The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Berlin, March 12, 1922

Dear attendees! It is admitted from many sides that today, when it is said that there is an urge to find something for the heart, soul and spirit of man that could not come from the previous traditions and also from the present science, it is not just the ideal or the longing of a few that is being expressed. It is admitted that a need of the times is being expressed. Anthroposophy wants to serve this need of the times. That it can even come close to doing so, however, is disputed by many. It is admitted that the need for spiritual deepening and for an uplift of the soul is present today in the most eminent sense. But people behave very strangely when they judge the anthroposophical spiritual movement on the basis of ideas that they often believe were really born out of these needs of the time. Among many others, one judgment is typical, which goes something like this (I will not give the name of the person who had this judgment printed; names are not important, as they often only annoy, but this is a judgment that is asserted from many sides): Anthroposophy is the wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is necessary for the needs of the time. There must be something extraordinarily remarkable at its basis if it could be said that Anthroposophy could indeed recognize with a certain certainty the right and even necessary goal for the needs of the time, but that it was also, in the fullest sense of the word, a mistake to pursue this goal.

Let us now, at the end of this week's course on anthroposophy, try to understand what might actually underlie such a judgment.

Anyone who makes such a judgment realizes that the scientific way of thinking has educated the souls of people in the civilized world for centuries, has given their search a certain character, and has left a certain imprint on what they call knowledge. He also realizes that what has been instilled into humanity in this way must be taken into account. This has found its way into all minds, even the simplest ones; it has also given these simplest minds the critical standard for everything that approaches them as a world view. Furthermore, the critic recognizes that it is the old traditional creeds and world views that profess to have a certain knowledge of the supernatural and the eternal in human nature, but that the way in which they present this knowledge to humanity is precisely what fails to satisfy the needs of today's humanity, which has been shaped in the way described by the development of recent centuries. And so a judging person sees: There is humanity thirsting for satisfaction in its world view; there are others who are, so to speak, natural leaders, who see this humanity before them, but who do not know how to speak to this humanity – neither from the perspective of modern natural science nor from that of the old traditional creeds and not even from what they knew how to make out of the two — to speak to this humanity in such a way that humanity is able to receive what is said as a proclamation of what it demands from its thus developed needs of the time. And then those who judge see that anthroposophy appears. One may think as one will about the details of what emerges from the anthroposophical method of research, but even they will admit that anthroposophy is trying to take account of these contemporary needs that have just been characterized.

And then the judges say: Yes, a certain intellectualism, a certain rationalism, has developed precisely in scientific thinking. But if one develops the human soul only in the sense of this rationalism and this intellectualism, and if one offers the seeking souls only what can be achieved in this way, then this human soul does not feel satisfied. For its yearning, its urge, arises from something other than mere intellect or than that which can be satisfied by mere rationalism. Therefore, those who sense the need of our time but are unable to enter into anthroposophy speak of the fact that we cannot approach our contemporaries with intellectualism or rationalism; that which is offered as a world view not be clothed in the forms of pale, abstract thoughts; it must not be won by a [rational] path; it must be brought forth from the irrational depths of the human heart, perhaps even from the subconscious depths of the soul. And then perhaps someone will also say: What man recognizes has already become an object; but what he is to revere as his eternal in the soul must not be an object of knowledge. One can also hear that what man thus turns to must be an Unconditional, which penetrates into the human soul somehow, not by the clear path of thought, but by an irrational path. And one can hear similar things.

Something actually presents itself in a remarkable way when one considers reviews of anthroposophical will today. People criticize anthroposophy for wanting to overcome mere intellectualism, mere systems of thought, but for being something rational itself, for working with thoughts. People shy away from mental work, and with some justification, and it is said – again with some justification – that anthroposophy does not fully want to get rid of thoughts; that is why people are somewhat wary of it. It is said that the newer world view has been burned by the thought life, despite it being so cold and pale. One would like to take from the unthought, from the seething of the soul faculties, which are not touched by the thought, that which is to become the content of a satisfying world view and world knowledge. It is then quite natural that, if one shuns the thought, one guards against wanting to express such a world view in thoughts. And so, when one wants to express the content of one's soul, one chooses the thinnest of thoughts. One must have thoughts after all, because mere feelings or impulses of the will or something merely irrational cannot be incorporated into a worldview, nor can they be incorporated into a life that is merely conceptual. One cannot even become aware of it. But if you want to bring what you are already striving for into consciousness as the content of your soul, then you make your thoughts as thin as possible. You make a very small, tiny thought: the irrational, the unconditional, and so on. But you have not escaped the thought, you just want to make the thought so small, so tiny, so easily manageable, so infinitely trivial that you do not realize that you have a thought at the end, in which you want to summarize something else. In contrast to this, anthroposophy seeks to recognize to the fullest extent, in the most comprehensive sense, what fate the life of thought has actually undergone within the human soul in recent times. Anthroposophy knows that with modern science, the life of thought has acquired a certain character, one that allows it to penetrate into the outer world, into the world of the senses, but not into that with which the soul can feel connected in its eternal essence. But Anthroposophy, taking into account all the tremendous spiritual values gained through the more recent development of thought, cannot simply exclude thought. Rather, it says to itself: Humanity has developed once up to thought, to the comprehension of thought in its purity, and in coming to this, thought has indeed become something that initially has only a very limited field. But Anthroposophy knows: this thought, as it was gained, must be regarded as something absolutely valuable, it must be the starting point. It does not shy away from accepting that as a gift of human development, which has brought great results in a certain area of humanity, but which, in order to achieve these great results, has made the sacrifice that the human soul must have in its eternal perspective.

Thus, Anthroposophy first turns to the realm of thought, regarding thought as a germ that, while it cannot be taken directly for the immediacy of worldviews in the way that natural science has carried it on the waves of its development, but can be developed, from which something can be extracted that is not yet revealed by itself – just as the fully grown and flowering plant that is about to bear fruit is not yet present in the germ, but is only hinted at for those who can judge the germ. And so anthroposophy seeks to strengthen thought through meditation and concentration, the means of inner soul development.

Then, when we strengthen it through meditation and concentration, it becomes something different in our inner experience. And I was able to show that by strengthening the thought inwardly, we first see the supersensible aspect of what lives here on earth as a human being: we see the physical body; we see the formative forces body, the time body, that which is thoroughly organized between birth and death as something spiritual, which underlying the physical body as the [creative] spiritual force and which is so constituted that, when the thought strengthens itself, it can condense so strongly that it itself is identical with the sum of those forces that are at the same time growth forces, formative forces of the physical organism. These formative forces, by being born with us into the physical world, become rarified in the human organism; they become powers of thought. Thus we take them up into abstract thought. But when we condense these abstract thoughts again through meditation and concentration, they become inwardly full of sap, vigorous in growth, and become real growing formative forces of the human organism. In this way, we move up in full, living knowledge to that which forms, permeates and supports the human organism between birth and death. And when we are then able to move from imaginative knowledge to inspired knowledge, that is, when we can remove from consciousness these thoughts, the formative forces, that we have attained through meditation and concentration, so that we can create empty consciousness, then we move we advance to the perception of the spiritual in the natural environment, advance above all [to the perception] of the spiritual soul in the environment, as we ourselves were before we descended into the physical world and connected with a physical body. The inspired knowledge thus shows us the spiritual soul according to the side of the unborn.

What do we do when we do such exercises and thereby gain certain insights that satisfy our need for knowledge? What are we seeking within the human power of thought by doing such exercises?

If I want to hint at what one is looking for, then I must say the following. The human soul is a unified whole; but it appears in three different external revelations: as a thinking soul, as a feeling soul, and as a willing soul. But in thinking, there is also willing; and in willing, there is also thinking. One would like to say that the life of thought is only the main thing in the life of thought; it has a hidden life of will in it. When we connect and disconnect thoughts, so that we enter more and more into reality through the disconnecting and connecting, the will works in this connecting and disconnecting of thoughts. But one does not see that; one overlooks this will, as it were, one hides this will. But when we meditate and concentrate, we disregard what the ordinary consciousness has as the content of thought; through meditation and concentration, through resting on a particular content of thought, we suppress, as it were, precisely that content. But what we bring up into consciousness is the will, as it is never otherwise taken into account, which lives in thinking itself. And it is this will that one grasps in order to then grasp with it the formative forces of the body and the eternal part of the soul, as it was before birth, as it was in the spiritual-soul world, in order to enter into a physical body. Thus, in the will, one grasps what can be grasped by the human being on the one side of eternity. The other exercises I have described are exercises of will; they lead to the will becoming independent of the physical body. And what is it that we are seeking when we practise this strengthening of the will? Just as we seek the will in the power of thought through meditation and concentration, so we seek the thought in the will through the exercises of the will. When we develop our will in our ordinary lives, we actually notice nothing of the power of thought in this will. We do start from the idea, as I have already explained these days, that when we bring about a simple development of will, for example, when we just raise an arm or a hand. But then the will penetrates down into the depths of our organization, and we see the result again only in the raised hand, in the raised arm. But anyone who does such exercises of will as I have described will find that, wherever he turns his will, it is permeated and glowing with the power of thought, with a power of thought that goes down into our limbs, a thought-power, the content of which we cannot even describe as human thoughts, but whose content we must describe as world-thoughts, because we stand in them through those thoughts that are not in our consciousness, but which are in our whole being and in our whole development of will. These thoughts, which are not in our consciousness, we discover as world-thoughts, as wisdom, but also when we lay down our body and go through the gate of death. Within our stream of will, we discover our eternal selves through thoughts that are otherwise deeply hidden in the human soul. This is how the picture of knowledge of dying emerges; this is how we come to know what we are when we have passed through the gate of death and moved back into the spiritual world.

Thus one sees that anthroposophy seeks the will in the power of thought and the thoughts in the power of the will. And by taking into account, in this way, I would say for itself, what a person otherwise leaves out of account in life, it comes precisely to that which otherwise remains hidden for the person, namely, to that which passes through birth and death as the eternal part of the human soul; and at the same time it comes to that which underlies all external nature as its spiritual-soul element. Anthroposophy values the thought. In thought-exercises it values thought as the germ from which other soul faculties are developed, and these are unfoldments of the will. But anthroposophy also appreciates thought when it lies hidden beforehand, like a flower in the bud. However, because one knows the thought beforehand from the ordinary consciousness, it is coaxed out as something well known when one experiences the will independently of the body.

Thus, anthroposophy is able to respect the thought and to endure it quietly when it is said that it is rationalistic after all. It is not rationalistic, as the people who say this believe, but it is able to make something else out of the thought at the same time, by appreciating the level of the thought.

Anyone who now goes through these exercises, both intellectually and will-wise, will sense something before actually entering the spiritual world that should not be ignored if anthroposophical research is to be appreciated in the right way. A true rationalist who immerses himself in the world of thought, which is rejected by the needs of the time, does not actually realize how thin an element of soul thought is. But he who does become aware of this will speak something like Friedrich Nietzsche spoke — it is recorded in his posthumous writings — about the tragic philosophical age of the Greeks, where he shows how those pre-Socratic Greek philosophers came to the first reflections, which, although not yet as pale as ours, nevertheless already had enough of a pallor of thought in them. Nietzsche found these concepts of Heraclitus, Parmenides and the others chilling; the human soul literally feels permeated by the icy cold in these thoughts. Nietzsche describes this in a poignant way as a philosophical experience of the most intimate kind.

Anthroposophical research must come to this experience and must know with whom what lives in the soul can be compared. If one can approach this thinness, this paleness and abstractness of thought, and really experiences it, then one does not set oneself above it by simply returning to the full succulence of life, but one surrenders to these thoughts. If one wants to enter the spiritual world, then a certain fear comes over one, a fear of nothingness, the fear that always arises before the void. And this fear must be overcome in such a way that the person is well prepared beforehand by such things as I have also described in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and in the second section of my “Secret Science.” The person must be prepared to go through this fear in the right way, so that when he arrives at the experience of the pale thought, he has the certainty: You have to go through this fearfulness, just as you have to go through the state of sleep for the time from falling asleep to waking up. But just as you may believe that you will awaken from sleep every morning, so you may believe that when you go through this fearfulness, a world will greet you that you will only be able to judge then. Before that, you have only earned the confidence that the spirit permeates the world and that you will find it when you leave this state of fear. The one who wants to prepare the soul to see the spiritual world must undergo many trials.

And when, on the other side, the human being is to arrive at the pictorial experience of death, he experiences something else. The spiritual world appears in the form of objective world thoughts from the currents of the will. But after it has emerged in this way, after we begin to imbibe these thoughts, which are greater than our subjective thoughts, in which we feel that the laws of the world, as living beings, draw themselves into our organism, we then become aware that something is also drawing into our will impulses, drawing into them like an alien feeling that takes hold of us as a certain anger at the merely finite. However paradoxical it may sound, one must experience a certain anger, one must expose oneself to it, at the experience of the eternal in the finite. This anger gives one something by which one can visualize the great distance between the infinite and the finite. For what is to be experienced by man must be cognitively experienced by the spiritual world. It must be grasped in clear thought, but if it were only that, it might be merely rationalized. But it penetrates into the human being as reality, entering into a relationship with human feeling and also with human will impulses, so that it is clearly announced that we are dealing with the unity of a reality, not mere thoughts, in the human being.

Dear attendees, what can now be clearly and distinctly present in the developed soul in this way is, however, present in all human souls, even in those belonging to the most naive minds, it is present in the subconscious state. It is present in the subconscious state when, from the newer spiritual development, man approaches the abstract thoughts, as they occur in natural science, for example, when he approaches them with the intention of creating a world view out of them. Then he experiences subconsciously what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher experiences consciously, he experiences this fear described. He does not bring it to consciousness, does not bring it up into his mind, but he devises logical reasons why what anthroposophy now wants, for example, by looking at thoughts, would be impossible. He reinterprets it to himself in order to avoid the necessity of transforming the thought in a living way and penetrating through the fear, as one penetrates through the night with the confidence that one will wake up again in the morning. And on the other side stands the shyness — that anger that overcomes one — to enter into the reality of the human soul as eternal.

In this final lecture, I will give you only a few characteristics of what the living knowledge of anthroposophy can do for the human being who, as I said in the previous lecture, can use his or her common sense to can relive with his healthy human understanding what is lived in this way by those who are really entering the path into the spiritual world to seek that which the deepest need of our time in this world is sighing and pushing for in the human soul. And in the face of this, people spend all kinds of energy, and certainly rationalistic developments, in order to avoid admitting to themselves that they shy away from that fear, from that patience in the face of anger, which I have described.

Then such people come along and say: Yes, it is right, people's need for time must be satisfied. But we don't want to know anything about anthroposophy, because it wants to take refuge in thought again – we have seen how it wants to do so not in a rationalistic form, but in a completely different form – but we want to seek out of the irrational what can satisfy the human soul. We want to try to analyze what can be in every human soul in order to find out how it can be expressed in the simplest non-rational way. Then such people believe – at least that is how they speak – that they can bypass anthroposophy by reinterpreting what they experience in their subconscious!

And then you can experience some very strange things in the opposition to anthroposophy. For example, it is said: This need of the time already exists, but anthroposophy is a wrong path to the correctly recognized and necessary goal; and those who correctly recognize this need of the time but do not want to go the wrong path of anthroposophy — oh, they would know how to wait for what Anthroposophy offers, but how the need of humanity for time could be satisfied from completely different, irrational human soul foundations.

Now it is very strange when you address such objections individually, in concrete terms. Today, I will avoid mentioning names for good reasons; but one can find out, for example, I am telling facts, that it is said: Oh, what does this anthroposophy want? There are other people today who are trying to gain a relationship in a very elementary way, firstly to the other human soul, which is also spiritual, and then to the spiritual soul of the world. When something like this is said, a name of a personality is mentioned who, with her writing, is held up in contrast to anthroposophy. I then found out these days that a name of a personality had been mentioned — I have to tell this so that the misunderstandings about anthroposophy are not repeated over and over again, and I am allowed to tell it because I am talking about a personality whom I hold in very high regard. This person, who is said to offer something for which there is no need to wait for anthroposophy, met with me about eighteen years ago to talk about anthroposophy. However, because she could not get to anthroposophy, but would not have been against it if she could muster the inner strength to approach it, she then tried the external methods, which were just appreciated by the opponents of anthroposophy in the manner just described. Then a few years passed and I met the same person again in a different place; she was trying again to get to anthroposophy, but she couldn't — perhaps also taking into account what is valued more in the outside world today than anthroposophical research. And during my last lecture tour a few weeks ago, this personality had come to me again, clearly expressing: There must be something that goes beyond what I can do myself, what I can give myself in my books. And this personality literally said: “There is something that seeks paths into the spiritual world not only from thought, from the rational, but from the will, from ethics; that is something that interests me, I would like to know more about it.” This is roughly what this personality said to me. A few days ago, I heard that the personality who would like to connect with anthroposophy in this way had achieved something that anthroposophy has no need of!

Dear attendees, behind the scenes of existence, things often look quite different than they are presented by those who often have very different goals — perhaps unconsciously — than those who are in the words. So, with our present life and its temporal demands standing before us, we need not be surprised if the position of those who would actually be called upon to understand anthroposophy in the light of the demands of the time is often still a grotesque one.

Listen to how I describe the methods of knowledge in anthroposophy: they are purely inward methods of knowledge, such methods by which the soul enters into the spiritual world through inward experience; what is experienced there is experienced as inwardly as only mathematical experience is; truth and certainty are experienced inwardly as only mathematical certainty is is experienced inwardly, only that mathematical certainty is formal and does not go to reality, whereas the knowledge gained by the soul through meditation, concentration and exercises of will and so on is quite real, and its standing in relation to this knowledge is then a standing in the real supersensible when it attains to it. And it is precisely in such books as “Occult Science”, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Riddles of the Soul” and others that it is described how the anthroposophical researcher arrives at these results; it is described in such a way that anyone who wants to apply these methods to their own soul can come to verify these things at any time. It is only a matter of the one who wants to verify having to apply the methods to his soul. Those who merely want to understand anthroposophy and make it fruitful for their lives in this way, as I discussed in the last lecture here, do not need to apply the spiritual-scientific methods to themselves, but can certainly stop at taking them in through common sense and a healthy sense of soul.

But even if you are not a very important philosopher or scientist in the present day, you must still gain an idea from this description of anthroposophical methods and their results that a real examination of what anthroposophy says about its results can only be done by applying the same methods that he uses, by checking how he arrives at his results — in our soul — that is, in the spiritual world itself, by also checking it in our soul in the spiritual world itself. Instead of understanding things this way, people who call themselves scientists today come along and say: Somebody who comes to anthroposophical conclusions should come to some experimental laboratory and try to verify whether he can really come to such conclusions! But the nonsense inherent in such a demand is no less than that which would be spread in the following way. Someone says: I am a mathematician, I have solved these and those mathematical problems; see if they are correct by acquiring the appropriate mathematical skills and checking them out. But then people will reply: We don't like that; why should we first acquire these mathematical skills? Come to the laboratory, where we will examine your skull through experimental psychology and so on and determine whether your mathematical results are correct! Such absurd demands are trumpeted out into the world today and unfortunately find a believing audience.

This is what must be said first about the path of anthroposophy in relation to the needs of the present time. But what the soul penetrates into and from which it announces the results to humanity in such a way that these results can be grasped by the healthy human mind, if it really wants to, what is that actually?

To characterize what can be given to the world through it, or – if I may express myself more modestly – would like to be given to the world, we must recall how earlier times related to the content of spiritual life. Let us look back to earlier times, from which the traditional world-view beliefs have remained with us. There people spoke as if of spiritual beings. They naturally did so in terms of concepts and ideas. But even though the knowledge and perception of spiritual beings was instinctive in ancient times, people still had an inner certainty about this spiritual world, so that they knew: you do not just have concepts and ideas about the spiritual world, you have the spiritual world itself within you; you are not just speaking of gods and angels, these gods and angels – one could also choose other terms – do not just live in your ideas, but they live as living beings in that with which you are connected with your soul, they are spiritual realities.

This is what the more recent period has brought about, that this direct spiritual experience is no longer there. When the more recent period speaks of spirit, it means thoughts. No one in earlier times would have understood what it means when we say today: ideas are realized through history. But everyone would have understood what is meant: spiritual beings realize themselves through history. The ideas are only the means of expression for the spiritual world behind them, and this lives in every single activity that a person performs. Just as a person feels at home in the sensory world, so he also feels at home in a spiritual world. But people who come from this direct experience of the spiritual world used to have, for example, when they were faced with a bush – I am talking radically now, but perhaps this will help to adequately characterize it – an immediate relationship with it, so that the spiritual immediately confronted them and the natural object was also immediately seen through.

Recently, we have seen this coming to humanity: to look at the details of nature in such a way that we no longer experience them in an elementary spiritual and soulful way, but that the abstract thought that expresses the natural event is there first. We stand before the bush; in our thoughts, we first consider what we can experience about the bush. But this separates us from the spiritual, and so nature has been de-animated by us. Because we were able to penetrate nature with abstract thought in the newer epoch of human development, abstract thought separated us from the actual spiritual world. But what human beings did not have when they saw the elementary spiritual in each individual thing was human freedom. It could only develop in the age when man now experiences abstract thoughts in nature instead of direct spiritual images, so that nature is no longer compelling and no longer has a direct effect on human nature.

The fact that we have lost the spiritual reality in nature and only retained the image of spirituality in abstract thoughts has made our freedom possible. This is described in detail in my Philosophy of Freedom. But this has also brought about the necessity that if we want to come to the spiritual again, we cannot stop at the thoughts that we find today in bushes and trees, in stones and sun, rivers and mountains; there live the abstract thoughts that the human race had to experience in order to become free. Today we have to condense thoughts through meditation and concentration. Then we will look at nature again in such a way that the spirit looks back at us from all the beings of nature. And in the same way, we find the spirit in social human life in the way we as human beings face each other, by developing love for our neighbor and expressing this love through deeds.

Thus, anthroposophy relates to the experience of thought in modern times in such a way that it says: Thought has also become the thinnest in external natural phenomena, has become what one might say is a last memory of the spirit; it must be condensed again, must be strengthened, then it will lead us back to the spirit again. Anthroposophy is not rationalism; it does not stop at the pale thought, but struggles through to this thought — really to this inner coldness of thought, which Nietzsche also describes in such a poignant way; but by the soul coming to such thin thoughts, it is, as it were, thereby enabled to have windows everywhere. For anthroposophy, abstract thoughts are like windows; the environment reveals itself everywhere. And then, by condensing the power of thought, the soul penetrates through the windows that have been opened by the abstractness into the spiritual world. In this way we come to experience not only a world of abstract ideas and ideals, but again to that which humanity once experienced as a reality, but of which only the abstract copy remains in the present worldviews and religions, even if today one believes that one is looking into a spiritual world in the irrational. And then we come back to not just wanting to know about the spirit, not just to represent it in our thoughts, but to experience it.

Our living knowledge is only a detour to bring living spirituality into our lives, so that we live again from morning till night in such a way that we know: every one of our deeds, every one of our feelings, every one of our thoughts is such that the spiritual lives in it. That the human being does not become unfree as a result, but precisely free, is what I sought to show in the “Philosophy of Freedom”. I tried to show that if man can grasp thinking in such a way that he can also grasp it, that he can, for example, ascend through the moral intuitions into the spiritual world in the ethical and moral spheres – if he ascends to pure thinking in this way, then he is in a position to grasp world events at the root. But that is the second thing, quite apart from the path: it is a God-filled, a spirit-filled world that is coming into being. Anthroposophy is not meant to provide a mere world view, but should become the cause for man to have a real experience through which the divine-spiritual draws into the newer development of humanity, because man — for the sake of his freedom — can no longer go the old ways to the spirit and would remain spiritless if he did not seek the way from the thought and from the will, as I have characterized it.

Thus, anthroposophy does not merely strive for spiritual experience, but strives to prepare a field, a dwelling for the spirit that will permeate humanity, to offer this spirit a field and a dwelling so that it can be among us, so that we can think, feel and want everything not only out of a temporally ephemeral humanity, but out of an eternal divine spirituality! Anthroposophy does not want to be just a process of knowledge, it wants to be a real process. And in that it, I would say, prepares the Lord's dwelling here on earth, in that it wants to be a knowledge that is at the same time life and at the same time builds the dwelling for the Lord, the Spirit, it has a relationship of its own accord to the third aspect of our great contemporary needs: to the social aspect.

The social question, and that which it summarizes, has a deep impact on the soul and heart of today's man, insofar as this man has soul and heart at all in the true sense of the word. That is, of course, the fundamental question. But can it actually be understood in the way it is often understood today?

Of course, esteemed attendees, every well-intentioned human perception must be thoroughly appreciated and valued for the moment; but something else is still needed for the good of humanity. Today we hear how millions are starving; we ourselves may have the opportunity to experience the misery that has remained from the terrible war catastrophe in the civilized world. We learn how unemployment is spreading everywhere, how it has affected the victors even more than the defeated countries, and especially the neutral countries. We look at this world that has been so severely tested. Certainly, we have no objection to those people who now say, out of a good heart and also out of a certain knowledge of the world: “The next thing to do is to create bread, bread to satisfy hunger!” Yes, that is so; that must also be considered the next step. But we, as humanity, must move forward again in such a way that such times of hunger and need will no longer be possible, as they have become possible today. For what caused them?

Anyone who looks at the world with an open mind will say: Even if there is a natural disaster, if there is any kind of natural disaster or infertility, it must be compensated for in the world economy if it is managed properly. On the whole, nature gives people what they need from it. If entire groups of people do not have what they should have, it is not because nature is withholding it from them, but because people do not understand how to properly process and deliver what nature provides! Nature provides everything that could feed and clothe all people, everything that could provide the barest necessities for all people; it just needs to be worked in such a way that people can give and take it for people in the right way. Need is not caused by nature, at least not in the main, leaving out the details. Need is caused by the way people have treated nature, by the way people have behaved towards each other. Need has come and comes from the kind of spirituality that prevails among people, and only the kind of spirituality can remedy the need in the long term. We must not only find abstract concepts in human interaction, through which people envision themselves, for my sake also a spiritual one, but we must find a living spirituality through which we also approach work, through which we find the means and ways to work out what our fellow human beings can demand of us in terms of the results of our work. We must find that spirituality through which trust can be restored in those people who can lead the work, so that its results can flow into the human social organisms in the right way. And we must find the God who is able to permeate social life in the right way. But we will only find him for social action if we have first found him in living knowledge, if we have first found him in nature and introduced him into human life as a living spirit, as I have described. We first need a path to the spirit; but we need a striving for the spirit that leads not only to a theoretical knowledge, but to an experience of spirituality, which, in relation to social life, leads not to abstract ideas about the social order, but to concrete ideas, so that through the flow of these ideas, the divine-spiritual itself flows into the social order. As much Leninism, as much Trotskyism, that is, as much materialism as there is in the world, there are as many forces of destruction in the world! The only help is to draw a spirituality back into humanity. It is quite true that much can be criticized about the social life of older times, but that belongs in a different chapter from the one we are discussing today. What needs to be discussed today is that our time demands a spirituality that can only come from the highest development of thought, and only through this path.

But anthroposophy wants to go this way. There may well be individual aspects of anthroposophy that are capable of improvement and in need of it. But humanity, having to live out of the needs of the time, will not be able to avoid seeking its leaders where such paths into the spiritual world are taken as anthroposophy would like to take them. For it is important that we not only escape materialism, but that we escape the dead thoughts that are mere representatives of something real, and that we grasp the real in the thoughts themselves. This cannot be in abstract thoughts, but only in the condensed thoughts that have been further developed in the soul; this can only be by experiencing the world thoughts in the developed will. To many people today, who have settled into the old currents of science, this seems paradoxical to such an extent that they want to test the anthroposophist in the laboratory using laboratory methods, just as one would test a mathematician in the laboratory to see whether an integral is correct or not; one does not want to follow what he presents as his mathematics, but rather wants to examine his personal behavior. But it must be realized that the spirit can only be experienced in the spiritual realm, in that realm which, however, has the indicated windows everywhere for the spiritual soul. There the thoughts, the windows through which the spiritual can enter the human soul, are experienced, and in this way the reality of the spiritual world is experienced as something with which people grow together as spiritual and soul beings.

This, esteemed attendees, describes the way in which anthroposophy believes it can serve the needs of the times. I have endeavored to explain today what the real path of anthroposophical research is. For I do believe that once we take a close look at this real path, we will not be able to say that anthroposophy represents a wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is even necessary for the times. No! If you examine what people who judge it call a mistake, you will ultimately discover again and again: it is not the anthroposophical path, it is the caricature that people themselves make of this anthroposophical path; it is the bugbear that they themselves make and then criticize, so that their words have absolutely no relation to the true anthroposophical path. This is what one experiences day after day: people criticizing their own spectres of anthroposophy because they do not want to get to know the true anthroposophy.

Those who, in the days of this college course, represented the anthroposophical method of research in the most diverse scientific fields, have honestly stood up against what is prevailing and for what is needed in our time. They wanted to show how this method of research can fertilize the most diverse fields of science, life, art, and social order. They wanted to advocate for the true nature of that which every honest critique wants to take up, but which today often only sees as it caricatures, turns into a bogeyman and then criticizes in the way I have indicated. Therefore, I would not want to fail, for my part, since I am connected with all my heart with this anthroposophical current, to thank you all here at the end, all those who in the last few days have entered from what they have gained through their science, through their life experience and so on, for anthroposophical research, for the anthroposophical worldview. It is to them that I would like to express my heartfelt thanks, in the name of anthroposophical thinking and the anthroposophical ethos. For whatever one's opinion of what anthroposophy has already achieved and produced, it is making a truly conscientious effort to adjust its intentions to the needs of the present day — not because it wishes to serve only the temporal, but Anthroposophy does not direct itself at all to these temporal needs. It speaks out of the eternal depths of the human soul, and actually of the eternal, but its striving coincides with the needs of the present time. For long enough, humanity has been concerned only with the transitory; today, in response to the demands of the times, it desires to get to know the eternal again, to reintroduce it into human feeling and human action. Anthroposophy can serve these demands of the time, this striving of the human soul, because its striving coincides with the needs of the time. It strives in such a way that I would now like to summarize in the following words what it has achieved today, but what it wants, which is perhaps still a long way off, and which is intended to express what the attitude and the will of the anthroposophical is.

This will knows full well how dark, how gloomy human paths of life are if they are not illuminated by a certain light; and today's humanity is coming to realize its contemporary needs, as I have characterized them, by being surrounded by much darkness in life and therefore must strive to attain that light that can illuminate the darkness, the darkness of life. How can this light be found? For this light, the human soul alone is the lamp. But this lamp can only be ignited by the spirit. The human soul becomes the shining light of life when the spirit ignites it! But when the human soul is ignited by the spirit as a light of life, then it also becomes the torch that can properly illuminate human life: the fruitful insights, the life-warming feelings, the active volitional impulses that are necessary for the human being.

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is misunderstood and often denounced today not only because we have to talk about it differently than about the things that conventional science talks about, but rather because it has to talk not only about different things but also differently, in a different way. That it has to talk about different things than ordinary science, that is basically what anyone who expects anything at all from supersensible research expects. But that it must also be done in a different way, I might say, if the word is taken in a higher sense, in a different form of expression, is something that is not expected. For centuries, a very definite way of thinking and expressing what has been thought and researched has been developed, through natural science, which has achieved such great triumphs. This form of expression appears to people of the present as something so certain, so well-founded, that they cannot tolerate it when a different way of speaking about a field of knowledge that is actually much closer to the human being is required.

Now, however, many of our contemporaries undoubtedly feel that the scientific approach does not even come close to the most important thing for humans, especially when it is applied most faithfully and most conscientiously in its field. And that is why many souls of the present are looking for a way to that which is so close to the human soul in terms of questions and riddles, I would even say, that although they do not impose themselves from the outside through nature, they do impose themselves through the very nature of the human being.

If we want to talk about these latter riddles, characterizing them, then perhaps, my dear audience, we may recall a saying of a spiritual mystic, Meister Eckhart, who once said: What use is it to me – or: What use would it be to me to be a king if I didn't know that I am a king! if I had no idea at all that I am a king?

Now one could even admit that one could perhaps still benefit from being a king even if one did not even know it. But what Meister Eckhart wanted to express applies to something else to a much greater extent than to his comparison. It applies to being truly human.

If we ask ourselves impartially, are we actually human in the full sense of the word if we are not aware of our humanity? If we cannot say to ourselves: What is our actual essence as a human being?

When we thoroughly ask ourselves this question, we are already struck by how little the natural sciences actually tell us about the most important aspect of this question: what we are as human beings.

One could cite many things if one wanted to characterize the full depth and full significance – the depth and significance of the soul – of this question. One could approach this characterization from the most diverse sides. Today, since I have often been able to speak in this city on topics similar to today's, I would like to start from the fact of life, I would like to say which, most intensely from the external world of facts, presents the real soul riddle to man.

Perhaps one can say: This fact presents the real soul riddle to man most selfishly. But this mystery of the soul is presented by this fact – presented in a way that is, I would say, generally self-evident. Let us keep this fact in mind, this fact of death in all its significance. Let us try to present this fact simply and impartially to our souls.

Death, as is sometimes said today by natural scientists, is characterized by the fact that a corpse is present. A trivial fact, certainly, but precisely as a trivial fact, perhaps one of the most harrowing of human physical existence. What can we see when we place the fact of death, the existence of the corpse, before our soul without prejudice? It begins at the moment when the physical body has become a corpse. For this physical human being, a path of development begins for what is within him, outwardly material-physical. This path of development takes a completely different course than it did before the point when the human being had to pass through the gate of death.

We see how that which remains of a person as a corpse – regardless of whether it is consigned to the fire or the earth – unites with the elements of nature, how it is taken over by the elements of nature, and how these elements of nature now assert their being, exercise their dominion over that which is handed over to them by the physical person. The substances and forces in the physical body of man no longer follow the laws that they followed until death, at least initially according to the external visible world; they follow the laws that are imposed on them by external physical nature, which until death the human being has only observed.

So that we can say: It is the outer world into which man dies, not only at the moment of his death, but by the fact that it receives him into its laws as a physical human being, he dies into this outer physical world.

If you look at this fact with an open mind, then, I would say, all kinds of human soul mysteries flow out of this contemplation. And above all, an important question presents itself to a person if he is open-minded enough.

He looks at the various elements that receive his corpse, that is, his outer physical body. He says to himself: These elements into which my physical body is absorbed, basically they have the same effect as they do out there, by absorbing my physical body; after all, they bring the same into me every day during my life. By absorbing food and drink, he absorbs those substances and forces into himself, to which he is handed over at death.

Can we reasonably assume that the laws of the substances and forces to which we are consigned at death as physical beings, that these laws only exist out there in the world? Must we not reasonably assume that what takes us in after death, by entering our physical body as food and drink, unfolds the same laws within us? A lawfulness that is only overcome by the inner being of the human individual?

We see, I would like to say, the way to one side: the surrender of the human physical body to the substances and forces with the same laws that we actually take into our physical body.

Of course, one would have to give many details if one wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery of life, I would say of the soul, which this fact so poignantly presents to our soul, if one wanted to go into it in full detail.

But another question immediately arises: Can external natural science, which is mainly devoted to care, to observation through the senses, to knowledge through experiment – thus again to observation through the senses – and which is devoted to the training of that mind that is bound to this observation and to these experiments, can this external natural science get close to the most essential part of the human being? It can certainly get close to that which, after death, is handed over to the physical elements and their laws. It can certainly also approach that which is incorporated into the physical body every day on the basis of these physical laws; and with its conscientious methods, it can also investigate the laws — which, in the human body, are no different in that they concern the substances and forces of the external world, and are thus life in the external world itself — it can follow the laws of that which is absorbed by the human body every day. But it can also follow the human being with his mental expressions; it can follow what significance that which we take in daily has for the mental life of the human being. And in this respect, natural science has already done an extraordinary amount, and there are very justified ideals in this regard.

What can already be known today about the significance of the brain and nervous system for the imagination, what can be known about certain processes that are connected with correct or incorrect nutrition or correct or incorrect food processing, and which also exert an influence on the soul, all this can be conscientiously pursued by external natural science, and it is doing so today. And anthroposophy would not be able to justify its existence at all in the face of what science has been able to achieve if it did not fully recognize what science has been able to achieve in this direction. Therefore, it is always and repeatedly a misunderstanding of what anthroposophy wants to be when it is brought into any kind of opposition to contemporary science. There is no such opposition. Anthroposophy fully recognizes what science is able to achieve!

But now it will also be readily admitted: Yes, in this physical body, into which the substances and forces of nature, endowed with external laws, are taken up, in this physical body all kinds of things happen; all kinds of things happen, of which the soul initially knows nothing, of which the soul gradually acquires knowledge by pursuing science, physiology, biology and so on. In this physical body, however, regardless of whether the soul knows or does not know what is going on, the causes for the way the soul feels in the individual and how it feels through a certain overall mood nevertheless lie. That which one has no need to know for a long time, what one can call general indispositions, whatever diseases may be present in the organs, that may sound in the soul. It is expressed in the soul as a mood. It does not need to take root in consciousness at all; it expresses itself in the general mood of the soul.

So that one must, I would say, presuppose much that is present in the material processes and effects of the physical organism, and which works in such a way that the soul has a share in it. But inasmuch as the soul has a share in it, it has a share in what already works during life, and in the way those forces work to which the physical body is handed over after death.

We carry within us – honored attendees – the same laws that bring about our destruction as a physical human being. And since these same laws come into us with food and drink, our soul participates not only in what is sprouting and sprouting power within us, but our soul participates in all that ultimately expresses itself by destroying our physical being. As the substances and forces of the external world work in us, the soul participates in our decay even during our lifetime. And when the series of facts that arises when it is presented to the soul without prejudice, then one learns to recognize: Death, which stands before us as a single moment at the end of our physical life, is ultimately only that which, as it were, adds up to what basically rules and reigns in us throughout our entire physical life. I would like to say: parts of death, the smallest parts of death, so to speak the atoms of death, are within us in every moment of our physical life, and our life of soul is partaken of these atoms of death.

This is expressed in the human soul in everything that arises in the mood through which the soul participates in the destructive forces of the world, in the world's forces of destruction. And however complicated the human soul may appear, one thing is true: the most important moods of doubt, of despair, those moods that often arise without any external cause, at least without any noticeable external cause, that often weaken the human being and conjure up the most important riddles of life from the deepest depths of his soul, which trouble him in both health and illness throughout his entire life. These riddles arise from the soul's participation in the world's forces of decline.

When we look deeply into what is working its way up out of the depths of the soul and into consciousness – consciousness does not know what it is, but consciousness has the working within it, has the experience of it in its soul mood – when we are fully aware of this, , then those other riddles of the soul emerge before consciousness, those that point, as it were, in the opposite direction, those riddles that people have always associated with the word that is the opposite of death: the word “immortality”.

The question of immortality is not just a selfish question for humans – arising from our desire not to disappear with death, for example – but the question of immortality is intimately connected with what can be called, in the sense of Meister Eckhart, the example of the king, what can be called: Man is only then fully man when he really knows of his own being.

But, my dear attendees, I would like to say: this knowledge, insofar as we can acquire it through external natural science, this knowledge takes away the fact of death. For everything we can know, even if it is the greatest and most significant thing about a human being, which we can know through experiment and observation, can only relate to the body and must lose its significance for the human being with death, because it relates to something that merges into the non-human, that is, non-natural, being. And man must ask himself the question: Can we look at the dissolution of the physical body in a similar way to which we can look at the inner mysteries that the soul experiences by participating in the destructive forces of the world? Can we look in the same sense at the creative forces of the world, at the sprouting, sprouting forces? And this is the direction in which, out of the same spirit that modern science has adopted and out of the same scientific conscientiousness, anthroposophy wants to point.

But it cannot hint, I would say point, to something that can happen every day, like death, before the eyes of every human being; it can only lead, this anthroposophy, to this – when viewed according to the opposite opposite principle of research into the reality of life — only by pointing to something that does not initially reveal itself as an external fact, nor as an internal fact of the soul's life, something that must first be achieved by the soul.

Death – dear audience – voluntarily places itself before the soul. We must first work for the knowledge of the nature of immortality if we want to recognize it. At least in its innermost essence, no knowledge of it can be bestowed upon us.

Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again that anyone who now wants to knowingly follow the path to the world of the soul, the actual essence of the soul, can only do so through inner activity, through inner work. That is, through what I have often referred to here as soul exercises.

Now, my dear audience, we will be able to form an idea of these soul exercises from the point of view that is necessary for today's topic if we first visualize how human soul life is in fact a unity. We first survey this soul life by looking within ourselves. It surges, I might say, up and down. It expresses itself in images through which we visualize the external world. It expresses itself through feelings, sensations, and will impulses that lead us to our actions and that we, as a member of the social order, allow to appear to us from the soul throughout the world.

That which surges and weaves within man as images, feelings, sensations and impulses of will, that which, with the means of external natural science, is pointed to as that which only can be investigated with the means of external natural science, which is pointed to that which only dies with death. This can be seen today by many people who are only unbiased enough to look at what this soul actually is, how it is quite different from that which is accessible to external sensory observation and experimentation. And then such people turn away from scientific considerations, because they believe that only science can exist for external nature, and they then turn to certain - as it is called - mystical endeavors.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, must not be confused with mysticism, which only wants to penetrate into the soul life, as it is said, through self-absorption; because Anthroposophy is real science and knows how to look back into the ordinary, earthly – if I may put it this way – soul life of man in such a way that one can indulge in great illusions and great deceptions.

Anthroposophy is less prone to delusions than its opponents and well-meaning critics might think! It is very often believed that anthroposophy is devoted to those inner forces that lead to illusions, hallucinations, and all kinds of mediumistic phenomena. They do not notice that the whole way in which Anthroposophy characterizes its research methods goes in the opposite direction to anything that could possibly lead to illusion, hallucination, vision and so on. What Anthroposophy is about is, above all, absolute clarity about what presents itself to the human being at first. There, the one who really looks inside without prejudice, who actually, I would say, follows the instructions of the mystic, will see what an uncertain thing this looking inside is, how, for example, memories that point to earlier childhood, how these memories simply arise in later life and how one does not recognize that what arises as a thought is actually only a memory, a reminiscence of something previously experienced. And if these memories were to emerge unchanged, one would soon recognize that one is dealing with mere memories. But in the human interior, the ideas of external experiences are absorbed into the feelings, into the impulses of the will, even into the temperament, into the whole human organization, I might say into the intimate human health and illness. And after decades, transformed into a completely different form, the ideas can arise, which are nothing other than what was ignited by external observation. The person who often believes he is a mystic

looks into his inner self and has such ideas, they appear to him as if they had never been borrowed from the outside world, as if they came from the eternal depths of the human soul, as if he could directly experience from such ideas how the soul in divine-spiritual worlds, [in] the world's reason, in the eternal is connected and the like.

Those who are aware of the metamorphoses and transformations that memories can undergo also know that they cannot rely on such introspection. And so, on the one hand, the results of natural science appear to the unprejudiced, showing how the soul is bound to the physical in earthly life, to that physical which is handed over to the outer forces of nature at death; and on the other hand, what often appears is the nebulous, foggy mysticism, through which one nevertheless comes to nothing other than to bring up from the soul that which one has again received through this outer world, albeit so transformed that one does not recognize it, that one regards it as belonging to a completely different world.

It is precisely when a person has prepared himself sufficiently to recognize how little external natural science and how little mysticism can give him, that he comes to recognize the value and significance of those soul exercises that simply consist in not merely brooding or looking inwardly at our soul life, but in bringing it into inner activity, so that it becomes something other than it is in everyday existence.

Nature takes our body with us at death; it incorporates the substances and forces of this body into its own laws. What anthroposophy aims for as the path to the opposite goal is the surrender of the soul for incorporation into that which is opposed to outer nature, into the spirit. Just as the physical body is surrendered to external nature at the time of the outer physical death, so now, not in a mere formal act of knowledge but as an inner fact of anthroposophical knowledge, the souls are surrendered to the spirit so that they may unite with the spirit.

And just as the fact of human physical destruction confronts us with death, so the immortality of the human being confronts us with the soul, in that we unite soul life with that which, as spiritual life, as spiritual being and spiritual weaving, underlies the whole world.

What anthroposophical knowledge strives for, as an actual inner experience, is the opposite of what the event of death is for the physical human being. And just as the soul participates in the processes that take place down there in the physical body organization, and how these physical processes play into the soul's mood, even when the soul is unaware of its essence, so it is that our soul is united – it is just becoming apparent in the knowledge that I will speak of in a moment – that our soul is united with the spirit on the other side, that it is only through this side that it comes to know its experiences by striving for knowledge as fact, as actual inner experience. And this actual knowledge can be attained by developing one's thinking on the one hand to a greater extent than in ordinary life, through inner activity, and on the other hand developing the will more than in ordinary life.

Between the will and the thinking lies the mind, with the feeling right in the middle. The most precious treasure of human life is this feeling, this mind. But when we develop thinking on the one hand and will on the other, the mind and feeling go along with it and become something different themselves.

In order for us — my dear audience — to be able to communicate with each other about the way in which thinking is developed on the one hand and will on the other, we must realize that the soul is nevertheless a unity — in its surging, weaving life a unity —, despite the fact that it lives on the one hand according to thinking, on the other hand according to will and in the middle according to feeling.

When we look at the natural world around us, for example, we must first engage our senses. But what we perceive through our senses is then processed by our thoughts. If we were to apply our will in this process, we would not be able to obtain a true knowledge of nature. We would not be able to do so if we let the will that permeates us in everyday life, if we let it flow into our thinking about nature. We would receive fantasies instead of natural laws. The conscientious scientific method cannot be involved in this.

It is precisely in those ideas and thoughts that we have to develop in relation to the external world, in our soul life, where the will recedes for the everyday and also the ordinary scientific life and the thought appears in a certain one-sidedness, as a mere image of what is present externally, and we have the actual will on the other side. Let us be honest about the actual will. Let us take a simple volitional impulse: I raise my arm, my hand. First of all, I have the intention that something should be lifted at some point. And then the intention, which is a thought, goes down into subconscious depths, unites in a certain way with the organism. How this is not seen through in everyday life, because what [happens] is first of all an experience again, that becomes clear again; the beginning and end can be clearly seen. What lies in the middle, how the will shoots into the organism, as it were, and brings the intention about, that has plunged so deeply into the subconscious as the life of a person from falling asleep to waking up.

One is tempted to say: in relation to his will, man is indeed asleep even when he is awake. From the intention to raise the hand, the arm, to the observation of the raised hand, the raised arm, the everyday consciousness basically sleeps, falls asleep, while the will impulse shoots into the organism, and only wakes up again when the result is seen. Then the will comes to meet us, not interspersed with thoughts. But this will is, I would say, something so alien to our consciousness as what takes place around us between falling asleep and waking.

Now, one can develop the human soul further in both directions, both in the direction of thought and in the direction of will, than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. And what do we have to do in these two directions, in the direction of thought and in the direction of will?

I have already said, my dear audience, that the will takes a back seat to the thought. The thoughts that give us clarity about the world make the will recede completely. And the will impulses that are in everyday life make the thought recede, as I have just explained.

But nevertheless, in thought, and in the most abstract and in the most concrete thoughts, there always lives a remnant of will, it is just not conscious. And in every volitional impulse lives a thought. The thought flows in somewhere and then appears again in the result. If we now seek the will in the thought and the thought in the will, then we exercise the soul in both directions. What does it mean to seek the will in the thought? This is achieved by practising what I have already characterised here several times, by practising meditation and concentration, because that means the soul resting on certain ideas that are presented to it in a completely comprehensible and clear way, like mathematical concepts.

In this often years-long devotion — it takes less time for one person and longer for another, depending on their abilities —, in this devotion to comprehensible ideas, a power of thought is developed, as is what is not present in the ordinary consciousness of the will, as is the will element in thinking, how it intervenes in our organism, and now in our complete organism, one discovers —- while otherwise one always only looks at the thought —, one discovers within the life of thought the otherwise hidden life of will; then the first element of supersensible knowledge enters into human consciousness. For what mingles with our thoughts — I would almost say intrudes — is not, as is usually the case, a pale and abstract thought life. It brings something into our thought life that is as alive and intensely inward as we otherwise experience only in our outer sense perceptions. What we otherwise have as a pale, abstract thought life within us becomes so vivid, so alive, by discovering the will in it, that we have an afterimage of the outer sensory perception in our thought life. And so these processes take place in such a way that complete consciousness — as we develop it in a mathematical problem or as we develop it in a geometrical task — is present in all soul exercises that lead to such, I might say will-veiled pictorial thinking.

Anyone who observes what I have described in detail for these concentration and meditation exercises in my books “Occult Science” and “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and in my book “Puzzles of the Soul” and in other writings, will see how unfounded it is to claim that some kind of dreamy soul life should lead to what has been described as imaginative cognition, as pictorial, cognizant inner life, that all processes are such that we, I might say — if I may use the trivial expression — approach them so soberly and with such sound common sense and finally take possession of this imaginative thinking as we approach and take possession of the solution of a geometrical problem. One would like to say: everything that has to be done to achieve such knowledge is practised in such a way that it can be justified before the most transparent, before mathematical knowledge. And actually one has to say that it is most surprising that it is not precisely mathematicians who sympathize with the innermost essence of anthroposophical research method. For the soul activity that is exercised in anthroposophical research is basically the same as that exercised in mathematics, only that the content is different: in mathematics it is formal, while in what is to be considered an anthroposophical research method it is one that leads into reality, into actuality.

And indeed, we are led into a very definite reality if we allow thinking, through meditation and concentration, to grasp the otherwise neglected element of will. For it is here that the first result of supersensible research, of supersensible knowledge, really comes to us. And that is what I have called in my books the formative forces of the human body.

When we have brought thinking to this stage, to imagination, then we learn to live, not in abstract thinking, but in a kind of thinking that is much more real inwardly than abstract thinking. Now we learn to live into a living thinking, into a thinking that flows into reality and takes in our soul. We live ourselves into a thought organism. And the first result appears before us: it is what stands before us in a large tableau of life, what has been working since our birth, inwardly, permeating our physical body as a supersensible one, precisely the body of formative forces.

This body of which I am speaking here is not spread out in space like the physical body; this body is a time body. Just as the individual organs are related to one another and interact in the physical body of space, so the processes of time from our birth to death are a great unity in this formative body. What the formative forces body experiences from, for example, the age of 45 to 50 is connected to what has been experienced between the ages of 10 and 15 in the same way as, let us say, some part of our brain is connected to the part of our heart or stomach in the physical body. We have a temporal body that is attached to us, but which represents a thinking that has become active, a thinking that at the same time has forces of growth within it, forces that are sprouting and sprouting growth. We now not only feel what we have inwardly lived through since our birth here on earth – like the stream of memory from which one or the other memory emerges – but we feel how these memories are only the abstract upper waves of what surface of ordinary consciousness, what lives in our metabolism, what is in the movement of our hearts, what lives in our activity, our nervous system, but what becomes visible as a spiritual body, as a supersensible, etheric body.

The stages of knowledge of earlier epochs, which could not yet recognize these things as clearly as today's anthroposophy strives to, but which had an inkling from dull clairvoyance, knew that such a formative body exists. Then it was called the ether body or life body. I do not want anything other than what I myself have characterized here to be understood by these expressions! And so, as in a large tableau, we discover what we are as a unity, since we have had a physical body on this earth.

The first supersensible element — dearly beloved attendees — is not yet something that leads us beyond our earthly existence. Anthroposophy must continue to advance conscientiously in stages, but it is the content of our earthly existence, the first supersensible element within us, this body of formative forces, which is organized in time, as our physical body is organized in space, characterized.

But we can move forward. We can carry out a next exercise, which, so to speak, is still linked to thinking, to meditation and concentration, but which at the same time leads beyond them. It consists in the fact that, after we have initially concentrated, we first turn our entire soul attention to an idea in meditation, so that we perceive nothing of the rest of the world, but turn the soul only to this one idea; then we strengthen the soul through this concentration, as we otherwise strengthen the muscle that repeatedly and repeatedly performs a task. So, through this ever-recurring concentration and meditation, we grasp some conceptual complex that is easily manageable, and this strengthens the soul; we ascend to what we have just described – to the apprehension of the will element in thinking – so that imaginative knowledge may arise. Although common sense always remains with this anthroposophical method, we must still say that something like a second personality is added to the person as he usually is, which now experiences what I have described, let us say, for example, in imaginative knowledge.

The difference between anthroposophical experience and experience as a medium is that the person experiencing hallucinations or visions as a medium lives with his whole ego, with his whole personality, in these states, which are definitely connected with his physical development. He loses sight of what he otherwise is; he lives only in what presents itself to his soul in an abnormal way.

The person who immerses himself in imaginative knowledge and also in the higher levels of what I am about to describe, sets a second personality apart from himself, the observer of the supersensible; but he always remains there, controlling and criticizing this observer of the supersensible, with his healthy human understanding, as he is in ordinary life.

Therefore, anthroposophy can be presented to anyone, it can be grasped with common sense, because even in the one who is an anthroposophical researcher, what presents itself to him in supersensible vision must first be checked and criticized with what he has remained alongside, with the bearer of common sense. But it is the case that by first concentrating on certain ideas, by doing so one also maintains the tendency, the inner tendency, to now keep these ideas in the soul, not to let go of these ideas again. It takes more strength than for ordinary forgetting to bring such ideas, which one has first placed in the soul with all one's strength, with the strongest strength of inner attention, out of the soul again.

The second exercise has been achieved, which must develop ideas that one has concentrated on sharply, I would say, that have taken over one completely, in order to get them out again. So that, after one has concentrated, I would say, after one has meditated on them, one can put down what I call empty consciousness.

When you develop this empty consciousness, when you develop the power to create this empty consciousness, you apply it from meditation, concentration, and then this consciousness is not filled with memories or impressions of the external world; it is truly empty.

But then, when this consciousness is empty, it does not remain empty for long, because the outer world penetrates into it, because one has initially created this consciousness oneself, one is awake without any content. But after some time, the content comes – which otherwise comes to us through development and is processed with the ordinary mind – that is the content of a supersensible, a spiritual world. And by having attained this imaginative realization through meditation and concentration, by having established this empty consciousness, one thereby gains insights into the spiritual world, into the supersensible world, which surrounds us just as the sensual world surrounds us. Now one learns: Once one has attained this — I now call it the initiated consciousness —, once one has attained this initiated consciousness: Now you stand inside everywhere in the spiritual world and besides with your common sense, your healthy senses, you have the same insight into the physical-sensual world as you otherwise have as an earth human.

The fact that these things develop side by side is the essential thing; then man will never be able to enter into pathological states when he is engaged in such research methods. But if one has trained oneself to suppress these forces, these images of meditation and concentration, one can create an empty consciousness and can also suppress the tableau of life that our inner being, our body of the power of becoming, has placed before our soul, how it has worked, how it has woven in all of us a supersensible one, since the beginning of our earthly existence. We can now, when we have appropriated these forces to create the empty consciousness, we can eliminate — when we have first brought the formative body into consciousness —, we can eliminate this formative body itself. We gradually achieve such a strong power that we can now also switch off this, our own spiritual world, that we can create an empty consciousness in relation to it. But then – my dear audience – when we create an empty consciousness in relation to this body, then the human soul, the human consciousness, is not merely filled with spiritual-soul content from the environment, as I have just described, but then this consciousness of the human being is filled with the spiritual and soul content that we ourselves were before we descended from the spiritual and soul world and accepted our physical body through the inheritance of matter and forces from our parents and ancestors. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of what we were before we took on a physical earthly body. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of our being before birth or before conception. This arises in supersensible knowledge, the second stage in the inspired knowledge that is attained in the way I have just described.

Anthroposophy is not able to conjure up something out of thin air, nor out of lightly-draped mysticism, but rather, anthroposophy must gradually conquer the insights by first drawing on the strength in the human disposition that leads into the supersensible existence. One defames anthroposophy when one merely calls it a philosophy. It is not based on philosophical speculation, but on a vision that is as vivid as any [sensory] vision can be, but which must be achieved by developing the powers that otherwise only slumber in the soul, as I have indicated in principle, and as you can find in the further explanations of it in the books mentioned.

But now, my dear attendees, something very special presents itself to the spiritual researcher. At the moment when he, so to speak, gets to know his humanity, his soul nature, as it was before his descent to earth, at that moment his physical body appears to him like an external object. He now lives, so to speak, with his newly created personality, as it were, transferred back to his existence before his physical body was. He now has this physical body in front of him as something external. And by having this physical body in front of him as something external, he looks at this physical body – that is what must be taken into account. He does not see this physical body merely as it is in ordinary life for physical perception, but he sees this physical body according to its inner organs, although these inner organs are spiritualized.

If you imagine the human heart, the human lungs, the human brain, the various human organs, not in physical terms with physical contours, but as processes, as inner activity, as ascending processes of becoming and growth, as descending processes of destruction and death, interacting with one another, if you think of the inner human organism in this way – but not the human being as a whole, as we usually have him before the physical observation, but also physically, but the physical in spiritual translation, I would say, if you imagine that, then this is what stands before the human being in the same moment when he sees his spiritual-soul existence as it was before he descended to earth.

I do not shrink back, my dear audience, because the things I am talking about are certain results of spiritual scientific research, and since I am simply, of course, unable to give all the intermediate links, which can, however, be found in the books mentioned can be found in the books mentioned, but I want to list the results — to say, at least in some areas, what must nevertheless seem quite paradoxical to today's man, namely to present that which, at the stage I have just characterized, to man, in the following way.

Consider, my dear audience, look into your inner being, you will find memories in your soul, memories that are connected with experiences, and believe that what emerges in the inner life of your soul as a pictorial life of ideas, as perceptions permeated with feeling, is what has been experienced. You can distinguish exactly, I would say the fine, delicate weaving of the soul that you recognize; and you can relate it to the robust outer physical of life, to which it is to be related. But what would happen if the following were to occur? If suddenly something were to emerge in the soul that makes you say to yourself, “Yes, where does that come from? I have never experienced anything like that.” You will not rest until you can relate what has emerged in your soul, which comes across like a memory, to a specific experience, and then you will be calm. And you always relate what is a fine spiritual weaving in your inner being to something robust and material in the outside world, to which you have had a connection.

Now, in the face of inspired knowledge, it is the case that the person is standing before his soul, I would say the entire interior of his organism with all the individual organs, with the forces that compose these organs, lungs, liver, everything is there; the person is looking at it from the inside as a physical being. Only, in recent times, this physicality appears to him to be more spiritually permeated, but it is the physical organization. And that is like having nothing but memories – we can compare it to that – of which we do not know what they refer to. But we can learn what what we encounter in our own organism refers to in the outside world. We learn, namely, by having acquired the empty consciousness, to see the outside world in a new form.

You see, my dear attendees, through our physical vision, also through physical science – astronomy, astrophysics, astrochemistry – we see the physical sun in a more or less precise or imprecise outline. But that is not the whole of the sun, just as what we see with our physical eyes is not the whole of the human being. In the moment when empty consciousness is established, we see, in addition, what presents itself to the outer eye in outer science, so to speak, a solar element that weaves through all of space that is accessible to us and that wafts as a form of power, that physically concentrates there, but that also spreads. We see a solar element in all of the space that is accessible to us.

And this sun-like quality, which is only recognized by the empty consciousness in inspired knowledge as a living being, this sun-like quality, when we meet a person, it combines in a remarkable way with what we recognize of ourselves. We perceive his physical body with our outer senses. Then, in a sense, what his physical body is as an extension is summarized in his soul. We have to imagine the soul as a concentrated form of the spatially extended; when we look at the outer great nature, at the cosmos, the conditions are the opposite. There is, for example, the physical body of the sun, the concentrated form, and the spiritual, which is now the form that is widely extended in space. But we perceive it. Just as we perceive the physical body of the human being with the outer senses as the widely extended, and only grasp it as concentrated in the soul, so we perceive the sun as an external revelation; and we perceive an inner configured life and weaving through the whole space accessible to us, an extending force-end of the sun-like. We observe how it lives into the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and also into the physical life of man. We now begin to relate something certain in our heart, in our lungs, to the sun-like, which we have only glimpsed through inspired knowledge.

And in the same way, we learn to recognize the spiritual aspect of the moon, the moon-like, and relate it to something else. We learn to recognize the sprouting, sprouting forces in our organism as the solar aspect; we learn to recognize what are the forces of decomposition, what are the forces of destruction, as the moon-like. We learn to relate other things in the great cosmos to the inner being.

Now, what are we learning now? In our ordinary lives, we encounter external events of a robust nature; these are the physical events. They are reflected in our thinking, in our feelings, as it were. We carry the spiritual within us. Externally, there is the robust physical. In relation to that which we perceive from the cosmos as spiritual, this spiritual is out there, and within us are our physical organs. Just as our ideas, our memories, are images of the physical universe that we experience, so our physical organs — as their spiritual translation shows us — are internal images, if I may use the term, physicalized images of that which is spread out in the great cosmos. We learn to relate our organs to the great cosmos, to relate them to the whole cosmos, that is, to the spiritual content of the cosmos. We grow with the riddles of our soul into the riddles of the cosmos, which we learn to look at externally.

Now we come to the thought exercises, and I would like to say that in addition to the transition from the thought exercises to something else – which I have characterized in the empty consciousness – we must add the will exercises.

A simplest will exercise – my dear audience – can still be done with imagining and thinking. It is carried out by doing what I would call backward thinking. Everyone can do these exercises in a simple way by recalling the events of the day backwards in reverse order in the evening, letting them pass before the soul; first what happened before going to bed, then something that happened a little earlier, and so on back to the morning, in as small portions as possible. One can also feel a special interest, one has a special interest from the event, one has a special interest in the processes from the fifth to the first re-experienced [real process]!

What is achieved through such real processes? It is, despite arising from the imagination, an exercise of the will. Otherwise, by imagining, we abandon ourselves to the external sequence of facts. We develop our soul life on the thread of external events, of external facts. Now we resist with our imagination what is there as a consequence of the external facts. We reverse the thought. To do this, a strong force is to be applied, a strong application of force is necessary, a stronger force than we usually apply. The will gradually moves out of our thinking.

We can then strengthen such exercises of will if we gradually break certain habits that we have and transform them into others. If we go even further; for example, if we say to ourselves at a certain age: You now want to get into the habit of something that for you is like a temperament trait, like a very intimate, inner, ingrained habit. It will take years before it becomes something natural in you, but you want to work on yourself daily. If you take yourself in hand, if you really take something that arises from thought and incorporate it into the will, then the will becomes something completely different! And then what happens is — it seems like just a comparison, but it is absolutely a reality, ladies and gentlemen. How is it that our eye is organized in such a way that it can serve to see? It is because the eye's own substance does not assert itself, but is, so to speak, selflessly integrated into our organism. In the moment when the eye asserts its own substantiality, for example in an eye disease, we can no longer see! Seeing – and the same applies to the other senses – perception is only possible because the organ of perception switches off its own materiality, in that it becomes, as it were, selfless.

Now I would never claim — of course not — that our whole organism is somehow diseased in relation to ordinary life or ordinary science. But this ordinary organism that we carry with us in our earthly life is, after all, designed for our external everyday life, for our ordinary, everyday consciousness. It is very healthy for that, but not for higher experiences, not for penetrating into the supersensible world. In this respect, it is like a diseased eye and, on the contrary, I would say it becomes even less transparent when we merely carry out mental exercises. Through these mental exercises, precisely that which is our heart, our lungs, becomes more opaque, like an external object. Through the exercises of the will, this opacity is accompanied by a transparency. We gradually come to perceive what actually happens between the intention to raise the arm and hand and the actual effect. That which, between one thought and the next, is immersed in sleep, that which descends as will into the organism, becomes tangible to perception.

But through this the organism — of course in the spiritual-soul sense, not as with the eye, but in the spiritual-soul sense — the whole organism becomes spiritually-soul transparent. In spiritual and soul terms, the human being becomes a single sensory organ. In this way, I would say, the human being develops opacity in one direction by getting to know his organs and learning to relate them to the cosmos. And on the other hand, by being able to pass arbitrarily from one to the other – that is what matters – he also develops the transparency of his whole organism.

And when he develops the transparency of his organism, then – my dear audience – that which otherwise appears in the physical world is developed to the highest degree in the spiritual-soul sense: the unfolding of love, that love which also underlies all our truly free actions, as I summarized it for the moral world – presented in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties – and which shows that in the spiritual life which is characteristic of ethics, of morality. I have described this special inclination of the will to the activity that unfolds in love from its ethical point of view; now I have to describe it from the point of view of knowledge.

But in this way, man comes to be truly free with his will from his physical organism, as he is free in seeing with his eye. He sees spiritually and soulfully through his physical organism. And he sees into the spiritual and soul world, so that he stands in it as he stands in the physical through his senses in a physical way. He learns to live in intuitive knowledge, which now stands in the reality of the spiritual.

Now, as the next experience, the image appears, the pictorial content of what the person then really experiences by passing through the gate of death. Man first became aware of his spiritual self in this order of realization, as I have described to you, independently of his physical body in relation to his thinking. In this way he gains knowledge of his being as it was before birth, or before conception. Now he becomes free of this body with his will, in that the body becomes transparent spiritually-mentally, in that the human being is in the spiritual-mental world. Now he has the image-knowledge of the real process that takes place at death, when the body not only becomes transparent, but is discarded, given over to the element of earth, and the spiritual-soul connects with the spiritual-soul world.

This has been prepared for through our entire life on earth, that what we behold through meditation, concentration and empty consciousness of the prenatal, or what lies before conception, is interrelated, that it connects with what emerges from the will. We learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of thought through will, and in the same way we learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of will through thought. World thoughts open up to us, not subjective thoughts, but thoughts that work out of the world. The world becomes transparent to us in thought when we place ourselves in this world in intuitive knowledge. The event of death appears before us, but it contains the causes for a real knowledge that has been conscientiously developed and that only those can confuse with all that appears today as occultism and the like who do not enter into that which is repeatedly and described as the conscientious method by which man can ascend to a spiritual realization that really allows him to approach the realm where the soul mysteries are experienced, but where also those experiences come up that are in a certain sense actually the answer to these soul mysteries. For in life we do indeed enter into facts.

We had to point out on the one hand the event, the fact of death. Then the soul leaves the body, leaves the body with which it was connected during its earthly existence. Man connects with the physical-sensual world in its conformity to law. And on the other hand, the person develops inwardly that through which the soul unites with the spiritual, as I have described. There the soul unites with the spiritual, and it experiences how, after it has detached itself from the body, it develops further with the spiritual as a unity after death, until it has developed to the point of birth or - we say - conception in the spiritual-soul world. And just as we have processes below that are simply carried over from the external natural laws, which play into the soul during life on earth, effecting its state, its mood, its happiness and unhappiness — as this is announced from within, so those processes are now weaving themselves, where the prenatal and the post-mortal elements interact. Just as we are dependent on our body, so we are dependent on our spiritual. And just as that which remains unconscious in the body remains unconscious for the soul until it is scientifically investigated by it, so that which flows to the soul from the spiritual, giving it mood, state, happiness and unhappiness, remains unconscious for the soul to which the receptive human soul is accessible at all.

That which is unconsciously experienced in the spiritual as an analogue, as the unconscious in the physical, plays as great a role for the soul and its independence as the physical and that which is linked to the physical. After all, something else is also similar to death, but in its similarity it is opposed to death; with our physical body we live in the outer world. By constantly absorbing this outer world through food, by allowing the laws that are in the outer world to continue to work in us, and by living in the spiritual world on the other hand, we absorb the spiritual laws into ourselves. And the spiritual laws touch the physical laws within us.

But what is the case with regard to physical laws? They are life, they are rhythmic life, they are constantly renewing themselves. We have to eat every day. If I may say something very trivial: we cannot be satisfied with having eaten yesterday or the day before or the day before that and remembering it today. This is the case with the external abstract, the knowledge intended for the ordinary consciousness; we do not assume that the memory of eating is enough for us.

What we take up from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is something that, in the spiritual realm, must have the same rhythmic existence for the human being as the physical and bodily processes otherwise do. We cannot remember — and be satisfied with — what we absorb as anthroposophy, as we can do in chemistry or in the external sciences.

Those who have ascended to the highest regions of anthroposophy feel that they must return again and again to what is for them the perception of the higher, supersensible world; otherwise something arises in them like spiritual hunger. This is just as real. Indeed, one cannot be satisfied with ordinary memories. We enter into a reality by seeking out that which shows us how the soul is connected to spiritual life.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Anthroposophy has to say about the riddle of the soul, at least the beginning, I would say. In the short time available in a lecture, I had to sketch out how anthroposophy delves into the field of soul mysteries, how it actually shows, not just adheres to everyday life, but how it points beyond birth and death, how it points to a supersensible world, to which the soul with its eternal essence belongs as it belongs to the physical-sensory world with its body. By facing the fact of death, the human being learns to see through the reality of anthroposophical knowledge, and thus to achieve something in anthroposophical experiments, or let us say the beginning of a solution to the riddle of the soul, that becomes a truly necessary spiritual nourishment for him again and again.

But this is how knowledge comes into being that is alive. And anthroposophy is the basis for knowledge that is alive, that is not dead knowledge that is valid only for memory. But this is also how something arises from anthroposophy that can be something for life. But I need only point to one area, to the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and led by me, where teaching is given and education is cultivated entirely in the spirit of such an understanding of the human being, as it can arise from the contemplation of the whole, full human being, even in the child. We do not seek to realize this in the external transmission of a worldview. We do not teach an anthroposophical worldview. It is not suitable for children in the form in which it exists today. But what arises from the anthroposophically oriented worldview for teaching and education is a real engagement with the child's being, a real engagement with the true being of the human being.

What is needed in education today, which will develop humanity? Humanity will have to engage with the great tasks of life in a completely different way than is already the case today. Humanity will have to engage with the ever-increasing tasks of life in education and teaching in a completely different way than people are already capable of today.

And however much one may have against the Dornach building – and this applies to those present – it is shown in the artistic realm that which is otherwise presented in words as a world-view content!

Dear attendees,

I would like to use the following comparison again and again: take a nut and its shell. In the nut shell, in its curves and bends, you have the same laws, the same formations at work as in the nut kernel itself. The anthroposophical world view makes it just as necessary as it is necessary for the nut to form its outer shell according to the nut kernel, to have some corresponding outer framework. It could not have had just an outer shell. It could not have been something that does not have an inner life. No mere architect could possibly have erected a good building; that could not be the case with what we are developing as an anthroposophically oriented worldview.

What is willed by mere life for good seeing, what comes towards us as genuine forms, what comes towards us as genuine artistic forms in the pictorial and sculptural, must, although it remains artistic, contain no single symbol, no single allegory; instead, everything has flowed into the artistic. But it must have the same effect as what is otherwise presented in words at the Goetheanum. What is presented on the stage in Dornach is only a different artistic language for that which lives when it wants to become a word, in order to go out into the world as a word of world-view.

But what leads into spiritual, supersensible worlds, in that it proceeds from clear, methodical thinking and methodical research as never before in any external science, what leads into the supersensible, that not only provides a foundation for a living knowledge, for a living science, not only a creative force for artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

No matter how much one may have to criticize Dornach and his style – I am my own harshest critic, and some things would not be built the same way again – one only learns through practice. But that is not the point. What matters is the will! What matters is that one can truly strive towards a living artistic style from a living world view, so that the outer shell within the world works according to the same laws as the nutshell according to the nut, and like the nut kernel also has an outwardly corresponding shell. How external some old architectural style would be to a world view that is now being born out of the immediate urges and longings of contemporary humanity! But such a striving must at the same time lead into the deepest foundations of the human being.

What I mention last is not the last, and one might actually think that those who are public representatives of religious denominations would see not some antagonism in anthroposophy, but rather a help. For people today are shaped by popular science, even in the most popular knowledge and in the simplest minds. And that which presents the content of the supersensible must be measured against the education of humanity. Today, even at school, work is done according to the habits and methods of external science. In this way, the connection between the human being and the supersensible world is increasingly being neglected. Religious life would increasingly be allowed to fade away if it did not receive a new foundation, if it did not receive the support of knowledge, of provable knowledge of the supersensible world.

Therefore, the representatives of religious denominations should look to anthroposophy as a helper that wants to support precisely that which they should support most, and to do so in a way that present-day humanity will increasingly want to see. A Christian is truly a fainthearted one who does not realize that his Christianity is only truly supported by Anthroposophy in the present; no longer by that which is traditionally reproduced, but through the living contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha, which we arrive at when we pass from the solution of the soul riddle, as we have presented it to our souls today, into the depths of religious life.

The third thing that should arise from this world view, which presents itself to the world as Anthroposophy , that does not want to think alone, that wants to become alive inwardly with all the soul forces in man, that wants to make an inner, spiritual man within the outer, bodily man tangible for one's own consciousness.

But that is what makes anthroposophy — however imperfect it still is today —, it is in its infancy, and I am the first to admit its imperfections, but I am also the one who could write all the criticisms that are written today myself. For the one who dares to say such things before the world today, as well as the things that have been said here before you today, also knows what can be objected to them, and he does not need to wait for what comes from this or that side as a judgment, out of an awareness that does not yet want to engage with Anthroposophy. He will not find anything new in the judgments, which mostly arise from a lack of understanding! I want to say this to show that the one who is inside Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, should not be surprised by what is encountered!

Dear attendees! If consciousness that does not engage with anthroposophy were right, then anthroposophy would not be needed. If anthroposophy could easily please everyone today, then it would not need to come forward at all! It does not aspire to be immediately accepted today, for it speaks to forces that lie much deeper in the soul; and yet it knows that even in those who contradict it, these yearning, driving forces for a scientific, artistic and religious deepening are present.

New paths are being sought in all three fields. Anthroposophy is aware of the weaknesses that still afflict the present day. But it would like to be — let me say this at the end, ladies and gentlemen, through its special method of research, through the life it evokes in the soul as a result of this method of research, through the deepening to which it can bring feeling and artistic insight in man —, it would like to be a foundation of a spiritual science. It wants to be that which leads people to the creativity of artistic creation and artistic attitude. And it ultimately wants to be that which inwardly develops a strong, soulful, spirit-filled vehicle for religious life as well.

If it endeavors to work in these three directions, then it may perhaps believe that it is working in the spirit of the most significant demands of today.

Dear attendees, the terrible fire disaster of last December night destroyed an outer shell of anthroposophical endeavor. This event, which is so painful for many who have grown fond of this building – the Goetheanum in Dornach – may perhaps give me cause to address these reflections first to the Goetheanum in Dornach today. I have been privileged to give many reflections of this kind here from this place, and today's reflection, too, is only intended to be given in the same style as the others, and only the connection is to be made to the Goetheanum. This Goetheanum has certainly had many people who, out of an insight into the will that wanted to emanate from this Goetheanum, greatly revered and loved this Goetheanum. But one may say that the vast majority of visitors, the numerous visitors who have been there over the years, could not make anything special out of this Goetheanum. There were many people who were annoyed by the very name Goetheanum. And then there were many who looked at the forms of this overall structure, composed of two domed buildings, and found them to be simply peculiar, perhaps merely the expression of a fantastic aspiration. There were then people who, on one or other of these grounds, believed that all kinds of spookish, perhaps spiritistic, goings-on took place in the Goetheanum, that it had been built to represent some kind of unclear, hazy mysticism, and perhaps even, as some put it, to serve the most blind superstition and so on, and so on.

And yet one might be amazed at how far what is believed in the present day about this or that can be from the actual fact. Because the Goetheanum has certainly not served any of the above. And if there are those today who fight against all these more or less backward or superstitious tendencies, those who want what was really wanted in the sense of building the Goetheanum, they certainly belong to these opponents. But I do not want to speak of the negative today; I want to speak of what the Goetheanum wanted and what Anthroposophy, for which it was intended to be a place, actually wants for present-day humanity.

The fact that the name Goetheanum was chosen over time was basically in line with the heartfelt desire of a number of admirers of the Goetheanum and Anthroposophy. The name of one of the figures in my mystery dramas, Johannes Thomasius (not John the Evangelist, but a character in my mystery dramas) was the first name chosen for this building on the hill at Dornach. It was accordingly named the Johannesbau.

Of course, this in particular gave rise to many misunderstandings, as is easy to understand, and I have therefore had to emphasize again and again that for me this Dornach building is a Goetheanum. Why? I can say that for more than 40 years I have been occupied with that which is based on Goethe's knowledge, art and world view. And anyone who delves into Goethe's striving for knowledge, into Goethe's art, into Goethe's striving for a worldview with an open mind, anyone who immerses themselves in it, will not only be stimulated to look at what Goethe wanted externally, but Goethe works when one really engages with him and with the universality of his striving. One can imbue one's soul with what he wanted, as with a spiritual lifeblood. And from this imbued experience of what one might call Goetheanism, I am convinced that it was wanted by Goethe in accordance with his time for certain parts of human perception, from this experience of what one might call Goetheanism, Anthroposophy has arisen.

Of course, anyone who takes Goethe's world view, Goethe's artistic intention and looks at it from the outside will not be able to extract from Goethe, with any kind of logic or, let us say, with any kind of ordinary artistic taste, what is contained in Anthroposophy. But there is, I would say, a logic of thought, and there is a logic of life. Those who make the logic of life their own can immerse themselves in something like that which Goethe revealed to the world, so that it comes to life in them, and continues to grow and develop. And in this sense of a living logic, I feel how Anthroposophy emerges from Goetheanism without contradiction, however little one admits it today. And because anthroposophy basically owes its origin to Goethe, it was a natural emotional need to call the place where anthroposophy, the descendant of Goethe's world view, so to speak, was cultivated, the Goetheanum.

This is not meant to be a silly claim to represent what Goetheanism is with any kind of perfection, but rather, I would like to say, this Goetheanum wanted to be a kind of place of homage for what Goethe gave to the world. It should not serve to represent Goethe's way of thinking for the sake of prestige, but rather it should be an expression of gratitude for what can be obtained from Goethe's world striving. And those who feel that this naming is in line with the expression of a feeling of gratitude will probably no longer be annoyed by the name.

But if I am to go further – my dear audience – and show you what the Goetheanum was intended for, then I must continue today the reflections that I have often been privileged to make in this hall and say what anthroposophy is intended for. Anthroposophy is indeed intended to find the answer, as far as it can be found by man, to the highest questions of human existence, to those questions that are related to human destiny and human dignity in the highest sense of the word. If a person does not numb their own soul life, then the question of the soul's eternity arises again and again. Then the question arises: Is the human soul a free or a non-free being? Then the question arises: To what extent does the human soul rest and work in that which can be called a divine world order?

Our present-day science, which has achieved such unspeakably great things for the external fields of life, has become rather timid about these questions, which are often called the last questions of existence, because this outer science wants to real, true science only that which can be perceived by the senses, which can be combined by human intellectual activity from sensory perceptions, and it rejects that which goes beyond the sensual. But in doing so, it also rejects any answer to the deeper questions of human existence, as just characterized. For without an entry of knowledge into the supersensible realm, man cannot even dare to attempt to approach a humanly possible answer to this question.

Anthroposophy, however, does not want to give the answers to these questions in a mere doctrine, to the extent that this is possible for man. Nor does anthroposophy want to give the answers to these questions through an unclear mysticism, but anthroposophy wants to penetrate as far as possible into these answers in the same way as today's sciences actually strive. The only thing is that anthroposophy is clear about the fact that what man calls knowledge still has to be grasped in a completely different way than it is often done today, especially by the most authoritative authorities, if one wants to see these questions in the right light at all.

I would like to start from a parable-like observation, but one that is supposed to be more than a mere parable. You see, my dear audience, every soul that contemplates the world, without thinking that it can gain special insights into the answers to the riddles of the world, every soul stands, perhaps only in amazement and admiration, before the images of that muffled world that we call the world of dreams. I start from the world of dreams, certainly not in order to mystically extract something from this world of dreams, but to illustrate how anthroposophy thinks about that which must become knowledge for humanity if the characterized questions are to be approached.

Imagine the manifold, colorful dream world before the sleeping soul. Imagine how, on the one hand, the content of the dream is a reflection of what we know well from the world we live in during the waking hours. But one should also imagine the soul, in which the dream world floats and envelops the soul in a freely moving way, transforming it, becoming more fantastic. And anyone who has an open mind, anyone who has a healthy mind and, above all, a healthy will in the world, will have no choice but to say to themselves: We can never recognize the reality value of the dream world during the dream itself.

We could, I would say, dream our whole life long, then we would simply, as we do in the dream experience, consider the dream content to be our reality. We would believe that the world we dream is the real world. But since we wake up from the dream world through our organization, we gain the perspective in waking life to examine the reality value of the dream world. Only when we are outside the dream, only when our senses and our will are, as it were, switched on to the external world around us, do we have a point of view from which to assess the reality value of the dream world. Of course, no one may judge what is spatial reality from the point of view of a dream. For healthy thinking and healthy willing, only the reverse assessment is possible.

Now, while someone is absorbed not in a dream world, but precisely in the world of daily reality, which, although in a different way from a dream, also provides us with diverse, colorful images, but images whose inner content we only recognize when we penetrate them, when we penetrate them in their interaction with what our mind gives us. As anthroposophy delves into this world of reality, as anthroposophy approaches the world of everyday reality in the same way that a dreamer approaches his dream world, you come to the question: Yes, is it not possible that a second awakening takes place, so to speak, in the human soul life? Just as the natural workings of our organism tear us out of our dreams, as our will is switched on during awakening into the external sensual world of reality, so it could indeed be possible that a further awakening is possible from the world that concerns our everyday consciousness. If that is the case, then it must be said that the reality value of the sensory world can only be assessed from the point of view of the world into which one awakens, the supersensible world, just as the reality value of the dream world can only be assessed from the point of view of the everyday world. I would like to say: Anthroposophy first asks itself the big question: Is such a second awakening possible? It does not want to sink back to recognize the world, into dream-like reality. It wants to go the opposite way; it wants to go the way that man goes from the dream into sensory reality. It wants to go further from sensory reality into supersensible reality. Whether one can do this depends, of course, on how one is able to penetrate the human soul life, in fact the whole human life. I would like to say: one must simply subject the soul and its life to examination to see whether it has the possibility of such a second awakening.

Now, my dear audience, such a second awakening is possible. Above all, it is possible if a person does not give in to intellectual arrogance, by which he says to himself: You were a small child at first, you were not yet equipped with the ability to think, feel or willpower as you have as an adult; you had to develop them with the help of your human environment, with the help of your education, with the help of life, these abilities, to the degree that you now have them. But if, as an adult, you discard intellectual arrogance and ask yourself: Is it possible for the abilities to be further developed from the level at which you have brought them as an adult, just as they have developed from the childlike stage to the stage of everyday life? And you are led on the path of such further development of human abilities when you pay special attention to individual such abilities.

Let us first turn our attention to that faculty of the human soul or, let us say, of the human being that is usually called memory in life, the gift of remembrance. Let us first consider it as memory presents itself in everyday life. Out of the realm of the soul, in the midst of impressions of the present, perhaps evoked by these impressions of the present, thought images emerge, pale thought images of something we may have experienced years ago. And so what emerges from the depths of the soul or is brought up by present-day perceptions is mixed with the all-embracing, transforming power of the imagination, perhaps with some fantasy too. And so, through the power of memory, we have before us images of something that can undoubtedly be said to It is in a fairly realistic way, in the kind of reality that we are accustomed to when we open our eyes and when we hear our surroundings with our ears; it is not present in this reality. We take events into our memory images that simply consist of our having entered into this or that relationship with this or that person, this or that natural event, or something else, years ago.

What took place there is no longer reality today. But we have the ability to present to ourselves from the depths of our soul, in more or less pale or more or less meaningful images, what, in the way we otherwise perceive reality through the senses, is not present reality. This ability to remember can be cultivated. And it is cultivated when a person delves into his or her own thought life in a way that is not usually done in everyday life, particularly today. When people devote themselves to their thoughts today, they are usually thoughts that have been inspired from outside or that arise as memory thoughts in the way I have described. If someone is honest with his soul life, he must say to himself: what the external impressions provide, what arises from the depths of the soul life as memory, is actually what makes up this exterior of the soul life.

But there is something else we can do. We can tear ourselves away from this, I would say passive role that we play in relation to our thinking. We can try to live in our thoughts with an ever-increasing inner activity. You can live in thought in such a way that you simply form thoughts that you can easily grasp; so that you can be sure that if you devote yourself to these thoughts with strong inner activity, you will not fall prey to suggestion or mystical dreams, if you only present thoughts that are easy to grasp to your soul in such a way that you do not let them scurry away like thoughts that are stimulated from outside or inside. Then you realize that in this thinking, which is brought about by your own arbitrariness – in this life, in the activity of thinking, something develops within the soul life that can be compared to what happens when we use a part of our muscles in external physical work, for example. They become stronger, they become more powerful, it is precisely in active application that the muscles become stronger and more powerful. However, we notice this in a different way, in that we repeatedly and repeatedly immerse ourselves in thoughts that we have woven ourselves or even made ourselves or acquired from some spiritual researcher, through our inner will — if I may put it that way. We become inwardly stronger in soul, and we notice when we do such exercises – for some it takes longer, for others shorter, it can take weeks, it can take years – when we continue such exercises, we notice: the inner strength of our soul awakens. And it awakens in such a way that we become acquainted with that which we previously only knew as a memory in a transformed, reshaped form. A new inner ability, I would say an increased ability to remember, but one that does not simply deliver memories to us, we feel them in our soul.

And in the moment when this power has become strong enough, when the thinking that has been repeatedly and repeatedly seized in inner activity – the thinking that is now not only thought but is experienced, so that one feels it as an inner reality – in the moment when this inner thinking has become strong enough, something occurs, it usually occurs piece by piece, something occurs before this human soul that it has not known before. It is not just memory that comes before the human soul, but the direct perception of what the person has experienced since about the first years of childhood within this earthly existence. But what the person experiences is not a collection of laboriously recalled images, but something that suddenly presents itself to the soul like a vast tableau of life, so that one can see one's past life as it is present, as if time had become space. If one is able to do this, then one also feels one's self in a completely different way than is possible in ordinary consciousness, actually no longer in the physical body. One feels connected with one's self with all the experiences one has gone through and which now come up in this enormous memory tableau for the consciousness.

I would like to call that in which one now experiences oneself, as one experiences oneself in physical life in one's earthly life in the arms, the head, in the legs, I would like to call this sum of life images, of which one feels: It is oneself, it is one's self, only extended beyond one's earthly lifetime. I would like to call it the temporal body in contrast to the spatial body, in which one perceives oneself for the ordinary consciousness. It is the first supersensible experience that one has in this way.

But now — and this is the significant thing — one does not experience this tableau, this time body, in such a way that one looks at it externally, but rather, by immersing oneself in thinking again and again with activity, with inner activity, one has acquired the possibility of being immersed in the experiences, of having them as if they were present, of really being one with this temporal body, not just existing in space but moving through time and feeling like a human unit through the time that one moves through. One expands one's existence almost to the point of one's birth as a continuous reality.

That is the result of what I would call transformed memory. While you are in this state, looking at yourself as being immersed in your previous life, you do not have the opportunity to develop the memory in any particular way. In fact, the one who experiences this must experience it again and again, at least in a shadowy way, if he wants to have it before him. The fact that one has turned memory into something else for this supersensible world, into the contemplation of a finer world of time, has the effect at the same time that memory itself is extinguished for the moments when one beholds this higher world. But the one who develops in this way in a healthy way will not, like a mystical dreamer or a somnambulist, involuntarily come to a different way of imagining, but will come to this different way of imagining with full consciousness. This also enables him, I might say, to return again and again to the ordinary consciousness of everyday life. He is able, despite looking first into the first realm of the spiritual world, to stand with both feet in sensual reality in a healthy way and not to become a mystical dreamer and fantasist.

But in this way, man attains true self-knowledge. For it is not what has approached me from the outside that appears in this tableau of life, but precisely how one has intervened in external events. There is a difference between someone making an effort to recall the events they have experienced in their ordinary consciousness and memory, and what I have just described, when one recalls the events one has experienced at one's birth in one's ordinary consciousness and memory. Above all, one is interested in how the world has affected one, how this or that person has approached one, what effect this or that natural event has had on one. When you have this higher spiritual, transformed memory tableau before you, then you actually do not see what another person has done to you, but rather you see how you yourself have behaved towards the other person, how you have behaved towards this or that natural event, this or that fact of life. One sees oneself as acting, as active. In short, my dear audience, one has advanced to a real self-knowledge, to a vivid self-knowledge. This is due, if I may express it so, to the strengthening of thinking to such an extent that one feels one is now living in one's thinking as one otherwise lives in one's blood circulation, in one's breathing.

In ordinary life, thoughts are dull and shadowy. They are not compelling; they are not something in which one lives as one does in one's blood or as one does in one's breathing. By practicing in the way I have described, one senses one's life in thought, as it were, just as one otherwise senses one's life in the physical body. And then one knows that in addition to the physical body that a human being carries, there is this second time body, which is not spatial – it can be drawn spatially, but that is only an illustration – that there is this second time body, which is infinitely finer, if one may use this expression at all, than the physical body. In my writings I have called it the etheric or formative body, because one must have an expression for these things. One need not be offended by expressions. This, alongside the physical body, is the second link in the human being, and it leads up the first stage to the supersensible body in order to penetrate further. For one learns through such contemplation only one's own human being for this earth life.

To penetrate further, it is necessary, so to speak, to develop the opposite strength to that which consists of immersing oneself in thoughts. It is indeed the case that Anyone who is familiar with this immersion in thought knows how it captivates people. Indeed, if you do it the way I describe it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in 'Occult Science: An Outline', you do preserve yourself. You do acquire this world, however, if you do the exercises the way I describe them there, in a completely free way. You are not influenced by what you experience, you stand in it as a free human being in the sensual outer world.

But still, to the same extent that anything in the external world that particularly moves us captivates us, this world, which we experience when we immerse ourselves in thought, captivates us; little by little — it is not even an exaggeration, my dear audience — one has the feeling: you now live in this power of thought, just as you otherwise live in your physical body. And yet, if one wants to progress in supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to overcome precisely this stage. For one must be clear about this: this stage is actually only what I have called an [imaginative] stage in my books. One experiences what the world has implanted in one during one's life on earth, what one has, so to speak, imagined as one's own conception, feeling, will — not in the sense of a fantastic education, but in the sense of really imagining what one has imagined.

But one experiences only what one is in the strictest sense as a human being, one experiences only one's human soul. And one does not yet have the right to say that this human soul, which one experiences as in a time body, that this has a continued existence beyond earthly life. For this, higher exercises are necessary. For this, it is necessary that one can now inwardly put oneself – just as one has placed the thinking before the soul, how one has immersed oneself in the thinking, so that the thinking became a life – to suppress this thinking again at any time in complete inner freedom. But that means something special now.

If you have freed yourself from the physical body in the sense I have just described, if you have settled into the etheric body, then initially suppressing the life of thought does not mean falling back into the physical body, but remaining outside of the physical body. But what one has acquired from outside the physical body is suppressed. And one establishes what one might call an empty consciousness. That is the significant thing, that man develops his inner soul abilities to this level of empty consciousness.

I would like to say: just as a person breathes in ordinary life, how he inhales and then exhales again, how the inhalation contains the air of life and the exhalation the air of death, so too, at this higher level of experiencing the mind through thinking, the person must come to stir thinking within himself, just as he stirs the inhaled air as a physical organism. But he must also be able to bring this thinking experience out of his soul. Then the consciousness becomes empty. But once one has attained this possibility of an empty consciousness, one has penetrated to alternating in the soul between being filled with inner powerful thinking, which proceeds in the images as I have described in the tableau of life; once one has achieved being able to alternate between these images and between having nothing in the soul, then after a while – all these things have to be awaited with patience and energy – the empty consciousness that one has achieved in this way does not remain empty, but external perceptions do not arise either. A spiritual world appears around us. And we acquire the ability to live for a while in what we awaken within as images of our own earthly life, and to change it by suppressing these images, by taking the approach of creating empty consciousness by alternating with being filled with external spiritual world content.

Yes, my dear audience, into this empty consciousness now enters the phenomenon of a spiritual world, which we distinguish from what we know ourselves to be in the time body, just as we distinguish the outer colors and sounds from our physical body when we stand in the world of space, in the physical world. We learn to distinguish between what we perceive externally as the spiritual content of the world, as a world of spiritual beings that is around us just as the physical world of physical facts and physical beings is around us, and we learn to distinguish ourselves from this spiritual world.

If I was able to say that the first step of supersensible knowledge comes to a real kind of self-perception, which is an intensified thinking, then this second step, through which we recognize a real spiritual world, through which we experience that there is a spiritual world around us, like the sensual world. This second ability can be compared to the soul activity that we pour into our physical organism when we speak. Speaking is not just a physical, mechanical expression of the human organism. What the physical organism reveals when a person speaks is poured into what is the soul life, and what flows in the words and sentences is what soul life is. When we learn to suppress amplified thinking as I have described it, we learn something in addition to this suppression of thinking, which I will describe in a few words. It is something that is known, but in this case it is described differently with these words. One does not just learn to suppress thinking, but rather one learns to be inwardly silent in a higher sense than is the case in ordinary life. Yes, when the empty consciousness is established, the inner experience is there: now the soul is silent. I said that I use the word as it is used for not speaking in ordinary life. But the word means something different in this case. This silence after suppressed thinking is now a positive inner experience, so to speak, as we otherwise fill ourselves, say, with joy or pain, with what our speech contains, what our words contain. In the same sense, we now feel ourselves immersed in our supersensible being in the way described: we are filled with silence. And this silence is of a special kind in yet another respect.

I have to use a comparison to express myself clearly. I have to say: let's assume we are in the middle of a big city, with all kinds of noise around us. We move out of the city, the sounds get weaker and weaker because they sound further and further away; it gets quieter and quieter. We go out into the solitude of the forest – it becomes even quieter. Finally, we are surrounded by complete silence. But I would like to say: this silence is only the zero. We can go further. We can diminish even further what silence means simply as something that is not heard – if I may use a very trivial expression – just as we can diminish even further when we have spent our assets down to zero, we can diminish these assets even further by getting into debt, by having even less than zero. This is how we can diminish silence. There is something deeper in the soul after the thinking has been suppressed than there is in silence. There is an inner strength in this intensified silence, and in this intensified silence, this stillness, which goes beyond the stillness of zero, this stillness produces something that is not an external thing but an inner language , a language that does not come from the depths of the soul, but that – one experiences it clearly – comes from the supersensible world, in which one is now in this supersensible being, as I have described it. One now feels compelled to describe what one experiences in the inner silence of the soul. One experiences the spiritual world, and from the spiritual world it is as if it speaks to us through the silence of our soul. It really speaks to us. Only one must not pour this speaking into the words that are otherwise produced with our speech organs, but one must pour it by using the natural phenomena themselves to express that which is revealed there as the spiritual world. That is how it happens. But what happens is that — my dear audience — one wants inner elementary naturalness, as it is the behavior towards the outer sensory world. I perceive something spiritual in the world in the way described. This spiritual makes an impression on me, a very specific impression. This impression stands directly before my silent soul. It is the same as the impression made by the color red, not in the way I saw the red color, but just as when I see in my memory a red color surface completely illuminated, I see not the redness of the color, but the memory of the color, the redness of the color. But it is something completely different. So I now experience the direct presence of a spiritual in the soul. I have to express this direct presence of a spiritual in such a way that I remember, so to speak. This spiritual affects me like the red or blue color. I can compare the spiritual in the red or blue color with this or that sound, although it is not at all meant to be any sound of the external sensory world. In other words, my language in relation to the spiritual world becomes very special. My language in relation to the spiritual world becomes such that I make use of sensory phenomena to characterize and express what is revealed to me in the spiritual world. However, these sensory phenomena belong to the spiritual entities and events just as little as the word thinking ultimately belongs to thinking itself. One describes that which one beholds in the spiritual world, as I have described it, for example, in my “Theosophy”; but it is a language that one uses. One makes use of the colors of the senses, the sounds of the senses, in order to describe that which one has to describe in the spiritual world. It is a language, it is the language of the silent soul.

And when the soul has progressed in this way, then even if the power that suppresses thinking and creates silence in the soul is simply strengthened, the whole tableau of self-introspection can be erased. I can, as it were, extinguish my temporal body. Just as I would otherwise only extinguish individual images or isolated thoughts from my consciousness, I now extinguish everything that I have experienced as an earthly human being since my birth. Once I have learned to establish consciousness with the silence of the soul, not only does the comprehensive spiritual world emerge, as I have just described, but also one's own true being, which the person was before descending into a physical world in a previous existence. Now, through the suppression of what one has experienced as an earthly human being, through the empty, silence-filled consciousness, one gets to know one's pre-earthly existence, thus the soul in the state in which it is eternal, in which it was before it entered physical earthly life through the physical human germ. Now one attains, not through philosophical speculation, but through a real contemplation, the knowledge of the eternity of the human soul.

But with that, one also attains knowledge of the whole connection between this human soul and the human body. For one now learns to look into the world in which one was before one descended to earthly existence. And now one learns to recognize how, in this world, which is a purely spiritual one, in which one was before one descended to earthly existence, now one learns to know how this human being, the one who is before one, is the human being, just as the extra-human on earth is the world. One learns to recognize how the human being had developed his supersensible senses — if I may use this paradoxical expression —, his supersensible senses, before he descended into a physical body, precisely in terms of the nature and essence of the human being, how he then, in his pre-earthly existence, saw through the secrets of man, as he saw through these secrets of man in the spiritual world, while he was in his eternal nature, not clothed in his physical body.

And with that, the realization of it also presents itself, the vivid, not speculated realization of how the human being passes through that which it maintains in its eternal being when the human being passes through the gate of death. Beliefs can be formed about that which lives beyond death. It is not at all intended to say here that these beliefs need to be wrong or inadequate; nothing should be said against their correctness. However, we are already living in an age in which man is directed to penetrate to that which is given to him through knowledge and the content of knowledge, not through the content of faith. Therefore, the path of knowledge should be sought, not the mere path of faith.

One comes to understand how the human soul itself is connected to the physical body, how it lives within the blood circulation, lives in the breathing process, lives in every single bodily function. One therefore learns to recognize how not only an ascending, sprouting, and burgeoning life is present in physical life on earth, but, after getting to know the eternal character of the human soul, one sees how this human soul lives in the physical body. One learns to recognize that the will, the growth force, is bound to the sprouting and sprouting forces, but one also learns to recognize that thinking and a part of feeling are bound to the destructive forces of the human organism.

Yes, my dear audience, when you grasp a thought, an idea, it is not a process of growth that takes place, but a process of decay, a kind of atomistic dying process. We are constantly dying as we think, and the same applies to part of our feeling. As physical human beings on earth, we carry within us that which grows like a plant grows. But we also carry within us that which, within our nervous system, continually withers away like a plant withers. But while the plant, in withering away, only decays, we have, alongside what I would call the crumbling away of dying, the possibility of thinking and part of feeling within us. In this way, we look at human life on earth differently than we would through a mere external physiology. We see how the human being comes to his or her thinking, how thought first takes hold, so to speak, when matter is no longer alive in its growth force or even when the structure of matter is destroyed.

Matter is so little the master of our thinking that matter must give up its own nature in our organism where thought wants to rule. Thought rules in our organism in that its whole structure is not the growth of matter, but in that matter withers away. Matter first makes way for thought. If we learn to know partial death in this way, I would say, we learn to recognize how something always dies in us, precisely in order to make room for our spiritual, then we arrive, especially when we have trained our thinking and inner silence as I have described, then we arrive at being able to really see and recognize the human eternity on the other side, beyond death. But something else is needed for this.

And now, dear audience, I must briefly mention something that will certainly seem extremely paradoxical, but it is nevertheless a reality. There is still a soul power that needs to be specially developed if one is to see through the fact that death is just hinted at. While one is developing this empty consciousness, this inner silence of the soul, one also increasingly acquires the need to further develop a soul force that is otherwise present in us, that plays an extraordinarily important role in human life, such a soul force into the spiritual, into the soul. This is the power of love. Love, the noblest of the soul forces, can also be the lowest in a certain respect. It plays its great role in life. So when a person goes through this stage, first feeling at home in his temporal body, then looking to this much higher body – if I may use this expression – which he wore in his pre-earthly existence, his soul powers are so heightened that he also feels the need to increase his ability to love. That is why I have also indicated in my writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' those exercises that increase the ability to love. If one increases this ability to love in parallel with the other abilities mentioned, then one gradually comes to experience in one's own life on earth that which one has seen as one's own nature in the pre-earthly existence. And now one experiences a third aspect of human nature.

In ordinary life, one has otherwise experienced one's physical body, through the way I have described, one's etheric or formative body, the temporal body. Now one experiences oneself in one's actual supersensible body, in which the soul life takes place. One now recognizes this as the one for whom space must always be created by matter, in that matter destroys its structure so that the actual soul-spiritual can spread throughout our organization. And now we also experience, by first seeing how, as it were, matter falls out of the nervous system, becomes dead, and the soul-thought element asserts itself, now we learn to recognize how the soul passes over into the spiritual world when the whole body falls away in death.

I had to describe to you, my dear audience, while speaking of human immortality – I wanted to characterize this question of the three mentioned today – while telling you this, I had to speak in a different way than is often spoken in a philosophical way. In philosophy, it is assumed that one can stick with ordinary thinking, that one can combine thoughts and that one can thus arrive at insights into the immortality of the soul through judgments and conclusions. But here I had to point out to you, based on anthroposophical striving, how one must first develop the human soul with the suppression of intellectual arrogance in order to arrive at the contemplation of the eternal essence, the soul-spiritual essence in man.

But this, dear attendees, is not a mystical activity in the soul, not a dream; it takes place in the soul with the same inner clarity, yes, I would even say with the same inner sobriety as breathing and thinking. Actually, anyone who engages in anthroposophy in the way I have indicated, as you can read in my books, always feels an obligation to treat their soul powers no differently than a mathematician does, to always give an account of the part of their soul life, step by step. It is the same activity that one performs in anthroposophy as in mathematics, except that mathematics deals with dead spatial and numerical relationships and thus what it inwardly grasps spiritually in its forms, in its geometric, arithmetic and algebraic and so on, is applicable only to the outwardly dead. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, creates in the living. Everything is alive. And therefore, what it has grasped, I would say in a mathematical way, it can apply not only to the living, but also to the spiritually existing dead.

When you are surrounded by his pictures in a room, you are alone with yourself as a human being. The person standing next to you, the other people who may be in the room, have a completely different world. If they are all dreaming, they may dream of different things. With his dream world, man is completely alone, isolated. The moment he wakes up, the moment he turns on his will and his senses into the surrounding sensory world, he is no longer isolated; he experiences a shared external world with the other people. But his inner life, his actual soul life, is something that man has only for himself, even within the sensory world of earthly existence. It is like a dream. We only have this for the sensory world outside; inside, everyone dreams their own soul world. In the moment when we look into the pre-earthly existence or, as I have described it, into the existence that a person enters before passing through the gate of death, in that same moment we also have a spiritual-soul existence with the other person. We live in a spiritual world like all souls. Therefore, anthroposophy does not merely open up the idea of immortality, but a real understanding of it: when you pass through the gate of death, you discard your physical body, you continue to live in the spiritual world in your spiritual and soul nature. But also those earthly relationships you had with other people – those you had with those you loved, were related to, or otherwise cared for, friends, like-minded people, and so on – all that is earthly about them falls away. But what your own soul lives on, you live that in community with those with whom you have entered into relationships, you also live that with those who have preceded you, perhaps or after they have also come to the spiritual world.

The real community relationship after people have gone through the gateway of death comes to the immediate realization of knowledge, which has achieved it — if I may use this expression — to develop inwardly transparently and clearly like mathematics, and on the other hand wants to reach up again to the highest questions of human existence. Anthroposophy honestly strives for such knowledge.

And since humanity has actually become accustomed to gaining clear and transparent insights into what it wants to know through the admirable science of nature, if humanity has not numbed itself, it will not be satisfied in the long run with mere beliefs – which, after all, also only incidentally emerged from ancient knowledge – humanity will have to attain spiritual insight just as it has attained natural insight over the past three, four, five centuries. The human soul would have to numb itself to the highest questions of its existence if it did not strive for such spiritual insight. Call it anthroposophy or whatever you like, but such spiritual insight is a need for most people of the present day, even if this need is still deeply rooted in the subconscious. So much of the weal and woe of present-day humanity stems from this need. If we shed light on what sits unconsciously in the mere perception of today's humanity, which feels unsatisfied, which has become nervous, which has all kinds of disharmony and chaos in the soul and also carries this into the world, then we come to the conclusion that that although these people do not grasp this or understand it, they have a deep need to gain knowledge about the spirit, just as humanity has gained knowledge about nature, which has led to external technology. This knowledge will lead people to an understanding of external experience, but also to a deeper understanding, to a truly inward soul understanding of morality. This too, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy is meant to achieve.

And the Goetheanum wanted to be the outer shell. Goethe spoke beautifully about art when he first encountered it in Italy. In his own way, he wrote beautiful words to his friends in Weimar: “I have a suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.” Goethe was seeking in art a sensual expression, a sensual revelation of that which spiritual knowledge glimpses when Goethe spoke from the depths of his soul the words: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without it” – without art, that is. Goethe was looking at the cognitive aspect of the human being in relation to the spiritual world – not the sensory world – as that which permeates the human being to such an extent that he then, as a sculptor, painter, musician and so on, wants to conquer form out of spirit. So, one could say, for Goethe, knowledge was one expression of human endeavor, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment the other. It is only in the course of human development, in the direction of abstract thought, of the theoretical, in which we have become so immersed today, that art of knowledge has become alien. Goethe, on the other hand, strove to bring knowledge to art and art to knowledge because he knew that nature, namely by creating the human form, creates itself as an artist.

What use is it – dear attendees – to say, however strongly you may want to, that you cannot visualize artistic images if you want to recognize something? If nature itself creates like an artist, then you simply do not learn to recognize nature if you only want to recognize it logically, and you least of all learn to recognize people if you are not able to gradually move from strict logical thinking to an artistic, visualizing comprehension of what lives in the human form, in colors, in everything human. A straight path leads from the cognitive to the artistic.

Now, in this sense, one also wanted to be Goethean in that moment when some friends of that world view, which I have again sketched out for you today with a few strokes, came together in a spirit of sacrifice to create a place in Dornach near Basel. I was commissioned to build this place.

Many people have got into the habit of saying: those who call themselves anthroposophists follow my word, they believe only in my authority. Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I believe that no one can say that they see their will fulfilled less through their followers than I do. I say this, although it may sound paradoxical: most of the time, what I want does not happen.

I was commissioned to build this very place in a certain way. If such a place had been built for any other worldview, one would have gone to this or that architect; the architect would have built a Gothic, Renaissance or ancient building in this or that style for the cultivation of this worldview or spiritual current. That could not be done for anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy wants to be — you will have recognized this from my description today — something that fits into the spiritual development of humanity as a new impulse. Anthroposophy really wants to lead to a change in knowledge: that the human being can achieve this second awakening, of which I have spoken, which is shown when the attempt is really made in the described way. Then the human being wakes up into the supersensible world. Then he can judge the sensory world here as he can judge the dream world from the sensory world. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is not abstract knowledge, it is not a sum of theories, it is not a thought-up world view, it is something that one must experience. It is not something that merely fills the head, it is something that fills the whole human being and seeks its human center in the heart. Then, however, it cannot be exhausted in a one-sided activity, then it must permeate everything that comes out of human nature. Then a person cannot advocate a worldview within a structure that was built from a completely different worldview. Within a Greek or antique, thus actually a Renaissance or Gothic building, one can advocate that which has emerged from the Greek or Gothic outlook. Anthroposophy needs its own envelope by its very nature. For it is not merely an outlook, it is not merely a theory, it is life and becomes life in man, as blood does in an organism. And just as blood builds up the human body artistically, so does the one who experiences anthroposophy build what he builds as a place for it. I have often used a simple, trivial comparison, but it is meant to be deeper. I have said: look at the nutshell. You cannot imagine that other forces are at work in the nutshell than those within [in the nut itself, which we eat instead of the nutshell]. Out of the same forces, in a similar form to which the nut itself is created, [the nut shell] is completely adapted to the nut; so the building envelope must be that which is not theory, but life, in the grasp of all the life forces of the human being.

And so the Goetheanum had to be such that, for example, when one stood on the podium and spoke, the words one chose to express what was revealed by supersensible vision thought-forms, they had to express what spoke to people's eyes from the forms of the columns and the paintings on the domes. The whole had to be in harmony down to the last sensual form.

And again, when the art of eurythmy was cultivated in Dornach, this art in which the human being comes to a visible language through complicated gestures that are completely drawn from his nature, so that one can express a poem in individual movements as well as through recitation and declamation — when the stage was filled with moving people, who were performing some kind of poetry or music in their movements, not dancing but singing in movement —, what was happening on stage was a continuation of what the forms were that surrounded the audience in the building. When the spectator turned his eye to the columnar forms, to the forms of the cupolas among themselves, when he turned his eye up to the cupola paintings, he had a similar basic feeling as when he looked at the stage and eurythmy was taking place.

Just as the nut can only be in its shell through the laws it has formed itself, so when Anthroposophy was given the opportunity to have its own house, it could only create this shell artistically out of the spiritual realm, out of which it itself experiences its world view, out of which the whole world view that takes hold of people is born. The Goetheanum wanted to be to the eye what Anthroposophy is to the direct apprehension of the soul through the word.

Because Anthroposophy still seems strange to people today and because all sorts of things are made of it by those who do not know it — I have characterized this in the beginning —, therefore what was the outer shell of a new architectural style seemed strange to people, just as the nutshell will seem strange to someone who knows nothing about nuts but believes that something is present in an arbitrary form and shape. Just as the world itself is shaped, so attempts have been made to create out of a spiritual world of impulses, taking hold of the anthroposophical world view, and also artistically, in Dornach.

The Goetheanum wanted to show this in its external forms under construction, entirely in the Goethean style: Art is a revelation of those secret laws of the universe that cannot be revealed without art – just as the Goetheanum speaks in sensual forms where the thought itself expired into sensual forms. There was no symbol, there was no allegory, there was artistic feeling everywhere, where the thought as mere thought is no longer enough, where the thought only becomes complete when it overflows into artistic form. But since the thought is born of the spirit, that into which it pours is also born of the spirit. Art is entirely for contemplation, but it is nevertheless, like everything in the world, born out of the spirit. Therefore, my dear audience, even for those who truly understand anthroposophy in their innermost being, something has been lost at the Goetheanum that is, in a sense, irreplaceable, because the Goetheanum was not intended for thinking up, explaining or describing, but for contemplation, because it was intended to visualize that which comes from the same source, namely anthroposophy. But what Anthroposophy can only give in words, which almost cries out to be poured out into a sensory form — what should be vivid —, that is what the fire has taken away, so to speak. In short, the way Goethe thought in relation to knowledge is what he wanted to be embodied in the Goetheanum. The Goetheanum wanted to reveal what Anthroposophy is meant to express.

Just as the human soul reveals itself as immortal in the mortal body through anthroposophical contemplation, so I may say without sentimentality: the body may fall away, even though all the pains and all the suffering that we know are attached to it. Only when the body falls away do we think of the immortality of the soul. And so today I may well conclude with the words that are only intended to illustrate what I meant not theoretically but humanly, emotionally, and intuitively today in answering the question: “What is anthroposophy and what did the Goetheanum want?” I would like to say — when the question arises: “What did the Goetheanum want?” it must be said: The Goetheanum wanted and needed to express the spirit in external matter, just as the human body is formed in external matter. That which is expressed in external material can be destroyed by the elements; but that which should live in the Goetheanum is itself of a spiritual nature. Anthroposophy does not want to be built and cannot be built out of external material; it can only be formed out of that which reveals itself from the spiritual, supersensible world. But this cannot be destroyed by any element, it is of a duration that may be characterized by saying: Yes, anyone who can look at the human soul impartially today knows that the human soul cannot remain calm for long when it comes to what it can learn today from knowledge about the [sensual]. It demands, even if still unconsciously, a supersensible knowledge. And because humanity will not be able to do without the knowledge of the supersensible in the long run, Anthroposophy may hope that, although it has now lost its home, it will revive all the more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity and to see through true human destiny. spiritual word, that it will come to life even more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity, to see through true human destiny, as the realization of the true spiritual, eternal essence of the human soul.

Dear attendees, I must apologize again today for the cold that I brought with me yesterday and which has not yet been completely overcome, so I do not know how I will manage the lecture with my voice.

Now, dear listeners, when we listen to the most ancient voices that have emerged within the development of humanity with regard to the essence of man himself and the striving for knowledge of this human essence, it is without doubt one of the most significant sayings that we hear resounding from ancient Greece, for example: “Know Thyself”. When this injunction from the ancient seats of wisdom is addressed to man, it certainly does not mean that one should only bring one's bodily inner experiences to a kind of self-knowledge; rather, it means that man should strive to fathom his own being, that which constitutes his dignity as a human being, that which lies at the root of his destiny as a human being. And it can be said that ever since this word first resounded in human history, throughout ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, despite all its aberrations, right up to the present day, this word has become a guiding principle. And a large part of the scope of the human spirit's endeavors, a large part of what has been brought up from the deepest foundations of the soul's life, all of this has culminated in fathoming the human being itself in connection with the world being and with the development of the world.

And precisely in the heyday of natural science, in that period of the nineteenth century in which the greatest achievements of natural science were made, achievements that cannot be overestimated, in that period humanity, especially its most enlightened minds, increasingly came to despair of the possibility of such self-knowledge, such knowledge of the human being. People came to believe that human knowledge could only include that which could be expressed from material, sensual, visible experiences, insofar as one has to acknowledge that something lives and moves in the human being like a soul or spirit. because one thought one saw the limits of knowledge of nature in the right way – one said to oneself: one cannot approach this actual human being, this human consciousness, with real knowledge, which after all can only be knowledge of nature. And so doubt arose more and more about whether we could ever achieve what was set before humanity as the highest demand in the “know thyself!” of the ancient wisdom sites.

It can be said that if it were so, then man would have to renounce the fulfillment of that ancient demand; the possibility would be lost that man has firm ground for his soul life under his feet. It would be lost for man because the knowledge of his dignity and his essence, his destiny, would be lost; it would also be lost for man the possibility to develop a secure sense of purpose and a joyful, joyful, but also energetic desire to work in the world.

It was therefore no wonder that at a time when, on the one hand, science was increasingly drawing attention to the fact that it itself – and it believed that it was the only possible, scientific knowledge – could not arrive at a true knowledge of man , that because people actually cannot live without such self-knowledge in truth, they strove from the deep longing of their soul for such self-knowledge and for an understanding of the connection with the world by other means than the scientific ones.

And so, in modern times, the dissatisfaction with science itself led many people to feel an ever-increasing need to seek out mysticism. When science established its boundaries, the mystic believed that by immersing himself in the inner being of man, he could penetrate to the eternal core of this being, and thus to the point in the human being where man is connected to the divine-spiritual, where man is connected to the moral order of the world, and so on and so on.

It must be said that wonderful descriptions of inner experiences are often the result of this mystical contemplation. The mystics believe that in this way, and in many other ways, they are able to dispense with the clear scientific method of knowledge and to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the relationship between man and the world only by delving into the inner being of man himself.

Between the two cliffs – the natural science on the one hand, the mystical on the other – the research of the world is placed, of which I was allowed to explain the principles of its search and striving to you yesterday, my dear attendees.

This research into a worldview is neither pure natural science, although – as I emphasized yesterday – it certainly wants to learn its cognitive discipline, its scientific responsibility, from natural science in its most exact form. But this spiritual research is also not mysticism; because precisely when one advances on those paths, which I described yesterday, to a real human self-knowledge, then one simultaneously discovers that what today is almost exclusively called mysticism is basically only a further deepening of the ordinary human memory or ability to remember. Understandably, only the mystics do not see through this more precisely. Whether the mystic draws what is from within from his own inner being or whether it comes from the often very, very dubious channels of mediumistic predisposition through other people, it is nothing other than a raising of that which, at some time or other, even if in the most hidden way, even if it has remained so unconscious , through external observation in ordinary life, has entered the soul and developed in the soul, but then submerged into the physical-bodily organization; so that the mystic fathoms nothing else than how his own memory representations have been transformed by the organic powers of the physical-bodily-etheric human being. The one who honestly engages in true soul and spiritual research in the way described yesterday comes to this conclusion.

If the one described yesterday is pursued further, then on the one hand it comes to grief on the cliff of natural science, but on the other hand also on the cliff of mere mysticism. Natural science rightly tells us from its point of view: There are certain limits that cannot be transgressed by the scientific method, by the combining intellect, by measuring, counting, calculating, by research with the scales. When science asserts these limits from its point of view, one must give it full credit, but only if it sticks to its assertion: With everything that can be found in this way, which respects the usual limits of knowledge of nature, one does not come close to man.

This is the first experience, dear attendees. Natural science introduces us in a wonderful way to the realms of external nature, insofar as they carry the purely natural-law entities within them. Natural science also leads us up to that which man carries within him of external nature, of his organization, which he absorbs from this external nature. Only, this external natural science removes us from man. It does not allow us to approach the true essence of the human being.

My dear audience, only by looking at this matter can we understand why we actually have scientific limits to our knowledge. How is it that we come to certain points that we cannot get beyond with scientific knowledge?

Now, as I said yesterday, probably to give the pure scientists a slight shudder, I pointed out that a force of the human soul can become a power of knowledge if it is developed further and further in the sense that I characterized it yesterday: that is the power of human love. Love can be developed in such a way that it can be connected to scientific research. What is the aim of scientific research? It wants to examine things and processes objectively. It wants man to add nothing of his own imagination or prejudices to the entities of nature, to the processes of nature, but to be able to disregard himself completely and let the things and entities of nature speak for themselves. That is the ideal of natural science.

The next step can no longer be taken theoretically, no longer through observation; the next step can only be seen in an even greater self-denial. One already practices self-denial when one excludes all prejudices, all subjective desires, and everything subjective in general, when researching nature. If you go a step further, you arrive at love as a power of knowledge, where you completely give yourself up and identify with the things and processes you want to explore. Then, by making love the power of knowledge, you take nature research a significant step further into the spiritual.

But this, dear attendees, also leads to the realization that all talk of the boundary still stems from a last remnant of human egoism, perhaps even from a very hidden human egoism. Man does not want to go out of himself. He wants to assert himself. He wants to remain firmly rooted in his ego. Therefore, he sets limits to his knowledge, which he does not want to exceed. When he says, “He wants,” he must go out of himself, must enter into the world, must make love the power of knowledge.

All the talk of limits to knowledge in the course of the nineteenth century was nothing more than the unnoticed emphasis: we as human beings also want to remain cognitively selfish; we do not want to go out of ourselves, we want to set ourselves limits that delimit our [nature], that we do not want to cross, into the nature of things.

Now, my dear attendees, once this knowledge emerges in humanity with the right feeling, in deep feeling and with the necessary will impulses, Talking about the limits of knowledge is the last remnant of human egoism, but it is the assertion of a well-hidden egoism, then the great impulse will actually be there to no longer regard the limits of science as insurmountable in relation to the spiritual. For transcending these limits then means nothing more than throwing off the last unnoticed and thus all the more stubbornly championed human egoistic forces.

I would say that there is a scientific-ethical trend, which on the one hand stands as a shining ideal of spiritual research in the face of the one obstacle – natural science. And I would say that the other obstacle – the mystical one – is tempting and seductive, because it is connected with what man needs to stand in life as an individual.

During his life on earth, the human being needs his memory. This memory must submerge into the physical organism. The memory thoughts make use of the physical organism. There the human being feels himself in his own being. And when he, as a mystic, conjures up the transformed memory image or when he allows himself to be conjured up through a medium, then he associates such inner pleasure, such inner satisfaction with what has been transformed through his own being that he likes to dwell on it and likes to indulge in the illusion: That which satisfies him so voluptuously from the depths of his own being – I would almost say – must also be connected with the most valuable thing in the world, it must point to the place where man is connected to the eternal sources of existence.

You see, dear readers, these are the reasons why spiritual research, as it is meant here and as I have to represent it to you, can neither stop at mere natural science nor fall back on mysticism; but this spiritual research realizes that mere natural science never comes close to man. Mere research into nature investigates the outer, uninhabited, and uninhabited world, and only comes to recognize: in this world of animal, inorganic, plant, animal organization, man is the final point - not a separate being - the most highly developed animal, the final point of extra-human development.

Natural science cannot escape from the world, nor can it lead to man. And mysticism enters into man, but it does not come from man; it does not come from man to the world; just as natural science does not come from the world to man, mysticism does not come from man to the world!

Cultivating knowledge of the world and knowledge of man by wrestling with the limits of science on the one hand, with what one has acquired as soul culture and soul discipline and scientific responsibility, and then immerses, [on the other side] like the true mystic, but now not in a dreamy way into one's own memory, but immerses with clear concepts, to which one surrenders — as I described it yesterday — in a strengthened and activated thinking. In this way one first arrives at a realization of what I described yesterday, not at first at an external knowledge of the world, not at an inner exploration of one's own human nature – insofar as the physical body is involved, as it always is in mysticism – but one arrives at the tableau of one's life, where one, as in a single moment, one sees what has been working in one as one descended from the spiritual world and was clothed with a physical, earthly body; one sees what arises as human self-knowledge, that mighty tableau of life in which one sees how one has found one's way in the course of one's life on earth out of one's inner forces, out of the forces of sympathy and antipathy to this or that person, out of one's way to this or that other event in life. In this tableau of life one feels for the first time lifted out of one's physical body. You grasp the higher human being, not yet the highest, but the higher human being, and you forget the physical organization for the moments of this realization, to which you naturally have to come back again and again.

Now, dear attendees, I explained yesterday, but at the same time, that one is able to ascend to a higher level of knowledge, that one is able to erase this self-knowledge, this tableau of life.

But then one comes to the realization of that which arises from the deep silence of the human soul, where everything has been eradicated, including that which makes up the earthly course of life. But then, when one maintains an alert consciousness with the inner silence of the soul, after one has wiped out not only all remaining ideas, but one's own soul content — as I explained yesterday — then one attains the insight of one's still higher human being: the one one was before one descended from the spiritual-soul world into the physical earth world. One arrives at an understanding of what one was in a purely spiritual-soul world among spiritual-soul beings, among whom one lived before one entered earthly existence, and how one lives here in earthly existence among people and among the other beings of the natural kingdoms.

Now, my dear attendees, such knowledge not only fills the human powers of perception, it not only fills the human mind. Yesterday I indicated how it comes from the whole person. Therefore, it also penetrates to the whole person. It teaches us about the human being in his development; it gives us the basis for guiding the development of the human being in the right way in earthly life. For we look up to that in man which has been drawn into the child, that is, into that which appears to us first in its physical organization, and which has been drawn into this physical organization of the child as a soul-spiritual being that has received from the parents the earthly, physical, bodily garment.

We, as educators, then stand before the developing human being with the awareness that in this developing human being, this spiritual-soul element, which he was before his earthly existence, reveals itself more and more in the physical-sensual from day to day, from week to week, from year to year. In this way, we learn to stand before the developing human being in a new way.

It is truly a wonderful thing to see how the child's features gradually become more and more distinct, how the chaotic movements with which the child enters the world from its innermost being become more and more distinct. Observing the developing child is like confronting the greatest mystery in the world. And this mystery dawns, it gradually dawns when one sees how, in this childlike physical organization, that which has descended from the spiritual and soul worlds permeates more and more the physical, molds it, I would say, as it does with the moral and hygienic. One learns to look at human development in a new way.

What belongs to such a way of looking at human development – if I may express myself in this way, ladies and gentlemen – is above all that inner courage of the soul, which ordinary natural science and also ordinary mysticism do not give, but which one learns to develop when, on the one hand, one unfolds the activated thinking, as I described it yesterday, but on the other hand, one also develops the deep silence of the soul. And finally, love as a power of knowledge. Then one has the courage to judge a person as science judges external natural things. Only something completely different comes out of such a, I might say truly natural, because it goes beyond the limits of ordinary science - if I may use the paradox - scientific spiritual research.

We look at the child and see very clearly how certain life epochs unfold in the child. We see how the child develops up to the significant stage of changing teeth around the age of seven.

Dear attendees! Just think about what a very remarkable thing it is that happens after the first life epoch of the human being when the teeth change. Do not think that the change of teeth is something that concludes with the first phase of a person's life. When a person gets their second teeth, they sprout and release forces from within that come to a conclusion with their second teeth. This is because a person does not undergo another change of teeth. It is a final event of its kind. You just have to look at things in the right way.

On the other hand, we must be clear about one thing: the forces that push and sprout forth in the teeth are rooted in the human organism as a whole. These are forces and impulses that interweave and permeate the whole human being during the first seven years of life. The change of teeth is an external manifestation, a symptom. But the whole human organism, the whole human being, comes to a conclusion with this event of the change of teeth. What is concluded there? From such a knowledge of the world and the human being, as I have described it yesterday and today, one gets the courage to now investigate these things in the right way. One says to oneself the following: Yes, but with this change of teeth, something tremendous also changes in relation to the human soul.

Thus, more and more – this can be seen by anyone who has learned to observe – more and more, as the change of teeth occurs around the seventh year, what can truly be called memory or remembrance arises. Now someone who has become quite clever in modern psychology will immediately come along and say: Yes, but we know that children have memory and recall even before the seventh year, that it is precisely at this time that memory is particularly well developed. That seems to be correct at first. But the person who asserts this is only basing it on things that he does not really understand, because in truth, around the seventh year, something quite different emerges from what we already call memory earlier, and we should only call it memory after the seventh year of life.

For what is it in a child up to the age of seven? It is a habitual performance of the same mental processes that it has practised, that it practises by imitating its environment. The fact that a constant representation occurs again and again in a child has the same reason as that a certain practised hand movement is performed again and again out of habit.

Everything we address as memory up to the seventh year is not actually memory, but soul habits. With the seventh year, these habits, these soul habits, become more refined and what we actually call memory becomes an inner movement through life phenomena, based on ideas. The first thing, which was still completely bound to the organism, functions together with the organism as habits of the soul, detaches itself in the seventh year and becomes first spiritual-soul-like.

You see, my dear audience, this gives us the opportunity to say: Yes, what lived in the child during the first period of life until the change of teeth, when, for example, the child's brain develops most plastically up to the age of seven, — then it is actually already essentially formed according to its inner demands —, what lives down there in the body? That, ladies and gentlemen, lives down in the body, which later emancipates itself from the body and becomes an independent soul-imagination, memory.

In external natural science today, we have the courage to speak of the fact that during certain processes in the body, heat remains hidden – latent heat, we say – because through certain processes this heat is released. We can measure it with a thermometer. We speak of bound and free heat. We cannot measure bound heat with a thermometer; we can measure free heat with a thermometer. The physicist has this courage of exploration for external processes. The spiritual researcher must receive it and make it applicable to practical life.

What we see in the child from the age of seven, from the year we start school, becoming more and more soul-like, more and more independent, was not yet so independent in the first seven years of life. It lived as growth forces within the physical body. It lived as formative, plastic forces within the physical body and ceases to live as a whole in the physical body when the change of teeth occurs.

You see, dear audience, once you become aware of such an important transition, of such a significant metamorphosis in human experience, then you also continue. Then you look at how the child is up to this change of teeth. And then you discover something very strange in this child. You discover that up until this change of teeth, the child is completely given over to the sense organs. The child is completely absorbed in its surroundings!

And if we want to compare it to something that is present in this childlike organization of the first epoch of life, then we must point, for example, to the human eye or the human ear – in short, to a sense organ. The child is entirely eye, entirely ear, in a soul-spiritual way! Just as the eye simply takes in what is around it and imitates it inwardly, so the child takes in every gesture, every word, everything that those around him allow to happen, and takes it in like a whole sense organ, imitating it inwardly. Therefore, everything that lives in the child's environment becomes part of the child's entire physical organization during the first seven years. The child takes everything in spiritually and mentally, and it becomes part of the physical organization.

Let us imagine: a father with a violent temper lives next to the child. Those who can observe these things can see how this father with a violent temper, who lives next to the child, is not only perceived by the child in such a way that the child sees the gesture of violent temper, that it is somehow repulsed by everything that comes out of a fit of anger, but the child feels the moral quality of the anger, what the anger morally carries as a value within itself! The child senses the moral qualities of its environment, with gestures, with what it experiences inwardly and imitates.

This, however, makes us aware of how we have to look at how the child really experiences the moral and intellectual aspects of his environment. We should be clear about the imponderable forces that are unfolding, so that we should not even allow ourselves to have impure or immoral thoughts around the child. For the child perceives precisely that which has an effect, especially in the first seven years, through the subtlest gestures, the twinkle of an eye, the emphasis of a word, and countless details that we, with our coarse adult intellects, cannot even imagine. And it carries this down into its physical organization.

What grows out of the father's violent temper or the mother's negligence does not become just any mental quality in the child; it becomes the density of the vascular walls, the efficiency or inefficiency of the blood circulation, in breathing, in the finest ramifications, in the finest activities. What the child acquires through imitation from its environment in the first seven years of life goes straight into the physical organism, in which even memory is only a habit that is tied to the physical organism. The soul and spirit emancipate themselves with the change of teeth. And when we get the child into school, this whole life of the child, as I have described it, enters into a different metamorphosis.

In the first years of life, the child is entirely a sensory organ. It attentively absorbs what is happening in its environment, whether in gestures or in these or those actions. The child is devoted to the actions of its environment, not only sensually but also morally! But with the change of teeth, the child begins to be more and more devoted to that which is no longer just a gesture or an action, but which reveals itself in the gesture, in the action, in a way that is appropriate to speech.

Dear attendees! Let us not only understand language – although that is the most important language – in terms of what we express externally with words, through phonetics, but let us understand language as everything we do in life – in that what we do becomes an expression of our human character – we understand everything that a person reveals about their own nature, how they reveal it through language, we have to say that the child becomes receptive to this linguistic expression of the other person, especially the educating person, the teacher, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. A child is an imitative being in the sense described until it has changed all its milk teeth; from then until sexual maturity, the child is a being who lives entirely under the self-evident authority of whoever in his environment expresses himself verbally to him.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! You will not expect the man who wrote “The Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago and who is now speaking to you to develop any kind of unjustified reactionary-passive desire for you, or to speak of authority in an unjustified way. But precisely the person who wants to see freedom represented in human life as I have tried to present it in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties, knows that this right feeling of freedom, the right experience of freedom, can only come to people if the self-evident authority of teachers and educators is present in the child between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Today we no longer appreciate in the right way what it means for our whole later life to have looked up with deep reverence to what was given to us in the person of an educator in the form of truth, beauty and goodness. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, a person is not organized in such a way that truth, beauty and goodness can appear to him. At this age, the human being is organized in such a way that the true, the beautiful and the good must appear to him through the adult human being!

Later in life, when one has faced an unquestionable authority at this age, one has said, as a matter of course: something is true because this authority recognizes it as true; something is good because this authority recognizes it as good and presents it as such; something is beautiful because this authority finds it beautiful! The world must approach the child through the medium of the human being.

Dear attendees! In this way, one gradually learns to look at the human being in earthly life when one becomes aware, through the research method that I described yesterday – and today could only hint at – of the fact that a spiritual being lived before becoming a human being on earth through conception. We were all spiritual-soul beings among other spiritual-soul entities before we descended into earthly life. If we look at the developing human being in the right way, at what was its prenatal, pre-earthly existence, we also stand, I would like to say, with the right piety, but also with the right reverence for what is revealed and developed and revealed so wonderfully and so mysteriously from day to day, from week to week in the developing human being, in the child.

But then one also looks at what then presents itself as a connection between the spiritual-supernatural life of the human being and the physical-sensory life. One sees the child, how it, devoted to its surroundings, imitates these surroundings. And now we remember that we can only achieve the highest form of spiritual existence, which man can achieve through loving devotion, through the development of love as the power of knowledge, because man, by is in a spiritual-soul world before his earthly existence and after his death, knows how selfish he is here on earth, so he must then be devoted to the other spiritual beings.

When you understand how man is given over to the spiritual and soul world in the supersensible existence, you realize how man brings himself with him into childish existence, before he changes this around at the change of teeth or at sexual maturity, when he becomes more and more selfish and selfish, as he physically relives what he was in his pre-earthly existence. And now we learn to look at the child in the right way: How does the child actually live in the world? Even if it sounds paradoxical, one may say: The child lives completely devoted to its surroundings! But that is the religious feeling. That is to say: the child lives, I would say bodily-religiously; through its nature, through the elementary of its organization, the child is bodily-religiously devoted to its surroundings. This is the case until the second change of teeth; at that point, the child is completely given over to a religious devotion in his physical organization, to a religious devotion to his surroundings. You see, this becomes spiritual-soul in the second age between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

We must be clear about the fact that what was, I might say, taken for granted – if I may use the paradox – as physical-religious disorganization, we must now, as teachers and educators, bring into the spiritual-soul. We educate this when we ourselves stand as the self-evident authority for truth, beauty, goodness before the child. Then we gradually bring it about that what was first in the body down below in the child, until the teeth change, works its way up into the spiritual and soul life. Then, as the child reaches sexual maturity, it becomes entirely spirit. It comes to us as that which we call religion in social human life.

How do we best establish this religion in social life when we understand human education in this way? We establish it best when we let the child imitate the right thing in the right way from the first years of life until the change of teeth, when we do not want to give it commandments, but when we stand before it in such a way that it can imitate us until the change of teeth, and after the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it can look to us as the model for truth, beauty, and goodness. Then the child develops in full freedom into a religious human being, in that with puberty the spiritual awakens from the soul-like, just as the soul awakens from the physical with the change of teeth. In this way we gradually learn to see how the human being develops, and we also learn to use such human development as an educational principle.

Dear attendees! Spiritual research, as described here, is not a theory; it leaves that to mere natural science, to those who are opponents of spiritual science today for quite understandable reasons, who consider themselves practical people. Their reasons are well known. For the spiritual researcher first familiarizes himself with what the opponents have to say. Only when he has become sufficiently familiar with this does he feel fully responsible for representing what grows out of the soil of spiritual research itself.

Spiritual research aims to be thoroughly practical, to bring a full life into practice. But when it comes to a full life, people who think they are particularly clever in a materialistic sense are about as clueless as a farmer who finds a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. Someone says to him: “Yes, look, that's a magnet, it attracts another iron, it can be used for all kinds of important things!” “Oh well,” says the farmer, “magnet? I don't see any magnet, I'll shoe my horse with it!” That's how the theoretical materialists seem, who don't want to know anything about spiritual research. They see everything as a horseshoe because they see nothing of the magnet! The supersensible is only hidden for those who only want to see the outwardly materialistic. If one really wants to be practical, if one wants to use the forces of the world in the right way in the progress of culture and civilization, then one must be able to really shine a light into the physical-material in the indicated way.

That is why spiritual research, I would say, did not get stuck in theory because of its destiny. Through the forces that have been developed out of social thinking by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, we were able to found the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, where it is really shown how an educational practice can be developed out of the consciousness of the full, spiritual, moral and religious human nature, which really takes into account the development of the human being as a whole.

This Waldorf school was founded a little over three years ago with about 150 children. Today, it has well over 700 children in six classes, and we have to run most classes in parallel classes. And the teachers, who now number many, are trying to educate the human being from out of the fullness of humanity so that the person can then grow into practical life out of this fullness of humanity.

For the spiritual science that is advocated here – I already spoke about it yesterday – grows out of the full nature of the human being, and therefore it does not want to stop at theoretical descriptions, but wants to flow directly into life, I would say.

Allow me to illustrate this with a particular example in a few concluding sentences. Spiritual science, as it is represented here, has been represented by me for more than two decades. I have been allowed to speak here in Kristiania for many years about the most diverse subjects of this spiritual science.

Now, after a decade of spiritual science, the idea arose in certain individuals who had devoted themselves entirely to the truth of this spiritual science with their common sense. These individuals were approached with the idea of building a structure for this spiritual science. In particular, my mysteries were to be used to express artistically what now flows not in some kind of straw symbolism or allegory, but from a truly artistic source, but from the same source as the idea of spiritual science — that is what I tried to present in my mysteries. At first they had to be performed in ordinary theaters. But this was to change through these personalities, who had devoted themselves to spiritual science in the way described and wanted to make their sacrifices in order to erect a building of their own for it. This building was to be erected for the cultivation of this spiritual science and especially for the performance of my mystery dramas. Destiny brought this building to Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, in the northwestern region of Switzerland: Dornach, near Basel.

Dearly beloved attendees! If any other spiritual movement had been in such a position that it wanted to build a house, a home, for the cultivation of that which it wants to cultivate in the world, it would have gone to some architect and had a building erected in an antique or Renaissance style or Rococo style - in any style, for that matter - and its world view would have been represented in it. This could never happen with anthroposophical spiritual science if one was true to it with one's whole being. Why not?

Well, spiritual science wants to be something that unfolds in ideas only in one direction; but it is not based in theories, it is not based in ideas, it is based in living spiritual life, in that living spiritual contemplation of the world and man, as I have described it yesterday and today.

So, my dear audience, three branches come out of the same source: there comes out the one branch – knowledge – which expresses itself in ideas. There comes out the second branch – art – which expresses itself in forms, in the form of sounds, of colors, of sculpture, in architectural forms. There comes forth the third branch – the religious-ethical, the moral branch.

Anthroposophy as a science does not want to found a sect or establish a religion. But it leads to the source from which religious life also flows, and the artistic flows from the same source. I have often used the following image:

Imagine, dear audience, a nut in a shell. You cannot imagine that the nut is surrounded by a shell that is built around it from the outside; rather, the shell must also be there, formed from the same forces and laws of form as the nut itself. You can see it in the nutshell: it is already formed according to the same laws of form as the nut itself.

This is life, where everything that arises arises from the same impulses, from the same laws of form.

Anthroposophical spiritual science is not abstraction, it is life that lives itself out, as I have described it, in education; that lives itself out in the social; that lives itself out in the religious. In the sense that a house is to be built for it, it is the nut, and the house must be built according to the same formal laws, must have its own style, which is not, for example, an artistically symbolic realization of an idea – that would be mere symbolist nonsense – but it must be a real, genuine artistic creation. The second branch can come from the same sources as anthroposophy comes from for its ideas.

And so, in connection with the fact that I myself gained the basis for my research from Goethe, the Goetheanum was built near Basel — a ten-year project — built in such a way that with every pillar, pillar, in every architrave piece, in every color scheme, in everything that could be seen, one could see the right artistic environment for what was being done from the podium in this building, which was designed for 900 people.

When one stood on the podium and spoke, one felt how the word one had to coin in order to bring spiritual vision before the listeners, one felt how this word is coined as an idea out of the idea, in exactly the same way as — and this may be said by the one who has worked out in wax every single detail in the model worked out in wax everything that has been built in Dornach may say —, how that which has stepped out to meet people outwardly visible in forms and colors; who heard the words from the podium in this Goetheanum itself, who saw the eurythmy artists unfold their art of movement, who heard reciting there, who saw anything else performed there, saw that what was happening and being spoken on stage and podium was just the other form of what the building forms, the architectural, the pictorial forms showed. And when the music sounded from the organ at the other end, the musical tones that filled the room were only a further expression of what was found in the column forms, in that which had found expression in the form and colors of the entire building. In short, this building for the anthroposophical worldview could not be built as an external Renaissance, Rococo, Gothic or classical shell. A new architectural style had to be created because anthroposophy is not a one-sided theory, but is that which can emerge on [the one hand] in all ideas of knowledge, which can emerge as art. And as art, as a performing art, it should now be expressed in one's own home.

It must be emphasized again and again: Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion, does not want anything sectarian, wants to proceed in the same purely objective, purely legal way as any other scientific direction. But by penetrating with real scientific exactness, but with spiritual-scientific insight, it also penetrates to the source of religiosity.

This led to the desire to place a [nine and a half] meter high wooden group at one of the most prominent points in the Goetheanum, with Christ Jesus himself as the central figure. So now, my dear attendees, a worldview should be given through anthroposophy that recognizes as its ideal the embodiment of the human mystery of Golgotha at one of the most prominent points in its home, through anthroposophy. This is a form of knowledge that has a religious aspect in its objectives, although it does not want to establish itself as a sect or religion, but wants to remain on the ground of the artistic, on the ground of knowledge.

Dear attendees! When I was last able to speak here in Kristiania, I was able to think of the Home for the Spirit of Science in Dornach with different thoughts, because this home was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/1923, burnt down to the concrete foundations, and a is now standing on the spot where it once stood, the thing that, in its outer forms, has brought about a revelation for thousands upon thousands of visitors over the years, the thing that could be said from the bottom of one's heart about human eternity, human development on earth, about human being and world being and world knowledge.

It is self-evident that the small insurance sums that we may receive after the legal investigations into the Dornach fire have come to an end will not be sufficient to rebuild this building, the Goetheanum. And we live in different circumstances today than we did before the war, when numerous people who professed to be engaged in anthroposophical spiritual research were truly willing to make deep sacrifices to make it possible to rebuild the Goetheanum. And again and again, such friends have come forward to help. How the Goetheanum can be rebuilt will depend on whether, in the present difficult world situation, the same sacrifices will be possible as were possible before. It must be rebuilt in some form, because it was intended to visibly express what anthroposophical spiritual research wants to say about the deepest longings of contemporary man.

I said it yesterday as well: in the people of the present, in numerous people of the present — for it is a deepest longing, even if they do not know it, even if it only lives in subconscious feelings and sensations — there is the urge to rediscover the spiritual, to reconcile faith with knowledge again. This was to be expressed outwardly through the forms of the Goetheanum.

Now, this is also expressed outwardly in the forms of the human being itself. But that which is physical and sensual - my dear audience - can be grasped by the material flames and thus perish like the Dornach Goetheanum. In the same way, the physical and sensual shells of the human being also perish. But spiritual science shows us how an eternal core of the human being descends from spiritual and soul worlds, only enveloping itself in the physical shell, and passes through the gate of death again in order to live on in the spirit.

What is said about the spiritual being human is expressed in the thoughts of anthroposophy, which also seeks to be spiritual. In the mortal building — whose passing is so painful to us, so melancholy, us who have grown so fond of this building, this structure — that had its mortal outer work, as man himself in relation to his true being in his earthly body has his mortal outer work.

Anthroposophy, however, seeks to speak of the eternal in man, but to speak in such a way that this very eternal can be fully realized in a truly practical way — as I have indicated today for a certain point — in the most diverse areas of life. To fully realize the eternal in the temporal, to be practical in all spirituality, that is what real anthroposophical spiritual knowledge strives for.

It will show that the deepest longings of the human soul can indeed be fulfilled more and more over time. And this spiritual knowledge can wait. It knows that the Copernican system was also first considered foolishness, but later became a matter of course. So Anthroposophy knows that it can well be considered foolishness by many people today. It will also wait and it can wait! It will also become a matter of course. For it speaks of what must be close to the human being when he, truly feeling, wants to turn again to the ancient, I would say sacred demand: “Know thyself!” If this great and mighty word of truth and warning is to be developed in any way in a modern form, then man must come to a knowledge of the world that shows through supersensible vision how the spiritual speaks from all realms of nature, from clouds and stars, from the movements of clouds and stars, how this world, which in truth can only be recognized when it is recognized in spirit, ultimately says: “I have achieved my goals in the human being.” Knowledge of the world is only complete in knowledge of man. And knowledge of man is not seen in mystical confusion and with mystical illusions, but as I have described it yesterday and today, in order to fathom man's being. Thus, by fathoming the human being, one comes to recognize the spiritual and soul nature of the human being, before and after death, when the human being is poured out into the world, despite having a higher self-awareness than here on earth; in true knowledge of the human being, one discovers world beings in the human being. Just as there is no true knowledge of the world without knowledge of man, because the world shows that its goal is man, so there is no true knowledge of man without seeing in man an image of the whole world, without penetrating through knowledge of man to knowledge of the world in the spirit.

This is what is already unconsciously seen today as a scientific, moral, and religious striving at the bottom of many human souls. This is what troubles many human souls today without them knowing it. This is what anthroposophical knowledge of the human being and the world wants to speak about, so that what the human being of the present, but especially the human being of the near future, will really need, will arise: truly genuine knowledge of the human being through true spiritual knowledge of the world, real, genuine knowledge of the world that is suitable for social work and religious feeling, through genuine, true knowledge of the human being that has been grasped in the spirit.

This lecture is also known as The Human Soul and the World of Nature.

It will be clear, I think, from what has been said on earlier occasions that the Spiritual Science cultivated at the Goetheanum has nothing sectarian about it, nor does it set out to found a new religion. It gives full recognition to the progress of natural science in modern times, drawing indeed, in a certain sense, the ultimate necessary consequences of the whole trend and spirit of modern science. This will be particularly evident when we come to consider questions concerning our inner life and our knowledge of the world; and to-day I will ask your attention for one such specific question. It embraces a very wide realm, and all I can do here is to give a few indications towards its solution. I shall try to give these in such a way as to throw light on what we consider to be the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach.

The subject before us is concerned with two ideas that man can never contemplate without on the one hand feeling an intense longing awaken within him, and on the other being brought face to face with deep doubts and riddles. These two ideas are: the inner being of Nature and the inner being of the human soul.

In his knowledge man feels himself outside Nature. What would induce him to undertake the labour of cognition, were it not the hope of penetrating beyond the immediate region within which he stands in ordinary life, of entering more deeply into the Nature that presents herself in her external aspect to his senses and his intellect? It is, after all, a fact of the life of soul, and one that becomes more and more apparent the more seriously we occupy ourselves with questions of knowledge, that man feels separated from the inner being of Nature. And there remains always the question—to which one or another will have a different answer according to his outlook on the world—whether it be possible for men to enter sufficiently deeply into the being of Nature to allow him to gain some degree of satisfaction from his search. We have at the same time the feeling that whatever in the last resort can be known concerning the being of Nature is somehow also connected with what we may call the being of man's soul.

Now this question of the being of the human soul has presented itself to human cognition since very early times. We have only to recall the Apollonian saying: “Know thyself.” This saying sets forth a demand which the conscientious seeker after knowledge will feel is by no means easy of fulfillment.

We shall perhaps be able to come to a clearer idea of the tasks of the present day in this connection if we go back to earlier ages and remind ourselves of conceptions that were intimately bound up, for the men of olden times, on the one hand with the knowledge of the inner being of Nature, on the other with the self-knowledge of man. Let us then look for a little at some of these conceptions, even though they will take us into fields somewhat remote from the ordinary consciousness of to-day.

In olden times, these two aims—knowledge of Nature and knowledge of self—were associated in the mind of man with quite strange, not to say terrifying, conceptions. It was indeed not thought possible for man to continue in his ordinary way of life if he wanted to set out on the path to knowledge; for on that path he would inevitably find himself in the presence of deep uncertainties before he could come to any satisfying conviction. In our day we are not accustomed to think of the path of knowledge as something that leads us away from.the natural order of our life; it leaves us free to go forward in everyday life as before. And one must admit that the knowledge offered to us in our laboratories and observatories and clinics is not such as to throw us “right off the rails,” in the way attributed to the path of knowledge that the pupils of wisdom in early times had to tread.

They beheld a kind of abyss between what man is and can experience in ordinary life, and what he becomes and is confronted with when he penetrates into the depths of world-existence, or into the knowledge of his own being. They described how man feels the ground sink away from under his feet, so that only if he be strong enough not to succumb to giddiness of soul can he go forward at all into the field of ultimate knowledge. To tread this path of knowledge unprepared would involve man in a harder test than he is able to meet. Serious and conscientious preparation was necessary before he dare bridge the abyss. In ordinary life man is unaware of the abyss; he simply does not see it. And that, they said, is for him a blessing. Man is enveloped in a kind of blindness that protects him from being overcome by giddiness and falling headlong into the abyss. They spoke too of how man had to cross a “Threshold” in order to come into the fields of higher knowledge, and of how he must have become able to face without fear the revelations that await him at the Threshold. Again, in ordinary life man is protected from crossing the Threshold. Call it personification or what you will, in those ancient schools of wisdom they were relating real experiences when they spoke of man being protected by the “Guardian of the Threshold,” and of undergoing beyond it a time of darkness and uncertainty before ultimately attaining to a vision of reality, a “standing within” spirit-filled reality.

It is inevitable that in our day all manner of confused and hazy notions should connect themselves with such expressions as “Threshold,” “Guardian of the Threshold.” Let me say at once that mankind is undergoing evolution; nor is it only the outer cultural renditions that change and develop, but man's life of soul is changing all the time, moving onward from state to state; consequently the expressions which in olden times could be used to describe intimate processes in the life of soul, cannot bear the same meaning for present-day mankind. What man meant in olden times when he spoke of the Threshold and the Guardian of the Threshold was something different from the processes that take place in man to-day, when he resolves to go forward from ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge; and it is only with a view to making more comprehensible what I shall have to say regarding these latter that I bring in a comparison with ancient conceptions.

What was it of which the men of olden times were afraid? What was it for which the pupil in the School of Wisdom had to be prepared by means of an exact and thoroughgoing discipline of the will—a discipline that should make the will strong and vigorous, able to stand firm in extremely difficult and perplexing situations in Life? Strange though it may sound, it becomes clear to us if we are able to survey the course of human evolution, that what men feared in those times was actually none other than the condition of soul which mankind in general has reached to-day. They wanted to protect the pupil from coming all unprepared to the condition of mind and soul to which we have been brought by the scientific education of the last three or four centuries. Let me illustrate this for you in a particular case.

We all accept to-day the so-called Copernican view of the universe. This view places the sun in the centre of our planetary system; the planets revolve round the sun, with the earth as a planet among the other planets. Ever since the time of Copernicus, this is the picture men have had. In earlier times, quite another picture of the world lived in the general consciousness of mankind. The earth was seen in the centre, and the sun and stars revolving round the earth. Man had, that is to say, a geocentric picture of the world. Copernicus replaced it with a heliocentric picture of the world. Man has now no longer the feeling of standing on firm ground; he sees himself being hurled through space, together with the earth, at a terrific speed. As for how it all looks to the eye, that, we are told, is a mere illusion, induced by relations of perspective and the like, to which human vision is subject.

Now, this heliocentric picture of the world already existed in earlier ages. Plutarch is a writer from whom we can learn a great deal concerning the men of olden times, and how they thought about the world. Let me read you a passage translated from his writings. Plutarch is speaking of Aristarchus of Samos, and he describes the way in which Aristarchus conceived the world. We are therefore taken back into early Greek times, into an epoch many centuries before the Middle Ages, and before Copernicus. In the opinion of Aristarchus, says Plutarch, the universe is much bigger than it looks; for Aristarchus makes the assumption that the stars and the sun do not move, but that the earth revolves round the sun as centre, while the sphere of the fixed stars, whose centre is also in the sun, is so immense that the circumference of the circle described by the earth is to the distance of the fixed stars as is the centre of a sphere to its entire surface.

We find thus in Greek times the heliocentric conception of the world; we find the very same picture as we have to-day of man's place in the planetary system and his relation to the heaven of the fixed stars. In olden times, however, this heliocentric conception of the world was a secret known only to a few, who had undergone a strict training of the will before such knowledge could be imparted to them.

It is important to grasp the significance of this fact. What is common knowledge to-day, freely spoken of by everyone, was in earlier times a wisdom known to a select few. What such a wisdom-pupil knew, for example, concerning the sun and its relation to the earth was considered a knowledge that lay “beyond the Threshold”; man must needs first cross the Threshold before he can come into those fields where the soul discovers this new relationship to the universe. The very same knowledge that our whole education renders familiar and natural to us to-day, was for them on the other side of a Threshold that must not be crossed without due preparation.

What we have shown with regard to the astronomical conception of the world could quite well be worked out for other spheres of knowledge. We should again and again find evidence of how the whole of mankind has in the course of evolution been pushed across what was for Olden times a Threshold on the path to higher knowledge. The apprehension that was felt in those times about the condition of soul evoked by such knowledge, has shown itself frequently in later centuries in the attitude of the churches, which preserve and tend to perpetuate the traditions of the past. Again and again the churches have rejected knowledge that has been attained in the progress of civilisation; and when, for example, the Roman Church refused to acknowledge the teaching of Copernicus (as it did until the year 1827), the reason was the same as [that which] in ancient times prevented the priests from giving out Mystery knowledge to the masses—namely, that the knowledge would bring man into uncertainty if he were not duly prepared beforehand.

Now it is well-known that no power on earth can withstand for long the march of progress; and we in these days have to think in an entirely new way about what one may call the “Threshold of the Spiritual World.” Spiritual Science is no “warming up” of Gnostic or other ancient teaching, but works absolutely on the principles of modern natural science, as I think will have been evident from the example we have been considering.

How was it that men of olden times feared knowledge which today is the common property of all mankind? In my book Die Ratsel der Philosophie¹, I have described the changes that have come about in man's mind and soul since early Greek times. The Greek had not a self-consciousness that was fully detached from the external world. When he thought about the world, he felt himself, so to speak, “grown together” with it; he was as closely united with it as we are to-day in the act of sense-perception. For him thought was also, in a manner speaking, sense-perception. Red, blue, G, C sharp—these are for us sense-perceptions; but thought we ourselves produce by inner activity. For the Greek this kind of inner activity did not yet exist. Just as we get red, green, G, C sharp from sense-perception, so did he get the thoughts too from the external world. He had not yet the independence that comes from the comprehension of self. Only quite gradually has the perception and understanding of the self developed to what it is to-day. Self-consciousness has grown steadily stronger in the course of time, and man has thereby detached himself from surrounding Nature. He has learned to look into himself, inwardly to comprehend himself as something that acts independently. In doing so he has placed himself over against Nature; he stands outside her, that he may then contemplate her inner being from without. And with this detachment of thought from external objective life is connected also the birth of the feeling of freedom, that sense of freedom which is in reality a product only of the last few centuries.

We have come to regard history more and more in its purely external aspect; but if we were to consider it, as we try to do in spiritual science, in a more inward way, we should discover that the experience we have to-day when we speak of “freedom” was not there for the Greek. Although we translate the corresponding word in their writings with our word “freedom,” the feeling we associate with the word was quite unknown to the Stoic, for example, and other philosophers. A careful and unbiased study of Greek times will not fail to make this clear.

I laid stress in my Philosophie der Freiheit² which was written in the early nineties, on the connection of the experience of freedom with what I called “pure thinking”—that thinking which is completely detached from the inner organic life, and which (if the expression be not misunderstood) becomes, even in ordinary life, cognition on a higher level. For when we permeate pure thinking with moral ideas and impulses—that is, with ideas and impulses that are not associated with desires, or with sympathies and antipathies, but solely with pure, loving devotion to the deed that is to be done—when we do this and allow the impulse to quicken in our soul to action, then the action we perform is truly free.

One cannot really put the question concerning freedom in the way that is frequently done, when it is asked: Is man free or unfree? All one can say is that man is on the way to freedom. By cultivating self-evolution and self-knowledge, by achieving inner liberation from his accustomed attitude of mind and soul, man is treading a path that will enable him to rise to pure thinking; and on this path he becomes increasingly free. It is thus not a matter of “either—or,” but rather of gradual approach, or, shall we say, of both. For we are at once free and unfree; unfree where we are still governed by our desires, by what rises up out of our organism, out of the life of instinct; free, on the other hand, where we have grown independent of the instinctive life, where we are able to awaken within us pure love for the deed that has been envisaged in pure thinking.

The condition of mind that leads to the experience of freedom—the condition, namely, of pure thinking, to which man is able to surrender himself—must necessarily, for present-day man, remain an ideal; an ideal, however, that is indissolubly bound up with his worth and dignity as man.

We are on the way to such an ideal, and it is natural science that has set us upon the path. In all the development of natural science in modern times—and the results of this natural science carry authority in the widest circles and tend more and more to become the groundwork of our whole education and culture—one thing stands out clearly. Study the development of natural science and you will be struck with the growing recognition of the value and importance of the thought—the thought that is elaborated by man himself inwardly. This is true in the realm of the inorganic, from physics up to astronomy, as well as in the realm of the organic, and in spite of the fact that scientists base their results everywhere on observation and experiment. And through the work he does in thinking, man develops an enhanced self-consciousness; which means, that his detachment from the inner being of Nature grows.

We can here take once more the example of Astronomy. What Copernicus did, fundamentally speaking, was to reduce to calculation the results of observation. In this way one arrives at a world system that is completely detached from man. The world systems of ancient times were not so; they were always intimately connected with the human being. Man felt himself within the world; he was part of it. In our time man is, so to speak, incidental. He sees himself hurled through universal space together with the planet Earth, and his picture of the whole structure of the world is completely divorced from himself; that which lives in his own inner being must on no account be allowed to play a part in his conception of the universe. Man becomes filled, that is to say, with a thought-content that is the means of detaching him from himself. True, he thinks his thoughts, and in thinking remains always united with his thoughts; but he thinks them in such a way that they have no sort of connection with what rises up out of his organism, out of his life of instinct. He is under necessity so to think that, although the thought remains united with him, it nevertheless wrests itself free from the human-personal in him, so that in his thoughts he becomes, in effect, completely objective.

And this experience brings man to greater consciousness of self. The strenuous efforts required for finding one's way to clear conceptions in the field of astronomy or physics or chemistry to-day, or even only for following in thought the results of others' work, are bound to lead to a strengthening of the consciousness of self.

In the ancient civilisations—and herein lies the great difference between them and our own—education was not directed to the strengthening of self-consciousness. Rather had it the tendency to make man's thinking correspond with what he saw with his eyes. So arose the Ptolemaic conception of the world, which in all essentials is a reproduction of what we perceive with the external senses. Man was not thrust so far out of himself as he is by the modern scientific outlook; hence his self-consciousness did not grow. He remained more within his body—held there, as it were, by enchantment. Consciousness of self he derived from his instincts, and from the feeling of life and vitality within him. Although in our age we have drifted into materialism, this living in the body has been overcome by the development of thinking; and the consciousness of self has grown correspondingly. The very fact that we have become materialists, and lost our awareness of the spiritual in the objects perceived by the senses, has contributed to the achievements of thought. In olden times it was feared that if a man were brought unprepared to the kind of thinking such as is necessary, for example, to grasp the heliocentric system, he would “faint” in his soul; his consciousness of self would not be strong enough to sustain him.

This accounts for the emphasis on the training of the will; for a strong and vigorous will strengthens also the consciousness of self. The preparation of the pupil in the Wisdom School was therefore directed primarily to the will, in order that he might grow strong enough to endure, beyond the Threshold, that picture of the world for which a highly-developed consciousness of self is required.

We see, then, what it was men feared in olden times for the pupil who was to be guided into the inner being of the things of the world, into the inner being of Nature. They were afraid lest he be hurt in his soul, through falling into a condition of uncertainty and darkness, a condition comparable, in the realm of soul, with physical faintness. This danger they hoped to avoid by a thoroughgoing discipline of the will. In ordinary life, they said, man must remain on this side of the realm where the dangerous knowledge is to be found; a Guardian holds him back from the region for which he is unfit, thus protecting him from being overcome by faintness of soul. And their description of the experiences the pupil had to undergo if he wanted to cross the Threshold and pass the Guardian correspond exactly to inner experiences of the soul.

It was told how, when the pupil draws near the Threshold, he immediately has a feeling of uncertainty. If he has been sufficiently prepared, he is able to stand upright in the realm which would otherwise make him giddy; he passes the Guardian of the Threshold and, by virtue of the powers of his soul, enters into the spiritual world—which the Guardian would otherwise not allow him even to behold. But he must be able also to stay in the spiritual world with full consciousness. For the tremendous experiences that await him there call for strength and not for weakness, and if he were to let go, these experiences would have a shattering effect on his whole organisation; he would suffer grievous harm.

And now the strange thing is that in course of evolution a knowledge that could be attained by pupils of the ancient Wisdom Schools only after most careful preparation has become the common property of all mankind. We stand to-day in our ordinary knowledge beyond what the men of old felt to be a Threshold. The purpose they had in view in the ancient Wisdom Schools was that the pupil, when he looked into his own inner being, should feel himself united there with the inner being of Nature. And believing that if he did so unprepared, he would sink into a kind of spiritual faintness, they would not allow him to attempt this exploration until he had received the right discipline and training. And yet in our age everyone penetrates into this region utterly unprepared!

As a matter of fact man is experiencing to-day precisely what the ancients took such care to avoid. He acquires his knowledge of Nature; and he acquires also a strong consciousness of self that enables him to stand upright amid all the knowledge that is current to-day in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. He imbibes this knowledge and can remain steadfast without losing his balance. Nevertheless there is a quality in his life of soul that the men of old would deeply deplore. Because in the course of evolution we have acquired thought and the feeling of freedom and a stronger selfconsciousness, therefore we do not lose ourselves when we study the results of natural science; but we do lose something, and the loss is only too manifest to-day in the soul-life of mankind everywhere.

In this matter we labour under great illusion; we dream, and we cling to our dreams, and will not let them go. I have often spoken of how natural science brings conscientious students to a recognition of the boundaries of knowledge, boundaries man cannot pass without taking his power of cognition into forbidden—nay, into impossible—regions. A very distinguished scientist of modern times has spoken of the “Ignorabimus,” reading into the word a confession that however far we go in the knowledge we acquire from sense-observation and the intellect, we never penetrate to the inner being of Nature. I here touch on a subject that at once lands us in conflict, as was felt even at a time when natural science was far less advanced than it is to-day. It was Albrecht von Haller who expressed the “Ignorabimus” in the well-known lines:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.
Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.

Goethe, who used constantly to hear these words on the lips of those who shared Haller's attitude towards Nature, labeled such thinkers “Philistine.” For him they are men who do not want to rouse themselves to inner activity of soul; for by dint of inner activity the soul of man can kindle a light within—a light which, shining upon the heart of Nature, shall carry the soul into her innermost being. Goethe proclaims this in forcible and trenchant manner in his poem Allerdings, quoting to begin with the words to Haller:

‘To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.’
O Philistine,
To me and mine
What use in such a speech?
We think, through every part
We enter into her heart.

Still the cry goes,
‘Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.’

For sixty years I have heard that cry;
I curse it, but secretly, silently,
Say to myself a thousand times,
Gladly she gives and she gives us all!
Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one; she is one and all.

Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!³

Out of an instinctive feeling that was conscious and yet at the same time unconscious, Goethe rejected utterly the separation of the being of man's soul from the innermost being of Nature. He saw clearly that if the soul becomes conscious, in a healthy manner, of its own real being, then that consciousness brings with it the experience of standing within the innermost heart of Nature.

This conviction it was that kept Goethe from accepting Kant's philosophy. They make a great mistake who assert that at one time of his life Goethe came very near to the philosophy of Kant. In contradistinction to what Kant recognised as the human faculty of cognition, Goethe postulated what he called “perceptive judgment.” This means that in order to form a judgment we do not merely pass in abstract reasoning from concept to concept; rather do we use inwardly for thought the kind of beholding we use outwardly in sense perception. Goethe says he never thought about thinking; what he set himself continually to do was to behold the living element in the thought. And in this beholding of the thoughts he saw a way to unite the human soul with the very being of Nature.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would go further on the same path. This perceptive judgment—which, as presented by Goethe, was still in its beginnings—it sets out to develop in the direction indicated in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Faculties of cognition, which in ordinary life, and in the pursuit also of ordinary science, remain latent in man, are led up to “vision,” to a “new beholding.” Just as man perceives around him with the physical eye colours, or light and darkness, so with the eye of the spirit does he now behold the spiritual. By the practice of certain intimate exercises of the soul, he calls forth and develops within him powers that usually remain hidden, and so lifts himself up to a higher kind of knowledge which is able to plunge into the very heart of external Nature. You have frequently heard me speak of the successive stages of this higher knowledge, and I would like here to say a little about their evolution from a particular point of view.

We are accustomed to think of the course of our life as divided between waking and sleeping. These two conditions must, we know, alternate for us if we are to remain healthy in mind and body. How is it with us from the time of awakening to the time of falling asleep? The experiences of the soul are permeated with thoughts; the thoughts receive a certain colouring from the life of feeling; and there is also the life of will, which wells up from dim depths of our being under the guidance of the thoughts, and accomplishes deeds. In the other condition, that of sleep, we lie still; our thoughts sink into darkness; our feelings vanish and our will is inactive. The ordinary normal life of man shows these two alternating conditions. The picture is, however, incomplete; and we shall not arrive at any satisfactory idea of the nature of man if we are content to see the course of his life in this simple manner.

We take it for granted that between waking up and falling asleep we are awake. But the fact is, we are not awake in our whole being. This is overlooked, and consequently we have no true psychology; we come to no right understanding of the soul. If, ridding ourselves of all prejudice, we try to observe inwardly what we experience when we feel, We discover that our feeling life is by no means so illumined with the light of consciousness as is the life of thought and ideation. It is dim, by comparison. For a sense of self, for an experience of self, the life of feeling is undoubtedly every bit as real as—even perhaps in some ways more real than—the life of thought: but clarity, light-filled clarity, is enjoyed by thought alone. There is always something undefined about the life of feeling. Indeed, if we examine the matter carefully, comparing different conditions of soul one with another, we are led finally to the conclusion that the life which pulsates in feeling may be compared with dream life. Study the dream life of man; consider how it surges up from unknown depths of his being; how it manifests in pictures, but in pictures that are vague and indeterminate, so that one does not see all at once exactly how they are connected with external reality. Has not the life of feeling the same quality and character?

Feelings are, of course, something altogether different from dream pictures, but when we compare the degree of consciousness in both, we find it to be very much the same. The life of feeling is a kind of waking dream; the pictures that appear in the dream are here pressed down into the whole organic life. The experience is different in each case, and yet the experience is present in the soul in the same manner in both. So that in reality we are awake only in the life of ideation; in the feeling life we dream even while we are awake.

With the life of the will it is again different. We do not as a rule give much thought to the matter, but is it not so that the impulse of will arises within us without our having any clear consciousness of its origin? We have a thought; and out of the thought springs an impulse of will. Then again we see ourselves acting; and then again we have a thought about the action. But we cannot follow with consciousness what comes between. How a thought becomes an impulse for the will and shoots into my muscle-power; how the nerve registers the movement of the muscles; how, in other words, that which has been sent down into the depths of my being as thought, comes to be carried out in action, afterwards to emerge again when I perceive myself performing the action—all this lives in me in no other way than do the experiences of sleep.

In deep sleep we have in a sense lost our own being; we pass through the experiences of sleep without being aware of them; and it is the same with what comes about through the activity of the will-impulse in man. We dream in our life of feeling, and we are asleep in our willing; dreaming and sleeping are thus perpetually present in waking life. And in these unknown depths of being where the will has its origin, arises also that which we eventually gather up—focus, as it were—in consciousness of self. Man comes to a recognition of his full humanity only when he knows himself as a being that thinks and feels and wills.

Ordinary life, therefore, embraces unconscious conditions. And it is just through the life of ideation becoming separated from the rest of the soul life and lifted up into consciousness, that a way is made for the development of the experience of freedom. Here, in a sense, we divide ourselves up. We are awake in a part of ourselves, in the life of ideation, whilst in relation to another part of us we are as unconscious as we are in relation to the inner being of Nature.

It is at this point that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science steps in with its methods for attaining higher knowledge. This spiritual science is very far removed from any dreamy, obscure mysticism, nor does it support itself, like spiritualism, on external experiment. The foundation for the whole method of spiritual scientific research lies in the inner being of man himself; it can be evolved in full consciousness and will manifest the same clarity as the most exact material conceptions. The world of feeling, which generally, as we have seen, leads a kind of dream life, can become hooded with the same light that permeates thoughts and ideas—which, according to some schools of philosophy, themselves originate in the feelings. By means of exercises described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. this lighting up of the world of feeling is brought about, with the result that the region which is usually dreamlike in character now lives in the soul as “imaginative” consciousness. The moment man gives himself up to this imaginative consciousness, something is present for him in consciousness that remains generally beneath the Threshold. He thinks pictures, knowing, however, quite well that he is not dreaming them, but that they correspond to realities.

Spiritual Science then leads on further, to “inspired” consciousness, and here we are taken into the realm of the will. Little by little, we are brought to the point of being able to behold clairvoyantly—please do not misunderstand the expression—how the whole human organisation functions when the will pulsates in it. We see what actually takes place in the muscle when the will is active. Such a knowledge is “inspired” knowledge. Man dives down into his own inner being and acquires a self-knowledge which is generally veiled from him. We come to know more of man than stands before us as “given” between birth and death. Feeling and willing being now also flooded with the light of consciousness, we can know man not only as a created being, perceiving in him that which wakes up every morning and enters again into a body ready-made; we can recognise in him also the creative power which comes down from spiritual worlds at the time of birth or conception, and itself forms and organises the body. In effect, at this further stage man comes to know his own eternal being which lives beyond birth and death; he attains to a direct beholding of the eternal and spiritual in his soul.

As man learns in this way to know himself, not merely as natural man, but as spirit, he finds that he is also now within the inner being of Nature; in the spirit of his own nature he recognises the spirit of the Nature that is all around him. And at this point a fact of deep significance is revealed—namely, that with our modern knowledge of Nature we are already standing on the other side of the Threshold, in the old sense of the word. The men of olden times believed they would lose their self-consciousness if they entered this region unprepared. We do not lose our self-consciousness, but we do lose the world.

The full clarity of thought and idea, to which man owes his consciousness of self, has been achieved by him only in modern times; and now this consciousness of self needs to be carried a step further. The men of old paid particular heed to the training of the will; we have now to press forward, as I emphasised in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” to pure thinking. We must develop our thinking; it must grow into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And this will bring us once again to a Threshold, a new Threshold into the spiritual world. We must not remain in the world that offers itself for sense-perception and leaves the inner being of Nature beyond the boundaries of knowledge. We must cross another Threshold, the Threshold that lies before our own inner being.

At this Threshold we shall no longer let our imagination run away with us and conjure up all manner of atoms and molecules to account for the impressions of colour and sound and heat; for when we come consciously to recognise, and be within, our own spirit, then we shall find we are also within the spirit of Nature. We shall learn to know Nature herself as spirit. In the region where to-day we talk of an atomistic world (we are really only postulating behind Nature a second equally material Nature), in the very region where to-day we are losing the world, we shall find the spirit. And then we shall have the right fundamental feeling towards the inner being of Nature and, also, the being of the human soul.

It is, as you see, a different attitude we have to attain from that of olden times. We must be conscious that we are living in conditions the men of old wanted to avoid. This does not mean, however, that we are in danger of losing ourselves; our world of thought has been too strongly developed for that. And if we develop the world of thought still further, then we shall also not lose what we are in danger of losing. The men of olden times were threatened with the loss of self, with a kind of faintness of the soul. We are faced with the danger of losing the world for our ego-consciousness; of being so surrounded and overborne by purely mathematical pictures of the world, purely atomistic conceptions, that we lose all sense of the “whole” world in its infinite variety and richness. In order that we may find the world again—in order, that is, that we may find the spirit in the world—we must cross what constitutes for modern man the Threshold.

We may even put it this way: if the men of olden times feared the Guardian of the Threshold, and needed to be fully prepared before they might pass him, we in our day must desire earnestly to pass the Guardian. We must long to carry knowledge of the spirit into those regions where hitherto we have relied only on external sense-perception in combination with the results of intellectual reasoning and experiment. Knowledge of the spirit must be taken into the laboratory, into the observatory and into the clinic. Wherever research is carried on, knowledge of the spirit must have place.

Otherwise, since all the results that are arrived at in such institutions come from beyond the Threshold, man is thereby cut off from the world in a manner that is dangerous for him. He feels himself in the presence of an inner being of Nature which he can never approach on an external path, which he can approach only by becoming awake in his soul and pressing forward to the immortal part of his own being. As soon, however, as he does this, he is at that moment also within the spirit of Nature. He has stepped across the Threshold that lies in his own being, and finds himself in the presence of the spiritual in Nature.

To point out to man this path is the task of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It has to give what the other sciences cannot give. And it may rightly claim to be Goethean, for to those who say:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.

Goethe replies:

Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one, she is one and all.
Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!

We are “shell” as long as we remain in the life of ideas alone. We sever ourselves from Nature, and all we can do is to talk about her. But the man who penetrates to his own inner “kernel,” and experiences himself in the very centre of his soul—he discovers that he is at the same time in the very innermost of Nature; he is experiencing her inner being.

Such, then, is the kind of impulse that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is ready to give to the whole of human life, and in particular to the several sciences. These several sciences need not remain the highly specialised fields that they have been hitherto; rather shall each be a contribution to that quest which man must ever follow if he would rise to a consciousness of his true dignity—the quest for the eternal in the human being. All that the individual sciences can teach to-day is still only a knowledge that looks on Nature from without. But if those who are working in them tread, as well as the outer, also the inner path of knowledge, then the knowledge acquired in the different fields can grow into a knowledge of man, a comprehensive knowledge of mankind. We need such a knowledge in our time if we are to guide the social problems of the future into paths where right and healthy solutions can be found—as I have explained in my book, “The Threefold Commonwealth.”

One who carries deeply enough in his heart the development of spiritual science will find himself continually face to face with this question of the connection between the being of man and the inner being of Nature. The specialised sciences cannot help us here; they only spread darkness over the world. The darkness is to be feared, even as the men of olden times feared the region beyond the Threshold. But it is possible for man to kindle a light that shall light up the darkness; and this light is the light that shines in the soul of man when he attains to spiritual knowledge.

• 1. The Riddles of Philosophy
• 2. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
• 3. English translation from Goethe and Faust; an Interpretation by F. M. Stawell and G. L. Dickinson. G. Bell & Sons, 1928.

First, as in previous lectures here, I must take a moment to ask for apologies, as I cannot give the lecture in the language of this country. Since this is not possible for me, I must make the attempt to be understood in my customary language. Secondly, I beg to apologize as I've arrived here with a cold, and so perhaps there will also be interruptions here and there throughout the lecture.

When one speaks in the present time of the question that has been announced for today's topic, a question that is indeed related to the deepest needs, the deepest yearnings of the human soul, then there emerges out of today's education the objection that questions so bereft of discovery cannot be spoken of scientifically at all, that one must be satisfied to let such questions remain within traditional beliefs, within the same things said about these things as are perception and feeling on the fingers. This is the familiar view nowadays, and therefore everything that is put forward from the point of view of a truly spiritual knowledge will be perceived as somewhat strange. Yet all that is brought forward here, that has arisen from valid points of view, can absolutely stand on the same ground as the accustomed scientific views over the course of the last three or four centuries, when the natural sciences actually climbed and arrived at the point of their highest success. But if one applies only the same methods of knowledge that are allowed by science today, then a way cannot be found into those areas for which answers must be sought, as far as is possible for people regarding such matters as those that we want to deal with today, questions of the soul's eternity, of the eternity of the innermost being of man.

Now the point of view here submitted wants nothing further than to continue within those natural scientific methods set down, but not just to those points from which one can gain a glimpse into the supersensory world, from which alone a possible view into the eternal nature of the inner man can be won. One must initially want to succeed in the acquisition of such knowledge so as to set the sights overall on the expectation of the knowledge itself. One must ask whether the insight, the inner realization, will stop within the ordinary consciousness as we apply it towards the phenomena of nature by measuring, by experiments in balance, through counting, arithmetic and so on, or whether a further glimpse into the supersensory is possible; whether an entirely different cognitive perception ought to be gained or not. So that we understand by such means this different cognitive perception, allow me next to make a comparison. I do not from the start want to prove anything by this comparison, but only to make myself understandable so that what I want to add as more evidence of any nature can be captured in just the right way.

Even in ordinary life we know of two states of consciousness within the human being that are strongly different from one another. We know the state of wakefulness, where we are from morning till night, and we know the state of sleep, in which we are outside of the ordinary circumstances of life, and from which arise colorful iridescent dreams. If we maintain a reasonable point of view, we do not attribute the same perspective of reality to these dreams that we experience in the waking state.

But let us consider: by what means in general do we come to speak of the dreams that arise out of the sleeping state—in general so to speak—so that they often carry, namely, an interesting character, but have a lower reality value, or perhaps in a certain sense they do not quite have the reality value compared to what we experience when awake? We come to an assessment of the dream world only by the fact that we wake up, and by awakening we come to an entirely different state of consciousness. What happens because of this awakening? We switch our will on, especially in our body, in our physical tasks. These depend on the will. After all, what we perceive through the awakened senses is also essentially caused by the awakening of the will in the senses, in the switching on of the sense organs. To a certain extent this goes on in our entire organism, our entire organism is taken hold of; we are able to turn ourselves to the natural world through our organism. And by what we experience because of this activity we are quite capable of assessing the value of the dream's reality. We could never come within the dream to any other insight about the dream than that which the dream itself presents as full reality. So long as we dream we see everything as real, what the dream presents to us in its colorful, dazzling variety.

Let us allow ourselves, once, to take up a certain correct, daring, paradoxical hypothesis. Allowing for this even once we would never awaken throughout our entire earthly life, but would constantly dream. Then we would fill ourselves during our conscious life on earth with all the ideas that we know only from our dreams. And one with such a problem could therefore definitely think that any force of nature—or by my account any spiritual being—could drive us to our actions, and in everything that we do from morning until evening our outer life thus proceeds as it proceeds. We would be accompanied not only with waking concepts, we would be doing something completely different of which we know nothing. However, we would dream our entire lives through, and we would come only to the thoughts that are not true reality. For that which occurs when we grasp things, when we see with the eyes, such as we have in the waking state, would not occur at all.

Thus we know our dream state only from the point of view of the Guardian's judgement. If such a thing is taken seriously, if we do not pass lightly out of habit over the usual events of life, then there arises just opposite the deeper soul questions this hypothetical view: Yes, is it not then perhaps also possible to some extent from a higher point of view to turn from our habitual everyday Guardian and awaken to something new, to a higher state of consciousness? Can we not allow ourselves to think that, if we can wake up out of the dream into everyday reality, we can also awaken out of everyday reality into a higher consciousness? Just as a higher consciousness is given with which we can judge the reality of the everyday world—where we are from morning until evening—can we not also judge the reality value of the dream from the standpoint of wakefulness?

I have put this before you first of all as a question, as an entirely hypothetical question. The same scientific point of view that I have here asserted now shows that it is actually possible for the human being to come to such a second awakening. Just as the shift from sleeping to dreaming in life occurs out of ordinary wakefulness, so this occurrence can increase to another higher level whereby one awakens out of this ordinary everyday life to a higher state and, from this, everyday life likewise appears as though out of dreams.

Now in order to take such a point of view at all, something is necessary that I always call, in this context, intellectual humility. This intellectual humility, however, does not belong to present-day man. Indeed, present-day man says to himself: “Well, when I was a small child, I dreamed in a certain way within life. Then I left childhood, I had to do so, yes, and I came to parenting through becoming older, through life itself. I was then in my entire soul constitution a different person. Each intellectual point of view that I had won for myself I had not brought into the world, for I had first developed it within myself out of the dull, dreamy state of the child's consciousness.” This is indeed the man of today, but here he stops, and then he says: “Well, I have this point of view. What appears to me to be true from this point of view is true; what appears to me to be false from this point of view is false. Through this point of view that I once won for myself, I am the sovereign ruler over truth and falseness, error and accuracy.”

Yes, one should not have this gesture of immodesty if one really wants to ascend to true knowledge of the supersensory world. So care must be taken: just as the human being has evolved out of the dull, dreamy soul-state of the child, so must it be presumed that from the standpoint of the soul—where he has already come once—he can continue to develop himself when he becomes an adult. Now it will be shown whether such a second awakening as I have hypothetically constructed is possible, whether such a development can be produced.

First of all, we naturally use those cognitive and mental powers that are already there when we want to enter into true, exact spiritual research. For there is nothing else the human being can use in relation to his soul constitution than what is already there; this he can try to develop further. Now there is a soul force that the more perceptive philosophers admit to, even in respect to our day, and if one looks at this properly it is already pointing clearly to the eternal essence of man. This suggests, however, that man will not develop even this soul force further; he will merely engage in philosophical speculations about it. That is to say, he wants just enough to stop in ordinary reality, and it is as though he, the dreamer, does not want to wake up, but wants to dream further about the dream in order to give himself an insight about the dream. He does not want to wake up a second time. The soul force I refer to is indeed beyond the power of memory. I do not want to engage in wide-meshed philosophical arguments here—naturally there is no time for it; in other circumstances there could very well be—I want to remain entirely within the popular consciousness. Let us imagine once that this popular consciousness actually works in man just as the power of memory and the power of perception do. Events that we may have gone through decades ago are accordingly brought up from the depths of the soul—or, preferably, we should say out of the depths of the human being so that we do not present a hypothesis about the soul. Out of the depths of the human being thought pictures will be conjured before the human soul that are the same as those that perhaps years ago were experienced in all of their vitality. What is actually occurring here? There lies before us something in memory that is different from what had been perceived in the outer world. In order to perceive the outer world it must be there. When the eye sees, that which is seen must be there. When the ear hears, that which is heard must be there, and so forth. What is experienced by the one perceiving is provided by the perception. With memory we have something in the soul that is not now present. What began as a perception, perhaps a long time ago, but is now no longer there, is conjured up before our souls by the memory.

From these facts intended here to emanate from spiritual science and not from philosophical speculation, connections can now be taken up and developed further through exercises of the soul. The question is this: if we are capable through ordinary memory of having something of the perceptions and the thoughts that are no longer there, but once were there in our earthly life, could we not perhaps also, through further development of such soul exercises, arrive at what refers to something that was never in earthly life, to something that is a more highly developed memory, yet is not actually a memory but an Imagination where the memory is so far advanced that something is presented that was not originally there? This can be achieved the more that we really develop the thought life that is used for ordinary consciousness.

This is not to criticize, but only to show the facts of mental life. Because for natural science and for the ordinary consciousness of the practical human being, only the external impressions of his consciousness are taken into consideration, and it is entirely correct that he surrenders to and passively experiences the thoughts of these external impressions. However, through this second process the higher awakening of which I have spoken can come about, but one must surrender all of the work and activities of thought life, surrender the forces of thought.

There then occurs that which should not be confused with what today is often called clairvoyance, which of course is based upon all possible associations dependent upon human organic functions. That which is acquired here presupposes that each step during practice is completed with as much prudence as the mathematician takes with his arithmetic for the mathematical sciences; so it is known exactly and precisely how to practice every forward step of the soul, just as the mathematician customarily carries out his work. Only the works of the mathematician are in objective forms, while here the work is to bring forward your own soul forces. In this manner you are finally led to remember. You live in an entirely different mental power than previously. Previously the power of thought was just abstract; you could think about something through your thoughts, but now, now you are internally experiencing the power of thought as a real force, just as you experience the pulsation of your blood. Now you experience thinking and action as a reality within you—now you see that the power of memory also lives in thought, only it is a dilution—if I may express myself figuratively—of that which is seen as a much greater power of thought, like the pulse of organic forces. You experience the reality of thought. And you can experience this reality of thought in so far as you really feel something that has not yet been felt. It has been felt in the physical body, and now one begins to feel a second, higher person. And this second, higher person then takes on a very definite shape.

So you have more than life in this time-body, the head is free: you have a human being in the etheric cosmos. That which I now recognize and know only in its importance as the earthly human being—and it actually has the I-sense—this is the human being as earth man, this is only the physical body that evaporates in space.

What we are as human beings as we go around in ordinary life, we are in that we carry a space-body with us, a fleshly space-body. Then we experience what I would call a time-body. One can also call this an etheric or formative forces body, as I have done in my books.

We experience namely that which emerges as a powerful tableau, an overview of our previous life on earth, from the point of time that we have reached, going backwards until the beginning of childhood. As otherwise we experience only a space tableau, now we experience a time tableau that occurs suddenly and is an overview of the entire previous life on earth. This is the first supernatural experience that the human being can have, his own earth lives suddenly appearing before him as a tableau.

Now someone can say: Yes, but perhaps this is only a somewhat complicated picture from memory. Indeed, one could likewise place together in thoughts what has been experienced and then form a continuous stream of memory; yes, one could just receive this picture as a memory picture. And perhaps we are brought to a state only of some self-deception here, to nothing other than such a memory picture from what you describe to us on the basis of your active guidance.

This would assuredly be so if there were no differences in accordance with the content! Indeed, if these things were really faced as though one were a scientist, confronting scientific things in laboratories, in physical cabinets, at the clinic and so forth, and then considering: is this an ordinary memory image? Imagine how people have approached us, how they have done this or that to us, how this or that has touched us with sympathy or antipathy, and so on. This can perhaps also provide us with a memory image that represents how natural phenomena has approached us. But it is always this that comes to us: what the thing mainly is when it is merely recollected.

In this tableau to which I have just drawn attention, it is not that the things draw near to us, but rather that everything comes out of us. This appears chiefly to be like that which we confront out of the inner forces of the soul as natural phenomena and the human being, yet everything appears from within us. This is real self-knowledge, real, concrete self-knowledge, which in fact occurs initially out of the previous earth life. And if we compare what we see overall, then we must say: that which we have produced from our previous life on earth does not behave like an ordinary recollection, but—like a sealing wax impression in a signet—it is the correct reverse image. And whoever simply makes this comparison will know that this is the first step of a new knowledge, of an increased memory that is not just more memory but represents an overall Imagination of a previous earth life. This is the first stage where one feels that he is this higher human being who carries within himself this time-body; this is not just something that the space-body has conjured out of itself, but something that has worked itself into this space-body ever since we have been on earth as human beings. For we recognize that the powers that lie in this space-body are of the same nature as the power of growth, the same kind that, in addition—for instance, when we were children—has wonderfully modeled our first—I want to say—unplastic, amorphous brain to the wonderful form that this brain gradually becomes, and so on.

And in settling into this time-body of the human being, into this first stage of the supernatural experiences of the human being, what must be rejected are all of the narrow-minded notions of the ego that one has, such as that the I is resting inside of the human skin. Now one feels as though he belongs together with the entire cosmos. Now one feels that he really is in his etheric body, in his time-body as a member of the entire cosmos, and he has a concept that is very real: if I cut off a finger of my body then it is no longer a finger; the finger has meaning only in the context of the organism. So by focusing on this time-body, you have a clear awareness: as a human being within this higher being you have the sense of being a member of the entire etheric cosmos, you belong to the etheric cosmos. It is really correct that the I now recognizes itself in its significance as an earthly human being; knows that it is actually owing to the physical space-body that the human being has the I-sensations as earthly man.

However, this is only the first stage of a super-sensible knowledge that can be acquired in order to feel the eternity of the human soul. The following higher stage actually leads, in truth, to a second awakening. For in the first stage we have reached nothing other than the self-knowledge of the earthly human being. The higher level will now be achieved with the same power with which one has initially, through active thinking, concentrated fully on concepts, and, with the same intensity of soul life, now carries away in turn such concepts from consciousness; only one has to come back to them time and again.

In the handling of all of these processes there is nothing suggestive; it proceeds as something with the fullest deliberation, like the course of mathematical procedures. But still, the one who finds himself surrendering such concepts, such thoughts in a strong manner, the one who moves as in the described example into the center of his consciousness, this is the one who at first is wholly devoted to these concepts.

And it is more difficult to get rid of these than the passively acquired ideas of ordinary consciousness. Therefore, in order to forget or carry away something from your consciousness, a stronger force must be applied than would otherwise be applied. But this is good, because through the fact that you apply this stronger force you can reach yet another higher state of consciousness.

You need only think honestly about what occurs in human consciousness when the familiar, passively acquired conceptions stop. Think first of all about stopping these visual concepts and you know that the person will fall asleep—such attempts have indeed also been made in psychological laboratories. This is exactly what now occurs in the human being when he, as a spiritual investigator, has first concentrated all of the powers of his soul on certain conceptions and then clears them away again. There then occurs in him a state which I call the deepest silence of the human soul, empty consciousness. And within this deepest silence of the human soul something very significant is actually said. Thus, the concepts that were first brought into consciousness with all of your strength are again released, and then you have an empty consciousness. This is simply so. You can wait in mere wakefulness for that which the inner life of the soul then reveals, but in that which I can only describe as the deep silence of the soul, something else enters in.

If we can agree on this soul experience, allow me to make the following comparison. Think to yourself: at first we are in one of the big, modern cities, where, if we go out onto the street, such real noise and tumult reign that we cannot understand our own words. Then, removed from the city, five minutes away, it is always silent, and another five minutes away it is even more silent, and more silent. Let us imagine then that we come to the deep, silent solitude of the forest. We can say: all around is silence. With the environment itself in silence our soul comes to silence.—But you see, we have not yet attained that silence which I now speak of as the deep silence of the soul. When one speaks of the silence of the forest over the din of the city, it is said that sounds very gradually cease. At the state of zero—having arrived at the zero state over the loud din—we call this, then, rest. But there is something that goes beyond the zero! Distract yourself, once, with one who has a fortune; he gives continuously of this wealth until he has little, yes, until he has less than nothing.

Nowadays we see that one does not particularly stop when he has nothing, but goes further. How does he do this? He goes below the zero, goes—as the mathematician says—into the negative, into debts that are made against the assets, into that which is negative in respect to zero, which is less than zero. Regarding the silence, think of this: we can go from the loud roar to the rest—zero—yet we can go still further, so that we enter into the regions of silence where the silence is stronger than the mere zero-silence. And the life of the soul enters into such regions, where there is a greater peace within than the mere zero-silence. If this occurs as I have indicated, the complex concepts of the consciousness are first powerfully extinguished; then the soul moves into the growing emptiness toward the inner experiences. There then emerges from the deep silence of the soul, contrary to the opposite sensual world, the objective spiritual world. Thus the spiritual researcher has arrived at the level I have described, and from the deep silence of the soul he meets the spiritual world, and he is gradually within the spiritual world, just as the human being through his eyes, through his ears, is in the physical-sensory world. And in the deep silence of the soul the objective spiritual world is revealed.

And then one can go further in the exercises. Just as one can get rid of a concept, so can one get rid of this entire picture of life that he had at the first stage of his super-sensible cognition, as I have described it, and that was experienced as real self-knowledge. This he can now clear away with all of his strength, clear away this time-person just as when, in the moment of realization when he had come to the time-person, he had already rid himself of the space-person with his strong I-feeling. Now the time-person can be removed. And out of the silence of the soul one is inflamed when one compares his own self-knowledge, the real self-knowledge, to the waking consciousness that has come in the deep silence of the soul. There is now revealed nothing spiritual, but through the outer work of his time-person he enters into the same world where he was before he descended to take on the physical body that had been prepared by his parents and forefathers. And from the deep silence of the soul there is revealed, in addition to the simultaneous spiritual world events, one's own spiritual and soul being, what he was before he descended to this earthly existence. Now he looks into the life that he went through with others before an earthly garment, if I may call it so, was accepted, purely spiritual-soul beings. The existence of the human being prior to birth or prior to conception actually occurs before the soul seeks to connect with others.

It is this that is the point of view represented here. One does not begin to speculate on any viewpoints so as to determine whether or not the soul is immortal. Nothing can be expected from this, because that would be as though one had pulled oneself out of the dreams, out of the dream that had won enlightenment. One must awaken in order to educate himself about the dream. Now one can awaken in the deep silence of the soul to a higher stage and clarify what life on earth is. It is formed from that existence that he had gone through before the step through birth—or rather through conception—and the descent to this earthly existence.

Spiritual science in the sense meant here wants to show the methods by which the vision of the eternal can be acquired by the human soul. This however is the second stage of spiritual knowledge by which we can climb to the secrets of the world, and which can also give us, in addition, the secrets of our own being.

A third stage is scaled through the fact that something is now a power of knowledge, although it is not a power of knowledge in ordinary consciousness, nor is the power of memory an actual power. We remember what we have experienced.

Just as little is another power of the soul a power of cognition. And when I say it is to be a power of cognition, then any scientist who sits here—I can understand quite well, because you have first to think as a scientist about these things, I know very well, and no one should actually speak with full responsibility about the exact spiritual knowledge asserted here who is not fully familiar with the usual scientific methods. So if scientists do not receive from the above the silent "goose bumps," they will at least receive a little if I now also claim that a force which otherwise plays a huge role in ordinary life—but should not be scientifically availed upon in ordinary life—that this will be now be taken as a power of knowledge for the soul to complete: the power of love.

Yes, certainly love plays a huge role in existence, but it is said that she is blind. It may not be taken as some sort of complete power of knowledge. But if one has driven the power of knowledge so far that we have come to the deep silence of the soul, then there occurs above all within this deep silence of the soul what one might call a distinct impression: When you want to see you have first to deprive your sight of the outer sense world.

You must pull it out of your physical body, pull it out even from the time-body. And then it fades so to speak, that coarser part that is bound to the physical body; the I-feeling very strongly goes yet further, as I have described earlier, where you feel that the time-body is already one with the entire cosmic existence.

But if—through the exercises that are described in detail in the books mentioned—you become acquainted with this deprivation, in which there occurs, in a very real sense, deprivation of the physical, deprivation of the time-body—if you look to existence as it was before you descended into physical existence on earth then you will experience something like a deep pain of the soul. And the true higher knowedge is actually born out of this pain.

Do not believe, if you are honest, that you can describe higher knowledge as being born out of desire! It is born out of pain. And you must gradually acquire the endurance to win against this pain.

If one acquires the endurance to win against the pain, then he will learn as a spiritual researcher to turn back repeatedly to physical-sensory existence in a slightly different way. Because he will understand, yes, that he will have what I have described as a higher knowledge—that may be acquired in the characterized example—for only a very short time. It is not about getting caught in a higher world if you are a spiritual researcher, for when you have stepped through the higher world you must return ever and again to the ordinary physical-sensory world.

However, one returns from the moments of higher intuition in which one has first learned, in deepest pain, to do without this physical-sensory world. Then you get a very different stance with respect to this physical-sensory world, since you actually get to know what may be called the feeling of being a victim. One really has this feeling, that remains within, of being a victim, and with full awareness—not only out of instinct but with full awareness—he surrenders himself to other beings or even to other natural processes.

While the instinct of love so acts that the sensation of love is felt to a certain extent in the physical body, then the love can be so developed that it runs in bodily-free activity if it is carried up and formed as a sacrifice to the other, in the spiritual world and also in the physical-sensory world. Then this love itself gradually becomes the power of knowledge. And then you get to know just what you can really only know when love becomes the power of knowledge.

You see, through love we come into a relationship with another being who may at first be foreign to us, and we feel ourselves standing next to the other being if we carry across our own existence into that existence. We need the certainty of the sense of our building a bridge to the unknown being through love. If love—at a higher level, I would like to say—so awakens as I have just indicated, then we obtain our ego again, like a foreign being that—yes—we have lost along the way, as I have described.

But how do we obtain our ego? As the one whom we were in former earth lives, who is as strange to us in this earth life as a different personality, taken to a higher scale by the spiritualized, refined level of love. Our ego is not given back earlier to us, not until we can grasp it in love as entirely foreign. We have not desired to see this ego as it has lived in former lives on earth, and then passed through the time that lies between death and a new birth.

However, we discover our ego where we are able to perceive ourselves out of the deep silence of the soul, before we descended to earth life, and look back to the previous earth life as it was before this purely spiritual-soul life.

But, I want to say—we must first have developed an entirely selfless higher love as a power of knowledge; this then gives us an unsought insight into a former life on earth. Then we know that we had to go through these former lives on earth. And we have so risen that we can see the ego, how it was and how it had a body other than the body that we have now, that has carried us since birth to this point of time in earthly life. Then we have arrived at this moment, to be able to really comprehend ourselves as entirely free of the body—that is, recognizing the moment to live through that we then live through as real when we pass through death. For we have placed the physical body into reality.

In the stage of knowledge that is gained in love, we remove the physical body of knowledge and we experience ourselves in the same elements where we will be with our eternal inner being when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, from which we have descended into physical existence on earth. And so we experience immortality when we—forgive me when I use the term—first recognize the experience of unbornness.

But the eternity of the human soul consists of these two: from unbornness, for which we do not even have a word in our contemporary educated language, and from immortality. Only when one comprehends these two as two sides of the eternity of the human soul can one really approach understanding. In the intellectual conceptions of today, people unfortunately treat these things with a certain egoism. They say to themselves—without having to voice this—more unconsciously they say to themselves: Well, that which has preceded our life on earth does not interest us, for we are here. It interests us that we are here. But we are interested in what happens after death because we do not yet know this.

This is egotism, but the results are not knowledge. Knowledge results only from unegotistical essence. Therefore, no one can gain a real knowledge of the immortality of the soul who does not have the will to achieve knowledge of the soul's unbornness. Because the eternity of the human soul is composed of the soul's unbornness and the soul's immortality.

This also results in the outlook of repeated earth lives, as indicated at the third level of knowledge after full awakening out into the spiritual world; the memory not only extends into premortal existence, it also extends into the stages of existence in the previously-lived earth life.

Thus we know that there really is before us a second awakening of the soul. Out of the dreams we switch our will on in the body. As a result we live in the world of space while the images otherwise proceed, and we accept these passing dream images as realities; we recognize the awakened nature of the image. But by what means are the images images? By the fact that they stand as images. As we awaken, we switch on our bodily functions. I want to say, we see red as red, the same whether we are awake or asleep; we hear tones the same way, whether we are dreaming or awake. But while we are awake, having turned our will on to bodily functions, we go over to some extent to the realities—in crossing over the hard things we are not speaking now of philosophical speculations, but are entirely within the popular consciousness. Thus to a certain extent when we are awake we do not retain the picture in sensory perceptions, but cross broadly over the hard things. We are switched on to the same element that presents to us the things of the world, in the sense of physical existence.

Now we have gradually switched into a new world as a spiritual researcher. Why have we done this?

When you compare the thinking, the feeling, and the will of the human being as they exist in the soul and also in the waking state, they are actually a dream. We actually only wake up with sensory thoughts and ideas together in the outer world, and these are combined as sensory perceptions. As soon as we look within ourselves with ordinary consciousness, we are dreaming. Even our thoughts, when we turn inward, are more or less dream perceptions. This remains so dreamlike, even the will is asleep. For when we have decided upon any action we know how this action that we initially had as an idea continues down into our limbs as an idea, so that we begin to move the limbs. Only through spiritual science can one see what is going on in the muscles, what is going on in the entire organism; usually that which is a voluntary action remains inhibited during sleep. First we have only the idea. Then it all goes down into an unconscious state. Then the idea of the action occurs again. And what the soul by itself can only dream about even in the waking state, we gradually switch on through reinforced thinking, through the deep silence of the soul, through the power of knowledge awakened by love in the spiritual existence of the human being, as we switch on the ordinary awakening of the will in bodily existence.

Thus we learn to judge the eternal in the human being from the point of view of the ordinary physical-sensory life that we absolve between birth and death, as we judge the content of the dream from the point of view of physical-sensory life. We advocate recognizing the eternal in this way!

Again and again I have to say on such an occasion: of course the objection is given that these things only apply to those who want to be a spiritual researcher, who look into these worlds.—No, ladies and gentlemen, the spiritual researcher actually has these things for himself as a human being only slightly, when he brought them down with the usual introduction into ordinary language, into ordinary life. And this can happen as well for everyone who hears these things from the spiritual researcher.

Just as one has grown accustomed to accept the things that the botanist or the astronomer has explored with his difficult methods, so one will gradually have to get used to the things that the spiritual researcher has explored after he gives an account of his method, as I have described today—to accept, to accept more readily, for there is the same relationship between ordinary common sense and these truths as there is between the right aesthetic taste and a beautiful picture.

You have to be a painter to paint a beautiful picture, but you do not have to be a painter to judge the beauty of its image! One needs only to have healthy taste.

One must be a spiritual researcher in order to know the things as they have been portrayed. But just as little as one needs to be a painter in order to judge the beauty of a picture, just as little does one need to be a spiritual researcher in order with complete common sense to be in agreement with what the spiritual researcher says. Apart from this, for people today at a certain level it is possible that each one can be a spiritual researcher. The one who delves into the books I have mentioned, who does the corresponding exercises, can today—no matter in what profession, in what life situation—get as far at the least as to control in a completely satisfactory manner that of which I have spoken this evening, and many other things.

What is this knowledge that leads into the eternal soul? It is a realization that is not only grasped in the head of the human being, it affects the entire person. For that which is the world of color, the eye will grasp. For that which is the world of tone, the ear will grasp. For that which is the law of nature, the human mind will grasp. For that, however, which is the spiritual world—as I have indicated here today—that will be grasped by the entire human being.

Hence, allow me in conclusion to say something personal by way of illustration, although this is not meant to be personal, but is meant rather to be entirely objective.

If you really want to capture that which is disclosed by the spiritual world, you need presence of mind, because it slips so to speak, turns away quickly; it is fleeting. That which is to a certain extent advanced through an improvement in the power of memory imprints itself only with difficulty upon the ordinary memory. One must use all of his strength to bring down what he beholds in the spiritual world, to bring this down to ordinary language, to ordinary memory-thought.

I would not be able to lecture about these things if I did not try by all means to bring down what arises in me of what can be beheld in the spiritual world, especially to really bring these thought-words down into physically audible regions. One cannot comprehend with the mere head, because the entire human being must to a certain extent become a sense organ, but a spiritually developed sense organ. Therefore I attempt every time—it is my custom, another has another one—I attempt every time if something is given to me from the spiritual world, not merely to think it through as I receive it from the spiritual world, but to write it down as well, or to record it with some characteristic stroke, so that the arms and hands are involved as well as the soul organs. So something else other than the mere head, which remains only in abstract ideas, must be involved in these findings: the entire person.

I have in this way entire truckloads of fully-written notebooks that I never again look at, which are only there in order to be descriptions, in order to provide preliminary work in the physical world for that which is from the spiritual world, so that the spiritually beheld world can then really be clothed in words; whereby the thoughts of which memories are usually formed or that usually apply in life can actually be penetrated—Thus one obtains a science that relates to the whole person.

I will have to show you tomorrow how this science provides us with the opportunity not only to understand the cultural development of humanity, but it might also socially promote namely a foundation, a true, real foundation for a true, real education, for a true, genuine pedagogy, for Waldorf education.

These things, how the development of the humanity and the education of humanity in light of this spiritual-scientific world view is excluded, this I will have to describe tomorrow. Today I wanted only to evoke the idea of how this spiritual-scientific point of view, through knowledge, is based to a certain extent on a second awakening, the soul of the human being in its eternity again returning to the full life.

Yes, we have to experience this out of our awareness of time, that scholarship has just spoken of a doctrine of the soul without soul, in a certain sense.—I will have to touch upon this question tomorrow—even of religion without God.

Spiritual science as it is meant here wants in turn to enter into the fullest intensity of the soul of the human being, into the eternity of the soul; it wants religious consciousness, the godly-religious content to enter again into the development of humanity and the education of humanity, precisely so that man can come through awareness to his full dignity. And he, conscious of his dignity which results from his knowledge of the connection of his soul with the eternal, with the ur-eternal powers of the world, realizes that this is part of his true nature, as the physical body, as something that stands in everyday life, is connected with him, is part of his life.

This is that which people themselves have followed as knowledge, and already many, many of them crave the equivalent, if it is not fully conscious to them. That which today torments people, what they feel as the uneasiness of life that makes them basically nervous about what drives them so that they feel undermined in their whole existence, this is the burning question of the eternal forces underlying the temporal forces that we need to develop in normal and in social life. This spiritual science is here so that people who want to have knowledge of these eternal forces—that spiritual science here intends—can find methods to lead others to this realization, so that others can also engage in this knowledge in social life; that they and their fellow man not only see something as it were that is borne by the stream of life on earth, to be born with birth and die with death, but that they learn rather of something that will go through all eternity, guided by the stars and the aims of people through the cosmic goal so that this cosmic goal gives the correct meaning to all earthly goals.

Anthroposophy wants to speak to people of this cosmic sense, the sense of the goals of earth. This is what it would awaken in souls again as feeling and sensation in the relationship of the human soul with all of the forces of eternal life, for people of the present and of the future.

And this, ladies and gentlemen—if you are going on honest advice you will have to admit—is what one needs as a human being at the present time. And what one will need more and more as a human being of the future.

Dear attendees,Those who seriously want to talk about topics such as those on which this evening's and February 28th's reflections are based must be aware that there are quite a number of souls in the present who, on the one hand, are striving for new ways of searching for the soul and, on the other hand, are striving for new directions for our entire public and social life. For a foundation for a new soul-searching and a foundation for new social directions in life is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to provide, and these two considerations will be based on this.

On the one hand, humanity has undergone a significant intellectual development in the course of the last three to four centuries, particularly in the natural sciences. Those who speak today of a new search for the soul must not ignore the great and powerful triumphs that have emerged from scientific research. But this scientific research has also produced tremendous results in practical life. Everything that surrounds us today as magnificent technical achievements, which we encounter at every turn in life, is fundamentally the result of scientific thinking.

On the other hand, however, it should not be overlooked – and as I said, many souls are already aware of this today – that in the face of these great achievements of scientific research, in the face of the tremendous technical achievements, a deep dissatisfaction runs through modern spiritual life and that it can be seen quite clearly – it can be seen quite clearly from the catastrophic events of recent years – how humanity needs new directions. And so there are really many people here today who want to look up to a spiritual realization, a spiritual insight, after science has told them so much about the world and about man. And there are many who are clear about the fact that these scientific views and these momentous technical achievements have indeed penetrated the outer life in an intensive way, but that something is needed that can permeate our moral, our soul life in a similar way in relation to the widest circles of humanity. And so some people want to look up from the abundance of individual sciences to a comprehensive view of the world. And so some appeal to that which can only have its seat in the deepest moral interior of the human soul, in order to gain those social impulses which, as it must already be clear to many today, cannot be gained without the deepest inner - spiritual and moral - impulses.

But on the other hand, we also see how, within the abundance of modern intellectual life and within the catastrophic chaos that has occurred in recent times, the inner courage is lacking for an inwardly active intellectual life, for a new creation in intellectual life. Therefore, we must note how numerous people are today who cannot yet rise to enthusiasm for such a new creation and who look back to ancient times of humanity when the human soul still had a knowledge that may seem childish to us now, but which was still intimately related to the whole of human nature, which could still build bridges above all to artistic creation and to religious feeling and action. Art, religion, science have fallen apart for the modern man, but he wants to build bridges between these three areas of life, which nevertheless - if man is to be satisfied in the long run, if he is to come to a fruitful social creation, if he is to be efficient for a life practice in general - which nevertheless must connect to a harmonious wholeness within the human being.

But we also see many looking back with great respect, and certainly from a certain point of view rightly so, with great respect to ancient Oriental wisdom, as if we could today, from the mysticism of the Orient or from similar spiritual currents, regain that deepening and elevation of the spirit at the same time, which the breadth of scientific and technical thinking cannot give us. If one develops such a longing for the old, then one only overlooks the fact that the development of humanity as such has a meaning, that it is impossible to follow the same paths of the spirit today that were taken thousands of years ago.

But on the other hand, much of the powerful human impulses have come down to the present day through the external science of observation; much of what connected our ancestors spiritually and emotionally with the depths of the world, connected them with the depths of the world in their own way. This has given rise in people to a longing to understand something of how our ancestors went their spiritual ways, how these our ancestors, in order to satisfy the innermost needs of the soul, strove for a knowledge of the eternal, the supersensible in the human soul. One can have respect for this striving, but ultimately one can only orient oneself by that which today, nevertheless, as a completely new creation, must arise from within the human being through an inner calling of the deepest soul forces. One can orient oneself. And so, dear attendees, in order to prepare what I actually want to express, allow me to say a few orienting words, just for comparison, so to speak, about the way in which our ancestors sought the paths of the soul and of the spirit.

Above all, we must look at the feelings that our ancestors experienced thousands of years ago in ancient India, but even as far back as the older Greek times, when they were shown the path to the spirit by the leaders of the wisdom schools of the time, which can also be called mystery schools. The students were to be prepared energetically and conscientiously. For these people were clear about something of which we are no longer strongly aware in our general education today: that man cannot ascend from the knowledge he can attain from the external sensual world to the actual heights of a satisfying knowledge of the eternal and of the connections between man and the divine, guiding forces of the world without tremendous inner struggles, without tremendous changes in his entire soul life. The soul should undergo thorough, intensive preparation before it is even given the opportunity to gain supersensible knowledge. And they spoke of something, my dear audience, that sounds almost fantastic today. They spoke a word, but today, too, one should gain an understanding of it in the face of a serious spiritual search; they spoke the word from the threshold into the spiritual world, from the guardian of the threshold to the spiritual world.

What was this threshold for our ancestors? What was this guardian of the threshold to the spiritual world? Oh, these were truly real, substantial experiences that a person underwent who became a disciple of the ancient wisdom, at the threshold and when passing the guardian of the threshold. What did our ancestors say to each other? Between what a person can go through in his ordinary, everyday state of consciousness, what he can learn about himself and the world through this state of consciousness, and between the actual knowledge that gives us insight into the nature of our soul and tells us about the most significant life forces – between There is an abyss between us and this knowledge, and man cannot cross this abyss without reflecting on the soul's inner struggles, without engaging in the most intense inner struggles, without, in other words, becoming a completely different person in spiritual and psychological terms.

The preparation that the teachers of the old wisdom schools gave their students consisted essentially of a certain education of the intellect and an education of the will. Above all, the will of the one who was to be initiated into the supersensible as a disciple of wisdom was to be made more energetic and intense. Why should this will be strengthened? Why should the disciple of higher wisdom, so to speak, unlearn the fear of the unknown? Therefore, the disciple of higher wisdom should be inwardly equipped with powers of courage that one does not have in ordinary life. Therefore, it should be made clear to him that if he has not unlearned the fear of the unknown , if he has not cultivated this inner courage in his soul, then, by crossing that threshold beyond which he could receive supersensible knowledge about the nature of the soul, he would have to fall into the abyss.

We can best understand what was there as intuition and what has changed so dramatically into our times by remembering something quite ordinary in the history of science. Today, we see our planetary world, our Earth in its relationship to the Sun, in the way that the Copernican worldview has entered the visual life of humanity and how it has developed from this Copernican worldview. We know today that we are not able to think of the earth as being at rest and the sun as moving around it in the same way as medieval man did; that we are not able to think of the different planets in the same movements as this medieval man. We know, looking back to those earlier times when the outer phenomena of the external astronomical world picture were also taken as a basis, the scientific spirit out of which the Copernican world picture arose, with all that followed. But we see something very remarkable: we see in Greek thought, for example in Aristarchus of Samos, something similar to what we profess today, with some variation, of course, corresponding to the old world view, a heliocentric world view. When we read in Plutarch how Aristarchus of Samos places the sun in the center of our planetary system and has the Earth revolve around it, then we find hardly any difference in the main features of how people thought, between what this Aristarchus — and anyone who studies such things knows that all so-called initiates have thought as he did — what this Aristarchus thought about our planetary system and what we ourselves think, except for the results of our extremely well-developed observation.

What do we have here? In ancient times, a worldview of the external and spatial that is so similar to ours, and in contrast to it, in the general consciousness of mankind, merely a registration of the external appearance! The fact that those who were the leaders of the wisdom schools in older times carefully guarded something like the heliocentric worldview from people who were not considered sufficiently prepared for such a worldview by them. And this heliocentric world view is only one part of a general world view that is not at all unlike what modern science has brought us, at least in terms of fundamental ideas, but which was withheld from the broadest circles of humanity. Yes, the peculiar fact is that today we have views in the general human consciousness that were strictly guarded in schools of wisdom in ancient times and that students were only allowed to receive after conscientious preparation of the will to be fearless in the face of the unknown and to courageously embrace such insights.

What did the ancient sages tell each other, when they did not even allow the students to know what every educated person today knows, one may [ask]. Why was it considered dangerous for people in those ancient times to know what every person knows today? Yes, there was thought to be a gulf between the general human consciousness and the knowledge of our world view that the ancient sages possessed, and the sentinel of that gulf, that is to say the experience that one could have when one had gone through that inner struggle, when one had educated oneself to fearlessness and to the courageous comprehension of what we learn in school today, what is general human consciousness today. So in those ancient times, people were virtually demanding preparation for what we are not prepared for today, what is simply poured into our ordinary consciousness. So times have changed, my dear audience. And basically, every historical consideration is a mere external one that takes no account of such a transformation of the soul experience in the course of human development.

The ancient sages said to themselves about the state of mind that humanity had at that time: If man knew something of the heliocentric world view and of that which stands on the same level with it, he would not be able to bear it, he would fall into a kind of spiritual faint, his ordinary consciousness would be clouded. Therefore, they wanted to steel the will through all possible pedagogical-didactic art; they wanted to create a courageous grasp of the supersensible, they wanted to create fearlessness. Because they said: Without the education of these willpower qualities, man will lose consciousness when, for example, he really thinks with the intensity with which one thought in ancient times and of which modern man no longer has a proper idea, that the earth moves with the sun through space at a tremendous speed. In the truest sense of the word, this meant losing one's footing for the student. One did not want to expose the person to this by leaving him in his ordinary consciousness. One said to oneself: He loses self-confidence.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” I have tried to show how, in fact, self-confidence of humanity has changed substantially since relatively recent historical times, how, for example, self-confidence in ancient Greece was quite different from what it is today. It is truly not just an external fact that with Copernicanism, with Galileanism, the intellectual comprehension of the world has come about, that since those times human beings have developed an unprecedented strength of abstract thinking. In this abstract thinking, in this intellectualism, not only was external scientific knowledge gained, but something was also gained for the inner being of the human being. A strengthening of self-confidence was gained for this inner being of the human being.

My dear attendees, what we have today, when we simply go through our school as children and learn in the way we learn today, being prepared for abstract thinking and intellectuality, as happens today, then self-confidence in the human being is cultivated in a different way than it was cultivated even by the most developed Greeks. Unfortunately, far too little attention is paid to such very significant facts of the world-historical development of humanity today. But one senses it, one feels it, and therefore has a longing to once again bring the deeper reasons for all human development to mind. Today, there is no danger of succumbing to spiritual impotence when we receive the external scientific results with a general average education. But to what we are given today with general education from childhood on, the adult human being in the ancient times had to be prepared through very special pedagogical-didactic measures. Then he was introduced to what fulfilled the famous Greek saying: “Know thyself”. For the ancients, however, all knowledge was such that at the same time a certain knowledge of the world arose from their instinct. They did not yet have the developed self-awareness that today's people have. They were exposed to the danger of falling into spiritual powerlessness in the face of the heliocentric world system, but they had an intuitive knowledge of the cosmos based on their instinct. When this intuitive knowledge was then passed on to humanity in myths, the wise men were always there to receive these myths as inner experiences. We must not perceive these as symbolic interpretations of the myths, but we must feel them as an inner sharing of the secrets of the world in the human soul itself. World knowledge was given to the ancients in their, compared to our, weak self-confidence with the soul life at the same time.

You can see for yourself when you take relatively late works of literature into your hands. Today, one may think as one likes about the natural science writings of the tenth to thirteenth century, if one wants to call them that at all. Basically, one cannot read them today if one is not particularly prepared, because they use a language that is no longer used in ordinary scientific life today. But in what is found in these works, what the human being experiences inwardly in his soul is everywhere not separate from what he beholds outwardly. Soul is in him and body is in him. Outside is the physical-corporeal nature, but everywhere he also sees soul in the outward physical nature. We may call this nebulous or false mysticism today and we may be right about it; but the man of earlier times had what carried his soul, what inwardly filled his soul, what consciousness taught him: I am connected with the eternal powers of the world and as the eternal powers of the world develop their powers from beginning to end, I develop my powers with them.

Today we have the opportunity to carry our strengthened self-awareness into what natural science knowledge gives us. We have a broad specialization in the natural scientific worldview, and from this specialization we are told a great deal about the physical body of the human being. But as a rule, the threads break when we seek to understand the relationship between this physical body of the human being about which science tells us so much, and that which we experience inwardly in our souls and in relation to which we cannot but ascribe a different origin to it than can be ascribed to external natural facts and natural forces and natural laws.

And so it has come about, my dear attendees, that modern man, especially when he is steeped in what natural science offers him in a fully justified way – for the spiritual science represented here fully recognizes the triumphs of modern natural science – comes to nothing else, especially when he is conscientious, but to the limits of knowledge. And basically it was precisely the best natural philosophers who spoke of such limits to knowledge, of the ignorabimus that is fatal for the life of the soul: we cannot know anything beyond the limits of what our senses provide us with and what the combining mind can extract from these sensory experiences. One only has to go along with such theories about the limits of knowledge with an intensely developed soul life and one must be able to unload the outdatedness of traditional religious views onto this soul life, which in turn are connected with the old knowledge of the beyond of the threshold. And one will feel the whole inner misery of the modern soul life.

One cannot but say to oneself, my dear audience: We have learned something in the last three to four hundred years with regard to scientific conscientiousness and scientific methods, and what has emerged from this ground as results has become popular and is already shared by all those who claim some kind of education. But at the same time, all of this gives rise to a certain lack of knowledge about what the human soul, out of its deepest longing, wants to know about the eternal destiny of this human soul and about its connection with the eternal powers of the world. After the contemplation of the ancients, we stand on the other side of the threshold. They first tried to prepare themselves for the knowledge that is now quite commonplace and familiar to us. But with their less intense self-confidence, which was therefore fearful of the supersensible world, they developed a pronounced world-consciousness that satisfied them and felt no limits. We have gained a more intensely developed self-confidence, but we have lost our world-consciousness. We feel limits everywhere in the breadth of our knowledge. We feel that we cannot enter into the actual depths of the world. We have gained self-awareness; we must first regain world awareness, otherwise we stand as hermits with our developed soul, admittedly beyond the threshold of the ancients, but not beyond that threshold, which we today call the limit of knowledge of nature or the like.

This is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science comes in, where this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give modern humanity something that in turn leads it over the threshold that has been set for it. However, we cannot stop at a renewal or a rehashing of some old or oriental wisdom. We can no longer unite all this with our consciousness. Today we have to create anew out of the elementary nature of the human soul, but we have to bring it forth from a depth of consciousness that is just as profound as that of the ancients in their own way. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is still rejected by many today out of a certain intellectual laziness, or because it seems to contradict what scientific knowledge has brought forth in modern times.

My dear attendees, one does, of course, run the risk of being misunderstood and, in particular, of being found immodest if one chooses such a comparison as I now want to use to characterize the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. But one can safely leave it to those who like to sneer and scoff. I am not claiming that what I am using as a comparison in terms of world-historical significance should be applied to what I am about to say, but the comparison will explain some things.

When Columbus set out to discover America, there was absolutely nothing in his consciousness that he would discover a new world, a previously unknown world. They believed that they would cross the ocean and land on the other side in India. They only believed that they could come to something known by an unknown path. This is roughly how it is for those who approach the modern scientific world view with the utmost conscientiousness and an inner, invincible desire for knowledge. They find that natural science is actually in the same position as Columbus initially. They want to use it to search for the secrets of the world and of life. They want to go down unknown paths. But either they step back discouraged and stay at home, as the others except Columbus did, or they try to venture out into the unknown. But then they only enter a world that they describe as something quite familiar. What is all that which is described beyond the limits of natural knowledge as moving atoms and molecules, ions and electrons, and all that which is supposed to be behind the curtain of the sensory world that is spread out before us? We search for the underlying principles of nature by unknown paths, and then describe what we encounter as something familiar.

But I would like to say that anyone who approaches things differently, who approaches them with a more lively soul life, especially in the face of this scientific world view, will indeed come to something different, to something comparable to Columbus's experience. He conducts research scientifically, he develops all the conscientious methods, all the intensive responsible thinking, through which one has come to the modern astronomical world view, to the modern biological world view, and then he reflects: What are you actually doing, how do you develop your soul life by experimenting externally, by using the microscope, the telescope, the [spectroscope], the X-ray apparatus, and thereby come to a summary of world phenomena? What is going on in your soul life? What do you discover by devoting yourself to living soul life?

The unknown becomes spiritually known; it is not material atoms and molecules that are discovered, but spiritual experience. Of course, it is rare for anyone to have the direct experience of happiness in natural science, to see the spirit within oneself, which pulses and undulates through the world from beginning to end, from top to bottom. But everyone can recognize the inner path of thinking in modern natural science. And then it can be further developed. And, you see, this further development, this taking up of a new path in the experiences one is having with natural science, that is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science! And what I have described in my books 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and 'Occult Science', is basically, despite the fact that some of the expressions and perhaps all of the terminology still seem adventurous to ordinary human consciousness today, it is nothing other than the higher training of the paths of knowledge that are cultivated by modern scientific research itself. But we must go further than the elementary experiences and develop special methods of knowledge of a purely spiritual nature. Then we shall be able to satisfy, in another way, the spiritual yearning that lives in many souls today, and which leads those who want to come to the spirit but who want to remain in the material world to spiritualism or similar superstitious things, instead of to real spiritual research. Only the intimate paths of the soul's inner life lead to true spiritual research. However, they are uncomfortable because they are different from the usual paths of science, although they are nothing more than a continuation of these usual paths of science.

When we enter life today, at whatever stage of development we do so, we have what we have as inherited qualities, developed through ordinary or higher school education. The results of school education are absorbed into the soul of educated humanity. But one has the awareness that one could remain at a certain stage of life. Today, people stop at a very specific stage of life. They are accepted into our highest scientific schools. There, they are not required to further develop their cognitive faculty, to add to the cognitive powers they have already developed, the cognitive powers that still lie dormant in their souls. They stop at the ordinary cognitive faculty. We observe natural phenomena, we make our observations, our experiments, we use the finest instruments, but we stop at the state of mental life, which is simply the general consciousness.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must proceed differently. It must start from a very specific feeling. I would characterize this feeling by the word “intellectual modesty”. And I cannot express myself about this intellectual modesty other than in the following way: Let us assume that a five-year-old child gets hold of a volume of Shakespeare. What will it do with it? It will play with it, tear it up. But when the child has grown ten or fifteen years older, it will behave in a different, more appropriate way. Its inner soul forces have been developed. That which was predisposed has been developed in these soul forces. Just as the soul forces of the child have developed through external educational influences or are being developed through the world, so something in the soul of the adult can still be developed today if he only says to himself: I must be intellectually modest. I must assume that I face the phenomena of nature in their totality in a way that this facing can be compared to the behavior of a five-year-old child towards a volume of Shakespeare. There is still something in the soul that can be developed in me just as the soul power of the five-year-old child can be developed up to the age of fifteen or twenty.

We must start from this feeling, which thoroughly encompasses the soul life in intellectual modesty. And then, then these forces slumbering in the soul must really be developed. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to do this for its students, for those who are suited to it and have enthusiasm for it. It is not something like a miracle of the soul or the like; it is the continuation of what ordinary soul life is, but a real continuation.

There are two soul powers, my dear audience, which are necessary in ordinary life, but which are different in ordinary life than in the soul life of the developed spiritual researcher in the field of anthroposophy. One of the soul powers is the ability to remember. This ability to remember must, as we say, be developed in a normal way in every human being; for if our ability to remember is somehow interrupted for any length of time, we are mentally ill. It is a serious mental illness when the thread of memory breaks; our sense of self is destroyed. You can read about how these symptoms manifest themselves in the relevant literature. But what do we only achieve in ordinary life through this ability to remember? We attain that which we have experienced, by which we were connected with the world of facts with our soul. This emerges in memories with greater or lesser vividness. We have to live in them. The stream of memories must reach back to a certain point in early childhood for our soul life to be normal. That which would otherwise flash by is given permanence in the soul life through the power of memory.

This is where spiritual scientific schooling comes in. What is called meditation and concentration in the books already mentioned is nothing other than a higher stage of what, at a lower level, is the ability to remember in the human being. When we – without being deceived by auto-suggestion, without being led astray by reminiscences of life – have images presented to our soul that we have been given by an experienced spiritual researcher or that we have been able to learn in some other way, but which must be fully comprehensible so that we can survey them with our consciousness – when we bring such ideas into the center of our consciousness and now rest on them quite arbitrarily, when we give duration to the ideas, which otherwise only follow external events and flit by, then something in our soul is developed in the same way as muscles are developed when they are used in work. This meditation, this constant resting on easily comprehensible ideas, in which nothing of auto-suggestion or reminiscences may be mixed, that is modern meditation. As an inner soul method, it is truly no easier to carry out than the modern scientific work in the observatory, in the chemical laboratory or in the clinic. For years, this resting on such ideas must be carried out.

But then we make the inner discovery that, on the one hand, the ability to remember naturally remains as healthy as a normal person needs it to be, but that, on the other hand, something else develops from this ability to remember for supersensible knowledge. The ability develops, at first in our lives, because that is where supersensible vision begins, not only to survey our lives in memories — for they are indeed pale, however vivid they may be — but to survey it pictorially, as I call it, “in imaginations”. We develop an imaginative view in a moment of everything that otherwise runs in the stream of memory. We survey our life from the point we have reached between birth and death back to childhood, as in a large tableau of life. Here one can say: Time becomes space. No longer do individual memories emerge from the stream of life, but a coherent and unified overview of what we have lived through. This is the beginning of supersensible knowledge through the developed faculty of memory. In a certain respect, the faculty of memory breaks away from bodily conditions; we experience purely in our soul what we have experienced in the outer world.

But as a result, something specific happens in the human being. By first coming to such heightened self-knowledge through an increased ability to remember, he finally comes to understand what it means to live with his soul outside the body. This is the significant event that occurs on the path to supersensible knowledge: living with one's soul outside the body. One reaches a consciousness where one experiences soul-spiritual, first one's own soul-spiritual, then an expanded soul-spiritual, with such clarity, with such an interweaving of inner arbitrariness, as one otherwise only experiences geometric, mathematical conceptions. I would like to say: In this way, one best learns for supersensible knowledge what is given as mathematical presentation; once one has learned to present mathematically, geometrically, to form inner views in contrast to this, so that, when one has a doctrine, one can say: If I know its teaching, then I see through its truth, no matter how many people speak against it. When one has gained the totality and essence of the inner vision, one can inwardly fulfill it and compare it with what one experiences quite differently as more vivid through the developed memory. One finally comes to gain new ideas about certain things that play into life.

One arrives, I said, at connecting a concept to what it means to live outside of the body. But then, the moment of falling asleep, the time between falling asleep and waking up, and waking up itself, becomes something else. For the ordinary consciousness, awareness is dulled when falling asleep and rises again when waking up; it is interrupted between falling asleep and waking up. Through a culture of memory life and the ability to remember as I have described it, the human being becomes aware of himself outside of the body and learns to recognize through direct observation how he leaves his physical body in his soul and spirit. It is not to be understood spatially, but dynamically. But it is correctly spoken: He learns to recognize how he goes out of his body; the spiritual researcher rises into states in which he is completely independent of his body, just as one is unconsciously independent of one's body when asleep. But he experiences himself in states of consciousness where, although his eyes do not see, his ears do not hear, he does not even feel the warmth around him, he is permeated by inner soul life. What he then experiences is as if, by sleeping, a person would experience a new world, a world beyond the physical-sensory world, and would again submerge, as if emerging from a spiritual sea into the ordinary sensory world upon waking.

Then, when one has such experiences, one can now move on to something else that must prepare one for the modern crossing of the threshold, as the old sage prepared his disciples for the unknown through fearlessness and courage. Then another power of the soul must be developed; another power must be transformed into a power of knowledge. Many a person wants to accept, out of modern consciousness, that the ability to remember can be transformed into an independent power of comprehension, because it is related to the intellect, and modern man loves the intellect. He accepts the intellect in the scientific field. But the other soul power, which the one who wants to cross the threshold today must also develop within himself, is not accepted as an objective power of knowledge. Yet it becomes an objective power of knowledge when it is developed in the right way, that is the power of love. Love in knowledge is not accepted; one says: Where love appears, cognition must lose objectivity. But you can read in the books mentioned, “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”, how you can actually make this love independent of what love is otherwise bound to in ordinary life.

Dear attendees, in ordinary life, love is bound to the bodily instincts, to that which a person is as a physical being. When you develop within yourself, just as I have explained before about meditation and concentration of thought, a certain way of looking at how to rise from level to level in life – after all, we basically become a different person every day; you just have to look seriously and honestly to consider what his view of life is today, what the purpose of his life is, what his soul's content is. One need only compare what he was nine or ten years ago with what he is today and he will have to admit that without the will's intervention in the course of life, he becomes another.

A certain schooling must take place in the spiritual researcher. He must learn to take full control of his self-education with complete arbitrariness. Self-discipline must become the education of life. And he must always be clear about what intervenes in his life. He must gain the possibility of confronting his own development of will as its own spectator. That this is necessary to attain a true consciousness of freedom is what I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Freedom, which I published in 1893 as a fundamental socio-ethical view and which has now appeared before humanity in a new edition. There I already dared to say, albeit in relation to ethical-liberal cognition: Love does not blind — but true love, which the human soul wins for merging with the object, educated to do so through faithful self-observation —, it makes seeing. This love makes man free. For by no longer acting out of instincts, out of impulsive drives, but by becoming absorbed in love in the outer world, and allowing himself to be guided only by what is necessary in the world of facts, he becomes free. Selfless love makes man free; but selfless love can also be educated to become a power of cognition. Then we can imbue what we have gained through the developed power of remembrance with what love becomes. And while the developed power of knowledge gives us an idea of how the human being is with the soul forces outside the body, the developed ability to love gives us a correct idea of the soul and spirit within. And when what one gains through the power of love connects with what one gains through the developed ability to remember, then such concepts expand. We know that one leaves the body with the soul, but is then in the spiritual world and that one enters the body again when one wakes up. This is a concept that has a certain significance for the time between birth and death and beyond life. By developing this higher knowledge, we gain the ability to see our soul in its journey before it connects with the earthly-physical human body through birth or conception. Just as we look at the soul as something real before it awakens, where it is indeed waiting for the prepared body, so we look at the soul that dwells in the spiritual worlds before birth and which now has different powers than the merely sleeping soul. The sleeping soul has only the power to revive the soul of the body lying in bed. The soul that dwells in the spiritual world before birth has the power, with the help of what is happening in its physical hereditary current, to organize the physical body so that the human individuality can live out its soul and spirit in it. And we come to gain insight into the eternal nature of the human soul. A view of what the soul is in the purely spiritual worlds is scientifically substantiated with mathematical clarity. And from this knowledge, the knowledge of what happens when we fall asleep as a transition through the portal of death, as the going out into a spiritual world when the physical body has been discarded, also develops. In brief, we attain as a higher stage that which appears on a lower stage as the merely imaginative overview of life up to birth; we attain an extension of this overview to an overview of the eternal of the human soul and the connection of the human soul with the spiritual cosmos. We learn to look into this spiritual cosmos. We learn to know: Here we are on earth in our physical body, looking through our eyes into the physical world, hearing physical sounds, perceiving physical warmth. But what rests in our physical body and says “I” to us, what thinks and feels and senses and wills, that lived in spiritual worlds before it took on this physical body.

And now we learn something extraordinarily characteristic: as we develop here in the body, the soul is shadowy, and we develop nothing but shadowy concepts with what lives inwardly as feeling, as thinking, as will, when we develop self-knowledge. But the world outside us, we have it clearly, it lies spread out before us. When one becomes conscious of what one was before birth in spiritual worlds, there is no external world of objects; we do not see through physical eyes into an external world, we do not hear physical sounds through the external ears, we perceive something else. We perceive the human being in his inner self as a world; the human being whom we have to help create when we are embodied in the world. Here the environment is our world. Before our conception in spiritual worlds, the human being's inner being was our world. The human being is revealed to the human being as the human being simultaneously cognitively grasps his or her eternal being. And here, then, my dear attendees, is where that which is anthroposophical spiritual science expands into a genuine feeling of true human significance and true human existence.

What has modern science ultimately brought? Conscientious research into the animal series, how it stands in development from the lowest creatures up to the perfect one, then, the human being, but nothing about the human being that describes him as a being of his own. He appears only as the end of the animal series. We look to him for what we found in the animal, only at a higher level, as a final point. But in a sense, we have lost the human being in his actual inner being. We stand before the boundaries of the world, we stand before a new threshold. We cross this new threshold in the way I have just described. What the ancients wanted to explore on the other side of the threshold is our present-day general human education; but what they had in world knowledge out of instinct, we must gain for ourselves by crossing the threshold, through such spiritual scientific methods as I have described. But then this spiritual scientific method is transformed into the feeling of true human respect. How this spiritual knowledge is transformed into the feeling of true human respect, how it is transformed into the knowledge of social impulses, is what I will be talking about in more detail on the 28th of the month, when I will draw the consequences for school and educational issues and practical social life issues from what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say.

When I had the honor of addressing the Dutch population here in 1912 and 1908 on the subject of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I could only speak of it as something that, using a new method, strives for spiritual knowledge that is intended to satisfy the soul of man. I could speak of something that is sought and developed by individuals. Since that time, despite the catastrophic events that have occurred in the meantime, much has been achieved in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, including external development.

We have established the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, in Dornach near Basel. The Goetheanum bears this name because we are aware that what appears in Goethe at the elementary level as an intuitive power of judgment, as his artistic and scientific attitude, must be further developed, as I have discussed it today; then one arrives at what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Nevertheless, although the building is not yet complete, we tried last fall to hold a whole series of college courses in this unfinished Goetheanum. These college courses were not held on spiritual science in the narrower sense, but were held by about thirty personalities, by scientists, specialists in the usual fields of science, specialists in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, sociology, law and so on, and so on. But men of practical life, too, who stand in commercial and industrial life, have spoken. Artists have spoken about their art. All this — besides the spiritual-scientific sifting of philosophy — has been presented by thirty lecturers in the content of the Dornach School of Spiritual Science.

What did these college courses aim to achieve? They wanted to show how everything that is modern scientific life, modern practical life and what basically forms the content of modern civilization contains many descending forces that would have to lead to chaos and decline if they remain descending, and how these descending forces can be transformed into ascending forces. It should be shown how spiritual science can illuminate and fertilize the science, the practice of life, the content of our civilization, so that souls longing for knowledge of the supersensible and for the permeation of social life with new impulses can be fulfilled.

Much has been achieved in the development of anthroposophical spiritual science during this time, ladies and gentlemen. Whether the Goetheanum in Dornach, this University for Spiritual Science that wants to intervene in a fruitful way in the life of modern civilization, can be completed will depend on whether people willing to make sacrifices continue to be found who are willing to see it through to completion, just as a great many people have already come together who were insightful enough for spiritual science as it is meant there and have brought it as far as it is today.

This spiritual science has also influenced civil life in other ways. I will discuss the principles in more detail in the next lecture and would just like to mention today how the practice of school life has been influenced by the founding of the Free Waldorf School, an initiative of Emil Molt in Stuttgart, for which I have been entrusted with the leadership of education and didactics as they are derived from spiritual science.

And a start has also been made in terms of practical life through practical economic foundations in Germany and Switzerland. I will speak about this next time too.

But what must underlie all this is the need for a rethinking, a relearning of the newer humanity in the deepest inner soul life. For we need a new self-knowledge of the human being, which can only be gained if we learn to cross the threshold in a new way, the threshold that leads us into the supersensible world in such a way that we can carry our modern strengthened consciousness into the realms that lie beyond this threshold, and gain a new spirit-filled world view to go with our strengthened self-awareness. This is the first question of civilization in the present day.

The second question is this, which confronts us wherever we look at life today. We cannot achieve a corresponding social coexistence if we are not able to recognize the human being in his essence when he comes to us; if we are not able to respect, feel and appreciate the full inner significance of the being that walks the earth as a human being. We can only truly approach people as people if we gain an understanding of people from spiritual knowledge, and true human love from that love that strives towards knowledge.

And we can only deepen all this religiously and develop it artistically if we come from mere abstract knowledge, the intellectualism of modern times, to a true spiritual insight that in turn not only takes hold of us intellectually, but as a whole human being; carries us as a whole human being into life. The science that we have had could only show us a world of nature that runs by itself, that has developed from nebulous states and produces man as an external form, and which in turn will one day fall back into the sun as slag. And on the other hand, what sits within us as ideals, what sits within us as moral impulses. But this modern science, if it is completely honest, cannot bridge the gap between a person's inner soul consciousness and the outer cosmic consciousness. By acquiring spiritual science in the sense described here, the human being regains the ability to say: “What I gain in social life is not only significant for a perishing humanity, but, in that the human being is born out of the spirit of the world, for this world spirit.”

Human deeds will in turn be recognized as cosmic deeds. That man may know himself, that he may learn to appreciate man, that he may learn to appreciate his position in the whole cosmos, spiritually as well as intellectually, these are the great civilizing questions of the present, which are more closely related to the field of knowledge. They expand into the question of schooling, into the economic and social question, into the legal and technical questions of social life, which I will allow myself to supplement today's reflection by speaking to you about on the 28th.

Answering questions

Question: Are there dangers associated with the path to the spiritual worlds?

Dr. Steiner: Dear attendees! It must of course be said that whatever a person does in life can, under certain circumstances, be associated with dangers and that there is always the possibility of avoiding dangers by taking the right path. As you will understand, it is not possible to give more than hints in a short lecture, and of course I could only give such hints today. Therefore, I could not describe the details of the path to knowledge in the supersensible worlds. If I could have done so, you would have seen that the matter of supersensible knowledge, as it is meant here in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the life of the soul in this way, stands in a very specific relationship to what the life of the soul otherwise is. We are familiar with the ordinary life of a human being as it manifests in the waking state, in which the human being makes use of his senses, combining the perceptions of the senses with the intellect, developing them into laws of nature or of history or of social life, and so on. But there is also another possibility, which is that the soul and spirit of man are more strongly bound to the body than is the case in ordinary life. According to the materialistic theory, it is as if the soul-spiritual experiences were nothing more than a result of the physical-bodily states. One refers, if one wants to prove something like that, to the fact that parallel physical-bodily states can indeed be proven for the soul-spiritual experiences. But if one approaches it only from a spiritual-scientific point of view, and it is precisely this that is important, that one goes into the details of spiritual-scientific knowledge, the view of the connection between spiritual-mental experiences and physical-bodily experiences, as it is usually given, is a thoroughly incorrect one.

Let us suppose, for the sake of a comparison, that I walk along a path that is somewhat soggy. The person following behind will see that there are tracks in the path that have been made by a human being. Another being, which is not visible to people, would be able to believe that these tracks on the path are determined from the inside of the path, from the earth; the earth would have powers through which these footprints arise. So anyone who just thinks about the configuration of the path could come to this conclusion. The one who has come to know the soul and spirit is not surprised that the traces of the soul and spirit are in the physical and bodily, for example, in the nervous system. They are imprinted, so to speak, like the traces in the soft earth. Therefore, everything that is experienced in the soul and spirit must be found again in the physical and bodily.

To do this, a certain independence of the spiritual-mental from the physical-bodily is already present in normal life. In the morbid life, in what we know as psychopathic, which of course occurs in the most diverse forms of mental illness, it turns out that the spiritual-mental life is strongly tied to the physical life, stronger than in the normal state. It should always be noted that mental illnesses are basically physical illnesses. Due to the physical illness, the soul-spiritual feels more bound to an organ than it should be. In this respect, medicine in particular will have to be deeply fertilized. Last spring I held a course for doctors and medical students in which I showed how medicine, especially therapy, can be fertilized. But it is precisely here, when one studies medicine in a spiritual scientific way, that one has to look at the physical and bodily foundations of mental illnesses. For they consist in the fact that the human being is more spiritually and soulfully bound to the body than in the normal state. The opposite state is brought about by the kind of education I have been discussing today, but not for spiritual knowledge, for spiritual insight.

The spiritual researcher will be fully immersed in practical life. If you sleep well and are able to function well during the day in your outer practical life, you are not a clumsy, useless, inept person, and you are not a proper spiritual researcher either. These things are definitely connected. Precisely because the spiritual soul becomes independent of the physical body, the method I have described lies in the opposite directions of mental illnesses. Mental illnesses are a sinking of the spiritual into the physical and bodily, and it is precisely through this method that I have described that one can, at the same time, make human life healthy, quite apart from the fact that they are methods of knowledge. And it is slander that dangers are associated with the spiritual or physical life of a person when these methods are followed. That is not the case. It is just that all kinds of amateurish methods of soul development are cropping up in the world. These are actually always associated with dangers, because they always push the spiritual-soul into the physical, whereas what is described here as the spiritual path from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not in any way attempt to connect the spiritual-soul with the physical-bodily in a pathological way, but to liberate it in such a way that the experience is as inwardly light-filled and clear as mathematical experience is. It is important to note that nothing that is striven for in spiritual-scientific methods is in any way mystically nebulous, but that everything is imbued with complete clarity. Therefore, there will be nothing more superficial than nebulous mysticism, which only appears to be deep but is in fact superficial. What is striven for is thoroughly intellectual and spiritual, but it is a healing of the soul, not an illness.

Dear attendees,

Those who speak about a topic such as the one that is to be the subject of tonight's evening reflection must be seriously aware that there are numerous human souls in the present who, both out of the currents of knowledge of the present and out of the practical social directions of this present, long for a re-creation of things, for a re-creation of the world view, souls that feel that in a certain respect, with the ideas, with the feelings and also with the will impulses that have come down to people from the last centuries and in which we have been educated, it is no longer easy to continue in spiritual and social life.

We, as humanity in the civilized world, have experienced, on the one hand, the great, the tremendous progress of the natural scientific worldview and, on the other hand, we have experienced the tremendous results of this natural scientific worldview in the field of technology, in the field of practical life, which we encounter at every turn, so to speak, from morning till night. But we have also been influenced by the tremendous scientific results, by the practical consequences of these scientific discoveries in social life. Today, people can – and this is the case in every field, if they allow themselves to be influenced by scientific knowledge in one form or another, through their usual reading, through everyday life, through everything that otherwise brings us together with existence, from morning to evening – they cannot help but ask the eternal questions of the human soul and spirit, the questions about the immortal essence of the human soul, about the meaning of the whole world, about the meaning of human action itself; he cannot help but ask these questions, the answers to which have been given to him earlier through religious beliefs. He cannot help but is still so devoted to religious creeds, when he absorbs modern education, than to think and feel about these questions, to consider what the impulses for his actions are, and to link them to what science has been saying for three to four centuries, which has not spoken to people of earlier centuries in this way. And this modern human being cannot do otherwise than, by standing inside of life that has become so complicated, the tone of which depends entirely on modern technology, by being harnessed to it through this modern technology, he cannot do otherwise than look at how his life is dependent on this technology. And he cannot help saying to himself: Fundamentally, people have become quite different from the old, simpler conditions throughout the whole civilized world. And he must then become fully aware of it, he must sense that in this social relationship, in relation to the coexistence of people with one another, many things must be resolved as a question.

Yes, we can even say the following in a certain respect; we can say: scientific knowledge compels us to reckon with it. The practical technical results that our modern life has brought about, they compel us to live with them. But neither of these actually answers the big questions of human existence; basically, they raise new questions. For anyone who delves with an unbiased mind into everything that science has to say in such a great and significant way about man, his organization, his form of life on earth, and so on, anyone who deals with all this, who really delves into these things, does not receive answers about the eternal nature of man, about the meaning of the world and existence; on the contrary, he receives deeper, more meaningful questions. And he must ask himself: Where now are the answers to these questions, which have become deeper and more urgent through the newer life? For from the side of knowledge, we have not actually received solutions to the great riddles of the world through the achievements of science, but rather new questions, new riddles.

And what about practical life? Well, we have been placed in this practical social life, with the means of our powerful, extensive industry, the means of our widespread world trade, and so on. But it is precisely this practical life that presents us with ethical, moral, spiritual questions about the way people interact with each other. And precisely the riddle that presents itself to us in the interaction between people is what is stirring minds today as a social question, and what often appears before people who think seriously and take life seriously in an alarming way. So it is also the practical side of life that presents man with a riddle.

These riddles, which approach the human soul from two sides, are now confronted by what the speaker calls “anthroposophically oriented spiritual science”. It seeks to find those sources of human nature, starting from the foundations of knowledge and then from the foundations of practical life, which can lead to at least a partial solution to this riddle; to that solution of these riddles that is possible for man, but also necessary; necessary because it is obvious to anyone who is unbiased that life continues in this way, when souls face the pressing questions in this way and become inwardly desolate, if new impulses for social life are not found from the depths of the human soul, we as humanity will go into decline and will not be able to rise in relation to the great civilizational issues of the present.

The goal of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not directed against scientific knowledge. Anything that was directed against the scientific knowledge that has brought humanity so much good would be completely amateurish and doomed to superficiality. But precisely because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is completely serious about what natural science has really achieved for modern humanity, that is precisely why it comes to different conclusions than those that are still being achieved today by scientific investigations or the like, which are carried out everywhere in ordinary life.

The same path is followed in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but it continues in a certain way. And I would like to use a comparison to illustrate and make clear how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to scientific research. I am certainly not using it immodestly to pin what anthroposophy has been able to achieve so far to a world-historical event and to try to explain it in a similar way. It is just a comparison, and I can certainly leave it to those who want to scoff to scoff at such a comparison. When Columbus set out across the ocean, it was by no means clear where he would end up. In those days, the problem of world trade, which Columbus then introduced into civilization, was either met either by ignoring the great unknown that lay across the ocean, or by remaining with what one already had as a home place; or one faced it in such a way that one ventured out onto the wide ocean, like Columbus and his men, but even then one did not yet hope that one would discover an America or the like. One only wanted to find another way to India, from the other side. One wanted to reach what was already known. In this way, I would like to say, as it was with Columbus, who wanted to reach something already known from the other side, but then found something completely different along the way, found something new, so it is with the spiritual scientist who seriously engages in scientific research. Usually, when people engage with scientific research at home, they stick to what they already have, to the observation of sensory phenomena and the rational combination of what the sensory phenomena present. Or, when one is armed with the instruments, the tools that serve observation, with the telescope, the microscope, the spectroscope, the X-ray machine, and then, armed with the conscientious, excellent method of thought of the newer sciences – when one ventures out with all of this into the sea of research, then on the other side one only wants to find something familiar, which is similar, but only similar to what one already has: atoms, molecules with complicated movements, a world, then, behind the curtain that is spread out as the sense world; a world that one describes as small movements, small bodies and the like, but which is basically similar to what one already has here and sees with one's eyes, touches with one's hands and the like. For that is what then underlies this supersensible world of the natural scientist.

But the person who, with the same seriousness, but only going further into this sea of research, sets out on this journey with anthroposophical spiritual science, comes to something else. He does not encounter the familiar atoms and molecules along the way, but by becoming aware of: What are you actually doing by investigating nature in the way that the more recent centuries have done? What happens in you during the research? What does your soul accomplish at the observatory, researching in the clinic? Your soul – as someone who combines a little introspection with what he is doing would say to himself – your soul works entirely spiritually, but it works by trying to explore the development of animals up to the human being, by trying to penetrate the course of the stars, in a way that people did not work in the past. But then, humanity did not always observe it that way. They did not always say to themselves: By exploring nature, it is the spirit, the soul, that is actually working in me, and I must recognize this spirit, this soul.

Dear attendees, what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science presents as its results has actually been gained through the path of natural science. It is won, as was found by Columbus as an unknown America. But that which is carried out, that which becomes conscious as spirit, as soul, in the truly searching mind, can then be further developed, further cultivated. In this way one attains a real knowledge of what spirit is in the human soul. And the methods of developing what I have just hinted at, what is thoroughly active in the human soul in the modern natural scientist, these methods of developing that, that is the task of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here. But a very specific starting point must be chosen for this spiritual science. One must start from what one could call “intellectual modesty”.

Indeed, one must have this intellectual modesty to such an extent that the comparison, which I will now use only as a comparison, is entirely justified. One must say to oneself: If, for example, you give a five-year-old child a volume of Shakespeare, what will the child do with it? He will tear it up or play with it in some other way. If the child has progressed in his development by ten to fifteen years, he will no longer tear up the volume of Shakespeare, but will do with it what is appropriate for the volume of Shakespeare. The child already had certain abilities in his soul as a five-year-old child, which could be brought out of this soul and developed, and through the development of these abilities the child has actually become a different person than he used to be. Is it possible for an adult human being – a person who has already achieved the usual development of everyday life and ordinary science – to summon up the intellectual humility to say to himself: when faced with the secrets of nature, I am basically in the same position as the five-year-old child in front of the volume of Shakespeare. There are still abilities in me that are hidden, that I can bring out, that I can develop and unfold from my soul, and I must further my soul life through self-education, then I will be able to face all of nature anew in a similar way to how the child, in relation to its five-year-old state, faces the Shakespeare volume when it has reached fifteen or twenty years of age. And I have to talk to you about the methods by which such powers, lying in every human soul, can be developed out of this human soul. For by developing these methods, we do indeed gain a completely new insight into nature and into human existence. These methods, the modern, seeking human soul senses in a certain way, but one does not get beyond these intuitions in the broadest circles until now.

You see, it is still the case that there are many people among us who say to themselves: When we look back to ancient times or when we look across to the Orient, for example, where the remains, albeit the decadent remains, of an ancient wisdom, there is still something of the knowledge, of that which is called science, at the same time takes on a religious character, where one can bring the human soul to a certain satisfaction about the world and one's own existence. And because one sees such, because also the outer anthropological science has brought up realizations of very deep nature over old human world views within our civilized life, therefore many people long back to those earlier soul conditions. They want to bring ancient wisdom back to life, and they want to spread what has been preserved of such ancient wisdom in the East to our Western world, according to the saying “Ex oriente lux”. Such people, who long for a knowledge that is not that of our age, do not understand the meaning of human development. For every age has its special tasks for humanity in relation to all areas of life. We cannot today fill our souls with the same treasures of wisdom that our ancestors filled theirs with centuries or millennia ago. But we can orient ourselves in a certain way to how they did it, these ancestors, and then we can seek a path in our own way into the supersensible. For the human soul does sense that in the depths of its being it is connected not with the natural world, to which the body is connected, but with a supersensible nature, to which the soul's eternal nature and the eternal destiny of this soul are connected.

Now, in earlier centuries or millennia, our ancestors had a very definite view of man's relationship to that world to which man belongs outside of birth and death. These were very definite ideas that filled the soul with deep feelings and emotions, which were linked to entering this path into the supersensible world, to supersensible knowledge. And there is one idea in particular that filled those who heard it resounding in all its depth from ancient times with shivers. It is the idea of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the threshold that one must cross if one wants to ascend from ordinary knowledge, which guides us in everyday life and in ordinary science, to the actual knowledge of the spirit and soul. People in ancient times sensed: There is an abyss between ordinary knowledge and that which actually provides insights into the nature of the soul. And it was a very real feeling for these people that something stood at this threshold, a being not of human kind, a being of spiritual kind, that guarded them from crossing this threshold before they were sufficiently prepared. The leaders of the old wisdom schools, which are also called mysteries, did not allow anyone to cross this threshold who had not first been properly prepared, namely through a certain discipline of will. We can understand why this was so by looking at a very simple example.

Today, we as human beings are quite proud of the fact that for centuries we have had a different external view of our planetary system and the rest of the starry world than the Middle Ages had, or than, in our view, ancient times had. We are proud of the Copernican worldview, and rightly so from a certain point of view. We say: We have the heliocentric world view in contrast to the geocentric world view of the Middle Ages and ancient times, when it was imagined that the Earth was at rest and that the Sun and the stars moved around the Earth. Today we know that the Earth orbits the Sun at a tremendous speed, and we then calculate from the observations that arise in connection with this what we then have as a world view of our solar or planetary system. And we look back to the Middle Ages and know that they had a world view that can be said to be childlike in a certain way in relation to this heliocentric system. But if we go further back, for example even to a few centuries before the birth of Christ, we find that in ancient Greece, for example with Aristarchus of Samos, a heliocentric world view was given; Plutarch tells us about it. This world view of Aristarchus of Samos does not differ at all in its main features from what everyone learns as the right thing in primary schools today. But in those days, Aristarchus of Samos only revealed it to a wider circle; otherwise it was only taught in the narrower circles of the mysteries. It was only brought to people who had first been prepared by the leaders of the wisdom schools. It was said: Man with his ordinary consciousness is not suited to receive such a world picture; between him and this world picture the threshold to the spiritual world must be erected; he must be guarded by the Guardian of the Threshold of the Threshold, from experiencing unprepared something like the heliocentric system or many other things that are known today by all educated people, but which were withheld from the ancients if they were not sufficiently prepared.

Why were people kept in the dark about these things back then? Well, our historical knowledge does not usually extend to the depths of human soul development. In this science of history, which is common practice today, people are not told how the souls of human beings have changed in their constitution over the course of centuries and millennia. In Greek and Roman times, and even in the early Middle Ages, people's souls were in a completely different state than they are today. People had a world consciousness, a world knowledge, that arose from their instincts, from very vague, half-dreamy states of soul. Today we cannot even begin to imagine this knowledge of the world. When we look at the works of that time that could be called scientific, we may think of them as we will. We may call them superstitious, and in terms of today's education we would be quite right to do so. But the peculiar character of these works was that people had never before looked at minerals, plants, and animals, at rivers and clouds, or watched the stars rise and set with such dryness and sobriety, and with such an emptiness of spirit. They perceived the spiritual soul in every stone, in every plant, in every animal, in the movement of the clouds, in all of nature. Man felt the spiritual soul within himself and what he felt within himself was also spread out for him in the outer world. He did not yet feel as separate from the outer world as man feels today. But his self-confidence was also weaker for that. And in the old days of human development, one could rightly say to oneself: If you told a person something of the nature of the heliocentric system, as it was communicated to the wise, as it were, if you told him that the Earth orbits through space at a tremendous speed, he would fall into a mental faint.

Yes, my dear attendees, this is an historical truth. It is just as much an historical truth as the historical truths we learn at school about Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian and the Persian Wars. But it is a truth that we usually do not learn, that the Greek soul was different from the human soul today. It was duller in relation to the powers of inner self-awareness. The wise leaders of the mysteries would have been right to fear that these souls, if led unprepared into supersensible knowledge, or even into the knowledge that is common to all educated people today, would have fallen into spiritual fainting. Therefore, it was said, the souls of men must first be made strong and courageous by a discipline of the will, so that they can endure when their self-consciousness is led into a very different world from the ordinary. And the souls must be made fearless in the face of the unknown into which they were to enter. Fearlessness in the face of the unknown, a courageous grasp of that which, according to the view of the ancients, literally causes one to lose the ground beneath one's feet — because when one is no longer standing on the resting earth, one the ground under your feet —, it was a courageous state of mind and fearlessness and many other qualities that prepared the students of the wisdom schools to cross the abyss into the spiritual, supersensible world.

And what did they learn then? They learned – and this is the surprising, the paradoxical – they learned what we [all] learn today in elementary school, what is considered to be an insight that is common to all educated people. This was what the ancients were actually afraid of, and they had to be courageously educated to it first. Thus, the human soul has developed over the centuries that it is now in a completely different state; that what could only be given to the ancients after difficult preparation is already given to us today in elementary school. Basically, we are well beyond the threshold that the ancients were only allowed to cross after long preparation. But we also have to bear the consequences of crossing this threshold. We stand before that which our ancestors feared, and for which they first had to train themselves to gain courage; but we have also lost something. What we have lost within our modern civilization is told to us, on the one hand, by those who, precisely as the serious researchers of our contemporary science, dwell on that which we cannot know. And why this is so, that must basically be explained to those who, from a serious spiritual science, confront such facts as I have just described to you.

Since the time of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, we have acquired a completely different self-awareness. We have progressed to abstract thinking. We develop intellectuality in such a strong way that the ancients did not develop it in their dull consciousness. That is why we have such a strong self-confidence that we can place ourselves in the world in which the ancients could only place themselves after preparation. But we enter this world, as shown by the most unbiased researchers, who speak of ignorabimus, of the limits of knowledge, and so on, by having a strongly developed self-confidence, a self-confidence that is strongly developed through thinking, through intellectuality, which the ancients did not have, but we lack the connection with the deeper reasons of the world in this strong self-confidence. We have acquired an insistence on ourselves, a strengthening of self-awareness; but knowledge of the world, we have lost that. We no longer gain such a connection from instinct as people could still achieve in the tenth or twelfth century. We must therefore speak of a new threshold into the spiritual world. We must in turn develop something through our increased self-awareness that will lead us into the spiritual, into the supersensible world, into which we cannot enter instinctively as the ancients [still] could. Just as the ancients developed self-awareness through self-discipline in order to endure in the world into which we come unprepared, we must prepare ourselves for something else. We must also prepare ourselves to develop the forces slumbering in our soul, which we become aware of through intellectual modesty.

You see, one starts from two well-known powers in the human soul, not from some obscure things or the like in the human soul. In serious spiritual science, one starts from two powers that are absolutely necessary in human life, but one develops them further. You say to yourself: they are only at the beginning of their development in ordinary life, you continue this development through your own work on yourself. One of the forces that is further developed in this way is what is called the human ability to remember. It is through this ability to remember that we are actually a self. It is through this ability to remember that we have ordinary self-awareness. We look back to a certain year in our childhood, and the experiences we have had emerge in memory images, more or less faded and shadowed, but they do emerge. And we know from ordinary medical literature – everyone can see for themselves that this is the case – we know what it means when an area of our lives is erased, when we cannot remember anything in the course of our lives. We are then mentally ill. Such an illness is one of the most severe mental illnesses. But this ability to remember, which is so necessary for ordinary life, is in this ordinary life quite bound to the body, to the body of the human being, as everyone feels. And those who are more materialistically minded point out how this dependence shows itself, how certain organs or organ members need only be injured, and the memory is also injured, interrupted, destroyed. But this faculty of remembrance can become the starting-point for developing out of him a new and higher soul power, and that happens in the way I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and in other writings. There I have shown how, through what I call meditation, what I call in the technical sense concentration on certain worlds of thought, of feeling, and of will impulses, the power of remembrance can be trained to something higher.

What is then the peculiarity of memory images? Otherwise we form our images and thoughts from the external world; they flit past like the external world flits past us. Through memory we constantly relive what we have experienced. Even years later we can still draw from the very depths what we have experienced. Through memory, images are constantly forming within us. We use this in meditation and in concentration when we want to become spiritual researchers. We form — or we let ourselves be advised by those who know about these things — easily comprehensible ideas; such ideas that cannot come from the subconscious, that cannot be reminiscences of life either, ideas that we can understand as precisely as we can understand mathematical or geometric ideas. Then we rest with our soul on these images. Training these methods is truly no easier than clinical research, research in a physics or chemistry institute or at the observatory. It is certainly an inner work of the soul, but it is a very serious work for this soul. It can take years, for some it can also take less time, depending on the inner destiny of the person, but it always takes some time until this repeatedly evoked resting on certain ideas can lead to something. Of course, the rest of life must not be disturbed by these exercises; one remains a reasonable, capable person, because these exercises only take up a short time. But they must be practised for a long time, then they will achieve what one might call a higher development of the power of recollection. We then become aware of something in our soul that lives like the thoughts of the experiences we have gone through. Only we know that what now lives in our soul does not refer to anything we have gone through in life since birth; but just as we otherwise have the images of such experiences, so we now have other images. I called them 'imaginations' in my writings. We have images as vivid as the memory images, but not linked to what we have gone through in our ordinary lives. Instead, we become aware that these imaginations do not relate to anything we have gone through in our ordinary lives, but to something outside of us, in the spiritual world.

And we learn to recognize what it means to live outside of the human body. With the ability to remember, we cling to our body. With this developed, trained ability to remember, we no longer cling to the body, and something occurs that we can call similar and yet quite different from the state that a person goes through from falling asleep to waking up. There he is usually unconscious, there is the consciousness extinguished, in this time from falling asleep to waking up, because man does not see with his eyes or hear with his ears. In this state one is when one uses the developed ability to remember. One does not perceive with eyes and ears, one does not even perceive the warmth in one's surroundings, but one does not live unconsciously as in sleep, but one lives in a world of perceptions, in a world of perceptions. One now perceives a spiritual world. It is really as if one were beginning to fall asleep, but not passing into the dullness of unconsciousness, but into another world. This other world is perceived through the developed ability to remember. And one now learns to recognize, as a first view, what I would like to call the 'memory tableau', but the developed memory tableau of this life up to the birth. That is, in a sense, the first supersensible perception.

Otherwise, one has memories of one's life, one lets images arise, memory images, from the stream of life. It is not the same when one looks at life through this supernaturally developed ability to remember. The whole stream of life is combined in a single moment — like something spatial — into a comprehensible image. What otherwise only emerges as individual memory fragments in the course of time becomes a coherent stream when we achieve this independence from our body. Then, once we have become accustomed to imagining independently of the body, just as a sleeping person would imagine if they could, what can be called a real contemplation of what it is to fall asleep, to wake up, and what it is to sleep in general develops. One learns to recognize how that which is in the human being spiritually and soulfully really comes out – not spatially, but dynamically. It is correct to say that it usually remains unconscious, but that the human being can develop his consciousness outside of the body and how consciousness consists of the spiritual and soulful re-immersing itself in the body. And once this has been developed, one can gradually ascend to further perceptions.

If you can imagine what a person is like when asleep as a living spiritual-soul entity, then you will also come to recognize how the spiritual-soul has lived in a purely spiritual world before descending into the physical world through birth or conception, if you keep working with the developed memory in the manner described. You learn to distinguish between: The sleeping person has a sensual and supersensory desire to return to the physical body lying in bed and to revive it spiritually and mentally. But this power is also known as a strong power in the soul, which first waits to be received by a physical body that comes from father and mother in the physical inheritance current, but one learns to recognize how this soul rises from the spiritual-soul world and permeates the body. One acquires knowledge of how our soul lives spiritually before birth. One gets to know the eternal in the human soul. It is no longer a belief that one clings to this eternal in the human soul, but a knowledge that is acquired through supersensible vision. And one also acquires knowledge of the great falling asleep that the human being experiences when he passes through the gate of death. Just as consciousness is only dulled, not lost, in sleep, so it is with the human soul as it passes through the gateway of death, only it is the other way around: while a person, when he falls asleep and wants to return to the body, clings to the body and thus, in ordinary sleep, his consciousness is dulled, when he passes through the gate of death, his consciousness is awakened because he has no desire for the body. Only after he has lived in the spiritual world for a long time does something occur that could be compared to the age of the physical body, which is reached in the 35th year of life. When the soul has lived for a time after death, a longing arises again to return to the body, and a transition to a new life on earth occurs. I have repeatedly described these experiences of a person between death and a new birth in more detail. When these things are described, they are still widely ridiculed and mocked by people today, seen as fantastic. But those people who consider what is gained in this way to be fantastic should at the same time consider mathematical concepts to be fantastic, because what is gained in this way is just as real as what is found through true and earnest natural research.

And a powerful and significant image appears. It is not the case that when we have a memory image, we actually have something that we experienced years before in front of our soul. We have that before us as an image that we have experienced. When we have that before us, which we do not have through ordinary memory, but through the developed ability to remember, we have that spiritual world before us in which we are as a sleeping person, but in which we are also before we descend to earthly life. We have that which does not appear to the senses in the external world around us, but which appears to the spiritual eye, the soul eye. We have the spiritual foundations, the world's width before us. We ascend again, past a new guardian of the threshold, over a new threshold, into the supersensible world, to the spiritual background of natural existence, to which we belong. There it emerges like a mighty memory of stone and clouds and of all that is in the realms of nature. This is what a stone looks like to the eye, a cloud. To the spiritual eye, something appears to which we are related because we have lived in it before our birth or conception. There is the great memory of the world. And as this world memory of our own superphysical existence before our birth arises, as our eternal self appears to us from the outer world before the spirit eye, we simultaneously receive a tableau of the spirit that is spread out in the world around us. We attain real spiritual knowledge of the world.

Spiritual science must speak of these things, because this is something that must enter into modern civilization, just as the Copernican worldview entered a few centuries ago, just as Galileo's worldview entered. Just as these things were rejected in those days, just as they were seen as paradoxical, as fantastic, so too is spiritual science seen as fantasy today. But these things will be taken up into the human soul and will have, as I will mention in a moment, an effect on the outer, social, and whole existence of man. But first I must point out that for full spiritual knowledge, another power of knowledge must be developed.

People will still admit that one can develop the power of memory into a cognitive faculty. But perhaps the strict scientists in particular will not accept the second power that I have to mention as a cognitive faculty, and yet it is, although not as it occurs in life, but when it is developed, a real cognitive faculty: it is the power of love.

In ordinary life, love is tied to human instincts and the human libido, but just as the ability to remember can be extracted from ordinary life, so too can this love. In terms of love, one can also become independent of the human body. The power of love can be developed by using it to achieve real objectivity. While in ordinary life one loves because the inner being of man encourages this love, one can develop this love by immersing oneself in external objects, by becoming one with the external object, forgetting oneself. When you perform an action not out of inner impulses that come from the drives, the instincts, but when you act out of love for external events, then that is the love that is at the same time the power of human freedom. That is why I already said in the book I published in 1893 under the title “Philosophy of Freedom” that in the higher sense the saying that love is blind is not true, but that love is precisely what enables us to see. And the one who finds himself in the world through love truly makes himself free, for he makes himself independent of the inner instincts and drives that enslave him; he knows how to become absorbed in the world of external facts and events and to let the world dictate his actions; but then he can act as a free human being in the sense of what should happen, no longer carried and led by what his instincts and drives are. Just as I wanted to provide a basis for a free social feeling within modern civilization in my Philosophy of Freedom, for that which can truly found a social life from the depths of the human being, so it must also be said that this love must be developed as a power of knowledge, for example, when one develops a keen power of observation for that which one becomes anew with each passing day.

Let us be honest, honored attendees, honest with ourselves: Are we not fundamentally different every day? Life drives us; what we experience in other people and what we experience in them, everything drives us. If we think back to how we were ten years ago, we will admit to ourselves: We were quite different from what we have become today and basically we are something different with each passing day. But we drift in our ordinary lives. This is what the spiritual researcher must do as a discipline of the will, that he must take this development of the will into his own hands, so to speak, observing himself: What have you been influenced by today? What has changed your inner life today? What has changed your inner life in the last ten or twenty years? What has occurred in you? On the one hand, you have to do this, but on the other hand, you have to do something else. You have to give yourself very specific impulses and drives so that you not only live in such a way that you are changed from the outside, that life is changed from the outside, but you also have to stand next to yourself as your own spectator, so to speak, and watch your will and your actions. If you do that, then you simply develop that higher love, which is completely absorbed in the objects, in a lawful way.

And when we develop these two soul powers: on the one hand, the memory that is freed from the body, on the other hand, the power of love, which actually makes us one with our true spiritual being and brings us to a higher self-awareness, then we cross the threshold to a spiritual world. Then the external knowledge of nature complements each other in such a way that we can fertilize all the individual sciences through this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I have experienced it, how at a famous medical school, the great medical authorities were talking about medical nihilism. They spoke of medical nihilism because they had gradually come to the conclusion that, basically, no remedies can be found for typical illnesses. In more recent scientific life, the connection with nature has been lost; it is not understood. At most, one tries out this or that substance to see if it has a healing relationship to this or that disease, but one does not see the bigger picture. Through spiritual science, one sees through plant life, the individual plants, the great differences that exist between the root life, the leaf life, the flower life, and one sees through the relationships of the spiritual being that is behind it, behind the root life, the leaf life, the flower life, the herb life of plants. Knowledge is gained about how this relates to the human being, who, as a whole human being, has grown out of this nature. One gains an insight into the relationships of animals, plants, minerals to man, and one thereby gains a rational therapy. Medicine can be fertilized in this way. Last spring I myself gave a course for doctors, medical practitioners and medical students, in which I showed how spiritual knowledge can be used to enrich the study of remedies, but also pathology, the study of diseases.

And so all the individual sciences can be enriched by spiritual knowledge. By attaining this spiritual knowledge, by truly growing together with what we were, with the spiritual and soul life, but which now works in our physical body, we acquire a completely different knowledge of human nature than through ordinary science. This ordinary science only wants to have logical, abstract, and delimited concepts about nature and human existence, and it is said that it is not a true science where such abstract laws cannot be derived. Yes, my dear audience, if nature does not work according to such abstract laws, then we humans can declaim about such laws for a long time; we only limit our knowledge if we only want to proceed logically and abstractly in science, if we can only indulge in abstract experiments. Then nature could easily say: Under such circumstances, I will not provide any insights into humans.

By approaching the subject with spiritual science, we learn to recognize that nature does not create according to laws, but according to principles that can only be attained through artistic observation, through real imaginations. We cannot fathom the wonderful secret of the human form, of the entire human organization, through abstract laws or through observation as it is done in ordinary science. We have to develop and grow into that which we gain in elementary knowledge for imaginative observation. Then true human nature is revealed, and thus an artistic view of the human being springs forth out of spiritual knowledge.

This is how the bridge is built from spiritual knowledge to art. For anyone who devotes themselves to knowledge in the sense of the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, knowledge is not something external. And if he is an artist, he does not create dry symbols, didactic theories or the like, but he sees forms in spiritual life and can impress them on the material. In this way, a renewal of art is created at the same time. We can experience it if we are open-minded. The old artists created great and powerful things. How did they create? In the past centuries, they first looked with their senses at external matter. Take Rembrandt or Raphael, they looked at the external matter in their age; they knew how to grasp the spiritual from the external sensual reality and depict it. The essence of their art consisted in the idealization of reality. The person who looks at this art with an open mind and sees how it has developed knows that the hour of this art has passed and that nothing new can be created along these lines. Spiritual science leads to spiritual insight. Spiritual forms are seen in spiritual and soul-like vitality. And with the same reality, with the same sense of reality, as was previously created artistically, where reality was idealized, artistic creation is now beginning through the realization of the spiritual and the spiritual. In the past, the artist extracted the spirit from matter; now the spirit is being carried into matter. But not in an allegorical or symbolic way. Only those believe this who cannot imagine how immediately real that can be which can be created as new art.

Thus we see how this spiritual science actually leads to real art. But it also leads to a real religious life. It is remarkable that today there are critics of this spiritual science who say: spiritual science wants to bring down into everyday life that which should only be felt at lofty heights as the divine world. Yes, that is what this spiritual science wants. It wants man to be so imbued with spiritual and soul existence through the knowledge of the supersensible worlds that the spirit is not only grasped in a mystical fog, experienced in an asceticism alien to life, but that this spirit can be carried into every practical existence. People believe that they have already achieved a great deal if they have given the other person an education. So that when they close the factory gate behind them, they are finished with their work; that they can then have all kinds of beautiful ideas outside. But a person cannot yet feel fully human if they first have to close the factory gate behind them in order to then devote themselves to elevating their soul. No, if we want to solve the great problems of civilization to some extent, we must proceed to carry the spirit into the factory when we enter the factory through the factory gate, by permeating with the spirit what we work with in our daily lives. This is what deserts life, this is what the catastrophic time has finally brought about, that we have created an external spiritless life, a mere mechanism of life.

Spiritual science fulfills the full human being. It will be able to carry the spirit from within the human being into the most practical, seemingly sober areas of life. And so everyday life - where we work for others, where we stand at the machine, where we participate in the totality through the division of labor - will become spiritualized when spiritual science, which can be knowledge and religious fervor at the same time, enters into life. It will be a social force in itself. It will stand by people as they work. Economic life, practical life in the outer world, will be seized by a science that has not only an abstract spirit in concepts and ideas, but a living spirit, and that can therefore also fill life with this living spirit.

My dear attendees, what only wants to reshape external institutions cannot lead us to a solution of the social question. We live in an age in which social demands are being made. But we also live in an age in which people are highly unsocial. A realization as I have described it will also bring social impulses among people that can solve the great riddles of life in a different way than the abstract way of thinking, which appears as Marxism and the like, which can only destroy because it arises from the abstract, because it kills the spirit, but because only the spirit can make life come alive. This is what spiritual science promises in a certain sense, that it can not only give satisfaction to the soul in its connection with the eternal, but that it can also infuse forces into social life.

This has led to the fact that one did not want to remain in spiritual science with mere mystical views. We do not have abstract mysticism. We have that which does not shy away from crossing the threshold into the spiritual world and leading people into the supersensible world in a new way. But at the same time we bring down into the physical, sensory world what we gain in this way. This has led to the practical view of life that is set forth in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' and in other writings, and that is represented by the 'Federation for the Threefold Social Organism'. There are still some people who say that spiritual science leads away from the old religion; for example, that it is anti-Christian. But anyone who takes a closer look at this spiritual science will find that it is precisely suited to present the Mystery of Golgotha and the true meaning of Christianity to people once again. For under the influence of the modern, naturalistic world view, what has become of the Christ, who must surely be a supersensible being drawn into a human body, who has given the earth a new meaning? The simple man of Nazareth; a mere human being, albeit the most outstanding human being in world history. Once again, supersensible knowledge is needed to understand Christianity in a way that is absolutely necessary for modern humanity. And through this spiritual science one will be able to arrive at an understanding of Christianity that is appropriate for the modern human being. Those who speak of a hostility of spiritual science against Christianity, even if they are often the official representatives of Christianity, seem to me to be fainthearted, not as true understanders of Christianity. When I hear such faint-hearted representatives of Christianity, I always have to remember a Christian Catholic theologian, a friend of mine, who, in a speech about Galileo, as a professor of Christian said: No scientific knowledge can ever belittle Christianity, but the knowledge of the divine can only win if the knowledge of the world continues to progress and presents this divine in ever higher glory. Therefore, one should think highly of Christianity and say: It is so well founded that extra-spiritual and spiritual knowledge will enter humanity by the thousands. But we need a Christianity that intervenes in life, that does not limit itself to saying, “Lord, Lord!” but that lives out the power of the spiritual in outward action. And such a practical Christianity should live in that which is striven for through the threefold social organism.

The person who introduced what I had to say today with a few words said that I had already spoken in Holland in 1908 and 1913. At that time I could only speak of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as something that wants to come from one or more human souls to solve the questions of modern civilization.

But since that time, despite the bitter war years in between, a great deal has happened: since 1913, when we laid the foundation stone, the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, has been built in Dornach near Basel. This School of Spiritual Science is intended not only to serve abstract spiritual science, but also to fertilize all sciences through spiritual science. That is why, last fall, despite the fact that the Goetheanum is not yet finished and still needs a great deal before it is finished, we held the first course, and we will also hold a second course at Easter, which will be shorter. During the autumn courses, thirty prominent individuals have spoken, some of whom are scholars in their respective fields: mathematics, astronomy, physiology, biology, history, sociology, and jurisprudence. But practical people of life have spoken as well, people who are industrialists, people who are merchants; artists have spoken. As I said, thirty personalities have spoken, who have shown that what can be gained as spiritual knowledge can be carried into the individual sciences. It could be shown that this science does not thereby acquire a superstitious character, but rather a rational, an inner, spiritual character and thereby a true character of reality. And so we will try to work in this Goetheanum. This Goetheanum, when you will see it one day, is built in a new art form, a new art style. In the past, if a scientific centre was to be built, negotiations would have taken place with this or that architect as to whether it should be built in Greek, Gothic or Renaissance style. This could not be done by spiritual science, because it shapes out of itself what it recognizes as reality, not only in ideas, not only in laws of nature and of the spirit, but also in artistic form.

One would simply have committed a sin against one's own spiritual life if one had applied a foreign style, not the style that flows artistically from spiritual science itself, to this building. And so you see the attempt at a new architectural style embodied in Dornach, so that you can say to yourself when you enter the building: every column, every arch, every painting speaks to you the same spirit. Whether I stand at the podium and express the content of this spiritual science, or let the columns, the capitals or something else speak for me, they are different languages, but it is the same spirit that is to be expressed in all of this.

This is the answer that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give to the great civilization questions of humanity. For the first of these civilization issues is the question of a real self-knowledge appropriate to the new times. This is gained by crossing the threshold in a new way, as I have described it, by gaining powers of knowledge through the developed ability to remember and the developed power of love to behold the eternal in human nature. And in this way one arrives at a new sense of what the human being actually is, one that is worthy of the human being. One approaches one's fellow human being in such a way that one respects in him that which is born of the spiritual world, that one sees in him a piece of this spiritual world. In this way, human life is ennobled anew in a moral sense, human interaction is ennobled by the spirit. This is the answer to the second question, the question of social interaction.

And the third great question of civilization in the present time is this: Man can know that in his deeds and actions here on earth, he is not merely the being that stands there and whose actions have a meaning only between birth and death. Rather, what I do on earth has a world significance; it is integrated into the whole world. By developing moral ideals in me, I develop something that has world significance.

Let me summarize: modern natural science separates the outer nature from the inner life of man. It sees in the development of the earth and the whole planetary system something that has emerged from a kind of primeval nebula. Man was also produced. But then, after some time, man will disappear. The earth will sink back into the sun as slag. A field of corpses will spread out. This is what natural science must say when it only looks at its own field. But from the human soul arise moral ideals. They are that which is most valuable in the human soul. The school of thought that has brought it to such a high level of sophistication knows no place for ideals. The ideals will disappear like smoke. Therefore, what is called the ideological world view has already taken shape in millions and millions of people. The modern proletariat speaks of custom, law, religion, and science and art as an ideology because the sense of the living spirit has been lost. If we come to recognize this living spirit, we will know that what lives in the human soul as moral ideals, as spiritual, is related to what is the germ in the plant. When what is a plant this year falls away, a new plant develops from the germ.

Thus, we know from spiritual scientific knowledge: the clouds, stars, mountains, springs, stones, plants, animals and the physical human being too, will disappear as the withered leaves fall off and decay from the plant. But just as a new germ comes out of the plant, so too, and not only for the next year but for an eternal future, that which rests as a germ in the human soul will come to life as moral ideals. And we can repeat the wonderful words of Christ:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words” — that which we develop in the human soul as spiritual knowledge — “it will not pass away”.

We can speak of the fact that, once again, a unity stands before us: the passing physical world, the arising spiritual world. Man acquires world significance through this. His social life also acquires weight. And the empty solutions that so torment humanity today, that carry such heavy social storm clouds in the East, will disappear when the social question is made a world view question; when one tries to find the impulses for solving this social question also in what the human being can fathom within himself as a living spirit.

In this way, the modern questions of civilization will receive their impulses from spiritual science. We have already made educational attempts in this direction. In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Freie Waldorfschule, which I run. It seeks to develop and bring to children, in an educational and artistic way, that which can be derived from living spiritual science.

In short, my dear audience, the task of reconciling religion, art and science, of introducing real science, real religion and real art into the most practical of lives, is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science feels called to do. The Goetheanum in Dornach was built for this purpose, to be a first place where such a science can be cultivated in free scientific, free spiritual life. In the beginning and up to the present stage, people willing to make sacrifices have ensured that the Goetheanum could be built; but as I said earlier, the Goetheanum is not yet finished. Its completion will depend on whether there are already enough people who understand the need for progress in this world; whether the Goetheanum remains a torso and humanity says: we do not want to reawaken the spirit, or whether, through understanding of the living spirit, its first home can be completed. Then others will follow. For this much is certain: in the long run, the cultivation of a knowledge of the living spirit will be necessary in modern civilization. For it is certain that even those people who hate the spirit as such, who regard spiritual research as something fantastic, even they need the spirit. The seeking souls need the spirit, and those who do not seek need it even more. And this fact cannot be eliminated. One will seek the spirit because, if one truly wants to be human, one needs the spirit.

Answering Questions

Question: Is it your intention to establish schools in different countries based on the model of the Waldorf School or should the Waldorf School remain as one?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, we would not be able to muster the necessary strength to establish the Waldorf School if we did not actually want such a school to be established wherever there are schools. Because the Waldorf school is not based on some quirk or personal agenda, but on what can be gained as the right pedagogical art from the knowledge of man, also the knowledge of the developing human being, the child, which can be gained through spiritual science. This means that an attempt has been made to fathom what one has to do with the child until it is an adult, so that body, soul and spirit develop in equal measure. Of course, I cannot develop the art and science of education on which the Waldorf school is based in a few words here; I will do that in other places in Holland, where I will speak about practical education and the art of living from the point of view of spiritual science. But if one is of course convinced that true, all-round educational theory can be found in this way, and if one has based the Waldorf School on this, then one cannot but intend to do at least as much as one can for the establishment of such schools. Now, of course, we are not yet allowed to do very much, because for the Waldorf School it is enough for the time being, but it is not enough for any other schools. And what is not enough, I may perhaps pose as a puzzle question this evening. You can easily imagine what is not enough at the moment. However, something else is not enough at the moment. When the Waldorf School was founded, it was necessary for me to hold a pedagogical seminar for the Waldorf teachers first. And so, in turn, the pedagogical must first be worked out from the spiritual scientific. All this could happen in the broadest circles throughout the civilized world, because the pedagogical question is primarily a question of civilization in the present day. If the civilized world were to come to the conclusion that something must be done for the education of the child.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, I said that we live in a world in which great social demands are made, but in which people's inner impulses and instincts are not particularly socially minded. We have to rely on the coming generation in many ways. And this coming generation, we must educate differently in a certain way, unlike the people who have led the world into the current catastrophes. We need a new education and, above all, we need to recognize that social people must be educated, that the general humanity of human nature must be brought out in the child.

If I may mention just one detail: in ordinary schools – and I am sure the Netherlands is no different in this respect – we find the examination system to be very strange. The Waldorf School has only existed for a year. We have thoroughly implemented it in the Waldorf School: we do not need exams, we have achieved something different. We have held conferences throughout the year that have had real psychological content. In a sense, each individual child became an object of study. We were able to study the largest classes. Strange things came to light. For example, it became clear what imponderables are at work. It was shown that a class looks quite different due to imponderable forces, where there are more girls than boys, than a class where the number of girls and boys is the same or where the majority are boys. All these things must be carefully studied. The old educators say that one should bring out what is right in the individuality of the child. But it is only through spiritual science that one will be able to recognize the individuality of the child. This changes from year to year, from month to month. One must become a careful observer of human beings. And instead of the certificates saying “almost satisfactory”, “almost sufficient”, which means nothing if you can't bring these things into concordance with the real individuality, instead of that we gave each child a real description of his or her nature, which can also be used, and a saying that was entirely from the soul of each individual child, which is a power saying, a motto for the child for the whole of the following school year. The child has a kind of mirror. And the children who receive these reports are most intensely happy about them, even if they have been criticized.

And we have experienced many things. When I repeatedly come to the school for inspections, not as a cliché but because it is part of a vibrant life, I quiz the children, and sometimes I ask them: Children, do you love your teachers? And you should see how, not as something learned, but wholeheartedly from the soul, the children answer with their “Yes”, even though they are not educated in a philistine way in some special philistine discipline, they are honest, so that they fully understand: You can only be educated in love. And so, for example, we achieved that the children, although they liked going on vacation, longed to be back at school. We were able to observe many interesting details. A boy who used to be a grumpy urchin and never wanted to kiss his mother gave his mother his first voluntary kiss on the day he was able to go back to school after the holidays, he was so happy. This shines a light into the whole imponderable life. We need something like this from the living spirit. Therefore, it seems to me to be a necessity that the ideas of the Waldorf school be understood in the broadest circles. If a world school association could be established, which consists almost entirely of consumers – that is, of those people who have children, and also those who have an interest in the development of future generations, because all people are actually interested in that – then such a world school association, which could be completely international, could establish such schools wherever possible. And that is actually the idea of the Waldorf school: to be a germ cell radiating forces of growth in all directions. The Waldorf school should be a model, although we should not try to make it as perfect as possible; things only reveal their true perfection when they are spread further. That is why I say: certainly, the Waldorf school should not be isolated; it does not arise from a single ideal, but from general world ideals. Therefore, the World School Association should establish as many schools as possible in the shortest time, even if we have to struggle with many old traditions.

Dear attendees! Anyone who speaks in all seriousness about a topic such as this evening's, or the one that I will discuss here in Utrecht on the 24th, must be aware that there are already numerous souls in the present who long for a new world view or at least for a new slant on the world view and on the way we live.

It can be said, however, that not all of the souls yearning for such a new direction in our present time are fully aware of it. Much of this yearning lies dormant in the depths of the human soul. But for those who can look at the soul life of the individual as well as at the social life of the present impartially, it is clear that there is a search, a serious search, going on in the present for such souls. And this search is basically connected with the great civilizational questions of our present time.

There are many such issues of civilization in the present day, but they can all be more or less mastered if they are viewed from two perspectives. One great riddle that has been dwelling in human souls for a long time – one might say – and which today already finds a very special revelation in these souls, comes from the scientific development of the last three to four centuries. This scientific development has brought humanity great, tremendous triumphs in the realm of knowledge, and provided remarkable insights. But for those who approach the results of this modern science with all their soul, especially with regard to soul and spiritual questions, understanding becomes clearer and clearer. I would like to make it clear from the outset so as not to be misunderstood: the spiritual science that is anthroposophically oriented – and that is what I mean here in giving my explanations – is fully grounded in the modern, scientific way of thinking. But we will see that precisely because it wants to be fully grounded in this way, it must go beyond what is usually considered the limits of this scientific way of thinking. Those who not only want external knowledge for some practical or other life tasks, but who want to gain something for the life of their soul and spirit from scientific insights, will indeed, if they are open enough to do so, gradually realize that the deeper one delves into these insights, the more they are actually riddles, the less they solve anything for us that wells up from the depths of the soul as the great existential questions of human life. On the contrary, these scientific insights teach us something quite different; they teach us to ask the questions that arise from the depths of our souls as human beings more deeply and more fundamentally. They teach us to pose more riddles than we posed before. For someone so unbiased, who lives with all his soul into these insights, there is no other way than to establish a relationship between what science has brought in the last three to four centuries and what is given in the old, traditional religions as a real spiritual upliftment, as a real spiritual content. Theoretically, one can discuss at length the question of whether religious life, a person's deepening of their religious life, should follow a path of its own alongside more recent scientific knowledge. The soul of man is one, and he cannot help it, when on the one hand he draws life-nourishment for the eternal destiny of his soul from religious foundations, and on the other hand he accepts what [the natural sciences] have to say to him, for example, about the structure of the heavenly building, about the development of organic living beings and the like. He cannot help but ask: How do the two relate to each other? We can say with our intellect: the two areas of life flow from different sources. However much we may declaim about how they flow from different sources, in our soul they flow together, and we must seek a balance. But in the search for this balance, new riddles arise, to which the man of the present day, when he really looks up to the general educational life, when he is immersed in this general educational life, is driven, which trouble him, which call for some other sources, from which a real unification of our whole soul life must flow.

And so we see that one of the most important questions of civilization today is actually an inner question of the soul. We have to come to terms with ourselves before we can meaningfully intervene in social life. We have to gain a certain inner strength. Therefore, all external questions of life, all questions of practical life, are fundamentally dependent on the questions of the human soul.

On the one hand, there are the great issues of civilization in the present. But from another side, too, life's riddles come to the contemporary, the modern human being. Scientific knowledge has not remained mere knowledge. They have intervened in practical life in a remarkable and admirable way. They have brought us modern technology, which we encounter at every turn in our external lives today, without which modern humanity can no longer really live. But here too, the modern results, the practical results of the scientific way of thinking, have not actually brought us solutions, but basically new, practical puzzles for life. Over the last two to three centuries, we have managed to create a complicated technology and a complicated human life that goes with it. We had to put people in large numbers at the machine, which is a result of the modern scientific way of thinking. We had to put humanity into the modern traffic conditions, which are a result of this very way of thinking. In the field of purely mechanical-machine work, even where the mechanical occurs in commerce, in world transport, in the world economy, the scientific way of thinking has proven fruitful. But in relation to the social way of thinking, in relation to the way people interact with each other as human beings, it has, so to speak, left everything behind. There is no need to study this theoretically; it can be seen in the convulsions of a social nature that are manifesting themselves in the present and that have a shockingly disturbing effect on humanity. You can see it in how little advice there is in humanity at first, these forces that gradually take on a terribly destructive character, a life-destroying character, in some way beneficial to humanity to guide and direct.

And so, especially with regard to the human, the moral, the soul-spiritual in the interaction between people, many puzzles have arisen in this modern, civilized life. And we are faced with the great soul question: How does modern insight unite with what the religious needs of humanity are? And we are faced with the great practical, social question of life: how do we bring such a direction into what has become mechanical-technical life, that in a sense that has grown out of modern thinking, human interaction is possible in such a way that all people perceive this relationship as leading to a dignified existence?

In short, we are faced with civilizational issues that require solutions and that run in the two currents mentioned. The anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, about which I would like to speak here today, first of all in terms of its insights, wants to approach precisely these riddle-like questions that come to modern man from the two sides just characterized. But it must do so in a way that is still unfamiliar to the broad masses of humanity, to the civilized world. It is therefore regarded as fantasy by one side; it is perhaps regarded as something even worse by the other. But we cannot advance in the evolution of humanity if we do not dare to express what in any age, because it is unfamiliar, will be fought against with extraordinary vehemence.

We see it in the souls that feel what I have just described in a particularly sharp way; they long, as it were, for a flood of knowledge from the supersensible, spiritual world into the human soul. And today such longing souls come up with many things that are, however, not compatible with our present-day civilized life. We see numerous souls looking to what was available to our ancestors in ancient times: a certain harmony between religious sentiment, artistic expression and scientific knowledge. Through its research into ancient times, external anthropological science also imparts to humanity today things that command great respect for these ancient cultures.

Some people look to the Orient, where the remnants of an ancient and original wisdom have been preserved in a decadent way. They want to have a sense of what once was. We see this emerging in numerous souls, but if we really want to understand the meaning of human development, we have to realize that we can understand such souls who long for something ancient or for what remains of something ancient in decadence, such as Indian mysticism or the like. We can understand such a yearning, but we have to say that it completely contradicts the meaning of the whole of human development. For this development is such that each age has its own character. And what was once in keeping with the drives and feelings of the human soul in ancient times is no longer so today.

However, we must also say something else. We must say: this urge for the old or this urge to warm up oriental wisdom also arises from a certain tiredness in the modern human soul. This weariness of the modern human soul announces itself in the fact that although a person may immerse themselves in what is centuries or millennia old tradition, or devote themselves to what are traditional external arrangements of practical life, within today's complicated life, it is difficult for him to muster the strength to unfold a creativity, an elementary creativity in the human soul, that is capable of bringing new spiritual forces from the depths of the soul to the surface of the soul, that is capable of giving new guidelines to practical social life. It is easy for the modern person to devote himself, but creation is far removed from his soul, which is fundamentally very tired. But it is precisely the creative powers of the human soul that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here seeks to address. For it believes that only through a new creation from the deepest, most elementary powers of the human soul can satisfaction come from what, in the manner characterized, is basically longed for by numerous people today from the great currents of civilization.

What spiritual science has to offer initially in terms of knowledge is, however, based entirely on the modern, scientific way of thinking. But at the same time, because it is based on this ground, it must go beyond this scientific way of thinking to the knowledge of a supersensible; while this scientific way of thinking only grasps the outer sense world and that which the mind can combine out of this sense world as abstract natural laws and the like with its means of knowledge, with its admittedly magnificent and admirable means of knowledge.

If I am to characterize the relationship between what I mean here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and this modern natural science, I would like to use a historical comparison. But I ask you not to count this comparison as immodesty. It is not meant that way. It is not a straightforward comparison that can be made today with spiritual science and the weak human power that corresponds to a great, powerful event, but rather with something that is also peculiar to this historical event: I am referring to the discovery of America. When Columbus set out to discover America, it was because he actually meant to cross the great ocean to reach what was already known to him from the other side, namely to reach India from the other side. So it was believed that one was heading for something already known. But on the way one found something unknown that had not been suspected.

This is basically the situation of the modern spiritual researcher. He wants to start from what modern life offers based on numerous scientific endeavors. He would like to venture out onto all the paths of research that are being taken in a conscientious and thoroughly methodical way in this modern scientific life. But on the way to this, he does not find what a large number of researchers basically think they are finding: a kind of knowledge that, although it is supposed to be distinguished from what we have around us in our sensory world by its smallness or the like, is still a kind of knowledge. Just as Columbus thought he was reaching India, that is, something familiar, so the researchers of the external sense realm want to discover atoms, molecules, ions, electrons and the like, which is nothing more than the smallest realization of what we already have in the sense world. And when we now look out into space with conscientious modern research methods, armed with all the admirable instruments that have been constructed, we also want to find nothing but what we already know here on earth. We construct the whole sky for ourselves out of the sensory elements that we already have on earth. One might expect this at first, and basically anyone who is not a dilettante in scientific life, but rather proceeds from the conscientious scientific life of the present, might expect something similar. But when he becomes very clear about what is actually available to him as a researcher, then he comes to something else. He may think he is coming to something familiar, to atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, but on the way he discovers something unknown, as unknown as America was to the Indian explorers. He discovers on the way, precisely by immersing himself in the thought processes, in the whole soul processes that he has to apply in scientific research, a previously unknown, supersensible world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to develop what one does inwardly in the soul through research in the clinic, in the laboratory, or at the observatory in a more refined and expanded way. By paying just the right amount of attention to this inner activity of the soul, it becomes clear that There it is the spirit, which, even if it adheres only to the external material, is active in you, especially in methodical research. And then, when one becomes aware of one's own activity in research, quite earnestly and as strongly as the human soul can, one gains the urge to further develop these soul powers that one carries within oneself, which are to be stimulated, as it were, by ordinary education. And then one comes to the spiritual scientific methods, of which I would like to give you a small indication here.

At the starting point of these spiritual scientific methods, however, there must be something that is also quite unfamiliar to today's humanity. That which I would call “intellectual modesty” must stand before the path of spiritual research. And again, I would like to explain what I mean by intellectual modesty by way of comparison. Imagine a five-year-old child, we give him a volume of Shakespeare in the hand, what will he do with it? It will tear him or play with him, but certainly it will not do that, what is appropriate for the band of Shakespeare. If the child has lived another ten to fifteen years, his soul forces will have developed so that it will do the right thing with this band of Shakespeare. We can say: What has been brought out of the most hidden depths of this child is what now enables him to do something quite different from what he was capable of earlier. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to be able to say this with intellectual modesty: As an adult, you could face all of nature that surrounds us in the same way as the five-year-old child faces the volume of Shakespeare. might feel challenged to develop the soul forces further through their own use, just as the soul forces of the five-year-old child were gradually developed, whereby the child became something quite different from what it was before. Spiritual scientific research seeks to further develop methods such as those already begun in natural scientific research, only in a natural way. And this spiritual scientific research is not based on any external measures, it is based entirely on inner soul work. This inner soul work is certainly no easier to perform than the work in the laboratory, in the clinic or at the observatory. What I am about to describe to you as the inner soul path of the spiritual researcher requires years of inner effort for its real training, although one does not work with external tools or instruments, but only with the powers of the soul itself; and basically, these soul powers are already present in ordinary life, they just need to be further developed.

Today, humanity does not love to further develop such soul powers within itself. Precisely because of the modern path of development, people have come to no longer think as they did in certain ancient ages about human development. From one point of view, this is fully justified. But on the other hand, it is also the case that other views must take the place of those that are currently popular. It is precisely for this reason that many seeking souls today long unhistorically for a certain way in which our ancient ancestors came to their insights, because these ancestors saw something completely different in the path of knowledge than people today see in it.

In ancient times — I can only hint at this, you can already find more explanations in outer science today — in ancient times there were wisdom schools, which are also called mysteries. In these mysteries, a science that was directed more towards the intellect was not cultivated in the same way as it is today. Instead, a science was cultivated that spoke so intensely to the human soul that it into the depths of this soul, while at the same time releasing religious fervor from this soul, which so stimulated this soul that it received what it received as knowledge in artistic visions at the same time. Art, religion and science were one in these ancient mysteries. But in these ancient schools of wisdom, the attainment of higher knowledge was spoken of in such a way as to appeal to the whole person and not just to the head. And one spoke of something that is somewhat dangerous to speak of today, because one will be considered paradoxical or fanciful when speaking of it. They spoke of the fact that between what a person can know, feel and want in ordinary life and that to which his soul actually belongs as the supersensible, an abyss opens up between these two areas of outer and inner life; that this abyss can only be crossed by the human soul through overcoming, through inner struggles. They spoke of the threshold that separates ordinary life from the supersensible world, to which the soul actually belongs. And it was said that man is protected by the world powers from entering the realm of supersensible knowledge unprepared. It was not a mere personification, but a very real experience for the students of the old wisdom schools when they spoke of the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian of the Threshold had not been experienced if one did not want to cross the abyss between the sensual and the supersensible world. But one had to pass by him if one wanted to enter this supersensible world. He only became visible, so to speak, when one wanted to swing one's insights up to the supersensible regions of existence. But one should not and must not do that, the old wisdom teachers said, without the human being being prepared in a healthy way and without fulfilling other conditions.

For differently than we speak now, people in ancient times spoke of what actual human wisdom and human science is. They said: The unprepared person, when handed the science of the supersensible, becomes a source of temptation for him, not only to do good but also to do evil. Knowledge of the supernatural incites human desires that would otherwise remain silent and tamed by external morality. These desires can no longer be tamed by insight into the supernatural. That is why these ancient wisdom teachers demanded of their students that they undergo such a discipline of the will, such an education, that these instincts receded, that these instincts no longer spoke, so that these students listened to everything that the ancient wisdom teachers presented to them as pure morality by virtue of their natural authority. And they demanded strict obedience.

You see, this was a relationship between student and teacher that has been preserved in many ecclesiastical contexts. But you will also admit that modern life is such that people no longer want to have such a relationship in any area. We can look up with great respect and full understanding to those ancient times when certain commandments, strict commandments for ethics, morality, obedience, and religious respect were handed over to the student of science and wisdom – otherwise they were not handed over if they did not submit to these conditions. We can understand this in the past, but today we can no longer enter into such relationships with science and wisdom from our modern, humane circumstances. Those who want to revive the old wisdom of the East do not understand this. Today we need something different, and this is revealed to us from a fact that I will characterize in the following way.

First of all, I would like to ask why it was that the ancient teachers of wisdom subjected their students to such strict discipline, willpower, and will training before they handed down their knowledge and wisdom? The reason for this was that the state of mind of people in the distant past was quite different from that of our own. External history only gives us the outer appearance of human development. The fact that the human soul has indeed undergone tremendous metamorphoses over the course of time is something of which this external history tells us very little today. We do not need to go back to ancient India or other regions of the Orient; we only need to look back to the times of ancient Greece, perhaps to the somewhat earlier and middle periods of ancient Greece, and we find a very different state of mind in people. That which we call intellect, that to which we attach such great importance as our intellectual culture, was not yet developed as a separate faculty of the soul in these older people. In them, instincts, drives, volitional impulses, emotional stirrings, and emotional forces rose up from the depths of the soul and permeated abstract concepts. Cognition worked its way out of the full human being, not just out of the head. We can only begin to understand what knowledge was for the Greeks if we can enter into this origin of their knowledge from the full human being.

This has changed in our time. From the Galilean-Copernican world view and from everything that is connected with it in the modern conception of nature, intellectual life has developed one-sidedly for us.

Some of you will surely say: This intellectual life would not be as one-sided as I would like to present it. It is true that we experiment. We are dealing with external facts and with what they reveal, and not with the mere intellect. We observe conscientiously according to our methods in all realms of nature and in the rest of the world. We are not dealing with the mere intellect. Of course we experiment and observe, but in doing so we apply only our intellect to these experiments and observations. And we are intent on recognizing as science and human wisdom only that which is gained from the experiment and the observation by the intellect of such natural laws or historical laws that can be expressed in intellectual forms. Our entire disposition has become intellectualistic. In this way it differs from the old soul disposition.

This old soul disposition, it came - not merely concepts, not merely ideas, but feelings and soul content about the world itself - from the depths of the whole human organization. There was a world knowledge for the ancients when they set out on the path of knowledge at all. They felt so closely connected with nature that, by observing minerals, plants, and animals, and by observing the physical human being, they simultaneously observed something spiritual and soul-like everywhere. Today we call this animism, but we know very little about the essence of what we are dealing with. This essence consists in the fact that in ancient times, when man looked at the outer nature, he did not just have the dry outer sensory perception before him, but a spiritual essence came out of everything to meet him. He knew that lightning was intimately connected with what was going on inside himself. He knew that moving clouds were connected with what was going on inside himself. He felt that he belonged to the whole universe. He felt as a part of the universe as a finger would feel about me as a part of me, if it had a consciousness. From this sense of the world all ancient knowledge emerged. But this sense of the world was only present because the sense of self, even in the ancient Greeks, was not as developed as our sense of self. The sense of self was dull, and that is why the old wisdom teacher said: One must not simply introduce the students to a higher knowledge, for which a higher sense of self is absolutely necessary, because if they came to this knowledge unprepared, they would fall into a kind of mental powerlessness. This mental powerlessness should be combated through the discipline of the will, the education of the will.

What about us? Yes, we can see this best from the following: Today we are justifiably proud of what we know, for example, about the structure of the external world through the Copernican worldview. We now profess the view that the sun is at the center of our planetary system and that the earth moves at great speed around the sun. We call this the heliocentric worldview, in contrast to the worldview of the Middle Ages and antiquity, which had placed the Earth at the center of our planetary system, so that man felt on the firm ground of the Earth, resting in space and letting the Sun circle with the other planets around the Earth. But even from the external history one can see that what we today call the heliocentric worldview was not unknown to the ancients, that it was not unknown in the schools of wisdom. Today's world view does not speak of this. But if you just read Plutarch's account of the astronomical view of Aristarchus of Samos, centuries before the emergence of Christianity, you will see that Aristarchus of Samos proclaimed the heliocentric world view, that he placed the sun at the center of the planetary system, that he made the earth revolve around the sun. Aristarchus of Samos only proclaimed in a more outwardly perceptible way what had otherwise been proclaimed to the students in the wisdom schools, after they had first undergone the preparation. And many other things were taught there that, like the Copernican world view and the heliocentric solar system, are now part of our general education, things that we learn, so to speak, at elementary school as part of our general education.

Thus we can note the remarkable fact that the ancient teachers of wisdom only handed down to their pupils what is now part of our normal school education after the pupils had undergone a strict training of the will. They awakened in their pupils the consciousness that they had to cross the threshold to the spiritual world. After that, they imparted to them the things that are now part of our general education.

We stand, so to speak, beyond the threshold through the very ordinary human development. The sense of historical metamorphosis is that what was given to students in ancient times, for example, only after tremendous preparation, is learned by every child today. Every child is led beyond the threshold today, which the ancients described in the characterized way. Why is that? It is because, through human development, we in turn have a different inner soul disposition from that of the ancients. We are no longer exposed to the soul fainting and soul numbness that had to be feared in ancient times. For centuries, we have, as civilized humanity, undergone a strengthening, an invigoration, precisely of our self-awareness through intellectual education. This self-awareness cannot be diminished, paralyzed, or rendered powerless by our entering into the world, which for the ancients was the world beyond the threshold. It cannot. The ancients would have said something like this: If one wanted to convey to the unprepared human being the realization that the earth moves in space with great speed, he would feel as if he were losing the ground under his feet, he would have the mental and spiritual feeling of losing his footing, as if he were becoming dizzy in his existence.

That is not the case today. But we are facing something different instead. The knowledge of the world that the ancients had instinctively is lost to us today, because we recognize from the outer world of the senses what was only given to the ancients after long preparation. We are standing at a different threshold today. We are just learning from the conscientious natural scientist how we must speak of the “limits of knowledge”, of “ignorabimus”. We sense this limit of knowledge wherever this knowledge of nature has to be put into practice for the benefit of humanity. We sense it in modern medicine, where it is so difficult to build a bridge from pathology to the actual practice of healing. We sense it when we want to apply the results of our knowledge to social life. We sense these limits, they are there.

We feel we have been moved to a new threshold. The task of spiritual science is to cross this threshold in a way that is appropriate for modern man. Therefore, it starts from intellectual modesty in order to bring back to its measure that which has just become great in modern man, and to develop the human soul forces out of the full human being. Spiritual science takes as its starting point two soul powers that are well known in ordinary life, and develops them further. It begins with what we call the power of memory in ordinary life. What does this power of memory give us in our ordinary human existence? It conjures up from memory what we have experienced since our birth or a few years after, what we have been through. These appear before our soul in more or less faded images through memory. What happens in this life fades away. We know, and modern science characterizes it very clearly, that when this ability to remember is not intact, there is a serious inner soul disease. This coherent memory, reaching back to childhood, must be present in the human being.

The methods of spiritual science take this power of remembrance as their starting point. They develop this power of remembrance into something different, into something more highly developed, through what I have described in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', in my 'Occult Science', in other of my writings, through what I call meditation or concentration. Here, however, I can only give a rough outline of what must actually happen to the soul in order to come to an immediate grasp of the supersensible world. Man must rest in a devoted way, rest energetically and patiently on ideas that are either recommended to him or that he prepares for himself by getting to know spiritual science. While otherwise the images flit past, he must, as memory becomes lasting, rest, and keep on resting, on clear images, and this he must do out of inner arbitrariness, out of complete inner composure — which must be as great as that which we develop in mathematical thinking — and this inner composure must be as great as that which we develop in mathematical thinking. Then, after some time, he will make a very definite discovery. He will feel that with his ordinary ability to remember, he is dependent on his organism. But if he further develops his ability to remember into a completely new soul power, then he is placed in a spiritual-soul activity in relation to which he is no longer dependent on his organism. He learns to understand what it means to think, feel, will or perform similar activities without the body providing the basis for it. He learns to unfold a soul life outside of his body.

I would like to characterize this soul life, which the human being gets to know as a spiritual researcher, in yet another way. We find that the ordinary life of a human being proceeds in such a way that it alternates between waking and sleeping. The human being goes through the states of falling asleep, sleeping and waking up. When falling asleep, consciousness is dulled. The human being is not aware of what he is going through between falling asleep and waking up because it is not shown by what pulses through the organism from the will. But what pulsates through the organism from the will, what the senses offer the human being in the way of perception, the spiritual researcher silences by immersing himself in self-made images. The content of the images is not important, but the immersion is, so that he feels the activity within him, which wells up from the depths of the soul through such resting on images, such lasting resting. He learns to be in a state in which one is otherwise only in sleep. But while one is unconscious in sleep, one is in a fully conscious state, in inner soul activity and soul activity. Only, this soul activity and soul activity does not refer, as the memory images of ordinary life, to things that we have gone through in the outer world and that now only arise from memory, but those images - I call them imaginations in the cited works — they can be immediately recognized as depicting a world that we have not lived through between birth and the present moment, but a world that is outside of us, just as colors and sounds are outside of us for the senses, just as warmth qualities are outside of us. We learn experientially that the spiritual world surrounds us; a spiritual world with real spiritual beings; that we are also in it in the time between falling asleep and waking up. But now we learn to look at it as a real world.

And by learning to see it in this way, we can broaden our view beyond life between birth and death. Let us learn to recognize at an elementary level how the life of sleep is nothing other than a separation of the spiritual soul from the physical body – not spatially, but dynamically. And how, when a person sleeps, there is a growing , there is an urge to return to the body. Through such inner vision, as it arises from the developed ability to remember, we learn to observe how sleep is nothing other than a separation of the spiritual soul from the physical body – not spatially, but dynamically. And we also learn to observe it in the times that preceded our birth, in which we lived in a spiritual-soul world from which we descended through birth, through conception into this physical-sensual world. We learn to distinguish between what lives in the soul as a mere desire to penetrate the body again, and the very different, stronger power that pervades the soul in the times when it is not yet conceived or born in a physical body, but which nevertheless tends to descend into the physical world in order to experience life between birth and death. Then we learn to recognize, as a development of what we have gained from the moment of falling asleep, what the soul experiences when it passes through the gate of death. We learn to recognize how this soul, because it is inwardly active, is driven precisely by the desire for the body lying in the bed; but as a result, its consciousness is extinguished. In death, consciousness is not extinguished, but remains. We learn to recognize that the extinction of consciousness in ordinary sleep comes from the fact that the bond between soul and body remains intact. When we learn to see through this, we also see through the mystery of death, just as we learn to see through the mystery of birth in the way indicated.

And so we learn to look at that which underlies us as human beings, as our eternal self, which passes through birth and death. We learn to recognize the inner strength of the human soul. We learn to recognize that which leads us through death. We learn to recognize that when the soul is led through death, at first it has no connection to a physical body, but that it receives this connection as a strength, so that it can descend to a new life. What we call 'repeated earthly lives' in spiritual science is not warmed-over oriental wisdom; it is drawn from the facts of spiritual life, which can be seen through in the present, and is scientifically extracted from them in the same way as other things are discovered by science. And anyone who says that such things are merely old wisdom, such as Gnostic or Oriental, or Indian wisdom, should just say: when we do geometry today, we are merely warming up the old Euclid. No, it is not just something historical that is brought out, but what is to be said about such things is brought out of original insights.

But then, when we get to know ourselves in this way, when we tap into the eternal of knowledge, then the eternal, the supersensible, the spiritual of the outer world also opens up to us. Then we will gain a different relationship to nature research than is otherwise possible for us in relation to today's civilizational spiritual current. What does the modern scientific world view give us – and if it is honest, it cannot give us anything else? Modern natural science, which must not be reproached for what I am about to characterize, can offer nothing else if it proceeds honestly and conscientiously. It can only give us a picture of external, natural, necessary events. It cannot help but look back to the times of the earth's formation, which it deduces from biological, astronomical, and other facts. At the starting point of this development, there is a nebulous world or something similar. Even if this is regarded as hypothetical today, science cannot arrive at anything other than the conclusion that man once formed out of purely external natural laws, which only imply an elementary necessity, but that the scene on which man forms will one day fall like a cinder into the sun, that everything that man experiences inwardly will be extinguished.

And so we get to know, alongside what an honest study of nature can offer us, how the moral world, ethical ideals, the whole spiritual and religious life, arises from within us . We feel it as the most valuable thing in us, but we cannot connect it to this outer world, because we find no connection between the moral in us and the physical-natural outside of us. If we want to remain on the ground of today's world view, we must regard them as two parallel worlds. But then the scientific world view asserts its persuasive power in such a way that it nevertheless predominates, that it nevertheless says: the ideals may be beautiful, they must be so, man must recognize them as valuable, but the world in which we live will one day be the great churchyard where the ideals that are now most valuable to us will be buried.

Through spiritual science, by looking into the transcendental world, by seeing the spiritual in every stone, in plants and animals, in clouds and springs, as it was revealed to the ancients; by developing the organs of the spiritual within himself, by learning to recognize himself as belonging to the spiritual world, he also comes to know the outer spiritual world in all of nature. But through this he can look back into distant times and say to himself: That which has come into being materially, in which you live today, has emerged from the spiritual, and that which you experience today as material will in turn be transformed into physical dross in the future; the physical dross will fall away, as the body falls away from the dying man. But just as the earthly-dying human soul enters the spiritual world, so that which lives in man, in humanity, will enter a spiritual world. The material world appears as a middle piece between one spiritual and another development. Man, however, belongs to the spiritual development of primeval times and he belongs to the future.

And today, when we see the interconnection of the world through spiritual science, through real knowledge of the supersensible, we can say: It is not true that what surrounds us as the material world has a future in the way that external science, if it is honest, must recognize. Rather, we have to say to ourselves: that which is external nature will fall away from that which is internal, and what human souls carry within themselves will leave the spiritual realm to which human beings belong, just as the body leaves the human soul. But that which lives in us today as moral ideals, as religious experiences, will have a future. One day it will break free from the earth, just as the individual human soul breaks free from the human body to find life and not death.

But when man learns to feel: That which is moral in him is like the germ of a plant; when the plant, when blossoms and leaves wither and dry up, the germ remains for the next year from the previous year's plant; we carry within us as a germ a distant future in which the earth will no longer be; when everything else by which we belong to the earth falls away from us; we carry our ideals, our fulfilled duties, we carry the social and religious life within us, which escapes from the earth with humanity. Let us consider what this means for the impulses that a person takes up for their social action. With such an awareness, they no longer stand in social life like a hermit on earth who can only think: I fulfill what is pleasant for me as a duty between birth and death, because the earth is only a body in space; it passes away. And when it has passed away materially, what is to become of ideals? If he remains true to natural science, if he does not claim to know from other sources what need not be united with natural science, then he will necessarily have to insert what ideals are into natural necessity. But thanks to spiritual science, his earthly consciousness is joined to the cosmic consciousness. This is the way to think about these things that the modern man needs.

Let us imagine today's social life. We make great social demands as today's humanity, but we have little social in our inner soul condition. We do not have social instincts, social drives. It is precisely because we do not have them that we demand so much from life on the outside. But everything that a person today feels as selfishness in relation to the social instincts is basically only an expression of the consciousness of the hermit on earth, as corresponds to the purely scientific view. If we learn to recognize that Everything you do for your neighbor or your fellow human beings, everything you do in the context of humanity, has a cosmic significance, a significance far beyond what it is for the day. If you link your earthly existence with your universal existence, you know that you are part of the universal existence, then social issues take on different impulses than they do today.

Therefore, it is indeed the case that something can be given to people from three sides through what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to develop. First of all, they are given a new understanding of the human being, an insight into the supersensible foundations of their existence. They are given self-knowledge in the true sense of the word. They can cross the threshold again. The limits of knowledge of nature can be crossed. He can again transcend himself; he can again enter into the world to which he belongs with his soul and spirit.

That is one thing: that the human being thereby gains inner support and security; that he does not sink into the abyss when he wants to acquire knowledge of the world, when he does not want to look at the unknown beyond the carpet of sensory perception. But when a person recognizes himself in this way, in his entire cosmic context, then he also encounters the other person with the respect that must arise when one knows: with every person there is a spiritual soul aspect. Our whole legal and constitutional life is placed on a different footing when we know that it only makes sense because it is the outer covering of that which is transplanted to earth from the spiritual realm of human souls, which we can also see through in terms of knowledge.

And the third thing is that human life takes on an immediate religious nuance, real brotherhood, because man behaves as we can understand the word, the wonderful word of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” So said the Being through whom the earth first received its meaning, without which it would have no meaning.

But it is true that this is the case with human ideals themselves. They germinate while the rest is ripe and withers all around. They are for the future. Everything that is lived out socially is basically the germ of future worlds; just as what surrounds us today as the natural world, as the material world, is the material expression of earlier moral worlds. If we see this clearly, we will be strengthened from three sides. And social life must also be transformed from within.

In 1913 and 1908, I spoke in Holland about spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy. At that time I could only point out what this spiritual science was striving for, but not in a sectarian way or with the will to found a new religion. No, that is not what spiritual science wants. It wants to be science, and precisely through its scientific nature, to lead to the true religion, which places the mystery of Golgotha at the center of earthly development, in the right way. I was able to point out at the time how something like a world view has emerged in many souls. Since then, however, something has been added. We were able to start building the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, in Dornach near Basel in 1913. However, this construction has presented many difficulties; in particular, the times of the world catastrophe have also brought difficult times for this construction. But we can say that this fall, despite the fact that the building is not yet finished and much remains to be done to complete it, we were able to hold a number of courses. These courses were intended to show how the fundamentals of what I have described to you today — but which you can find more details about in the books I have mentioned — can have a fertilizing effect on all sciences as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Thirty personalities have been involved in these Dornach Autumn Courses, experts in all fields of science, from mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, jurisprudence, history and sociology. Artists also contributed, shedding light on spiritual science from their art. Men of practical life, of industrial and commercial life, have contributed to show how, when thinking in terms of spiritual science, one does not become an impractical person, but how one becomes more practical than one can be through any other contemporary way of life.

Furthermore, in the spring of 1920, I was able to show doctors and medical students, some of whom are here in Holland, in a course how what can be called medicine in the true sense of the word, how medicine can be fertilized by this insight into the supersensible life. For we come to know the inner nature of the outer products of life in the various kingdoms only when we are also able to observe them from the supersensible side. And those people who may absorb what is initially given in the form of a worldview through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should at least make a little effort to inquire how one can speak with full knowledge of the subject to the experts; how one can speak from the individual fields of science without dilettantism and with full mastery of what modern science is, to the renewal of science, precisely to lead beyond those boundaries that are not felt theoretically as boundaries, but that are felt as boundaries, that show up as unsatisfactory, as insufficient in the practical way science works in life.

In the fall, we were then able to show how spiritual science can have a stimulating effect on the individual sciences and branches of practical life and art. And those who gathered in large numbers — more than a thousand people were present at the opening of these courses — were able to see what this Goetheanum itself represents as an external structure. Where else would one have built such a university? If one had needed a special building in which to pursue this or that spiritual life or to pursue science, one would have called upon an architect; one would have had a Greek, a Romanesque, a Gothic or a Renaissance building designed, or something else. That was not possible in Dornach with our free university, the Goetheanum. There, out of the same soul impulses that were to be spoken and researched there, one also had to build, sculpt and paint. And so one sees in this Goetheanum, which is admittedly a first attempt — the first lift cannot be anything else — a new architectural style. For that which is spiritual science is not a one-sided culture of the head, it is something that engages all branches of practical life. It is something that, without becoming didactic or pedagogical or symbolic or corny allegorical, will also inspire artistic creativity. What is proclaimed from the podium as spiritual science, what is communicated there in ideas, in thoughts, in scientific results, comes from the same source of soul life as the columns are built from, the ceiling is painted from, and the figures that are sculpted are created from. Sometimes we speak of the living spiritual life through words, at other times through the forms of architecture or sculpture or through painting and so on. Spiritual science is something that comes from the full human being, but through this it can also intervene in all branches of human life.

There have been many people willing to make sacrifices who have supported us so far that we have been able to take this project to the point it has reached so far. It is with a sense of melancholy that we realize how much remains to be done and how many people are needed who understand the matter if this building is to be completed. But we want what is meant by this building to speak urgently to the souls of men.

And we have not stopped at what the Dornach building merely is, but we have also moved on to practical institutions, especially in the field of education. And today I can only briefly mention this – I will be discussing on the 24th what practical institutions have emerged from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for practical life itself – I can only briefly mention that the Waldorf School has been founded in Stuttgart as a creation of Emil Molt, and that I am leading it according to the educational-didactic impulses that can flow from spiritual science. This Waldorf School, despite its short existence, has achieved successes in the educational and teaching fields, which I will also talk about on the 24th of the month. Then we proceeded to form what are purely practical institutions, economic institutions, out of the spirit of spiritual science. For it must be shown everywhere that spiritual science does not mean an unworldly, remote spiritual life to which one can ascend when one finds earthly life too bad. Rather, spiritual science is meant to permeate the spirit so that it can be carried into all material things, including economic material things, so that everything becomes spiritualized and thus truly practical. I will have more to say about this on the 24th of the month. Then I will speak about education and teaching issues and about practical life from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science.

Today I just wanted to discuss what the direction, the actual spirit and meaning of this spiritual science are, and how this spirit and meaning of spiritual science accommodates the searching souls of the present day. And however much this soul searching has been decried as fantasy, as folly , humanity will have to learn from the catastrophic events of the present, from all the things that so clearly express the mood of decline and fatigue today, from all the things that are heralding in modern civilization as that which leads modern civilization into decadence , from all this humanity will have to learn that the seeking souls are on the right path – and of these seeking souls, those who seek in the whole of the rest of the universe that which must be experienced there in the innermost being as the deepest and most significant; who seek the spirit in spirit. Because, dear attendees, no matter how much one may deny the spirit, in the end, through reaction, what must emerge from this denial is the conviction that humanity cannot be without spirit in the long run, because the innermost depths of the soul need the spirit! And that which the soul needs so much, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to seek, albeit today with weak forces.

Answering questions

Question: Is it really inhibiting to search for ancient wisdom in the sense of earlier times because we have become different people within the present civilization?

Rudolf Steiner: That is absolutely the case, my dear attendees. Today, there is indeed a widespread yearning for the renewal of ancient wisdom. When one stands before humanity with something like anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which draws from the very sources of today's soul life and, from an external point of view, arrives at many things that are similar to what was known to the ancients, people come and say, “Why not the old?” That many people cannot imagine anything different absolutely contradicts the meaning of human development.

Let us look at the matter from a point of view that can explain a lot: Suppose someone wanted to seek satisfaction for their soul without prejudice to what I have just said, simply by applying, say, ancient Indian wisdom in modern yoga philosophy or the content of Vedanta philosophy. What would happen to that soul? Something would arise that is simply not compatible with what this soul has become today, something that cannot be fully experienced by the soul of the modern human being. It is then the case that the person believes he has something to do with this old, warmed-up wisdom, but he does not get real soul content, but he gets a soul content that he cannot penetrate, and to which he actually only becomes intoxicated. We find such intoxication in people who unite in societies for the renewal of old wisdom. A certain inner untruthfulness then occurs in the soul. One believes to have something, but one cannot have it. And this inner dishonesty, even if it is not wanted at all, if it is striven for by the soul even in the most honest, consciously honest way, it still has a destructive effect on the soul life of the human being. It hollows out rather than filling it with a truly satisfying content.

One could also say that today, even if they do not participate in scientific life, people have already attained a certain kind of self-awareness through what they absorb at school. This self-awareness is dampened, tuned down, when one takes in an old world view, despite its beauty. One's consciousness is dampened and one does not arrive at a real understanding, but at a fantasizing, even if it sometimes looks more like dreaming. There is no reality in a soul that takes in something so old. These are things that can only be spoken from experience. Theoretically, one can of course believe that what was right for people in ancient times must still be right today. But I must say that it is rare to find the right understanding on this point.

I was once very pleased to be visited by an American clergyman in Berlin who had devoted much time to spiritual science. Unfortunately, he had already died, despite being still a young man, and so was torn away from his work in America. He addressed me immediately with the following words. He said: 'Today you speak of what you represent as anthroposophical spiritual science, what is in your books, for example in 'Geheimwissenschaft', in '' or otherwise in social views, of what is to come into the world as impulses. Do you believe that what you are giving now, in terms of content, as you are giving it now, must remain permanently?' I said, realizing very well that he was on the right track: “I don't think so. I am imbued with the recognition of human development that the spirit lives from eternity to eternity, but that what we express in our full humanity through the spirit, be it in religion, science or art, is in full development.” And so I believe that what I present as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is the right thing for the present time, but that it is precisely because of this that it will have changed completely after a relatively short time – times are moving ever faster, after all – and will undergo completely different metamorphoses. From this question I saw that I was understood by this American quite well. One must have this feeling about it; it lies in the development of humanity. Question: What reasons do you have for assuming that no more was taught in earlier schools than has become known today?

Rudolf Steiner: I did not say that. Much more was taught in earlier schools than is now known. I believe that even what I have said today about the teaching in the old schools is unknown in the widest circles. What is known today — mainly in the style —, in the present direction of the world view questions, that is general education today. That is the significant thing. I gave the example of the heliocentric world view; one could give many such examples. If we go back to ancient cultures, we find everywhere – although we first have to understand the languages of the ancient cultures and overcome the prejudice that primitive man made up some kind of world view and did not let his experiences speak – we find everywhere the content of ancient world views that commands respect, more and more respect. It is precisely by becoming acquainted with the old Chaldean ideas of the world and other blossoms of old mental states, the Indian, Egyptian, Greek worldviews in their true form, in their deeper, fully human impulses, that one gains great respect for the old. But then, as a spiritual researcher, one also becomes familiar with those soul experiences. It is really not the case that one produces things out of one's imagination. I must say that I began with some of the research that I am presenting today thirty to thirty-five years ago, and only in recent years have I dared to express these things because I have worked on them in the meantime. Everything I have said about the threefold human being in my book 'Von Seelenrätsel' (The Soul's Enigma) is based on thirty to thirty-five years of research. There one comes across many things, which are then indeed investigated in a modern way, and which are connected to the modern soul life, but which in a certain way were present in vague instincts in old wisdom that is no longer useful to us. Then a great respect arises for what the ancients have achieved in a completely different way, what we rediscover today, but what we must seek in a completely different way today.

And I would like to say: What the ancients have achieved by instinct, we have lost by instinct. But what they have achieved beyond the threshold is the result of our ordinary education. We must develop out of a developed consciousness what the ancients had as world knowledge from their instinctual life. These are deep connections. If we know how to read it, outer history speaks on every page, and we are not satisfied with just any old meanings of words.

For example, what Indian wisdom is, can be translated as Deussen translated it. But then those who receive such translations do not get any idea of this Indian wisdom. But you can also imbibe it with your mind, then you learn to recognize that in the old Indian schools of wisdom, based on the philosophy of yoga, things were found that we have to seek in a different way, and that is what matters. We learn to recognize how people said to themselves: If we start from our ordinary consciousness, we are not very connected to the world. But if we start from the things that give us more than sense perceptions, if we delve into the breathing process, then, by following breathing inwardly and organically, the meaning of the world becomes clear to us in a completely different way. This was then recorded, which was understood as the meaning of the world in this way. We can no longer renew these yoga schools, and if we do, we will stifle the organism. For what has been revealed to people is, in its main features, general human education today. We must do something else. We must deepen that which we have appropriated more completely than the ancients, the intellectual culture, so that we can plant the intellect in the life of the feelings and will impulses; in this way we can reach deeper into human nature and into nature itself. In this way we arrive at the spiritual. We have to go a different way, a way of soul and spirit. And only by knowing what the path of the Indian world view actually was, can we understand what is communicated in the scriptures. Then, whenever we discover a supersensible truth in some other way, we can understand it in its earlier form, although the reverse is not the case. From such insights arises what I have said about the relationship between what is today general human education and what the ancient students were initiated into.

It is not possible in a lecture, which has already lasted too long, to give more than the guidelines. In the literature, however, you will find that every assertion made in such a lecture has always been turned around in terms of its evidence, and that it is indeed the case that most of the objections raised by spiritual researchers have already been raised by them in the most diverse ways.

That is what I wanted to say about the justification of such a judgment as I have given. It is entirely possible to say, on the basis of the apologetic traditions, that it is as I have explained it using the example of Aristarchus of Samos and the heliocentric worldview.

Dear attendees,

Anyone who speaks on a topic such as this evening's topic and the one I will be speaking on the 27th of this month must be aware, especially with regard to the spiritual life of the present day, that there are numerous souls today who long for a new impetus, for a renewal and metamorphosis of of important parts of our entire civilizational life, out of many things that today clearly bear the hallmark that, if continued, would lead humanity into the decline of civilization, out of many things that have been the civilizing current for a century or two or more. We find this especially in those souls who are trying to look most deeply into their own inner being in the present. We can say that whatever needs to be said about the supersensible worlds can be spoken to every human soul at any time. It can be spoken, one might say, to the hermit who has withdrawn completely from the world and is only interested in his immediate surroundings; it can also be spoken to personalities who are fully involved in life. For what is at issue here is, after all, a thoroughly human matter.

But it is not from these points of view alone, dear ladies and gentlemen, that I would like to speak to you today and on the 27th, but rather from the point of view that arises when one allows the most important civilizational issues of the present to take effect on one's soul. And there, especially leading souls find much that shakes them to the core, that drives them in their innermost being to long for a renewal of certain parts of spiritual life.

If we survey the situation in which we find ourselves in the spiritual life of the present, I would say we can trace it back to two main questions. One of these questions is illuminated by the scientific life, by the form of scientific life that has been observed within the civilized world for three to four centuries. The other of these questions is illuminated directly by practical life, but also by that practical life that has experienced the deepest influences from modern science.

Let us first look at what modern science has brought forth. I would like to say, precisely in order to avoid being misunderstood, that what I am representing here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should by no means be opposed to the spirit of modern science. The great triumphs and significant results of this modern scientific spirit are to be fully recognized by the spiritual science meant here. But precisely because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to penetrate with an unbiased soul into the spirit of this science, it must go beyond what has become the object of a general human education from this scientific spirit. In its specific disciplines, this science provides precise and conscientious information about many aspects of the human environment. But when the human soul asks about its highest concerns, about its deepest, its eternal destiny, it cannot receive any information within the spirit of science, especially not when it consults with itself quite honestly and quite impartially. And so today we find numerous souls who, out of more or less religious needs, long for a renewal of old worldviews.

What is external science, in particular anthropological science, is already drawing attention to the fact that our ancestors centuries ago did not know what is dividing and fragmenting human souls today: a certain disharmony between scientific knowledge and religious feeling, religious longing. If we look back to ancient times, it was the same human beings who cultivated a science that seems childlike to us today, but only seems childlike, and who, from this science, at the same time kindled the religious spirit in humanity. There was no discord between these two currents of thought.

Many souls today long for something like this. But one cannot say that a renewal of ancient Chaldean, ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian or other wisdom teachings would bring a special blessing to the present age. Those who believe this do not understand the true spirit of human development. Human development is such that each age has a special character, that in each age human souls want to be satisfied by something different. And what our souls need, simply by virtue of the fact that we live in the 20th century and have received our education from the 20th century, must be something different from what people of a distant past needed for their souls. Therefore, a renewal of old worldviews cannot serve the present. But one can orient oneself to what those old worldviews were. We will then see what actually gave rise to the satisfaction that human souls experienced within those old worldviews. We have to admit that the satisfaction for human souls in those days arose from the fact that they basically had a completely different relationship to scientific knowledge than we have today.

I would like to draw your attention to a phenomenon, my dear audience. If you point it out today, you are very easily accused of paradox or fantasy. But there is much that needs to be said that, just a few years ago, would have been considered highly dangerous for general education. After all, the last catastrophic years have at least brought about a change in the way we think and feel. And today, souls are better prepared than they were even ten years ago for the fact that the deepest truths may nevertheless initially appear paradoxical and fantastic to our habitual ways of thinking and feeling.

In ancient times, people spoke of something that, in view of scientific knowledge, is hardly questioned today, but which people will speak of again, probably also in the context of general education, in a relatively short time: of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the from the ordinary world in which we live in everyday life, in which we live with ordinary science, to that higher world in which man can recognize how he himself, with his supersensible, inner being, belongs to a supersensible world. Between these two worlds, the world that man perceives with his senses, the facts of which he can combine with his mind into natural laws, and the world to which man belongs with his actual being, one saw an abyss in those ancient times. One first had to cross this abyss. Within the old civilizations, only those who had been intensively prepared by the directors of the educational institutions of those days, which we now call 'mysteries', were allowed to cross this abyss. Today, we have different views on how to prepare for science and for a life of scientific research. In those ancient times, it was said that an unprepared person should not be allowed to receive higher knowledge about the nature of man at all. Why did they say this?

The reason for this can only be understood by someone who, going beyond ordinary historical knowledge, gains an insight into what the human soul has gone through in the course of human development. Today, we only have a knowledge of the externalities of human development. No attention is paid to the state of the soul. For example, no attention is paid to the state of the soul of people who have stood in the ancient oriental wisdom, of which only decadent forms still live in the Orient today. Basically, people have no idea how different the souls were in the world in those days. People in those days, just like us, saw the nature around them with their senses; they also combined in a certain way what they saw of nature with their minds. But they did not feel as separate from the nature around them as people today feel. They felt a spiritual soul within themselves. They felt that the human physical organization was filled with a spiritual soul. But they also felt a spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in the passing clouds, in minerals, in plants, and in animals. They felt that which they suspected within themselves also outside in nature, in the whole universe. The whole universe was permeated by spiritual soul for them.

But they lacked something that we humans have today within our state of mind: they did not have such a pronounced, intense self-awareness as we do. Their self-awareness was duller, more dreamy than ours today. This was still the case even in Greek times. One can only understand later Greek culture if one imagines the souls of people in the Greek era as being in the same state as our souls. In earlier Greek culture, there can be no question of a state of soul such as ours. There was still a vague sense within nature. I would say: just as if my finger had a consciousness and then felt itself as one with my entire organism, as it could not conceive of itself as being separated from my organism, without which it would die, so man felt himself within the whole of nature, [unseparated] from it.

And those ancient sages who were the leaders of those schools of which I have spoken, they said to themselves: This is the moral in human self-awareness. But this self-awareness must not look at the world in such a way that it appears to be spiritless, soulless. If this state of mind were to face a world that is more spiritually empty – a world, I might add, that we perceive in our science, in our everyday life – then the souls of human beings would be overcome by a spiritual powerlessness.

This mental fainting was recognized by the ancient wisdom teachers in those people who were to arrive at such a world view as we have. Yes, can it be said at all that these ancient wisdom teachers said to themselves that souls should not arrive at such a world view as we say we have today? Yes, that can be said. And I would like to give you an example of this. Many examples could be cited, but I will highlight just one.

Dear participants, today we are justifiably satisfied that we no longer view the external and spatial structure of the world in a medieval way, based only on outward appearances. We stand on the standpoint of the Copernican world view, which is a heliocentric one. The medieval man believed that the Earth was at the center of the planetary system, and indeed of the entire star system, and that the sun and the other stars moved around the Earth. The heliocentric solar system brought about a complete reversal of all relationships, and today we hold fast to this reversal as something that we already absorb in our ordinary school education, in which we are immersed with all our education. We look back at the people of the Middle Ages, we look back at the people of ancient times, who in their Ptolemaic world system saw that which I have just characterized, the geocentric. But by no means did all people in those ancient times accept only the geocentric world system. We need only read Plutarch's account of the world system of an ancient Greek wise man of the pre-Christian era, Aristarchus of Samos. Aristarchus of Samos already places the sun at the center of our planetary system; he has the earth revolve around the sun. And if we take, not in the details, about which recent natural science has brought so much, but in the main features, the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos, then it basically completely agrees with the one that is ours today.

What do we actually have here? Well, the world system that Aristarchus of Samos merely revealed was the one taught in the ancient schools of wisdom. Outwardly, people were left with the world system of appearances. Why was that so? Why were they allowed to keep this world picture of appearances? Well, it was said: Before a person can advance to this heliocentric world system, he must first cross the threshold to a different world than the one in which he lives. In his ordinary life, he is protected by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, under whom these ancients imagined a very real, albeit supersensible being. He is protected from suddenly opening his eyes as if he were seeing the world, dead, de-spirited. For it is in a dead and spiritless way that we see the world today. We look at it and form our view of nature through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and we see it as dead and spiritless. When we form ideas about the path and movements of the heavenly bodies at the observatory with the help of a telescope and calculations, we see the world as dead and spiritless. The ancient wisdom teachers of the mysteries knew that the world could also be seen in this way. They conveyed these insights after the preparation, after they had led their students past the Guardian of the Threshold, but they prepared the students through strict training of the will. How was this willpower given to the students? By leading the students through privations, but also by encouraging them for many years to strictly obey the pure morals prescribed to them by the wisdom teachers. The will had to be strictly disciplined, and this willpower was to strengthen self-awareness. And when the disciples had progressed from a dreamy, dull self-awareness to a more intense self-awareness, only then were they shown what lay beyond the threshold for them: the world that, in the heliocentric system, represents outer space. But they were also shown many other things that we now recognize as the content of our everyday worldview.

So it was that the pupils of those ancient times were first prepared, carefully prepared, before they were taught what, so to speak, every schoolboy and schoolgirl today absorbs. So times change, so do civilizations. One simply gets a false idea of the development of humanity if one only knows the outer history, not this history of the human soul.

What had the students of the old wisdom schools brought with them to the threshold of the supersensible world? They had brought with them an instinctive knowledge of the world, which arose, as it were, from the instincts, from the drives of their bodies. Through these, they saw — today we call this animism — everything outside as ensouled and spiritualized. They felt the kinship of man with the world. They felt their spirit within the spirit of the world. But to see the world here as we learn to see it today, already in elementary school, these ancients had to be prepared.

Dearly beloved attendees, in all the various types of literature that amateurishly tackle mysticism, even if they sometimes give the impression of being scholarly, there is a lot of talk about the Guardian of the Threshold, about the threshold into the spiritual world. And they are often believed all the more, the more nebulous mysticism one pours out about these things.

What I have presented to you now is what arises for the unbiased spiritual researcher precisely through what the ancients called the threshold into the spiritual world. Not those nebulous things, of which some orders and some sects and the like speak today, were sought beyond the threshold, but precisely that which is general education with us today. But at the same time we see from this that we face the world with a different self-awareness. The old wisdom teachers feared that their students, if they had not first strengthened their self-confidence through self-discipline, would have become mentally impotent if, for example, they had adopted the idea: The earth does not stand still, but circles around the sun at great speed; one circles around the sun with the earth. This loss of ground under their feet would have been unbearable for the ancients, it would have dampened their self-confidence to the point of unconsciousness. We learn to endure this from childhood on. We live, as it were, in the world as our world of education, into which the ancients had to penetrate only after careful preparation.

Nevertheless, we should not long for the conditions of ancient civilizations. They no longer fit with what nourishes our souls today. What I am presenting to you today as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is neither a renewal of old Gnostic teachings nor an ancient oriental wisdom, which could only be brought to human souls today as something decadent. It is something that can be found today through elementary creative power from this human soul, in the ways that I will explain in a moment. But first, I would like to point out that in a sense we can also speak of a threshold into the supersensible world, or in any case into a world other than that of ordinary life and ordinary science.

The ancients suspected a different world from the one presented to them in their everyday life beyond the threshold. But what do we hear from our conscientious natural scientists, from those who are most right in terms of their methods? We hear that natural science presents us with limits to knowledge. We hear about “ignorabimus” and the like, and, it must be emphasized, within natural science with full justification. If the ancients lacked the intense self-awareness that we have today, then we lack something else.

Where did we get this intense self-awareness in the first place? We got it from the fact that the way of thinking and the way of looking at things that began with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and so on came into humanity. As a result, we have not only gained a sum of knowledge, but modern humanity has also undergone a certain education of its soul life. Everything that we have developed under the influence of the way of thinking of these minds in modern times tends to cultivate the intellect, the powers of reason. Of course, today we experiment in science, we observe carefully and conscientiously. We observe the phenomena around us with our instruments, with the telescope, the microscope, with X-rays, with the spectroscope, and we use our intellect, so to speak, only to extract the laws of nature from the phenomena. But despite all this, what are we doing when we observe, when we experiment? We are doing it in such a way that within this work of knowledge we only let the intellect speak in formulating the laws of nature. And it is also the case that, in the course of the last three, four, five hundred years, it is primarily the intellect that has been emphasized in human development. But the mind has the peculiarity of strengthening, hardening and intensifying human self-awareness.

Therefore, today we can endure what even the ancient Greeks could not have endured: the awareness that we move with the earth in the bottomless, as it were, around the sun. But on the other hand, precisely because of this strengthened self-awareness, which shows us the world as soulless and spiritless, we are led to lack a realization that souls must nevertheless long for: We see the world in its material phenomena, its material facts, as they have never been seen by ancient people without a preparation of the mysteries. But we do not see - and that is why conscientious naturalists speak of ignorabimus and of the limits of knowledge - we do not see the world of a spiritual around us.

We stand as human beings in this world. When we reflect on ourselves, we have to say to ourselves: it is the spirit that is active in us simply by thinking about things, by summarizing the experiments, by summarizing the observations. But is this spirit the same as the hermit who stands in a world of material appearances? Is this spirit only present in our body? Is the world spiritless and soulless, as we have to understand it from the point of view of the physical and biological sciences, and rightly so? Today we stand before our environment. We are standing on the threshold of a new era. This has certainly not yet dawned on the broadest sections of humanity. But what humanity does not fully realize is not completely extinguished in the soul. One does not think about things, but inwardly these things sit as feelings of the soul. We have an unconscious soul life. For most people it remains unconscious. But out of this unconsciousness arises the longing to cross a threshold again, to gain spiritual knowledge of the world through self-awareness.

Now, whatever else one may call these things, which one usually feels only unclearly, they are in truth, from one side, the deepest riddle of civilization; they are such that people feel that a spiritual world around them must be found again. The world of ordinary science, devoid of spirit and soul, cannot be the one with which the human soul also forms a unity in its deepest essence. This is the first great civilizational question of the present: How do we again find knowledge that at the same time deepens our religious feeling? How do we find knowledge that at the same time satisfies the deepest needs for a sense of the eternal in the human soul?

It can be said that this modern science has brought great and powerful things, but for the unbiased person it has not actually brought solutions, but rather, one might say, the opposite of solutions. And we should be satisfied and glad about that too. What can we do with modern science? Can we solve the questions of the soul? No, but we can ask them in greater depth! Through this modern science, we have before us the world of material facts in their purity, free from what the human being brings into the world of soulfulness and spirituality from his or her subjectivity. We see, so to speak, the pure phenomena of the external material world. Through this, we get to know the questions of the soul more intensely. This is precisely the achievement of the modern spirit of science: it has brought us new riddles, deeper riddles. This is the first great question of civilization in the present time: How do we face these deeper riddles? One cannot solve the great soul questions in the Haeckelian, Huxleyan, Spencerian spirit, but one can, in this spirit, feel the great riddle questions for the existence of humanity today more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science comes in. Its aim is to guide humanity today, in accordance with its nature, over the renewed threshold into a spiritual world. And the way by which modern man can cross the threshold differently from the ancient man, it is to be described here today in outline. I can only do this in brief strokes. What I only want to explain in principle can be found in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other writings.

I would first like to draw attention to the starting point that a person who wants to become a spiritual researcher must take today. He must start from a point that, due to the whole of our time, people today are least willing to accept. It is the point in the soul's makeup that I would like to call intellectual modesty. Although we have developed intellectually to a height never before seen in human development as humanity to a particular height in the last three to four centuries, as a spiritual researcher one must rise precisely to intellectual modesty.

I would like to illustrate what I mean by comparing it. Let us take a five-year-old child and give him a volume of Shakespeare. What would he do with it? He will play with it, leaf through it, tear it up; he will not do what is appropriate with it. But when the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, he will relate to the volume of Shakespeare quite differently. What has happened? Well, abilities that were inherent in the child have been developed in the child through external intervention by people, through education and teaching. It has become a different being in the course of ten to fifteen years. Intellectual modesty allows the person to say, even when he is an adult, when he has absorbed the current education in science intellectually: you could face nature and the environment in such a way that your approach could be compared to that of a five-year-old child facing Shakespeare's works. There could still be potential in you that can be further developed, so that you become a different being in terms of soul and spirit.

People today are not very keen on adopting the point of view of such intellectual modesty. Our habits of thinking and feeling towards the life of education are different. Those who have received the usual education today are then accepted into our higher educational institutions. There, one no longer has to deal with the development of knowledge, willpower, and the abilities of the soul. Basically, one remains within the scientific research at the point of view that inheritance and ordinary education give. Certainly, observation was broadened in an incredible way through experiment and science, but the same powers of cognition were applied that one has once in so-called modern intellectual life. One did not aim at developing one's human being to bring these powers of cognition further. One did not say to oneself: the person who has these powers of knowledge of life or science could stand opposite nature as a five-year-old child stands opposite Shakespeare's works, and he could develop powers and abilities of knowledge within himself that would lead him to a completely different behavior towards nature. But this is said by someone who, in the sense of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here, wants to become a researcher in the supersensible worlds. This is really about the development of human abilities that initially only exist in the Anlagen, albeit in every human being, but in order for them to be developed, a great deal has to be gone through.

I am not talking, dear listeners, about some kind of miraculous or even superstitious measures for the human soul, but rather about the development of abilities that every person is well acquainted with, that play a major role in everyday life and in ordinary science; they are just not developed to their full potential for the human being between birth and death.

There are many such abilities, but today I would like to characterize only two in their further development. You can find more details about this in the books mentioned. First of all, there is the ability to remember. This ability to remember is absolutely necessary for everyday life. We know, and those who are particularly interested in such things will know from the psycho-pathological literature, what it means for a healthy mental life that the memory is intact up to a point in childhood that lies quite early; that there is no period in life from which memory images do not emerge, bringing to mind the experiences we have gone through. If that which memory is extinguishes, then the human ego is destroyed; a severe mental illness has come over him. Now, what memory gives us is a re-emergence in pale or vivid images. It is precisely this ability, this power, that can be further developed. What is its peculiarity? Well, otherwise the experiences flit past us. The images we form of these experiences also flit past our soul. Memory retains them. I can only speak about this memory in sketchy terms; in my literature you will find a developed science precisely about this ability to remember.

What memory does with the otherwise fleeting images is that it gives them duration. This is what one first takes up and develops in the spiritual scientific method; one develops it through what I call meditation and concentration in the books mentioned. This consists of either seeking advice from someone who has experience in these matters or gleaning the advice oneself from the relevant literature, and of taking easily comprehensible complexes of images such as are geometric or mathematical figures, which one completely overlooks, knowing that these are not reminiscences from life emerging from the subconscious, but everything one has in consciousness is there through one's own arbitrariness in consciousness. One is not subject to auto-suggestion or reverie; one surveys that which one brings into the center of consciousness. Then one remains in consciousness for a long time with complete inner calm on this idea. Just as muscles develop when they perform a particular kind of work, so certain soul powers develop when the soul devotes itself to this unusual activity of remaining on such ideas. It looks easy, and not only do some believe that the spiritual scientist draws what he has to say from some kind of influence, but some also believe that what I am describing here as methods that take place in the inner, intimate life of the soul itself is easy. No, what I am telling you now also requires a long time; some people can do it more easily, others more difficultly. The depth of the performance is much more important than the length of time spent in such meditation.

But one must do such exercises for years. And what one has to accomplish within the soul is truly no easier than what one accomplishes in the laboratory, in the physics room, or at the observatory. Outward research is no more difficult to acquire than that which is carefully and conscientiously cultivated in the soul over many years. But then certain inner soul powers, which we otherwise only know as powers of remembrance, become stronger, and thus something arises in us as soul power that we have not known at all before. This enables us to clearly recognize what materialism says about the power of memory and remembrance. Materialism tells us that the human being's power of remembrance is bound to the material body; if something in the nervous system is not properly constituted, then the power of remembrance also declines, and it declines with age. In any case, mental powers depend on physical development. Spiritual science does not deny this for the life between birth and death. For someone who is developing his memory as I have just described it knows from direct experience how the ordinary memory, which conjures up images of our experiences before our soul, is dependent on the human body. But what he is now developing becomes completely independent of the human body. And the human being experiences how one can live in a soul realm, so that one has supersensible experiences in this soul realm, just as one has sensory experiences in the physical body. I would like to explain to you how these supersensible experiences are in the following way.

You know that human life alternates rhythmically between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and waking up and the intervening period of sleep occur in our waking life. What happens then? The following is present for the ordinary consciousness: when we fall asleep, our consciousness is dulled, and in most people it reaches absolute zero. Dreams sometimes bubble up out of this half-dulled consciousness. In this state, the person is indeed alive; otherwise he would have to pass away and be reborn, in a soul-spiritual sense, but his consciousness is paralyzed. This is because from falling asleep until waking up, the human being does not use his senses, does not use the impulses that represent his organic will impulses.

But the one who has developed the higher ability out of the ability to remember, which I have just mentioned, can switch off precisely the same. Such a spiritual researcher comes to the point where he no longer needs to see with his eyes, as one does not see with one's eyes when asleep; nor to hear with his ears, as one also does not hear with one's ears when asleep; nor to feel the warmth in the surroundings, nor to use the will impulses that work through the muscles, or through the human organization in general. He can shut out all physical things. And yet his consciousness is not dulled as it is when asleep, but he is able to devote himself to states in which otherwise a person is only in sleep, but unconscious; the spiritual researcher is fully conscious. Just as the sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world that contains nothing for him, so the spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with our sensual world, but which is just as full and intense as our sensual world. We face our sensory world through our senses; the spiritual researcher faces the supersensible world when he can consciously free himself from the body, when he is in a state that is otherwise experienced by a person between falling asleep and waking up; but he is fully aware in this state.

In this way, one learns to recognize that a supersensible world constantly surrounds us, just as a sensual world otherwise surrounds us. However, there is one significant difference: in the sensual world, we perceive facts through our senses, and within the facts, we also perceive entities. Facts predominate, and entities arise in the course of these facts. In the supersensible world that we open up for ourselves in this way, we first encounter entities. When we open our spiritual eyes to see the supersensible world, we are surrounded by real entities. And at first it is a world of very concrete, real, supersensible entities in which we are, not yet a world of facts; we still have to conquer that through something else.

So this is the achievement of modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: that the human being crosses a threshold again and learns to enter a different world from the one that otherwise surrounds him. And when a person learns to recognize how he is independent of the body, then he finally comes to say to himself: Not only when the soul falls asleep does it, as it were, separate itself from the body and then return to the body when it wakes up; through the desire for the body lying in bed, it returns. Through such supersensible knowledge one also comes to really get to know the essence of the soul, how it returns to the body through this desire when waking up. But if you acquire such real concepts of falling asleep and waking up, these concepts will eventually expand to include learning to recognize the human soul in its essence, as it was before it descended from the spiritual worlds through birth or conception into a physical body that is given to it through inheritance.

Once you have grasped and learned to follow the soul outside the body between falling asleep and waking up, just as you learn to recognize the lesser forces that draw the soul to the body in bed, you learn to recognize the soul as it lives when it is freed from the body after passing through the gate of death. In particular, the following ideas are recorded: One learns to recognize why the human soul has only a duller consciousness during sleep. It has this because the desire for the body lives in it. This desire for the body dulls consciousness between falling asleep and waking up to the point of unconsciousness. When a person passes through the gate of death, this desire no longer exists. And by getting to know the soul through the developed ability to remember, one gets to know it precisely in the state in which it develops after passing through the gateway of death; how it can then have consciousness because it is not bound to a physical body, because it no longer has any desire for one. This freedom from desire makes consciousness possible.

When a person passes through the gateway of death, he acquires a different consciousness from the one he had through the instrumentality of the body. In this way one also learns to recognize what forces were in the soul that attracted it to a physical body when it was in a spiritual world, but to a physical body that only generally shone before it as a physical body, which was not a specific one. One learns to recognize the soul as it absorbs the desire to come down again into physical life on earth. In other words, one first gets to know the eternal part of the human soul in its true meaning.

And that, dear listeners, is one thing that one gets to know in this way. But one also gets to know something else through it. By learning to recognize the eternal in the human soul that passes through births and deaths in images, I call them imaginations in my books, one learns to recognize that this human soul belongs to a supersensible world; that the soul belongs to a supersensible world just as the body belongs to the sensual world. And just as one can describe this sensual world through the body, so one can describe the supersensible world in its spirituality. One learns to recognize a supersensible world in addition to the sensual world.

However, one must be willing to develop a second soul quality, beyond that which is present in ordinary life. Today's scientist recoils at the mere mention of this quality as an intellectual capacity. One can fully appreciate the reasons why he does this; but nevertheless, what I have to tell you about the further development of this human soul ability is true.

The first power that had to be developed was the ability to remember, which becomes an independent force. The second power is the power of human love. In ordinary life between birth and death, love works through the physical organism; it is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature. And only in the most sublime moments does some of this love detach itself from the physical. Then man has that uplifting moment when he becomes free from himself, which is the state of true freedom, where man does not give himself over to his instincts, but forgets himself, where he bases his actions on external facts, on the necessity of those facts. Because love is inwardly connected with freedom, I dared to say as early as 1893 in my Philosophy of Freedom, by which I wanted to found a philosophy of sociology for the present day, that true love does not make man blind, but rather seeing, that is, free. It leads him beyond that which otherwise blinds him when he is dependent on what is within him. Love allows us to be devoted to the outside world, and in so doing frees us from that which we must be freed from if we are to act freely.

But this love, which only shines into our ordinary life in truly free actions, must be cultivated by the modern spiritual researcher. Love must gradually spiritualize in the same way as the faculty of memory must spiritualize; it must become a power that is purely soul-life, and which makes him, as a soul-being, independent of the body, so that he can love without the body, through its blood, through its entire organization, providing the basis for this love. This is how immersion in the external world, in people, comes about; this is how you become one with the external world.

This developed power of love now brings us a second thing; it puts us into the spiritual world in a substantial way, which we enter through the developed ability to remember. And we now get to know spiritual facts and learn to describe the world in such a way that we do not merely say how our present planetary system once emerged from some old nebulous world, which will then in turn either disperse or fall into the sun. We do not look at such a world, which is alien to the spirit, and which is confronted by something else. And if a person is honest, they must feel that this world, as viewed scientifically, is confronted by the most valuable thing in the human being. In modern spiritual life, we have been able to get to know the besieged souls who tell us again and again: Science tells us about a world of pure natural necessity, that our world comes from worlds that were fog worlds, that clumped together into the four natural kingdoms, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, up to man. But now, in the depths of his being, something arises in man to which he must attach the greatest value: his moral, his religious world. This stands before his soul, and it is what actually makes him human in the first place. But he must say to himself, if he is honest with regard to the purely scientific world view: This earth, on which you stand like a hermit of the universe with your moral ideals, will disintegrate, will fall back into the sun, will become a slag. There will be a large churchyard, the ideals will be buried.

This is where spiritual science comes in. It does not approach this situation from the standpoint of faith and hope, but from real knowledge, which is developed in the way I have indicated, and says: No, the mere scientific world view offers an abstraction of the world. This world is permeated with spirit, this world is permeated with supersensible entities. And if we look back to prehistoric times, what is material on earth has emerged from the spiritual; and what is material now will become spiritual in the future. Just as man discards his body and enters a spiritual world spiritually with consciousness, so that which is material on earth will fall away like a corpse, and that which is spiritual-soul on earth, that which is spiritual-soul in man, will arise in the future, even when the earth has perished. One could say that the Christian saying “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” proves true here with a certain variation. Man can say: Everything my eyes see will perish, just as the human body perishes in the face of human individuality. But what lives in man as morality rises from what is perishing. Man senses a spiritual world around him; he lives into a spiritual world.

In this way, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science deepens our knowledge of the spiritual, and in doing so, it takes on a different form from that of external science in relation to the civilizational needs of the present. External science can in turn deepen knowledge and insight to religious fervor and higher consciousness. It gives the human being a spiritual self-awareness.

This is basically the first great civilizational question of the present day. If a person does not have the right inner support, if he feels like he is floating in the void as a mere material being, he cannot develop a strong inner being, nor can he appear as a strong being in social life. Man must create what external institutions are, man must create what external social conditions are. There is something significant about external institutions and external social conditions in terms of the great civilizational questions of the present and the future, and these civilizational questions lead us back to the search for the great, true consciousness of humanity. For only people who have such inner support, which can give them peace of mind, will be able to integrate themselves properly into social life. That is the first question: how can a person with inner support, with a secure hold on life, integrate themselves into our social conditions? The second is what we might call the encounter between people, human interaction. And here we enter a field where, no less than in the field of knowledge, modern civilization has brought man not new solutions but new riddles. Consider only the breadth of technology, of technical life, that the achievements of modern natural science have brought. Technical life, commercial life, life of intercourse, as they surround us from hour to hour today, they are the achievements of this magnificent, modern view of nature. But what we have not found within modern technology, what is posed as a new vital question, is: How should people live in this complicated technical, commercial and transport life?

This question is posed by modern civilization itself. That it has not yet been solved is shown by those terrible movements that present themselves all the worse the further east we go, into Asia, where human instincts are not used to create something upward, but, because the great civilizing questions have not been solved, are used to create something destructive. Undoubtedly, the whole of modern civilization would have to perish through what is emerging in the East. Much more terrible than people in the West imagine is what is lurking there to lead to the decline

of modern civilization. But it also testifies to how necessary it is to find something else to solve the civilizational issues of the present.

We must not only work in modern technology, which has emerged from the modern view of nature, but we must also gain another possibility: Man has become estranged from nature; he has been placed, practically speaking, with his actions and his whole occupation in a soulless, mechanistic way; he has been led from dealing with nature to dealing with the spiritless machine, with the spiritless mechanism of traffic; and we must find ways to give man something again that he can feel as something given by nature. It must be a world view that speaks to his soul with great power and tells him that man is something more than what he experiences here; that he belongs to a spiritual-soul, a supersensible world that surrounds him and can be explored in an exact science, just as the outer science is that leads to technology. But only such a science will also be able to establish the right relationship between people. Such a science will enable us to encounter a being in man that not only appears to us as it comes to us, as it appears between birth and death, but in such a way that we learn to respect the eternal, the immortal, the connection with a supersensible world forever. Through such a deepened knowledge, the feeling must change from person to person.

And a third thing is also important. It is important that the human being learns again that his life is not exhausted with the life between birth and death, as the modern proletarian believes from his ideology called ideology, but that what we do here in every moment has not only an earthly but also a cosmic significance. For indeed, when the earth has perished, what we bring out of our souls into our daily work, out of moral, spiritual and soul foundations, will arise in another world; it will take part in spiritualization in the metamorphosis.

Thus, spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented approaches the questions of the present in three ways. It brings people to a spiritual self-awareness. It brings people to see in their fellow human beings, in their neighbor, a spiritual being in turn. It brings people to give their work, their earthly activities, a cosmic, universal, spiritual meaning, however material they may be.

Spiritual science today not only has theoretical views about what can be worked out in this way, but has already begun to apply it in practice in life. In Stuttgart, we have the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I am in charge of, and where a pedagogy, a didactics, is being developed through the knowledge of human nature that can be obtained through spiritual science, as it is meant here. Furthermore, in Dornach near Basel, we have the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, the construction of which I will show you in a few days with the help of slides. This Goetheanum in Dornach is not yet finished, but we were able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building last fall. I have also been able to speak here in Holland about spiritual science in the past. At that time I could only speak of spiritual science as a form of research, a research tendency, as something that lives in individual human beings.

Since then, this spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Last spring I myself showed how what I have only outlined for you today in its beginning as spiritual scientific research can be applied to all fields of science in its execution. I showed physicians and medical students how what can be gained from this spiritual science in a strictly exact method can have an effect on medicine and therapy. Those questions in medicine that become borderline questions are juxtaposed with the health issues of humanity. Every conscientious doctor will perceive those practical questions of medicine as cultural issues. These questions are the ones that remain unanswered today because today's science does not want to rise from the sensory to the spiritual and supersensory.

How medicine can be fertilized, how all sciences can be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, experts from all fields, from jurisprudence, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, pedagogy, tried to show it. Then there were also personalities who belong to the arts, to artistic creation, who showed how artistic creation can be fertilized by spiritual science. There were representatives of practical life, of commercial and industrial life, who showed how their lives, guided by spiritual science, are no longer merely caught up in the old routine that led us into the catastrophes, but how, through it, the human being is brought into life practice in a higher sense. This is precisely what these courses should show: how spiritual science does not want to cultivate some kind of dilettantism, some nebulous mysticism, but how it can fruitfully intervene in the individual sciences. But in doing so, it simultaneously elevates what is in these sciences to an overall spiritual and supersensible conception of the human being.

I will have more to say about the practical side here; then I will speak about teaching and educational issues and about the social question. Then you will see how the spiritual science meant here, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, does not seek some nebulous mysticism in a sphere that is alien to life, but how it wants to grasp the spirit for other reasons: firstly, because the human being must become aware of his connection with the true spiritual origin; secondly, however, because the spirit wants to intervene precisely in the material, in the practical life, as it makes a distinction between the spiritless practical life and a spirit conceived in terms of a lack of life, which certainly does not grasp the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, nor that which is most necessary for the present.

Dear attendees, we have found people who have an understanding of what is to be achieved in the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach for the development of humanity, and how necessary it is in the face of the great civilizational issues of the present day that this be achieved. The difficult circumstances have slowed down the construction very much. We are not yet finished, and completion will depend to a large extent on whether people who have a heart and mind for all the human progress that is needed today will continue to come to our aid. In its unfinished state, we gathered more than a thousand people at the opening of our courses. Those who come to this Dornach after this — as will also be shown in the next lecture — will see that at the same time this spiritual science wants to work out of the full humanity: that it does not just want to speak to the human head, that it not only wants to gain that which can be presented through experimentation and observation, but that at the same time it strives for truly artistic expression, without falling back on straw-like symbolism or abstract, pedantic allegories. Therefore, not just any architectural style could be applied in Dornach – as the slide lecture will show – but the architectural style had to be drawn from the same sources from which this spiritual science itself flows. It is not a one-sided science such as today's experimental and observational sciences, but seeks to draw from the full human being. It wants to speak to the full, whole human being, despite the fact that it is as exact as any science can be.

I will still have to talk about the practical implementation, but today I had to present the results of the spiritual research on these matters, in order to then show in the practical areas how necessary this is for our time, which is based on the observation of the history of this period by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It aims to add to the conscientious and methodical study of the material world, which it recognizes more than any other spiritual direction, the science of the spirit, which in turn can lead to religious deepening and to artistic creativity, just as the old instinctive science, which we can no longer renew, led to art and religion in the mysteries.

That this spiritual science is not opposed to religion and Christianity, I will have to show in the further explanation of the practical side. It strives for that which every true, religious deepening has to strive for, it strives for the spirit. Hence we have hope: all those people who today still resist this spiritual science will come round to it in the end, because this spiritual science strives for something universally human: it strives for the spirit, and for humanity, it needs the spirit.