The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday at the end of the considerations about High Scholasticism, I attempted to point out that the most essential of a current of thought are problems that made themselves known in a particular way in the human being. They culminated in a certain yearning to understand: how does the human being attain that knowledge which is necessary for life, and how does this knowledge fit into that which controlled the minds in those days in social respect, how the knowledge does fit into the religious contents of the western church?

The scholastics were concerned with the human individuality at first who was no longer able to carry up the intellectual life to concrete spiritual contents, as it still shone from that which had remained from Neo-Platonism, from the Areopagite and Scotus Eriugena. I have also already pointed to the fact that the impulses of High Scholasticism lived on in a way. However, they lived on in such a way that one may say, the problems themselves are big and immense, and the way in which one put them had a lasting effect. These should be just the contents of the today's consideration—the biggest problem, the relationship of the human being to the sensory and the spiritual realities, still continues to have an effect even if in quite changed methodical form and even if one does not note it, even if it has apparently taken on a quite different form. All that is still in the intellectual activities of the present, but substantially transformed by that which significant personalities have contributed to the European development in the philosophical area in the meantime.

We also realise if we consider the Franciscan Monk Duns Scotus (~1266-1308) who taught in the beginning of the fourteenth century in Paris, later in Cologne, that as it were the problem becomes too big even for the excellent intellectual technique of scholasticism.

Duns Scotus feels confronted with the question: how does the human soul live in the human-body? Thomas Aquinas still imagined that the soul worked on the totality of the bodily. So that the human being is only equipped indeed, if he enters into the physical-sensory existence, by the physical-bodily heredity with the vegetative forces, with the mineral forces and with the forces of sensory perceptivity that, however, without pre-existence the real intellect integrates into the human being which Aristotle called nous poietikos. This nous poietikos now soaks up as it were the whole mental—the vegetative mental, the animal mental—and intersperses the corporeality only to transform it in its sense in order to live on then immortal with that which it has obtained—after it had entered into the human body from eternal heights but without pre-existence—from this human body.

Duns Scotus cannot imagine that the active intellect soaks up the entire human system of forces. He can only imagine that the human corporeality is something finished that in a certain independent way the vegetative and animal principles remain the entire life through, then it is taken off at death and that only the actually spiritual principle, the intellectus agens, goes over to immortality. Scotus cannot imagine like Thomas Aquinas that the whole body is interspersed with soul and spirit because to him the human mind had become something abstract, something that did no longer represent the spiritual world to him but that seemed to him to be gained only from consideration, from sense perception. He could no longer imagine that only in the universals, in the ideas that would be given which would prove reality. He became addicted to nominalism—as later his follower Ockham (William of O., ~1288-1347) did—to the view that ideas, as general concepts in the human being are only conceived from the sensory environment that it is, actually, only something that lives as names, as words in the human mind, I would like to say, for the sake of comfortable subsumption of existence. Briefly, he returned to nominalism.

This is a significant fact, because one realises that nominalism, as it appeared, for example, with Roscelin of Compiègne—to whom even the Trinity disintegrated because of his nominalism-, is only interrupted by the intensive work of thought of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas and some others. Then the European humanity falls again back into nominalism which is incapable to grasp that which it has as ideas as spiritual reality, as something that lives in the human being and in a way in the things. The ideas become from realities straight away again names, mere empty abstractions.

One realises which difficulties the European thinking had more and more if it put the question of knowledge. Since we human beings have to get knowledge from ideas—at least in the beginning of cognition. The big question has to arise repeatedly: how do the ideas provide reality? However, there is no possibility of an answer if the ideas appear only as names without reality. The ideas that were the last manifestations of a real spiritual world coming down from above to the ancient initiated Greeks became more and more abstract. We realise this process of abstracting, of equating the ideas with words increasing more and more if we pursue the development of western thinking.

Single personalities outstand later, as for example Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm L., 1646-1716) who does not get involved in the question, how does one recognise by ideas, because he is quite traditionally still in the possession of a certain spiritual view and leads everything back to individual monads which are actually spiritual. Leibniz towers above the others, while he still has the courage to imagine the world as spiritual. Yes, the world is spiritual to him; it consists of nothing but spiritual beings. However, I would like to say what was to former times differentiated spiritual individualities are to Leibniz more or less gradually differentiated spiritual points, monads. The spiritual individuality is confirmed, but it is confirmed only in the form of the monad, in the form of a spiritual punctiform being.

If we disregard Leibniz, we see, indeed, a strong struggle for certainty of the primal grounds of existence, but the incapacity everywhere at the same time to solve the nominalism problem. This becomes obvious with the thinker who is put rightly at the starting point of modern philosophy, Descartes (1596-1650) who lived in the beginning or in the first half of the seventeenth century. Everywhere in the history of philosophy one gets to know the real cornerstone of his philosophy with the proposition: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore, I am.—One can note something of Augustine's pursuit in this proposition. Since Augustine struggles from that doubt of which I have spoken in the first talk, while he says to himself, I can doubt everything, but, the fact of doubting exists, and, nevertheless, I live, while I doubt. I can doubt that sensory things are round me, I can doubt that God exists that clouds are there that stars are there, but if I doubt, the doubt is there. I cannot doubt that which goes forward in my own soul. One can grasp a sure starting point there.—Descartes resumes this thought, I think, therefore, I am.

Of course, with such things you expose yourself to serious misunderstandings if you are compelled to put something simple against something historically respected. It is still necessary. Descartes and many of his successors have in mind: if I have mental contents in my consciousness if I think, then one cannot deny the fact that I think; therefore, I am, therefore, my being is confirmed with my thinking. I am rooted as it were in the world being, while I have confirmed my being with my thinking.

The modern philosophy begins with it as intellectualism, as rationalism that completely wants to work from the thinking and is in this respect only the echo of scholasticism. One realises two things with Descartes. First, one has to make a simple objection to him: do I understand my being because I think? Every night sleep proves the opposite.—This is just that simple objection which one has to make: we know every morning when we wake, we have existed from the evening up to the morning, but we have not thought. Thus, the proposition, I think, therefore, I am, is simply disproved. One has to make this simple objection, which is like the egg of Columbus, to a respected proposition that has found many supporters.

However, the second question is, at which does Descartes aim philosophically? He aims no longer at vision, he aims no longer at receiving a world secret for the consciousness, and he is oriented in intellectualistic way. He asks, how do I attain certainty? How do I come out of doubt? How do I find out that things exist and that I myself exist?—It is no longer a material question, a question of the content-related result of world observation; it is a question of confirming knowledge.

This question arises from the nominalism of the scholastics, which only Albert and Thomas had overcome for some time, which reappears after them straight away. Thus, that presents itself to the people which they have in their souls and to which they can attribute a name only to find a point somewhere in the soul from which they can get no worldview but the certainty that not everything is illusion, that they look at the world and look at something real, that they look into the soul and look at reality.

In all that one can clearly perceive that to which I have pointed yesterday at the end, namely that the human individuality got to intellectualism, but did not yet feel the Christ problem in intellectualism. The Christ problem possibly appears to Augustine, while he still looks at the whole humanity. Christ dawns, I would like to say, in the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages; but He does not dawn with those who wanted to find Him with thinking only which is so necessary to the developing individuality, or with that which would arise to this thinking. This thinking appears in its original state in such a way that it emerges from the human soul that it rejects that which should just be the Christian or the core of the human being. It rejects the inner metamorphosis; it refuses to position itself to the cognitive life so that one would say to himself, yes, I think, I think about the world and myself at first. However, this thinking is not yet developed. This is the thinking after the Fall of Man. It has to tower above itself. It has to change; it has to raise itself into a higher sphere.

Actually, this necessity appeared only once clearly in a thinker, in Spinoza (Benedictus Baruch S., 1632-1677), the successor of Descartes. With good reason, Spinoza made a deep impression on persons like Herder and Goethe. Since Spinoza understands this intellectualism in such a way that the human being gets finally to truth—which exists for Spinoza in a kind of intuition, while he changes the intellectual, does not stop at that which is there in the everyday life and in the usual scientific life. Spinoza just says to himself, by the development of thinking this thinking fills up again with spiritual contents.—We got to know in Plotinism, the spiritual world arises again to the thinking as it were if this thinking strives for the spirit. The spirit fulfils as intuition our thinking again.

It is very interesting that just Spinoza says, we survey the world existence as it advances in spirit in its highest substance while we take up this spirit in the soul, while we rise with our thinking to intuition, while we are so intellectualistic on one side that we prove as one proves mathematically, but develop in proving at the same time and rise, so that the spirit can meet us.—

If we rise in such a way, we also understand from this viewpoint the historical development of that what is contained in the development of humanity. It is strange to find the following sentence with a Jew, Spinoza, the highest revelation of the divine substance is given in Christ.—In Christ the intuition has become theophany, the incarnation of God, hence, Christ's voice is God's voice and the way of salvation.—The Jew Spinoza thinks that the human being can develop from his intellectualism in such a way that the spirit is coming up to meet him. If he can then turn to the Mystery of Golgotha, the fulfilment with spirit becomes not only intuition, that is appearance of the spirit by thinking, but it changes intuition into theophany, into the appearance of God himself. The human being faces God spiritually. One would like to say, Spinoza did not withhold that what he had suddenly realised, because this quotation proves that. It fulfils like a mood what he found out from the development of humanity this way; it fulfils his Ethics.

Again, it devolves upon a receptive person. Therefore, one can realise that for somebody like Goethe who could read most certainly between the lines of the Ethics this book became principal. Nevertheless, these things do not want to be considered only in the abstract as one does normally in the history of philosophy; they want to be considered from the human viewpoint, and one must already look at that which shines from Spinozism into Goethe's soul. However, that which shines there only between the lines of Spinoza is something that did not become time dominating in the end but the incapacity to get beyond nominalism.

Nominalism develops at first in such a way that one would like to say, the human being becomes more and more entangled in the thought: I live in something that cannot grasp the outside world, in something that is not able to go out from me to delve into the outside world and to take up something of the nature of the outside world.—That is why this mood that one is so alone in himself that one cannot get beyond himself and does not receive anything from the outside world appears already with Locke (John L., 1612-1704) in the seventeenth century. He says, what we perceive as colours, as tones in the outside world is no longer anything that leads us to the reality of the outside world; it is only the effect of the outside world on our senses, it is something with which we are entangled also in our own subjectivity.—This is one side of the matter.

The other side of the matter is that with such spirits like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) nominalism becomes a quite pervasive worldview in the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. For he says, one has to do away with the superstition that one considers that as reality which is only a name. There is reality only if we look out at the sensory world. The senses only deliver realities in the empiric knowledge.—Beside these realities, those realities do no longer play a scientific role for whose sake Albert and Thomas had designed their epistemology. The spiritual world had vanished to Bacon and changed into something that cannot emerge with scientific certainty from the inside of the human being. Only religious contents become that what is a spiritual world, which one should not touch with knowledge. Against it, one should attain knowledge only from outer observation and experiments.

That continues this way up to Hume (David H., 1711-1776) in the eighteenth century to whom even the coherence of cause and effect is something that exists only in the human subjectivity that the human being adds only to the things habitually. One realises that nominalism, the heritage of scholasticism, presses like a nightmare on the human beings.

The most important sign of this development is that scholasticism with its astuteness stands there that it originates in a time when that which is accessible to the intellect should be separated from the truths of a spiritual world. The scholastic had the task on one side to look at the truths of a spiritual world, which the religious contents deliver of course, the revelation contents of the church. On the other side, he had to look at that which can arise by own strength from human knowledge. The viewpoint of the scholastics missed changing that border which the time evolution would simply have necessitated. When Thomas and Albert had to develop their philosophy, there was still no scientific worldview. Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, and Kepler had not yet worked; the intellectual view of the human being at the outer nature did not yet exist. There one did not have to deal with that which the human intellect can find from the depths of his soul, and which one gains from the outer sensory world. There one had to deal with that only which one has to find with the intellect from the depths of the soul in relation to the spiritual truths that the church had delivered, as they faced the human beings who could no longer rise by inner spiritual development to the real wisdoms who, however, realised them in the figure that the church had delivered, just simply as tradition, as contents of the scriptures and so on.

Does there not arise the question: how do the intellectual contents relate—that which Albert and Thomas had developed as epistemology—to the contents of the scientific worldview? One would like to say, this is an unconscious struggle up to the nineteenth century. There we realise something very strange. We look back at the thirteenth century and see Albert and Thomas teaching humanity about the borders of intellectual knowledge compared with faith, with the contents of revelation. They show one by one: the contents of revelation are there, but they arise only up to a certain part of the human intellectual knowledge, they remain beyond this intellectual knowledge, there remains a world riddle to this knowledge.—We can enumerate these world riddles: the incarnation, the existence of the spirit in the sacrament of the altar and so on—they are beyond the border of human cognition. For Albert and Thomas it is in such a way that the human being is on the one side, the border of knowledge surrounds him as it were and he cannot behold into the spiritual world. This arises to the thirteenth century.

Now we look at the nineteenth century. There we see a strange fact, too: during the seventies, at a famous meeting of naturalists in Leipzig, Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896) holds his impressive speech On the Borders of the Knowledge of Nature and shortly after about the Seven World Riddles. What has become there the question? (Steiner draws.) There is the human being, there is the border of knowledge; however, the material world is beyond this border, there are the atoms, there is that about which Du Bois-Reymond says, one does not know that which haunts as matter in space.—On this side of the border is that which develops in the human soul.

Even if—compared to the imposing work of scholasticism—it is a trifle which faces us there, nevertheless, it is the true counterpart: there the question of the riddles of the spiritual world, here the question of the riddles of the material world; here the border between the human being and the atoms, there the border between the human being and the angels and God. We have to look into this period if we want to recognise what scholasticism entailed. There Kant's philosophy emerges, influenced by Hume, which influences the philosophers even today. After Kant's philosophy had taken a backseat, the German philosophers took the slogan in the sixties, back to Kant! Since that time an incalculable Kant literature was published, also numerous independent Kantian thinkers like Johannes Volkelt (1848-1930) and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) appeared.

Of course, we can characterise Kant only sketchily today. We want only to point to the essentials. I believe that someone who studies Kant really can understand him in such a way, as I tried to understand him in my booklet Truth and Science. Kant faces no question of the contents of the worldview with might and main in the end of the sixties and in the beginning of the seventies years of the eighteenth century, not anything that would have appeared in certain figures, pictures, concepts, ideas of the things with him, but he faces the formal question of knowledge: how do we get certainty of something in the outside world, of any existence in the outside world?—The question of certainty of knowledge torments Kant more than any contents of knowledge. I mean, one should even feel this if one deals with Kant's Critique that these are not the contents of knowledge, but that Kant strives for a principle of the certainty of knowledge. Nevertheless, read the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and realise—after the classical chapter about space and time—how he deals with the categories, one would like to say how he enumerates them purely pedantically in order to get a certain completeness. Really, the Critique of Pure Reason does not proceed in such a way, as with somebody who writes from sentence to sentence with lifeblood.

To Kant the question is more important how the concepts relate to an outer reality than the contents of knowledge themselves. He pieces the contents together, so to speak, from everything that is delivered to him philosophically. He schematises, he systematises. However, everywhere the question appears, how does one get to such certainty, as it exists in mathematics? He gets to such certainty in a way which is strictly speaking nothing but a transformed and on top of that exceptionally concealed and disguised nominalism, which he expands also to the sensory forms, to space and time except the ideas, the universals. He says, that which we develop in our soul as contents of knowledge does not deal at all with something that we get out of the things. We put it on the things. We get out the whole form of our knowledge from ourselves. If we say, A is connected with B after the principle of causation, this principle of causation is only in us. We put it on A and B, on both contents of experience. We bring the causality into the things.

With other words, as paradox this sounds, nevertheless, one has to say of these paradoxes, Kant searches a principle of certainty while he generally denies that we take the contents of our knowledge from the things, and states that we take them from ourselves and put them into the things. That is in other words, and this is just the paradox: we have truth because we ourselves make it; we have truth in the subject because we ourselves produce it. We bring truth only into the things.

There you have the last consequence of nominalism. Scholasticism struggled with the universals, with the question: how does that live outdoors in the world what we take up in the ideas? It could not really solve the problem that would have become provisionally completely satisfactory. Kant says, well, the ideas are mere names, nomina. We form them only in ourselves, but we put them as names on the things; thereby they become reality. They may not be reality for long, but while I confront the things, I put the nomina into experience and make them realities, because experience must be in such a way as I dictate it with the nomina.

Kantianism is in a way the extreme point of nominalism, in a way the extreme decline of western philosophy, the complete bankruptcy of the human being concerning his pursuit of truth, the desperation of getting truth anyhow from the things. Hence, the dictates: truth can only exist if we bring it into the things. Kant destroyed any objectivity, any possibility of the human being to submerge in the reality of the things. Kant destroyed any possible knowledge, any possible pursuit of truth, because truth cannot exist if it is created only in the subject.

This is a consequence of scholasticism because it could not come into the other side where the other border arose which it had to overcome. Because the scientific age emerged and scholasticism did not carry out the volte-face to natural sciences, Kantianism appeared which took subjectivity as starting point and gave rise to the so-called postulates freedom, immortality, and the idea of God. We shall do the good, fulfil the categorical imperative, and then we must be able to do it. That is we must be free, but we are not able to do it, while we live here in the physical body. We reach perfection only, so that we can completely carry out the categorical imperative if we are beyond the body. That is why immortality must exist. However, we cannot yet realise that as human beings. A deity has to integrate that which is the contents of our action in the world—if we take pains of that what we have to do. That is why a deity must exist.

Three religious postulates about which one cannot know how they are rooted in reality are that which Kant saved after his own remark: I had to remove knowledge to get place for faith.—Kant does not get place for religious contents in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, for traditional religious contents, but for abstract religious contents that just originate in the individual human being who dictates truth, that is appearance.

With it, Kant becomes the executor of nominalism. He becomes the philosopher who denies the human being everything that this human being could have to submerge in any reality. Hence, Fichte, Schelling, and then Hegel immediately reacted against Kant. Thus, Fichte wanted to get everything that Kant had determined as an illusory world or as a world of appearances from the real creative ego that he imagined, however, to be rooted in the being of the world. Fichte was urged to strive for a more intensive, to a more and more mystic experience of the soul to get beyond Kantianism. He could not believe at all that Kant meant that which is included in his Critiques. In the beginning, with a certain philosophical naivety he believed that he drew the last consequence of Kant's philosophy. If one did not draw these last consequences, Fichte thought, one would have to believe that the strangest chance would have pieced this philosophy together but not a humanely thinking head.

All that is beyond that which approaches with the emerging natural sciences that appear like a reaction just in the middle of the nineteenth century that strictly speaking understand nothing of philosophy, which degenerated, hence, with many thinkers into crass materialism. Thus, we realise how philosophy develops in the last third of the nineteenth century. We see this philosophical pursuit completely arriving at nullity, and then we realise how—from everything possible that one attaches to Kantianism and the like—one attempts to understand the essentials of the world. The Goethean worldview which would have been so significant if one had grasped it, got completely lost, actually, as a worldview of the nineteenth century, with the exception of those spirits who followed Schelling, Hegel and Fichte. Since in this Goethean worldview the beginning of that is contained which must originate from Thomism, only with the volte-face to natural sciences.

Thomas could state only in the abstract that the mental-spiritual really works into the last activities of the human organs. In abstract form, Thomas Aquinas expressed that everything that lives in the human body is directed by the mental and must be recognised by the mental. Goethe started with the volte-face and made the first ground with his Theory of Colours, which people do not at all understand, and with his “morphology.” However, the complete fulfilment of Goetheanism is given only if one has spiritual science that clarifies the scientific facts by its own efforts.

Some weeks ago, I tried here to explain how our spiritual science could be a corrective of natural sciences, we say, concerning the function of the heart. The mechanical-materialist view considers the heart as a pump that pushes the blood through the human body. However, it is quite the contrary. The blood circulation is something living—embryology can prove that precisely -, and it is set in motion by the internally moved blood. The heart takes the blood activity into the entire human individuality. The activity of the heart is a result of the blood activity, not vice versa. Thus, one can show concerning the single organs of the body how the comprehension of the human being as a spiritual being only explains his material existence. One can do something real in a way that Thomism had in mind in abstract form that said there, the spiritual-mental penetrates everything bodily. This becomes concrete knowledge. The Thomistic philosophy lives on as spiritual science in our present.

I would like to insert a personal experience here. When I spoke in the Viennese Goethe Association about the topic Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics, there was a very sophisticated Cistercian among the listeners. I explained how one has to imagine Goethe's idea of art, and this Cistercian, Father Wilhelm Neumann (1837-1919), professor at the theological faculty of the Vienna University, said something strange, you can find the origins of your talk already with Thomas Aquinas.—Nevertheless, it was interesting to me to hear from him who was well versed in Thomism that he felt that in Thomism is a kind of origin of that which I had said about the consequence of the Goethean worldview concerning aesthetics.

One has already to say, the things, considered according to truth, appear absolutely different than they present themselves to the history of philosophy under the influence of an unconscious nominalistic worldview which goes back largely to Kant and the modern physiology. Thus, you would find many a thing if you referred to spiritual science. Read in my book The Riddles of the Soul which appeared some years ago how I tried there to divide the human being on the basis of thirty-year studies into three systems; how one system of the human physical body is associated with sense-perception and thinking, how the rhythmical system, breathing and heart activity, is associated with feeling, how metabolism is associated with the will. Everywhere I attempted to find the spiritual-mental in its creating in the physical. That is, I took the volte-face to natural sciences seriously. One tries to penetrate into the area of natural existence after the age of natural sciences, as before the age of scholasticism—we have realised it with the Areopagite and with Plotinus—one penetrated from the human knowledge into the spiritual area. One takes the Christ principle seriously as one would have taken the Christ principle seriously if one had said, the human thinking can change, so that it can penetrate if it casts off the original sin of the limits of knowledge and if it rises up by thinking free of sensuousness to the spiritual world—after the volte-face. What manifests as nature can be penetrated as the veil of physical existence. One penetrates beyond the limits of knowledge which a dualism assumed, as well as the scholastics drew the line at the other side. One penetrates into this material world and discovers that it is, actually, the spiritual one that behind the veil of nature no material atoms are in truth but spiritual beings.

This shows how one thinks progressively about a further development of Thomism. Look for the most important psychological thoughts of Albert and Thomas in their abstractness. However, they did not penetrate into the human-bodily, so that they said how the mind or the soul work on the organs, but they already pointed to the fact that one has to imagine the whole human body as the result of the spiritual-mental.

The continuation of this thought is the work to pursue the spiritual-mental down to the details of the bodily. Neither philosophy nor natural sciences do this, only spiritual science will do it, which does not shy away from applying the great thoughts like those of High Scholasticism to the views of nature of our time. However, for that an engagement with Kantianism was inevitable if the thing should scientifically persist.

I tried this engagement with Kantianism first in my writings Truth and Science and Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview and, in the end, in my Philosophy of Freedom. Only quite briefly, I would like to defer to the basic idea of these books.

These writings take their starting point from the fact that one cannot directly find truth in the world of sense perception. One realises in a way in which nominalism takes hold in the human soul how it can accept the wrong consequence of Kantianism, but how Kant did not realise that which was taken seriously in these books. This is that a consideration of the world of perception leads—if one does it quite objectively and thoroughly—to the conclusion: the world of perception is not a whole, it is something that we make a reality.

In what way did the difficulty of nominalism originate? Where did the whole Kantianism originate? Because one takes the world of perception, and then the soul life puts the world of ideas upon it. Now one has the view, as if this world of ideas should depict the outer perception. However, the world of ideas is inside. What does this inner world of ideas deal with that which is there outdoors? Kant could answer this question only, while he said, so we just put the world of perception on the world of ideas, so we get truth.

The thing is not in such a way. The thing is that—if we look at perception impartially—it is not complete, everywhere it is not concluded. I tried to prove this strictly at first in my book Truth and Science, then in my book Philosophy of Freedom. The perception is everywhere in such a way that it appears as something incomplete. While we are born in the world, we split the world. The thing is that we have the world contents here (Steiner draws). While we place ourselves as human beings in the world, we separate the world contents into a world of perception that appears to us from the outside and into the world of ideas that appears to us inside of our soul. Someone who regards this separation as an absolute one who simply says, there is the world, there I am cannot get over with his world of ideas to the world of perception. However, the case is this: I look at the world of perception; everywhere it is not complete in itself, something is absent everywhere. However, I myself have come with my whole being from the world to which also the world of perception belongs. There I look into myself: what I see by myself is just that which the world of perception does not have. I have to unite that which separated in two parts by my own existence. I create reality.

Because I am born, appearance comes into being while that which is one separates into perception and the world of ideas. Because I live, I bring together two currents of reality. In my cognitive experience, I work the way up into reality. I would never have got to a consciousness if I had not split off the world of ideas from the world of perception while entering into the world. However, I would never find the bridge to the world if I did not combine the world of ideas that I have split off again with that which is not reality without the world of ideas.

Kant searches reality only in the outer perception and does not guess that the other half of reality is just in that which we carry in ourselves. We have taken that which we carry as world of ideas in ourselves only from the outer reality. Now we have solved the problem of nominalism, because we do not put space, time, and ideas, which would be mere names, upon the outer perception, but now we give back the perception what we had taken from it when we entered into the sensory existence.

Thus, we have the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world at first in a purely philosophical form. Someone is just overcoming Kantianism who takes up this basic idea of my Philosophy of Freedom, which the title of the writing Truth and Science already expresses: the fact that real science combines perception and the world of ideas and regards this combining as a real process. However, he is just coping with the problem which nominalism had produced which faced the separation into perception and the world of ideas powerlessly.

One approaches this problem of individuality in the ethical area. Therefore, my Philosophy of Freedom became a philosophy of reality. While cognition is not only a formal act but also a process of reality, the moral action presents itself as an outflow of that which the individual experiences as intuition by moral imagination. The ethical individualism originates this way as I have shown in the second part of my Philosophy of Freedom. This individualism is based on the Christ impulse, even if I have not explicitly said that in my Philosophy of Freedom. It is based on that which the human being gains to himself as freedom while he changes the usual thinking into that which I have called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Freedom which rises to the spiritual world and gets out the impulses of moral actions while something that is bound, otherwise, to the human physical body, the impulse of love, is spiritualised. While the moral ideals are borrowed from the spiritual world by moral imagination, they become the force of spiritual love.

Hence, the Philosophy of Freedom had to counter Kant's philistine principle—“Duty! You elated name, you do not have anything of flattery with yourself but strict submission” -, with the transformed ego which develops up into the sphere of spirituality and starts there loving virtue, and, therefore, practises virtue because it loves it out of individuality.

Thus, that which remained mere religious contents to Kant made itself out to be real world contents. Since to Kant knowledge is something formal, something real to the Philosophy of Freedom. A real process goes forward. Hence, the higher morality is also tied together with it to a reality, which philosophers of values like Windelband (Wilhelm, 1845-1915) and Rickert (Heinrich R., 1863-1936) do not at all reach. Since they do not find out for themselves how that which is morally valuable is rooted in the world. Of course, those people who do not regard the process of cognition as a real process do not get to rooting morality in the world of reality; they generally get to no philosophy of reality.

From the philosophical development of western philosophy, spiritual science was got out, actually. Today I attempted to show that that Cistercian father heard not quite inaccurately that really the attempt is taken to put the realistic elements of High Scholasticism with spiritual science in our scientific age, how one was serious about the change of the human soul, about the fulfilment of the human soul with the Christ impulse also in the intellectual life. Knowledge is made a real factor in world evolution that takes place only on the scene of the human consciousness as I have explained in my book Goethe's Worldview. However, these events in the world further the world and us within the world at the same time.

There the problem of knowledge takes on another form. That which we experience changes spiritual-mentally in ourselves into a real development factor. There we are that which arises from knowledge. As magnetism works on the arrangement of filings of iron, that works in us what is reflected in us as knowledge. At the same time, it works as our design principle, then we recognise the immortal, the everlasting in ourselves, and we do no longer raise the issue of knowledge in only formal way.

The issue of knowledge was always raised referring to Kant in such a way that one said to himself, how does the human being get around to regarding the inner world as an image of the outer world?—However, cognition is not at all there at first to create images of the outer world but to develop us, and it is an ancillary process that we depict the outside world. We let that flow together in the outside world in an ancillary process, which we have split off at our birth. It is exactly the same way with the modern issue of knowledge, as if anybody has wheat and investigates its nutritional effect if he wants to investigate the growth principle of wheat. Indeed, one may become a food chemist, but food chemistry does not recognise that which is working from the ear through the root, the stalk, and the leaves to the blossom and fruit. It explains something only that is added to the normal development of the wheat plant.

Thus, there is a developmental current of spiritual life in us, which is concerned with our being to some extent as the plant develops from the root through the stalk and leaves to the blossom and the fruit, and from there again to the seed and the root. As that which we eat should not play any role with the explanation of the plant growth, the question of the epistemological value of that which lives in us as a developmental impulse must also not be the basis of a theory of knowledge, but it has to be clear that knowledge is a side effect of the work of the ideal in our human nature. There we get to the real of that which is ideal. It works in us. The wrong nominalism, Kantianism, originated only because one put the question of knowledge in such a way as food chemistry would put the question of the nature of wheat.

Hence, one may say, not before we find out for ourselves what Thomism can be for the present, we see it originating in spiritual science in its figure for the twentieth century, and then it is back again as spiritual science. Then light is thrown on the question: how does this appear if now one comes and says, compared with the present philosophy one has to go back to Thomas Aquinas, and to study him, at most with some critical explanations and something else that he wrote in the thirteenth century?—There we realise, what it means, to project our thoughts in honest and frank way in the development current that takes High Scholasticism as starting point, and what it means to carry back our mind to this thirteenth century surveying the entire European development since the thirteenth century. This resulted from the encyclical Aeterni patris of 1879 that asks the Catholic clerics to regard the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. I do not want to discuss the question here: where is Thomism? Since one would have to discuss the question: do I look best at the rose that I face there if I disregard the blossom and dig into the earth to look at the roots and check as to whether something has already originated from the root.

Now, you yourselves can imagine all that. We experience what asserts itself among us as a renewal of that Thomism, as it existed in the thirteenth century, beside that which wants to take part honestly in the development of the European West. We may ask on the other hand, where does Thomism live in the present? You need only to put the question: how did Thomas Aquinas himself behave to the revelation contents? He tried to get a relationship to them. We have the necessity to get a relationship to the contents of physical manifestation. We cannot stop at dogmatics. One has to overcome the “dogma of experience” as on the other side one has to overcome the dogma of revelation. There we have really to make recourse to the world of ideas that receives the transforming Christ principle to find again our world of ideas, the spiritual world with Christ in us. Should the world of ideas remain separated? Should the world of ideas not participate in redemption?

In the thirteenth century, one could not yet find the Christian principle of redemption in the world of ideas; therefore, one set it against the world of revelation. This must become the progress of humanity for the future that not only for the outer world the redemption principle is found, but also for the human intellect. The unreleased human reason only could not rise in the spiritual world. The released human intellect that has the real relationship to Christ penetrates into the spiritual world.

From this viewpoint, Christianity of the twentieth century is penetrating into the spiritual world, so that it deeply penetrates into the thinking, into the soul life. This is no pantheism, this is Christianity taken seriously. Perhaps one may learn just from this consideration of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas—even if it got lost in abstract areas—that spiritual science takes the problems of the West seriously that it always wants to stand on the ground of the present.

I know how many false things arise now. I could also imagine that now again one says, yes, he has often changed his skin; he turns to Thomism now because the things become risky.—Indeed, one called the priests of certain confessions snakes in ancient times. Snakes slough their skins. As well as the opponents understand skinning today, it is indeed a lie. Since I have shown today how you can find the philosophically conscientious groundwork of spiritual science in my first writings.

Now I may point to two facts. In 1908, I held a talk about the philosophical development of the West in Stuttgart. In this talk, I did not feel compelled to point to the fact that possibly my discussion of Thomism displeased the Catholic clerics, because I did justice to Thomism, I emphasised its merits even with much clearer words than the Neo-Thomists, Kleutgen or others did. Hence, I did not find out for myself in those days that my praise of Thomism could be taken amiss by the Catholic clergy, and I said, if one speaks of scholasticism disparagingly, one is not branded heretical by the so-called free spirits. However, if one speaks, objectively about that, one is easily misunderstood because one often rests philosophically upon a misunderstood Thomism within the positive and just the most intolerant church movement. I did not fear at all to be attacked because of my praise of Thomism by the Catholic clergy, but by the so-called free spirits. It happened different, and people will say, we are the first whom he did a mischief.

During these days, I have also pointed to my books that I wrote around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among them also to a book that I dedicated to Ernst Haeckel, Worldviews and Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth Century. There I pointed to the fact that the modern thinking is not astute and logical; and that Neo-Scholasticism tried to rest upon the strictly logical of Thomism. I wrote: “These thinkers could really move in the world of ideas without imagining this world in unsubtle sensory-bodily form.” I spoke about the scholastics this way, and then I still spoke about the Catholic thinkers who had taken the study of scholasticism again: “The Catholic thinkers who try today to renew this art of thinking are absolutely worth to be considered in this respect. It will always have validity what one of them, the Jesuit father Joseph Kleutgen (1811-1889), says in his book An Apology of the Philosophy of the Past: “Two sentences form the basis of the different epistemologies which we have just repeated: the first one, that our reason ...” and so on. You realise, if the Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen did something meritorious, I acknowledged it in my book. However, this had the result that one said in those days that I myself was a disguised Jesuit. At that time, I was a disguised Jesuit; now you read in numerous writings, I am a Jew.

I only wanted to mention this at the end. In any case, I do not believe that anybody can draw the conclusion from this consideration, that I have belittled Thomism.

These considerations should show that the High Scholasticism of the thirteenth century was a climax of European intellectual development, and that the present time has reason to go into it. We can learn very much for deepening our thought life to overcome any nominalism, so that we find Christianity again by Christianising the ideas that penetrate into the spiritual being from which the human being must have originated, because only the consciousness of his spiritual origin can give him satisfaction.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I should like in these three days to speak on a subject which is generally looked at from a more formal angle, as if the attitude of the philosophic view of life to Christianity had been to a certain extent dictated by the deep philosophic movement of the Middle Ages. As this side of the question has lately had a kind of revival through Pope Leo XIII's Ordinance to his clergy to make “Thomism” the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, our present subject has a certain significance. But I do not wish to treat the subject which crystallized as mediaeval philosophy round the personalities of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, only from this formal side; rather I wish in the course of these days to reveal the deeper historical background out of which this philosophic movement, much underrated to-day, has arisen. We can say: Thomas Aquinas tries in the thirteenth century quite clearly to grasp the problem of the total human knowledge of philosophies, and in a way which we have to admit is difficult for us to follow, for conditions of thought are attached to it which people to-day scarcely fulfil, even if they are philosophers. One must be able to put oneself completely into the manner of thought of Thomas Aquinas, his predecessors and successors; one must know how to take their conceptions, and how their conceptions lived in the souls of those men of the Middle Ages, of which the history of philosophy tells only rather superficially.

If we look now at the central point of this study, at Thomas Aquinas, we would say: in him we have a personality which in face of the main current of mediaeval Christian philosophy really disappears as a personality; one which, we might almost say, is only the co-efficient or exponent of the current of world philosophy, and finds expression as a personality only through a certain universality. So that, when we speak of Thomism, we can focus our attention on something quite exceptionally impersonal, on something which is revealed only through the personality of Thomas Aquinas. On the other hand we see at once that we must put into the forefront of our inquiry a full and complete personality, and all that term includes, when we consider the individual who was the immediate and chief predecessor of Thomism, namely Augustine. With him everything was personal, with Thomas Aquinas everything was really impersonal. In Augustine we have to deal with a fighting man, in Thomas

Aquinas, with a mediaeval Church defining its attitude to heaven and earth, to men, to history, etc., a Church which, we might say, expressed itself as a Church, within certain limitations it is true, through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

A significant event separates the two, and unless one takes this event into consideration, it is not possible to define the mutual relationship of these mediaeval individuals. The event to which I refer is the declaration of heresy by the Emperor Justinian against Origen. The whole direction of Augustine's view of the world becomes clear only when we keep in mind the whole historical background from which Augustine emerged. This historical background, however, becomes in reality, completely changed from the fact that the powerful influence—it was actually a powerful influence in spite of much that has been said in the history of philosophy—that this powerful influence on the Western world which had spread from the Schools of Philosophy in Athens, ceased to exist. It persisted into the sixth century, and then ebbed, but so that something remains which in fact, in the subsequent philosophical stream of the West, is quite different from that which Augustine knew in his lifetime. I shall have to ask you to take note that to-day's address is more in the nature of an introduction, that we shall deal tomorrow with the real nature of Thomism, and that on the third day I shall make clear my object in bringing before you all I have to say in these three days.

For you see, ladies and gentlemen, if you will excuse the personal reference, I am in rather a special position with regard to Christian mediaeval philosophy, that is, to Thomism. I have often mentioned, even in public addresses, what happened to me once when I had put before a working-class audience what I must look upon as the true course of Western history. The result was that though there were a good many pupils in agreement with me, the leaders of the proletarian movement at the turn of the century hit on the idea that I was not presenting true Marxism. And although one could assert that the world in future must after all recognize something like freedom in teaching, I was told at the final meeting: This party recognizes no freedom in teaching, only a rational compulsion! And my activity as a teacher, in spite of the fact that at the time a large number of students from the proletariat had been attracted, was forced to a sudden and untimely end.

I might say I had the same experience in other places with what I wanted to say, now about nineteen or twenty years ago, concerning Thomism and everything that belonged to mediaeval philosophy. It was of course just the time when what we are accustomed to call “Monism” reached its height, round the year 1900. At this time there was founded in Germany the “Giordano-Bruno-Bund” apparently to encourage a free, independent view of life, but au fond really only to encourage the materialistic side of Monism. Now, ladies and gentlemen, because it was impossible for me at the time to take part in all that empty phrase-making which went out into the world as Monism, I gave an address on Thomism in the Berlin “Giordano-Bruno-Bund.”

In this address I sought to prove that a real and spiritual Monism had been given in Thomism, that this spiritual Monism, moreover, had been given in such a way that it reveals itself through the most accurate thought imaginable, of which more recent philosophy, under the influence of Kant and Protestantism has at bottom not the least idea, and no longer the capacity to achieve it.

And so I fell foul also of Monism. It is, in point of fact, extraordinarily difficult to-day to speak of these things in such a way that one's word seems to be based sincerely on the matter itself and not to be in the service of some Party or other. I want in these three days to try once more to speak thus impartially of the matters I have indicated.

The personality of Augustine fits into the fourth and fifth centuries, as I said before, as a fighting personality in the fullest sense. His method of fighting is what sinks deep into the soul if we can understand in detail the particular nature of this fight. There are two problems which faced Augustine's soul with an intensity of which we, with our pallid problems of knowledge and of the soul, have really no idea.

The first problem can be put thus: Augustine strives to find the nature of what man can recognize as truth, supporting him, filling his soul. The second problem is this: How can you explain the presence of evil in a world which after all has no sense unless its purpose at least has something to do with good? How can you explain the pricks of evil in human nature which never cease—according to Augustine's view—the voice of evil which is never silent, even if a man strives honestly and uprightly after the good?

I do not believe that we can get near to Augustine if we take these two questions in the sense in which the average man of our time, even if he were a philosopher, would be apt to take them. You must look for the special shade of meaning these questions had for a man of the fourth and fifth centuries. Augustine lived, after all, at first a life of inner commotion, not to say a dissipated life; but always these two questions ran up before him. Personally he is placed in a dilemma. His father is a Pagan, his mother a pious Christian; and she takes the utmost pains to win him for Christianity. At first the son can be moved only to a certain seriousness, and this is directed towards Manichaeism. We shall look later at this view of life, which early came into Augustine's range of vision, as he changed from a somewhat irregular way of living to a full seriousness of life. Then—after some years—he felt himself more and more out of sympathy with Manichaeism, and fell under the sway of a certain Scepticism, not driven by the urge of his soul or some other high reason, but because the whole philosophical life of the time led him that way. This Scepticism was evolved at a certain time from Greek philosophy, and remained to the day of Augustine. Now, however, the influence of Scepticism grew ever less and less, and was for Augustine, as it were, only a link with Greek philosophy. And this Scepticism led to something which without doubt exercised for a time a quite unusually deep influence on his subjectivity, and the whole attitude of his soul. It led him into a Neoplatonism of a different kind from what in the history of philosophy is generally called Neoplatonism. Augustine got more out of this Neoplatonism than one usually thinks. The whole personality and the whole struggle of Augustine can be understood only when one understands how much of the neoplatonic philosophy had entered into his soul; and if we study objectively the development of Augustine, we find that the break which occurred in going over from Manichaeism to Platonism was hardly as violent in the transition from Neoplatonism to Christianity. For one can really say: in a certain sense Augustine remained a Neoplatonist; to the extent he became one at all he remained one. But he could become a Neoplatonist only up to a point. For that reason, his destiny led him to become acquainted with the phenomenon of Christ-Jesus. And this is really not a big jump but a natural course of development in Augustine from Neoplatonism to Christianity. How this Christianity lives in Augustine—yes—how it lives in Augustine we cannot judge unless we look first at Manichaeism, a remarkable formula for overcoming the old heathenism at the same time as the Old Testament and Judaism.

Manichaeism was already at the time when Augustine was growing up a world-current of thought which had spread throughout North Africa, where, you must remember, Augustine spent his youth, and in which many people of Western Europe had been caught up. Founded in about the third century in Asia by Mani, a Persian, Manichaeism had extraordinarily little effect historically on the subsequent world. To define this Manichaeism, we must say this: there is more importance in the general attitude of this view of life than in what one can literally describe as its contents. Above all, the remarkable thing about it is that the division of human experience into a spiritual side and a material side had no meaning for it. The words or ideas “spirit” and “matter” mean nothing to it. Manichaeism sees as “spiritual” what appears to the senses as material and when it speaks of the spiritual it does not rise above what the senses know as matter. It is true to say of Manichaeism—much more emphatically true than we with our world grown so abstract and intellectual usually think,—that it actually sees spiritual phenomena, spiritual facts in the stars and their courses, and that it sees at the same time in the mystery of the sun that which is manifest to us on earth as something spiritual. It conveys no meaning for Manichaeism to speak of either matter or spirit, for in it what is spiritual has its material manifestation and what is material is to it spiritual. Therefore, Manichaeism quite naturally speaks of astronomical things and world phenomena in the same way as it would speak of moral phenomena or happenings within the development of human beings. And thus this apposition of “Light” and “Darkness” which Manichaeism, imitating something from ancient Persia, embodies in its philosophy, is to it at the same time something completely and obviously spiritual. And it is also something obvious that this same Manichaeism still speaks of what apparently moves as sun in the heavens as something which has to do with the moral entities and moral impulses in the development of mankind; and that it speaks of the relation of this moral-physical sun in the heavens, to the Signs of the Zodiac as to the twelve beings through which the original being, the original source of light delegates its activities. But there is something more about this Manichaeism. It looks upon man and man does not yet appear to its eyes as what we to-day see in man. To us man appears as a kind of climax of creation on earth. Whether we think more or less in material or spiritual terms, man appears to man now as the crown of creation on earth, the kingdom of man as the highest kingdom or at least as the crown of the animal kingdom. Manichaeism cannot agree to this.

The thing which had walked the earth as man and in its time was still walking it, is to it only a pitiful remnant of that being which ought to have become man through the divine essence of light. Man should have become something entirely different from the man now walking the earth. The being now walking on earth as man was created through original man losing the fight against the demons of darkness, this original man who had been created by the power of light as an ally in its fight against the demons of darkness, but who had been transplanted into the sun by benevolent powers and had thus been taken up by the kingdom of light itself. But the demons have managed nevertheless to tear off as it were a part of this original man from the real man who escaped into the sun and to form the earthly race of man out of it, the earthly race which thus walks about on earth as a weaker edition of that which could not live here, for it had to be removed into the sun during the great struggle of spirits. In order to lead back man, who in this way appeared as a weaker edition on earth, to his original destination the Christ-being then appeared and through its activity the demonic influences are to be removed from the earth.

I know very well, that all that part of this view of life which is still capable of being put into modern language, can hardly be intelligible; for the whole of it comes from substrata of the soul's experience which differ vastly from the present ones. But the important part which is interesting us to-day is what I have already emphasized. For however fantastic it may appear, this part I have been telling you about the continuation of the development on earth in the eyes of the Manichaeans—Manichaeism did not represent it at all as something only to be viewed in the spirit, but as a phenomenon which we would to-day call material, unfolding itself to our physical eyes as something at the same time spiritual.

That was the first powerful influence on Augustine, and the problems connected with the personality of Augustine can really only be solved if one bears in mind the strong influence of this Manichaeism, with its principle of the spiritual-material. We must ask ourselves: What was the reason for Augustine's dissatisfaction with Manichaeism? It was not based on what one might call its mystical content as I have just described it to you, but his dissatisfaction arose from the whole attitude of Manichaeism. At first Augustine was attracted, in a sense sympathetically moved by the physical self-evidence, by the pictorial quality with which this philosophy was presented to him; but then something in him appeared which refused to be satisfied with this very quality which regarded matter spiritually and the spiritual materially. And one can come to the right conclusion about this only if one faces the real truth which often has been advanced as a formal view; namely, if one considers that Augustine was a man who was fundamentally more akin to the men of the Middle Ages and even perhaps to the men of modern times than he could possibly be to those men who through their soul-mood were the natural inheritors of Manichaeism. Augustine has already something of what I would call the revival of spiritual life. In other places I have often pointed, even in public lectures, to what I mean. These present times are intellectual and inclined to the abstract, and so we always see in the history of any century the influences at work from the preceding century, and so on. In the case of an individual it is of course pure nonsense to say: something which happens in, let us say, his eighteenth year is only the consequence of something else which happened in his thirteenth or fourteenth year. In between lies something which springs from the deepest depths of human nature, which is not just the consequence of something that has gone before in the sense in which one is justified in speaking of cause and effect, but is rather something which is inherent in the nature of man, and takes place in human life, namely, adolescence. And such a gap has to be recognized also at other times in human evolution—in individual human evolution, when something struggles from the depths to the surface; so that we cannot say: what happens is only the direct uninterrupted consequence of whatever has preceded it. And such gaps occur also in the case of all humanity. We have to assume that before such a gap Manichaeism occurred, and after such a gap occurred the soul-attitude, the soul-conception in which Augustine found himself. Augustine could simply not come to terms with his soul unless he rose above what a Manichaean called material-spiritual to something purely spiritual, something built and seen in the spiritual sphere; Augustine had to rise to something much more free of the senses. So he had to turn away from the pictorial, the evidential philosophy of Manichaeism. This was the first thing that developed so intensively in his soul. We read it in his words: the heaviest and almost the only reason for error which I could not avoid was that I had to imagine a bodily substance when I wanted to think of God.

In this way he refers to the time when Manichaeism with its material spirituality and its spiritual materiality lived in his soul; he refers to it in these words and characterizes this period of his life thus as an error. He needed something to look up to, something which was fundamental to human nature. He needed something which, unlike the Manichaean principles, does not look upon the physical universe as spiritual-material. As everything with him struggled with intensive and overpowering earnestness to the surface of his soul, so also this saying: “I asked the earth and it said: `I am not it,' and all things on it confessed the same.”

What does Augustine ask? He asks what the divine really is, and he asks the earth and it says to him, “I am not it.” Manichaeism would have: “I am it as earth, in so far as the divine expresses itself through earthly works.” And again Augustine says: “I asked the sea and the abysses and whatever living thing they cover:” “We are not your God, seek above us.” “I asked the sighing winds,” and the whole nebula with all its inhabitants said: “The philosophers who seek the nature of things in us were mistaken, for we are not God.”

(Thus not the sea and not the nebula, nothing in fact which can be observed through the senses.)

“I asked the sun, the moon, and the stars.” They said: “We are not God whom thou seekest.”

Thus he gropes his way out of Manichaeism, precisely out of that part of it which must be called its most significant part, at least in this connection. Augustine gropes after something spiritual which is free of all sensuousness. And in this he finds himself exactly in that era of human soul-development in which the soul had to free itself from the contemplation of matter as something spiritual and of the spiritual as something material. We entirely misunderstand Greek philosophy in reference to this. And because I tried for once to describe Greek philosophy as it really was, the beginning of my Riddles of Philosophy seems so difficult to understand. When the Greeks speak of ideas, of conceptions, when Plato speaks of them, people now believe that Plato or the Greeks mean the same by ideas as we do. This is not so, for the Greeks spoke of ideas as something which they observed in the outer world like colours or sounds. That part of Manichaeism which we find slightly changed, with—let us say—an oriental tinge, that is already present in the whole Greek view of life. The Greek sees his idea just as he sees colours. And he still possesses that material-spiritual, spiritual-material life of the soul, which does not rise to what we know as spiritual life. Whatever we may call it, a mere abstraction or the true content of our soul, we need not decide at the present moment; the Greek does not yet reckon with what we call a life of the soul free from matter; he does not distinguish, as we do, between thinking and outward use of the senses. The whole Platonic philosophy ought to be seen in this light to be fully understood.

We can now say, that Manichaeism is nothing but a post-Christian variation (with an oriental tinge) of something already existing among the Greeks. Neither do we understand that wonderful genius who closes the circle of Greek philosophy, Aristotle, unless we know that whenever he speaks of concepts, he still keeps within the meaning of an experienced tradition which regarded concepts as belonging to the outer world of the senses as well as perceptions, though he is already getting close to the border of understanding abstract thought free from all evidence of the senses. Through the point of view to which men's souls had attained during his era, through actual events happening within the souls of men in whose rank Augustine was a distinctive, prominent personality, Augustine was forced not just only to experience within his soul, as the Greeks had done, but he was forced to rise to thoughts free from sense-perceptions, to thoughts which still kept their meaning even if they were not dealing with earth, air and sea, with stars, sun and moon; thoughts which had a content beyond the sense of vision.

And now only philosophers and philosophies spoke to him which spoke of what they had to say from an entirely different point of view, that is, from the super-spiritual one just explained. Small wonder, then, that these souls striving in a vague way for something not yet in existence and trying with their minds to seize what was there, could only find something they could not absorb; small wonder that these souls sought refuge in scepticism. On the other hand, the feeling of standing on a sound basis of truth and the desire to get an answer to the question of the origin of Evil was so strong in Augustine, that equally powerful in his soul lived that philosophy which stands under the name of Neoplatonism at the end of Greek philosophic development. This is focused in Plotinus and reveals to us historically what neither the Dialogues of Plato and still less Aristotelian philosophy can reveal, namely, the course of the whole life of the soul when it looks for a greater intensiveness and a reaching beyond the normal. Plotinus is like a last straggler of a type which followed quite different paths to knowledge, to the inner life of the soul, from those which were gradually understood later. Plotinus must appear fantastic to present-day men. To those who have absorbed something of mediaeval scholasticism Plotinus must appear as a terrible fanatic, indeed, as a dangerous one.

I have noticed this repeatedly. My old friend Vincenz Knauer, the Benedictine monk, who wrote a history of philosophy and who has also written a book about the chief problems of philosophy from Thales to Hamerling was, I may well say, good-nature incarnate. This man never let himself go except when he had to deal with Neoplatonism, in particular with Plotinus, and he would then get quite angry and would denounce Plotinus terribly as a dangerous fanatic. And Brentano, that intelligent Aristotelian and Empiric, Franz Brentano, who also carried mediaeval philosophy deeply and intensely in his soul, wrote a little book: Philosophies that Create a Stir, and there he fumes about Plotinus in the same way, for Plotinus the dangerous fanatic is the philosopher, the man who in his opinion “created a stir” at the close of the ancient Greek period. To understand him is really extraordinarily difficult for the modern philosopher.

Concerning this philosopher of the third century we have next to say this: What we experience as the content of our understanding, of our reason, what we know as the sum of our concepts about the world is entirely different for him. I might say, if I may express myself clearly: we understand the world through sense-observations which through abstraction we bring to concepts, and end there. We have the concepts as inner psychic experience and if we are average men of to-day we are more or less conscious that we have abstractions, something we have sucked as it were out of things. The important thing is that we end there; we pay attention to the experiences of the senses and stop at the point where we make the total of our concepts, of our ideas. It was not so for Plotinus. For him this whole world of sense-experience scarcely existed. But that which meant something to him, of which he spoke as we speak of plants and minerals and animals and physical men, was something which he saw lying above concepts; it was a spiritual world and this spiritual world had for him a nether boundary, namely, the concepts. While we get our concepts by going to concrete things, make them into abstractions and concepts and say: concepts are the putting-together, the extractions of ideal nature from the observation of the senses, Plotinus said—and he paid little heed to the observation of the senses: “We, as men, live in a spiritual world, and what this spiritual world reveals to us finally, what we see as its nether boundary, are concepts.” For us the world of the senses lies below concepts: for Plotinus there is above concepts a spiritual world, the intellectual world, the world really of the kingdom of the spirit. I might use the following image: let us suppose we were submerged in the sea, and looking upward to the surface of the water, we saw nothing but this surface, nothing above the surface, then this surface would be the upper boundary. Suppose we lived in the sea, we might perhaps have in our soul the feeling: This boundary would be the limit of our life-element, in which we are, if we were organized as sea-beings. But for Plotinus it was not so. He took no notice of the sea round him; but the boundary which he saw, the boundary of the concept-world in which his soul lived, was for him the nether boundary of something above it; just as if we were to take the boundary of the water as the boundary of the atmosphere and the clouds and so on. At the same time this sphere above concepts is for Plotinus what Plato calls the “world of ideas” and Plotinus throughout imagines that he is continuing the true genuine philosophy of Plato. This “idea-world” is, first of all, completely a world of which one speaks in the sense of Plotinism. Surely it would not occur to you, even if you were Subjectivists or followers of the modern Subjectivist philosophy, when you look out upon the meadow, to say: I have my meadow, you have yours, and so and so has his meadow; even if you are convinced that you each have only before you the image of a meadow, you speak of the meadow in the singular, of one meadow which is out there. In the same way Plotinus speaks of the one idea-world, not of the idea-world of this mind, or of another or of a third mind. In this idea-world—and this we see already in the whole manner in which one has to characterize the thought-process leading to this idea-world—in this idea-world the soul has a part. So we may say: The soul, the Psyche, unfolds itself out of the idea-world and experiences it. And the Soul, just as the idea-world creates the Psyche, in its turn creates the matter in which it is embodied. So that the lower material from which the Psyche takes its body is chiefly a creation of this Psyche.

But precisely there is the origin of individuation, there the Psyche, which otherwise takes part in the single idea-world, becomes a part of body A, and body B, and so on, and through this fact there appear, for the first time, individual souls. It is just as if I had a great quantity of liquid in one mass, and having taken twenty glasses had filled each with the liquid, so that I have this liquid, which as such is a unity, thus divided, just so I have the Psyche in the same condition, because it is incorporated in bodies which, however, it has itself created. Thus in the Plotinistic sense a man can view himself according to his exterior, his vessel. But that is at bottom only the way in which the soul reveals itself, in which the soul also becomes individualized. Afterward man has to experience within him his very own soul, which raises itself upward to the idea-world. Still later there comes a higher form of experience. That one should speak of abstract concepts—that has no meaning for a Plotinist; for such abstract concepts—well, a Plotinist would have said: “What do you mean—abstract concepts? Concepts surely cannot be abstract: they cannot hang in the air, they must be suspended from the spirit; they must be the concrete revelations of the spiritual.”

The interpretation therefore that ideas are any kind of abstractions, is therefore wrong. This is the expression of an intellectual world, a world of spirituality. It is also what existed in the ordinary experience of those men out of whose relationships Plotinus and his fellows grew. For them such talk about concepts, in the way we talk about them, had absolutely no meaning, because for them there was only a penetration of the spiritual world into souls. And this concept-world is found at the limit of this penetration, in experiencing. Only when we went deeper, when we developed the soul further, only then there resulted something which the ordinary man could not know, which the man experienced who had attained a higher stage. He then experienced that which was above the idea-world—the One, if you like to call it so—the experience of the One. This was for Plotinus the thing that was unattainable to concepts, just because it was above the world of concepts, and could only be attained if one could sink oneself into oneself without concept, a state we describe here in our spiritual science as Imagination. You can read about it in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It. But there is this difference: I have treated the subject from the modern point of view, whereas Plotinus treated it from the old. What I there call the Imagination is just that which, according to Plotinus stands above the idea-world.

From this general view of the world Plotinus really also derived all his knowledge of the human soul. It is, after all, practically contained in it. And one can be an individualist in the sense of Plotinus if one is at the same time a human being who recognizes how man raises his life upwards to something which is above all individuality, to something spiritual; whereas in our age we have more the habit of reaching downwards to the things of the senses. But all this which is the expression of something which a thorough scientist regards as fanaticism, all this is in the case of Plotinus, not something thought out, these are no hypotheses of his. This perception—right up to the One which only in exceptional cases could be attained—this perception was as clear to Plotinus and as obvious, as is for us to-day the perception of minerals, plants and animals. He spoke only in the sense of something which really was directly experienced by the soul when he spoke of the soul, of the Logos, which was part of the Nous, of the idea-world and of the One. For Plotinus the whole world was, as it were, a spirituality—again a different shade of philosophy from the Manichaean and from the one Augustine pursued. Manichaeism recognizes a sense-supersense; for it the words and concepts of matter and spirit have as yet no meaning. Augustine strives to reach a spiritual experience of the soul that is free from the sense and to escape from his material view of life. For Plotinus the whole world is spiritual, things of the senses do not exist. For what appears material is only the lowest method of revealing the spiritual. All is spirit, and if we only go deep enough into things, everything is revealed as spirit.

This is something which Augustine could not accept. Why? Because he had not the necessary point of view. Because he lived in his age as a predecessor—for if I might call Plotinus a “follower” of the ancient times in which one held such philosophic views,—though he went on into the third century,—Augustine was a predecessor of those people who could no longer feel and perceive that there was a spiritual world underneath the idea-world. He just did not see that any more. He could only learn it by being told. He might hear that people said it was so, and he might develop a feeling that there was something in it which was a human road to truth. That was the dilemma in which Augustine stood in relation to Plotinism. But he was never completely diverted from searching for an inner understanding of this Plotinism. However, this philosophical point of view did not open itself to him. He only guessed: in this world there must be something. But he could not fight his way to it.

This was the mood of his soul when he withdrew himself into a lonely life, in which he got to know the Bible and Christianity, and later the sermons of Ambrosius and the Epistles of St. Paul; and this was the mood of his soul which finally brought him to say: “The nature of the world which Plotinus sought at first in the nature of the idea-world of the Nous, or in the One, which one can attain only in specially favourable conditions of soul, why! That has appeared in the body on earth, in human form, through Christ-Jesus.” That leapt at him as a conviction out of the Bible: “Thou hast no need to struggle upward to the One, thou needest but look upon that which the historical tradition of Christ-Jesus interprets. There is the One come down from heaven, and is become man.” And Augustine exchanges the philosophy of Plotinus for the Church. He expresses this exchange clearly enough. For instance, when he says, “Who could be so blind as to say: 'The Apostolic Church merits no Faith” the church which is so faithful and supported by so many brotherly agreements that it has transmitted their writings as conscientiously to those that come after, as it has kept their episcopal sees in direct succession down to the present Bishops. This it is on which Augustine, out of the soul-mood described, laid the chief stress:—that, if one only goes into it, it can be shown in the course of centuries that there were once men who knew the Lord's disciples, and here is a continuous tradition of a sort worthy of belief, that there appeared on earth the very thing which Plotinus knew how to attain in the way I have indicated.

And now there arose in Augustine the effort, in so far as he could get to the heart of it, to make use of this Plotinism to comprehend that which had through Christianity been opened to his feeling and his inner perception. He actually applied the knowledge he had through Plotinism to understand Christianity and its meaning. Thus, for example, he transposed the concept of the One. For Plotinus the One was something experienced; for Augustine who could not attain this experience, the One became something which he defined with the abstract term “being”; the idea-world, he defined with the abstract concept “knowing,” and Psyche with the abstract concept “living,” or even “love.” We have the best evidence that Augustine proceeded thus in that he sought to comprehend the spiritual world, with neoplatonic and Plotinistic concepts, that there is above men a spiritual world, out of which the Christ descends. The Trinity was something which Plotinism made clear to Augustine, the three persons of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.

And if we were to ask seriously, of what was Augustine's soul full, when he spoke of the Three Persons—we must answer: It was full of the knowledge derived from Plotinus. And this knowledge he carried also into his understanding of the Bible. We see how it continues to function. For this Trinity awakens to life again, for example, in Scotus Erigena, who lived at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and who wrote a book on the divisions and classification of Nature in which we still find a similar Trinity: Christianity interprets its content from Plotinism.

But what Augustine preserved from Plotinism in a specially strong degree was something that was fundamental to it.

You must remember that man, since the Psyche reaches down into the material as into a vessel, is really the only earthly individuality. If we ascend slightly into higher regions, to the divine or the spiritual, where the Trinity originates, we have no longer to do with individual man, but with the species, as it were, with humanity. We no longer direct our visualization in this bald manner towards the whole of humanity, as Augustine did as a result of his Plotinism. Our modern concepts are against it. I might say: Seen from down there, men appear as individuals; seen from above—if one may hypothetically say that—all humanity appears as one unity. From this point of view the whole of humanity became for Plotinus concentrated in Adam. Adam was all humanity. And since Adam sprang from the spiritual world he was as a being bound with the earth, which had free will, because in him there lived that which was still above, and not that which arises from error of matter—itself incapable of sin. It was impossible for this man who was first Adam to sin or not to be free, and therefore also impossible to die. Then came the influence of that Satanic being, whom Augustine felt as the enemy-spirit. It tempted and seduced the man. He fell into the material, and with him all humanity.

Augustine stands, with what I might call his derived knowledge, right in the midst of Plotinism. The whole of humanity is for him one, and it sinned in Adam as a whole, not as an individual. If we look clearly between the lines particularly of Augustine's last writings, we see how extraordinarily difficult it has become for him thus to regard the whole of mankind, and the possibility that the whole fell into sin. For in him there is already the modern man, the predecessor as opposed to the successor; there lived in him the individual man who felt that individual man grew ever more and more responsible for what he did, and what he learnt. At certain moments it appeared to him impossible to feel that individual man is only a member of the whole of the human race. But Neo-Platonism and Plotinism were so deep in him that he still could look only at the whole of humanity. And so this condition in the whole man, this condition of sin and mortality—was transferred into that of the impossibility to be free, the impossibility to be immortal; all humanity had thus fallen, had been diverted from its origin. And God, were He righteous, would have simply thrown humanity aside. But He is not only righteous, He is also merciful—so Augustine felt. Therefore, he decided to save a part of mankind, note well, a part. That is to say, God's decision destined a part of mankind to receive grace, whereby this part is to be led back from the condition of bondage and mortality to the condition of potential freedom and immortality, which, it is true, can only be realized after death. One part is restored to this condition. The other part of mankind—namely, the not-chosen—remains in the condition of sin. So mankind falls into these two divisions, into those that are chosen and those who are cast out. And if we regard humanity in this Augustinian sense, it falls simply into these two divisions: those who are destined for bliss without desert, simply because it is so ordained in the divine management, and those who, whatever they do, cannot attain grace, who are predetermined and predestined to damnation.

This view, which also goes by the name of Predestination, Augustine reached as a result of the way in which he regarded the whole of humanity. If it had sinned it deserved the fate of that part of humanity which was cast out. We shall speak tomorrow of the terrible spiritual battles which have resulted from this Predestination, how Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism grew out of it. But to-day I would add as a final remark: we now see how Augustine stands, a vivid fighting personality, between that view which reaches upward toward the spiritual, according to which humanity becomes a whole, and the urge in his soul to rise above human individuality to something spiritual which is free from material nature, but which, again, can have its origin only in individuality. This was just the characteristic feature of the age of which Augustine is the forerunner, that it was aware of something unknown to men in the old days—namely individual experience. To-day, after all, we accept a great deal as formula. But Klopstock was in earnest and not merely the maker of a phrase when he began his “Messiah” with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man's salvation.” Homer began, equally sincerely: “Sing, O Goddess, of the wrath. ... “: or “Sing, O Muse, to me now of the man, far-travelled Odysseus.” These people did not speak of something that exists in individuality, they interpreted something of universal mankind, a race-soul, a Psyche. It is no empty phrase, when Homer lets the Muse sing, in place of himself. The feeling of individuality awakens later, and Augustine is one of the first of those who really feel the individual entity of man, with its individual responsibility. Hence, the dilemma in which he lived. The individual striving after the non-material spiritual was part of his own experience. There was a personal, subjective struggle in him. In later times that understanding of Plotinism, which it was still possible for Augustine to have, was—I might say—choked up. And after the Greek philosophers, the last followers of Plato and Plotinus, were compelled to go into exile in Persia, and after they had found their successors in the Academy of Jondishapur, this looking up to the spiritual triumphed in Western Europe—and only that remained which Aristotle had bequeathed to the after-world in the form of a filtered Greek philosophy, and then only in a few fragments. That continued to grow, and came in a roundabout way, via Arabia, back to Europe. This had no longer a consciousness of the idea world, and no Plotinism in it. And so the great question remained: Man must extract from himself the spiritual; he must produce the spiritual as an abstraction. When he sees lions and thereupon conceives the thought “lions” when he sees wolves and thereupon conceives the thought “wolves,” when he “sees man and thereupon conceives the thought” man these concepts are alive only in him, they arise out of his individuality. The whole question would have had no meaning for Plotinus; now it begins to have a meaning, and moreover a deep meaning.

Augustine, by means of the light Plotinism had shed into his soul, could understand the mystery of Christ-Jesus. Such Plotinism as was there was choked up. With the closing by the Emperor Justinian of the School of Philosophy at Athens in 529 the living connection with such views was broken off. Several people have felt deeply the idea: We are told of a spiritual world, by tradition, in Script—we experience by our individuality supernatural concepts, concepts that are removed from the material How are these concepts related to “being?” How so the nature of the world? What we take to be concepts, are these only something spontaneous in us, or have they something to do with the outer world? In such forms the questions appeared; in the most extreme abstractions, but such as were the deeply earnest concern of men and the mediaeval Church. In this abstract form, in this inner-heartedness they appeared in the two personalities of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Then again, they came to be called the questions between Realism and Nominalism. “What is our relationship to a world of which all we know is from conceptions which can come only from ourselves and our individuality?” That was the great question which the mediaeval schoolmen put to themselves.

If you consider what form Plotinus had taken in Augustine's predestinationism, you will be able to feel the whole depth of this scholastic question: only a part of mankind, and that only through God's judgment, could share in grace, that is, attain to bliss; the other part was destined to eternal damnation from the first, in spite of anything it might do. But what man could gain for himself as the content of his knowledge came from that concept, that awful concept of Predestination which Augustine had not been able to transform—that came out of the idea of human individuality. For Augustine mankind was a whole; for Thomas each separate man was an individuality.

How does this great World-process in Predestination as Augustine saw it hang together with the experience of separate human individuality? What is the connection between that which Augustine had really discarded and that which the separate human individuality can win for itself? For consider: Because he did not wish to lay stress on human individuality, Augustine had taken the teaching of Predestination, and, for mankind's own sake, had extinguished human individuality. Thomas Aquinas had before him only the individual man, with his thirst for knowledge. Thomas had to seek human knowledge and its relationship to the world in the very thing Augustine had excluded from his study of humanity.

It is not sufficient, ladies and gentlemen, to put such a question abstractly and intellectually and rationally; it is necessary to grasp such a question with the whole heart, with the whole human personality. Only then shall we be able to assess the weight with which this question oppressed those men who, in the thirteenth century, bore the burden of it.

The point I tried yesterday particularly to emphasize was that in the spiritual development of the West, which found its expression ultimately in the Schoolmen, not only is a part played by what we can grasp in abstract concepts, and what happened, as it were, in abstract concepts, and in a development of abstract thoughts, but rather that behind it all, there stands a real development of the impulses of Western mankind. What I mean is this: we can first of all, as happens mostly in the history of philosophy, direct our eyes on to what we find in each philosopher; we can follow how the ideas, which we find in a philosopher of the sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth century are further developed by philosophers of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and from such a review we can get the impression that one thinker has taken over the ideas from another, and that we are in the presence of a certain evolution of ideas. This is an historical review of spiritual life which had gradually to be abandoned. For what takes place there, what so to speak is revealed by the individual human souls, is merely a symptom of something deeper which lies behind the scenes of the outer events; and this something which was going on already a few centuries before Christianity was founded, and continued in the first centuries a.d. up to the time of the Schoolmen, is an entirely organic process in the development of Western humanity. And unless we take this organic process into account, it is as impossible to get an explanation of it, as we could of the period of human development between the ages of twelve to twenty, if we do not consider the important influence of those forces which are connected with adolescence, and which at this time rise to the surface from the deeps of human nature. In the same way out of the depth of the whole great organism of European humanity there surges up something which can be defined—there are other ways of definition,—but which I will define by saying: Those ancient poets spoke honestly and sincerely, who, like Homer, for instance, began their epic poems: “Sing to me, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles,” or “Sing to me, O Muse, of the much-travelled man.” These people did not wish to make a phrase, they found as an inner fact of their consciousness, that it was not a single, individual Ego that wanted to express itself, but what in fact they felt to be a higher spiritual-psychic force which plays a part in the ordinary conscious condition of man. And again—I mentioned it yesterday—Klopstock was right and saw this fact to a certain extent, even if only unconsciously, when he began his “Messiah Poem” not “Sing, O Muse,” or “Sing, O Goddess, of man's redemption,” but when he said “Sing, immortal Soul. ...” In other words, “Sing, thou individual being, that livest in each man as an individuality.” When Klopstock wrote his “Messiah,” this feeling of individuality in each soul was, it is true, fairly widespread. But this inner urge, to bring out the individuality, to shape an individual life, grew up most pronouncedly in the age between the foundation of Christianity and the higher Scholasticism. We can see only the merest surface-reflection in the thoughts of the philosophers of what was taking place in the depths of all human beings—the individualization of the consciousness of European people. And an important thing in the spread of Christianity throughout these centuries is the fact that the leaders of its propagation had to address themselves to a humanity which strove more and more, from the depth of its being, towards an inner feeling of human individuality.

We can understand the separate events that occurred in this epoch only by keeping this point of view before us. And only thus can we understand what battles took place in the souls of such people who, in the profundity of the human soul, wanted to dispute with Christianity on the one side and philosophy on the other, like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The authors of the usual histories of philosophy to-day have understood so little of the true form of these soul-battles which had their culmination in Albertus and Thomas, that this epoch is only approximately clearly depicted in their histories. There are many things to consider in the soul-life of Albertus and Thomas.

Superficially it looks as if Albertus Magnus, who lived from the twelfth into the thirteenth century, and Thomas, who lived in the thirteenth, had wished only to harmonize dialectically Augustinism, of which we spoke yesterday, on the one hand, and Aristotelianism on the other. One was the bearer of the church ideas, the other of the modified philosophical ideas. The attempt to find assonance between them runs, it is true, like a thread through everything either wrote. But there was in everything which thus became fixed in thoughts as in a flowering of Western feeling and will, a great deal which did not survive into the period which stretches from the fifteenth century into our own day, a period from which we have drawn our customary ideas for all sciences and for the whole of our daily life.

The man of to-day finds it really paradoxical when he hears what we heard yesterday of Augustine's beliefs; that Augustine actually believed that a part of mankind was from the beginning destined to receive God's grace without earning it—for really after original sin all must perish—to receive God's grace and be spiritually saved; and that another part of mankind must be spiritually lost—no matter what it does. To a modern man this paradox appears perhaps meaningless. But if you can get the feeling of that age in which Augustine lived, in which he absorbed all those ideas and influences I described yesterday, you will think differently. You will feel that it is possible to understand that Augustine wanted to hold on to the thoughts which, as contained in the ancient philosophies, did not take the individual man into consideration; for they, under the influence of such ideas as those of Plotinus, which I outlined yesterday, had in their minds nothing but the idea of universal mankind. And you must remember that Augustine was a man who stood in the midst of the battle between the thought which regarded mankind as a unity, and the thought which was trying to crystallize the individuality of man out of this unified mankind. But in Augustine's soul there also surged the impulse towards individuality. For this reason, these ideas take on such significant aspects—significant of soul and heart; for this reason they are so full of human experience, and Augustine becomes the intensely sympathetic figure which makes so great an impression if we turn our eyes back to the centuries which preceded Scholasticism.

After Augustine, therefore, there survived for many—but only in his ideas—those links which held together the individual man as Christian with his Church. But these ideas, as I explained them to you yesterday, could not be accepted by those Western people who rejected the idea of taking the whole of humanity as one unity, and feeling themselves as it were only a member in it, moreover a member which belongs to that part of humanity whose lot is destruction and annihilation.

And so the Church saw itself compelled to snatch at a way out. Augustine still conducted his gigantic fight against Pelagius, the man who was already filled with the individuality-impulse of the West. This was the person in whom, as a contemporary of Augustine, we can see how the sense of individuality such as later centuries had it, appears in advance. So he can only say: There is no question but that man must remain entirely without participation in his destiny in the material-spiritual world. The power by which the soul finds the connection with that which raises it from the entanglements of the flesh to the serene spiritual regions, where it can find its release and return to freedom and immortality—this power must be born of man's individuality itself. This was the point which Augustine's opponents stressed, that each man must find for himself the power to overcome inherited sin. The Church stood half-way between the two opponents, and sought a solution. There was much discussion concerning this solution—all the pros and cons, as it were—and then they took the middle way—and I can leave it to you to judge if in this case it was the golden or the copper mean—at any rate they took the middle way: semi-Pelagianism. A formula was found which was really neither black nor white, to this effect: It is as Augustine has said, but not quite as Augustine has said; nor is it quite as Pelagius has said, though in a certain sense, it is as he has said. And so one might say, that it is not through a wise divine judgment, that some are condemned to sin and others to grace, but that the matter is this, that it is a case not of a divine pre-judgment, but of a divine prescience. The divine being knows beforehand if one man is to be a sinner or the other filled with grace. At the same time no further attention was paid, when this dogma was agreed, to the fact that at bottom it is in no way a question of prescience but rather a question of taking a definite stand, whether individual man is able to join with those powers in his individual soul-life which raise him up out of his separation from the divine-spiritual being of the world and which can lead him back to it.

In this way the question really remains unsolved. And I might say that, compelled on one side to recognize the dogmas of the Church but on the other filled from deepest sensibility with profound respect for the greatness of Augustine, Albertus and Thomas stood face to face with what came to be the Western development of the spirit within the Christian movement. And yet several things from earlier times left their influence. One can see them, for instance, when one looks carefully at the souls of Albertus and of Thomas, but one realizes also that they themselves were not quite conscious of it; that they enter into their thoughts, but that they themselves cannot bring them to a precise expression. We must consider this, ladies and gentlemen, more in respect of this time of the high Scholasticism of Albertus and Thomas, we must consider it more than we would have to consider a similar phenomenon, for instance, in our day. I have permitted myself to stress the “Why?” in my Welt-und Lebensanschauung des 19 Jahrhundert,—and it was further developed in my book Die Rätzee der Philosophie, where the proposition was put in another way so that the particular passage was not repeated, if I may be allowed to say so. This means—and it will occupy us in detail tomorrow, I will only mention it now—this means that from this upward-striving of individuality among the thinkers who studied philosophically that in these thinkers we get the highest flowering of logical judgment; we might say the highest flowering of logical technique.

Ladies and gentlemen, one can quarrel as one will about this or that party-standpoint on the question of Scholasticism—all this quarrelling is as a rule grounded on very little real understanding of the matter. For whoever has a sense of the manner quite apart from the subjective content in which the accuracy of the thought is revealed in the course of a scientific explanation—or anything else; whoever has a sense of appreciating how things that hang together are thought out together, which must be thought out together if life is to have any meaning; whoever has a sense of all this, and of several other things, realizes that thought was never so exact, so logically scientific, either before or afterwards as in the age of high Scholasticism. This is just the important thing, that pure thought so runs with mathematical certainty from idea to idea, from judgment to judgment, from conclusion to conclusion, that these thinkers account to themselves for the smallest, even the tiniest, step. We have only to remember in what surroundings this thinking took place. It was not a thinking that took place as it now takes place in the noisy world; rather its place was in the quiet cloister cell or otherwise far from the busy world. It was a thinking that absorbed a thought-life, and which could also, through other circumstances, formulate a pure thought-technique. It is to-day as a matter of fact difficult to do this; for scarcely do we seek to give publicity to such a thought-activity which has no other object than to array thought upon thought according to their content, than the stupid people come, and the illogical people raise all sorts of questions, interject their violent partisanship, and, seeing that one is after all a human being among human beings, we have to make the best of these things which are, in fact, no other than brutal interruptions, which often have nothing whatever to do with the subject in question. In these circumstances that inner quiet is very soon lost to which the thinkers of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries could devote themselves, who did not have to yield so much to the opposition of the uneducated in their social life.

This and other things called forth in this epoch that wonderfully plastic but also finely-outlined thought-activity which distinguishes Scholasticism and for which people like Augustine and Thomas consciously strove.

But now think of this: on the one side are demands of life which appear as if one had to do with dogmas that have not been made clear, which in a great number of cases resembled the semi-Pelagianism already described; and as if one fought in order to uphold what one believed ought to be upheld, because the Church justifiably had set it up; and as if one wanted to maintain this with the most subtle thought. Just imagine what it means to light up with the most subtle thought something of the nature of what I have described to you as Augustinism. One must look closely into the inside of scholastic effort and not only attempt to characterize this continuity from the Patristic age to the age of the Schoolmen from the threads of concepts which one has picked up. These spirits of High Scholasticism did a great deal half unconsciously and we can really only understand it, if we consider, looking beyond what I already described yesterday, such a figure as that which entered half mysteriously from the sixth century into European spiritual life and which became known under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. To-day, because time is too short I cannot enter into all the disputes on the question of whether there is any truth in the view that these writings were first made in the sixth century, or whether the other view is right which ascribes at any rate the traditional element of these writings to a much earlier time. All that is after all not important, but the important thing is, that the philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite was available for the thinkers of the seventh and eighth centuries right up to the time of Thomas Aquinas, and that these writings throughout have a Christian tinge and contain in a special form that which I yesterday defined as Plotinism, as the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. And it had become particularly important for the Christian thinkers of the outgoing old world and the beginning of the Middle Ages up to the time of High Scholasticism, what attitude the author of the Dionysius writings took to the uprising of the human soul till it achieved a view of the divine. This Dionysius is generally described as if he had two paths to the divine; and as a matter of fact there are two. One path requires the following: if man wishes to raise himself from the external things which surround him in the world to the divine, he must attempt to extract from all those things their perfections, their nature; he must attempt to go back to absolute perfection, and must be able to give a name to absolute perfection in such a way that he has a content for this divine perfection which in its turn can reveal itself and can bring forth the separate things of the world by means of individualization and differentiation. So I would say, for Dionysius divinity is that being which must be given names to the greatest extent, which must be labelled with the most superlative terms which one can possibly find amongst all the perfections of the world; take all those, give them names and then apply them to the divinity and then you reach some idea of the divinity. That is one path which Dionysius recommends.

The other path is different. Here he says: you will never attain the divinity if you give it only a single name, for the whole soul-process which you employ to find perfections in things and to seek their essences, to combine them in order to apply the whole to divinity, all this never leads to what one can call knowledge of a divinity. You must reach a state in which you are free from all that you have known of things. You must purify your consciousness completely of all that you have experienced through things. You must no longer know anything of what the world says to you. You must forget all the names which you are accustomed to give to things and translate yourself into a condition of soul in which you know nothing of the whole world. If you can experience this in your soul-condition, then you experience the nameless which is immediately misunderstood if one attaches any name to it. Then you will know God, the Super-God in His super-beauty. But the names Super-God and super-beauty are already disturbing. They can only serve to point towards something which you must experience as nameless, and how can one deal with a character who gives us not one theology but two theologies, one positive, one negative, one rationalistic and one mystic? A man who can put himself into the spirituality of the time out of which Christianity was born can understand it quite well. If one pictures the course of human evolution even in the first Christian centuries as the materialists of to-day do, anything like the writings of the Areopagite appears more or less foolishness or madness. In this case they are usually simply rejected. If, however, one can put oneself into the experience and feeling of that time, then one realizes what a man like the Areopagite really wanted—at bottom only to express what countless people were striving for. Because for them the divinity was an unknowable being if one took only one path to it. For him the divinity was a being which had to be approached by a rational path through the finding and giving of names. But if one takes this one way one loses the path. One loses oneself in what is as it were universal space void of God. And then one does not attain to God. But one must take this way, for otherwise one can also not reach God. Moreover, one must take yet another way, namely, the one that strives towards the nameless one. By either road alone the divinity cannot be found, but by taking both one finds the divinity at the point where they cross. It is not enough to dispute which of the roads is the right one. Both are right, but each taken alone leads to nothing. Both roads when the human soul finds itself at the crossing lead to the goal. I can understand how some people of to-day who are accustomed to what is called polemics recoil from what is here advanced concerning the Areopagite. But what I am advancing here was alive in those men who were the leading spiritual personalities in the first Christian centuries, and continued traditionally in the Christian-philosophical movement of the West to the time of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. For instance, it was kept alive through that individual whose name I mentioned yesterday, Scotus Erigena, who lived at the court of Charles the Bald. This Scotus Erigena reminds one forcibly of what I said yesterday. I told you: I have never known such a meek man as Vincenz Knauer, the historian of philosophy. Vincenz Knauer was always meek, but he began to lose his temper when there was mention of Plotinus or anything connected with him; and Franz Brentano, the able philosopher, who was always conventional became quite unconventional and abusive in his book Philosophies that Create a Stir—referring to Plotinus. Those who, with all their discernment and ability, lean more or less towards rationalism, will be angry when they are faced with what so to speak poured forth from the Areopagite to find a final significant revelation in this Scotus Erigena. In the last years of his life he was a Benedictine Prior, but his own monks, as the legend goes—I do not say it is literally true, but it is near enough—tortured him with pins till he died, because he introduced Plotinism even in the ninth century. But his ideas survived him and they were at the same time the continuation of the ideas of the Areopagite. His writings more or less disappeared till later days; then ultimately they reappeared. In the twelfth century Scotus Erigena was declared a heretic. But that did not mean as much then as it did later or does to-day. All the same, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were deeply influenced by the ideas of Scotus Erigena. That is the one thing which we must recognize as a heritage from former times when we wish to speak of the essence of Thomism.

But there is another thing. In Plotinism, which I tried to describe to you yesterday with regard to its Cosmology, there is a very important presentation of human nature which is derived from a material/super-material view. One really regains respect for these things if one discovers them again on a background of spiritual science. Then one admits at once the following: one says, if one reads something like Plotinus or what has come down to us of him, unprepared, it looks rather chaotic and intricate. But if one discovers the corresponding truths oneself, his views take on a quite special appearance, even if the method of their expression in those times was different from what it would have to be to-day. Thus, one can find in Plotinus a general view which I should describe as follows:

Plotinus considers human nature with its physical and psychic and spiritual characteristics. Then he considers it from two points of view, first from that of the soul's work on the body. If I spoke in modern terms, I should have to say: Plotinus says first of all to himself; if one considers a child that grows up in the world, one sees how that which is formed as human body out of the spiritual-psychic attains maturity. For Plotinus everything material in man is, if I may use an expression to which I trust you will not object, a “sweating out” of the spiritual-physic, a “crustation” as it were of the spiritual-psychic. But then, when a human being has grown to a certain point, the spiritual-psychic forces cease to have any influence on the body. We could, therefore, say: at first we are concerned with such a spiritual-psychic activity that the bodily form is created or organized out of it. The human organization is the product of the spiritual-psychic. When a certain condition of maturity has been reached by some part of the organic activity, let us say, for example, the activity on which the forces are employed which later appear as the forces of the memory, then these forces which formerly have worked on the body, make their appearance in a spiritual-psychic metamorphosis. In other words, that part of the spiritual-psychic element which had functioned materially, now liberates itself, when its work is finished, and appears as an independent entity: a mirror of the soul, one would have to call it if one were to speak in Plotinus' sense. It is extraordinarily difficult with our modern conceptions to describe these things. You get near it, if you think as follows: you realize that a human being, after his memory has attained a certain stage of maturity, has the power of remembering. As a small child he has not. Where is this power of remembering? First it is at work in the organism, and forms it. After that it is liberated as purely spiritual-psychic power, and continues still, though always spiritual-psychically, to work on the organism. Then inside this soul-mirror inhabits the real vessel, the Ego. In characteristics, in an idea-content which is extraordinarily pictorial, these views are worked out from that which is spiritually active, and from that which then remains over, and becomes, as it were, passive towards the outer world—so that it takes up, like the memory, the impressions of the outer world and retains them. This two-fold work of the soul, this division of the soul into an active part, which practically builds up the body, and a passive part, derived from an older stratum of human growth and human attitude to the world, which found in Plotinus its best expression and then was taken up by Augustine and his successors, was described in an extraordinarily pictorial manner.

We find this view in Aristotelianism, but rationalized and translated into more physical conceptions. And Aristotle had it in his turn from Plato and again from the same sources as Plato. But when we read Aristotle we must say: Aristotle strives to put into abstract conceptions what he found in the old philosophies. And so we see in the Aristotelian system which continued to flourish, and which was the rationalistic form of what Plotinus had said in the other form, we see in this Aristotelianism which continued as far as Albertus and Thomas a rationalized mysticism, as it were, a rationalized description of the spiritual secret of the human being. And Albertus and Thomas are conscious of the fact that Aristotle has brought down to abstract conceptions something which the others had had in visions. And therefore they do not stand in the same relation to Aristotle as the present day philosopher-philologists, who have developed strange controversies over two conceptions which originate with Aristotle; but as the writings of Aristotle have not survived complete, we find both these conceptions in them without having their connection—which is after all a fact which affords ground for different opinions in many learned disputes. We find two ideas in Aristotle. Aristotle sees in human nature something which brings together into a unity the vegetative principle, the animal principle, the lower human principle, then the higher human principle, that Aristotle calls the nous, and the Scholiasts call the intellect. But Aristotle differentiates between the nous poieticos, and the nous patheticos, between the active and the passive spirit of man. The expressions are no longer as descriptive as the Greek; but one can say that Aristotle differentiates between the active understanding, the active spirit of man, and the passive. What does he mean? We do not understand what he means unless we revert to the origin of these concepts. Just like the other forces of the soul the two points of understanding are active in another metamorphosis in building up the human soul:—the understanding, in so far as it is actively engaged in building up the man, but still the understanding, not like the memory which comes to an end at a certain point and then liberates itself as memory—but working throughout life as understanding. That is the nous poieticos; the factor which in Aristotle's sense, becoming individualized out of the universe, builds up the body. It is no other than the active, bodybuilding soul of Plotinus. On the other hand, that which liberates itself, existing only in order to receive the outer world, and to form the impressions of the outer world dialectically, is the nous patheticos—the passive intellect—the intellectus possibilis. These things, presented to us in Scholasticism in keen dialectics and in precise logic, refer back to the old heritage. And we cannot properly understand the working of the Schoolmen's souls without taking into consideration this intermixture of age-old traditions.

Because all this had such an influence on the souls of the Scholiasts, they were faced with the great question which one usually feels to be the real problem of Scholasticism. At a time when men still had a vision which produced such a thing as Platonism or a rationalized version of it such as Aristotelianism, at a time when the sense of individuality had not yet reached its highest, these problems could not have existed; for what we to-day call understanding, what we call intellect, which had its origin in the terminology of Scholasticism, is the product of the individual man. If we all think alike, it is only because we are all individually constituted alike, and because the understanding is bound up with the individual which is constituted alike in all men. It is true that in so far as we are different beings we think differently; but that is a shade of difference with which logic as such is not concerned. Logical and dialectical thought is the product of the general human, but individually differentiated organization.

So man, feeling that he is an individual says to himself: in man arise the thoughts through which the outer world is inwardly represented; and here the thoughts are put together which in turn are to give a picture of the world; there, inside man, emerge on the one hand representations which are connected with individual things, with a particular book, let us say, or a particular man, for instance, Augustine. But then man arrives at the inner experiences, such as dreams, for which he cannot straightway find such an objective representation. The next step is the experience of pure chimaeras, which he creates for himself, just as here the centaur and similar things were chimaeras for Scholasticism. But, on the other hand, are the concepts and ideas which as a matter of fact reflect on to both sides: humanity, the lion-type, the wolf-type, etc.; these are general concepts which the Schoolmen according to ancient usage called the universals. Yes, as the situation for mankind was such as I described to you yesterday, as one rose, as it were, to these universals and perceived them to be the lowest border of the spiritual world which was being revealed through vision to mankind, these universals, humanity, animality, lion-hood, etc., were simply the means whereby the spiritual world, the intelligible world, revealed itself, and simply the soul's experience of an emanation from the supernatural world.

In order to have this experience it was essential not to have acquired that feeling of individuality which afterward developed in the centuries I have named. This sense of individuality led one to say: we rise from the things of the senses up to that border where are the more or less abstract things, which are, however, still within our experience—the universals such as humanity, lion-hood, etc. “Scholasticism” realized perfectly that one cannot simply say: these are pure conceptions, pure comprehensions of the external world:—rather, it became a problem for Scholasticism, with which it grappled. We have to create such general and universal conceptions out of our individuality. But when we look out upon the world, we do not have “humanity,” we have individual man, not “wolf-hood” but individual wolves. But, on the other hand, we cannot only see what we formulate as “wolf-hood” and “lamb-hood” as it were in such a way as if at one time we have formulated the matter as “agnine” and at another as “lupine,” and as if “lamb-hood” and “wolf-hood” were only a kind of composition and the material which is in these connected ideas were the only reality: we cannot simply assume this; for if we did we should have to assume this also:—If we caged a wolf and saw to it that for a certain period he ate nothing but lambs he is filled with nothing but lamb-matter; but he doesn't become a lamb; the matter doesn't affect it, he remains a wolf. “Wolf-hood” therefore is after all not something which is thus merely brought into contact with the material, for materially the whole wolf is lamb, but he remains a wolf.

There is to-day everywhere a problem which people do not take seriously enough. It was a problem with which the soul in its greatest development grappled with all its fibre. And this problem stood in direct connection with the Church's interests. How this was we can picture to ourselves if we consider the following:—

Before Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas appeared with their special exposition of philosophy, there had already been people, like Roscelin, for example, who had put forward the theory, and believed it implicitly, that these general concepts, these universals are really nothing else but the comprehension of external individual objects; they are really only words and names. And a Nominalism grew up which saw only words in general things, in universals. But Roscelin took Nominalism with dogmatic earnestness and applied it to the Trinity, saying: if something which is an association of ideas is only a word, then the Trinity is only a word, and the individuals are the sole reality—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; then only the human understanding grasps these Three through a name. Mediaeval Churchmen stretched such points to the ultimate conclusions; the Church was compelled, at the Synod of Soissons, to declare this view of Roscelin partial polytheism and its teaching heretical. Thus one was in a certain difficult position towards Nominalism; it was a dogmatic interest which was linked with a philosophic one.

To-day we no longer take, of course, such a situation as something vital. But in those days it was regarded as most vital, and Thomas and Albertus grappled with just this question of the relationship of the universals to individual things; for them it was the supreme problem. Fundamentally, everything else is only a consequence, that is, a consequence in so far as everything else has taken its colour from the attitude they adopted towards this problem. But this attitude was influenced by all the forces which I have described to you, all the forces which remained as tradition from the Areopagite, which remained from Plotinus, which had passed through the soul of Augustine, through Scotus Erigena and many others—all this influenced the manner of thought which was now first revealed in Albertus and then, on a wide-reaching philosophic basis, in Thomas. And one knew also that there were people then who looked up beyond concepts to the spiritual world, to the intellectual world, to that world of which Thomism speaks as of a reality, in which he sees the immaterial intellectual beings which he calls angels. These are not just abstractions, they are real beings, but without bodies. It is these beings which Thomas puts in the tenth sphere. He looks upon the earth as encircled by the sphere of the Moon, of Mercury, of Venus, of the Sun, and so on, and so comes through the eighth and ninth spheres to the tenth, which was the Empyreum. He imagines all this pervaded by intelligences and the intelligences nearest are those which, as it were, let their lowest margins shine down upon the earth so that the human soul can get into touch with them.

But in this form in which I have just now expressed it, a form more inclined to Plotinism, this idea is not the result of pure individual feeling to which Scholasticism had just fought its way, but for Albertus and Thomas a belief remained that above abstract concepts there was up there a revelation of those abstract concepts. And the question faced them: What reality have, then, these abstract concepts? Now Albertus as well as Thomas had an idea of the influence of the psychic-spiritual on the physical body and the subsequent self-reflection of the psychic-spiritual when its work on the physical body was sufficiently performed: they had an idea of all this. Also they had an idea of what man becomes in his own individual life, how he develops from year to year, from decade to decade precisely through the impressions he receives and digests from the external world. Thus the thought came that though, of course, we have the external world all round us, this world is a revelation of something super-worldly, something spiritual. And while we look at the world and turn our attention to the separate minerals, plants, and animals, we surmise all the same that there lies behind them a revelation from higher spiritual worlds. And if we look at the natural world with logical analysis, with everything of which our soul makes us capable, with all the power of thought we possess, we arrive at those things which the spiritual world has implanted in the natural world. But then we must get clear on this point: we turn our eyes and all the other senses on to this world, and so are in definite relationship with the world. We then go away from it and retain, as it were, as a memory what we have absorbed from it. We look back once more into memory; and then there first appears to us really the universal, the generality of things, such as humanity, and so on; that appears to us first in the inner conceptual form. So that Albertus and Thomas say: if you look back, and if your soul reflects its experiences of the external world, then you have the universals preserved in it. Then you have universals. From all the human beings whom you have met, you form the concept of humanity. If you remembered only individual things you could, in any case, live only in earthly names. But as you do not live only in earthly names, you must experience the universals. There you have the universalia post res—the universals which live in the soul after the things have been experienced. While a man's soul concentrates on things, its contents are not the same as afterwards when it remembers them, when they are, as it were, reflected from inside, but rather he stands in a real relationship to the things. He experiences true spirituality of the things and translates them only into the form of universals post rem.

Albertus and Thomas assume that at the moment when man through his power of thought stands in real relationship with his surroundings, that is, not only with what is “wolf” because the eye sees and the ear hears it, but because he can meditate on it and formulate the type “wolf,” at this moment he experiences something which, though invisible, in the objects, is comprehended in thought independently of the senses. He experiences the universalia in rebus—the universals in things.

Now the difference is not quite easy to define, because we usually think that what we have in the soul as a reflection is the same in the things. But it is not the same in the sense of Thomas Aquinas. That which man experiences as an idea in his soul and explains with his understanding, is the same thing with which he experiences the real, and the universal. So that according to their form, the universals in the things are different from those after them, which remain then in the soul: but inwardly they are the same. There you have one of the scholastic concepts which one does not generally put to the soul in all its subtlety. The universals in things and the universals after things are, as far as content is concerned the same, and differ only in form. But then we must not forget that that which is distributed and individualized in things points in its turn to what I described yesterday as being inherent in Plotinism, and called the actually intelligible world: there again the same contents which are in things and in the human soul after things are, as far as content goes, alike, but different in form; they are contained in another form, but of similar content. These are the universalia ante res, before things. These are the universals as contained in the divine mind, and in the mind of the divine servants—the angelic beings. Thus what was for a former age a direct spiritual-sensory/super-sensory vision becomes a vision which was represented only in sense-images, because what one sees with the super-senses cannot, according to the Areopagite, be even given a name, if one wished to deal with it in its true form: one can only point to it and say: it is not anything such as external things are. Thus what was for the ancient's vision and appeared as a reality of the spiritual world, became for Scholasticism something to be decided by all that acuteness of thought, all that suppleness and nice logic of which I have spoken to you to-day. The problem which formerly was solved by vision, is brought down into the sphere of thought and of reason. That is the essence of Thomism, the essence of Albertinism, the essence of Scholasticism. It realized, above all, that in its epoch, the sense of human individuality has reached its culmination. It sees, above all, all problems in their rational and logical form, in the form, in fact, in which the thinker must comprehend them. Scholasticism grapples chiefly with this form of world-problems, this form of thinking, and thus stands in the midst of the life of the Church, which I illumined for you yesterday and to-day in many ways, if only with a few rays of light. There is the belief of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries; it is to be attained with thinking, with the most subtle logic; on the other side, are the traditional Church dogmas, the content of Faith.

Let us take an example of how a thinker like Thomas Aquinas stands to both. Thomas Aquinas asks: Can one prove the existence of God by logic? Yes, one can. He gives a whole series of proofs. One, for instance, is when he says: We can at first gain knowledge only by approaching the universalia in rebus, by looking into things. We cannot—it is the personal experience of this age—we cannot enter into the spiritual world through vision. We can only enter the spiritual world by using our human powers if we saturate ourselves in things, and get out of them what we can call the universalia in rebus. Then we can draw our conclusions concerning the universalia ante res. So he says: We see the world in movement; one thing always gives motion to another, because it is itself in motion. So we go from one thing in motion to another, and from this to a third thing in motion. This cannot be continued indefinitely, for we must get to a prime mover. But if this were itself in motion, we should have to proceed to another mover. We must, therefore, in the end reach a stationary mover.

And here Thomas—and Albertus comes after all to the same conclusion—reaches the Aristotelian stationary mover, the First Cause. It is inherent in logical thinking to recognize God as a necessary First Being, as a necessary first stationary mover. For the Trinity there is no such path of thought which leads to it. It is handed down. With human thought we can only reach the point of testing if the Trinity is contrary to sense. We find it is not, but we cannot prove it, we must believe it, we must accept it as a content, to which the unaided human intellect cannot rise.

This is the attitude of Scholasticism to the question which was then so important: How far can the unaided human intellect go? And in the course of time it became involved in quite a special way with this deep problem. For, you see, other thinkers had gone before. They had assumed something apparently quite absurd, they had said: it is possible for something to be true theologically and false philosophically. One could say straight out: it is possible for things to be handed down as dogma, as, for instance, the Trinity; yet if one ponders over the same question, one arrives at a contrary result. It is certainly possible for the reason to lead to other consequences than those to which the faith-content leads. And that was so, that was the other thing which faced Scholasticism—the doctrine of the double truth, and it is on this that the two thinkers Albertus and Thomas laid special stress, to bring faith and reason into harmony, to seek no contradiction between rational thought—at any rate, up to a certain point—and faith. In those days that was radicalism, for the majority of the leading Church authorities clung to the doctrine of the double truth, namely, that man must on one side think rationally, the content of his thought must be in one form, and faith could give it him in another form, and these two forms he had to keep.

I believe we can get a feeling of historical development if we consider the fact that people of so few centuries ago, as these are of whom we speak to-day, are wrapped up in such problems with their whole soul. For these things still reverberate in our time. We still live with these problems. How we do it, we shall discuss tomorrow. To-day I wanted to describe the essence of Thomism as it was in those days.

So it was, you perceive, that the main problem in front of Albertus and Thomas was this: What is the relation of the content of human reason to that of human faith? How can that which the Church ordains for belief be, first, understood, and secondly, upheld against what contradicts it? With this, people like Albertus and Thomas had much to do, for the movement I have described was not the only one in Europe; there were all sorts of others. With the spread of Islam and the Arabs other creeds made themselves felt in Europe, and something of that creed which I yesterday called the Manichaean had remained all over the continent. But there was also, for instance, what we know as “Representation” through the doctrine of Averroës from the twelfth century, who said: The product of a man's pure intellect belongs, not specially to him, but to all humanity. Averroës says: We have not each a mind; we each have a body, but not each a mind. A has his own body, but his mind is the same as B has and C has. We might say: Averroës sees mankind as with a single intellect, a single mind; all individuals are merged in it. There they live, as it were, with the head. When they die, the body is withdrawn from this universal mind. There is no immortality in the sense of individual continuation after death. What continues, is the universal mind, that which is common to all men.

For Thomas the problem was that he had to reckon with the universality of mind, but he had to take the point of view that the universal mind is not so closely united with the universal memory in separate beings, but rather during life with the active forces of the bodily organization; and so united, forming such a unity, that everything working in man as the formative vegetable, and animal powers, as the power of memory, is attracted, as it were, during life by the universal mind and disposition. Thus Thomas imagines it, that man attracts the individual through the universal, and then draws into the spiritual world what his universal had attracted; so that he takes it there with him. You perceive, there can be no pre-existence for Albertus Magnus and Thomas, though there can be an after-existence. This was, after all, the same for Aristotle, and in this respect Aristotelianism is also continued in these thinkers.

In this way the great logical questions of the universals join up with the questions which concern the world-destiny of each individual. And even if I were to describe to you the Cosmology of Thomas Aquinas and the natural history of Albertus, which is extraordinarily wide-reaching, over almost all provinces and in countless volumes, you would see everywhere the influence of what I called the general logical nature of Albertinism and Thomism. And this logical nature consisted in this: with our reason—what was then called the Intellect—we cannot attain all heights; up to a certain point we can reach everything through logical acumen and dialectic, but then we have to enter into the region of faith. Thus as I have described it, these two things stand face to face, without contradicting each other: What we understand with our reason, and what is revealed through faith can exist side by side.

What does this really entail? I believe we can tackle this question from very different sides. What have we here before us historically as the essence of Albertinism and of Thomism? It is really characteristic of Thomas, and important, that while he is straining reason to prove the existence of God, he has to add at the same time that one arrives at a picture of God as it was rightly represented in the Old Testament as Jahve. That is, when Thomas departs from the paths of reason open to the individual human soul, he arrives at that unified God whom the Old Testament calls the Jahve-God. If one wants to arrive at the Christ, one has to pass over to faith; the individual spiritual experience of the human soul is not sufficient to attain to Him.

Now in the arguments which Scholasticism had to face (the spirit of the age demanded it), in these theories of the double truth—that a thing could be theologically true and philosophically false—there still lay something deeper; something which perhaps could not be seen in an age in which everywhere rationalism and logic were the pursuit of mankind. And it was the following: that those who spoke of this double truth were not of the opinion that what is theologically revealed and what is to be reached by reason are ultimately two things, but for the time being they are two truths, and that man arrives at these two truths because he has to the innermost part of his soul, shared in the faith. In the background of the soul up to the time of Albertus and Thomas flows, as it were, this question: Have we not assumed original sin in our thought, in what we see as reason in ourselves? Is it not just because reason has fallen from its spirituality that it deceives us with counterfeit truth for the real truth? If Christ enters our reason, or something else which it transforms and develops further, then only is it brought into harmony with that truth which is the content of faith.

The sinfulness of the reason was, in a way, responsible for the thinkers before Albertus and Thomas speaking of two truths. They wanted to take the doctrine of original sin and redemption through Christ seriously. But they had not the thinking power and the logic for it, though they were serious about it. They put the question to themselves: How does Christ redeem in us the truth of the reason which contradicts revealed spiritual truth? How do we become Christians through and through? For our reason is already vitiated through original sin, and therefore it contradicts the pure truth of faith.

And now appeared Albertus and Thomas, and to them it appeared first of all wrong that if we steep ourselves purely logically in the universalia in rebus, and if we take to ourselves the reality in things, we should launch forth in sinfulness over the world. It is impossible that the ordinary reason should be sinful. In this scholastic question lies really the question of Christology. And the question Scholasticism could not answer was: How does Christ enter into human thought? How is human thought permeated with Christ? How does Christ lead human thought up into those spheres where it can coalesce with spiritual faith-content? These things were the real driving force in the souls of the Schoolmen. Therefore, it is before all things important, although Scholasticism possessed the most perfect logical technique not to take the results, but to look through the answer to the question; that we ignore the achievements of the men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and look at the large problems which were then propounded. They were not yet far enough to be able to apply the redemption of man from original sin to human thought. Therefore, Albertus and Thomas had to deny reason the right to mount the steps which would have enabled them to enter into the spiritual world itself. And Scholasticism left behind it the question: How can human thought develop itself upward to a view of the spiritual world? The most important outcome of Scholasticism is even a question, and is not its existing content. It is the question: How does one carry Christology into thought? How is thought made Christ-like? At the moment when Thomas Aquinas died in 1274 this question, historically speaking, confronted the world. Up to that moment he had been able to get only as far as this question. What is to become of it, one can for the time being only indicate by saying: man penetrates up to a certain point into the spiritual nature of things, but after that point comes faith. And the two must not contradict each other; they must be in harmony. But the ordinary reason cannot of its own accord comprehend the content of the highest things, as, for example, the Trinity, the incarnation of the Christ in the man Jesus, etc. Reason can comprehend only as much as to say: the world could have been created in Time, but it could also have existed from eternity. But revelation says it has been created in Time, and if you ask Reason again you find the grounds for thinking that the creation in Time is the rational and the wiser answer.

Thus the Scholiast takes his place for all the ages. More than one thinks, there survives to-day in Science, in the whole public life of the present what Scholasticism has left to us, although it is in a particular form. How alive Scholasticism really is still in our souls, and what attitude man to-day must adopt towards it, of this we shall speak tomorrow.

Yesterday I endeavoured at the conclusion of our consideration of Scholasticism to point out how in a current of thought the most important things are the problems which presented themselves in a quite definite way to the human soul, and which, when you think of it, really all culminated in the desire to know: How does man attain the knowledge which is essential to his life, and how does this knowledge join up with that which at the time governed the dispositions of men in a social aspect? How does the knowledge which can be won join up with the contents of faith of the Christian Church in the West? The militant Scholiasts had to deal first of all with human individuality which, as we have seen, emerged more and more, but which was no longer in a position to carry the experience of knowledge up to the point of real, concrete, spirit-content, as it still flickered in the course of time from what survived of Neoplatonism, of the Areopagite, of Scotus Erigena. I have also pointed out that the impulses set in motion by Scholasticism still continued in a certain way. They continued, so that one can say: The problems themselves are great, and the manner in which they were propounded (we saw this yesterday) had great influence for a long time. And, in point of fact—and this is to be precisely the subject of to-day's study—the influence of what was then the greatest problem—the relationship of men to sensory and spiritual reality—is still felt, even if in quite a different form, even if it is not always obvious, and even if it takes to-day a form entirely contrary to Scholasticism. Its influence still lives. It is still all there to a large extent in the spiritual activities of to-day, but distinctly altered by the work of important people in the meantime on the European trend of human development in the philosophical sphere. We see at once, if we go from Thomas Aquinas to the Franciscan monk who originated probably in Ireland and at the beginning of the fourteenth century taught at Paris and Cologne, Duns Scotus, we see at once, when we get to him, how the problem has, so to speak, become too large even for all the wonderful, intensive thought-technique which survived from the age of the real master-ship in thought-technique—the age of Scholasticism. The question that again faced Duns Scotus was as follows: How does the psychic part of man live in the physical organism of man? Thomas Aquinas' view was still—as I explained yesterday—that he considered the psychic as working itself into the physical. When through conception and birth man enters upon the physical existence, he is equipped by means of his physical inheritance only with the vegetative powers, with all the mineral powers and with those of physical comprehension; but that without pre-existence the real intellect, the active intellect, that which Aristotle called the “nous poieticos” enters into man. But, as Thomas sees it, this nous poieticos absorbs as it were all the psychic element, the vegetative-psychic and the animal-psychic and imposes itself on the corporeality in order to transpose that in its entirety—and then to combine living for ever with what it had won, from the human body, into which it had itself entered, though without pre-existence, from eternal heights. Duns Scotus cannot believe that such an absorption of the whole dynamic system of the human being takes place through the active understanding. He can only imagine that the human bodily make-up exists as something complete; that the vegetative and animal principles remain through the whole of life in a certain independence, and are thrown off with death, and that really only the spiritual principle, the intellectus agens, enters into immortality. Equally little can he imagine the idea which Thomas Aquinas toyed with: the permeation of the whole body with the human-psychic-spiritual element*. Scotus can imagine it as little as his pupil William of Occam, who died at Munich in the fourteenth century, the chief thing about him being that he returned to Nominalism. For Scotus the human understanding had become something abstract, something which no longer represented the spiritual world, but as being won by reflection, by observation of the senses. He could no longer imagine that Reality was the product only of the universals, of ideas. He fell back again into Nominalism, and returned to the view that what establishes itself in man as ideas, as general conceptions, is conceived only out of the physical world around him, and that it is really only something which lives in the human spirit—I might say—for the sake of a convenient comprehension of existence—as Name, as words. In short, he returned again to Nominalism.

That is really a significant fact, for we see: Nominalism, as for instance Roscelin expounds it—and in his case the Trinity itself broke in pieces on account of his Nominalism—is interrupted only by the intensive thought activity of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others, and then Europe soon relapses again into the Nominalism which is really the incapacity of human individuality, ever struggling to rise higher and higher to comprehend as a spiritual reality something which is present in its spirit in the form of ideas; so to comprehend it as something which lives in man and in a certain way also in things. Ideas, from being realities, become again Names, merely empty abstractions.

You see the difficulties which European thought encountered in greater and greater degree when it opened up the quest of knowledge. For in the long run we human beings must acquire knowledge through ideas—at any rate, in the first stages of knowledge we are bound to make use of ideas. The big question must always crop up again: How do ideas enable us to attain reality? But, substantially, an answer becomes impossible if ideas appear to us merely as names without reality. And these ideas, which in Ancient Greece, or, at any rate, in initiated Greece were the final demonstration, coming down from above, of a real spirit world, these ideas became ever more and more abstract for the European consciousness. And this process of becoming abstract, of ideas becoming words, we see perpetually increasing as we follow further the development of Western thought. Individuals stand out later, and for example Leibnitz, who actually does not touch upon the question whether ideas lead to knowledge. He is still in possession of a traditional point of view and ascribes everything to individual world-monads, which are really spiritual. Leibnitz towers over the others because he has the courage to expound the world as spiritual. Yes, the world is spiritual; it consists of a multitude of spiritual beings. But I might say that that particular thing which in a former age, with, it is true, a more distinctive knowledge not yet illuminated by such a logic as Scholasticism had, that moreover which meant in such an age differentiated spiritual individuals, was for Leibnitz a series of graduated spiritual points, the monads. Individuality is saved, but only in the form of the monads, in the form, as it were, of a spiritual, indivisible, elemental point. If we exclude Leibnitz, we see in the whole West an intensive struggle for certainty concerning the origins of existence, but at the same time an incapacity everywhere really to solve the Nominalism problem.

This is particularly met with in the thinker who is rightly placed at the beginning of the new philosophy, in the thinker Descartes, who lived at the opening or in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn everywhere in the history of philosophy the basis of Cartesian philosophy in the sentence: Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. There is something of Augustine's effort in this sentence. For Augustine struggles out of that doubt of which I have spoken in the first lecture, when he says: I can doubt everything, but the fact of doubt remains and I live all the same while I doubt. I can doubt the existence of concrete things round me, I can doubt the existence of God, of clouds and stars, but not the existence of the doubt in me. I cannot doubt what goes on in my soul. There is something certain, a certain starting point to get hold of. Descartes takes up this thought again—I think, therefore I am. In such things one is, of course, exposed to grave misunderstandings, if one has to set something simple against something historically recognized. But it is necessary. Descartes and many of his followers—and in this respect he had innumerable followers—considers the idea: if I have a thought-content in any consciousness, if I think, I cannot get over the fact that I do think. Therefore, I am, therefore my existence is assured through my thinking. My roots are, so to speak, in the world-existence, as I have assured my existence through my thought. So modern philosophy really begins as Intellectualism, as Rationalism, as something which wants to use thought as its instrument, and to this extent is only the echo of Scholasticism, which had taken the turning towards Intellectualism so energetically.

Two things we observe about Descartes. First, there is necessarily the simple objection: Is my existence really established by the fact that I think? All sleep proves the contrary. We know every morning when we awake that we must have existed from the evening before to the morning, but we have not been thinking. So the sentence: I think, therefore I am—cogito ergo sum—is in this simple way disproved. This simple fact, which is, I might say, a kind of Columbus' egg, must be set against this famous sentence which found an uncommon amount of success. That is one thing to say about Descartes. The other is the question: What is the real objective of all his philosophic effort? It is no longer directed towards a view of life, or receiving a cosmic secret for the consciousness, it is really turned towards something entirely intellectualistic and concerned with thought. It is directed to the question: How do I gain certainty? How do I overcome doubt? How do I find out that things exist and that I myself exist? It is no longer a material question, a question concerned with the continual results of observing the world, it is a question rather that concerns the certainty of knowledge. This question arises out of the Nominalism of the Schoolmen, which only Albertus and Thomas suppressed for a certain time, but which after them appeared again. And so these people can only give a name to what is hidden in their souls in order to find somewhere in them a point from which they can make for themselves, not a picture or conception of the world, but the certainty that not everything is deception and untruth; that when one looks out upon the world one sees a reality and when one looks inward upon the soul one also sees a reality. In all this is clearly noticeable what I pointed to yesterday in conclusion, namely, that human individuality has arrived at intellectualism, but has not yet felt the Christ-problem. The Christ-problem occurs for Augustine because he still looks at the whole of humanity. Christ begins to dawn in the human soul, to dawn, I might say, on the Christian Mystics of the Middle Ages; but he does not dawn clearly on those who sought to find him by that thought which is so necessary to individuality—or by what this thought would produce. This process of thought as it comes forth from the human soul in its original condition is such that it rejects precisely what ought to have been the Christian idea for the innermost part of man; it rejects the transformation, the inner metamorphosis; it refuses to take the attitude towards the life of knowledge in which one would say: yes, I think and I think first of all concerning myself and the world. But this kind of thought is still very undeveloped. This thought is, as it were, the kind that exists after the Fall. It must rise above itself. It must be transformed and be raised into a higher sphere. As a matter of fact, this necessity has only once clearly flashed up in one great thinker, and that is in Spinoza, follower of Descartes. Spinoza really did make a deep impression on people like Herder and Goethe with good reason. For Spinoza, although he is still completely buried apparently in the intellectualism which survived or had survived in another form from the Scholiasts, still understands this intellectualism in such a way that man can finally come to the truth—which for Spinoza is ultimately a kind of intuition—by transforming the intellectual, inner, thinking, soul-life, not by being content with everyday life or the ordinary scientific life. And so Spinoza reaches the point of saying to himself: This thought replenishes itself with spiritual content through the development of thought itself.. The spiritual world, which we learned to know in Plotinism, yields again, as it were, to thought, if this thought tends to run counter to the spirit. Spirit replenishes thought as intuition. And I consider it is very interesting that this is what Spinoza says: If we survey the existence of the world, how it continues to develop in its highest substance, in spirit, how we then receive this spirit in the soul by raising ourselves by thought to intuition, by being so intellectualistic that we can prove things as surely as mathematics, but in the proof develop ourselves at the same time and continue to rise so that the spirit can come to meet us, if we can rise to this height, then, from this angle of vision we can comprehend the historic process of what lies behind the evolution of mankind. And it is remarkable that the following sentence stands out from the writings of the Jew Spinoza: The highest revelation of divine substance is given in Christ. In Christ intuition has become Theophany, the incarnation of God, and the voice of Christ is therefore in truth the voice of God and the path to salvation. In other words, the Jew Spinoza comes to the conclusion that man can so develop himself by his intellectualism, that the spirit comes down to him. If he is then in a position to apply himself to the mystery of Golgotha, then the filling with the spirit becomes not only intuition, that is, the appearance of the spirit through thought, but intuition changes into Theophany, into the appearance of God Himself. Man is on the spiritual path to God. One might say that Spinoza was not reticent about what he suddenly realized, as this expression shows. But it fills what he had thus discovered from the evolution of humanity with a kind of tune, a kind of undercurrent of sound, it completes his Ethics.

And once more it is taken up by a sensitive human being. We can realize that for somebody who could also certainly read between the lines of this Ethics who could sense in his own heart the heart that lives in this Ethics, in short, that for Goethe this book of Spinoza's became the standard. These things should not be looked at so purely abstractly, as is usually done in the history of philosophy. They should be viewed from the human standpoint, and we must look at the spark of Spinozism which entered Goethe's soul. But actually what can be read between Spinoza's lines did not become a dominating force. What became important was the incapacity to get away from Nominalism. And Nominalism next becomes such that one might say: Man gets ever more and more entangled in the thought: I live in something which the outer world cannot comprehend, a something which cannot leave me to sink into the outer world and take upon itself something of its nature. And so it is that this feeling, that one is so isolated, that one cannot get away from oneself and receive something from the outer world, is already to be found in Locke in the seventeenth century. Locke's formula was: That which we observe as colours, as tones in the outer world is no longer something which leads us to reality; it is only the effect of the outer world on our senses; it is something in which we ourselves are wrapped also, in our own subjectivity. That is one side of the question.

The other side is seen in such minds as that of Francis Bacon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where Nominalism becomes such a penetrating philosophy that it leads him to say: one must do away with man's false belief in a reality which is, in point of fact, only a name. We have reality only when we look out upon the world of the senses, which alone supply realities through empiric knowledge. By the side of these, those realities on which Albertus and Thomas have built up their theory of rational knowledge play no longer a really scientific part. In Bacon the spiritual world has, so to speak, evaporated into something which can no longer well up from man's inmost heart with the certainty and safety of a science. The spiritual world becomes the subject of faith, which is not to be touched by what is called knowledge and learning. On the contrary, knowledge is to be won only by external observation and by experiment, which is, after all, only a more spiritual kind of external observation.

And so it goes on till Hume, in the eighteenth century, for whom the connection between cause and effect becomes something which lives only in human subjectivity, which men attribute to things from a sort of external habit. We see that Nominalism, the heir of Scholasticism, weighs down humanity like a mountain. What is primarily the most important sign of this development?

The most important sign is surely this, that Scholasticism stands there with its hard logic, that it arises at a time when the sum of reason is to be divided off from the sum of truth concerning the spiritual world. The Scholiast's problem was, on the one hand, to examine this sum of truth concerning the spiritual world, which, of course, was handed down to him through the faith and revelation of the Church. On the other hand, he had to examine the possible results of man's own human knowledge. The point of view of the Scholiasts overlooked at first the change of front which the course of time and nothing else had made necessary. When Thomas and Albertus had to develop their philosophies, there was as yet no scientific view of the world. There had been no Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus or Kepler; the forces of human understanding had not yet been directed to external nature. At that time there was no cause for controversy between what the human reason can discover from the depth of the soul and what can be learned from the outer empiric sense-world. The question was only between the results of rational thought and the spiritual truths as handed down by the Church to men who could no longer raise themselves through individual development to this wisdom in its reality, but who saw it in the form handed down by the Church simply as tradition, as Scripture, etc. Does not the question now really arise: What is the relation between the rationalism, as developed by Albertus and Thomas in their theory of knowledge, and the teaching of the natural scientific view of the world? We may say that from now on the struggle was indecisive up to the eighteenth century.

And here we find something very remarkable. When we look back into the thirteenth century and see Albertus and Thomas leading humanity across the frontiers of rational knowledge as contrasted with faith and revelation, we see how they show step by step that revelation yields only to a certain part of rational human knowledge, and remains outside this knowledge, an eternal riddle. We can count these riddles—the Incarnation—the filling with the Spirit at the Sacraments, etc.—which lie on the further side of human knowledge. As they see it, man stands on one side, surrounded as it were by the boundaries of knowledge, and unable to look into the spiritual world. This is the situation in the thirteenth century. And now let us take a look at the nineteenth century. We see a remarkable fact: in the seventies, at a famous conference of Natural Scientists at Leipzig, Dubois-Raymond gave his impressive address on the boundaries of Nature-Knowledge and soon afterwards on the seven world-riddles.

What has the problem now become? There is man, here is the boundary of knowledge; but beyond the boundary lies the material world, the atoms, everything of which Dubois-Raymond says: We do not know what this is that moves in space as material. And on this side lies that which is evolved in the human soul. Even if, compared with the imposing work which shines as Scholasticism from the Middle Ages, this contribution of Dubois-Raymond, which we find in the seventies is a trifle, still it is the real antithesis: there the search for the riddles of the spiritual world, here the search for the riddles of the material world; here the dividing line between human beings and atoms, there between human beings and angels and God. We must examine this gap of time if we want to see all this that crops up as a consequence, immediate or remote, of Scholasticism. From this Scholasticism the Kantian philosophy comes into being, as something important at best for the history of the period. This philosophy, influenced by Hume, still has to-day a hold on philosophers, since after its partial decline, the Germans raised the cry in the sixties, “Back to Kant!” And from that time an uncountable number of books on Kant have been published, and independent Kantians like Volkelt, Cohen, etc.—one could mention a whole host—have appeared.

To-day we can, of course, give only a sketch of Kant; we need only point out what is important in him for us. I do not think that anyone who really studies Kant can find him other than as I have tried to depict him in my small paper Truth and Knowledge. At the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies of the eighteenth century Kant's problem is not the content-problem of world-philosophy in full force, not something which might have appeared for him in definite forms, images, concepts, and ideas concerning objects, but rather his problem is the formal knowledge-question: How do we gain certainty concerning anything in the outer world, concerning the existence of anything? Kant is more worried about certainty of knowledge than about any content of knowledge. One feels this surely in his Critic. Read his “Critic of Pure Reason,” his “Critic of Practical Reason,” and see how, after the chapter on Space and Time, which is in a sense classic, you come to the categories, enumerated entirely pedantically, only, we may say, to give the whole a certain completeness. In truth the presentation of this “Critic of Pure Reason” has not the fluency of someone writing sentence on sentence with his heart's blood.

For Kant the question of what is the relation of what we call concepts, of what is in fact, the whole content of knowledge to an external reality, is much more important than this content of knowledge itself. The content he pieces together, as it were, from everything philosophic which he has inherited. He makes schemes and systems. But everywhere the question crops up: How does one get certainty, the kind of certainty which one gets in mathematics? And he gets such certainty in a manner which actually is nothing else than Nominalism, changed, it is true, and unusually concealed and disguised—a Nominalism which is stretched to include the forms of material nature, space and time, as well as universal ideas. He says: that particular thing which we develop in our soul as the content of knowledge has nothing really to do with anything we derive from things. We merely make it cover things. We derive the whole form of our knowledge from ourselves. If we say event A is related to event B by the principle of causation, this principle is only in ourselves. We make it cover A and B, the two experiences.

We apply causality to things. In other words, paradoxical though it sounds—though it is paradoxical only historically in face of the vast following of Kant's philosophy—we shall have to say: Kant seeks the principle of certainty by denying that we derive the content of our knowledge from things and assuming that we derive it from ourselves and then apply it to things. This means—and here is the paradox—we have truth, because we make it ourselves, we have subjective truth, because we produce it ourselves. And it is we who instil truth into things. There you have the final consequence of Nominalism. Scholasticism strove with universals, with the question: What form of existence do the ideas we have in ourselves, have in the outer world? It could not arrive at a real solution of the problem which would have been completely satisfactory. Kant says: All right. Ideas are merely names. We form them only in ourselves but we see them as names to cover things; whereby they become reality. They may not be reality by a long way, but I push the “name” on to the experience and make it reality, for experience must be such as I ordain by applying to it a “name.”

Thus Kantianism is in a certain way the expansion of Nominalism, in a certain way the most extreme point and in a certain way the extreme collapse of Western philosophy, the complete bankruptcy of man in regard to his search for truth, despair that one can in any way learn truth from things. Hence the saying: Truth can exist only in things if we ourselves instil it into them. Kant has destroyed all objectivity and all man's possibility of getting down to the truth in things. He has destroyed all possible knowledge, all possible search for truth, for truth cannot exist only subjectively.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a consequence of Scholasticism, because it could not acquiesce in the other side, where there appeared another boundary to be crossed. Just because there emerged the age of Natural Science, to which Scholasticism did not adapt itself, Kantianism came on the scene, which ended really as subjectivity, and then from subjectivity in which it extinguished all knowledge, sprouted the so-called Postulates—Freedom, Immortality, and the Idea of God. We are meant to do the good, to obey the categoric imperative, and so we must be able to. That is, we must be free, but as we live here in the physical body, we cannot be. We do not attain perfection so that we may carry out the categoric imperative, till we are clear of the body. Therefore, there must be immortality. But even then we cannot realize it as human beings. Everything we are concerned with in the world, if we do what we ought to, can be regulated only by a Godhead. Therefore, there must be a Godhead. Three postulates of faith, whose source in Reality it is impossible to know—such is the extent of Kant's certainty, according to his own saying: I had to annihilate knowledge in order to make room for faith. And Kant now does not make room for faith-content in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, for a traditional faith-content, but for an abstract one: Freedom, Immortality, and the Idea of God; for a faith-content brought forth from the human individual dictating truth, that is, the appearance of it.

So Kant becomes the fulfiller of Nominalism. He is the philosopher who really denies man everything he could have which would enable him to get down to any kind of Reality. This accounts for the rapid reaction against Kant which for example, Fichte, and then Schelling, and then Hegel produced, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century. You need only look at Fichte and see how he was necessarily urged on to an experience of the soul that became more intensive and, one might say, ever more and more mystical in order to escape from Kantianism. Fichte could not even believe that Kant could have meant what is contained in the Kantian Critics. He believed at the beginning, with a certain philosophic naïveté that he drew only the final conclusion of the Kantian philosophy. His idea was that if you did not draw the “final conclusions,” you would have to believe that this philosophy had been pieced together by a most amazing chance, certainly not by a thoughtful human brain. All this is apart from the movement in Western civilization caused by the growth of Natural Science, which enters upon the scene as a reaction in the middle of the nineteenth century. This movement takes no count at all of Philosophy and therefore degenerated in many thinkers into gross materialism. And so we see how the philosophic development goes on, unfolding itself into the last third of the nineteenth century. We see this philosophic effort coming completely to nothing and we see then how the attempt came about, from every possibility which one could find in Kantianism and similar philosophies, to understand something of what is actually real in the world. Goethe's general view of life which would have been so important, had it been understood, was completely lost for the nineteenth century, except among those whose leanings were toward Schelling, Hegel and Fichte. For in this philosophy of Goethe's lay the beginning of what Thomism must become, if its attitude towards Natural Science were changed, for he rises to the heights of modern civilization, and is, indeed, a real force in the current of development.

Thomas could get no further than the abstract affirmation that the psychic-spiritual really has its effect on every activity of the human organism. He expressed it thus: Everything, even the vegetative activities, which exists in the human body is directed by the psychic and must be acknowledged by the psychic. Goethe makes the first step in the change of attitude in his Theory of Colour, which in consequence is not in the least understood; in his Morphology, in his Theory of Plants and Animals. We shall, however, not have a complete fulfilment of Goethe's ideas till we have a spiritual science which can of itself provide an explanation of the facts of Natural Science.

A few weeks ago I tried here to show how our spiritual science is seeking to range itself as a corrective side by side with Natural Science—let us say with regard to the theory of the heart. The mechanico-materialistic view has likened the heart to a pump, which drives the blood through the human body. It is the opposite; the blood circulation is living—Embryology can prove it, if it wishes—and the heart is set in action by the movement of the blood. The heart is the instrument by which the blood-activity ultimately asserts itself, by which it is absorbed into the whole human individuality. The activity of the heart is a result of blood-activity, not vice-versa. And so, as was shown here in detail in a Course for Doctors we can show with regard to each organ of the body, how the realization of man as a spirit-being really explains his material element. We can in a way make real the thing that appeared dimly in abstract form to Thomism, when it said: The spiritual-psychic permeates all the physical body. That becomes concrete, real knowledge. The Thomistic philosophy, which in the thirteenth century still had an abstract form, by rekindling itself from Goethe continues to live on in our day as Spiritual Science.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I may interpose here a personal experience, it is as follows: it is meant merely as an illustration. When at the end of the eighties I spoke in the “Wiener Goethe-Verein” on the subject “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic,” there was in the audience a very learned Cistercian. I can speak about this address, for it has appeared in a new edition. I explained how one had to take Goethe's presentation of Art, and then this Father Wilhelm Neumann, the Cistercian, who was also Professor of Theology at Vienna University, made this curious remark: “The germ of this address, which you have given us to-day, lies already in Thomas Aquinas!” It was an extraordinarily interesting experience for me to hear from Father Wilhelm Neumann that he found in Thomas something like a germ of what was said then concerning Goethe's views on Aesthetics; he was, of course, highly trained in Thomism, because it was after the appearance of Neo-Thomism within the Catholic clergy. One must put it thus: The appearance of things when seen in accordance with truth is quite different from the appearance when seen under the influence of a powerless nominalistic philosophy which to a large extent harks back to Kant and the modern physiology based on him. And in the same way you would find several things, if you studied Spiritual Science. Read in my Riddles of the Soul which came out many years ago, how I there attempted as the result of thirty years' study, to divide human existence into three parts, and how I tried to show there, how one part of the physical human body is connected with the thought and sense organization; how the rhythmic system, all that pertains to the breathing and the heart activity, is connected with the system of sensation, and how the chemical changes are connected with the volition system: the attempt is made, throughout, to recover the spiritual-psychic as creative force. That is, the change of front towards Natural Science is seriously made. After the age of Natural Science, I try to penetrate into the realm of natural existence, just as before the age of Scholasticism, of Thomism—we have seen it in the Areopagite and in Plotinus—human knowledge was used to penetrate into the spiritual realm. The Christ-principle is dealt with seriously after the change of front—as it would have been, had one said: human thought can change, so that it really can press upwards, if it discards the inherited limitation of knowledge and develops through pure non-sensory thought upward to the spiritual world. What we see as Nature can be penetrated as the veil of natural existence. One presses on beyond the limit of knowledge, which a dualism believed it necessary to set up, as the Schoolmen set up the limit on the other side—one penetrates into this material world and discovers that this is in fact the spiritual world, that behind the veil of Nature there are in truth not material atoms, but spiritual beings. This shows you how progressive thought deals with a continued development of Thomism in the Middle Ages. Turn to the most important abstract psychological thoughts of Albertus and Thomas. There, it is true, they do not go so far as to say concerning the physical body, how the spirit or the soul react on the heart, on the spleen, on the liver, etc., but they point out already that the whole human body must be considered to have originated from the spiritual-psychic. The continuation of this thought is the task of really tracing the spiritual-psychic into each separate part of the physical organization. Philosophy has not done this, nor Natural Science: it can only be done by a Spiritual Science, which does not hesitate to bring into our time thoughts, such as those of the high Scholiasts which are looked upon as great thoughts in the evolution of humanity, and apply them to all the contributions of our time in Natural Science. It necessitates, it is true, if the matter is to have a scientific basis, a divorce from Kantianism.

This divorce from Kantianism I have attempted first in my small book Truth and Science, years ago, in the eighties, in my Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, and then again in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Quite shortly and without consideration for the fact that things, when they are cursorily presented appear difficult, I should like to put before you the basic ideas to be found in these books. They start from the thought that truth cannot directly be found, at any rate in the observed world which is spread round about us. We see in a way how Nominalism infects the human soul, how it can assume the false conclusions of Kantianism, but how Kant certainly did not see the point with which these books seriously deal. This is, that a study of the visible world, if undertaken quite objectively and thoroughly leads to the knowledge that this world is not a whole. This world emerges as something which is real only through us. What, then, caused the difficulty of Nominalism? What gave rise to the whole of Kantianism? This, the visible world is taken and observed and then we spread over it the world of ideas through the soul-life. Now there we have the view, that this idea-world is to reproduce external observations. But the idea-world is in us. What has it to do with what is outside? Kant could answer this question only thus: By spreading the idea-world over the visible world, we make truth.

But it is not so. It is like this. If we consider the process of observation with an unprejudicial mind, it is incomplete, it is nowhere self-contained. I tried hard to prove this in my book Truth and Science, and afterwards in aThe Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. As we have been placed in the world, as we are born into it, we split the world in two. The fact is that we have the world-content, as it were, here with us. Since we come into the world as human beings, we divide the world-content into observation, which appears to us from outside, and the idea-world which appears to us from the inner soul. Anyone who regards this division as an absolute one, who simply says: there is the world, here am I—such a one cannot cross at all with his idea-world to the external world. The matter is this: I look at the visible world, it is everywhere incomplete. Something is wanting everywhere. I myself have with my whole existence arisen out of the world, to which the visible world also belongs. Then I look into myself, and what I see thus is just what is lacking in the visible world. I have to join together through my own self, since I have entered the world, what has been separated into two branches. I gain reality by working for it. Through the fact that I was born arises the appearance that what is really one is divided into two branches, outward perception and idea world. By the fact that I am alive and grow, I unite the two currents of reality. I work myself to reality by my acquiring knowledge. I should never have become conscious if I had never, through my entry into the world, separated the idea-world off from the outer world of perception. But I should never find the bridge to the world, if I did not bring the idea-world, which I have separated off, into unity again with that which, without it, is no reality.

Kant seeks reality only in outer perception and does not see that the other half of this reality is in us. The idea-world which we have in us, we have first torn from external reality. Nominalism is now at an end, for now we do not spread Space and Time and ideas, which are only “Nomina” over our external perception, but we return to it in our knowledge what we took from it on entering into our earth existence.

Thus is revealed to us the relation of man to the spiritual world in a purely philosophical form. And he who reads my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, which rests entirely on the basis of this knowledge-theory of the nature of reality, of this transference of life into reality through human knowledge, he who takes up this basis, which is expressed already in the title of Truth and Science, that real science unites perceptions and the idea-world and sees in this union not only an ideal but a real process; he who can see something of a world-process in this union of the perception and idea-worlds—is in a position to overthrow Kantianism. He is also in a position to solve the problem which we saw opening up in the course of Western civilization, which produced Nominalism and in the thirteenth century threw out several scholastic lights but which finally stood powerless before the division into perception and idea-world.

Now one approaches this problem of individuality on ethical ground, and hence my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has become the philosophy of reality. Since the acquisition of knowledge is not merely a formal act, but a reality-process, ethical, moral behaviour appears as an effluence of that which the individual experiences in a real process through moral fantasy as Intuition; and there results, as set forth in the second part of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, the Ethical Individualism, which in fact is built upon the Christ-impulse in man, though this is not expressed in the book. It is built upon the spiritual activity man wins for himself by changing ordinary thinking into what I called “pure thinking,” which rises to the spiritual world and there produces the stimulus to moral behaviour. The reason for this is that the impulse of love, which is otherwise bound to the physical man, becomes spiritualized, and because the moral ideals are borrowed from the spiritual world through the moral phantasy, they express themselves in all their force and become the force of spiritual love. Therefore, the Philistine-Principle of Kant had to be resisted. Duty! thou exalted name, that knowest nothing of flattery, but demandest strict obedience—against this Philistine-Principle, against which Schiller had already revolted, the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity had to set the “transformed Ego,” which has developed up into the spheres of spirituality and up there begins to love virtue, and therefore practises virtue, because it loves it of its own individuality.

Thus we have a real world-content instead of something which remained for Kant merely a faith-content. For Kant the acquisition of knowledge is something formal, for the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, it is something real. It is a real process. And therefore the higher morality is linked to a reality—but a reality to which the “Wertphilosophen” like Windelband and Rickert do not attain at all, because they do not see how what is morally valuable is implanted in the world. Naturally those people who do not regard the process of knowledge as a real process, also fail to provide an anchorage for morality in the world, and arrive, in short, at no kind of Reality-Philosophy. The philosophical basic principles of what we call here Spiritual Science have really been drawn from the whole course of Western philosophical development. I have to-day tried really to show you how that Cistercian Father was not altogether wrong, and in what way the attempt lies before us to reconcile the realistic elements of Scholasticism with this age of Natural Science through a Spiritual Science, how we laid stress on the transformation of the human soul and with the real installation of the Christ-impulse into it, even in the thought-life. The life of knowledge is made into a real factor in world-evolution and the scene of its fulfilment is the human consciousness alone—as I explained in my book, Goethe's Philosophy. But this, which is thus fulfilled is at the same time a world-process, it is an occurrence in the world, and it is this occurrence that brings the world, and us within it, forward. So the problem of knowledge takes on quite another form. Now our experience becomes a factor of spiritual-psychic development in ourselves. Just as magnetism functions on the shape of iron filings, so there functions on us that which is reflected in us as knowledge; it functions at the same time as our form-principle, and we grow to realize the immortal, the eternal in ourselves, and the problem of knowledge ceases to be merely formal. This problem used always, borrowing from Kantianism, to be put in such a way that one said: How does man come to see a reproduction of the external world in this inner world? But knowledge is not in the least there for the purpose of reproducing the external world, but to develop us, and such reproduction of the external world is a secondary process.

In the external world we suffer a combination in a secondary process of what we have divided into two by the fact of our birth, and with the modern problem of knowledge it is exactly as when a man has wheat or other products of the field and examines the food value of the wheat in order to study the nature of the principle of growth. Certainly one can become a food-analyst, but what function there is in wheat from the ear to the root, and still further, cannot be known through the chemistry of food values. That investigates only something which follows the continuous growth which is inherent in the plant.

So there is a similar growth of spiritual life in us, which strengthens us, and has something to do with our nature, just like the development of the plant from the root through the stem, through the leaf to the bloom and the fruit, and thence again to the seed and the root. And just as the fact that we eat it must not affect the explanation of the nature of plant growth, so also the question of the knowledge-value of the growth-impulse we have in us may not be the basis of a theory of knowledge; rather it must be clear that what we call in external life knowledge is a secondary result of the work of ideas in our human nature. Here we come to the reality of that which is ideal; it works in us. The false Nominalism and Kantianism arose only because the problem of knowledge was put in the same way as the problem of the nature of wheat would be from the point of view of bio-chemistry.

Thus we can say: when you once realize what Thomism can be in our time, how it springs up from its most important achievement in the Middle Ages, then you see it springing up in its twentieth century shape in Spiritual Science, then it re-appears as Spiritual Science. And so a light is already thrown on the question: How does it look now if one comes and says: We must go back to Thomas Aquinas, he must be studied, possibly with a few critical comments, as he wrote in the thirteenth century. We see what it means sincerely and honestly to take our place in the chain of development which started with Scholasticism, and also what it means to put ourselves back into the thirteenth century, and to overlook everything that has happened since then in the course of European civilization. This is, after all, what has really happened as a result of the Papal Encyclical of 1879, which enjoins the Catholic clergy to regard the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the official one of the Catholic Church. I will not here discuss the question: Where is Thomism? for one would have to discuss, ladies and gentlemen, the question: Is the rose which I have before me, best seen if I take no notice of the bloom, and only dig into the earth, to look at the roots, and overlook the fact that from this root something is already sprung—or if I look at everything which is sprung from this root?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can answer that for yourselves. We experience all that which is of value among us as a renewal of Thomism, as it was in the thirteenth century, by the side of all that which contributes honestly to the development of Western Europe. We may ask: Where is Thomism to be found to-day? One need only put the question: What was Thomas Aquinas' attitude to the Revelation-content? He sought a relationship with it. Our need is to adapt ourselves to the revelation-content of Nature. Here we cannot rest on dogma. Here the dogma of experience, as I wrote already in the eighties of last century, must be surmounted, just as on the other side must the dogma of revelation. We must, in fact, revert to the spiritual-psychic content of man, to the idea-world which contains the transformed Christ-principle, in order again to find the spiritual world through the Christ in us, that is, in our idea-world. Are we then to rest content to leave the idea-world on the standpoint of the Fall?

Is the idea-world of the Redemption to have no part? In the thirteenth century the Christian principle of redemption could not be found in the idea-world; and therefore the idea-world was set off against the world of revelation. The advance of mankind in the future must be, not only to find the principle of redemption for the external world, but also for human reason. The unredeemed human reason alone could not raise itself into the spiritual world. The redeemed human reason which has the real relationship with Christ, this forces itself upward into the spiritual world; and this process is the Christianity of the twentieth century,—a Christianity strong enough to enter into the innermost recesses of human thinking and human soul-life.

This is no Pantheism; this is none of those things for being which it is to-day calumniated. This is the most serious Christianity, and perhaps you can see from this study of Thomas Aquinas' philosophy, even if in certain respects it was bound to digress into the realm of the abstract, how seriously Spiritual Science concerns itself with the problems of the West, how Spiritual Science always will stand on the ground of the Present, and how it can stand on no other, whatever else can be brought against it.

These remarks have been made to demonstrate that a climax of European spiritual evolution took place in the thirteenth century with High Scholasticism, and that the present age has every reason to study this climax, that there is a vast amount to be learnt from such a study, especially with regard to what we must call in the highest sense the deepening of our idea-life; so that we may leave all Nominalism behind, so that we may find again the ideas that are permeated with Christ, the Christianity which leads to the spiritual Being, from whom man is after all descended; for if man is quite honest and open with himself, nothing else can satisfy him but the consciousness of his spiritual origin.

In the first address of Rudolf Steiner's, he dwells on that moment in the history of spiritual development at which Thomas begins his life-work. The most recent movement of the time, Arabianized Aristotelianism, which “no longer contained anything of Plotinism” questioned every result of Christian thought, such as the basic concept of Augustine—of whom Thomas says that he is imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists—among them, that conception of ^“Humanity as a Whole” which was a dim reflection of the old clairvoyant vision. By the “modern” thought imbued with this Arabianism—which had broken down the bridges behind it to the spiritual world of the clairvoyant visionaries but had thrown no new bridges in front of it to the discovery of individualism on earth—by man alone, therefore, and his struggle for knowledge now become abstract, the question had to be answered from the Christian spirit-life:—What is our relationship to a world of which all we know is from conceptions which can come only from ourselves and our individuality? [pp. 40, 41.]

Let us choose a part of the “Prologue” to a work by Dionysius the Areopagite, whose historical importance is made clear in the second Address [p. 54]. It is one of many proofs in his works of his split from a Platonism which was out of date, and whose position he regarded as untenable against the new Aristotelianism.

Commentary on the Book of Dionysius “Concerning the divine names”

Prologue

…It must be pointed out that Dionysius employs an obscure style in all his writings; not because he knows no better, but on purpose, in order to protect the holy and divine doctrines from the mockery of unbelievers.

The difficulty of understanding these writings arises from several causes.

First, because Dionysius uses the style and expressions of the Platonists, to which the moderns are not accustomed. The Platonists, in their love of referring everything that is composite and material back to simple and abstract principles, set up separate species of things. They spoke of “man apart from matter,” and the same of the horse and other species of nature. They said, for instance, that this particular physically visible man is not the same as “man”; but that he is called “man” because he has a part of that separated species “man.” It follows then that a something is found in the individual physical man, which does not belong to the general human species, namely, the individual substance, and other things; but in the separated species “man” there is nothing which does not belong to the human species. Therefore, the separate man was called “man per se,” because he had in himself nothing which is not a part of humanity; and also “man in the original sense,” in so far as “being man” is carried over from separate man after the manner of participation to physical men. Thus we can also say that the separate man is above individual man, and that he is the “being man” of all physical humanity, in so far as human nature is ascribed purely to the separate man, and from him is carried over to physical humanity.

The Platonists applied such abstractions not only in their discussions on the latest species, but also to the widest range of things, such as the Good, the One, the Existing. They propounded namely a First One, which is the quintessence of Goodness and of Oneness and of Existence, and which we call God; and imagined that all other beings are called “good” or “one” or “existing” through derivation from that First One. Therefore, they named that First One the Self-Good, or the Intrinsically-Good or the First-Good, or the Super-Good, and also the goodness of all goodness, or the Being-Good, or the Quintessential Substance, in the same sense as was explained in the case of the separate man.

But this thought-technique of the Platonists does not harmonize with faith and truth in proportion as it is extended to the species which are separated from Nature; respecting what they said, however, concerning the First Principle their view is very true and in harmony with Christian belief. Therefore, Dionysius calls God at different times the Self-Good, the Super-Good, the First-Good, or the Goodness of every Good; and similarly he calls Him the Super-Life, the Super-Substance, and Arch-divine Godhead, which means the Original Divinity, since the name divinity is also received after a certain participation by certain creatures—the heavenly Hierarchies.

The second difficulty in Dionysius' form of expression comes from the fact that he uses mostly irrefutable arguments in arranging his sentences and often compresses them into few words or even into a single one.

The third difficulty is that he also often heaps word on word which might at first appear superfluous, but which reveal themselves to those who ponder them seriously enough as containing a great depth.

The process involved in the consciousness of Europeans becoming individualized is expressed in the rejection of Plotinism with its special forms separated from matter. Agreement with Plotinism in what it has to say on the subject of “The First Principle” and of the divine world of pure spirits divorced from all things of the senses is developed into a marvellous edifice of logical technique in the Commentaries on the thirteen chapters of the book Concerning the Divine Names. In this technique, applied to the visions of the Dyonistic writings is stamped out the other pole of spiritual and historical change in consciousness: “The problem, which formerly was solved by vision, is brought down into the sphere of thought” [p. 69]. The sentences with which Thomas closes the Commentary seem like a raising of the eyes from an impoverished consciousness which has gone from the security of vision to the loneliness of thought, from the departed riches of the spirit worlds of Plotinism and of Dionysius and Erigena:—

And after the explanations concerning the expressions of St. Dionysius, whose intelligence is far in advance of ours, we demand to be corrected in anything wrong we have said. But if we have said aught well, thanks are due to the giver of all good, the triune God, who lives and rules throughout all ages. Amen.

In the second address [p. 65] Rudolf Steiner shows how the most supreme problem, the “relationship of the universals to individual things,” can only be understood if we realize its connexion with the tradition, founded by the Areopagite, Plotinus, Augustine and Erigena, of the reality of an ^“intellectual world” permeated by “immaterial intellectual beings.” This background of spiritual history showing the struggle over the problem of the universal forms of being and knowing is made wonderfully clear in the quoted Commentary, especially in the 4th Chapter (on the Good, on Light, on the Beautiful, on Love, on Transports, and on Zeal) in the seventh section of which the question is examined: “What are the movements of Angels and of souls?” Thomas develops not only a knowledge-theory, but also a knowledge-Eurythmy, which, when one has once been caught up in its fanciful play, gleam also through the most abstract, theoretical thought-processes of the “Summa Theologica” or the Commentary on Aristotle. This movement playing on the understanding makes not only clear but also capable of experience how the controversy over the universals is for Thomas a problem of drawing the line between the “intellectual world” of the “immaterial, intellectual beings,” which let their lowest margins, as it were, shine down so that the human soul can experience them, and the kingdom of the human soul, bound to matter, and assigned to the “straight” understanding [p. 66]. (The universals, which in the intellectual world are circular and curve-movements, become visible to human thinking only in straight-lined projections.) There is, unfortunately no space to dwell on this knowledge-Eurythmy, with its effects of Gothic window tracery.

Instead we shall give you an exposition of the “intellectual world,” in which Thomas sees the immaterial intellectual beings, which he calls the Angels [p. 65]. This has an important historical significance, because in it purely earthly-logical concepts of the understanding are built up to contain the knowledge of a world the contents of which were formerly revealed to supernatural vision. As evidence of this really “Gothic” strife, a few passages are given from the “Compendium Theologiae,” which Thomas wrote for his fellow-monk Reginald.

It belongs to divine goodness that it bestows its own likeness on creatures ... to complete divine goodness it is fitting now not only that God is in himself good but that he leads back the other beings to goodness. God therefore imparts both qualities to the creature, that it should be in itself good and that one should lead the other to the good. Thus he brings creatures to the good the one through the other. The first are necessarily the higher creatures: for that which receives from a creator the likeness of form and creative power is more perfect than the other which receives the likeness of form, but not the creative power. Just as the moon receives the sun's light more completely—because it not only receives but itself gives light—than the shadowed bodies, which receive but give no light. Thus God guides the lower creatures through the higher ... (Chap. 124).

Because the intellectual creatures are placed over the others, it is obvious that the latter are guided by God through the former. And since among the intellectual creatures some are placed over others, the lower are guided by God through the higher. Thus it comes about that man, who has the lowest position in the order of Nature among the intellectual substances, is led through higher spirits, who because they bring divine messages to man, are therefore called Angeli, that is, Messengers. And also among the Angels the lower are governed by the higher according to the circumstance that among them various Hierarchies, that is, sacred dignities, and among the separate Hierarchies various ranks, are distinguished (Chap. 125).

And because every operation of an intellectual substance as such proceeds from the intellect, the variety of the operation, among the intellectual substances, the variety of behaviour, and the variety of rank, must be considered as resting on various types of intelligence. But the more sublime and serene the intellect is the higher and more universal is the reason which it perceives for its functionings. We speak of “higher” because the higher intellect has more universal intelligible species.

The first manner of using the intellect which intellectual substances attain derives from the fact that they have a share, in the first Cause itself, namely, in God, of the functional reasons, and consequently of its works, since God ordains the smaller activities through his reasons. And this is characteristic of the First Hierarchy, which is divided into three Orders, according to the three types of being, through which every active art shows itself: first the End, which excludes the reasons of the works; secondly, the reasons of the works, in so far as they exist in the Artist's spirit; and thirdly, the adapting of the works to the effects. Now it behoves the highest Order, in the highest good itself, which is the ultimate object of things, to be instructed in the effects; therefore, they are called “Seraphim,” from the warmth of love, for they glow at the same time, or burn: and the object of love is the good. It behoves the second Order to contemplate the effects of God's acts in his own intelligible reasons, in so far as they are in God; wherefore they are called “Cherubim,” after the fullness of knowledge. It behoves the third Order in God himself to consider how creatures share the intelligible reasons as applied to the effects, wherefore they are called “Thrones,” from having God in themselves.

The second manner of using the intellect consists in considering the reasons of the effects, so far as they lie in universal causes; and this is characteristic of the Second Hierarchy, which is also divided into three Orders according to the three types of being, which belong to the universal causes, preferably if they function according to the intellect. Of these it behoves the first to pre-ordain what is to be performed, wherefore among the active artists the highest arts are those that are thus pre-arranged, and these are called the architectonic arts; and so the first Order of this Hierarchy are named “Dominations,” for it becomes the lord to organize and ordain. The second type of the universal reasons is a Something, which gives the first urge to the work, and so has the first place in carrying it out; and therefore the second Order of this Hierarchy is called “Principalities,” according to Gregory, or “Virtues” according to Dionysius, so that they may be known as “Virtues” because the first step of a performance or operation is the most virtuous. The third, which is found in the universal causes, is something which overcomes the difficulties of performance, wherefore the third Order of this Hierarchy is that of the “Powers” whose office is to overpower everything which could stand in the way of the execution of the divine command, and for this reason we ascribe to them also the task of restraining daemons.

The third manner of using the intellect consists in studying the reasons of the effects in the effects themselves. And this is the property of the Third Hierarchy, which is placed just above us human beings, who are forced to receive our knowledge of the effects from the effects themselves. This Hierarchy also contains three Orders, of which the lowest are called “Angels,” because they bring to man as a message whatever pertains to their guidance; wherefore they are also called the guardian-angels of men. Above them is the Order of “Archangels,” who bring to men as a message whatever surpasses the human reason, such as the mysteries of faith. The highest Order of this Hierarchy is called, according to Gregory, “Virtues,” because they perform works which surpass Nature, thus substantiating the message which comes to us as super-rational; wherefore miracle-working is attributed to the “Virtues” But according to Dionysius the highest Order of this Hierarchy is named “Principalities,” so that they may be known as Princes who stand at the head of separate peoples, the Angels known as guides of individual men, and the Archangels as the Spirits who bring to individual men as a message whatever concerns the common welfare.

And because a lower power performs its work in virtue of a higher, the lower rank carries out the requirements of the upper, in so far as it derives its virtue for the work from the upper; and the higher ranks have the qualities of the lower, but in a greater degree. For this reason, everything in them is, as it were, communal; but they receive their particular names in accordance with the functions of each order. The lowest Order has reserved to it the common name, as it functions by virtue of all the others. And because it is the business of the higher Orders to act on the lower, and the intellectual function is one of instruction or teaching, it is said of the higher angels, in so far as they instruct the lower, that they purify these, illumine and perfect them. Purify, in so far as they abolish nescience; illumine, in so far as they strengthen with their light the intellects of the lower Angels, so that they can comprehend higher things; and perfect, since they lead the lower Angels to the perfection of higher knowledge. For these three things belong to the acquisition of knowledge, as Dionysius says. But thereby is nothing lessened that enables all Angels, even the lowest, from looking upon the divine Essence. For when each of the holy Spirits looks upon God according to his own essence, one sees him more perfectly than another,—as can be understood from what has been said. And by how much more perfect a cause is seen to be by so much richer are seen to be its effects. The higher Angels in God thus instruct the lower in the divine effects, which they recognize first, but not in the Essence itself, which all look upon without mediation (Chap. 126).

The subtle thought which is employed in constructing this faultless logical column has provided in this treatise an example of what Rudolf Steiner calls “the highest flowering of logical judgment,” the “highest flowering of logical technique” [p. 51]. This “Gothic” thought-technique illustrates—looking into the past—that “it remained an article of faith with Thomas, that in higher regions was to be found the revelation of these abstract concepts,” for to look into an “open Heaven” did not require such Gothic arches. But looking into the future, there is revealed in this tremendous struggle of thought the urge of the question—reached but not solved by Scholasticism—“How can human thought develop itself upward to a vision of the spiritual world? ... How can thought be made Christian? ...” [p. 76.]

After explaining that there are no German verbal forms equivalent in meaning to the noun “Reason,” which correspond to the Latin intelligere, intellectualis, intelligens, and intelligibilis, etc., and that therefore he has retained the Latin words, he proceeds:

In a Chapter of the Summa Theologica, “Concerning the gift of Intellect”—that is, concerning the strengthening of the normal human reason up to the point of vision (through the gift of the Holy Ghost) Thomas clearly defines the place in which man stands as a learning being.

The word “intellectus” contains in itself a certain inner perception: for “intelligere” means at the same time “to read inwardly.” And this is quite clear if one considers the difference between intellect and sense: for perception by the senses is occupied (note the passive form!) with external sensible qualities; but perception by the intellect penetrates (note the active form!) to the essence of things. For the object of the intellects is: what something is, as Aristotle puts it in the third book Concerning the Soul.

But that which is hidden internally is of manifold kinds, that to which man's perception must penetrate, so to say, to the inner side. For under the accidental qualities lies hid the real nature of the thing; behind the words lies their meaning; under similarities and figures lies the truth which is represented—for intelligible things are, as it were, internal, compared with the things that are perceived by the senses, which are thus externally perceived—and in causes lie hid the effects and vice versa. Therefore the word “inward reading” (intellectus) can be used in respect of all this.

Since man's acquisition of knowledge begins from the senses, that is, from outside, it is clear that the stronger the light of the intellect is, the deeper it can penetrate into the innermost things. But the natural light of our intellects is of limited power; and therefore it can advance only to a certain limit. In order to penetrate further, in order to gain knowledge of something which cannot be gained by the natural light, man requires a supernatural light. And this supernatural light given to man, is called “The gift of the Intellect.” (Summa Theologie a, II, 2. Quaestio VIII. Art. 1.)

The central question for Thomas, “What reality have these abstract conceptions?” which man thus “reads inwardly,” leads to the very heart of Thomism [p. 67-69].

Since things are the creations of God—as a house would be the creation of the architect, if he had also shaped all the building material from complete formlessness—their nature, their “substance” is implanted in them—as “universalia in rebus”—and can be “read inwardly” in them by men through the “natural light”—the light of understanding; and they can become the possession of the soul as “universalia post res.” But beforehand the nature of things rested in God, who saw it in self-reading through the “lumen gloriae” the light of glory (the whole and each part in one glance, so that the difference between universal and special form as yet did not exist). At the time of transition of the plan of creation to the realm of the middle light, of the “lumen gratiae” of the Light of Grace, that was poured on to the Hierarchies there arises the division into “morning knowledge” and “evening knowledge.” of which the former proceeds from the universal to the particular, and the latter goes backwards from the particular to the universal.

Thus the quality “inteiligere” is attributed to:—

1. God in the light of glory, of “doxa,” of essential revelation.

2. The Angels, in the light of grace, of “gratia,” because God “has created in the angelic intelligence everything he has created in the nature of separate things,” as “universalia ante res” and

3. Men, who must laboriously collect their knowledge of separate things in “Natural Light”—since the loss of Paradise.

But just as not only an eye but also a legible book is necessary for outward reading, so also inward reading can only take place if something “readable” (intelligible), something knowable is visible, that is, a spiritual substance illuminated by one of the three kinds of knowledge light.

And a third condition of achieving knowledge in reality, is that the “Eye of inward reading”—the “intellectus” is not too weak to grasp the fullness of the splendour which emanates from a spiritual substance.

A thing is capable of being understood, in so far as it is in a condition of actuality. Therefore, God, who is pure actuality with no admixture of potentiality, is above all things capable of being understood. But what is supremely capable of being understood is not so by any intellect, on account of the excess of the intelligible over the intellect. As the sun, which is visible in the highest degree, cannot be seen by the bat, because of the excess of its light.

As Faust says to the sunrise: “It rises! and blinded I turn away my eyes, pierced by pain.” By “excess of light,” says Faust:

“So let the sun stay behind me, we live by the coloured reflection.”

And Thomas says:—

So far we may say that we see everything in God and judge everything according to Him, just as we know and judge everything by participation in His light. For the natural light of reason is also a certain participation in the divine light; as one may also say that we see and judge everything physical in the sun, that is, through the sun's light ...

But as it is not necessary to see the substance of the sun in order to see something physically, so it is not necessary, in order to see something with the intellect, that the essence of God be seen. (S. Theol. I. Quaestio XII, Art. XI).

The light of reason, the natural light innate in man, is participation in the divine light—like the “coloured reflection” from the “excess of flame” of the sun. This “intellectualism” of Thomas—often criticized—is the deepest well of his mighty thought-power. As thinker he knows himself also to be God-protected—attached to heaven by the thread of light. His thought is full of the attitude of prayer.

And the consummation of this attitude in his thought are Thomas^' proofs of the existence of God. They do not overstep the realm of the “lumen natural,” but push thought to the very source of this light [pp. 69, 70].

... our natural knowledge proceeds from the senses. Wherefore our natural knowledge can reach as far as the point to which the senses can lead it. But our intellect cannot stretch beyond the realm of the senses so as to behold the divine Essence; for creatures that are dependent on the senses are the productions of God, which do not equal the virtue of their cause. Therefore, the whole virtue of God cannot be known from the knowledge of the sense world, and accordingly also His essence cannot be seen. But since effects depend upon cause, we can be brought by them to know if He exists, and to know of Him what attributes He necessarily has is the First Cause of All, which transcends all. {Summa Theologie a, I. Quaestio XII, Art. XII.)

This is just the personal experience of this age—we cannot penetrate by vision into the spiritual world [p. 70].

... and God in His Essence cannot be seen in vision by the pure man, unless he be separated from this mortal life. For the reason that the manner of acquiring the knowledge follows the manner of existence of the being concerned. But as long as we are in this life, our soul has its existence in corporeal matter, and therefore it gains knowledge naturally of nothing which has not its form in matter, or which cannot be known through matter ...

But this modesty in the sphere of earthly thinking is not a lack of will-power. As the gold heavens of early Christian art disappeared behind the blue curtain, there grew out of humanity the heaven-assaulting Gothic. And as Plotinism dried up, there arose the “gothic” thought-technique of High Scholasticism.

The “Sun behind” is only a temporary condition. In the transfigured body we shall one day see God in His Essence.

As man's highest bliss consists in his most sublime activity, mainly in the operation of the intellect, either man would never attain this bliss, or it would consist of something other than God, if the created Intellects were never to behold the Essence of God—which is contradictory to faith. For in that which is the origin of his existence lies the final completion of the rational creature; and a thing is so far complete as it attains to its origin. But it contradicts Reason also. In man there is natural desire to know the cause when he sees the effect, and from this arises wonder in men. If the intellect of the rational creature were not to reach the first cause of things, this desire of nature would have to remain in vain. Therefore, it must be unconditionally granted that the Blessed behold God's Essence.

This “natural desire for the origin,” is the primary urge of Scholasticism, comparable with the plant-like heavenward urge of Gothic art. As in early Gothic there was no remission of tenseness, so Thomas never allows a “piousness”—of whatever kind—the power to dispense the intellect from activity.

For Thomas the act of thought leads always upward, never to a lying-down to rest. His praying has nothing to do with beds and cushions.

... God is not called incomprehensible because He has some quality which is not seen; but because it is not seen so perfectly as it can be ...

... What is perfectly known, is comprehended, and that which is known as deeply as it can be, is perfectly known. Thus, if something, which is capable of being known by empiric science, is held by one opinion, which originates from some reason of probability, that thing is not comprehended. If, for instance, someone knows by demonstration the proposition that the sum of the angles of a triangle equal two right angles, he comprehends it. But if someone assumes the opinion on the score of probability, because the learned say so, or the majority, he does not comprehend it, because he does not attain to that complete manner of knowing it, in which it is capable of being known. But no created intellect can reach up to knowing the divine Essence, in that perfect manner in which it is capable of being known ... For there is no limit to the knowledge of God. No created intellect can have a limitless knowledge of God. Now, a created intellect knows the Divine Essence more or less perfectly in proportion as it is fathomed by a greater or less Light of Glory. (S. Theol. Q,. XII. Art. VII.)

The deepest work-impulse of Thomas is to limit as far as possible the share of tradition—based on outer authority and therefore probability—in the faith-content of the Church, in favour of what can be gained “per demonstrationem.” He wanted to lead with the Gothic technique of his concept-temple those concepts “which can come only from ourselves and our individuality” far into the kingdom of faith-contents [pp. 41, 42.] To open up faith-content to the understanding—also in order to defend it against unbelievers—was the “main problem in front of Albertus and Thomas,” [p. 72.]

This use of the intellect in the “natural light” supplies therefore on the one hand, weapons for the fight of the “Ecclesia militans”—and from this point of view Thomas writes his “Summa contra Gentiles” (against the “Heathen”—i.e., the Arabs)—on the other hand, it supplies foundations, on which the “Ecclesia Triumphans” can be built up—which is the object of the Summa Theologica.

For through grace—after death or even beforehand, through a miracle (as in the case of Moses or Paul)—the natural light can receive a lifting-up to the power of vision.

When something is raised to a degree which transcends its nature, it must be given a disposition which is above its nature. If, for instance, air is to receive the form of fire, it must be disposed to this form by means of a certain faculty. But when a created intellect beholds God in His Essence, God's Essence itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect. Wherefore a supernatural disposition must be added to it, so as to raise it to such sublimity. For as the natural power of the created intellect is not sufficient to see God's Essence, it is necessary that by Divine Grace a power of intelligence should be added to it. For this reason, we call the increase of the power of intelligence the “illumination” of the intellect; and this is the illumination of which it is said in the Apocalypse xxi, 28, that “the light of God will illumine them,” namely, the society of the Blessed who see God. [Summa Theologica, I. Quaestio XII, Art. V.)

Of those who behold God in His Essence, one will behold Him more perfectly than another ... because the intellect of one will have more power or ability to see God than that of the other. The capacity to see God, however, does not belong to the created intellect according to its nature, but through Glory and Light ... Therefore the intellect which has a greater share of glory and light will see God more perfectly; and he will have this greater share who has more of Charity, for where there is more charity there is more desire, and desire makes him who desires in some manner apt and prepared for the reception of the objects desired. Whoever therefore shall have more Charity will see God more perfectly, and be more blessed. {Summa Theologica, I. Quaestio XII. Art. VI.)

But the inner drama of the Aristotelian-Thomasian doctrine of knowledge not only runs along an abstract line of development from the less perfect to the more perfect, but already assigns its quite special and distinguishing share to the lower steps of learning.

According to the Platonists' supposition (that the soul carries all knowledge in itself but has forgotten it on account of its conjunction with the body, that all learning is a remembering and that the turning towards the world of the senses is mere imperfection) the soul is not united to the body for its betterment, for because of this union it is less intelligent than when separate, but this union is solely for the betterment of the body, which is against reason, for matter exists for the sake of form, not vice versa.

But one might object that if a thing is always ordained towards betterment (and the direct turning towards the intelligible is a better kind of intellectual activity than the turning towards phantasms) God might have arranged the nature of the soul in such a manner as to make the nobler kind of intellectual activity come naturally to it and so that it would not have to be united to the body for the purpose.

It must be noted that even if the application of the intellect to higher things is more perfect than its application to physical images, still, the former mode was less perfect, if one considers how it would have been possible to the soul; which is made clear in the following thoughts: In every intellectual substance intellectual power exists through the influence of the Divine Light. This is in its first principle one and simple but divided and diversified in proportion as creatures are further removed from the Source, as is the case with lines which radiate from a central point. Thus it follows that God knows all things through His one Essence. And if the higher intellectual substances exercise their intellects through more than form, still it is through less numerous and more universal forms (than the lower substances) owing to the efficacy of the intellectual virtue that is in them. But in the lower substances there are forms, less universal and less efficacious in comprehending, in proportion to their disparity in intellectual virtue from the higher. Now if the lower substances had the forms in that degree of universality in which the higher have them, they would not gain through these forms a perfect knowledge of things, because they cannot develop such an intellectual power, but only a general and confused knowledge. This applies correspondingly to men. For those furnished with weaker intellects do not gain a complete knowledge through the universal concepts of the more intelligent, unless the details are specially explained to them. It is obvious that among the intellectual substances according to the arrangement of Nature, human souls are the lowest. But the perfection of the whole demands that there should be different grades in the world. Thus if God had so arranged human souls that they understood in the same manner as the separate substances can, they would not be capable of a complete knowledge, but in general a confused one. But that they might have a complete proportionate knowledge of things, human souls are so made that they are united with bodies and thus gain a proportionate knowledge from physical things, just as uneducated people can be taught only through concrete examples. Wherefore it is clear that it is for the soul's good to be bound to the body, and to understand by turning to phantasms.

Thus the Thomistic doctrine of knowledge leads from God, who comprehends everything in one intellectual act, through the separate substances, which need ever weaker “universals,” to man, who must study the universals from below, by releasing the phantasms from things through the senses, and from these the species through the “active intellect”, and from the species the universal conceptions through the “possible intellect.” With these by thought, not by vision, he builds up his temple of knowledge through the kingdom of the spirits, to heaven.

As a background to the magnificent summary of Thomas' doctrine of knowledge in the second of Rudolf Steiner's Addresses [pp. 59 et seq.], we will translate the short chapters of the Compendium Theologiae, in which Thomas gave his brother Reginald in compressed completeness the quintessence of his doctrine.

Chapter 78.—That Man's Intellectual Substance is the lowest of the Species.

As it is not the property of things to stretch into eternity, there must be among the intellectual substances not only a highest which reaches nearest to God, but also a lowest, which is nearest bodily matter. And this can be seen in the following manner: Intellectual activity is the faculty of man above the other animals; for it is clear that man reviews the universals, the qualities of things and immaterial things, all of which are comprehended only through intelligence. Now it is impossible that this intellectual activity is carried out by means of a bodily organ, as seeing is through the eye. For every instrument of cognitive power must necessarily itself be void of that kind of matter which is known through it, as the pupil of the eye by nature is void of the colours. For the colours are known by reason of the fact that the species of the colours are taken up in the pupil; but that which takes up must be void of what is taken up. But the intellect is in a position to learn with regard to all physical nature. Thus if it were to acquire knowledge through a bodily organ, this organ would have to be void of all physical nature—which is impossible.

Further: every cognitive instrument is itself known in the manner according to which the species of the object known lies in it; for this is for it the principle of knowledge. But the intellect knows things immaterially, even those which in their own nature are material, because it withdraws the universal form from the material conditions which create the separation. It is therefore impossible that the species of the thing known is in the intellect materially; and it is not received in a bodily organ, for every bodily organ is material.

Equally is it plain that the sense is weakened and destroyed by exaggerated sense-qualities—as the hearing is by loud sounds and the sight by blinding light; and this happens because the harmony of the organ is destroyed. But the intellect is rather strengthened through the exaggeration of the intelligible qualities, for whoever uses his intellect for higher things is able to understand the others not less well, but better. Thus if man is discovered as an intellectual being and his process of knowing does not take place through a bodily organ there must necessarily be some kind of incorporeal substance through which man comprehends.

For anything that can itself be active without body does not depend on the body according to its substance; and all powers and forms which cannot exist without body can also have no effectiveness without body. Thus warmth does not engender warmth by itself but a body engenders warmth by means of warmth.

This incorporeal substance therefore through which man comprehends is the lowest in the order of intellectual substances and that which stands next to matter.

Chapter 79.—Of the Difference of the Intellect and of the Mode of its Activity

Since the intellectual Being is higher than the sensual, as the Intellect is higher than the senses, and since the lower by nature imitates as much as possible the higher, so bodies that are subject to growth and decay imitate to a certain extent the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, it must be presumed that the sensory qualities in their way resemble the intellectual; and thus we can in some manner acquire knowledge of the intellectual from the likeness to it of the sensual. Now in the sensory we find a “highest” as it were, namely actuality, or form, and a “lowest” potentiality, or matter, and a “middle,” namely, that which is composed of matter and form. Similarly, we must differentiate in the intellectual Being; for the highest intellectual, God, is pure actuality, the other intellectual substances have something of actuality and something of potentiality according to their intellectual nature; but the lowest intellectual substance by which man uses his intellect, is in the intellectual realm only in the condition of potentiality. This strengthens the idea that originally man was made intellectual only as a potentiality, and subsequently by degrees was brought to actuality. Wherefore the intellectual substance of man is called the “intellectus possibilis,” or potential intellect.

Chapter 80.—That Maris Intellectus Possibilis evolves the Intellectual Forms from Sensory Things

Now since, as already stated, the higher an intellectual substance is, the more universal are its intellectual forms, it follows that the human intellect, which we called “possibilis,” has, among the other intellectual substances, less universal forms; and here is the reason why it evolves the intellectual forms from sensory things.

This can also throw light on another consideration. The form must be proportionate to that which is to be comprehended through it. Therefore, as the human intellectus possibilis among all intellectual substances lies nearest to bodily matter, its intellectual forms must also necessarily be nearest to material things.

Chapter 81.—That Man needs the Powers of the Senses for Intellectual Activity

It is to be remarked that the forms in bodily things are composed of separate particles and are material, but in the Intellect they are universal and immaterial, which the mode of our intellectual activity establishes, for we use our intellects “universally” and “immaterially.” But this mode must necessarily correspond with the intellectual form and species, by means of which our intellects act. Therefore, since we go from one extreme to another only by way of a mean, forms proceed from bodily things to the intellect through certain media. Of this kind are the sense-powers, which comprehend the forms of material things apart from matter—we see, for instance, the particular form of the stone with the eye but not its matter—and on the other hand they comprehend the forms of things in a particular way—for the senses only comprehend the differentiated particles. Senses therefore, were necessary to man for intellectual activity; and this is confirmed by the fact that if anyone is bereft of one sense, he loses also the knowledge which is dependent on that sense, like a man born blind, who can have no knowledge of colours.

Chapter 82.—That it is necessary to assume an “Intellectus Agens”

It becomes clear, therefore, that knowledge concerning things is not caused in our intellect through a participation in some kind of actual intellectual forms, that exist in and for themselves, or through their influence, as the Platonists and others who followed them, supposed. Rather the intellect extracts this knowledge from physical things through the mediation of the senses. But because, as already stated, the forms of things are particularized in the sense-powers, they are comprehensible not according to reality, but only to potentiality. For the intellect works only universally. Now something which is in the potential state can be transferred to that of actuality only by means of some active agent. There must therefore exist an “agent” which makes the particularized forms which lie in the sense-powers comprehensible in reality. But the “intellectus possibilis” cannot bring this about: for it is itself more in a state of potentiality with respect to the comprehending qualities, than active in them. Another intellect must therefore be postulated, which makes particularized forms which are comprehensible in potentiality comprehensible in reality, as light causes potentially visible colours to be actually visible. And we call this the “Intellectus Agens”—which we need not postulate, if the forms of things were comprehensible in reality, as the Platonists assumed.

... The “intellectus possibilis” is receptive of the comprehensible particularized forms ... the “intellectus agens” makes them actually comprehensible.

Chapter 83.—That the Human Soul is Indestructible

“In this way the great logical questions of the universals join up with the questions which concern the world-destiny of each individual,” says Rudolf Steiner [p. 73]: How this chapter 83 joins up with the preceding chapter!

In accordance with what has been said, the intellect, with which man comprehends must be indestructible. Every Being is active in proportion to its nature. But the intellect has an activity independent of the body, as has been shown—from which it follows that it is active of its own accord. Therefore, it is a substance which subsists by itself. But it was shown above that intellectual substances are indestructible. Thus man's intellect is also indestructible.

Moreover, the real basis of growth and decay is matter, and a thing is therefore as far removed from decay as it is from matter. Things composed of matter and form are intrinsically destructible; material forms are destructible through that which is bound up with them and not through themselves; but the immaterial forms which transcend the measure of matter are definitely indestructible. The intellect is by its nature exalted above matter, which is shown by its function: for we comprehend nothing through something else, without separating it from matter. Thus the intellect is, in accordance with its nature, indestructible.

This confutes also Averroës, who supposed “there is no immortality in the sense of an individual continuance after death.” In the connection of problems as shown by Rudolf Steiner, Thomas in the subsequent chapters of the Compendium Theologiae collects together all the principal arguments of his powerful battery against the Arabic antagonism to individuality, by proving “that there is not one intellectus possibilis only among all men” (Chapter 84); “that the intellectus agens in all men is not a single one” (Chapter 85); but “that the intellectus possibilis and the intellectus agens are founded in the essence of the individual soul.” (Chapter 86.)

The Fight against Averroës

For the fight against the denial of the individual by the Arab doctor and philosopher, Averroës (1126-1198), Thomas filled an arsenal with marvellously made and sharpened logical weapons. From this armoury let us take one argument—with which Thomas closes the terrific 73rd chapter of the Second Book of the Summa contra Gentiles.

Averroës' standpoint is: “Each of us has his own body, but not his own understanding.”

Thomas replies:—

If the intellectus possibilis is translated, through its having taken up a particularized form, into a condition of real intellectual activity, it can remain real of its own accord, as Aristotle says in the third book Of the Soul. Therefore, it is in our power to reconsider something of which we have once acquired knowledge, if we only wish it, without being impeded on account of the phantasms—i.e., through a failure to receive these “images” by means of the senses. For we have the power to form such images, which are proportionate to the desired consideration, unless there is some impediment on the part of the organ in question; as in the case of imbeciles and those who cannot keep awake, for they have not the free use of imagination and memory. Thus Aristotle says in the Eighth Book of the Physics that the man who already has the endurance to acquire knowledge, if he is in a condition to be able to undertake contemplation, need not be translated from this condition into that of real contemplation by means of an external mover, apart from overcoming an impediment, but that he can, if he wills it, pass to the act of contemplation himself. But if the comprehensible particularized forms of all sciences lie in the intellectus possibilis (N.B.—which one must assume if one regards it, like Averroës, as One and Everlasting), the role of the phantasms with respect to the intellectus possibilis must always be of such a kind as the case with the man who has already mastered a science, and in consequence can formulate considerations of which without such images he would be incapable (N.B.—by calling them up out of his memory). But since man employs intellectual activity through the intellectus possibilis in so far as this is through particularized forms, translated into the condition of real intellectual activity, every man could, if he but wished, command the knowledge of all sciences. But this is obviously not so, for then no one would require a teacher in order to learn a science. It follows therefore that the intellectus possibilis is not One and Everlasting.

The “doctor angelicus,” the greatest theological teacher in Christian history throws his personal destiny—his spiritual profession of teaching—in the scales against Arabism. For Thomas wanted not to contradict Averroës only, but to smash him (as Dr. Carl Unger said in the last lecture of his life in the Goetheanum). [Esotericism by Carl Unger, published by Percy Lund, Humphries & Go. Ltd., 3, Amen Corner, London, E.C. 4. Price 2s.] He fought with the whole force of his being for “the acceptance of the Word through the power of the Son,” (Unger). The acquisition of knowledge—to which the teacher should guide—is for Thomas not a breaking into a treasure-cave, where the “knowledge of all sciences” lies ready for him who knows the “Open, Sesame!” but a nursing of spiritual seed, which is scattered in the earth, and must be tended with hard work, “in the sweat of his brow.” Thomas takes his metaphors from the realm of plant-life and light in order to make clear the relationship of the teacher to the seed in the pupils' souls; as for example in the chapter on “The Teacher” in the great treatise on “Truth.”

There pre-exist in us seeds of knowledge, as the first conceptions, as it were, of the intellect, which are at once recognized in the light of the “intellectus agens,” through the medium of the particularized forms which are derived from the memory qualities ... Every principle is included in these universal principles. Now if the mind is led out of this universal knowledge, so that it recognizes the particularized parts actually, which had hitherto been recognized only potentially, and, as it were, in general, then one says of someone that he acquires knowledge.

To pre-exist is understood by Thomas not—as by the Platonists—that “original concepts” are incorporated in man already before birth, so that his knowledge is a recollection of something pre-natal, but in the sense that before the process of acquiring knowledge begins there is created in us by God a seed of light, a seed of functional power, a “lumen creatum” and this is educated or brought out in the knowledge-acquiring process.

That every soul harbours in itself its own seed of light, which is brought to life by the “Teacher,” is the thesis that is upheld against Arabism.

But Thomas overthrows Averroës not only on his own ground—that of the teacher—but also on that of the “medicus,” the medical doctor, by an intensely fruitful combination of the problems of teaching and healing. In it he appears to be a forerunner of the splendid revival of Healing which in our day the greatest teacher of intellectual activity, Rudolf Steiner, perfected by the “strengthening of thought-power.” (Cf. Chapter I. “True Knowledge of Human Nature as the Basis of Medical Art,” in the book Foundations for an Extension of the Art of Healing according to Spiritual Science Knowledge.) Rudolf Steiner overthrows the materialistic remains of the Arab treasure-hunt that lie underneath the weak-minded modern empiricism. (One digs for the treasures of knowledge to-day in “Handbooks.”)

… Learning is produced in the pupil by the teacher, not like heat in wood by the fire, but like health in the invalid by the doctor ... (Treatise Of Spiritual Creatures. Art IX. in conjunction with a polemic against Averroës).

In healing, the doctor is the helper of Nature, the chief agent, since he strengthens Nature and adds medicines which Nature uses like instruments in healing.

Just as a man can be healed in two ways—first through the sole agency of Nature, and secondly, by Nature together with a small dose of medicine—so there are also two ways of acquiring knowledge: first, when the seed of reason implanted by Nature in one comes of its own accord to the knowledge of something previously unknown, one speaks of “invention”; and secondly, when the implanted reason is given doses by someone outside, one speaks of “learning” ... And one says also that one man teaches another if he explains to him by signs the forward steps which the reason implanted in him enables him to take. As one says of a doctor, that he produces health in the invalid in the realm of Nature, so one says also of a man that he produces learning in another in the realm of his implanted reason. And this is called “teaching.” And in this sense one can say that a man teaches another and is his teacher. But the light of this reason, through which these primary concepts are known is given us by God (is the “intellectus possibilis”); as also a likeness to uncreated wisdom (to “Sophia” as the likeness of which on earth the “intellectus possibilis” gleams in the human soul). Now since no human teaching can have any effectiveness in us, but for the power of this light, it is quite certain that it is God alone who originally implants learning in us, just as Nature originally produces the healing power in us.

In this “Doctrine of Teaching,” in opposition to Arabism, Thomas opens up for a man a Holy of Holies, where he is in direct communion with the Creator: he fights “for the reception of the word through the power of the Son” (Unger); in each individual God speaks as “Verbum cordis,” the heart^'s word. There is no space to reproduce the “Word-doctrine” of Thomas, as it developed especially in the “Tractatus de verba.” Here only a few sentences are set out, in which shines that atmosphere of light, which is the greatest contribution—so often misunderstood—of Thomas to the history of Western spiritual thought.

…As one says of the doctor, he makes health, although he works from outside and Nature alone from the inside, so one says also of a man that he teaches truth, if he only enunciates it from outside, but inside it is God who teaches.

…The words of the teacher, either heard or read, in the education of knowledge in the intellect, play the role of things which are outside the soul ...

…Conclusions are reached with certainty if they are referable to the primary concepts. Hence what someone knows with certainty comes from the inwardly created light of reason, through which God speaks in us, and not from man, who teaches from the outside ...

…The teacher does not produce truth in the pupil, but knowledge of the truth. For the subjects which are taught are true before they are known: because truth does not depend on our knowledge of it, but on the essence of things ...

…if one says: nothing can form the mind of man but God, it applies to its highest form, without which it would be formless, whatever other forms it might have. But this is that form by which the mind is turned to the WORD, and inheres in it.

Thus, intelligent man is “turned to the WORD” through his highest form. From the philosophy of learning and teaching which he developed in the war against Arabism, Thomas passes on to the question: “How is thought made Christ-like?” [p. 76.]

But he finds no answer to this question for the man who lives in the earthly body, but only for the man to whom—after the day of Judgment—through God's grace the earthly body, transfigured into the spirit body, will be restored [vide infra p. 180].

Rudolf Steiner has given the answer in our time: Anthroposophy, in which created man through the evolution of creative thought is joined with uncreated Wisdom—sapientia increate—that is the Anthropos with the Sophia.

“Thomas could get no further than the abstract affirmation that the psychic-spiritual really has its effect on every activity of the human organism.” [p. 96]

This “abstract affirmation” is—as emerges from the trend of the three addresses—in no sense to be taken as a toying with concepts invalidated by the “pale cast of thought.” The whole drama which surges in the background of scholastic thought, lives in this “abstrahere,” this “abstracting,” in this up-building of the scholastic-gothic cathedral. In this mighty building there is this abstracting, from the bottom to the top; first, from the material things of the world, the “phantasmata,” the sensory images, through the activity of the senses; then from these images, the “species,” the special concepts, through the “intellectus agens,” and finally, the “universalia,” the general concepts, through the “intellectus possibilis.” But this “abstracting” from below upwards, through which man draws into his thought as it unfolds itself “post res,” what before lay “in rebus is to serve the purpose of fitting the created human reason into the spirit forms, through which the Creator's power which works” ante res acts from the top downwards.

The innermost impulse of this “abstract affirmation” applied to the ideal transfiguration of the human body (which is found by Thomas to be a vision of the future real transfiguration of the risen body) appears in the works of Thomas Aquinas in the passage which Rudolf Steiner analyses as the dramatic climax: when the problems of creation, of human knowledge and of human individuality concentrate, as it were, in a knot. It is clearest in the answer to the question: Why one human soul differs from another.

Since the soul as such (i.e. when abstracted from the body) is not composed of matter and form, the differentiation of one soul from another could only be formal, if they were differentiated only according to their existence as pure soul. But a formal differentiation involves a division of the species; (i.e. men would not then all belong to the same class, but each would be a species in himself, which Thomas grants to the Angels, but not to men). But the division according to mere number within one and the same species arises out of the material difference. And the soul cannot have this material difference from Nature, out of which it is created, but from matter in which it is created. Thus, we can presume the existence of many human souls, which are different within the same species according to their number, if they are united to bodies from their own beginning, (i.e. if they have not a pre-existence in the Kingdom of Nature, out of which they are created) so that their differentiation originates from union with the body as the material principle, even if their differentiation originates from God as the effective principle. (Quaestion Of the Might of God. III. 10.)

In the chapter “Reincarnation of the Spirit and Destiny” of the book Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner carries on with compelling logic this Thomistic thought: “... The man who rightly ponders over the essence of biography, comes to see that spiritually every man is a species in himself” This means “secundam naturam ex qua fit,” according to the pre-existing individual “nature” which after previous incarnations enters on birth, the individual human being is a species of his own. The “materia in qua fit,” the bodily material, is no longer the “principle of individuation” though it may retain its full significance as the object, on which the spiritual individual, in accordance with his destiny, works.

But this Thomistic train of thought is a necessary preliminary, from the point of view of spiritual history, to the spiritual individualism of Rudolf Steiner. The second of the foregoing quotations comes from the midst of the fight against Averroës. The “material individualism”—if one may call it so—of Thomas is a fortress built of earthly stone as a protection of human individuality against the doctrine of Averroës, who snuffs out the intellectus possibilis and individuality in a universal spirit. Man acquires—according to Thomas—his individual nature precisely by living in this earthly body, from which state (as one then pre-existing) God will after the day of Judgment vouch him eternal life in a transfigured body through the Grace promised by Christ [p. 180].

Each human body is, in the sense of Thomas, the concrete tool, by which God—if one may put it so—takes up the material with one hand from the realm of Nature, by Him created, and into which with the other hand, he impresses the anima humana through the first act of creation of each separate man. The so-called “Creationism”—the doctrine that every soul at birth is created by God absolutely anew—is the inevitable consequence of a thought-system which through “abstract affirmation” would allow heaven to triumph completely over the earth in man, without having the disposal even of the powers of the human Ego, which have been acquired with difficulty through centuries, during which the Ego had to find and assert itself without God or spirit in the universe of material reality, suppressed by Nominalism with its feeble abstractions.

The whole force of “abstract affirmation which lives in Thomas' effort to find a knowledge of the body, is an expression of the will: to get an insight into the working of God's” right hand which by the preparation of the body of the newly-created human soul ordains the conditions of its individual form, and there with the conditions of its earthly and heavenly destiny.

God as Perfect Creator of the Imperfect

The effect pre-exists according to its power in the effective cause. To pre-exist in the power of the effective cause, does not mean, however, to pre-exist in a less perfect, but in a more perfect mode; even if pre-existence in the potentiality of the material cause is pre-existence in a less perfect mode, because matter as such is imperfect, whereas an “agent” as such is perfect. Now, since God is the first effective Cause of things, the perfections of all things must pre-exist in God in a still more eminent degree. And Dionysius touches this thought when he says of God, in the book Of Divine Names: “… He is certainly not this thing; but He is all things, being the Cause of all.” (S. Theol. /. 4. II.)

Of the Creation of the Body of the First Man

Since God is perfect in His works, He gave perfection to all creatures after their kind ... He Himself is perfect by reason of the fact that He prepossesses all things in Himself: not in the manner of something composed of different elements, but simply and solely, as Dionysius says: that is, in the manner in which different effects pre-exist in their causes, according to their single power. Thus, to the Angels He communicates His perfection in the knowledge of all natural things in divine forms, a perfection which is received by man after an inferior manner: for man has not the knowledge of all natural things. For he is to a certain extent composed of all things; from the type of spiritual substance he has the rational soul. From his likeness to the heavenly bodies he has the differentiation from the opposites by virtue of the extreme balance of his constitution. The elements, however, are substantial in him, and indeed in such wise that the higher elements predominate according to power, namely Fire and Air, since life is passed agreeably divided between warmth, the quality of Fire, and moisture, that of Air; but the lower elements prevail in him according to substance. For in no other way could there be a balance of the mixture, unless the lower elements, with their smaller power, outweighed the higher in man in quantity. And there is this justification, that the body of man is made from a clod of earth, for earth mixed with water is called a clod. Therefore, also, man is called a “small world” because all creatures of the world are somehow found in him.

Man's body had to be created out of the matter of the four elements, so that man might be in agreement with the lower bodies—standing half-way between the spiritual and material substances.

If Fire and Air, which are greater in effective power, were to predominate also in quantity in the composition of the human body, they would attract the other elements completely to themselves, and there could be no balance which in man's composition is necessary for the excellence of the sense of touch which is the basis of the other senses: for the organ of each sense may not have anything in reality contradictory, which the sense can test, but only in potentiality, either in such a manner that it is altogether free of every kind of this contradiction, as the pupil lacks colour, in order to be “in potentia,” towards all colours—which, however, was not possible with the sense of touch, since it consists of just those elements whose qualities it experiences—or else so that the organ might hold the middle place between the opposites, as is necessarily the case with touch. For the middle is “in potentia” to the extremes ...

All natural things are created by divine art, and are therefore equally God's work. But every master endeavours to give his work the best form, not simply for itself, but with an eye to his general purpose. And if this form necessitates leaving something out, that does not worry the master: as a master who prepares a saw for cutting, makes it of steel, so that it is fit to cut; it does not occur to him to make it of glass, which is a more beautiful material, because such beauty would be an obstacle to its purpose. So God constructed every natural thing, also not simply for itself, but according to His arrangement for its particular purpose, as Aristotle says ...

…The primary purpose of the human body is the rational soul and its accomplishments. For the matter is there for the sake of the form, and the tools are there for the sake of the efficiency of the worker. I say, therefore, that God has given the human body the best combination in the sense of fitting it to this form and these accomplishments. And if something is found to be lacking in the construction of the human body, it must be remembered that such a defect follows from the necessary arrangement of matter with regard to that which the body requires, so that there may be the right relationship of the body to the soul and its accomplishments.

…The sense of touch, the basis of the other senses, is more perfect in man than in any other creature that has a soul; and for this purpose man had to receive the most temperate constitution. And man also exceeds the other creatures in the inner powers of the senses. (N.B.—The doctrine of the four inner senses—the social sense, imaginative power, capacity to reason, and the sense of memory, cannot be discussed shortly.) But from a certain necessity it appears that man falls short of the animals in some outer senses; thus, among all creatures with souls man has the worst sense of smell; for man had necessarily to have the largest brain among all in proportion to his body, so that the accomplishments of the inner sensory powers could develop more freely, which he needs for the achievements of the intellect—and also so that the coolness of the brain might moderate the warmth of the heart, which again must be large in man on account of his more erect posture. The size of the brain is an obstacle to the smell because of its moisture, for the sense of smell is dependent on dryness. And similarly the reason can be given why certain animals have a keener sight and a finer hearing than man—because of the retardation of these senses which is necessarily postulated in man through the complete balance of his constitution. The same reason can be adduced for certain animals being speedier than man, since an immoderate speed is contrary to the balance of his constitution.

…Horns and claws, the weapons of certain animals, the thickness of the hide, of hair or feathers, which serve animals as covering, show the preponderance of earthly elements, which are contrary to the balance and delicacy of man's composition; and therefore they were not adapted to him. But instead he has reason and hands, wherewith he can arm himself with weapons and protection and other requirements of life in endless variety. So that Aristotle calls the hand “the organ of organs”—which, however, really applies still more to the power of reasoning, which is open to countless ideas, and gives him an illimitable capacity to make tools.

…The erect posture was given man for four reasons: First, because man was given the senses not only to provide himself with the necessaries of life, like the other animals with souls, but also to appreciate. So while the other animals rejoice in the senses only in so far as they are concerned with nutriment and reproduction, man alone rejoices in the beauty of things as such. And because the senses live pre-eminently in the countenance, the other animals have bent their eyes to the ground, in order to search for food and find nourishment—but man has raised up his countenance in order to be able to appreciate freely material things on every side, heavenly as well as earthly, through the senses and especially through that of sight, which is the noblest and reveals the greatest number of varieties in things, so that he may reap the intelligible truth from all. Secondly, so that the inner senses might be more free for their accomplishments, by reason of the fact that the brain in which they are perfected is not depressed but raised above all other parts of the body. Thirdly, because man, if he were bent down, would have to use his hands as fore-feet, which would destroy their fitness for carrying out manifold works. Fourthly, because, if he were in this position, he would have to seize his food with his mouth; and for this he would have to have a prominent snout, and hard thick lips and a hard tongue, as one sees in animals in order not to be injured by things. But such a construction would completely prevent speech, the peculiar work of the understanding.

Although man has an erect posture, still he is the furtherest removed from plants. For man has raised his upper part, his head, towards the upper part of the world, and his lower part is towards the lower part of the world, and is therefore arranged the best in accordance with the total arrangement. But plants have their upper part towards the lower part of the world (for the roots correspond to the mouth). Animals behave in a middle manner: for the upper part of an animal is that through which it takes in nourishment, and the lower part that through which it rejects waste. (S. Theol. Quaestio 91, from several articles.)

…it was ordained that the woman should be formed from a rib of the man. First, as a sign that there should be a union of a special kind between man and woman; for woman is to be neither the lord over man—otherwise she would have been formed from his head—nor looked down upon by man as his slave—otherwise she would have been formed from his feet. Secondly, because of the Sacrament: for the Sacraments, namely, blood and water, out of which the Church (the Bride of Christ) has been erected, flowed from the side of Christ as he fell asleep on the Cross. (S. Theol. I. Quaestio 92. Art. III.)

From Thomas' Teaching concerning the Heart

Thomas' teaching concerning the heart is the heart of Thomism. In the heart intellectual activity comes to an end: in the “verbum cordis,” in the heart's word, each thought takes a definite shape. From the heart every movement of the body, and therefore also speech, the formation of the “verbum oris,” the mouth's word, originates. The rhythm of the pulse-beat follows the laws of the heavenly movements: but disturbances of the rhythm come from passions that rise in the earthly body. In the heart given to God passions are purified into virtues: as, for instance, the burning red of anger becomes the illuminant red of charity. Here is translated a passage from Thomas' Commentary on the Treatise of Aristotle “On the Soul,” which shows how through “abstract affirmation” Thomas attempts so to “intellectualize” the form and movement of the heart, that all the manifold facets can combine with the imaginative and conceptual image already there.

Aristotle says that the prime mover in the organism must be of such a kind that in him must be both origin and end of the movement, as in a sort of circulation between a convex and a concave form, of which one is the result, but the other also the origin. For the concave appears as a reality, but the convex as an origin of the movement. By virtue of its concavity the heart is compressed, but by virtue of its convexity it expands. And because origin and end are contained in it, and the origin of every kind of movement must all the same be unmoved—as the arm remains still when the hand is moved, and the shoulder, when the arm is moved, and as every movement arises from some sort of non-movement—so there must be something at rest in the organ of movement, the heart, in so far as the heart is the origin of movement, but causing movement in something else, in so far as the movement attains its object in it. And these two, namely, the stationary and the moved are different in their behaviour, though inseparable according to their basis and their size. And that the heart must be at the same time origin and end of the movement, and consequently at the same time stationary and in motion is explained by the fact that every movement in a soul-endowed creature consists of thrust and pull. The thrust is that which gives motion, the origin of it, because that which thrusts something pushes it away from itself. In the pull is also that which gives motion, the objective of the movement, because the puller draws the pulled to itself. And therefore the first organ of the local movement must, in a soul-endowed being, be arranged at the same time as origin and objective of the movement. And there must be a stationary part in it, yet it must all the same be capable of starting movement; as in a circular movement. For a rotating body does not change its position as a whole except relatively, because its centre and its axis remain stationary and stay as far as the whole and its basis are concerned in the same spot. Its parts, however, change their position not only relatively but basically. Thus it is in every movement of the heart. For the heart remains fast in the same place in the body, but moves in the sense of expanding and contracting, in order to produce the movements of thrust and pull. In one way therefore it is moving, and in another stationary.

With all this it must be carefully noted that the heart is not presented as a pump for the blood. Scholasticism has as yet no conception of the circulation of the blood. The movements of the heart's thrust and pull are rather regarded as a perpetually available supply, from which the soul when it desires to institute some definite thrust or pull in the body, transmits the necessary movement-action by means of the warmth that moves freely in the body, and the inner life-spirit, to the organ concerned.

Noble and Ignoble Bodily Qualities

The teaching of “the foundation of the senses,” the sense of touch, is very closely connected with the teaching concerning the heart. We differentiate between hard and soft, warm and cold, dry and moist, etc., not (like colours and sounds) through an organ which is itself without the qualities it perceives, but through our body which is provided with these qualities—but which has in the origin of the heart and lungs a general balance, and this enables it from “the golden mean,” to differentiate the extremes. The real organ of touch is, according to Thomas, the heart and lung region; the flesh is only a medium of touch—like the “transparent” in vision and the atmosphere in hearing. From the formation of this medium, through which we are connected with the elements—particularly, as “earth-clods,” with the heavy elements—deductions can be drawn concerning the “nobility” of individual man.

In the Commentary on the 19th chapter of Aristotle's work on the sensibility of the senses (with respect to the treatment of the sense of smell) Thomas writes:

Man has the most reliable sense of touch among all soul-endowed creatures, if in other senses he falls behind certain animals. Because of this he is the cleverest. And among the race of men we find from the quality of the sense of touch, and not of any other sense, that some people are endowed with talents and others not. For those people whose flesh is hard and who have in consequence a poor sense of touch are mentally ill-equipped; but those whose flesh is soft and whose sense of touch is consequently good, are mentally well-equipped. And the other beings endowed with souls have also harder flesh than man. To this it might be objected that the capacity of the spirit corresponds more with the excellence of sight than with that of touch, because sight is the more spiritual sense and reveals more numerous and more diverse sides of the senses. But against this must be said that for two reasons the excellence of the spirit corresponds with the excellence of the sense of touch: first, touch is the foundation of all the other senses; for the sense is obviously distributed throughout the whole body, and what is an instrument of every other sense is the instrument of touch. And touch is that by which anything is characterized as material. It follows from this that if someone has a better sense of touch, he has a more sensitive nature, and in consequence a better intellect; for excellence of the sense means a disposition to excellence of intellect. But from the fact that a man hears or sees better it does not follow that he plainly has more acute senses, or has a more sensitive nature, except in a particular respect.

The other reason is that the excellence of the touch-sense follows the excellence of the whole constitution or of the balance. For since the instrument of touch cannot be free from the class of touchable qualities, because it is composed of the elements, it must thereby be “in potentia” to the extremes, so that it keeps the mean between them. Good composition of the body results in nobility of soul, because every form is proportioned to its matter. And from this follows that men with good sense of touch are of nobler soul and acuter mind.

Touch is “Tactus,” tact! “Tact” as a psychophysical quality is for Thomas the basis of man's sense-nature, on which through the functioning of the intellectus agens and the intellectus possibilis he builds up the gothic cathedral of scholastic wisdom. How thoroughly “kneaded” the clod of earth is apportioned by God to each soul at birth—as delicate or coarse flesh—from this Thomas Aquinas, the scion of generations of highest nobility, the cousin of the Emperor Frederic II of Hohenstaufen, recognizes the “nobility of the soul” in each man.

But this bodily delicacy is already a foretaste on earth of the quality of that spirit body which the blessed souls will receive after the day of Judgment, through the transfiguration of earthly bodies put off for a time at death:

Because the Blessed soul will be noble and virtuous in the highest degree, in tune with the primeval principle of the world, the body united with it by God's disposition will be substantial in the noblest way, so that the soul can keep it completely in its control, wherefore it will be delicate and spiritual as a breath. It will also be distinguished by the noblest quality, the glory of clarity. And thanks to the virtue of the soul, this body will be incapable of being deflected from its construction by any agent; i.e. it will be impervious to all suffering. And because it will be completely obedient to the soul, as the tool is to the person who moves it, this body will be mobile. Transfigured bodies will therefore possess the four following characteristics: subtilitas, claritas, impassibilitas et agilitas ... (Compendium Theologica. Chap. 169.)

A comparison of this “Anatomy” of transfigured bodies with Thomas' doctrine of the Hierarchies [p. 66 et seq.] shows that the transfigured body will resemble the Holy Ghost in spiritual substance, the first Hierarchy in the quality of light, the second in power, and the third in mobility. It will be “sicut Deus” and will have assumed the characteristics of pure Spirits.

From Thomas' Teaching concerning the Passions

But because substance, quality, virtue and mobility do not “in via,” on the earthly Pilgrim's road, have the perfection they will have “in patria,” in the Fatherland, the path to heaven must be fought for on earth by spiritual building as a guide to the soul's growth. In order to get at least an idea of the mighty edifice which in the second part of the Summa Theologica brings the whole medley of human passions under the influence of the virtues, some chapters from his Teaching concerning them are appended in conclusion. They make clear how Thomas throws the bridge from his knowledge of the body to the spirit world by means of “abstract affirmation.”

Of Fear

…in the passions of the soul the formal element is the movement of the power of desire itself, whereas the material element is the bodily metabolism; and both stand in a definite relationship with each other. Therefore, the bodily change begins after the likeness and standard of the desire-movement. Now Fear brings with it a certain contraction of the soul's desire-movement. The basis of it is that Fear arises from imagining a threatening Evil, which can with difficulty be driven away ... But that something can with difficulty be driven away comes from the inadequacy of strength ... The more inadequate the strength is, the less far can it reach. And so there results from the imagination itself, which produces Fear, a certain contraction in the desire; as we see in the dying, that nature withdraws into the inside on account of the insufficiency of strength, and as we see in the case of a community, that the citizens, when they are afraid, retire from the outer quarters of the town and concentrate as much as possible in the centre. And similarly with these contractions, which take place in the desires of the soul, there appears also in the body a contraction of warmth and life-spirits into the interior.

... but, as Aristotle says ... even if in one who is afraid the life-spirits are withdrawn from the outer organs to the inner, still the movement of the spirits in one who is afraid and one who is angry is not identical. For in an angry man on account of the warmth the subtlety of the life-spirits which arise from the desire for revenge, an inner movement takes place from the lower to the upper organs, whereby warmth and the spirits are collected round the heart. Hence it follows that the angry become skilful and bold to attack. But in the fearful, on account of the increased cold which arises from the imagined lack of strength, the spirits move from the upper to the lower organs, and so warmth and the spirits of life are not only not increased round the heart, but rather flee from it. Therefore, the fearful do not proceed promptly to attack, but run away.

The man or animal that is always suffering, seeks every means to be rid of the trouble which causes him pain. Thus we see suffering animals belabouring themselves with mouth or horns. But the greatest help for everything, among animals, is warmth and the life-spirit; and therefore Nature in pain collects them into the inside, in order to use them in fending off the harmful. For this reason, Aristotle says ... that air is provided for the spirit and the warmth which are collected in the interior, through the voice; and therefore sufferers can scarcely suppress cries of pain. But in the fearful the movement is from the heart to the lower organs, and so Fear prevents the production of the voice, which takes place by the emission of the life-spirit upwards through the mouth. Hence Fear induces dumbness as well as trembling ...

Danger of death works not only contrary to the soul's desires, but also contrary to Nature, wherefore in this kind of Fear there is not only a contraction of desire but also of the body's nature. The soul-endowed creature, when in imagining death, it withdraws the warmth inside behaves exactly as if it were in reality confronted with death; and therefore those who are a prey to the fear of death become pale ... But the evil which shame fears is not contrary to Nature, but only to spiritual desire, wherefore there follows a certain contraction in proportion to the spiritual desire, but not in proportion to bodily nature; and the soul keeps itself free from the movement of the life-spirits and the warmth, as if it were itself contracted, which results in their diffusion into the outer members. Hence those who are ashamed blush.

... the result of Fear is a contraction from the outer into the inner organs; wherefore the outer organs become cold. This gives rise to trembling, which is caused by the inadequacy of the strength which holds the limbs together. But such an inadequacy is chiefly the result of a lack of warmth, which is the instrument by which the soul produces movements, as Aristotle says.

... because with Fear the warmth leaves the heart, going from the upper to the lower organs, the fearful tremble most in the heart and in the limbs, which have a connection with the breast where the heart lies. Therefore, also the fearful tremble in voice particularly, because of the proximity of the windpipe to the heart; the lower lip also trembles and the whole lower jaw because of their connection with the heart. From this comes also the chattering of the teeth. For the same reason the arms and hands tremble ... but possibly also because these limbs are more flexible; which applies equally to the knees.

In the category of bodily tools Fear as such is always of such a kind that it prevents the outer accomplishment on account of the lack of warmth, which through Fear occurs in the outer limbs. But in the sphere of the soul Fear, if it is moderate and does not confuse the reason too strongly, helps to produce good by causing a certain anxiousness and leads man to reflect and act more carefully. Nevertheless, if Fear so increases that it confuses the reason, it hinders accomplishment also in the province of the soul. (Summa Theologica, II. 1. Quaestio 44, from different sections.)

Of Anger

If we consider the nature of the genus—i.e., the nature of each man as a soul-endowed being, concupiscence is more natural to him than Anger, because by reason of a common Nature man has a certain tendency to desire what serves to maintain the life of his kind or of the individual. But if we consider human nature in the domain of the species, namely in so far as man is a rational being, then anger is more natural to him than desire, because anger is closer to reason than lust. ... If, finally, we consider the nature of one definite individual in accordance with his own temperament, then Anger is more natural than lust, because from a natural tendency to get angry, which comes from this temperament, Anger is much more easily let loose than lust or any other passion. For man is liable to be angry in proportion as his temperament is choleric. But among all juices, choler is the quickest roused, it—after all—resembles Fire; and so one who is liable to Anger because of his natural temperament, is quicker to become angry than one who is inclined to concupiscence is to become lustful ...

… In the sphere of bodily temperament it is natural for man, according to his kind (as rational being), not to have any excess, either of Anger, or any other passion, because of the proper admixture of his temperament. But animals, since they are far removed from this temperate quality, and are extremes in one direction or another, are correspondingly addicted by Nature to excess of one or another passion, as the lion to boldness, the dog to anger, the hare to fear and others similarly. But in the domain of reason both anger and control are natural to man, since reason in one sense induces anger, by making the cause for it conscious, or in another sense assuages it, in so far as the angry man does not entirely obey the command of reason ... (Summa Theologica, I., i. Quaestio 46, 5.)

…the bodily metabolism stands in a definite relationship to the rousing of desire ... Every desire strives more strongly towards its opposite, if it happens to be present [p. 123]. The rousing of anger, however, is caused by an inflicted insult, as well as by stubborn opposition, and thus the desire seeks to the utmost to retaliate for the insult by revenge. Hence the violence and impetuosity of irate movement. And because the movement does not occur in the manner of a retirement, corresponding with cold, but rather in the manner of an advance, corresponding with warmth, it causes in consequence a certain glow of the blood and life-spirits round the heart, which is the instrument of the soul's passions. For this reason, on account of the great Turmoil in the heart, which Anger implies, certain signs appear in the outer limbs of those who are angry. Thus Gregory says: “The heart inflamed by the pricks of Anger twitches, the body trembles, the tongue is tied, the face becomes hot, the eyes wild, and friends are no longer recognized; the angry man shouts with his mouth, but knows not what he says.”

…Love is felt differently ... True, when a man experiences through insult a diminution of a beloved excellence, Love is felt more strongly; and the heart is more passionately stirred to banish whatever attacks the beloved object, as if the flame of love grew and became stronger through Anger. Nevertheless, the glow following the warmth of love is different from that of Anger; for the warmth of love is characterized by a certain sweetness and mildness; it extends to include the beloved possession, and so is assimilated to the warmth of the air and the blood. Wherefore those of sanguine temperament are more inclined towards Love; and it is also said that the liver, in which a certain blood-production takes place, urges one towards Love. The heat of Anger, on the other hand, is filled with a bitterness and desire to devour, because it urges one to punish what opposes it; and therefore it is assimilated to the heat of Fire and Choler.

…As a large fire quickly goes out after the fuel is consumed, so Anger by its very violence, comes soon to an end.

… although the reason makes use of no bodily organ for its own ends, bodily disturbances must nevertheless impede the rational judgment, because it is dependent for its functioning on the powers of the senses, whose activity is limited by bodily disturbance, as is seen in drunkenness or sleep. Now Anger produces a disturbance chiefly in the region of the heart, so that it is transmitted also to the outer limbs, and for this reason Anger of all the passions interferes most visibly with the judgment of reason.

… one says of someone seized with sudden anger, that he is open, not because it is clear to him what to do, but because he acts openly without seeking any secrecy. This comes partly from the interference with the reason, which cannot differentiate what is to be hidden and what revealed, and cannot think sufficiently for the cunning required for concealment. But partly it comes also from the breadth of heart which is a quality of magnanimity and this is caused by Anger. Therefore, Aristotle also says of a man with large soul, in his Ethics, that he is an open hater and an open lover, and that he speaks and acts frankly. But concupiscence one calls underground and insidious, because for the most part the desired object of delight savours to a certain extent of disgracefulness and voluptuousness, and herein man prefers to remain unseen. But in those concerns which belong to manliness and excellence, man seeks to be frank. [Summa Theologica, II, 1. Quaestio 48, several sections.)

Anger, like every other passion, according to Thomistic philosophy, is introduced into the Soul, not by reason of the Soul's own spiritual nature, but by reason of its being tied to the body—i.e., from outside, in so far as the whole, composed of soul and body, undergoes the passion. In the Paradisal condition of “justitia originalis,” the body was completely subject to the soul, whose lower powers, from which the passions rise, were subject to reason, and the reason to God. Through the Fall this condition of “original justice” was lost. Christ, who had no “passions” in the sense of Thomas' doctrine of the passions, because, for instance, his “Anger” was entirely the effluence of the Divine Will, and his “Love” entirely the “actio” of the presence of the Divine Spirit, has through his “Passion” opened up the way for man from out of the chains of the “passiones.” With the simple stress and the endless complexity of a Gothic cathedral, Thomas, in his doctrine of Virtue, with its base the Cross of the “passio Christi,” raises man towards heaven out of the fetters of their “passiones”—towards that condition of the future transfiguration, where the new body will be “impassibilis,” freed from the fetters of passion, [p. 180.]

But Rudolf Steiner states that “in the 13th century the Christian principle of Redemption could not be found in the idea-world,” [p. 108.]

Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, the spiritual Goetheanum answers the question: “Where does Thomism dwell in the present day?” In the spirit of the Risen Christ, who in the form of a mighty wooden statue appears in the double-domed chamber of the Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner in the last of his three Addresses could say: “The redeemed human reason, which has the real relationship with Christ, this forces itself upward into the spiritual world; and this process is the Christianity of the 20th century,—a Christianity strong enough to enter into the innermost recesses of human thinking and human soul-life.” [p. 108.]

After seven centuries the Thomistic contribution to knowledge of the human intellect crucified in the body, towering up from the Gothic ground-plan of the Cross, gives way to the contribution of Rudolf Steiner, envisioning the body and releasing and awaking the soul, a contribution whose “Goetheanic” plan is related to the Gothic Cross, as Easter is to Good Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees,

At the invitation of the local Free Student Body, I would like to speak to you today about the nature and task of the anthroposophically oriented worldview. In a few introductory words, I would like to point out, above all, that this anthroposophically oriented worldview seeks to be in full harmony, firstly, with the most essential cultural demands of the present and - as far as one can recognize them - of the near future. Above all, however, this world view also seeks to be in complete harmony with what has emerged over the last three to four centuries for the development of humanity through what is called the scientific world view. It is fair to say that this anthroposophically oriented worldview, which is still viewed by many people today as nothing more than a sect, the quirk of a few unworldly people, seeks to listen very carefully to what is most deeply moving our time, and to grasp very intensely, so to speak, a matter of conscience for our time, and even more so for the near future.

May one not say, esteemed attendees, that for about three to four hundred years, through that which is scientifically oriented world view, many of the old ways of thinking that satisfied the human heart and mind have been has brought man into conflict with man himself, that much that was sacred to centuries, to millennia, has had to be discarded, that science has shown as illusion what older worldviews had counted among their most valuable possessions? And is it not clear from the hardships and catastrophes of our time that the moment has come, the moment in world history, when this scientific world view must now, so to speak, also fulfill what many have expected of it for a long time: that it must once again open up a path to those spiritual heights without which man cannot live after all and from which the old path has taken him? With this question, ladies and gentlemen, the anthroposophical world view would like to be taken very seriously. Now, I am certainly under no illusion that in the short time of a lecture I could convince anyone in this hall of what anthroposophy actually strives for. In a sense, I will only be able to hint at some of the paths that are being taken in this field. And I will be able to suggest a few things regarding the way in which research and questions should be asked in this field of anthroposophically oriented world view.

In its essence, anthroposophy is completely different from all other current scientific knowledge. And because its fundamental nature is different, especially from what is usually regarded as the only scientific knowledge today, it is misunderstood in many circles and, one might say, treated badly. In ordinary science, as in life in general, what can be experienced through the senses and what the mind, the intellect, can gain from this sensory world through observation of natural laws and the like is regarded as the sources of human knowledge. In this way, an attempt is made to gain an overview of what is in man's world environment. In this way, one tries to gain insights into man's own position and task within the world order. In a sense, one looks at the human being as he is born into the world, as he can be educated and taught in the ordinary sense of the word, and how he can then, on the basis of this being born into the world, look around scientifically or otherwise in life, solely on the basis of his abilities and qualities inherited as a human being, on the basis of what ordinary education produces.

Anthroposophy does not take this view. It appeals to something in the human being that is still actually a rarity in human nature today and that, when humanity fulfills its next cultural task, will have to assert itself in human culture in a completely different way than it is present today. Anthroposophy appeals to what I would call intellectual modesty. I often use a comparison to make clear what I mean by this intellectual modesty – this immediately leads us into the essence of what anthroposophy actually wants to be. If we have a five-year-old child and we give this five-year-old child a volume of Goethe's poems, for example, what will he do with this volume of Goethe's poems? It will probably play with it at first and then tear the book apart; in any case, it will have no idea of what this volume of Goethean poems is actually intended for. If we teach the child, if we bring it up, we will bring it to the point where, as an adult of 17, 18, 19 years of age, it will make a completely different use of this volume of Goethean poems. We can say that the five-year-old child had precisely the same relationship to the book as the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old. However, the relationship of the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old to the book is quite different from that of the child, because something has been cultivated in him, something has been drawn out of the depths of his inner being, and this also determines a different relationship to the book than before. Applied to the human being's relationship to nature, to the whole world, what emerges is what I would call intellectual modesty, namely, when the human being decides to say to himself, simply as a human being: however old I get, however I am educated and taught in ordinary life, I stand in relation to the whole of nature and to the whole of the environment in such a way that I relate to it as the five-year-old child relates to the volume of Goethe. And in order to behave differently, I must first bring up from the innermost part of my being something that lies deep within me. Then something will reveal itself to me that cannot be offered to me through ordinary sensory observation, not through the ordinary combining mind, as it is active in conventional life and becoming. That is the essence of anthroposophical world view: that one does not approach the investigation of things as one is, but that one first brings out something that is hidden in the human interior. And only after one has taken one's own development into one's own hands in a certain sense, after one has brought oneself further than one is by being born, by being educated and taught in the usual sense, after one has made oneself a different person, only then does one approach the investigation, the research of things. So, the transformation of the entire human soul life before the exploration of things, that is what initially constitutes the essence of what underlies the striving for an anthroposophically oriented world view.

And here I must say that an anthroposophically oriented world view is based on two cornerstones - namely, of scientific life. One cornerstone is the limits of knowledge of nature. In relation to the knowledge of nature, anthroposophy is based on conscientious research, which sets very definite limits to natural research itself, just as an anthroposophically oriented world view seeks to be in full agreement with everything that science legitimately brings to light. But we do, of course, necessarily come up against limits, not by dabbling in some area of natural science, but by immersing ourselves in it objectively and professionally.

And we must, after all, set ourselves certain concepts at these limits, of which I would like to present the two concepts of the atom or matter and force today, just to cite one example; many other examples could be cited. We then come to work scientifically with such concepts as force and matter, force and substance. Much philosophical thinking has been linked to such concepts as force and substance. In more recent times, people have even gone so far as to want to found a philosophy of “as if”, that is, they said to themselves, one cannot, after all, gain any very clear, luminous concepts of force and matter, and so one should conduct research in the wide sphere of phenomena, of perceptions, “as if” such concepts corresponded to a reality that one does not know, “as if” they had some justification. It may well be said that it is a desperate world view, this philosophy of “as if”, however plausible it may appear to some people today. We have arrived at one of the cornerstones of human knowledge when we come to this concept, to this borderline concept of knowledge of nature. In our knowledge, these concepts, when pursued only intellectually, become a kind of cross, a crux.

The spiritual researcher, the anthroposophist, now tries to deal with this concept in a completely different way than the ordinary philosophers. Ordinary philosophy seeks to continue the intellectual process even at the points where one has arrived at the boundaries of natural science. Spiritual science, as I mean it here, tries to start something completely different in the human soul. Once we have arrived at this borderline concept, one part of the methodology of spiritual science and spiritual research becomes apparent. This part consists not at all of confused or bad mystical meditation, but of systematic, well-structured, thoroughly strict and conscientious meditation. I would like to describe this meditation to you at least in principle. You can find more details about it in the literature, especially in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. It is about the fact that one must practice again and again - and I emphasize explicitly, patience and energy are needed for these things. To do research in the chemical laboratory or in the observatory may seem difficult to some; it may seem easy to achieve something by systematically transforming the soul. But anyone who adheres to the truly strict method in this field knows that all research in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the observatory is relatively easy compared to those procedures that are imagined to be easier than they are, and that consist in a transformation of our soul life.

It begins with the fact that one initially places strictly comprehensible, simple concepts – let us say, for the time being, those that one has formed oneself, some symbols or the like – at the center of one's mental life. It does not matter, my dear audience, that these concepts, these ideas correspond to a truth, because what matters is what is effected in our soul life by these ideas. What matters is that, to a certain extent, we carry out a strict self-education, a strict self-discipline with these ideas in our intellect. We therefore place such concepts, which we can strictly survey, those that we have formed ourselves or that we have been advised to use by experienced spiritual researchers, at the center of our soul life. We try to shut out everything else from our consciousness and to concentrate solely on these clearly defined concepts. The danger is that at the moment we concentrate on such concepts, our bodily images and memories may indeed fly in from all sides, as if we were in a swarm of bees and the bees were flying towards us, and actually destroy our inner methodology. We have to expend ever greater and greater strength. And what matters is the expenditure of this strength; what matters is that we drive the will, with all our might, into the life of imagination, into the act of imagining, so that we actually grow stronger in this driving of the will into the life of imagination.

That is one side of strictly scientific meditation, or rather of meditation that leads to science: that we drive the will into the life of imagination. Such exercises cannot be completed in a few days. Such exercises require years of effort. One must return to them again and again. It is not a matter of completing these exercises in one day. One might say that a few minutes are enough for a day. But to return to them again and again, that is what it is all about. Then one finally experiences how the soul summons up quite different powers from its lowest regions than are summoned up in ordinary life and also in ordinary science. If one applies it by concentrating all possible volitional effort on such self-made volitional content, then after some time, as I said, I can only hint at the principle, the exact You can read more about this in my books. The possibility of approaching the boundary concepts of natural science, such as matter and force and the like, in a way that is not merely intellectual. I could also mention others.

Then the following happens: one no longer speculates, one no longer philosophizes at these boundaries of natural knowledge, but one experiences something at these concepts. Something takes place in the soul in the face of these concepts that encompasses experiences that we otherwise only experience when we love outwardly or when we are otherwise immersed in the struggles of our external lives. What matters, my dear audience, is that, by disregarding the external world, we undergo something within ourselves that leads us into a reality that is just as intense for us, that presents itself to our consciousness just as intensely as the external reality that we justifiably touch and work with our hands and feet is otherwise. And when we have worked our way through to a consciousness that is inwardly, in the intellect, willfully strengthened, through concentration and meditation, then what one can characterize as follows finally occurs: Just as one otherwise recognizes red as a color through external observation, just as one recognizes blue, just as one hears C-sharp or C, so, when one has worked one's way through in this way, no longer , no longer using the nervous system or the like as a tool, but by experiencing it at the merely mental level, one recognizes that there is a soul in itself - one knows this in direct consciousness.

At this moment, my dear audience, it is where one says the following to oneself through direct experience - I would like to suggest it through a comparison. Let us assume that we are walking along a path that is soaked, we see ruts in the path from carts, we see footprints. If we are reasonable people, it will not occur to us to say: These ruts in the soaked path are caused by forces below the surface that bring the earth into such a configuration that these ruts, these footprints arise. We will say to ourselves: There comes something to the earth's surface that is indifferent to this earth's surface as such, that comes to it from outside; carts, human feet have indeed gone over it, which are indifferent to what the earth forms out of itself. If we really come to know the inner configuration of soul life in the way I have described, then we will see everything that is the physical organization of the brain in such a way that we can say: This is not at all shaped by the inner forces of the bodily constellation, but rather the soul, which we have only just come to know, has worked from the outside in the same way as human footsteps or carts have worked in the softened soil.

In other words, dear attendees, one does not get to know the soul through speculation; one only gets to know it by gradually working one's way up to experiencing the soul, by leaving what ordinary life and ordinary science would like to consider the end — the intellectual, the concepts of perception — by leaving that to be the beginning. Once you have reached the point where you have experienced this soul life in this way in direct perception, then, through this method, through this kind of anthroposophical methodology, you are on the threshold of an experiential, tangible grasp of what I human preexistence, the spiritual-soul preexistence of the human being, because this kind of beholding does not lead to speculation about what is called human immortality, but to an immediate insight into preexistence. In the spiritual vision, one sees inwardly, in the soul, that which works in the body and configures the body. One beholds it, and in beholding it, one can also trace it back to before birth or, let us say, before conception. Thus, in its essence, Anthroposophy pursues the idea of immortality differently than ordinary philosophy. Ordinary philosophy seeks to deduce from what is experienced between birth and death that which extends beyond birth and death. Anthroposophy regards even the work of deduction as only a preparation; it seeks to live completely in the process of deducing the borderline concepts, so that it can experience what figures as the immortal in the human being, what is active in him. What fills the human consciousness becomes more active subjectively than we otherwise have it in consciousness. And that is what is really important – I will have to come back to this in the later part of the lecture – that above all, through this methodology of anthroposophy, the human being becomes more and more active. He actually ceases to passively surrender to the course of events, at most to what he has produced in the course of recent times through the arrangement of the experiment, whereby, however, he again passively surrenders to what the experiment tells him. All of this is certainly justified, and it is the last thing that spiritual science would dispute. But beyond that, anthroposophically oriented methodology elevates itself to active thinking, to a thinking that, in the very act of thinking, directly grasps the immortal essence of the human being. I know how much can be said against this experience, which must take the place of ordinary discursive reasoning, but only to the extent that this can be justified philosophically - I will come back to this briefly. I just wanted to show, on the one hand, how this part of anthroposophical methodology, which is based on an evaluation of thinking and on the will's effect on the intellect, actually leads to a truly essential knowledge of the preexistence of the human being. That which is immortal is grasped, which exists in spiritual worlds before conception, before birth, and which cannot be explained from the physical, because it proves itself to be that which works on the physical, and because precisely the physical, the bodily, results - as I will also show in an example in a moment - as that which is shaped out of this spirit.

The second important part of the anthroposophical method consists in approaching one's own self in a different way than is usually the case. People usually approach their own self through what is called mysticism in the ordinary sense of the word. Just as the anthroposophist must no longer entertain illusions regarding the limits of knowledge of nature, and must see this knowledge of nature in its true form through the experience just described, so anyone who truly wants to become an anthroposophical researcher must also have no illusions about the deceptions and illusions of ordinary mysticism. Anyone who believes that they can look into the human soul in the way that mystics of all times have described it, and as is often hinted at in religion, will not truly come to know the human self. My dear audience, there is no way to get beyond the element of deception in this way.

How much does a person really know of what he has heard here and there, say, in childhood? He needs only to have once lain in a meadow and heard a distant peal of bells. No sooner has this fact entered his consciousness than he has forgotten it again. Decades later, as a man, as an adult, he encounters some event in the world. Something appears quietly within this series of events, something that echoes the almost unnoticed peal of bells. And a whole series of images that one believes to have welled up from within are nothing more than a reminiscence of what we went through in early youth. Anyone who really endeavors to explore the human soul in a more rigorous way than is usual today knows how much human self-knowledge is subject to deception. He knows to what extent what the mystics of all times believed they were drawing from their inner being as some kind of power is nothing other than the transformed, perhaps nebulous, but in any case metamorphosed experience of an earlier age. Just as one must go through what I have just described in order to approach the limits of knowledge of nature without deception, one must not indulge in nebulous mysticism in the usual sense, but one must—again in a different way—systematically train the soul at the other cornerstone of human knowledge. And this can only be done by approaching something that one otherwise pays little attention to in life.

We experience our existence between birth and death from decade to decade, from year to year. We passively surrender to many things. We actively and willingly put ourselves into few things. Anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher in the sense meant here must consider what I would like to call strictly systematic self-discipline as the second link in the path of knowledge. You have to resolve again and again – that is why the path of knowledge takes years, many years – you have to resolve again and again: You want to incorporate these or those qualities – as Nietzsche called it – “into yourself”. You want to make this or that out of yourself. — If I thus acquire the possibility of building a bridge, as it were, between the present and a point in time that may have been five, ten or fifteen years in the past, if I have incorporated something into my soul through my own activity for five, ten or fifteen years, then I am in a position to see the effect of what I have incorporated over the past five, ten or fifteen years – something that I have made my own through self-discipline. In other words, I then perceive how something has become something else today, how it appears as a new element.

If I succeed, dear readers, in bringing that which otherwise functions only as will into intellect, concept, representation – as I have thus brought the will into the intellect – then I must now bring the intellect into my life, into that volition which otherwise usually flows past me, as I passively surrender to life. I take my life into my own hands. In this way I try, as it were, to walk beside myself, to look at myself - you just have to do it with the necessary naivety, then you won't lose your naivety of life either. Through such processes one thus becomes, as it were, one's own double. And one arrives at making the life of the will something that one observes, as one otherwise merely observes external nature. If you manage to duplicate yourself in this way, to make yourself into a spectator and an actor at the same time, you have achieved something that manifests itself in a very peculiar way. What you previously only saw as memory now becomes clear to you in a new way. The memory images bring what one experienced ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, and so on, into the present. Now one experiences something quite new, which seems like a transformation of memory.

But lest I be misunderstood, I wish to state explicitly: Of course – in all other respects one retains one's ordinary memory; only for spiritual research does one experience the transformation of memory that is to be described. One experiences something like this that one otherwise only experiences in space. In space, let us say, one walks along an avenue. One turns around: you see not only the images of the trees you have passed, no, you see – albeit from a different perspective than before – the trees themselves. In the same way, it rises in consciousness. You look back on your life, but now not just by having the images, the phantasms of the past, but you recognize - just as when you look around in an avenue in space - from the different perspective that you survey life in the immediate present, as if time had become space. What is otherwise memory becomes a completely new mental power, a looking into time. And only now, in a certain sense, do we gain real insight into that mysterious element in our own being, which is just as little known to us as the content of sleep, of dreamless sleep, is known to ordinary consciousness. We gain such insight into the nature of the human will, and we actually gain the opportunity to see this nature of the human will at work in the physical body. And by getting to know the will in this way as transformed memory, one gains an immediate insight into the other end of life, into the post-existence, into that in us which carries us out through the gate of death and into a spiritual world. Again, it is through the development of a very special soul element into an immediate experience that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to penetrate to a comprehensive world view.

Now, my dear audience, by dealing with the two cornerstones of human knowledge in this way, knowledge of nature on the one hand, knowledge of the self on the other, by entering on the one hand into the soul itself through the limits of knowledge of nature – not through speculation, but through direct experience -, into the soul itself, and on the other hand, by entering into the element of one's own will - not by dabbling in mysticism, but by methodically developing one's memory through strict self-discipline - one awakens in the depths of the human being that which is immortal in that person. And that seems to me to be a continuation of what, although it is not the external scientific method of the present, is scientific education.

I may well confess that it seems to me that the one who, out of blind authority or out of complacency, does not stop at what science has to offer today - this admirable science - but who allows himself to be guided by science in the great question that science imposes on the soul, must, as I have described in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, feel impelled not only to speculate, to philosophize, beyond what science provides, but he must seek to further develop what he applies by experimenting, to a more active intellect, to a more active will. Then he attains to that intensity of soul life of which I have just spoken, where immortality is not speculated but directly beheld. And then, my dear audience, what is described in my book “Occult Science” or in some of my other books, and which to people today still seems like a wild fantasy, will gradually come about as a matter of course, I believe, precisely because of the enigmatic nature of science itself. How do we go about understanding natural science? By strict methods! And anyone grounded in anthroposophy will be the very last to fail to recognize these strict scientific methods. But you see, for example, we are faced with the following. We say to ourselves: We are developing certain geological ideas; and we are trying to gain a picture of the geological stratification of the earth in the present day, based on the starting points of Lyell and other geologists. We then try to gain a picture of the past from this picture, using the well-known methods, by going back millions of years – more or less, of course, the time periods are disputed. Other researchers go millions of years forward by prophetically anticipating this or that about the end of the earth from a physical or geological point of view. We do indeed form a picture of the development of our Earth, and with the Earth, the human being has developed. Now, however, I cannot give a complete insight into the results of spiritual scientific research in the short time available in a lecture. If you look through the relevant literature, you will see that certain things are available. I can only suggest and hint at the way in which things are being sought.

Take the example of the human heart examination. We get a picture of how this human heart transforms in the organism over five, ten years and so on. We can then deduce what the human heart was like thirty years ago and can also do this for a person who is forty years old, but not for someone who is only twenty years old. However, we could take the mere deduction further and could proceed similarly, using a very strict mathematical method. We could ask ourselves: What was this heart like thirty years ago? We would not be using a different method from that used by today's geologists if we were to say about this or that layer of rock what it was like millions of years ago, because we forget that the Earth may not have existed before these millions of years, just as man was not there as a physical being at that time. And when we today, according to some laws of physics or geology, assume something prophetic about some end of the earth after millions of years, it is as if we now calculate, according to the degree of change that the human heart has undergone in five years, what that heart was like in a person three hundred years ago.

At first glance, this appears to be something tremendously paradoxical. And yet, my dear audience, there is something quite justified for the one who does not delve into the present-day admirable science with his intellect or with what authority has brought him up to, but with his whole soul and with an unbiased human nature. And this science of the present itself can benefit greatly from the kind of approach I have suggested, for it is indeed still the case today that one has few co-workers in the field of spiritual science. Those who one would wish to have as co-workers are truly not laymen or dilettantes – the matter is much too serious for that. As co-workers I would most like to have those who have immersed themselves for years in some field of science, who have learned to work scientifically and who have retained in this scientific work all the impartiality necessary to then reshape the human powers of knowledge and soul forces in the way I have indicated, so that one can then enter into that which leads to a much more concrete, truly realistic knowledge, for example, of human nature itself. Anthroposophy will be the best foundation for an anthropology that can be used for medicine and also for social science.

That is why it gave me such great satisfaction – and I mention this because it is very relevant to the matters I would like to discuss today – when I was able to hold a week-long course for forty doctors and medical students in Dornach, where we have established the School of Spiritual Science with an anthroposophical orientation in the Goetheanum. The course was about way in which the bridge between pathology and therapy can be built, which so many people, including doctors, long for today: how this bridge can be built through such an insight into the human being, which can be gained when we no longer think in abstract terms about the relationship between body and soul, but when we come to look into the concrete. I would like to give a small example of this, albeit a somewhat more remote example, but it will be able to point to the concreteness with which spiritual science wants to treat specifically scientific problems.

It is now the case that speculation is taking place about the relationship between body and soul; parallelist theories, interactionist theories and so on have been put forward. However, what is missing is a real insight into the soul and spirit on the one hand, which can only be achieved in the way I have described today, and into the physical on the other. The more materialistically oriented worldview suffers from the tragic fate of not being able to master matter. We cannot look into material processes since we have materialism, because the inner workings of material processes are spiritual, and one must first see the spirit in order to recognize material processes.

So I would like to show you, so to speak, more as a result of what one comes to in terms of knowledge of a developmental moment of man when one proceeds in a spirit-scientific way. We see how man grows through birth into physical existence. We then see how there is an important conclusion in a certain respect when the human being undergoes the change of teeth around the sixth, seventh or eighth year. This change of teeth is only understood in the right sense if we take into account the whole bodily, spiritual and soul life of the human being, as it changes in this important epoch of life. And we see – I can only hint at it – when we consider the soul, firstly that which I have already dealt with here in lectures that I have given more for lay people. We see how the child, who develops as an imitator until the change of teeth, becomes the being who likes to educate himself under the influence of the authority of his surroundings, how, with the change of teeth, the principle of imitation passes over into the principle of authority. But leaving that aside, if we are able to really look at this human soul life, if we have learned to deepen our observation of the soul - and one truly learns to deepen when one develops everything within oneself that I mentioned today as will and intellect training today, if we look at everything that happens to a person around the time of the change of teeth, then it is noticeable how what first grows in a person as the ability to remember undergoes a certain change with the change of teeth. It is noticeable how, from this period on, our imagination begins to take shape, how it begins to become continuously memorable ideas. And I could show many examples! But I would have to talk for a long time if I wanted to show how the transformation of the whole intellectual soul element shows itself purely empirically around the period of the change of teeth.

If one then pursues further what can be investigated in this field, pursuing it with that concrete empiricism that arises precisely from having sharpened one's soul eye through the method I have described , then one finds that the ability to push out the second teeth, so to speak, reveals something that works in the human being throughout the first seven years of life, finally pushing itself out and reaching a climax, a culmination, with the change of teeth. Now, as the teeth change, the soul becomes different. Concepts take shape. The entire ability to remember, which is of course present earlier, is transformed, and by extending the concepts of Goethe's metamorphosis theory to such developments, one recognizes how the soul-spiritual life has emancipated itself from the physical-bodily , how the same thing that later works in the realm of imagination, that is, in the intellectual, has worked in the body - has worked in a formative, plastic way - has reached its culmination in the change of teeth and, after the teeth have been pushed out, shows itself spiritually and mentally. In this way, one follows concretely, no longer abstractly, as one otherwise speculates about body and soul, this formative power, which one later looks at, directly at, when the person brings sharply contoured concepts, not phantasms, out of memory. One follows how it forms, how it drives the forces into the change of teeth. By extending the observation over time, one sees how the spiritual-soul works in the bodily-physical.

Then again, when one approaches the human being in the period of life when sexual maturity occurs, one notices how the will element in particular consolidates during this time from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. But it is still active in the body, and one can see from what occurs – in boys it shows in the change of voice, in girls it shows in a different way, but still – namely, how the will takes possession of the human organism between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. While the intellectual emancipates itself, becomes free with the change of teeth, and works independently, the will becomes free by puberty. I would like to say that a purely spiritual element connects with the body, so that this change, which occurs in the boy during the change of voice, clearly shows how the life of the will manifests itself in the body.

From these two elements that I have given, you can see how one approaches the human being through concrete observation with spiritual empiricism. But what I have shown there then leads from the human being out into the cosmos, and one learns to recognize it as one otherwise gets to know the external sensory content through sensory perception. Through this spiritual vision, one learns to recognize a deeper, but also a more essential element of the cosmos. For example, one learns to recognize what consists in the cosmic forces in which the human being is embedded, which is effective up to the change of teeth on the one hand, and up to sexual maturity on the other. In one case, it acts as an intellectual force, shaping the body until the teeth change, then it emancipates itself and acts on the other side as a volitional force, which takes hold of the human body intensely at sexual maturity.

Now one learns to recognize how that which, as it were, drives out the teeth, what works in the human organism so that it then passes over into the sharply contoured concepts of memory, is the same as what one can only call light in representation. But actually it is all that which bears the same relation to sensory perception as light bears to the eye. One learns to recognize how light is that which actually works in the human organism, and how through the power of light, which thus works in looking with the eyes - but actually it is only the representation, we could speak of the same element for all the senses - that which is otherwise experienced as heaviness is overcome. We see light and heaviness, light and gravitation fighting each other. The cosmic light, the cosmic gravitation is effective in the human being until the permanent teeth have come through. And then again one sees how from the permanent teeth coming through until sexual maturity, gravitation gains the upper hand, how the light-filled, which in turn only represents the rest of perception, is the content of sensory perception, but how gravitation achieves a victory , an inner victory, over this light-filled element and thereby forces the will into the human nature and thereby configures the human being inwardly with what then makes him sexually mature, and guides his organization towards his center of gravity.

This insight into human nature, dear attendees, this direct, concrete, empirical connection between the spiritual and the material, is what the anthroposophically oriented worldview offers. It is truly not some nebulous mysticism, but a rigorous method of research, not only as strict as that otherwise usual in science, but much more rigorous, because each individual aspect approached is accompanied by what the soul has made of itself, so that it sees something new in the old. In this way, what is recognized in man in an anthropocentric way is extended into the cosmic, without becoming anthropomorphic. It will be seen that it is a strict scientific method when something like this is developed, as I have been able to sketch out in my “Occult Science”.

It is easy for those of you, dear readers, who laugh at such a book because you do not understand all the effort that has been expended and all the paths that have been taken to achieve something like this. But something like this must be said in the present time. The materialistic orientation has led to the inability to recognize matter, but only to speculate about the connection between spirit or soul and body or matter. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should teach us to recognize the human being – to truly grasp him as spirit, soul and body – and from there open up the paths into the cosmos, because the human being is something that encompasses everything else in the cosmos. We can conjure up an event that occurred long ago but which we have experienced and which we carry within us in the form of an image — the event is no longer there — from what is in our soul, as an image in us. Because I was once with my mind, with my intellect and feelings and with my perception at this event in life, I can conjure it up. Man was present in all that has ever happened in the cosmos, and thus, when he grasps his whole being, he can really grasp something cosmic - and in a different way than if he had to achieve it externally. As I have described it, inner knowledge also provides a certain cosmology, so that anthroposophy expands into a true cosmology, as I have tried to present it in my “Occult Science”, which may still seem ridiculous to our contemporaries today, but which is based on a strict scientific method, only it has emerged from the nature of anthroposophical orientation.

Dear attendees, what may be described as the essence of anthroposophy can, in a sense, be justified philosophically. And anyone who has followed my writings from the beginning, as I tried to do in the 1880s, commenting on Goethe, working out an epistemology, as I tried to do in my little book “Truth and Science”, to establish the relationship between what human inner life is and what is outside in the cosmos, as I then tried to do in my Philosophy of Freedom, to extend this to a complete world-view for the human being, will find that a great deal of effort has already been expended, as far as has been possible to date, to philosophically justify what I would call higher, spiritual empiricism as spiritual science, as anthroposophy.

I must say that for decades I had to wage a stubborn battle against Kantianism – a stubborn battle against Kantianism, which, in my opinion, has misunderstood the epistemological problem and thus the fundamental philosophical problem of my conviction. I don't have enough time to go into Kant's philosophy or epistemology, but I can say a few words about what it is philosophically that is at stake when we really want to understand the human being. We can start by looking empirically at how man reaches this limit of knowledge of nature, how he comes to a cornerstone at this limit of knowledge of nature that has not yet been expanded anthroposophically, where he stakes the concepts of matter, force and so on. Yes, the point is that the one who is now able to investigate this limit of knowledge of nature by experiencing it, also comes to why man - and I ask you to forgive me the “why” at this point, it is to be understood as merely rhetorical, not teleological —, why man is organized in such a way that he must, at a certain point, impale concepts that are, as it were, obscure, inscrutable to ordinary consciousness.

If we were always able to look into the things of the world, to make them intellectually transparent, including human beings, we would not be able to develop in our human nature what we absolutely must have and develop for ordinary life, especially for ordinary social existence between birth and death: we would not have what lives in us as the element of love. Anyone who studies the connection between knowledge and love in depth will notice that this separation from things that have become intellectually opaque to us, which presents itself to us through the limitations of knowledge of nature, is necessary. It is necessary so that we can develop the power of love within us, in our entire human organization. Not what Kant raised in the “Critique of Pure Reason” and the like, but what we develop within us as the power of love, that is what prevents us from making things transparent in an intellectualistic way. We only attain intellectualistic transparency through the paths I have described today. The human being is organized in such a way that he must buy the power of love around the limits of knowledge of nature. But the human being is the being who, through the power of love, receives his true value and human dignity between birth and death.

And on the other hand, we have the other cornerstone, which some people so lightly want to overcome through a nebulous mysticism and which can only be methodically overcome through the self-discipline that I have described today: that cornerstone lies in self-knowledge. Yes, my dear audience, if we could always look into ourselves, if we could gain the knowledge that, as it were, turns time into space, that, in a changed time perspective, makes earlier events experienceable in a supernatural way in a spiritual vision, that tore away the veil of memory, as it were, and allowed us to look into the past and thereby also into the future in a certain sense, if we always had that, then we would see through it, but we would not have the power of memory, of recollections. We need this power of memory just as we need love in our ordinary human lives. Those who know what disruption of memory means for the continuity of the self, who know that this self is based on the power of unimpaired memory, will also be able to appreciate how this other cornerstone must be placed. The power that makes us a remembering being between birth and death is the only thing that makes it possible for us to tear this veil of memory using the spiritual-scientific anthroposophical method and to look into our own inner being in self-insight. So anyone who understands this organization, who, with real psychology, compares what occurs in memory with what is self-knowledge, knows that we must also have this other cornerstone in ordinary human knowledge and life. It is therefore due to our organization – in a somewhat different way than Kant described it – that we must first grow beyond what organizes us in ordinary life if we want to penetrate into the depths of nature that can be aspired to and longed for.

But then, my dear attendees, for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, if it is inwardly alive on this path, something arises that is very daring today, very daring to express. But what use is it to leave such things unspoken when it depends on them? Anyone who looks at how we have to imagine the world today in terms of the thoughts and ideas that have emerged over the last three to four centuries can never bridge the gap between what arises in the soul as an ethical, moral, social and religious ideal and what arises from knowledge of nature.

On the one hand, there are natural phenomena. They lead us, albeit hypothetically or in the philosophy of “as if”, to a beginning, to an earlier state of the physical universe; they then lead us to metamorphoses of this physical universe, showing us how one law, or let us say two laws, but which are actually one, prevails in this physical universe. If these laws prevail in the way that today's knowledge of nature can imagine, then no bridge can be built to the other, to the ethical, to the social, to the religious ideal. And these two laws are the law of the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter. If the world in the universe outside, in nature, changes in such a way that matter is indestructible and force, in eternal preservation, only transforms itself, then - then our ethical ideals, our religious ideals, are nothing but smoke that rises, then they are our great illusions. And when the world has long since transformed its substance and its forces in a certain way, then those world experiences that we enclose within our moral ideals, within our religious ideals, and so on, will be carried to the grave, sunk into nothingness. These things are usually not pointed out. But what splits many souls inwardly in the present, what tears many souls inwardly in the present, that is more or less unconsciously present as a result of this complete failure to bridge the gap between knowledge of nature and spiritual grasp of the moral, of the religious, as a mood of the soul.

But, my dear attendees, if we experience our own intellect at the limits of knowledge, as I have described it today, then we see how our intellect also belongs only to a certain part of external existence , and that we cannot grasp the beginning of earthly existence with the intellect that we are only really getting to know in the experience described, because this intellect belongs to that which lies only after this beginning and which lies before the end. If we apply this intellect to the whole process, if we go back millions of years or millions of years forward, as geologists and physicists do, then we do the same as if we thoughtlessly talk, for example, about the transformation of the heart as it appears in humans before or after three hundred years. We must be clear about the nature of this intellect: that it does not come close to the other powers of knowledge that we have to acquire in the way described today.

With anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, no Rickert or Windelband theory of value is established, where values are supposed to assert themselves out of the blue, without reality. Rather, it opens up for us what we survey in the intellect. We feel obliged to somehow integrate value into the currents of being. But this will be completely impossible as long as we do not overcome the crushing law of the conservation of energy and matter. We must come to think of matter and force as transient. It is only an illusory world that has arisen from our intellect and that leads us to believe in the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of force. It is certain that 19th-century science could lead to nothing else. But for those who see through the world as it has been presented today, what substances and forces are, something that perishes like this year's plants, and what lives in us as an ethical ideal, as a religious idea, is something that we experience as a germ, like the germ in the flower of the present plants. We look at this germ, which is perhaps just a mere point at present; we know that it will be a plant next year when what is surrounding it now as a flower or as leaves has vanished. We see this outer world in a spiritual vision when we apply our intellect to it. We do not get to know it under the principle of the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of energy, but we get to know it as a dispersing one, and the germs in it are what prevails in our souls as a moral element, as a religious idea. What surrounds us today in a sensual way will be dispersed! What grows and thrives within us will be the world of the future, the cosmos of the future. In my opinion, only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can lead to this bridge between spirit and nature, under today's conditions.

Dear attendees, I was allowed to speak these few stimulating sentences here at the request of the “Free Student Body”. I know that they cannot be conclusive or convincing, but they are intended only as a stimulus. However, because I have been given the opportunity to speak on behalf of the student body today, for which I am very grateful, I would like to point out that it is particularly natural for someone who has to look at the world today, who is himself at the end of his sixth decade, to look towards today's youth. In the hearts and souls of today's youth, one really sees the seeds of the future, for one looks back to one's own youth. Four decades ago – and this I would like to say to the esteemed young friends who invited me today – was when people of my age were young. We looked into the world back then, but we were dependent on it, in a sense, we looked into a world of illusions. We were dependent on it back then. It is true that many of the great achievements of external life still awaited people, but the civilized Europe that was present for us at that time also looked different than it does now. Now a man of spirit, Oswald Spengler, is writing about the decline of Western civilization. Back then, three or four decades ago, ladies and gentlemen, was the time when the motto “How did we get it so good?” was perhaps most prevalent – a time, however, when people were very much wrapped up in illusions. The strength of these illusions only dawned on some of those who were of that age when this modern civilization rolled into a terrible catastrophe in 1914. At that time, an infinite pain settled on the souls of the thinking, the waking elders, and they looked back on that time when they were not allowed to say - because the illusions were too great -: We need something that is not just a renaissance, but that is a naissance, that is the birth of a new spiritual life.

Now, after years of pain, now, my dear audience, I believe that life is different in youth. Now the great need is here, and now it is evident in all areas that one cannot indulge in the illusion that we have come so gloriously far. But now, I believe, there is something in every waking person, or in the one who can awaken, that leads him to the inner admonition: Use your will! In the external, objective world, everything points to decline. But the Spenglers, those who only speak of decline and even want to prove this decline, will be wrong if that fire asserts itself in today's youth, if that strength asserts itself in youth that wants to awaken the soul to create and to will, because only through the creativity and will of people who are fully aware of themselves can there be improvement today, not through speculating about forces in which we are supposed to believe. No, it must lie in activating the forces that can be found in our own will, in our own ability.

Therefore, I would like to end this lecture, for which I am very grateful to the esteemed student body for inviting me, with Fichte's words, which read: “Man can do what he should; and when he says, I cannot, he will not.” If we become aware of the spirit that shines towards us from the universe through spiritual vision, that wages its battles with gravity within us, then this spirit will inspire us to create, and then precisely from the present youth will emerge that which every alert person today must hope for, that which every alert person today must long for. Yes, we need not just a renaissance, we need a naissance of the spirit. It will come to us when today's youth understands and honors their task.