being learns in the contact with the outside world to adapt itself; it forms a kind of picture of the outside world by the sense of touch; by the collisions with the border, this sense of touch develops.

One can compare to this image of that what develops the outer senses in the lower organisms what the soul experiences if it gets to such border places of cognition. There the soul really experiences in such a way, as if you bump against anything in the darkness that you have outside at first. Then that differentiates itself, which you experience there in such contradictory mental pictures that one forms at boundary places of knowledge. As the sense of touch arises as a physical sense from the undifferentiated cells, a spiritual existence arises from the mental, while the soul bumps against the border of the spiritual world. You really bump against the spiritual world. However, you also adapt yourself to it. You experience the significant that you have the soul first as it were as an undeveloped soul organism, which the outside spiritual world faces, then however, this soul develops spiritual senses of touch and spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in the further process to perceive that with which it is confronted at first.

I gladly believe that today those people who feel the urge to experience something of the spiritual world would prefer if one could teach the ability of perceiving the spiritual world while one imposes them mystically or as the case may be. Some people believe this. Nevertheless, it is not that way. What opens the spiritual world to us is inner soul work. This inner soul work really leads to that which I have indicated. The human being who changes his soul into an organised soul knows that his soul gets free from the body, when pushing against the spiritual and perceives the spirit. Getting free from the body is a result of inner perception. Since also that which I have explained just now appears repeatedly with persons of knowledge.

It is strange, how the course develops which I have described spiritual-scientifically with those who have worked through the longings for knowledge.

Let me bring in an example of Vischer once again, the example of a quotation by him by which he shows how he felt placed repeatedly at those boundary places of cognition where one cannot help perceiving contradictions, but contradictions that cannot be solved while you solve them logically, but while you settle down into them and develop your spiritual organs.

In particular, the following contradiction appeared to Vischer over and over again: the brain should be the organ of the soul, should produce mental pictures as it were; but if one becomes engrossed in the being of the mental pictures, one cannot regard them as cerebral products. This is such a boundary place of cognition; Vischer says referring to it:

“No mind, where no nerve centre, where no brain, the opponents say.”—Vischer himself does not say it—“No nerve centre, no brain, we say if it were not prepared from below on countless levels. It is simple to jibe at a spirit rumbling about in granite and lime—it is not more difficult than if we ask mockingly how the proteins in the brain soar ideas. The human knowledge cannot measure the level differences. It will remain a secret how it appears and happens that nature behind which the spirit still must slumber is such perfect counterblow of the spirit that we get bumps from it. It is a diremption of such apparent totality that with Hegel's alterity and exasperation, as witty as the formula may be, nothing is said; the asperity of the imaginary partition is simply covered. One finds the right recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust of this counterblow with Fichte, but no explanation of it.”

This portrayal is very strange. Friedrich Theodor Vischer feels facing a limit of knowledge; he describes his experience. How has he to describe it?

He gets to the expression: “we get bumps from it.” He gets to the expression: “cutting edge and thrust of the counterblow.”—One sees the soul that wants to differentiate to develop internal spiritual organs by which it can experience the supersensible outside world, in which it lives.

For a long time in the history of humanity, it was an obstacle to soar spiritual organs in the right way because one believed only the human thinking that takes the sense impressions as starting point could solve certain questions, just the questions of God, freedom and immortality.

Well, thinking is important, because strictly speaking a big part of those exercises that one must do to attain spiritual organs consists of a higher development of thinking than the thinking is which one uses in natural sciences. However, if you only abandon yourself to the usual thinking, that originates from the usual human being not from that second human being sleeping in you. This thinking does not lead into the spiritual world; this thinking can only realise that it is in the spiritual world. However, no unbiased person concedes that thoughts are something that lives in the sensory world; however, these thoughts contain nothing but impressions of the sensory world if they are taken from the usual human nature. People with deeper inner life have always felt like in flashes of inspiration where to the human thinking leads if it is left to itself, emancipated from the outer sense perception.

You can find—if you have experience of the spiritual-scientific literature—such light flashes with numerous personalities which sometimes are, however, darkness flashes. With them, one has to stop and observe to which cliffs the human cognitive life leads if this life is sincere and honest to itself and does not fool itself with all kinds of prejudices, and does not apply all kinds of methods taken from other, verified fields to the soul life itself. Again an example of many:

A man who really struggled with knowledge problems and riddles is Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) who taught philosophy at the University of Münster until few years. Gideon Spicker took the education for the spiritual as starting point. The deepest knowledge questions arose to him from theology. Some years ago, he wrote two nice booklets: From the Cloister to the Academic Lectureship. Destinies of a Former Capuchin (1908) and In the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. A Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (1910); in the one he describes his life, in the other his knowledge desire.

At a place, one has to pause particularly where this former Capuchin, who then became a professor, expresses himself about the experience that he had with thinking that he had emancipated from the sensory experience. However, he did not have the courage to go into spiritual science; he did not develop the power of thoughts so far that it wakes the spiritual organs, so that he faced a spiritual world, felt with his soul being in the realm of the supersensible. Because he was at such a border place where he experienced something with the thinking, he expressed himself as follows:

“To which philosophy one confesses, whether to a dogmatic or skeptical, to an empiric or transcendental, a critical or eclectic one: all without exception take an unproven and unprovable proposition as starting point, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation gets to this necessity, as deeply as it may prospect one day. It must be absolutely accepted and can be founded by nothing”—he means the necessity of thinking—“every attempt to prove its correctness always requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know, where from it comes, neither where to it leads. Whether a merciful God or a bad demon put it in the reason, both are uncertain.”

However, no human being speaks this way who has learnt a little bit only, has maybe learnt very much, and puts up all kinds of philosophy from the learnt concepts. Thus a human being speaks who has worked through what the knowledge researcher can go through if he submerges with his soul forces only deeply enough into that undergrounds of inner experience into which one can submerge where one is confronted with the cliffs, the partitions which one only penetrates if the spiritual organs really awake if they become consciousness.

In my life, I became acquainted with a number of such persons like Gideon Spicker, and I have tried to reflect such characters in the picture of Strader in my mystery dramas. However, I had to experience with it that just those who are often called followers of anthroposophy misunderstood me to the greatest extent. While the persons whom these dramas show are taken out of the real, comprehensive life, from that life that should just show the necessity and the validity of spiritual science from the other areas of modern existence, weird persons believed, I would write such roles that are tailor-made for those who should represent them, whereas I was just a far cry from this.

I could show with a comparison what such a person experiences who does not get to the knowledge of spirit but to the insight of the necessity of thinking. Someone who gets to the knowledge of spirit knows that if one not only wants to consider the thinking but experiences it, he does not experience, indeed, that beyond the thinking that Gideon Spicker describes, the bottomless abyss, the nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light, but he experiences the spiritual world beyond this thinking that bears the sense-perceptible reality. He experiences with his soul in this supersensible area. He also experiences that there is no uncertainty whether a merciful God or a bad demon has been put in the reason, but he experiences and observes the spiritual that penetrates the reason, as the sense perceptible world penetrates the sensory observation.

However, one must say that the thinking—if it is left to itself if it is only thought, and is not experienced—that such a development of the soul life can be compared—you forgive for the somewhat odd comparison—with a hungry organism. If one believes to be able to recognise something of the highest questions by mere thinking—God, freedom, immortality—, then one resembles a person who does not want to still his hunger with food from the outside, but lets the hunger develop. As little as you can develop a hungry organism, so that it balances out its needs in itself, just as little you can attain any spiritual content of the soul and any solution of the questions of God, freedom, immortality if you abandon yourself only to the thinking. As you starve on and on unless you eat, you cannot attain the spiritual development if you think only on and on.

The older philosophical metaphysics wanted this. As hard as it is, it is true: this outdated metaphysics that is something new, however, to some people is nothing but a science that suffers from mental malnutrition.

However, it is not enough that you gain this knowledge only to understand the inner experience correctly. As you have to understand that mere thinking leads to mental malnutrition if this thinking does not brace itself up for inner experience, you have also to understand that much knowledge of the outer sense-perceptible reality and its processing by the intellect, by methodical research do not lead to any knowledge of the soul.

You will convince yourselves if you take common textbooks of psychology that one normally starts speaking about the nervous system. What one says, otherwise, about the human organism is borrowed from physiology, from natural sciences.

Now I have to stress repeatedly not to be misunderstood that spiritual science is a far cry from misjudging what natural sciences have reached concerning the secrets of the nervous life, the secrets of the human organism. I do not want to discount its value. Nevertheless, the value is in another area than in that of the soul knowledge. You may abandon yourself to the mere thinking, then you starve; but abandoning yourself to the outer observation for the knowledge of the soul life only resembles the supply of all kinds of stuff that is indigestible. If you fill your stomachs with stones or the like, the human organism cannot make anything from this indigestible stuff.

Thus you cannot suppose, if you take the scientific results simply in such a way as they are and do not process them mentally, that you receive any enlightenment of the spiritual world, of the life of the soul in the supersensible realm. In our times, people abandoned themselves to the most different mental pictures that should explain how actually the soul relates to the body. Not only that there the oddest fairy tales are bustling about in that what one often calls science. One wants to eradicate fairy tales and superstition from the outer life, in science they often flourish, one only notes it in science just as little as one noted it in the outer life of former times. That fairy tale also belongs to it that the nerves are telegraph wires to the soul that pass on the outer sensory impressions, then again other nerves are there which direct the will impulses to the periphery. About this fairy tale, one would not like to talk at all, because what is meant with this comparison is far away from reality and arises only from an unnoticed scientific superstition.

However, I would like to emphasise two mental pictures that are also widespread today with those who contemplate the relationship of the body and the soul.

Some people believe that they have to regard the body or the nervous system as a kind of tool of the soul, as if the soul is a being that uses the body like a tool. The others who cannot realise how a mental-spiritual being should find a working point to work on something material like the body got even to the weird mental picture of the mental-bodily parallelism. There the processes of the body should proceed for themselves. Without the soul working on the body like a cause or the body reacting on the soul, the soul life should proceed in parallel with the bodily processes. One current always accompanies the other, but the one does not work on the other. Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920), Ebbinghaus (Herman E., 1850-1909), Paulsen (Friedrich, 1846-1908) and many others dedicate themselves to this weird parallelism theory.

All these theories suffer from the fact that they do not realise what the coherence of the soul with the body is based on. This coherence can be expressed neither by the fact that one says, the body is the tool of the soul, nor that one says, the soul processes proceed in parallel with the bodily phenomena.

However, I am able to bring only forward that what I can say that encompasses a wide field as a result and observation of anthroposophy. Everybody can find the other reasons in my various writings. Nevertheless, I would like to show the essentials briefly today.

If one wants to express the relationship of soul and body correctly, one has to say, as far as one considers the human being, everything bodily of the human being turns out to be for a real observation neither as tool nor as a process running alongside but as a creation of the soul in microcosm and on a large scale.

It is nothing bodily at the human being that is no creation of the soul. However, one has to cast off some prejudices and to take up new concepts from spiritual science if one wants to envisage this far-reaching idea that everything bodily is a creation of the soul.

Already in microcosm, this is in such a way if we form any mental picture if a feeling emerges in us. Yes, only because one has not learnt to observe spiritually and bodily, one believes that there something exterior works on a finished body; the exterior effect spreads to the finished body through the eye or ear, then the effect continues inwardly. Have an unbiased look at the suitable theories. You will find everywhere that they are not at all based on real observations but on prejudices. Since what really goes forward if we perceive if we hear anything, is already carried out, actually, for the most part when we become aware of it, and is strictly speaking always a developmental process in the body. A beam of light hits us and causes something. It is in the same world in which our body is. In our body, something goes forward. What goes forward in it is of the same kind, only in microcosm, as it is if on a large-scale forces form our organism on a large scale. As the forces of growth and other forces form our organism, something is formed in us if a beam of light hits us if a tone hits us and so on. That which is formed there as something subtle in us is reflected in the soul that is not in the body but always in the supersensible realm. We become aware of the reflection. The process, however, which must take place there for the wake consciousness must be a destructive process, a little death.

We cannot completely convince ourselves of the consciousness, of the soul being with the help of the usual consciousness processes, and with bodily-spiritual observation. Nevertheless, if we come on what also accompanies our usual awake life, on the forming of memories, we come already nearer to that which I have just said. Someone who is able to observe what goes forward in the human being knows: what makes a mental picture aware to us does not lead straight away to memories. No, something has always to run alongside, another process has to take place. If you have sense for observation, look at a pupil who studies hard ever so much; what he must perform as auxiliary exercises, so that that which he takes up also goes over into his memory. For a subconscious accompanying process must proceed always. That which we know does not remain to us, but that which goes alongside the consciousness in the subconsciousness. However, that which happens there in our organism by this side flow of the consciousness is still very similar to the growth processes of childhood.

The origin of mental pictures is a growth process in microcosm. Usually we grow like with tremendous power in proportion to the small growth process that takes place in us, unnoticed in the usual life if memory forms. Under the surface of the current of the conscious mental pictures, events happen which carry the memories; and this is very like the growth processes. Do you ask why one can well train the memory just in your youth? Because you still have fresh growth forces in yourselves, because they have not yet withered. However, I can always give such single proofs only; you can prove what I have said with many single observations.

Our usual imagining, feeling and willing intervenes already in such a way that it is reflected not only and makes aware what happens; but in such a way as concerning the memory an undercurrent is there for our conscious life, there is also an upper current. As one does not note the undercurrent—one notes it at most if the pupil studies hard and does movements and knocks its head to support this undercurrent—, one does not note the upper current all the more. However, this upper current belongs above all to that second human being who sleeps there in the usual human being, while we think, feel, and will in our usual life.

Just as the current of memory proceeds beneath the consciousness, something purely mental proceeds above the consciousness, something that does not intervene at all anyhow in the body. Because this conscious soul life has such hyper-experience, I would like to say, the forces of growth are not sufficient for this conscious soul life, for the entire soul life at all. The forces that lead the human being to birth are not sufficient. These forces could only evoke that in the human being that we perceive with the sleeping organism.

At the moment when the consciousness intervenes with its upper currents in the organism, those forces which also destroy this organism finally at death must intervene in the organism. These forces are destructive forces, so that the forces of growth must balance out them in sleep. Only then, one understands the supersensible life of the soul if one knows how far the purely organic reaches subsensibly.

I do not like speaking about personal experiences; what I tell, however, is associated substantially with that which I generally have to bring forward. I confess that I intensely pursued the problems about which I speak today and in my writings since for more than thirty years on all ways that may arise. These ways have to lead the soul into the area of spiritual life and in the coherence of this spiritual-mental life with the bodily life. I have found that—if you go about your work scientifically in the sense of our time honestly and sincerely—you really can obtain many fertile things, while you discipline yourself scientifically. On this way then you just find those questions for whose solution the usual natural sciences do not suffice. Yes, just from scientific thinking one gets other observation results about what is in natural sciences, actually.

The question of the nature of the nervous system was one of the biggest ones to me for decades, which the scientific psychologists, the psychological scientists regard as the organ of the soul who imagine that in the nerves an inner activity takes place, which is similar to other organ activities. Well, such activities also proceed in the nerves, but they do just not serve the forming of mental pictures, of feelings and will impulses. They serve the nutrition of the nerves, the production of the nervous substance if it has been consumed. They just do not serve the soul life; however, they must be there, so that the soul life can take place. I use a comparison that I have used here already once.

If you consider the nervous system as something that must be there for the soul life, you just have something, as if you say, the ground must be there, so that I do not fall into the depth if I want to go. However, if I go and the ground is soft, I leave behind tracks. Then someone will completely err who checks the ground and searches the forces in it, which my footprints have produced from inside. As little as these forces produce tracks from inside, any inner forces of the brain and nervous system produce the tracks that originate from imagining, feeling, and willing. There the mental works which prevails in the supersensible area.

Before one does not realise this and experiences it as real observation, one can generally come to no understanding of the true nature of the soul. That which is on the bottom of the soul life in the nervous life is not the organic processes of the nervous system—they lead to another direction—, this is that which I would like to specify now. I have brought in the preceding personal remark, so that you realise that I do not frivolously pronounce something such substantial that it is hard gained what I say about the nervous life: while organic forces go into the nervous ramifications, the human being goes over from life to death. In the nervous ramifications, the human being dies perpetually, if he uses these nervous ramifications for thinking, feeling, or willing.

The organic life does not continue as the growth conditions do, but it dies away, while ramifying in the nerves. While it dies away, it prepares the ground for the spiritual development, for the purely supersensible mental. As I remove the air with a pump from a container, produce vacuum, and then the air completely flows again into the container by itself, in the same way mental life flows in the dead part of the nervous system perpetually if the organism sends the partial death into it.

Hence, the partial death is the basis of consciousness. If one recognises that the human being does not need to pour his organic forces into his body to make this body the place of the soul, but that the human being needs to kill his organic experience to withdraw this organic life constantly from the places to which the nerves give the opportunity, you notice how the supersensible soul life can develop in the sensory body, however, after it has created this sensory body first. Since the same soul, which thinks, feels and wills in the time from conception to death, exists also before. The spiritual world is not anywhere in a cloud-cuckoo-land, it is there where the sense-perceptible world is also; it penetrates it. Where sensory effects are, they originate from supersensible, spiritual effects. This same soul lives in the supersensible world that has formed the body and has changed it into the apparatus reflecting the processes to it of which you can become aware. Before it came to conception, it lived in the supersensible world, and in this life on earth, it is connected with the supersensible world. This soul exists already since centuries, before it enters the sense-perceptible existence at conception. As in the life between birth and death this soul has created the body as its image and unfolds its life with this image of the body, the life of the soul unfolds the forces that develop the forces of heredity from the supersensible world.

It is correct that that which we pass on originates in the successive generations. However, our soul works already on them. We insert the forces in our ancestors by the effects of our soul that we receive then as inherited. Thus, we develop our whole organism from the spiritual world as we form something with the memory in microcosm; and only the base, the opportunity of it is given by the sensory heredity. The body is completely a creation of the mental-spiritual. As well as the single experience between birth and death is based on a creation of the spiritual, the entire human body is also based on the spiritual-mental. However, there are incorporated not only the forces of growth in this developmental current but also the forces that appear finally in the total sum as death which is only the outside of immortality.

Since while the mental-spiritual puts the body in the world, is reflected with it, it experiences its own life in the supersensible area. However, at the same time it destroys the body because the upper current mentioned just now develops. As every consciousness is based on a partial death, the complete death is nothing but the withdrawal of the soul from the body that is the beginning of a different experience of the soul. We know: as we develop memories between birth and death, we developed the inner human being in the supersensible current who goes through births and deaths who is everlasting.

What I have indicated as soul experience is not anything that the spiritual researcher produces, it is the characterised second human being whom one only oversleeps, otherwise, but is always in the human being. Spiritual research is nothing but making people aware of that what is perpetual and eternal in the human being, so that he can go through death. If you are able to move with your mental in the spiritual in the intimated way as you move with your senses in the physical-sensory, then you know that you live as a human being also in a spiritual world as one lives with the senses in a physical world. As one distinguishes the mineral, plant and animal realms in the physical world, one distinguishes realms in the spiritual world, which are full of beings that become more and more spiritual the higher you ascend to which the human being belongs with his soul, as he belongs with his body to the physical realms. Briefly, the soul consciously enters in the spiritual world.

I would like to call this worldview Goetheanism after its origins, as well as I would call the building in Dornach Goetheanum that is dedicated to this worldview. Since not on some daydreams but on the healthy condition on which the Goethean worldview is based that is also based what I mean as anthroposophy. Goethe differed in his view of the physical things just by such conditions from that what originated later as natural sciences. However, Goethe developed such scientific concepts that these concepts may sit heavily in the soul's stomach like stones, but can be transformed, so that you reach the mental realm with these scientific concepts. Goethe himself did not yet found spiritual science; he did not get around to doing this. Nevertheless, he developed his theory of metamorphosis so that you only need to develop the internal experience from the principles further, then you also attain knowledge of the mental-spiritual experience.

Whereto does the common psychology, actually, come? A very significant philosopher of the present, Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who died recently, had a rich knowledge life behind himself. He was a fighter in this area; last, he found asylum during this war in Zurich. He attempted to cope with thinking, feeling, and willing his whole life through, beside his other profound researches in the psychological field. These three concepts play a particular role in psychology. Franz Brentano did not advance further than to a classification, did not advance where one can grasp the mental itself only as something living. If one clusters imagining, feeling, willing so simply mechanically, one has three classes. To grasp the mental as something living, one has to grasp the mental, now, however, the spiritual-mental, in such a way as Goethe tried to grasp the outer physical things with his theory of metamorphosis, as Goethe imagined the green leaves of the stalk transformed into the petals, even into the fruit organs. As he attempted to explain all organs by a transformation into each other, one must not only leave thinking, feeling, and willing side by side, but also gain the living transition of them.

There I can bring in the research results again which matured in myself for a long time. Our will is not only put so externally beside the feeling and the imagining, but the feeling has simply originated as a metamorphosis of the will in such a way as the petal forms from the stalk leaf; and imagining develops from feeling. At the end the anthroposophist gets to the result that the will is basically a young being which if it becomes older changes into feeling, and if it becomes even older into thinking, into mental pictures. In the imagining the same is always mysteriously contained which is also inside feeling and willing. However, we do not experience how mental pictures arise from feeling.

However, if the soul has developed its spiritual organs, it experiences a mysterious feeling in all its mental pictures, but not a feeling which is bound to our body, but which leads us on the detour of the mental picture into the vastnesses of the spiritual world. You experience—if you are not led by the feeling into your bodily, but are led into the vastnesses of the spiritual world—that supersensible in which we are between death and a new birth. Then you experience the supersensible world with higher knowledge than the usual mental pictures are, with spiritual-mental knowledge.

However, most people would like to experience this supersensible world after the methods of the sensory world. They are not contented to experience it only in pictures, in Imaginations. They would like to experience it with the senses. However, as the body has to die to become pure spirit, one has to cast off the sensory knowledge that combines with the material. Knowledge has to become Imagination, so that in the Imaginative experience which is as subtle as imagination, but not so arbitrary, the sensory-material is cast off, and a picture of that reality is already attained between birth and death that the human being experiences after death.

Hence, nobody can hope to recognise the supersensible who would like to hear voices or to get other material effects like the spiritists do, while because of a weird self-deception these want to tackle, actually, the supersensible and put something sense-perceptible to themselves. With that subtle spiritual experience, which must happen if one wants to experience the imperishable human being, just many people are not content today. Only this supersensible experience can lead us to the real knowledge of the soul being in the supersensible field that leads us to a true view of the relationship of the body to the soul and that of the soul to the body.

As the feeling changes into imagining, the willing does it too. As one can find a feeling mysteriously in every mental picture, one also discovers a will impulse, which does not lead us to the movements of the limbs, to sensory actions, but leads us from imagining into the supersensible world.

If one discovers the young soul being of willing in the old-grown soul being of imagining, one discovers in this willing which is experienced purely spiritually those forces which work from the preceding life on earth on this life on earth. Then the repeated lives on earth and the intermediate lives in the purely supersensible world become real observation; then the human being gets to the real supersensible knowledge.

One could think that the supersensible knowledge is there only to satisfy the human need of knowledge. Let me quite briefly, at the end, only indicate with few words that this does not hold true. One could believe that only the human need of knowledge is satisfied, but this has its deep practical significance. Indeed, one is concerned with progress in the evolution of humanity. The Copernican worldview, the modern natural sciences came only, after humanity had gone through other levels before. Thus, the anthroposophical spiritual science only originates if the urge to recognise the supersensible is strong enough in the human beings. Many people who know that there is a supersensible world still believe that today the human beings are not ripe to develop those free cognitive forces to wake the sleeping human being. The opposite is the case! Today the human being thirsts for supersensible knowledge. He numbs himself only as I have said at the beginning of this talk.

This cannot go on this way for other reasons, too. One can recognise nature without ascending to laws that make the soul life explicable. You can even say that you can recognise nature the better, the more you keep away from any mental-spiritual while developing physical laws. The physical laws will be the more suited for their field, the less one confuses them with laws that refer only to the mental-spiritual. One has already to say this. However, as soon as it concerns the complete understanding of human life, so that our understanding can intervene in the development of this human life, as soon as it concerns the social and political living together, as soon as it concerns generally finding a right relation from human being to human being, something else is necessary. Then the thoughts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences are not sufficient.

Unfortunately, humanity has got used very much to thinking life after such thought forms after which one imagines natural processes. Thus people also have instinctively familiarised themselves with the social life, with the political living together in such a way and also to form it as the spirit forms which only is just used to thinking physical laws. More and more this has developed that way during the last four centuries. As it is correct if natural sciences exclude the spirit from their field, it is insufficient for the human living together, for everything that is connected with society, with sociology to develop thought forms that originate only from natural sciences. One does not become ready with how the human beings have to live together all over the world if one wants to develop this living together after political, after social ideals that are produced after the pattern of scientific principles.

One example of many: when this tragic war broke out, one could hear from many sides, just from the people who called themselves experts of the laws of human living together: this war can last no longer than at most four to five months.—In full seriousness, these persons said this from their scientifically developed thinking, which also exists with that who is not a physical scientist. Just the greatest experts spoke this way. How sadly has reality disproved these mental pictures! Nobody who figures spiritual-scientifically out the world can dedicate himself to such mistakes because he knows which difference exists between escapist mental pictures and realistic ones.

What fulfils our souls as spiritual science brings us together with reality; it puts us into the full reality. A social science, which really copes with this living together of human beings around the whole world which should not bring in instincts, impulses to the human beings which discharge as the today's dreadful, catastrophic events discharge—such a social science can arise only from the conditions which spiritual science gives. Since it deals not with a part of life but with the whole life; hence, it only can generate mental pictures and concepts that cope with reality.

If people do not force themselves to build up their social thinking based on spiritual science, humanity will not come out of the calamities that discharge today so frightfully. I can appreciate what goes out from the people who one calls pacifists or similarly. However, such things cannot be decided by mere orders, cannot be decided by the fact that one decrees: this and that must be.

One can absolutely agree with that which must be. However, if one only produces the orders, only the laws of the usual thinking, it is in such a way, as if one says to a stove: dear stove, it is your duty to heat the room; hence, heat the room.—It will not heat the room, without putting wood into it and making a fire.

Just as little all the usual ideas of peacekeeping et cetera are sufficient. It concerns that one not only says, human beings, love each other, but that one puts heating material into the human souls. However, these are concepts that arise from the living conception of spiritual life.

Since the soul does not only belong to the material, it belongs to the spiritual life. One does often not understand even today, what it means that this human soul belongs to the supersensible area. One usually thinks that one is with the laws which one develops today already in the supersensible area. One does not do this.

Just in the fields of serious science one often starts realising already that it is also significant to check for human experience not only that which scientific prejudice has sketched out in the last decades but also that there other concepts, other ideas are necessary.

Did we not experience the strange play in the last time that one of the most loyal disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), the famous physiologist, wrote a book in which he says farewell to the whole outwardness of Darwin's theory which wants to explain the evolution only with a sum of contingencies, of coincidences, which does not want that forces intervene in this evolution that one cannot recognise with mere outer observation. Thus, one experienced the strange case that Oscar Hertwig wrote a significant book in the last time: The Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). In this book in which serious science itself attempts to come out from the only material, to ascend to the spiritual, Oscar Hertwig closes his explanations with the following considerations:

“The interpretation of Darwin's theory which is so ambiguous with its indefiniteness also permitted a versatile use in other fields of the economic, social, and political life. From it everybody could get desired answers, like from a Delphi oracle, concerning its practical applications on social, political, hygienic, medical, and other fields and refers as affirmation of his assertions to the Darwinian biology with its immutable physical principles. However, if now these putative principles are no real ones”—Oscar Hertwig believes to have proved that—, “should there not be social dangers with its versatile practical application on other fields? Nevertheless, do not believe that the human society can use phrases like the relentless struggle for existence, the selection of the fittest, the natural perfection etc. transferring them to the most different fields without being deeper influenced in the whole direction of its ideation. One could easily prove this assertion with many phenomena of modern times. Just therefore the decision of truth and error of Darwinism is beyond the scope of biological science.”

There you recognise how a naturalist realises: what the human beings think and what of their thoughts changes over into their impulses, that prepares and develops what then in the outer reality comes into being; the spiritual is also the creator of the material in the social field.

If the material appears in such figure as today, one has to search other reasons in the spiritual than someone searches them who goes forward with his concepts of the social only after the pattern of natural sciences. Spiritual science that is based on occultism will work different on the social life; it will not speak only of a relentless struggle for existence, but it will figure out what positions itself as something spiritual in that which appears in nature only as struggle for existence. It considers not only the existence after the outside, but after that which the spirit has poured into it; it will not only judge the course of evolution by its functionality but also by that which has been put as something ethical in the course of purposefulness. It will not only speak of perfection by natural selection but of the creative spirit that flows into the developmental current and creates the natural selection as well as the soul creates its body. It will search the bases of the social laws above all in the supersensible.

There we can already realise that spiritual science is not something that satisfies mere knowledge, but something that is intimately associated with the practical need, with the whole course of life. The future will demand those bases of thinking just for the practical life that can originate only from spiritual science.

Why are the human beings reluctant even today to accept spiritual science? Just from that which I have said now one can get an answer. We were mainly concerned this evening how spiritual science pursues the riddle of immortality. However, death separates us from immortality. We have realised that just in the course of life we have to recognise the perpetual intervention of death. In ancient times, one always said, someone who enters into the spiritual world must experience death symbolically.

It is maybe a radical diction, but it is true. Between our world of the senses and the intellect that analyzes the sensory observations and the world of immortality is no world of growth but of death. One has to envisage death; one has to look at the destructive forces that counteract the forces that just natural sciences regard as the forces of growth.

This produces something similar in the area of knowledge, as it is the fear of death in the outer life. One can already speak of the fact that people do not have the courage to penetrate that area through which one must go if one wants to enter into the supersensible. The human beings shrink from it. They do not know it. They deceive themselves with all kinds of theories and prejudices of limits of knowledge, with any only material significance of life. They rather deceive themselves than that they pass that gate courageously through which one can come only from the sensory to the extrasensory world. However, the gate is that by which one must recognise the nature of death. Since it is true: the human being will find adequate harmony of his soul only if he can absorb the secrets of immortality.

Nevertheless, to the fruit of knowledge that can be enjoyed as immortality one gets only if one ploughs over the ground of death. However, one must not be afraid of it. As the human being overcomes the deadly fear of knowledge in the area of cognition, a science of the immortal, of the supersensible will originate. Tomorrow I speak about the fact that this science of the supersensible disturbs nobody's religious confession. I hope that I do not engage your attention tomorrow as long as today; but I was not able to shorten this basic talk.

If religious feeling and experience wanted to understand its task properly towards the requirements of modern time and faced that with full understanding what anthroposophy intends, the religious feeling and confessing would consider anthroposophy as a welcome confederate just today. However, one does not always make it his business in the present to get to know the properties of those things about which one believes to judge competently. This is true to the greatest extent in particular compared with anthroposophy. One judges what one faces while one labels it from without, often sketches a caricature of that what it concerns in reality. Then one does not judge this reality but the self-made picture, the self-made caricature.

If one delved on anthroposophy, if one envisaged its task towards the riddles and problems of our time, one would become attentive above all to the fact that anthroposophy differs from all other opinions and views that arise about world and human being et cetera, because it is deeply penetrated by the idea of development in the most comprehensive sense.

Human opinions and worldviews feel contented only if they can say to themselves, in certain sense and within certain limits at least, I have thoughts that are true; they are valid in themselves; science, religion, or I have found them; but they are valid in themselves.

That does not apply to anthroposophy. Anthroposophy knows that the thoughts have to come from the spirit of time in every epoch. The spirit of humanity is continually developing. That is why that what appears as opinion in the world in an age must have another form than in another age. While anthroposophy appears to the world today, it knows that after centuries that what it says today it has to say in quite different form for quite different human needs and interests that it cannot aim at “absolute truths” but that it is in living development.

From such conditions a certain attitude results. On it the judgement depends, which anthroposophy must have about other spiritual attempts and currents; its relationship to other spiritual currents, other opinions, other views depends on it. Above all one has to take into consideration that anthroposophy did not originate in such a way as many people mean, and that it is not able to position itself in the network of contemporary opinions and views as one thinks frequently. Since one thinks if one gets to know anything about anthroposophy cursorily, while one has heard a talk about it once or has read a few pages of any book about it, or maybe not even this, but has heard from anybody who knows only very dubiously what anthroposophy intends; one thinks that anthroposophy is a religious confession as other religious confessions are.

In the course of time, one has just developed the sensation: developing ideas about the world is a religious view beside others. Hence, one thinks that anthroposophy is also such a sect, as many sects exist in the world.

I have to stress on the other hand first, just this is distinctive of anthroposophy that it did not appear anyhow in the world beside or in contrast to any faith. It did not appear because of this or that creed on which it has to take a stand, but because the scientific development made it necessary which has a formative influence on the views of the present. Anthroposophy wants to extend and to perfect what natural sciences have brought. One has to consider this starting point. If one gets to know the scientific achievements that go over in the public consciousness and work on its worldview, one has to say, natural sciences have worked and will work their way out even more in the course of time as interpreter of the outer sense-perceptible existence. The laws and methods that they develop are suitable in the most eminent sense to understand the outer existence, but unsuitable if one does not transform them in order to grasp the spiritual. If one wants to grasp the spiritual just with the same scientific severity as one grasps the natural, one has to work into the spiritual world as I have shown it yesterday from the way of thinking and attitude of natural sciences.

There, however, big difficulties tower up for some people. One may say: just by the brilliant progress of natural sciences by which one has also looked into the spiritual border areas it has happened that one has developed a worldview in which, actually, the spirit has no place. This must be like that. Just as the scientific methods are suitable for the natural existence, they must be in such a way that they exclude the spirit from their research fields. If one takes the human being himself into account, one has to say, anatomy, physiology, and biology can study the bodily existence of the human being only if they show that with their methods, with their way of research the spirit is excluded as it were.

However, if one gets involved how natural sciences go forward, then one can continue natural sciences in such a way as I have characterised this yesterday. One finds his way with certain methods that the human soul applies to itself just from the natural existence to the spiritual world. The spiritual world becomes such a reality to the spiritual senses, as the mineral realm and other realms of nature are real to the outer senses. One works the way up to the spiritual.

A difficulty arises there for many people. They say if one speaks of the relationship of natural sciences to anthroposophy in such a way, yes, he is right maybe completely if he speaks about natural sciences; one cannot grasp the spirit with the scientific methods, one cannot know anything of the spirit; there are just borders, there are areas beyond natural sciences about which we can know nothing.

However, just from the yesterday's talk it may have arisen that anthroposophy is not of this opinion. The opposite is the experience of anthroposophy: that one can really penetrate into the spirit, into this unknown land with certain spiritual methods. It is hard for some people to concede that one can still get to know something of an area if one gets involved in certain ideas and research results.

It is much more comfortable to say, this is an area about which all human beings know nothing—because they themselves know nothing about it. However, this is no proof that one can know nothing of it, although one often concludes this. Hence, it concerns just if anthroposophy argues that one can enter as a human being into the spiritual world—using those methods to which I have yesterday pointed—in which in truth the human being lives with his soul. In this spiritual world, he experiences immortality and freedom, the real impulses of his supersensible existence.

Because during the last centuries and up to now natural sciences follow the transient, just something had to face them that appreciates the same scientificity in the spiritual area. In former times, natural sciences did not yet face the religious confessions that referred the human beings to the spiritual world. Hence, a special spiritual science was not yet necessary. Such natural sciences did not yet exist which could dupe the human beings into regarding the outer sense-perceptible reality as the only one. Only in the time when such a science and with it such a belief could appear, a spiritual science had to come.

This is in the course of development. That is why one can understand the emergence of anthroposophy only properly if one understands its arising from natural sciences. If natural sciences produced a kind of confession only of their own accord in the human beings, they would gradually entice them because of their strictly scientific methods and completely dissuade them from the view that one can penetrate by knowledge into the spiritual world. They would bring along that the human beings believe to the greatest extent: well, one can know everything about the sense-perceptible world; anything else that is beyond the sense-perceptible world is subject to faith that can never lead to any certainty.

Here is the point that is hard to understand for the contemporaries at first because it requires a major effort to subject the soul to those experiences by which it attains spiritual senses to itself beside the physical senses to penetrate into the real spiritual world. It will still last long, until the prejudices disappear which prevail in this respect, until an sufficiently big number of human beings realise that one can really penetrate into the spiritual world as scientifically as into nature.

So that spiritual science can gradually settle down in our cultural life, it is necessary that people unite who intend and feel a need to maintain it. From that desire everything has also originated that comes into being in the Dornach building and its surroundings. However, the union of single persons leads straight away to the wrong opinion: well, there one deals with a sect, there the persons consort who want to support any new faith among themselves. However, associating in this area has another sense than associating in sects. Associating in the anthroposophic area has the sense that anthroposophy cannot be attained by reading a single talk, but that anthroposophy is something on which someone who wants to know it properly has to work gradually.

This takes place also in the schools, in the universities; and if one wants to call an audience in the university a “sect,” one may call an association of those who practise anthroposophy a “sect,” otherwise not. If to certain talks, to certain events only some persons can come who have absorbed other things already in themselves, this seems quite natural; since with any other knowledge it is that way. Anthroposophy wants just to consider the modern institutions. Nothing mysterious forms the basis if human beings come together and carry out events, but only that which they have searched as preparation as you prepare yourself for university lectures, before you can visit them because, otherwise, the visit is useless. Any other view about such a coming together does not apply because it does not get to the heart of the matter.

However, one has to say, an association in this area must have another character in certain respect than an association of students at a college, for example. The cognitions that a college provides refer mostly to the outer life, with the exception of quite small “enclaves;” they refer by the influence of natural sciences to the intellect based on the sensory observation. However, this is directed more to the mere thinking, to a part of the human being, to the head. By no means has anthroposophy opposed the intellectual understanding!—People who consider themselves as capable sometimes judge anthroposophy just with their prejudices and regard anthroposophy as amateurish. However, if these people engaged in it, they would realise that the thinking and the logic that one uses in the outer science must also exist in anthroposophy, but a much subtler, higher logic is necessary to understand its advanced parts really. However, what anthroposophy reveals of the spiritual world because of its research seizes not only the head, not only the thinking, but it seizes the whole human being with his whole soul: feeling, thinking, and willing. However, the human being thereby gets a more intimate relationship to that what is delivered to him as knowledge than possibly the mere university study does.

 I would now like to go back—in order to make understood myself completely in this regard—to the fact that anthroposophy is important for the human development as a supplement of natural sciences that it appears in the sense of the spirit of our time that, however, the cognitions that anthroposophy intends as they corresponded to the needs and interests of former times were always there. Nevertheless, one had other views about the development of the suitable knowledge. One has to talk about mysteries, even of secret societies if one looks for the analogous things of former times that correspond to anthroposophy. One performed that in the mysteries in the course of the human development which today anthroposophy does in another form, which corresponds to the present. Those who did such researches in former times initiated procedures by which the higher knowledge of the spiritual world approached the human beings. They took the view that they had to cut themselves off just in a circle of human beings who were very well prepared for such activities. With them one had made sure that they really had that attitude and character which is necessary to receive something that seizes the whole human being and his whole soul. Hence, one has strictly kept secret the knowledge that one cultivated in such mysteries, in such secret societies.

One can realise even today that good reasons existed to protect this higher knowledge against profanation by the public. There were good reasons. More in view of the today's development of spiritual science I would like to indicate something of these reasons.

If you get from the sense-perceptible world to the spiritual one, as I have described it yesterday, you have to cross a certain border area. One may very well use a term that many people used who understood something of such things: one has to cross the threshold of the spiritual world. This expression means something. It is not an only pictorial term. It means something, as far as the science of the spiritual—if it really approaches the human being and the human being combines with it—brings images, ideas and views with it which are completely different from the images, ideas, and views which one has in the outer sensory world. One can already say: someone who is habitually eager to accept the truth of the outer sensory world only will discover that truths of the spiritual world sound paradoxical at first; they are so different from the truths of the sensory world that they could seem maybe crazy, fantastic. This comes from the fact that one completely goes astray if one believes, the spiritual world which forms the basis of our sensory one is only a kind of continuation of this sensory world; it only seems somewhat more nebulous, somewhat subtler and thinner than the sensory world. No, you have already to familiarise yourself with the fact that you must experience something new, incredible, paradox as truth if you want to engage in the real spiritual world.

Hence, this engagement in the real spiritual world is not only something astonishing, but it often evokes feelings of fright in the human being, in particular if he stands at the threshold of the spiritual world. They are like fear, like shyness that always exists if the human being if he enters into an unknown area. Since for someone who has done his experiences only in the sensory world the spiritual world is an unknown area. Hence, it happens that at the threshold of the spiritual world two things may flow into each other: on one side that is which you have still to acknowledge as truth concerning the sensory world that you have to acknowledge as consecutive facts, as lawful course of facts. Then, however, something confronts us from the other side of the world, from the spiritual side, something that is subject to other laws, that proceeds quite different that makes a paradoxical impression. This can intertwine at first. However, thereby the thinking comes into a situation, which puts high claims to the human mind, to a healthy power of judgement of the whole state of all circumstances. One must be well prepared if one wants to distinguish illusion from spiritual reality within the border area.

Someone who studies the books really which I have mentioned yesterday will realise that the given method to penetrate into the spiritual world is designed in such a way that the human being does not impair the health of his senses, of his mind, and reason, on the contrary it furthers it. Any intrusion in the spiritual world that is managed mystically or with hypnosis is the opposite of that what a healthy spiritual research intends.

However, this does not prevent that malevolent people come repeatedly and state that the spiritual-scientific method hypnotises the human beings, persuade them of all kinds of things. Nothing can contribute so decidedly to save the human being from any hypnotic influence and suggestion as the true spiritual-scientific methods do which make the human being free. One works in the spiritual-scientific method with the following principle: I have pointed in my book The Riddle of Man to the fact that one can say: as well as the human being awakes from sleep where he has only a quite vague consciousness; he can wake from the usual consciousness to the spiritual beholding. It is like an awakening in a spiritual world what you attain with the spiritual-scientific method. However, as the usual day life can be never healthy unless one makes preparations so that the sleep is healthy, the entry into the spiritual world cannot be healthy unless one can develop a healthy everyday life based on reality, on worldly wisdom unless one has disciplined himself, so that one is a human being who copes with reality.

The awakening to the beholding can occur only from a healthy day life. Spiritual science has to expel all preparations in the usual life by which the human being becomes estranged to this life may it be by prejudices, by wrong asceticism, or by wrong turning away from life. Just the proper existence in the practical life is the best preparation to enter into the spiritual world.

However, if one has acquired a healthy sense for the outer reality if one has developed,—to put it another way—a healthy mind and power of judgement, you can distinguish illusion and reality in the border areas of the sensory and spiritual worlds, where the threshold is between both worlds. Hence, one has himself strictly convinced in former times whether the human beings who associated with the mysteries were really prepared to stand the stronger fight that the common sense had to lead off in the border area. Since someone who does not have common sense is misled by the apparently paradox phenomena. He soon leaves the whole matter as one drops an ember if one has burnt himself, and he feels disappointed and becomes more and more an opponent of any spiritual pursuit. These ancient societies wanted to be sure of their people.

Such associations have continued their work up to now; there are still ones. Anthroposophy does not belong to them; anthroposophy reckons that today on a much bigger scale than it was the case in former times, everything that approaches the human being must be subject to the public. We hear with a certain right that even the secret diplomacy has to be replaced by a public one. The spirit of time tends to public. However, just with this spirit of time anthroposophy lives. Only in this respect which I have mentioned before—because certain preparations are necessary if one wants to understand something later—only from such conditions something still has the appearance of the old institutions, but it strives to position itself completely in the public. Since anthroposophy can only become an element of the modern cultural life—what has to happen—if anthroposophy positions itself in the public.

However, not only this is a peculiarity of anthroposophy what I have just indicated, but this internal soul experience which enables you to behold in the spiritual world as you look with the physical senses in the physical world. This requires that you can generally behave to concepts, views, and mental pictures somewhat different from you behave toward the outer reality. In this area, natural sciences have also created concepts that are useless as such in spiritual science. They are useless because the spiritual researcher realises the following very soon: a concept, an idea, a mental picture is real, as soon as one approaches the spiritual facts and beings, is nothing but an image, a photo which one gets in the physical world, we say of a tree. If one takes a photo of a tree from one side and a photo from another side, a photo from the third side—these pictures look different. However, they all are of the one and same tree. Only because one takes these photos from different sides one can receive a complete idea of reality. However, one does not like that today. One likes limited concepts. One wants to adhere to them. Spiritual science cannot do this. Spiritual science describes a matter from most different sides; it describes it once from one side and knows that it gives an one-sided picture only; then it describes it from a second side, from a third side, from a third viewpoint.

Indeed, what astonishes even more is the following. If one really wants to become a spiritual scientist, one has to be completely penetrated by the sentence that Goethe formed: between two contrary opinions, the problem is right in the middle. One must know not only—if one wants to know the truth of a spiritual being or a spiritual fact—what militates for it, but also what speaks against it.

The listeners who have frequently heard talks by me know that it is my habit from the spiritual-scientific attitude to not only say what militates for, but also what militates against a matter. In particular, I have the habit of doing this always if I hold talks about more intimate talks on higher fields of anthroposophy. That is why someone who peruses my writings not only discovers with which arguments one can found certain spiritual facts, spiritual beings, but also with which arguments one can disprove the things. Only thereby, one receives truthful experience.

However, this has led just in this anthroposophic area to strange things that one can experience, actually, only in this area today. Just from within the ranks of the followers, persons have appeared who did not search work in spiritual-scientific respect but personal interests. They have seceded; they became adversaries. They needed only to copy what one can read in my writings what I have said in my talks, and then they could easily disprove anthroposophy. Indeed, one does not need to invent own disproofs, one needs only to copy the disproofs!

However, what I have just indicated is a peculiarity of anthroposophic research: to light up the things from the most different sides. Thereby only one acquires the necessary inner discipline if one does not want to live only in abstractions, but wants to unite with spiritual realities. Someone who only knows the outer nature and natural sciences has no idea of this inner discipline. For he thinks, he may be able to transfer certain concepts, certain mental pictures that one obtains from the outer nature, simply to the spiritual area; since he regards them as generally valid. However, one is not able to do this.

I would like to clarify this with the following. Indeed, the paradoxical concepts immediately begin with it. I think, for example, of a lecture which at the beginning of this century Professor Dewar (James D., 1842-1923) held in London. Professor Dewar attempted in a similar way, as the geologists do concerning the beginning of the earth, to form ideas of the possible end of the earth from physics, from chemistry. These ideas are exceptionally brilliant. If one pursues how the earth cools off gradually, and with it the conditions of the single substances change on earth, one gets to certain insights which are valid within the border of observation. Then one extends them and asks: how will all that be after millions of years?—One can be a rather witty physicist or chemist and imagine, it is so cold that, actually, no human being can live with his current constitution; even so, one calculates, how then, we say, for example, the milk looks like. Then the milk will be solid, it cannot be liquid and will have another colour. One can find certain materials, as for example proteins with which one coats the walls, so that they shine, so that one can read newspapers. The professor has derived all that from physics and chemistry as a nice idea.

Nevertheless, someone who has trained himself with spiritual-scientific methods must deny himself such ideas with inner soul discipline; he cannot get to them. Since how does one attain them, actually?

I just get now to what is paradoxical compared with the usual mental pictures: if one observes how the vital functions of a child change from the seventh, eighth years on, you get a suitable picture. Then you can continue calculating how the organs must look in 150 years. This is exactly the same method after which Professor Dewar calculated the final state of the earth.

However, if one applies it to the human being, one notices: he does no longer live in 150 years! One does not consider that that is not applicable to the human being, that the earth is dead before the state enters which one calculates from physics. One could also calculate from the changes from the seventh until the ninth years how the child was 180 years ago—but it was not there! The geologists calculate how the earth looked millions of years ago. However, at that time the earth did not yet exist.

This sounds paradoxical, and one has as a spiritual researcher to bring in concepts that sound paradoxical. Nevertheless, what one gets to know spiritual-scientifically is just something that can give soul discipline. To settle in the spiritual, just a soul discipline is necessary which can also deny itself certain concepts, which does not calculate after the same pattern which one would follow if one said, the human being who faces me existed 200 years ago.—The calculation would completely be after the same pattern.

I know very well how paradoxical this is what I say with it. However, if one does not point to such paradoxes, one draws attention to that which upsets some people so much. If one crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, one cannot enough emphasise how much the common sense must be active. However, if one appropriates such a soul discipline, one can unite with reality this way; then this becomes an achievement of the whole soul; it becomes a disposition, a basic character of the soul.

Then, however, the soul can judge how its view relates to other worldviews. Then it will understand how its worldview relates to other viewpoints. Then one can pursue which other currents of thinking, feeling and experiencing are there to criticise not only but to settle in them. Such a behaviour extends to all historical and contemporary developments concerning the human cultural life.

Only if one takes the attitude from the deepest impulses of anthroposophy, one can judge the relation of spiritual science to the religious confessions. Anthroposophy attempts to understand these religious confessions above all. It attempts to settle down into them not with critical mind, but in such a way, that one takes them, as they are to understand their right to exist. Hence, anthroposophy succeeds in making a fair judgement of the past spiritual currents in quite different sense than other directions of thought often do.

Let us take the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas or the philosophy of Aristotle at first. Someone who is today a philosopher or scientist after the pattern of the common concepts says: well, Aristotle is an old obsolete philosopher; the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is a thing of the Middle Ages.—Anthroposophy knows that something special must arise from the conditions and impulses of the spirit of our times; it does not want to take over what in former epochs was the right thing. However, it understands that out of the conditions of those epochs what only those epochs could offer. It understands their nature; it knows that the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas was basically a servant of Christianity at that time that it could arise from the spirit of that time. You have to familiarise yourself with what cannot arise only from the spirit of our time. Anthroposophy does not regard the engagement in Thomism as an only historical study, as something that one can get only from it. This is very important. Since this does not produce that washed out tolerance, but it produces that understanding tolerance which looks at that what developed once not as something obsolete, but appreciates it at its place, appreciates it also in its developing reality. Some things have to develop in nature, in the spiritual life as annual plants develop from which again annual plants originate. However, other plants develop further from one year into the other forming wood, for example; they are perennial plants.

In the spiritual culture, it is likewise. Something must go on in the spiritual culture, must be taken up in later times by those who want to feel united with the whole development of humanity. You can also get an idea of the relationship of anthroposophy and the religious confessions that believe, but only because of a misunderstanding, that anthroposophy opposes them as another religion.

No, that is not true. Anthroposophy knows very well that it can never become a religion because it knows that just as little, as one can become a child at the age of 60 years again, just as little the modern humanity will be able to form religions of its own accord. New religions do no longer originate. Hence, anthroposophy is appropriate just to figure out the absolute value of the confessions. Anthroposophy would badly get along with itself if it believed to be able to found a new confession. However, the religions originated because human beings should receive impressions of the spiritual world. They keep their value and can be understood just with anthroposophy that also works its way to the spiritual world.

Hence, properly understood, religion and anthroposophy can meet each other. Anthroposophy works its way from the human being, developing human forces, to that spiritual area in which the religion puts its revelations.

May one be, actually, so little religious that one can believe, one has received the religion as truth from divine heights and one does fear for it if the human being strives now after working his way to the truth of the spiritual world with the forces that he received from God, as the religions believe? Is it not religious from the start if one knows that one has revelations of truth in the religion that one is not afraid that this truth will comply with that truth which the human being finds with his forces given by spirit?

One should consider that seriously if one wants to judge the relationship of religion and anthroposophy. In former times, the human being was not minded in such a way that he needed one way more into the spiritual world beside the religious way. As the human being of the Middle Ages did not need the Copernican worldview, he did not need anthroposophy. Today he needs it because humanity is developing. Nevertheless, that which certain forces, existing only in certain epochs, gave once to humanity keeps its value.

However, in this respect there is a complete contrast of anthroposophy and the modern scientific current: The latter owes its brilliant results, its value just to the fact that its methods are not suited to lead into the spiritual world. Anthroposophy could not get to such errors because quite different forces lead to anthroposophy and because it would regard any attempt to found a religion as not contemporary. It would be as if a man wanted to do the same as a child does. That what the child does has not to be less worth than what the man does. Anthroposophy knows that the time of forming religions is over. Hence, it will use just its forces to understand the religions, to lead the human being deeper and deeper into the understanding of the religions.

One has to say, as the soul strives after the spiritual world anthroposophically with its own cognitive forces not only of the head but also of the whole soul, the religions did not strive. They strove in such a way that one may say: while anthroposophy takes the human being as starting point and works its way to the spiritual world, the religions took that as starting point what they had received like by gracious revelation. However, this fulfils the human soul different from that what is created with his own forces. Anthroposophy is a science. That, however, which works there as religious truth seizes the soul different from a cognitive truth as anthroposophy must be. One cannot change anthroposophy immediately into a religion. However, from the properly understood anthroposophy a real religious need will also originate. Since the soul is not uniform, but multifarious. The human soul needs different ways to reach its goals. It needs not only the way of knowledge to the spiritual world but also the way of the warm religious feeling.

One thing was always strange. I have received many letters here from Switzerland that always had a fundamental note. In these letters, you may read the following: I can understand quite well what you intend with spiritual science, I can also understand that it is entitled to enter the spiritual world this way—not everybody writes in such a way, however, there are those who write this—but I miss that it leads so intimately into the Christian experiences as—and then the writers bring in this or that sectarian direction.

Yes, one wants to express a lack of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, in such a way. In my view, this lack is always a particular advantage. Since one demands something from anthroposophy that it just does not at all want to be by its whole nature. However, it wants also to concede the same right to the other side. They hold something against you if you still keep a way open to them. This is something peculiar.

Today some priests resent if one keeps a way open to them on which anthroposophy does not at all want to walk. There refutations appear, for example: you say something else about Christ than we do—anthroposophy says nothing else; it tells it only more explicitly—hence, you are not on the right track; we have to disprove you.

Yes, however, if the matter were in such a way that one just says that what he does not say, and lets him say what he can know what is on his way. He attacks you just because you want to accept him. On one side, he resents that anthroposophy does not solve his task because I leave it to him. If one said anything else, it would also be taken amiss. Thus the paradoxical appears that someone refutes you with that what he would have just to feel as benefit. Because anthroposophy does not want to interfere with the very own thing of the confessions because it gives them the right to work at their place of their own accord, therefore, it just says something else that is not said at this place. Anthroposophy does that in order to show the authorisation of the confessions. One demands from it, it should take over the task of the religion. In this area, a whole sum of clear mental pictures would have to replace unclear ideas.

One may say, a start has been made with the excellent book which Ricarda Huch (1864-1947. German author) has written about Luther's Faith (1916). Beside some other excellent things one gets an idea of this quite different colouring of the sentimental way that the religious confession takes. The way of the religious truth speaks from every page of this book. However, today deeper truths are trivialised as a rule because everybody believes, he does not need much to get involved with the depths of this or that matter, he is already perfect. Ricarda Huch has passed an appropriate remark concerning the way how Nietzsche's followers have originated everywhere some years ago because they believed to have the makings in themselves to be such men as they were described here and there. They do not want to work their way up, but they want above all to be on par with a superman if one describes a superman. Thus, one saw numerous “supermen” walking around who did not even have the anlage of a respectable guinea pig, they walked around as “blond beasts” in the sense of Nietzsche.

Anthroposophy is a way into the spiritual world, as the present demands it, which supports the religious confessions, the religious experience. One also judges the outer course of history too cursorily. One thinks, one has to familiarise wide sections of the population with the religion again, which does not have that influence as in former times. One believes to do the religion a favour if one fights against the putative opponents. If one goes into the deeper reasons, why, for example,—as it was stated in 1873—only one third of the French population was religious in the ecclesiastical sense if one took the matter seriously, you would say to yourself: not from these superficial reasons, but from deep soul impulses an indifference has arisen not only towards the single religions, but also towards the spiritual reality generally. A materialist age has approached.

Now anthroposophy knows the following of the course of development of humanity. While any developmental current proceeds, another proceeds unnoticed in the depths of consciousness. For example, while the tendency of materialism and denial of spirit prevailed, the need to find the way into the spiritual world developed in the unconscious depths of the souls. Thus, a human being could be with his head an atheist like David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1872 theologian and philosopher); and develop his soul forces which can be developed, however, only on a direct path of knowledge, just on the anthroposophic way, if one finds it. Then, however, one finds the connection with the religious confession again on this detour, while one leaves the religious confession if one sticks only to the brilliant progress of natural sciences.

How have those scientific directions positioned themselves that have developed only under the influence of natural sciences to the religious development? Quite different from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy attempts to understand the religious confessions. Because religious confessions speak of the spirit and anthroposophy knows spiritual facts and spiritual beings as its research results, it encounters the religious confessions.

Other directions speak different. I want to bring in the example of the psychologist Ebbinghaus (Hermann E., 1850-1909, German psychologist); he investigates with his scientific mind, with his power of judgement how religion came into being. He says, the human beings of former times did not yet have the enlightened thinking of the present, they noticed that they are exposed to dangers in the outer world, to heavy showers, thunderstorms and the like; there they imagined that hostile powers are there. Out of their fear, they imagined demoniacal spiritual beings. Then from necessity, they have invented the gods who should help them.

Such things sound rather nice, and that human being who is accustomed to the popular ideas of today understands these things easily. However, one takes a very wrong idea as starting point if one says repeatedly, the child of nature is inclined as any child to personify, to ensoul an edge of a table; if it stumbles against it, and it bashes the edge. It does not at all ensoul the edge of a table, but it does not yet know the difference of something dead and something living, and from an internal desire it bashes the dead; it does not at all ensoul anything. The child of nature does also not at all ensoul anything, but it follows its desires; and it is right that it always tries to explain that what faces it hostilely or harmfully anyhow by invention of a demon. I do not believe, if a naughty boy is a threat to a savage anyhow, that the savage invents a demon with which he defends himself against the boy, but he bashes him.

These things seem to be paradoxical again. Only spiritual science can judge it properly. Spiritual science knows how to interpret the facts properly that the child, actually, is not yet minded religiously, just as little as the savage is minded this way. One regards the religion as something childish. However, just the child is not minded religiously, but it must be educated to religion first. Thus, the human being has been educated in the course of human evolution.

A quotation by Ebbinghaus is in such a way that he says first, fear and hardship are the mothers of religion.—Then he says: “The churches fill and the pilgrimages increase in times of war and disastrous epidemics.”

I would like to know whether the churches also fill with those who are materialistically minded from the start at epidemics and war times. Nevertheless, they fill with those only who have a religious disposition anyway. However, this does not originate from fear and hardship, this originates because the human being experiences the spiritual in his soul. In ancient times, he experienced that more instinctively. Today he can experience it more consciously. Because the human being has gradually developed to the experience of the spiritual, he realises an image of the spiritual in the sense-perceptible.

If you want to call the connection that the human soul has with the environment if it faces the spirit with spiritual organs, but if you want to call it only with an analogon, you may say, it is a kind of sympathy. You know sympathy in the moral sense; it is a kind of love. The connection with the spiritual world can be compared with the feeling of love. Thus, anthroposophy may say, even if primitive religions originated from hardship and troubles, they were filled with spiritual contents, with concepts and ideas of the spiritual world because the human being lives in it. Perfect religions, above all that religion which is the synthesis, the union of the other religions have not developed from fear and hardship; it has developed from that what one can call spiritualised love, coalescing with the spiritual world. Not fear and hardship but love produces the perfect religions.

Hence, you may say, those who have materialist-scientific mental pictures only misjudge the whole relationship of religion and cognitive truth. One is allowed to repeat repeatedly: if one stands firmly on the ground of a religious truth, one can assume—if the human being approaches the spiritual world from another side—that understanding, even support is possible. Thus, one will experience more and more—even if people do not want to admit this today—that, while by the impulses of the scientific worldview the religions feel weak, their value for humanity is acknowledged if the human being can approach the spirit spiritual-scientifically. The representatives of religion should be just friends of anthroposophy.

They will become friends. Since the conflict between religion and science does not originate from certain religious conditions. This conflict originated from the fact that strictly speaking the representatives of the religious confessions once represented science at the same time. You need not go far back and you will find, the representatives of religion were at the same time those who taught the worldly sciences. They were connected with these worldly sciences. Only in the course of time, natural sciences emancipated themselves from religion. This emancipation contributes to the spiritual world process.

Only because of the human nature, the understanding of such things lags behind. As recently as in 1822, the Catholic Church abolished the decrees that had condemned the teachings of Copernicus and Galilei. Maybe it needs centuries that a decree, an opinion is abolished which forbids to the Catholics to believe in repeated lives on earth. However, this abolition will come. Since human religious experience will not come into conflicts with the repeated lives on earth, just as little as with the Copernican worldview.

On this occasion, I have repeatedly to remind of that priest (Laurenz Müllner, 1848-1911) who was at the same time a university professor. He said in a lecture on Galilei, a properly understood religion will not rebel against scientific progress, but on the contrary, the religious truth will feel supported, that it can say to itself, if astronomy points to the stars and discovers their laws, then it happens also out of the magnificence and power of the divine being. Copernicus did not undermine the religion, but he contributed with his activity to the revelation of the divine being.—These words of a priest are quite different from those, which oppose that what must just appear in the history of humanity.

I have already pointed out how strange it is that one demands that one should accept, for example, not only that about Christ Jesus as Christianity what the one or the other representative of this or that denomination says, but one should say nothing else. One cannot reproach anthroposophy that it disturbs any religious confession. Nevertheless, it has to recognise something of that most important incision of the earth evolution that is significant for the whole universe. It still can say things about the Christ impulse which are quite different from that which was said up to now. One holds against it that it wants to contribute even more to the understanding of Christianity than the official representatives contribute.

Do realise only once how little one is up to the tasks of time if one does not want to understand that anthroposophy never disturbs the truthful religious confession, but deepens it. Then, however, one needs an attitude as Bishop Ireland (John I., 1838-1918) has expressed it with the words: religion needs new forms and viewpoints to keep in step with the modern time. We need apostles of thought and action.

Yes, there are also within the religious confessions those who feel the signs of time. Then they even demand that another way is coming up to meet them. Since they understand that if humanity loses the interest in the spirit, also the interest in religion gets lost. However, if humanity gets again interest in the spiritual as it corresponds to its today's development, then one will properly understood the religious confessions again. Hence, one can always experience, while often by the unilaterally qualified natural sciences the human beings have been dissuaded from the religious experience, they are led again if the mind is filled with anthroposophy.

If one wanted to understand the way seriously how anthroposophy understands the work of the spirit in the confessions how it understands that from these conditions this confession, from those conditions another confession has originated how it can judge the value of the single confessions, one would never want to combat anthroposophy just from this side.

Today one likes stopping at abstractions. One says, anthroposophy wants to search the core in all religions; it equates, actually, all religions. That does not hold true, but it investigates how a religion developed from another. It tries to understand how that confession which wants to content all human beings in one spirit how the synthesis of the different confessions is which are distributed to the single peoples. It speaks like Frobenius (Leo Viktor F., 1873-1938, ethnographer) of ethnic religions and of the religion of humanity.

The relationship of the religious life to anthroposophy can become clear only if one realises how anthroposophy wakes the human being for the spiritual world and how he can thereby feel that again what he can experience in the religious community.

Not with details, I wanted to explain the relationship of anthroposophy and the religious confessions but from the whole spirit of the anthroposophic worldview. I wanted to show that for that who knows anthroposophy there can be no talk that anthroposophy disturbs any religious experience. In this respect, one has also to consider what I have already said yesterday: I would like best to call that worldview which has arisen to me as anthroposophy from the healthy Goethean ideas, I would like best to call it Goetheanism, and I would like best to call the Dornach building Goetheanum.

Everything that one can find on the ground of anthroposophy induces you to say to yourself, I continue only what this unique spirit has put into the human evolution. He stopped in many respects at the elementary mental pictures. But one is not a supporter of Goetheanism in the right sense if one looks historically or externally biographically at that what Goethe himself wrote; but you are Goetheanist if you can project your thoughts vividly in this worldview and develop it further.

Goethe was a Goetheanist up to 1832 here in the physical world. Today he would express himself quite different from that time. However, if anything is healthy, certain basic impulses remain which also carry over a worldview from one epoch to the other. If that blossoms anew what was there as seed, then it points to this solidarity of the entire human development that it takes up certain basic impulses. Thus, I would like to close with the known confession of Goethe.