The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,A very serious philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, spoke from his deepest insight the sentence: What kind of philosophy you choose depends on what kind of person you are. - For a philosophy that wants to talk about moral and ethical, moral-social aspects from its own field, such a sentence is, if you look more closely, downright devastating. For if, in its highest realizations, which are supposed to be the philosophical ones, one only reflects what one already is as a moral and social human being, then philosophy, world view, cannot possibly provide impulses for morality and the social. And anyone who takes such a sentence seriously will have to ask themselves the important question: How can knowledge, how can a body of knowledge have any kind of impelling effect on the moral, on the social life? For in our time, scientific thinking, which permeates all the life forces of human beings, would indeed like to have a certain authoritative effect on the moral and social life. This question seems to me to have a very special significance for our time, and to an even greater extent for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be an active force in life. And how could it become one if it could not find any impulses for morality, for social life, which arguably include the greatest problems of our present time. Again and again, however, one is referred to the special nature of today's scientific spirit when such a question is raised.

This scientific spirit, it would like to develop in a way that actually contradicts Fichte's dictum. Today's scientific spirit, which has developed the way of thinking and the methods that are particularly suitable for the external, independent nature of man, would like to deliver results that cannot be said to be the way man is. And in fact, it will make a lot of sense if someone says today: a chemist who forms a world view, a physicist who forms a world view, will be pushed by the objectivity of his view to develop something that is valid for all people, so to speak, that cannot be said to be similar to what the human being is as a whole. In a sense, objective science must flourish independently of the moral or other state of the soul.

One can say: this science has risen to its highest triumphs in the last few centuries, especially in the very last century. Not that one would want to believe that it is already sophistically oriented spiritual science, it still has this meaning to an increased extent. For anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be an active force in life. And how could it become that if it could not find some impulses for morality, for social life, which arguably include the greatest problems of our present day. But again and again, when such a question is raised, attention is drawn to the special nature of today's scientific spirit.

This scientific spirit, it would like to develop in a way that actually contradicts Fichte's dictum. Today's scientific spirit, which has developed the way of thinking and the methods that are particularly suitable for the external, independent nature of man, would like to deliver results that cannot be said to be the way man is. And in fact, it will make a lot of sense if someone says today: a chemist who forms a world view, a physicist who forms a world view, will be pushed by the objectivity of his view to develop something that is valid for all people, so to speak, that cannot be said to be similar to what the human being is as a whole. In a sense, objective science must flourish independently of the moral or other state of the soul.

One can say: this science has risen to its highest triumphs in the last few centuries, especially in the very last century. Not that one would want to believe that it is already sophistically oriented spiritual science, it still has this meaning to an increased extent. For anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be an active force in life. And how could it become that if it could not find some impulses for morality, for social life, which arguably include the greatest problems of our present day. But again and again, when such a question is raised, attention is drawn to the special nature of today's scientific spirit.

This scientific spirit, it would like to develop in a way that actually contradicts Fichte's dictum. Today's scientific spirit, which has developed the way of thinking and the methods that are particularly suitable for the external, independent nature of man, would like to deliver results that cannot be said to be the way man is. And in fact, it will make a lot of sense if someone says today: a chemist who forms a world view, a physicist who forms a world view, will be pushed by the objectivity of his view to develop something that is valid for all people, so to speak, that cannot be said to be similar to what the human being is as a whole. In a sense, objective science must flourish independently of the moral or other state of the soul.

One can say that this scientific nature has risen to its highest triumphs in the last few centuries, especially in the very last century. Not that one would believe that they already talk this way, that they say: you don't make social life with moral principles. That was considered almost the most outstanding axiom in the socialist-thinking circles of modern times, that all the social life drawn from moral or socially conceived maxims is an illusion. And the socialists' social attitude actually fed on this axiom. It was said that what really matters is not how some class, how some individual person thinks about what should actually happen socially, but that it matters that one turns to those people in whose egoism, in whose entirely natural, elementary egoism it lies to shape the world as it must be shaped – and that is the proletarian demand. I would like to say that, precisely because of the modern spirit of science, every moral principle, every social view not based on egoism, has been eliminated. And as long as we do not realize what this means for the whole course of the world in modern times, and as long as we do not want to see how our social needs arise from the feelings and thoughts of human beings, we will not be able to approach what our time particularly needs in this respect.

The scientific spirit of modern times is therefore powerless against moral and social impulses, as is simply shown by the historical course of events. What emanates from this spirit, however, flows through a certain social necessity into the minds of the broadest classes of people. And it is out of this attitude that even those who know nothing about science, who have not arrived at science, judge the social affairs of this world. What does that mean in this case? The social affairs are viewed in such a way that everything that must appear in a healthy way as a social and moral evaluation of some fact for humanity is also, as in the shaping of science, eliminated. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take this fact into account in particular. It wants to become a power that is able to unleash such moral impulses in the individual human being that these moral impulses can prevail in a socially beneficial way. But then the anthroposophical school of thought must lead, I would say, in the way people who develop it look at world phenomena, to bring the moral and the social into it so that one sees it.

In the lecture you gave earlier, you humorously showed how people are talked into all sorts of things in our social and economic life, and how these people then add these things to their household goods. Such things must be seen in their symptomatic aspect, and they are seen in their symptomatic aspect only when one can draw the connecting lines from them to the great events of world history. For if it were not for the fact that people let these things be talked into them by the peddlers, then there would not be that either – for things are connected in social life – which at the end was told to us about the horrific militarization of economic life.

What is truly effective in the here and now is what matters. And I would like to paint a picture for you, prompted, so to speak, by the humorous account I have just given, of how such peddling has an antisocial, dare I say it, anti-moral effect.

Once, when I was at a fair, a trader was selling huge amounts of soap. Now, ladies and gentlemen, an observation that really leads to social thinking must inspire the human mind to arrive at a point in life where soaps are offered that can be used for washing. But that was completely out of the question with the soaps offered by this trader. Those who tried it afterwards soon gave up the attempt to wash themselves with it permanently. But the trader did great business, and I will tell you how he did it. He had large bales of such soap next to him. He stood on a podium; he took a number of soaps from the first bundle. Now he was, in the best sense, what you might call a representative person. In the most wonderful phrases, he presented the excellence of his soap to his audience, and he called forth the opinion that this must be a particularly valuable soap, which one can pay well for, through everything he did there. And then he sold about ten soaps, piece by piece, for a very high price, the individual piece. This price was paid by those who happened to have the money in their pockets, and they were very happy to have received such good soaps; for they recognized the quality of the soap by the high price. Now they were standing there. The man had achieved as a representative personality what he wanted to achieve, and he was no longer interested in being this representative personality. Therefore, he said later: Oh, the way I've been selling the soaps up to now, they're much too expensive! These soaps are only worth half the price. I will sell them at half price from now on. And now he had the kind of customers again who would buy from him, and he was able to suggest to them that he was such a good man that he would sell the soap cheaper than the first buyers, who were still standing there, had received it. They didn't complain, but instead — excuse the harsh expression — opened their mouths wide. But then, when he still had a considerable number of bars of soap from the first bundle, he said: “But I'm a good man, I won't sell this last bar of soap at all, I'll throw it away.” And so he threw all the soap among the audience and they could pick it up for free.

I am telling you this fact not only because it is grotesque in itself, but because I also learned something else that is highly interesting. All this had happened and the salesman went to his second bundle, and he did it again in the same way, and in all three stages, and he again got rid of his bars of soap in all three stages!

This seems to me to be extraordinarily symptomatic, ladies and gentlemen, because when I look at the big businesses that are being done in the world, and when I look at the consuming public and how it relates to them, then I actually see all three stages continually there, and one can see from the perception of these three stages how internally impossible our economic structure actually is. But precisely under the modern spirit of science, this truly healthy, truly practical thinking has been lost. For practical thinking, which does not remain within the routine, but becomes a true purpose in life, must above all see reality in things, see what lies within them, not what is only outwardly before the eyes, and in which one can beguile people with all kinds of suggestions.

It is very often slanderously said of anthroposophical spiritual science that it seeks to exert some kind of suggestive power. In the example I have told you, which certainly did not originate with an anthroposophist, there was a great deal of suggestive power that is very common today, a suggestive power that its audience knows very well.

In contrast to this, anthroposophical spiritual science wants to provide something that is capable, through its inner vitality, of effectively seeing through social and moral connections, of finding something in the human being that find something that may be as Fichte's sentence expresses it: that it is of the same nature as the human being itself, but at the same time can be effective within the moral and social world. But if we really want to understand the spiritual life, then, ladies and gentlemen, we have to make some effort, and so, just to illustrate my train of thought today, allow me to go into something that can illustrate it a little from a completely objective point of view, without regard to personalities, from a certain quarter.

You see, when I spoke about it in Stuttgart, people from all sorts of different quarters believed that I consider Count Hermann Keyserling's comments about me to be a lie, and people from various quarters believed that I was personally annoyed and speaking about such a matter for some personal reason. But that was not the case at all, because I can give you the most honest assurance: I couldn't care less about what Count Hermann Keyserling thinks of me; I don't care about a personal attack. But there is something else I do care about: I care about looking at the phenomena that occur in our lives in terms of their ethical and moral value. And here I must say the following: I consider it one of the greatest achievements of modern science that – even if not always in practice, at least in the theories expressed – this modern science tends towards the proposition that one should not simply express what one subjectively believes to be true, but that one must absolutely recognize the obligation to first truly fathom the truth of what one expresses.

It is usually not recognized that there is something extraordinarily progressive in the assertion of this sentence, because anyone who is a historian or a scientist cannot and must not content themselves with the excuse that they have heard this or that here or there, but they are obliged to recognize the basis of truth for what they say. And this principle must be incorporated into our moral life, because if the moral life is to be the basis of the social, then morality must be permeated by objective truth and not merely by subjectively believed truth, because it is not this subjectively believed truth that has an effect on social life, but only objectively experienced truth. It must be said that we are now living in an age in which the split between knowledge and belief has led to a situation in which, whenever someone asserts something that they have believed and that subsequently turns out to be objectively untrue, they excuse themselves by saying that a person is entitled to assert what they believe to be the truth to the best of their knowledge and belief. My dear audience, this principle allows the possibility of every possible objective untruth entering into public life, and only by combating this principle can morality be brought into our social life, and into our business and economic life. Therefore, because I always want to make use of the spirit of truth that is necessary for anthroposophy on the one hand and for all of modern life on the other, I had to assert this spirit of truth in the face of what has occurred on the characterized side. I was interested in this as a cultural phenomenon, not as a personal matter, and as a cultural phenomenon it actually leads to that deeper concept of truth that we so urgently need today.

You see, it is easy to say that Count Hermann Keyserling is not an opponent of anthroposophy. Count Hermann Keyserling himself wanted to prove to me that he was not an opponent of anthroposophy, and that is why he wrote me a long letter a long time ago. But this long letter was written in a handwriting that I could not read; the lines that went across were always crossed by others, the letters were written in a highly sloppy and careless manner, and I really could not finish reading this letter. The person who is able to judge the world and people not according to arbitrary principles but according to essential inner symptoms could say to himself – this writing is of course not the reason I want to give for the underlying facts, but it is a symptom –: this writing, and the way such a letter is brought about, does not provide the human basis for what is attributed to Count Hermann Keyserling from certain quarters. And if you then approach his works, you find something, you find what I now express as my conviction: if Count Hermann Keyserling were to say that he was a very devious opponent and enemy of anthroposoph , dear ladies and gentlemen, I would believe him and I would find it entirely justified, because the person who writes Count Keyserling's books cannot be a follower of and cannot be an objective judge of anthroposophy. But if he says that he is not an opponent, then he is telling an objective untruth. When Count Hermann Keyserling says that he is not an opponent of anthroposophy, to me that says much more about his dishonesty than if he had honestly said that he must be an opponent. I do understand that there must be opponents; but the fact that there are people, numerous people, who today even become fashionable, who simply say the opposite of what is now their inner truth as an outer truth, that goes against the principle of anthroposophy, which looks everywhere for inner truth and not for outer truth, which is then no truth but only an apparent truth.

I wanted to emphasize this, dear attendees, for the reason that one should not always misjudge what the innermost impulse of anthroposophical sentiment is, and so that one may know that this anthroposophical sentiment touches the nerve of the present world, and it makes the claim not only to say what has already been said in the same sense, but to say it in a way demanded by the spirit of the time; but that demands that we even learn to think anew about lie and truth.

This, however, is the only thing that can guide us when we approach such an important problem as anthroposophy as a moral and social creative force. For there we must look at the fact that anthroposophy not only embraces this modern scientific spirit, this modern scientific spirit, but that it also develops that which is already present as a germ in this modern science, developing this germ more and more, while this germ is not developed by this modern science. Therefore, my dear audience, in its beginning, Anthroposophy is quite like modern science, but by inwardly grasping the essence of this modern science, it leads in its further course to where not only the facts of external nature are understood, but where the facts of the inner life of man are also understood, for example, the instincts or the will.

And we will only come to grasp the true core of anthroposophy, on the one hand, and to understand the moral and social impulses of anthroposophy, on the other, if we realize how the [scientific] spirit, which otherwise only grasps external natural facts, can can reach in, transforming and metamorphosing itself, into what the human being is in his instincts, for example, in his will impulses; for this is connected with the actual character of our present epoch, which began in the 15th century and in which we still find ourselves today. In the 15th century, the first seeds of the modern scientific spirit were sown, and this modern scientific spirit had to develop in a one-sided way. I cannot go into this in more detail now; I have explained it many times in other places. It had to develop the inner soul constitution in such a way that it was capable of pursuing the connection between external natural phenomena in a lawful way. In order that this one-sided power of the human soul-life might develop vigorously in spite of its one-sidedness, the other powers of human life and human organization had to be left behind for a while.

What first developed in a one-sided way was that which guided human beings to let a conscious soul-life take the place of an old instinctive soul-life. No matter how much one may declaim about the fact that man has lost his naivety as a result of consciousness having taken the place of the old instinctive, such declaiming has no more value than if one complains that one used to be twenty years old and looked a certain way, and now one is older. These things cannot be criticized, but must simply be recognized in their necessity. From the 15th century onwards, humanity had to pass over into consciousness, and it did so first in the realm of imaginative life. But even this imaginative life was formerly placed in the instinctive life. Those who are truly familiar with the totality of civilization and cultural life that preceded the 15th century, including Greek civilization, know how all the powers of the human soul worked instinctively in those days, and how even what was called scientific worked, in certain respects, much more instinctively, out of the instinct-based human soul condition, than it does today. And in this human soul-condition, borne by instinct, in which a world necessity beyond human beings was at work, a kind of threefold structure of this social life has always emerged, approximately, until the 15th century, as human beings have worked in social life. The instincts have worked, I might say, with natural certainty – if I may use this not quite proper expression. People have integrated themselves into the social organism through their instincts, and through what they have done in the process, what they have achieved – whether in these or those life situations that arose from people acting on instinct – a certain structure of the social organism has emerged in the spiritual sphere, in the legal-constitutional sphere and in the economic sphere.

This threefold social order, which today must be spoken of consciously, was basically present, even if this is not apparent to some people today who do not understand the threefold social order at all. , by feeling that he was part of the social life, he received what he needed to satisfy his imaginative, [his soul's] and his will needs, he received it from a spiritual member of the social organism, from a state-legal and from an economic one. They were in a relationship that was understood by humanity at that time through their instincts and that they could satisfy through their predispositions. Of course, today we no longer know what to do with this old structure.

But now came the newer time. It was the time when people developed their imaginative life one-sidedly. It was the first half of the 15th century, the 16th, 17th century, and partly still the 18th century. Beneath the imaginative life that had become conscious, there still glimmered what was left of the inheritance of the old instincts. And I would like to say that something instinctive was still at work in the moral and social spheres, while man passed over this world and looked at that which was now already emerging from his fully conscious life of ideas. But since then, since the 18th century, these instincts have completely died out, and what remains are only abstract traditions. We do not live today with an elementally generated morality and justice of the social world; we live because the instincts that used to establish social orders are no longer active. And as much as the Marxists believe that they live in Marxism, they live in the most ancient traditions, which can be seen from the fact that they always want to explain the conditions of social life from the prehistory of wild and barbaric peoples.

This is what has developed up to our most recent times. But this, ladies and gentlemen, has also led to the fact that man now only wants to approach social and moral life with his imagination, which has been developed one-sidedly, and that out of the old tradition, moral institutions and social institutions have arisen alongside it, for which only traditions remain, with which human life in its reality is no longer connected. And while instinct, the instinct-based state of mind, has, out of a sense of world necessity, placed the spiritual alongside the legal and the economic, the not yet fully developed life of ideas, the one-sidedly developed life of ideas, lacks the possibility of seeing through this structure of the social organism. What the human being can think and what he has in the way of traditions are mixed up in a chaotic way. He does not have the impetus to see the correct characteristics of spiritual, legal-state, and economic life, and in recent times he has mixed them up into chaos in all areas of state life.

This chaos is the latest phase in the development of the social organism. Man, placed in the social order, wants to receive from the spiritual life, out of his human nature, what this alone can give him in his freedom; he wants to receive from the legal-state life what this alone can give him when all mature people can have a say, and from the economic life what this alone can give when it is formed out of expertise and specialist knowledge in associations. Everything that a human being, in accordance with his nature, can only receive from a properly structured social organism, he should receive today from a chaos, from a chaotic formation of this social organism.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the fundamental cause of the crisis we are facing today; for everything you can describe in the field of education, in the field of the free intellectual life, insofar as it has still retained its freedom, everything you can describe in the fields of business life, the other economic sectors, all these are special crises in the face of the great crisis, [which consists in] the fact that man today, without the broad masses actually knowing it, is placed in a social chaos that actually rejects his innermost being. And this rejection manifests itself in the revolutionary, social-revolutionary forces of the present. And as long as one does not realize that the basis for our present world crisis lies in this modern powerlessness of man to see through the structure of the social organism, one will also be unable to have any understanding for the reforming forces of this world crisis.

Within the threefold structure of the social organism, however, there is one area that works differently from the others: the economic area. Economic life, which produces goods according to human needs, is subject to a certain necessity. These needs arise. This economic life still gives itself its social impulses in the same way as it used to give them according to old traditions. Man must pay attention to this. He has no freedom here, no arbitrariness. With regard to the legal and state life, and especially with regard to the spiritual life, he can divert attention from that which is really essential to him, and for the reasons I have given, modern humanity has diverted its attention from the structure of the social organism. This has become evident: that this turning away has initially only led to the neglect of progress in intellectual and legal life, but that economic life, as was to be expected from such neglect, could not but develop in a one-sided way. And so today we have a public thinking that basically pays no attention to intellectual and legal life, but continues to work in old forms, in old traditions, and which, through the natural economic necessities to see everything it thinks at congresses and other gatherings, in war and peace resolutions, solely in the light of this economic life.

And the means by which man could truly intervene in social life in the past were his instincts and his will. Anthroposophy shows us how man, through the activity of his will and his instincts, continually draws from a subconscious realm, just as he draws strength from sleep, which is also a subconscious state. Anthroposophical knowledge must absolutely place what the human being experiences in relation to the actual essence of his will in parallel with what he calls sleep. It is a sleep that we continually carry around in us as we let our will impulses work from the unconscious, just as the refreshing forces that approach our life work from what we gain in our sleep. But in relation to social life, this unconscious was only possible in a certain period of time; it has no longer been possible since the middle of the 15th century.

And here natural science is subjecting itself to a great, a powerful illusion: it wants to explain everything scientifically, it wants to include the human being in this scientific explanation, and from the principles it has formed about natural facts, it now wants to explain instinct and will. She constructs views about instinct and will that are actually only continued views about external natural existence. But anthroposophical spiritual insight shows us that instinct and will are rooted in their deeper essence in the spiritual and not in the natural, which we can only reach with natural science. Instinct and will are rooted in the spirit; they only integrate themselves in the human being. They reveal themselves in the human being in a natural shell. It is only this natural shell that science approaches; it does not approach the actual essence of instinct and will at all. But by taking the path from external natural science to a spiritual science, anthroposophy is able to see through not only the shell, the cover of instinct and will, but the true essence of instinct and will. And in so doing, it not only brings up into abstract thinking that which works as instinct and will, but the essence of instinct and will comes alive in the life of imagination. Anthroposophy begins as the most modern science as knowledge; in the further pursuit of its path, it leads to life, it leads the human being to submerge into those depths where instinct and will are rooted spiritually in the spirit. She may say, because she is a living being, with Fichte: What view one forms depends on what kind of person one is – because she is able, through her liveliness, to be allowed to work in the sense of this saying and yet be able to bear fruit for the moral, for the social life.

What kind of mind one has, dear attendees, depends to a certain extent on the nature of the rest of the human organism. But if we focus only on what lives in the mind, we fail to grasp the rest of the organism; then the rest of the organism seems like an unknown. Thus, for the modern scientific mind, that which works in the will below the level of the life of ideas still appears as an unknown. If, then, this modern science works in the way that the human being is constituted, it does not see through, and therefore does not experience, what is in the human being's will nature, because it does not penetrate into this will nature of the human being. By rising from knowledge to full life, anthroposophy flows with all human consciousness into the stream of instinct and will, making them conscious, and one thereby acquires the possibility of working not only on one's thinking but on one's whole human being. But then, when we have a science that works on the whole human being, then, while we think, that which may influence this thinking arises in the other person. Then knowledge and life work as an organic whole, where one determines the other simultaneously, not one after the other. Then, in this organic interaction, philosophy, including moral philosophy, may be what the human being can make of them by virtue of his or her nature.

These, esteemed attendees, are the things we must look at if we want to recognize anthroposophy as a moral and social impulse. This is what anthroposophy believes it has to say to our time in this regard, to which it feels obliged to say it. And it must be convinced that the possibility of replacing the oppressive forces with constructive ones will not arise until people decide, when discussing economic issues, to look at what is beneficial for the spiritual and for the legal life, until they have a true heart for what alone can become lawful and what can only arise from the harmony of all of all mature human beings in their independent legal lives, before they do not have a deep feeling that genuine spiritual life can only flourish when it is left to its own devices, that the three can only work together as they once worked together out of instinct, when consciousness out of man finds its way to the secrets of the world, to which it once found its way when it still worked only instinctively.

This time will be the time when people no longer marvel at the world like Woodrow Wilson — at least he was, even if he is no longer — justify the state administration of school education by saying that only the state is capable of creating the conditions of freedom in which the free individual can live. Well, my dear audience, such a freedom is only to be allowed to prevail if it is conditioned, that is, made necessary by state institutions.

And further, in his great book “The State”, published in 1889, Woodrow Wilson says: the state must not give up control of the schools, because what the state needs for its power, for its authoritative effectiveness, it can best achieve by owning the teaching.

Now, my dear audience, anyone who feels what freedom of spiritual life should and must be must rebel against a maxim that says: the state must instill in children what it needs for its preservation – because by saying this, it is saying that the state must establish in schools that which is not freedom of spiritual life, which is the deepest lack of freedom in spiritual life.

As long as scientists do not have an eye, an eye of the soul, to look up to what is thought about the spiritual, about the legal, there can be no improvement in our present moral life, which underlies the social, and in this social life itself, because we not only need a critique of the old moral instincts, a critique of the old social concepts, we need the creation of new moral impulses and new social impulses. But these can only come about through a science, through a knowledge that, by spiritualizing human knowledge itself, is also capable of penetrating into the spiritual world.

Dear attendees! At the kind instigation of Baron Rosenkrantz, a number of questions have been put by our friends, which are now to be answered within the framework of this event.

Before that, however, since the request has been expressed so frequently and I have also asked some friends personally, I would like to ask those artists present here and a few others who have never seen the wooden group, which is still in progress, to come to the studio tomorrow at 9 a.m. This group will then be shown. But I ask you to take this matter very seriously and I really ask only those to come who have never seen the group before.

Now a number of questions have been handed to me.

Question: If the content of a work of art is the most important thing, why can't we express it in accordance with the Greek ideal?

Dr. Steiner: The question is not quite clear. I would like to think that it alludes to what I have often said about Goethe's view of art, which was expressed when Goethe, upon arriving in Italy, wrote to his friends in Weimar: When I look at these Greek works of art, I believe that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am trying to grasp. I would just like to note that if it is possible for a person to truly find a way to experience and relive the creative forces of nature, as I have indicated on various occasions when discussing this building, then we do not actually become imitators of nature, but we do create with our materials in the same way that nature creates. We need only remember that, in the full perception of man, the aim should not be to imitate nature, because whatever we encounter in nature, whether in the form of landscape or anything else, is always done more perfectly by nature than even the most accomplished artist can achieve. Art is only justified if, in the Goethean sense, it does not imitate nature, but continues nature's work from the same forces that nature uses to create. And then, if we create in this way, we can recreate nature just as the Greeks did. We must only be clear about the fact that humanity does not go through various stages of development in vain, just as the individual human being does not either, but that our present humanity has different developmental impulses from those of the people of the Greek age. What the Greeks had in common with nature in their art is there for us in a different form, and if we accept and understand this metamorphosis of the whole coexistence of man with nature, then we can definitely say that what we create is just as “recreated according to the laws of nature” as the Greek works of art are.

Question: If we take beautiful colors from nature, why shouldn't we be able to take beautiful forms from nature?

Dr. Steiner: I would not be able to see that either. But I ask you to consider again how I repeatedly spoke about colors in connection with this building and how I spoke about forms in my lecture on art. It is not a matter of imitating the inartistic, which is characteristic of an inartistic present time, but of not imitating nature's colors, but of experiencing them. We do, after all, inwardly experience color and then create from the world of color. Likewise, we can, of course, also experience form from within, and then we will create forms for ourselves as they also appear in nature. But we must bear in mind that when we draw, we are actually demanding not to imitate nature's forms, but to counterfeit them. We have to draw the surfaces.

It is indeed the case in nature itself that the horizontal line, when we draw it, is a fake – I said a lie a few days ago. What can be seen is the blue sky, the green sea, and the form is the result of the color. This is already in nature, and when we work artistically out of color, the form arises just as the form arises in nature itself.

Question: Should color be used in painting from a moral point of view?

Dr. Steiner: If I understand the question correctly, it is asked whether one should try to translate a moral intention into colour or even into colour harmony if one has a moral intention.

I believe that anyone who tries to embody human and moral thoughts in colour in this way actually creates in an unartistic way. Only that which can be experienced as spiritual in the world of color can be embodied in color. To the same extent that one has the moral intention of artistically forming what has been morally conceived, one falls back on symbolizing, and allegorizing is always inartistic.

To illustrate what I actually mean, I will say the following: I was once obliged to reconstruct the forms of the Kabirs, the Samothracean gods, the Samothracean mysteries, for the purpose of a Faust performance here. They had to be shown while the Goethean text was being spoken. I believe that I was able to construct these Kabirs out of spiritual contemplation. Then – and I say this not out of immodesty but because it is a fact that should be communicated – then it occurred to one of our members to have these Kabirs, who fell, as well and they should be photographed. Now, the thought of photographing a three-dimensional work is so repulsive to me that I actually want to run away from every photograph of a sculpture, because what is really artistically created is created out of the spiritually experienced feeling for material, and because it is impossible to directly experience what is conceived in spatial forms in the form of a surface. Therefore, at the time, I preferred to do it again in black and white, because I wanted to take this wish into account, and then you could photograph it.

Anyone who thinks that moral intentions can be realized in painting is thinking that you can take any content, I mean a novella, and then pour it into any material. That is not true. It is artistically untrue. In a material, any artistic thing can only be formed in one way.

Question: Does this mean that in the future sculpture should express inner feeling and painting inner wisdom?

Dr. Steiner: I will allow myself to answer this question now because it belongs together with another question, in connection with the other question.

Question: Would art under the influence of anthroposophical teachings not tend to become monotonous, which would not be interesting? Is there not a danger that art would bear an anthroposophical stamp, as if from a particular school of painting? Dr. Steiner: If one grasps what can really arise out of anthroposophical thinking as art, grasps it correctly, then I think the question will not arise at all, and one will not be led to believe that anthroposophy could ever aspire to influence art through anthroposophical teachings. To think in any other way than that the artistic can arise out of the experience of the spirit flowing in the material, out of living together with the material, cannot actually be assumed from an anthroposophical attitude.

In a somewhat primitive way, many anthroposophists understand this to mean, for example, that they somehow paint what they have been given in the teaching of the Rosicrucians on a blackboard, and then one encounters these images in all the individual branches. There is inner feeling, inwardly intended, outwardly recorded. I usually help myself with regard to such “artistic attempts” by not looking at them in the respective branches, because these are admittedly primitive and not very far-reaching, but they are precisely wrong attempts to transfer what can be represented in the spirit, which now becomes word, which becomes teaching, into some artistic aspect. That is nonsense. You cannot carry what is teaching into the work of art.

But what real anthroposophy is, whether you approach it through the teachings or through art, leads to the inner experience of something far more original than anthroposophical teaching and anthroposophical art is, of something that lies further back in human life. If, on the one hand, artistic forms are created that have nothing at all to do with the anthroposophical teachings, and if, on the other hand, one focuses on the word, on the thought, then, from the same foundations, one creates contexts of ideas. Both are branches that come from the same root. But you cannot take one branch and stick it into the other.

In any case, I cannot understand how a life that has developed out of such art could possibly become monotonous, because – and I am speaking only illustratively now – I can assure you that if I had to build another one after this one is finished, it would be completely different, it would look completely different. I would never be able to build this structure again in a monotonous way; and I would build a third one differently again – it will certainly not come to that in this incarnation. But I feel, especially in what underlies the anthroposophical as the living, that in art, beyond everything monotonous, it comes to life. I can tell you, one always only wishes to comply with what one can do, with what presents itself to the soul, and not at all in a monotonous way, but to show in great variety what one would like to show.

The questions that were asked in English have now been answered, and since Mrs. Mackenzie has promised to tell us about some of her intentions, I believe that we may use the time we still have left to listen to Mrs. Mackenzie about her intentions.

Mrs. Mackenzie: (remarks in English not written down)

Dr. Steiner: I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie and ask Baron Walleen to translate her words into German.

Baron Walleen: (translation:) Dr. Steiner has given his consent to hold a seminar for teachers here around Christmas time. Mrs. Mackenzie has taken on the responsibility of finding suitable individuals in England and America who could be accepted as students in these seminars, and Mrs. Mackenzie hopes that if such a beginning is made, it will be possible to gradually develop a teacher training seminar for the whole world here. The matter is being handled quite informally in order to gain time, so that when she returns to England, Mrs. Mackenzie will immediately try to make contact with such personalities as she finds suitable to attend this course. It would be important to know early on, in October, which personalities and how many can and will come here. Of course, Dr. Steiner himself will lead the course.

Dr. Steiner: I would just like to say this very briefly in response to Mrs. Mackenzie's words: if this extraordinarily satisfying plan can be realized, everything should be done here to bring satisfaction to those who are making such efforts to expand the effectiveness of the Goetheanum in this important area. Thank you very much on behalf of our cause and the promise that all efforts will be made here to implement your intentions in a dignified manner!

Dear ladies and gentlemen! With your permission, I will expand on and supplement what I have already said during the tour of the Goetheanum, and present a summary of our building here today.

For many years, our anthroposophical movement worked by holding its meetings in ordinary halls, as can be found today. And even when we were able to present dramatic performances based on the impulses of the anthroposophical worldview, starting in 1909, we initially had to limit ourselves to having these performances in ordinary theaters and under ordinary theater conditions. As our anthroposophical movement grew, a large number of our friends came up with the idea of building a house for anthroposophy. And now I was given the task, so to speak, of creating a home for the anthroposophical movement. I would like to make it clear that the commission to build did not come from me, but from friends of the anthroposophical worldview.

The question now arose: how should the construction of such a house be approached? If any other society, an association with any task or goal, builds a house for itself today — and today there are all kinds of associations with all kinds of goals — then it consults with some architect. They agree on the style in which such a house is to be built: Greek, Gothic, Renaissance or some other style. This is the usual process today. If Anthroposophy had been a movement like all the others, it could have proceeded in this way. But Anthroposophy takes into account the great demands of our time for a thorough renewal of our entire culture, and therefore it could not be built in this way. Furthermore, Anthroposophy is not a one-sided body of ideas, but the ideas of Anthroposophy arise from the whole of human experience, from the deep sources of the human being. And that which lives in the ideas of anthroposophy has arisen from a primeval source, just as it was the case with the older cultures. And just as the words of Anthroposophy can be proclaimed by human mouths and given as teaching, so too can that which flows from the sources from which the Anthroposophical ideas also flow be given on the other side for direct artistic insight. It is not a translation or transposition of anthroposophical ideas into art that is at issue here, but rather a different branch that can develop as art from the same source of life from which anthroposophical ideas come.

What Anthroposophy has to reveal can be said from a podium in words that signify ideas. But it can also speak from the forms, from the plastic forms, from painting, without sculpture or painting becoming symbolism or allegory, but rather within the sphere of the purely artistic. This means nothing other than that if anthroposophy creates a physical shell in which it is to work, then it must give this physical shell its own style, just as older worldviews have given their physical shells the corresponding style. Take the Greek style of architecture, as it has partly been realized in the Greek temple: This Greek temple has grown entirely out of the same world view that gave rise to Greek drama, Greek epic, Greek views of the gods. The Greeks felt that in creating their temples they were building a dwelling for the gods. And this corresponds to what earlier cultural views saw in the further development of the human soul that had passed through death; there is a certain qualitative relationship between the Greek god and the human soul that has passed through death, as it was felt in earlier cultural currents. And something similar to how in ancient times dwellings were built for human souls that had passed through death, while still believed to be on earth, was later shaped by the Greeks in their temple. The temple is the dwelling of the god, that is, not of the human soul that has passed through death itself, but of that soul that belongs to a different hierarchy, a different world order.

Those who can see forms artistically can still feel in the forms that have been created by carrying and burdening and other things for the Greek temple, as in older times the dead, who still remained on earth after death, who, as a chthonic deity, as an earth , this house was formed out of the earth, so that the temple was built as a continuation of the gravitational forces of the earth, as they can be felt by man when he somehow looks through his limb-being, as such a connection of forces. A Greek temple is only to be considered complete when one views it in such a way that the statue of the god is inside. Those who have a sense of form cannot imagine an empty Greek temple as complete. They can only imagine, they can only feel, that this shell contains the statue of Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and so on.

Let us skip ahead in art history and look at the Gothic building. When you experience the Gothic building with its forms, with its peculiar windows that let in the light in a unique way, you always feel that when you enter the empty Gothic cathedral, it is not a totality, not complete. The Gothic cathedral is only complete when the community is inside it, whose souls resonate in harmony in their work. A Greek temple is the wrapping of the god who dwells on earth through his statue. A Gothic cathedral is in all its forms that which encloses the community in harmony and with thoughts directed towards the eternal.

The Greek worldview, or the worldview that took shape in the Gothic period, are dead worlds for today's humanity. Only the degenerate forces of decline that stem from them can still live today. We need a new culture, but one that is not only expressed one-sidedly in knowledge and ideas, but one that can also express itself in a new art. And so the development of art history also points to the necessity of an architectural style of its own for anthroposophy, which wants to bring a new form of culture.

The way anthroposophy is to be lived is based on the fact that, to a certain extent, a higher being in man, but which is man himself, speaks to the person who lives in ordinary life, which takes place between birth and death. By feeling this, the two-dome structure presented itself to me as the necessary building envelope for this basic impulse of the anthroposophical world view. In the small dome, what is inwardly large and wide is, as it were, physically compressed; in the large dome, what is inwardly less wide is spatially expanded, what inwardly belongs to the life that we lead between birth and death. And when a person enters this building in the sense of such an anthroposophical world view, they must find their own being. This is based on what has just been said. And while he is inside, he must feel the structure in such a way that he, as a human being, as a microcosm, does not feel constrained by the structure, but is externally connected to the universe, to the macrocosm, through the entire structure. But if you look at the structure from the outside, you must have the feeling: Something is going on in there that brings something unearthly, something extraterrestrial to earthly existence. Something is going on in there that is hidden in the earthly itself. So it must be possible to look at the building in terms of its overall form and also in terms of the sculptural extensions, which, as I said over there, must represent organic structures.

Dear attendees! When I had the pleasure of welcoming you here as visitors to our summer course last Sunday, I was able to say from the bottom of my heart that here in this Goetheanum we are trying, in science, in art and in everything that can be religiously inspired by science and art in the depths of the human being, to follow the clearly audible call of the spirit of the time itself, which, as we believe, allows itself to be heard, as it is understood here, because it wants people to use their strength to lead themselves out of decline and towards a new dawn. The work of this Goetheanum and the work of all its co-workers is to be devoted to the fulfillment of this call of the times. In the short time during the summer course that we have been so fortunate as to see you here, it was naturally impossible to give more than a few hints about the intentions of this Goetheanum and the actual goal that our co-workers have in mind for this work. But what is to be worked out here should be a living whole. And so it cannot be otherwise than that, as in the life of an individual human being, every single step one takes, be it as a child, as an adult or as an old person, contains the meaning of one's whole life in some way, that in the same way, in a living spiritual body, a living spiritual activity, the individual step, which can only be presented in the short span of a week, nevertheless shows in a certain sense the meaning of the whole. And we would be happy here if you could take something from this one step about the meaning of our work, about the meaning of our will. I have often taken the liberty of expressing something of the meaning of this work, of this will, by pointing out how the content of knowledge expressed here in the word is the one branch that grows out of one root, but how another branch, that of artistic creation, grows out of this root, so that here neither art nor science is introduced into the other, but that both have the same root and both want to work out their products here with equal rights and in a fully creative way. And when that which can be expressed in ideas for the sake of knowledge, that which can be expressed in forms for the sake of contemplation, is worked out in this way, then that which is revealed from both sides, from the two most important and essential sides of human nature, that it seizes the religious roots of human existence, that it works into the human being, into those deeper dispositions of the heart where the human being is connected to the unity of the world, to the divine in the world. So that, even if not everything is to be reformed here and cannot be reformed, religious life is cultivated as it can be cultivated when the other revelations of the divine, the artistic and the scientific, are cultivated in the right way. This sense was expressed by Goethe, from whom this Goetheanum bears the name, in the beautiful word: He who possesses science and art also has religion. He who does not possess both, let him have religion.

And because such a gathering touches on the most essential part of what a human being carries within, in his entire humanity, we would like to work in such a way that those who come as visitors also come closer to each other humanly, humanly closer to what wants to work and be effective here out of the sense of Goetheanism. And anyone who understands the meaning of Goetheanism would like to hope that what is striven for and felt here will lead people to leave here with the thought that they have seen something in this Goetheanum, have experienced something that gives one the feeling of a kinship of the forces that live in all human beings, of a kinship of those forces in human nature that can bring people together in brotherhood from all over the world. One would also like to hope that those who visit this Goetheanum would have the feeling that it is being striven for here with our modest means – whether we can actually achieve this, that will depend on the judgment of our contemporaries – the aim here is that those who experience the work and the whole being of this Goetheanum here, because they experience human kinship, can feel this house like a human soul home. If only you could take with you the feeling that you were in a home for human souls! In a home, everything that we feel, sense and experience points to the communal processes and origins. The sense of belonging, the sense of brotherhood of all humanity, is what we would like to instill in everything that is done here. And I would also like to say today, as we part, that your visit may have contributed something to this great goal of human brotherhood, to whose collaboration everyone who enters this Goetheanum, at least in the spirit in which it was intended, must feel called. And so may the days you have spent here have brought you closer to us as human beings as well. Nowadays, we hear calls for human brotherhood and human alliances everywhere and from all sides. But what do we want to achieve by raising this call? We want to unite people who have inflicted unspeakable pain on each other in a terrible catastrophe to form fraternal alliances. Is such a union necessary if we approach the human being in the right way, by approaching the spirit from which the human being has grown, in which the human being is rooted? True, genuine human brotherhood does not need to be established, does not need to be glued together, if people want to seek the human brotherhood that has existed since the human being has existed, that human brotherhood that is found when one penetrates to the human spirit, in which human beings nevertheless actually are, since the human being has existed on earth. To seek true human brotherhood means to seek the source of the human being in the spirit, in the spiritual world; such genuine seeking is what is striven for here at the Goetheanum. In this respect, the work and striving of the Goetheanum is connected with the demands of the present-day spirit. It was out of this spirit that I was able to call out the words of greeting to you on Sunday when you came here. It was with a grateful heart, because this gratitude always wells up in those who are serious and honest about the tasks of this Goetheanum, and it wells up when people come together who want to pay attention to what is wanted here. After these days have passed, this gratitude towards you is rooted all the more in my mind. It is out of this thankfulness that I say goodbye to you today, but this farewell can be summarized in the words that come from the whole living spirit that strives for the future: “See you soon!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You will have realized, from what has gone before, that imaginative perception shows some similarity to the way memory works in the human mind. One way of defining imaginative perception is to compare it to the processes going on in our memory. It will, however, be necessary to take a more penetrating look at this life of memory than is normally done by psychologists today.

Memory is very often thought to consist of thoughts becoming attached to outer sensory perceptions. The idea seems to be that we have thoughts about what we perceive with the senses—while we do so, or perhaps a little while after—and those thoughts then subside gently into a subconscious sphere, rising up again from that subconscious when suitable efforts are made are taking the form of remembered ideas. One school of philosophy has referred to such thoughts or ideas as going down below the threshold of consciousness, as it were, to come up again, crossing the threshold, when the moment is right. It is of course exactly what the lazy thinker wants: to imagine a process where ideas are first of all stimulated by sensory perception, and then, when we no longer have those perceptions, they hang around somewhere or float about in a subconscious—which of course one has never seriously thought about—to pop up again when required. Even a very superficial look at what the human soul experiences will show that this certainly is not the case.

To begin with, direct observation will show no appreciable difference between an idea arising in connection with something we perceive with our senses and one held in the memory. In the first case, the outside world stimulates the idea or concept. Something outside is perceived, an idea follows. We do of course have awareness of the process of perception, and are able to follow the process leading to the evolution of an idea if we reflect on this. But that is not really the point. It is true that when a remembered idea comes up we have no immediate awareness of what it is inside us that stimulates this idea. Yet, as I have just indicated, the point is not that we know about sensory perception, but that from one side or another—now from without and now from within—an idea is brought to mind.

It could be said, taking care to use the words properly, that in either case it is something objective that drives us to form an idea. Pursuing the process of sensory perception and ideas arising from it further, the essential point will have to be that we go through certain motions when we want to make sure we remember something, that is, when it matters to us that something we have experienced does not simply fall into oblivion, and it is important to keep it in our memory. Just consider the machinations we used when we were young to help us memorize things when it was important to memorize them. Whatever brings about memory therefore clearly goes beyond what is needed merely to form an idea. If we consider memory as such, we shall find that the ability to remember is at times reduced or else enhanced merely by the physical condition we are in, and that our organism as a whole is involved when memories arise. We shall discover that when we are in the process of forming ideas based on sensory perceptions we carry out an activity that is organic by nature. This organic activity is partly or completely concealed from conscious awareness, yet it is in fact the function responsible for memory. This is so because a concept or idea formed on the basis of sensory perceptions does not simply swirl down into the subconscious. Something else is linked with the process of forming concepts on the basis of what we perceive. The concept or idea fades. Once we have gone past the process of sensory perception that has been in the forefront of our mind, the idea will have faded; but something else has also happened within us, and this will recall the idea when the occasion arises.

Anyone able to observe mental processes will find that a remembered idea is something completely new and that it forms in about the same way as an idea based on sensory perceptions is formed. The difference is that in the one case the process is going from without to within and in the other it goes from within to without. In the one case one is clearly aware of the triggering factor being something perceived by the senses, while in the other it remains hidden from awareness, being an inner process connected with the organism. Let us simply state this fact—I have only been able to give an outline—and return to our discussion of imaginative perception.

I have described how imaginative perception is developed first of all by doing exercises that enable us to form mental images in the same way we form mental images when remembering things. These exercises have been described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in my Occult Science. They enable us to experience in images. A point is reached where such inner experience of seeing concepts in the form of images has a content that does not recall personal experience but now bears the stamp of representing a reality, a truth, not initially accessible to ordinary consciousness—a truth we may call a spiritual truth.

When imaginative perception is applied to the action I have just described, this action will appear in quite a different light. It becomes apparent how perception linked with the forming of ideas and ideas based on memory appear in relation to the ability to form images. The ability to perceive in images will above all give a specific inner experience of the forming of ideas, of thinking as such. We do not get far when we use our ordinary consciousness for reflection. Philosophical training would be necessary if one wanted to arrive at anything at all when making the forming of ideas, thinking as such, the subject of one's reflections. Anyone without philosophical training will grow impatient when required to think about thinking as such. Even Goethe considered himself lucky for never having thought about thinking.¹ It is easy to see why if we consider Goethe's nature. He was always endeavouring to achieve a vivid, plastic image—I have already referred to this in these talks. He felt like a fish abandoning the water for the air when he moved from his concrete element into this element of pure thought; there his spirit could not breathe, it being utterly against his nature.

It is however possible, and indeed necessary, to understand thinking as such. Without this, no conclusive philosophical concept can be achieved. This may not be to everybody's taste, but it certainly is the philosopher's business. Our concept of thinking activity, of the forming of concepts, is extraordinarily abstract; it is a pale notion to our everyday consciousness and we do not like to dwell on it for long. Yet to imaginative perception it becomes more concrete, more vivid and graphic; indeed I would say that now the thinking process, the forming of ideas, that previously appeared an abstract, disembodied thing, comes close to being concrete and graphic.

A statement like that should not be misinterpreted. In the first place it must really come as a surprise that something usually regarded as having nothing to do with the material world becomes more concrete when looked at in the first stage of working towards knowledge of the non-physical world—supersensible knowledge. Indeed it approaches a form that, I would say, actually bears the stamp of the material world. The picture one forms of the thinking process—for Imagination consists in receiving pictures—bears the mark of processes to do with life coming to an end, with dying. Imaginative perception does indeed show the process of forming ideas, of thinking, as one in which the material world is dying. Comparing what I have just described with something perceived by the outer senses, I think I may say that the only thing to compare it with is the process to be observed when physical death ensues for a living creature. Basically, the transition from ordinary sensory perception to imaginative perception of the thinking process is an experience of the kind one gets when sharing in a death in the physical world.

The process of gaining insight comes more alive when approaching Imagination and Inspiration, than it is in its abstract form, in ordinary consciousness. This also is the reason why advancement to supersensible perception is combined with what yesterday I referred to as inner experiences of destiny. In ordinary consciousness, the acquisition of knowledge is gone through with a certain inner indifference. We know that life normally lifts us up in delight and takes us down into pain, that we move up and down with the waves of feeling and emotion. We also know that the processes involved in cognitive thinking have an icy coldness to them, a quality that leaves us cold, making few waves in our emotions.

This does indeed change when we advance to imaginative perception. Here, the processes of gaining insight come to resemble more the processes of ordinary life, although they are entirely in the sphere of mind and spirit and have nothing to do with the physical world. A more intimate relation to the processes of perception develops, for they now arouse greater personal interest. And now, in going through this process where thinking, the forming of ideas, becomes vivid, we experience a process so vivid it is almost concrete. Making ourselves really conscious of this process, we are able to use it to gain more of an understanding of the memory process. The human organism in a way becomes transparent if one visualizes it in this way. In the first place, the thinking process has been experienced in mind and spirit, in an Imagination. The same process becomes a material image when we come to study the memory process. The reason is that a remembered idea is preceded by a form of material process similar to the process which presents as a picture to the inner eye when we apply the process of Imagination to thinking, as I have just described. It can be said that imaginative perception offers the possibility of seeing through the memory process. Continuing in our efforts to gain insight in this way, we shall indeed come to realize that Imagination itself is a process in mind and spirit similar to the process of remembering at the level of the physical body. The memory process is however individualized into the human body—if I may put it like this, made individual for our personal experiences. The process of Imagination moves away from the human body, aligning itself with similar processes that occur in the cosmos, outside the human body.

A physical process of dying is active in the organism; in return, memory concepts arise in the conscious mind. A spirit and soul element is active in Imagination. There is an actual process in the outside world corresponding to this, but Imagination is as yet unable to grasp it, because the complete process of supersensible perception consists in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But, as you can see, there are certain things in human life, such as memory, such as the processes occurring in body and soul altogether, that cannot be grasped by speculating, nor with philosophical arguments. They can only be approached by training faculties of the soul that initially are latent. That way we can get closer to them, as will be obvious also from the following.

When the life of our hearts and minds is within the sphere of ordinary thinking, the usual way of forming ideas, then our feeling with regard to such thinking processes is that it is we ourselves who let one idea follow the other. Indeed, we are clearly aware that if we do not use our minds to exercise a certain inner choice in letting one idea follow another, and if instead ideas impel one another, we should merely be the reflection of an automatic machine within us, and we should not be real human beings. In my Philosophy of Freedom I have tried to show how this feeling we have towards our ordinary thinking processes is the very source of our feeling of freedom altogether, and it is only through this that the phenomenon of freedom can in fact be grasped—in experience.

This feeling of deliberate inner choice will be lost for a time when we progress to Imagination. Imagination yields images that are experienced purely in soul and spirit and yet, as I said yesterday, have nothing to do with visions, hallucinations and the like. Exactly because they have content, these images show that they no longer permit the same freedom in linking or analysing them as the freedom we know when we put ideas together or separate them in our ordinary consciousness. Very gradually, we get the feeling that with imaginative perception we are not merely entering into pictures the way we enter into our ideas, into ideas that strictly speaking appear as individual concepts we must link up ourselves. The feeling we gradually develop is that the Imaginations are only broken up into individual detail by ourselves, and that in reality they form a whole, that a continuous force is always at work in them, as it were. We experience a presence in the imaginative sphere that only comes to conscious awareness in us through this imaginative perception. In our ordinary consciousness we really have no idea of it.

And again—if we consider ordinary life, and especially if we follow Goethe and observe how plant forms come about, noting the transition from one form to another—living metamorphosis—we shall find that this life of the plants in the material world holds within it the very thing of which the continuous force we experience evolving in the world of Imaginations is a picture. Gradually we find out that through entering into Imagination, we have worked our way through to a point where we are able to grasp the power of growth. We realize that we must reject a vital force arrived at through speculation, indeed, even more so than the mechanists.² Anything in the sphere of this vital force will never be understood by the usual thought processes, the usual philosophical speculation. It is accessible only to a higher power of understanding, and this has to be worked for. We come to realize that only the inorganic world is accessible to ordinary understanding, and that the entity alive in the growth process has to be grasped in a state of mind and soul that we shall achieve only by achieving Imagination. This power of growth lives in our organism. We are able to see through it by giving ourselves up to a life in Imagination.

It should be noted that it is really important to observe the rules I have given in my books when following the exercises that lead to imaginative perception. What is the purpose of all those rules? Their purpose is to make sure that everything done by someone working to achieve a capacity for higher understanding is done with the same inner clarity as that experienced in forming mathematical concepts. The conscious mind needs to be in the same state as when it is working with geometry, when it enters in a living way into everything that is needed to develop Imagination and also the next two stages of supersensible perception—Inspiration and Intuition. Just think of life in visions and hallucinations, which is pathological, or of our dream life, which is at least a shadow picture of something pathological, and you will see the tremendous difference between all this and a conscious mind proceeding with the clarity of mathematical thought. The steps taken to reach Imagination must never aim for a reduced level of conscious awareness. Our goal must be achieved purely in the sphere of mind and spirit and with the lucidity we know in mathematics, not with a dreamy, mystical attitude, in confusion and in darkness. Otherwise we would be unable to rise to higher powers of perception. We would sink down into forces we already possessed, the forces of growth, the inner reproductive forces of the human organism. These would be stimulated into growth, and the result would be a tendency to have visions, hallucinations, rather than imaginative perception. It is possible to see how things are related, but we must get a really clear idea of the path to imaginative perception, as it has been described.

In imaginative perception we live in a world of pictures, as I have described it. But it is in the very nature of those pictures that characteristically they are reflections of realities. We do not have the realities. Instead, we have an awareness of living in a world of pictures that are not real. And that is sound and healthy. A person who hallucinates, who has visions, takes his visions, his hallucinations, to be a reality. A person practising Imagination knows that everything he experiences in Imagination is an image—an image of reality, but still an image—and it is this knowledge that gives a person practising Imagination a state of conscious awareness that is not the usual one but has become enhanced. It is impossible for him to confuse this world of images with the reality. It will be Inspiration that carries us forward, as it were, into the reality of the world of images.

Imagination first presents a picture of supersensible reality. Inspiration shows the way beyond, to the reality. We achieve Inspiration by using a mental technique, just as meditation, concentration, is used to make Imagination possible. The new faculty acquired is one that would be anything but welcome in ordinary life, and rightly so. It will be necessary to use observation to help one get a reasonably clear awareness of what it is to forget, to throw out an idea from conscious awareness. Meditative exercises are required in artificially forgetting ideas, separating them out. This must lead to the ability to reject and, in the final instance, wipe out the imaginative life, the life in images, as we have acquired it. Anyone merely able to have Imaginations cannot yet penetrate into a spiritual reality, which can only be done by someone who has reached a point where he is able to erase these Imaginations again. These Imaginations only appear like a realization of imaginative faculties initially and have to be erased, for they are more or less something we have produced ourselves. It is a question of completely clearing the conscious mind, as it were, using the act of forgetting deliberately, applying it to the imaginative life. Then we shall come to know what it means to live in a state of fully awake consciousness, a state where no mental images are formed but where the Imagining that went before has created inner energy and has been cleared of its contents. We shall then come to know what it means to live in such a state of energized consciousness. This we must come to know, and then we progress from Imagination to knowledge through Inspiration. We shall then also know that we are touched by a spiritual reality that reveals itself in a process in soul and spirit that is comparable to breathing in and breathing out, to the rhythmical process of respiration altogether. That process consists in our taking in the outside air, working it through within ourselves, and then releasing it again in a different form, having in a way identified ourselves with it. In the same way we come to know a process in soul and spirit that consists in our being able to sense, to inhale, as it were, the inner conscious energy we have acquired into a conscious awareness strengthened through Imagination. As a result, the objective Imagination will shine forth in our strengthened conscious awareness. We inhale the spiritual world, we take it into ourselves. A rhythmical interaction with the spiritual world occurs.

In ancient India, instinctive efforts were made to attain higher perception. These instinctive efforts active in yoga made use of the breathing process, as you probably know, to make it possible to experience this actual breathing process as a process in soul and spirit, by using a physical method. In oriental yoga exercises, breathing—inhalation, holding the breath, exhalation—is controlled in a special way, and the person enters wholly into this breathing process. As a result, the soul and spirit is sucked out of the breathing process, as it were. The breathing process is removed from conscious awareness by the very fact that it is pushed in, leaving behind the soul and spirit aspect. The organization of our present culture is such that we cannot copy the process gone through in the yoga exercise, and we must not copy it. It would cast us down into the physical organization. It may be said that our soul life is no longer on the plane where the soul life of the Indian was in the past. His soul life tended more towards sensibility, ours tends towards intellectuality. And in the sphere of intellectuality, yoga breathing would present the risk of man destroying his physical organization. Living on the intellectual plane, it is necessary to use exercises of the kind that I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These exercises are entirely in the sphere of soul and spirit. They may just have a hint of the physical breathing process—though even this only rarely and mostly not at all. The essential part of our exercises to achieve Imagination lies entirely in the sphere of mind and spirit, the sphere man has experience of when working with geometry and mathematics. The work which has to be done to achieve Inspiration also has to be in this sphere.

With Inspiration, it becomes possible to gain awareness of an outside world of soul and spirit, objectivity of soul and spirit. This is connected with conscious life itself undergoing an inner metamorphosis. Man simply has to let it happen that as a physical being he goes through external growth and metamorphosis as he passes through childhood, youth, old age and very old age. Where his conscious awareness is concerned, he feels a touch of fear, a hesitation, when it comes to going through something as alive as those metamorphoses in his innermost soul content. Yet this has to be gone through it supersensible perception is to be achieved. Goethe reached a certain perfection in his perception of metamorphosis, and such perception is particularly well able to move on the plane of imaginative life. The reason is that everything subject to Imagination presents itself in living, ever-changing forms. Some form or other comes to awareness. It changes into a completely different form through transitional changes or directly—yet it is possible somehow to transpose the contours of the first figure into those of the second. It is possible to transform one into the other without making too great a jump. This stops when we approach the essential aspect of the world that has to be understood through Inspiration; it stops as soon as we approach the animal organization.

Let me try and show you what it is we have to approach as we turn towards the animal organization. Anyone studying the process of thinking as a psychologist or logician and more or less reaching a point where this can be defined can evolve a certain idea of the thinking process. Logicians, experts in the theory of knowledge and psychologists will take pride in getting such a clear, lucid, definite idea of the thinking process. They will be pleased to have achieved this, to be able to say: The process of thinking is... and now predicates (or the second term of the proposition) will follow. But let us assume someone was really pleased to develop such an idea of the thinking process and then found himself in the situation I found myself in when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom. He would need to trace the thinking process from the form in which it is active when it links up with external visual perceptions to the form in which it is active in free spirituality in the human individual, as an impulse of will, an impulse to act. In the latter case the thinking process certainly will still be recognized as pure, clarified thinking. We are able to move on from the type of thought we have studied through the sensory perceptions it linked up with, to the thoughts that are the motivation for our actions when we act as free human beings. Yet when we come to consider this particular type of thinking process, which indeed is a genuine process of thinking, it no longer agrees entirely with the definition we established for the thinking process linked to sensory perception. We are no longer able to do anything with the definition, for this form of thinking—and it definitely is thinking—no longer resembles the kind of thinking that is the motivation behind our actions; for now it is also out-and-out will force. It has metamorphosed, one might say, into its opposite, into will, has become will, is out-and-out substantive will, if I may put it like this. You see from this how flexible one has to become in one's mind when using ideas or concepts. Anyone who gets into the habit of forming concepts and then applying them can easily find himself in a situation where realities make his applied concepts utterly meaningless.

Let us assume—and this after all is actually the case where external reality is concerned—we have formed a concept of Joseph Miller in his seventh year. When we get to know him again in his fiftieth year, the concept will not help us to see through Joseph Miller properly. We have to expect a metamorphosis, something must have changed. The definition of young Miller at seven will not help us when face to face with fifty-year old Miller. Life makes a mock of definition, of sharply defined concepts full of content. It is this which causes all the misery in the many discussions and disputes that arise in life. We are really disputing from a point beyond reality, while reality makes a mock of rigid definitions and rigid descriptions. And in the same way we must also come to see how thought becomes will, and will becomes thought.

That was a case applicable to a person, and it is approximately also the case which applies when we simply want to get to know the animal organization through Inspiration. Here we cannot just speak of the type of metamorphosis Goethe spoke of in relation to the plant world, where in a way it is possible still to transform one shape into another. It will be necessary to speak of inner transitions, or—if I may be permitted to use the term Dr Unger and I were using yesterday—of inversion or involution, speaking not only of geometrical but also of qualitative involutions, to get from one thing to another. In short, we have to accept that the inner state of soul goes through a metamorphosis, that we go through a process in which our inner content of experience, content of knowledge gained, grows up, as it were.

And so it happens that, ascending from Imagination to Inspiration, we are not able to use the concepts that are quite rightly and properly used in ordinary consciousness. They will have to remain for purposes of orientation, but need to be modified when perception is addressed to the truly inner world, that is, to the spiritual nature of things. This then lifts the logical distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ out of the abstract as we advance form Imagination to Inspiration. In the world that now presents itself as a spiritual world outside us, we shall no longer be able to manage if we use the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the same way as we have learned to use them, quite rightly, at an earlier level of perception. The ideas ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ now become something much more concrete, something we now experience in the radiant Imaginations that arise in us. Where they are concerned, we cannot say ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ the way we do with reference to ideas in the intellectual sphere. At this point, more concrete ideas arise specifically in the sphere of soul and spirit; one thing is ‘sound’ or ‘healthy’, another ‘sick’, one encourages life, the other kills it. The abstract notion of ‘right’ turns into a more concrete notion, and what we are tempted to call ‘right’ is something that brings life and health into the spiritual world, while the things we are tempted to call ‘wrong’ bring disease, paralysis and death into the spiritual world.

Ideas we are accustomed to apply in physical life thus arise in a new form when we have crossed the threshold of the spiritual world, and this is because we then experience the content of these ideas at the level of soul and spirit. You will find that someone with integrity towards perception of the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception will use different terms. He will no longer juggle with terms such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ but will of his own accord come to use such terms as ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’ and the like.

I have been attempting to describe—and in the lectures that follow I shall go into these things in much greater detail—how it is possible to progress from ordinary perception to Imagination and to Inspiration, and how access is gained step by step to the true nature, that is, the spiritual nature, of the part of the world that is not accessible to the physical senses.

Let me remind you how in order to describe human actions, to understand the phenomenon of freedom when writing my Philosophy of Freedom, I found it necessary on the one hand to achieve a sharp definition of the concept of purely sensory perception and the thinking process linked to this. On the other hand I pointed out that moral impulses are Intuitions taken from a spiritual world. In my efforts to establish a realistic moral philosophy, I thus found it necessary on the one hand to present a clear definition of how perception of the outside world accessible to the senses has to be penetrated with thought at one extreme of all that is human and, on the other hand, define moral Intuition at the other extreme—on the one hand perception and recognition of physical objects, on the other, intuitive perception. If we really want to understand man as he is in this physical world, with regard to the way he perceives things with his physical senses and with regard to the way he develops his impulses to act out of the very depth of his being, then it is necessary on the one hand to draw attention to sensory perception penetrated by thought-representing reality—and on the other hand to look for a reality existing at the opposite pole, a reality arising out of pure empiricism, pure observation and experience a reality rooted in the intuitive experience of moral impulses.

It is my purpose, in presenting these observations, to show you the different levels of perception that lead to the spiritual world, ‘spiritual world’ meaning nothing more than the world that makes up the whole of reality when combined with our sense-perceptible world. We have to start with object-based perception in the world of matter, which I placed at one pole in my Philosophy of Freedom, and advance to imaginative and inspired perception. There we are touched by the spiritual truth. Then we advance to Intuition, and in Intuition we are not merely touched by the spiritual truth that is outside the physical world—I shall describe this in the lectures that follow—but live into it, become one with it.

We live in Intuition when we are at one with spiritual reality. This means nothing else but that in man as he is today, in this period of world³ evolution, perception of physical things is at one pole and intuitive perception at the other. Between these two poles lie Imagination and Inspiration. Yet if we wish to describe man as he is in ordinary life, as someone who does things, someone who is morally active, it will be necessary to look for the moral Intuition relating to this clearly defined area, the area of ethical motivation, if for no other reason but to establish a philosophy of freedom. If the basis for human actions provided out of such a philosophy of freedom is then developed to apply to the whole cosmos, we shall find Intuition realized throughout the whole cosmos, whereas normally one finds it merely in the limited field of human actions. Here in the physical world, any moral person merely joins moral Intuition to everyday perception of material things, for the simple reason that it is part of man's natural constitution to do so. Yet if we wish to arrive at true perception of the universe, if we want to ‘land’ on cosmic Intuition—if I may put it like this—which in the cosmos corresponds to the moral Intuition for man's inner life, it is necessary to pass through the two stages of Imagination and Inspiration. In other words, it is possible to describe man in terms of a philosophy of freedom. This merely necessitates arriving at the limited field of intuitive experience for human actions. Looking for a cosmic philosophy to match this philosophy of freedom, it is necessary to expand what has previously been done with reference to a limited field, by evolving the different stages of perception: object-based perception. Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

In principle, therefore, what I mean by Imagination and Inspiration lies between the first part of my Philosophy of Freedom, where I establish the reality of object-based perception, and the second part of the book, where moral Intuition is defined in the chapter on moral imagination.⁴ At the time when the Philosophy of Freedom was in the process of being written, this could only be hinted at. It was hinted at when I wrote the words: ‘The individual human being is not truly separate from the world. He is part of the world, and there is a connection with the cosmos as a whole that is a reality and is broken only in our eyes, the way we perceive it. We see this part initially as something existing by itself because we do not see the “ropes and belts” used by the basic forces of the cosmos to move the wheel of our life.’* If we want to know man only in the terms of this world, we are not aware of the direct transition from physical perception to moral Intuition.

There is something this type of description only touches on—the ‘ropes and belts’ are of course mere metaphor—and that is that there is something within man that links his essential nature to the whole cosmos. This really needs further elucidation. It would be necessary to show that, just as man is able to skip the two middle stages by an empirical approach and get from object-based perception to moral Intuition, he is also able to progress from his perceptive experience as a human being to cosmic Intuition. In his human nature, he is linked to the cosmos through ‘ropes and belts,’ that is, through spiritual entities. Yet man is only able to perceive this connection if he now goes through the intermediate stages between object-based perception and Intuition, stages that are not required for ordinary reflection. He needs to ascend from object-based perception through Imagination and Inspiration to reach cosmic Intuition.

That is how the whole of the anthroposophical science which has been evolved relates to the seed that was given in my Philosophy of Freedom. It must of course be understood that anthroposophy is something alive. It had to be a seed before it could develop further into leaves and all that follows. This fact of being alive is what distinguishes anthroposophical science from the deadness many are aware of today in a ‘wisdom’ that still wants to reject anthroposophy, partly because it cannot, and partly because it will not, understand it.

• 1. ‘How did you get as far as that?
  They say you have done well indeed.’
  ‘Ah, child, I did a clever thing:
  I never gave a thought to thought.’

  Goethe, Works published posthumously (1833), Poems.

• 2. Mechanist—someone holding a mechanical view of the unviverse.
  See also notes on page 62.
• 3. ere, Rudolf Steiner used the German world for ‘imagination’ in the everyday sense. (Translator)
• 4. Page 245 of the 12th German edition.

The most important question in modern intellectual life, a question that casts its shadow on the whole of cultural life, is one that really everybody is aware of today in their feelings; yet it can only be solved, or attempted to be solved, by a method that leads to supersensible perception—from the ordinary perception of material things to Imagination, Inspiration and finally Intuition. This most important question is one that is bound to be raised by every wholly unprejudiced soul, anyone with inner integrity who has a genuine interest in the nature of man. On the one hand the soul has to face the moral, the ethical views that may be held today, and on the other it must consider life as it is seen from the scientific point of view today, a view that is rightly given recognition. Ethical and moral life faces us with burning questions today for the very reason that this is an age when ethical questions are at the same time also social questions, and the social question is one every human being feels to be a burning question.

Let us consider how the existing world presents itself to the mind in modern thought on the basis of scientific knowledge. Genuine science, genuine study of nature, aims to understand the things in this world as they are of necessity, in their causal origins. And these causal origins, this necessity, is to be consistently applied to everything that is to be found in the order of the universe, including man. When we want to understand man through science today, we apply to him, almost as a matter of routine, the method of gaining knowledge we habitually use for natural phenomena that are outside of man. We then establish hypotheses, with greater or lesser daring, to extend what science has discovered in relation to nature as it lies before us, for our observation, to cosmic facts and the nature of the cosmos. Hypotheses as to the beginning and the end of the earth are evolved on the basis of ideas formed in science. Using this scientific approach, we come to a point where we have to say to ourselves, if we are consistent in our methods: We must not stop when it comes to the freedom of man. I have already made some reference to the problem we are facing here.

Anyone who because of a certain desire for consistency looks for a formalized, standardized system that will explain the world will find that he has to decide between the premise of freedom as something given empirically, as an immediate human experience, and on the other hand natural necessity pertaining to everything. As a result of the habits of thinking and perception in which men and women have been trained over the last centuries, he will decide in favour of nature-given necessity. He has the experience of freedom, yet he will declare it to be an illusion. He will extend the sphere of absolute necessity to the most inward and subtle aspects of human nature, with the result that man is completely held in the cocoon spun by science-determined inevitability. And the same will be done with regard to the hypothetical ideas concerning the beginning and end of the earth. The laws discovered in physics, chemistry and so on are used to develop theories such as the nebula theory, which is the Kant-Laplace theory of the origins of the earth. The second thermodynamic law is used to develop theories about the heat death the earth is supposed to suffer in the end.¹

In this way we can touch even on the most intimate aspects of human nature and the very limits of the universe by applying an approach that has undoubtedly proved fruitful in modern times when it comes to elucidating the phenomena of nature, phenomena that surround us in the world where we walk about between birth and death. But when we reflect on ourselves to some extent and ask ourselves where the true rank and dignity of man lies, what value there really is in man, we turn our attention also to the moral sphere, the sphere that is responsible for moral and ethical impulses in our conscious mind. We feel that a form of existence which is really worth calling human can only be achieved by following ethical ideas, ideas that we enter into and imbue with religious feeling. We cannot call ourselves human in the real sense of the word unless we think also of impulses within us that we call moral, impulses that then flow out into the social life. We see these impulses as bearing within them the pulse of what we call the divine element in the world order. Yet for anyone who today in all honesty takes up the point of view from which an overview can be gained of the order of nature based on mechanism and causality, on necessity, there can be no bridge from this natural order—and a certain honesty in our view of things compels us also to include man in this order—to that other order which is a moral one, the order man must consider connected with all of his rank and dignity, all of his value.

Very recently, however, a certain way of putting things has been evolved that aims to pretend that the gulf which has opened up between two essential elements of our human nature does not exist. It has been said that the term ‘scientific’ can be applied only to anything that aims to explain the world, inclusive of man, inclusive of the beginning and the end of the world, in terms of natural necessity. From this point of view, nothing is considered valid unless it fits without contradiction into the system of thought representing this natural order. Separately from this, however, a realm with quite a different kind of certainty is set up, a realm based on certainty of faith. We look to the moral light that shines within us and say to ourselves: No scientific knowledge can in any way affirm the significance of this moral realm; yet man has to find certainty of faith; he must come to acknowledge this realm out of the subjective element, so that he is in some way connected with the realm that bears within it the stream of moral imperatives.

Many people will no doubt feel reassured when they have neatly separated the things one is able to know from the things one is supposed to believe. Perhaps such a separation provides a certain reassurance in life, a feeling of certainty in life. Yet if we delve deeply enough—not with one-sided thinking but with everything our thinking can experience when it links up with the whole range of faculties in the human soul and spirit—we must arrive at the following. We shall then have to say to ourselves that if the realm of natural inevitability really is the way we have got in the habit of visualizing it in recent centuries, then there is no possible way of saving the moral realm. This has to be said because there is simply no evidence anywhere in this moral realm of a power to prevail against the realm of the natural order. Merely consider the idea which had to evolve, with a certain inner justification, out of the concept of entropy²—let me state explicitly, had to evolve—that one day all other forms of energy on earth will have been converted into heat, that this heat cannot convert to other forms of energy, that this will lead to the heat death of the earth. Honest thinking, holding fast to the thought habits of modern times and therefore the principle of causation, will be unable to say anything but that this earth subject to heat death is a vast battlefield strewn with the corpses not only of all men, but also of all moral ideals. Those must disappear into a state of non-being once heat death has come upon the earth, according to a point of view that considers natural necessity to be the only valid principle.

The feeling this engenders in a person who looks at the world with an unprejudiced eye is one that takes away his certainty of a moral world order. It inevitably causes him to see the world in a dualistic way, so that really all he can say is: The moral ideal arises from the sphere of natural inevitability like froth and bubbles, and like froth and bubbles moral impulses shall vanish. You see, the inward element which has to do with the rank and dignity of man cannot be considered something which is in being and can be incorporated in a philosophy based on recognition of natural inevitability only. As I have said, it is possible to make formal distinction between scientific knowledge and faith, yet as soon as one assumes such a certainty of faith, science has to examine it rigorously, and the result will be that certainty of faith cannot provide inner assurance as to the reality of the moral sphere.

This has an effect not only on man's theoretical ideas. In anyone who is honest about life it must have an effect on his deepest feelings. In the realm of man's deepest feelings, processes that are deeply unconscious will then have a destructive effect on the foundations of man's inner certainty, on that element in man that actually enables him not only to think of his relationship to the world as one that holds firm, but also to feel and to will it to be such. Anyone who has some understanding of how these things hang together will be able to say to himself: The devastating waves thrown up so ominously from the depths of human life in the 20th century have in the final instance arisen from the accord, the unison—though we could also say the discord—of everything individual human beings experience for themselves. This disastrous time we live in has in the final instance been born out of the innermost condition and constitution of human souls and human hearts. The type of inner conflict I have described does not stay merely at the surface of soul life, as a theoretical view. It descends to the depths from which our instinctive life, the life of conscience, arises. There, the conflict is transformed into feelings that are at odds with the order existing on earth, feelings that give rise to disorder, to asocial attitudes, rather than a potential for creating social form.

What I have said today will not be appreciated to its full extent by many people; but taking a fairly unbiased look at the way the human intellect has developed over the last few hundred years and particularly in most recent times, it is possible to foresee the moral consequences, the kind of social structure which will have to result from this conflict in human souls—and within the very near future. We shall never find the answer to the burning question as to why we live in such troubled times unless we set about finding the building stones for what in the depths of human life are our own needs.

The opposite to what I have described is the cosmic insight sought through the spiritual science of Anthroposophy by progressing through Imagination and Inspiration to Intuition. We shall see how the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is able to come to terms with the most burning question of today, the question I have just been discussing, because of the insights it believes it is able to gain by following its path. I have described the path spiritual science takes through Imagination and Inspiration. I have pointed out that the exercises which I cannot describe in detail on this occasion may be found in my books, books I have mentioned several times before. Those exercises to achieve imaginative perception will make the element of spirit and soul a conscious content in the same way as our ordinary consciousness has a content within it when it lives in memory. Behind that which arises as memory, by deliberate choice or involuntarily, lies our physical and etheric organization. Processes occurring in our physical and etheric organization are coming up into conscious awareness at that point. With the exercises described in great detail in my books, it is possible to achieve purely in soul and spirit what our physical and etheric organization does in the ordinary process of remembering. As a result, ideas will arise that in a purely formal way are similar to remembered ideas, but they relate to an objective external content, not to one based on personal experience. By practising Imagination in this way we prepare ourselves for insight into a genuinely objective supersensible world.

To advance to Inspiration, it will then be necessary not only to practise the generation of such ideas in soul and spirit, ideas similar to remembered ideas, but we shall have to direct our efforts towards forgetting in soul and spirit, removing such Imaginations from the consciousness we have now achieved. We need to practise no longer to have the Imaginations, for they are unreal, but deliberately to remove them from our conscious mind, so that we then have a conscious mind, if I may put it like this, that is to some extent empty. If we achieve this, we shall have the ability, with an ego strengthened by all these exercise processes, to find our way to the revelations of the objective supersensible world. Where our Imaginations previously have been subjective, objective Imaginations will now light up in our conscious mind. The lighting up of such objective Imaginations, Imaginations not arising out of us but out of spiritual objectivity, that is Inspiration. We are in a way reaching the borders of the supersensible sphere which reveals its outer aspect to us in those Imaginations. In the sphere of our sensory perception, we can convince ourselves of the reality of the objective outside world that provides the basis for this world of the senses. We can do this by allowing the whole human being to be active within this sphere of sensory perception. In the same way, the Imaginations achieved at this point reveal to us with the fullest power of conviction the supersensible world which they bring to expression.

It is now a question of continuing on this path of knowledge to reach a further stage. We achieve this by not merely-taking the process of forgetting so far that we rid ourselves of Imaginations, but by going yet one step farther. When we attain to the imaginative world, the first thing to show itself is our own life, the course it has taken. We then live not just in the moment in our conscious awareness but within the whole river of life, gong back almost to the moment of birth. If we are then able to progress to Inspiration, the overview we have so far had over our life from the time of birth expands, and we perceive a supersensible world out of which we have come into the physical, sense-perceptible world through birth or through conception. The field of our spiritual vision will extend to the worlds we lived through before birth or conception and which we shall live through again when we have gone through the gate of death. The prospect of the supersensible world to which we belong opens up through insight gained in Inspiration.

It is possible to take our efforts beyond the point where we get rid of Imaginations containing details from within the horizon of the Imaginative world. We may forget the Imagination of our whole being as a human person, that is, discard, if we gain strength to do so, eradicate all we have experienced from birth what has become the collective content of our ego, and also what has been added as our horizon expanded to include a spiritual world. This will not weaken the ego but indeed strengthen it, through self-forgetting. And it will gradually take us into the reality of the spiritual world, the world above the one perceptible to the senses. We live into union with the reality of this spiritual world. We come to see our vision of repeated earlier lives as something showing us the ego at different stages. And once we have gained the ability to forget the ego at its present stage, that is, to shut out its imaginative content, we come to see the eternal ‘I’ or ego.

The things Anthroposophy speaks of are not derived out of any kind of blue haze of mysticism. It is possible to define every step along the way to every single insight. This way is one that is not external; it is an inner one throughout. It also is a way that leads to comprehension of a reality that is genuinely objective, though beyond sensory perception. By achieving genuine intuitive insight in this way, we come really and truly to see through our thinking, the actual process of forming ideas in everyday life, a process we apply to all our sensory perceptions. We arrive at the full, the whole reality of a process which to a certain degree can also be conceived of, empirically conceived of, in the way I have tried to describe in my Philosophy of Freedom. There I attempted to draw attention to pure thought, to the thinking processes that can also be alive within us before we have joined this particular part of our thinking with some external perception or other to make the full reality. I have drawn attention to the fact that this pure thought process as such can be perceived as an inner soul content. Its true nature, however, can only be recognised when genuine Intuition arises in the soul on its path to higher knowledge. Then we are able to see through our own thinking process, as it were. It is only through Intuition that we enter into our own thinking process, for Intuition consists in entering with our own being into something that is supersensible, in immersing ourselves in this supersensible element.

We then come to perceive something which it is again a kind of cognitive destiny to experience. We experience something quite tremendous as we enter through Intuition into the nature of cognition. We come to know how we are organized as human beings in terms of matter. We know how far our physical organization extends. And we also perceive through Intuition that it goes as far as providing a counterbase, the foundation, as it were, on which thinking can develop, and that the material processes as such need to be broken down at all points where true thinking occurs. To the same extent as material processes are broken down it is possible for something else, for thinking, the forming of ideas, to occupy the place where material elements have been subject to destruction.

I know all the objections that can be raised against the words I am now saying, but intuitive perception leads us to see, with regard to the physical sphere, that where thinking processes develop, material vision will perceive mere nothingness. It leads us to say: When I think, I am not—for as long as I regard material existence, normally considered the form of existence that counts, the only valid form of existence. Matter must withdraw first in the organism and make room for thinking, for the forming of ideas; that is when this thinking, this forming of ideas, sees a possibility of unfolding in man. At the point, therefore, where we perceive thinking in its reality, we perceive degradation, destruction of material existence. We gain insight into the way matter turns into nothing.

This is the point where we have reached the limit of the law of conservation of matter and of energy. It is necessary to recognize the limits of this law relating to matter and energy, so that we may take courage and contradict it where necessary. It will never be possible for anyone to see through the essential nature of thinking in an unbiased way, at the point where matter destroys itself, if they regard the law of conservation of matter to be absolute; if they do not know that it applies in the sphere of what we can survey externally in the field of physics, chemistry etc.. but that it does not apply at the point where thinking appears on the scene in our own human organization. If it were not necessary to present such insights to the world today, for certain underlying reasons, I would not expose myself to all the derision and objections that are bound to come from those who, conditions being as they are, consider the law of conservation of matter and of energy to be absolute, to be applicable throughout.

On the one hand therefore Intuition reveals to us the relationship of thinking to ordinary matter as it surrounds us in the physical world. On the other hand. Intuition also reveals to us the relationship of Inspiration, of the Inspiration that pertains to the spirit, to the sphere of human feelings, to the rhythmical life of man. In the sphere of nerves and senses, physical matter is destroyed. As a result the sphere of nerves and senses can provide the basis for ideation, for thinking. The second system in man is the rhythmical system. At the level of the soul, man's feeling life is connected with this in the same way as the thinking life is connected with the sphere of the nerves and senses. The relationship between the objective world outside man—which we are approaching through Inspiration—and man himself shows us that through Inspiration we become aware of a cosmic entity that extends its activities into us in the same way as the sense-perceptible world extends into us through ideation. This inspired world comes in specifically through the breathing process, the rhythms of which continue also into the processes occurring in the brain and in the rest of the organism.

We then come to know the element which lives within man as rhythm. Matter is not killed here in the same way as it is in the thinking process, but life is paralysed, so that it needs to fan itself into flame again and again. The usual, purely mechanical breathing rhythm is based on an inner rhythm which in a certain dualism splits itself into the physical process of respiration and the soul process of feeling. We perceive the unity of this feeling process, in the soul on the one hand and the physical rhythms of our respiration on the other, as something which has objective existence in Inspiration and can be penetrated by Intuition. In short, we can come to perceive the whole way in which the world of feelings and man's rhythmical element belong together, come to perceive that here the material element is not cancelled out completely as in the nerves and senses, but that the material element is partly paralysed. So we gradually come to see through man. We look at the feeling life of man and see something there that can exist only because life is partly paralysed again and again, in rhythmical sequence, and has to fan itself into flame again.

A second, important element in the nature of man is thus revealed when we perceive the way enlivening and paralysing processes act in concert. We see the significance of everything that is rhythmical in man, and how it is connected with man's essential being as a whole, in body and soul. As we come to perceive this second element in man, it will however become clear to us that man bears within himself a real force that is in rhythmical interplay with an external force that lies in the supersensible sphere. We see, as it were, an inner and an outer force swinging to and fro. In a similar way it is possible to perceive man in his metabolism and limbs.

Ascending to Inspiration, to Intuition, and Imagination, we perceive in soul and spirit the real forces that normally are unconsciously at work in man. Our usual object-bound perception only provides formal elements; we are merely looking on at a world, as it were. Anything we achieve through Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration however is first of all an independent product of our inner soul, but in supersensible perception we relate it to something that is objective in man, so that we are finally able to see how the human will acts when we act ethically. Having first of all realized that pure thought represents matter being broken down and that it altogether has to do with processes of death, processes effecting involution, we come to realize that everything that has will-like soul qualities has to do with processes of anabolism (building up)—with growth processes. The processes of growth and anabolism, the processes of organization and reproduction in us, reduce our normal conscious awareness for the depths of the human organization, and the will rises from those depths of human nature, depths our ordinary consciousness does not reach. Our thinking lives in a sphere where death enters in; the will element lives in the sphere of growth, of healthy development, of bearing fruit.

It is then possible to perceive, out of Intuition, how out of metabolism and through the will—which at this point however is motivated by pure thought—matter is pushed to the place in the human organism where it is to be broken down. Thinking activity as such breaks matter down: the will builds it up. It does it in such a way, however, that initially the building-up process remains latent in the human organization in the course of life as it moves towards death. But a building-up process is present. When we achieve truly independent moral Intuitions in our moral intentions, as described in my Philosophy of Freedom, we are living a life, on the basis of our organization, where transformed matter is, through will activity, put in a place where matter has been destroyed. Man develops inner creativity, building-up processes. In other words, within the cosmos we see nothingness getting filled with newly formed elements in the human organization, in an absolutely material sense. This means nothing else but that in consistently following the path of Anthroposophy we reach the point where purely moral ideals effect cosmic creation within man, to the point of materiality.

We have now discovered, in a way, where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises that ensures its own reality, out of human morality, because it bears this within itself, itself creating it. When we then come to see the outside world in the light of this Intuition, the mineral kingdom first of all shows itself to be in the process of being killed, in a process of decay. This is a process we have come to know well in the material process that corresponds to our own thinking process. We therefore come to see how this process of decay takes hold also of plant and animal life. There we are not thinking in terms of heat death—though within certain limits this does apply—but looking at the disappearance of the whole mineral-permeated world that is all around us. We see the world we realize to be based on causal necessity as one that is perishable, and we see the world we build up out of pure moral ideals arising on the basis of that other world which is dying. In other words, we now perceive how the moral world order relates to the world order of physical causality. A morally pure will is the element in human nature that overcomes causality in man himself and therefore also for the whole world.

If one takes an honest look at the explanation of nature based on causality, there is no place in the world where it is not valid within its particular sphere. And because it is valid there must be a power that destroys its validity. This power is the moral sphere. The moral sphere, recognized out of man's whole nature, holds within itself the power to break through natural causality, not by effecting miracles, however, but in a process of evolution. The element which within the individual human being thus presents itself as the destroyer of causality will only gain significance in future worlds. Yet we perceive the reality of the human will as it enters into alliance with pure thought. This provides us with the most wonderful fruit of life achieved through the scientific approach used in Anthroposophy—a glimpse of man's significance within the cosmos—and we also gain a feeling for man's rank and dignity within the cosmos.

Things are not merely connected in the world the way we often imagine them to be on the basis of the abstract concepts we use. No, they are connected as something real. One real and most important thing is the following. Not everyone is of course able today to advance to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. One thing, however, which we take with us through all these stages of cognition, even as spiritual scientists, is the thinking process in which one thought evolves from another with an inner necessity. This form of thinking is one every human being is able to experience if he enters into it without prejudice. And this is why all the findings of spiritual science, once they have been made, can also be verified by applying pure thought to them, because the spiritual scientist takes this pure thinking with him into all the elements of the ideas he forms.

In the context of everything I have presented to you, one very particular element evolves in the human soul in conjunction with what in the first place may be taken merely as an affirmation of anthroposophical spiritual science. Other ideas formed by man are derived from external perceptions or based on such external perceptions. The external perceptions provide the support for that life of ideas. There are however people today who on the basis of the thought and philosophical habits of very recent times absolutely refuse to accept that anything could possibly come to man that does not have the support of external perception. We shall end up with abstractions that have no relation to life if we refuse to accept that man is also able to understand matters of essence if only he will give himself up to his own pure thinking that organizes itself and concretely arises out of itself. It has to be accepted that he will then be able to take in the concepts gained through spiritual science, through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, concepts which the philistine will say are figments of the imagination and do not represent reality.

The philistine is too lazy to enter with his thought into the reality the spiritual scientist reveals through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Yet this reality is intimately bound up with the nature of man. We need to achieve the ability to take in anthroposophical concepts, concepts that have no correlative in the outside world perceptible to the senses, concepts we have to experience in freedom in our mind. The feeling, the attitude of mind we need for this will bring a new essential nature to our whole being.

Once spiritual science enters into cultural life it will be seen that because what is perceived in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition is a living entity within man himself—as I have indicated—the living essential being of man is taken hold of directly by spiritual science, and man is able to go through an inner metamorphosis and transformation by taking it in. He will be richer within himself. We are able to feel how he is made richer by letting an element enter into him that cannot be kindled by the outer physical reality. Full of this element, which streams through the whole human being, we then turn to our fellow men. We now gain an insight into man that we have not had before, and above all we gain love for our fellow man. Love of humanity is what the insights gained in anthroposophical spiritual science directed towards the supersensible sphere can kindle in us, a love of humanity that teaches us the value of man, that makes us aware of the rank and dignity of man.

Perception of the value of man, inner awareness of the dignity of man, will activity in love of humanity—those are the most beautiful fruits of life that can be made to grow and ripen in man when he lets the discoveries made in spiritual science enter into experience.

Spiritual science then acts on the will to the effect that the will is able to attain to what in my Philosophy of Freedom I have called moral Intuitions. And something tremendous comes into human life, for these moral ideals are Filled with what otherwise is love, and we are able to become men acting in freedom, out of the love our individual personality is capable of. With this, spiritual science is approaching an ideal that also arose in the time of Goethe, though u was Goethe's friend Schiller who put it most clearly. When Schiller really entered into Kantian philosophy he took in a great deal from Kant with regard to theoretical philosophy. When it came to Kant's moral philosophy, however, he was not able to follow Kant. In Kant's moral philosophy, Schiller found a rigid concept of duty, presented by Kant in a way that makes it appear as a force of nature, something with compelling effect on man. Schiller had an awareness of human value and the rank and dignity of man and could not accept that in order to be moral man had to be under spiritual compulsion. It was Schiller who wrote the beautiful words: ‘I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately do so from inclination, and it often vexes me that I am not a virtuous man.’³ For to Schiller's mind, Kant postulated that one really had to try first of all and suppress all partiality felt for a friend, and then do whatever one did for him out of a rigid notion of duty.

Schiller felt that man's attitude to morals had to be different from that presented by Kant. As far as it was possible to do so in his day, he defined his concept of this in his letters Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Training of Man in Aesthetics), aiming to show how duty has to descend and become inclination, and how inclination has to ascend, so that we develop a liking for what is the content of duty. Duty, he said, had to descend and natural instinct to ascend in a free human being who, from inclination, does what is right for the whole of mankind. If we look for the roots of moral Intuitions in human nature, if we look for the actual impulse, the ethical motivation in those moral Intuitions, we find love, a love become most pure so that it attains to the spiritual. Where this love becomes spiritual it absorbs into itself the moral Intuitions, and we are moral human beings in so far as we love our duty, in so far as duty has become something that arises out of the human individuality itself as an immediate force.

It was this which moved me to present a definite antithesis to the moral philosophy of Kant and to do so out of Anthroposophy in my Philosophy of Freedom. Kant's thesis⁴ was: ‘Duty! Great and sublime word, you have nothing in you of what is favoured, of flattery, but demand submission ... you establish a law ... before which all inclination must fade into silence, even though it run counter to it.’

If man had such a notion of duty he could never grow upwards into the spirit, to become the free originator of his moral actions within his innermost being. In such an endeavour to comprehend human nature on the basis of a genuine understanding of man in Anthroposophy, I countered this rigid concept found in Kantianism with the one you find in my Philosophy of Freedom: ‘Freedom! Gentle and truly human word, you hold within you all that is morally favoured, what does most honour to my humanity; you make me subservient to none, you do not merely establish a law, but wait to see what my moral love itself will come to recognize as law, seeing that it feels unfree in the face of any law imposed on it.’

That is what I felt I had to say in my Philosophy of Freedom, to propose that the moral element appears to the fullest degree in accord with the rank and dignity of man when it is one with man's freedom, rooted in true love of humanity. Anthroposophy is able to show how this love of duty in the wider sense becomes love of humanity and therefore the true leaven in social life, which we will be considering next. The tremendous, burning social question that today presents itself to us can only be fully understood when we make an effort to grasp the relationship between freedom, love, the nature of man, spirit and natural law.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner's reply to a question on the subject of entropy (after a lecture given on 12 Nov. 1917 in Zurich) in Anthroposophie undakademische Wissenschaften, Europa Verlag, Zurich 1950, p. 179 ff.
• 2. Entropy—in thermodynamics a quantitative factor used to define the thermal state of a system. (Translator)
• 3. From Schiller's Xenien (Gewissensskrupel)
• 4. The thesis Kant presents in relation to duty in his Critique of Practical Commonsense is: ‘Duty! Great and sublime word, you have nothing in you of inclination, of flattery, but demand submission, yet you do not threaten with what would arouse natural antipathy or fear in the mind in order to stir the will, you merely establish a law which finds its own way into heart and mind and yet against our will gains reverence (though not always adherence), before which all inclination fades into silence, even though it run counter to it.’

The imaginative, inspired and intuitive perception I have attempted to describe to you presents to man the findings of supersensible investigations that guide him towards his own essential nature. It needs to be emphasized, however, that it is not a question of achieving Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as such. These are just tools for research in the supersensible world, in the same way as scales, units of measurement, are used in the physical world. It is a question of developing these research tools in spiritual science in such a way that we take our starting point from something which is already present in our ordinary consciousness, in our everyday consciousness, in the consciousness on which ordinary science is based. We must, however, find the right way of rising to this ordinary consciousness with its potential for genuine ideas free from sensuality, ideas the mind is able to grasp. All it needs is to bring higher life into an element left unregarded in ordinary consciousness, and this will open the way to supersensible worlds. Anyone wishing to become a spiritual scientist himself must above all see to it that he holds in full awareness to the same element which is also needed for genuine research in the physical world, if such research is to yield results that are in accord with reality.

What I have just told you really applies only to the present age. This epoch in human evolution, which started in the 15th century, has advanced to scientific research as such, and in handling this type of research has also established concepts in human consciousness that can be developed and given life in the way I have indicated. In earlier times quite different methods had to be used. Some hint of this has been given in references to the yoga system, etc., but these older ways can no longer be ours. Just as the things an adult person does in life cannot be the same as those a child achieves, so the means used by civilized 20th century man cannot be the same as those used in the ancient Eastern and Greek cultures.

We have to start from pure thought, free from sensory elements, as I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Freedom. This sensation-free thinking is best developed—and this may sound paradoxical—by entering into the study of nature based on the scientific approach I have already referred to in these evening lectures. It was not without purpose that I spoke of Haeckel's approach, despite the fact that this has its faults, which I am able to see and admit. This is a particular method of immersing oneself in the evolution of animal and human life. If we strictly apply the discipline spiritual research has to demand with regard to the sense-perceptible world—living interaction of pure perception and pure thought—the results we arrive at for the organic world as it presents itself to external, sense-based empiricism are exactly those arrived at by Haeckel's method. To create a vivid picture of what is achieved by this approach, where external observation is penetrated with methodical thought, we must proceed as follows. We cannot in that case produce all kinds of speculations out of some kind of abstract thinking about a ‘vital force’ of the kind produced by neo-vitalists.¹ Nor can we speculate on the basis of pure concepts as to whether there is a supersensible principle or some such thing behind the things we perceive outside us, when using our senses. No, we have to stick to the world of facts the way Haeckel and his followers did. Spiritual science specifically demands that the study of external nature must be limited to this area, limited in this sense, otherwise speculation about outer nature leads to nebulous mysticism. Inevitably I shall be accused of materialism. Such accusation may also be given a special twist by saying that I did previously present things from the materialistic point of view but later abandoned this approach. There can be no question of this. Such objections are foolish, coming from people who take a very literal view and are unable to enter into the whole spirit of spiritual-scientific research. It is exactly by limiting ourselves to phenomenology in the study of nature that we are in a position to practise the inner renunciation in our thinking activity which is necessary if we are not to follow some nebulous mysticism but consider the phenomena as they present themselves in the physical world. We shall then come to use thought activity merely as an instrument, a method of working, I would say, in our study of the outside world. In no way would it serve as some form of constitutive principle, but as something that can go no further in any statement made with regard to the sense-perceptible world than determine an order among the phenomena of that outer physical world so that it reveals its own secrets, which is of course entirely in the Goethean sense. In practising such renunciation we shall come up against the limit set in this field of research. At this point we do not embark on philosophical speculation, coming up with all kinds of ideas as to a transcendental element that is to be revealed. Instead, we begin to experience the inner struggles and conquests that will not induce speculative thought but instil an elixir of life into thought, as it were, so that thinking activity now becomes transformed into the perceptions which then appear in our Imaginations. Thinking will then be able to reach the world which it can never reach through speculation, but only by metamorphosis into supersensible perception.

It is only by using such means to gain insight that man really comes alive to himself. It is by starting from exactly this type of thinking and by keeping it with him throughout that the spiritual scientist has to take everything he sees in imaginative perception and reduce it to the form of a pure idea. Then anyone will be able to follow what he presents in the form of ideas, provided they pay the right kind of attention to ordinary consciousness. Even the highest results obtained by the spiritual scientist can therefore be verified, and only lazy minds can insist that it is necessary to enter into the spiritual world oneself in order to verily those results.

When the results of Imagination are revealed, man's soul perceives—and I have already described this in these lectures—everything encompassed within his life from the time of birth as one cohesive stream. The ego grows beyond the here and now, sensing and experiencing itself within the whole river of life, from the time of birth. As man advances to Inspiration, the world he lived in before birth, or before conception, opens up before him, and this is also the world he will live in when he has gone through the gate of death. In this way, the immortal element that is part of man's life becomes the object of his perception. In Intuition, finally, the prospect opens up of repeated past earth lives. The things anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of may therefore be defined as such that the individual steps needed to achieve these results are stated in every case, and that the results are verifiable, as I have said, because they have to be expressed in thought forms that are accessible to everyone.

Initially, therefore, man is presented with the discoveries made in anthroposophical spiritual science that relate purely to human nature. As we begin to find ourselves, as we learn to express in summary form what we experience in our spirit, in our ego, we arrive at the whole of our self opened out and spread out, the self that encompasses temporality and eternity. We are able to do so by making the findings of spiritual science our own. That is how man finds himself, and it is for the time being the most significant outcome in quite general human terms. At the same time, however, the whole of man's consciousness is expanded. The findings made in spiritual science arise from thought processes that have been enlivened and re-formed and because of this also have an enlivening effect on human souls when taken into those souls and tested for their truth. As a result, human consciousness gains a new kind of insight into the world. Let me first of all briefly describe two of the life fruits arising out of this very expansion of consciousness, out of its intensification.

Today, we face the burning social question. The elements which influenced social life right to the present day arose from indefinite and subconscious human instincts. Men established social systems that arose as though by a law of nature, out of all kinds of instinctive backgrounds. This is evident to anyone able to review social life with an unbiased mind. We are now living in an age when such instinctive contingencies in the social organism of humanity are no longer adequate. Just as the individual husbanding of resources became tribal economy, national economy and finally world economy, so the thinking applied to economics had to become more and more conscious. For modern man the necessity has arisen to consider the potential relationships between people involved in the economic sphere and altogether what goes on between people who have to get along together in social life. It has to be admitted that these are complex issues. When the need arose to progress from instinctive to clear consciousness in this field, attempts were made to do this from the point of view which has come to be the scientific way of thinking over the last centuries. I think there is no need here to pay homage yet again to the scientific approach that evolved as the proper one to explore the secrets of external nature. Where the secrets of external nature are concerned this method which has arisen from the teaching of Copernicus, of Galileo, has certainly proved fruitful. Mankind has got well used to this method in the course of recent centuries, using it to bring clarity into a system of nature but dimly perceived with the aid of the senses.

Then the necessity arose to get a clear picture also of human relationships in social life. It is not surprising that people first of all applied the skills acquired in the study of external nature to these human relationships. That is how our views on economics and social economics have arisen, ranging from those merely promulgated from professorial chairs to what millions upon millions of people have come to believe, and finally to Marxism. I have discussed this in my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage.² Efforts were made to understand how capital has its functions, to analyse labour as a factor in the social context, and the effects of the circulation, production and consumption of goods. All these things form part of a highly complex situation, and the whole thing presents itself to the soul in living processes, I would say, with infinite potential. Even the best of scientific methods will not be adequate for the processes discernible here, and it is because they have not been adequate and nevertheless have been persisted with in the effort to penetrate the social life that we are today finding ourselves in such a wretched situation on the widest scale, for the whole world. Anyone wanting to go deeper than the surface and penetrate to the depths of our social problems will of course realize that they have to do with what I have just tried to present to you. Social forms cannot evolve out of the kind of thinking that has proved effective in science. The kind of thinking however that works its way through to Imagination, taking hold of something objective and coming to expression as something that is alive and astir rather than at rest—a process offering infinite potential within a relatively narrow sphere or also covering a large area—such a process will penetrate this changeable life that has to do with capital, labour, economics, etc. It will be able to come to grips with what is alive in the social order of man, and that really is not surprising, for the things to be discerned in the life of mankind do after all arise from within man. The inner life of man is the life of soul and spirit, or at least it is governed by soul and spirit. When we come upon the social order we therefore come upon something spiritual. No wonder it needs spiritual methods to penetrate social issues.

Ladies and gentlemen, forgive me if I bring a personal note into this now—but it was this which gave me courage to look for the spirit where it reveals itself in the immediate intercourse of man's social life. I did so on the same basis on which I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom, my Theosophy and my Occult Science—an Outline. That is how I came to take the road that led to my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage. I speak with a personal note, but behind this personal note lies my objective conviction as regards the way man can gain insight into the social order, an order that he must create very consciously today, which of course means out of the spirit. That is the one thing.

The other—I am merely giving examples of the life fruits yielded by anthroposophical research, and I could give many such examples—the other thing I want to mention is something we may encounter when considering the human organism. We see this before us in the first place in its outer form. The enveloping part of this outer form hides the internal organs. In physiology and biology we study the morphology, the structure, of these inner organs. There is no other way so long as we stay within the context of science as we know it today. In reality, however, the lungs, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys, all the organs of man are not as they present themselves to the eye when it looks at them in their enclosed form, in a structure that on the whole, I would say, is in the resting state, particularly in so far as we perceive them with our senses. No, these organs merely pretend to have such a configuration, for in the living human being the individual organs are constantly alive and stirring. They are anything but organs at rest in a finite form, they are living processes. In fact, we should not really speak of a lung, a heart, of kidneys and a liver. We should speak of a heart process, the sum total of heart processes, the sum total of lung processes, the sum total of kidney processes. Everything that goes on there is in a constant process of metamorphosis, though this is so much shut away that the whole may well be taken for a fixed form, and indeed has to be taken as such from an external point of view. From a view that only sees this form, a form that really only reveals the outer aspect, we need to advance to the living process, to something that fundamentally speaking changes into something else at any moment in these organs, to whatever it is that really gives rise to the process of life out of these organs. This cannot be done by using our senses; we can only achieve it through an inner vision that is alive and astir, and this is given in imaginative perception.

Social processes are such by nature that they run away from us in their complexity, as it were, when we approach them with scientific concepts, and the processes in our lungs, heart, liver, kidneys are such that they really hide their inner nature if we apply those ordinary scientific concepts to them. We penetrate into those processes that have shut in upon themselves through Imagination. On the one hand. Imagination is able—if I may put it in such ordinary terms—to run after those volatile complex social processes. On the other hand it is able to resolve the resting form falsely apparent in human organs into the ever changing life of organic processes. These are then perceived directly, not arrived at by speculation or deduction. For in scientific research based on the senses, thinking has to limit itself to what presents itself in the phenomena. Beyond that it has to transform itself into a living, supersensible view. It is only then that it enters into the reality of what goes on there, hidden from sensory perception also where individual organic processes are concerned.

This is the way to achieve fertilization of science-based medicine, a discipline given full recognition by spiritual science. We can achieve this with what spiritual science is able to add to that science-based medicine. Spiritual science does not wish to ally itself with quackery, with the mystery mongers in therapeutics. No, in this field, too, spiritual science wants to take into account all genuine research, genuine findings based on sensory perception, but it wants to take them further, to those secrets of life that we also need to uncover if we want to enter into the wholeness of life. Such penetration will then yield fruits again for life itself as we meet it in sickness and health, or in human community life. It will make it possible to perceive the fruits of life that arise out of the perception gained in Anthroposophy of elements beyond the world of the senses.

All this then comes together in something I should like to define as follows. People often think that materialism can be overcome by abandoning the whole world of matter to the outside world, in a way saying goodbye to it in one's mind and then ascending into an abstract spiritual sphere, into ‘cloud-cuckoo-land,’ and mystery-monger around there. They consider material life as something inferior which we must rise above. Oh yes, if we do this we shall rise to a state of mind that is very pleasant to be in, a kind of Sunday pleasure for man's spirit after the rough weekday work we devote ourselves to in the material world that we do after all inhabit. That is not the soil on which genuine anthroposophical science can be established. Anthroposophy aims to grasp the spirit in such a way that once it has got hold of it in its working, its creative activity, it can follow it right down into the finest tendrils of material life. It is important for a spiritual science of the kind I am speaking of to do more that establish that in addition to a body consisting of brain, lung, liver and so on man also has a soul and a spirit. That would not take us far beyond talking around things in mere words, for it leads to abstract notions of the world which we inhabit between birth and death. The aim of spiritual science is to immerse itself in everything with the spirit it has taken into itself, to say how spirituality, something essentially spiritual, is active in every single human organ, how the essential nature of lung, liver, stomach, etc. is comprehended in the spirit, how spirit and soul are present everywhere in the whole of the human organism, directing the light of the spirit to every single cell, so that there shall be nothing that is not illumined with the light of the spirit. Then it is no longer a question of matter on one side and spirit on the other; then a unity has arisen, joining what in abstract terms is seen as spirit on the one side and matter on the other. And the same applies to the social life.

We must let the spirit enter right into reality, and ourselves enter into reality with it. Then the human soul achieves profundity and the ropes and strings I have spoken of in these evening lectures³ enter into man's awareness. These are the ropes and strings that stretch from the innermost being of man to the innermost nature of the cosmos, the spiritual connection between man and cosmos and, as we become conscious of them, a living flowing movement arises, an inhalation and exhalation of the cosmos, I would say. Something which otherwise is grasped only in theory, in abstract concepts, becomes living experience within free spirituality; it becomes transparent as only ideas can be and on the other hand also as alive as only life itself is, and as free as only the freest of actions can be, yet wholly objective, though in this case the objective element has to be grasped in free spirituality. This is why it is necessary to enliven the faculties that normally fight their way to the surface unconsciously in man, enliven them out of this spiritual research, this insight into the spirit.

People who are artists justifiably feel a certain aversion when it comes to the usual academic studies. And modern aesthetics, evolved out of the thinking of more recent times, a form of thinking habitual to science, is also something artists avoid—justifiably so, for it is something abstract, something that leads away from art rather than into it. Spiritual science does not lead to such abstract concepts. It brings to life what to begin with was merely concept, idea, and this in turn enlivens the other faculties of man. This is why the soil from which this spiritual science is growing is also able to produce genuinely artistic work, in a truly natural way. The art we cultivate at Dornach—tomorrow I will be showing some samples of this in pictures—and anything else drawn from the same soil from which spiritual science has arisen, eurythmy for instance⁴—has nothing to do with translating some idea or another into an artistic approach. No, it is merely the soil that is the same, this soil being the living creativity of the whole human being.On one occasion he will evolve ideas and that will be one branch; another time the other branch, the artistic one, will arise from the same root. That is also why I have always felt extremely uncomfortable when tendencies to produce allegories, to symbolize, emerged within the anthroposophical movement. Anything artistic will have to arise from the same source as Anthroposophy, but it is not Anthroposophy translated into art. And so a particular life-fruit is brought forth in the sphere of art, like those briefly referred to in the field of social life and in medicine.

If we consider how man is there brought together with what is immortal and eternal within him, with the forces that give him form out of the spiritual world, we will also understand why the insight in experience and experience in insight gained through Anthroposophy also has to do with deeper religious feeling. In an age which has grown so indifferent to religion we need fundamental religious forces again. We need ways that lead to the areas of spiritual experience where fertilization may be found for man's artistic work, for everything to do with the value and dignity of man. Such fertilization comes from the centre that is God. It is a perversion of the truth to ascribe sectarian tendencies to Anthroposophy, for it certainly has no such intentions. It is a perversion of the truth to believe that it wants to be a new religious foundation. It does not want to do any such thing, for the simple reason that it is endeavouring to understand the progress of human evolution the way it really is. Here we must say that the divine powers that fashioned the world and guided the evolution of man were in earlier times understood in accord with men's capacity to understand. We need to progress to different metamorphoses of perception and of motivations; we need to make our souls appreciate the eternal in accord with the thinking of modern times. Of course, spiritual science will not be speaking of a Christ other than the Christ who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. But spiritual science has to speak of the qualities of insight and perception which it considers necessary in the 20th century, also where the Christ event is concerned. People who base themselves on some particular confession may feel afraid that the ground will be taken from under their feet by Anthroposophy. They have to be asked again and again: Is someone who is all the time afraid that the truths of Christianity may be diminished really someone who truly professes Christianity? Or is it the person who knows that however many millions of discoveries are made on the basis of the physical world, the soul or the spirit, these can only make the genuine truths of Christianity appear to the soul in even greater glory? No one would ask why there is nothing in the Bible about America, and someone who might have wanted to raise objections to the discovery of America by basing himself on the Bible would have been just like someone who today wanted to fight the views put forward by anthroposophical spiritual science by basing himself on the Bible.

It is necessary to take an honest look at these things and think them through in honesty. Otherwise the element contained in denominational religion must always be a drag on genuine research. Yet if genuine research penetrates to the spirit in the way anthroposophical spiritual science wishes to do, it will yield the very life fruit that consists in new life coming to the religious element in the human soul. We need to bring the findings made in our researches in the different worlds into harmony with the element which represents our religious awareness and feeling. And we do not take anything away from the religions when we try to establish harmony, justifiable harmony, a harmony based on insight, between their truths and what has been shown to be the quality of knowledge in different epochs. Our age in particular shall also have this life fruit out of anthroposophical work, a deepening of a religious life which has grown indifferent. When this fruit ripens, it will be from this direction that the warmth and enthusiasm will come which we need if we are to make progress as Christians in this time of decline. Any insights we gain into social life, into the human organization, anything we may produce in the sphere of art: all this can only further the evolution of man if there is the warmth of man's innermost nature and his creative power behind it. This is to be found in the truly religious feelings of mankind.

Opposition to these spiritual scientific researches is particularly powerful at the present time. This is profoundly bound up with the fact that contact has gradually been lost with reality. On the one hand, attention is directed to a nature which has had all spirit removed from it, so that modern science is not able to perceive it in its true complexion but only in its outer form perceptible to the senses. On the other hand, attention turns to the spiritual world, perhaps in mere certainty of feeling—I spoke of this yesterday—but here men are unable to get beyond abstract concepts. All of this has its root in the fact that people have gradually grown too lazy to want to grasp the spiritual in spiritual freedom, in free spiritual experience, in inner activity. Yet that is the only way in which the spiritual can be tracked down in every nook and cranny of the material world. Science finds its truths by very close adherence to outer events, basing them on experience, on experiment. No effort is made to think beyond what random experiments, random observation reveal, and a habit has developed of replacing the former dogma of revelation—as I put it in my earliest writings⁵—with the dogma of evidence, evidence of the outer senses. As a result we have grown dissatisfied in our heart of hearts. Within the soul's capacity for experience, we have got out of the habit of gaining the objective experience that is independent of anything in the outer world; we do not have free inner experience. This free inner experience is what we must seek above all else if we want to achieve genuine spiritual research. It is also what people are now resisting most strongly.

I would like to give you an example, not with the intention of using a recently published essay to settle accounts in these lectures with regard to some objection or other which has been raised against spiritual science in the light of Anthroposophy. No, it is not my intention in these lectures to deal thus directly with any particular opponent, least of all with what has been said in the essay I am referring to. The writer of that essay is dealing with something quite different from anthroposophical spiritual science, about which he knows nothing. He has tried to analyze it on the basis of hearsay and after glancing at perhaps a single book and hearing certain reports, in perfect sincerity—this one has to admit—and to the best of his ability. I do not want to discuss the points that essay makes with regard to spiritual science. I merely want to consider the issue in the light of cultural and contemporary history. This extraordinarily distinguished author⁶ refers to the exercises he has been told I describe, exercises to enable man truly to take the path to the spiritual world in his soul life. And he has obviously also heard or read that the initial, very elementary exercises consist in spending five minutes in reflection on a neutral object. A thought is held on to in genuine inner freedom, when one is under no compulsion and merely follows something one has willed oneself. To indicate what really matters I therefore said one could use a pin or a pencil, for the object one was thinking of was irrelevant.

It is not a matter of becoming absorbed in the thought content, but of the thought process being held on to for five minutes, the thought process being transferred to the sphere of free activity. We are not used to keeping our thinking activity within the sphere of free activity in ordinary life. Turning our thoughts to an object we want to rivet attention on that object; we keep it in our thoughts for as long as it holds our attention. It will never be possible to enter into spiritual science in this way. On the contrary, such an approach turns us aside more and more from supersensible study and intuition.⁷ It is quite typical for a person who insists on continuing in the decline that shows itself in the present time to say: ‘I could not manage that at all at present; and I am afraid, yes, I am afraid, that however much I try to overcome myself I shall never learn it. On the other hand I have been accused of being so engrossed in an object that held my interest that for more than five minutes the rest of the world no longer existed for me.’

That is exactly the opposite path. If we get so engrossed in an object that the rest of the world no longer exists for us, we are given up to that object, we have relinquished our freedom to that object. That is the essential point: to take an object that does not rivet our attention, and keep that object in awareness for five minutes out of inner strength and freedom. It therefore is enormously typical when someone says: T think I prefer to leave such a faculty to people who have nothing in their lives that holds sufficient genuine interest for them to keep their attention for five minutes.’

This is a famous man of the present age, and there is so much that holds his attention, keeping him unfree, over and over again, for five minutes and probably more—let us assume this, to give him his due—that he never gets to a point where he is able to hold a thought complex in his mind for five minutes. This he intends to leave to people who are not as enthralled with the outside world as he is. It also shows him to be completely bound up with the modern point of view, the modern way of thinking and feeling which has evolved and which I have defined for you tonight. That is a long way from the essential aim of spiritual science which is to enter with one's mind into the sphere of free thought activity.

Another example I have given of the way man may enter into such a sphere of independent thought is the meditation on the Rose Cross I have described in the second part of my Occult Science. You can look it up there, how the exercise should be done. The author I am referring to had the following to say on this: ‘The cross does not infrequently come before my mind's eye, without volition’—so again it does not come when called to mind in freedom, but involuntarily—‘but it is not a black cross, say of polished ebony, but an absolutely ordinary crude gallows tree, a dirty grey in colour. No circlet of seven radiant red roses hangs on this cross, but a cadaverous man, sorely beaten, who is going through the tortures of death, and indeed the tortures of hell.’

So you give an exercise that is designed to lead to inner freedom of thought, and this person can think of nothing else but what comes to mind under the powerful compulsion of his whole upbringing, out of the whole of his life habits, and he even considers this to be the acceptable, the right thing. With such an attitude of mind it will never be possible to reach what spiritual science really has to offer. That man had no need to refer specifically to the cross I spoke of in my Occult Science. It could, for instance, have happened to him that someone somewhere spoke of the cross formed by the transom and mullion in a window, describing this to him. And in that case, too, he might have said: ‘You have no right to speak of that cross in the window, for what comes to mind for me is not a cross formed by transom and mullion and painted a reddish brown, say, but always a black cross that is a crude common gallows tree’ and so on. And if someone were to try and tell the man how a cross is used in analytical geometry, the cross formed by ordinate and abscissa, he would stop them from doing so. Even if Einstein were to draw the abscissa and ordinate for him, he would conceive of nothing else but his crude gallows tree. We must consider these things with regard to their true content and it will become obvious what forces are present in our time that lead in directly the opposite direction to what is such an urgent necessity today with regard to social issues, religious and scientific issues—as I hope, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have been able to see.

It is not surprising, then, that the author in question also says something else that is indeed most curious. I have presented the Akashic Record, as I have called it,⁸ as something through which man tries to develop his thoughts to such an extent that he is able to survey cosmic evolution through inner activity. What I had to depend on was that when such things are described they are received in an inner soul state that is kept alive, with this soul state elevated in free spirituality to what is open to supersensible perception. But this man said the following: ‘And—believe it or not—I do not even find it difficult to abstain. Even if Dr Steiner were to present me with an illustrated special edition of the Akashic Record, I would not bother to read it.’ Well, this man seems to imagine an illustrated special edition of the Akashic Record may be presented to him, so that he can be sure to stay passive, so that there would be no question of anyone counting on his inner soul activity.

It certainly is necessary for anyone wishing to participate in working on the powers for a new beginning coming into our time to view such things dispassionately, without antipathy, seeing them as they are—all the elements of transition and decline. Many people stand there and are not even aware that they have these powers of transition in them, and a great many others rush after them—thousands and thousands of people. They are keen to follow such passive religious natures because they want to remain passive, because they do not want to take hold of the one thing that is so essential: objectivity, the essential nature of objectivity—that is, to take hold of the supersensible in free spirituality. That requires an active inner soul state, a free inner soul state.

That is what I want to say in conclusion, summing up: Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to foster supersensible insights, insights that lead to the kind of results I have briefly defined these last few days. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to lead up to dead concepts that tell us only of a dead outer reality. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to limit scientific work, the discovery of truth, to the kind of results an abstract intellect gathers like wilting leaves from the outer reality perceptible to the senses, wilting leaves that dry up as they are translated to the human soul and in drying up paralyse man's inner strength.

Anthroposophical spiritual science wants its findings to be true life fruits, not wilting leaves, life fruits that may become spiritual nourishment for the living soul, just as the circulating blood provides nourishment for the body. For this to be possible, spiritual science needs to breathe the air of freedom. Perception has to be taken into the spiritual atmosphere of freedom, a freedom that is able to awaken the greatest depths of the human soul and make them perceptive, and at the same time also awaken them to the ability to act in genuine freedom, act in a way that may establish harmony, social harmony among men. Certain things will have to happen in the social organism that of necessity must arise from the present and into the immediate future. In the final instance this has to arise from what man attains to in full conscious awareness and free perception, is able to experience in his innermost soul as the independent life fruit of such perception, and is able in turn to bring into human society as a whole, in social action. This will lead to mankind out of the present and into the immediate future through powers that are not those of decline but of a new beginning; it will lead mankind to a new element that is human, healing and creative.

• 1. Concerning ‘vital force,’ vitalism and neo-vitalism, see for instance Ansprachen und Vorträge Rudolf Steiners im zweiten anthroposophischen Hochschulkurs (Talks and lectures given by Rudolf Steiner as part of the second course given at the School of Anthroposophy) 3–10 April 1921, Berne 1948, p.99 ff. GA76.
• 2. Die Kernpunkte der socialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkciten der Gegenwart und Zukunft by Dr Rudolf Steiner, early April 1919. Includes his ‘Aufruf an das deutsche Volk und an die Kulturwelt’. GA 23. English: Towards Social Renewal. Tr. by F.T. Smith. Rudolf Steiner Press.
• 3. See footnote to page 45.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbarer Gesang, 8 lectures, 1924. GA 278. Engl. Eurythmy as Visible Music. Tr. by V. and J. Compton-Burnett. Rudolf Steiner Press. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache. 15 lectures, 1924, GA 279. Engl. Eurythmy as Visible Speech. Tr. by V. and J. Compton-Burnett and S. anc C. Dubrovik. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1956.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner; Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung. GA 2. Engl. The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. Tr. by O. Wannamaker. Anthr. Press & Rudolf Steiner Publ. Co. 1940.
• 6. Christoph Schrempf wrote a letter to the publisher Eugen Diederichs which was published in volume 13, No. 6 of the journal Die Tat (Jena, September 1921).
• 7. Rudolf Steiner here used the term ‘Anschauung’, which in philosophical terminology is ‘intuition’.(Translator)
• 8. Rudolf Steiner. Aus der Akasha-Chronik. GA 11. English: Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria. Translated by K.E. Zimmer. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1971.