The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Discussion in the “Giordano Bruno League for a Unified World View” with a speech by Rudolf Steiner.

The purpose of the Bruno Federation is to promote a unified worldview. It does not see this as a final accomplishment, but as a task in the solution of which it seeks to participate in a research and teaching, organizing and stimulating way. In doing so, it is particularly concerned with bringing the various points of view to an understanding and, if possible, to some reconciliation. He also strives for unity in that he wants to harmoniously combine science, philosophy, art and devotion. As one of the means to this end, the league considers not only larger public lectures but also discussions about questions of world view in a smaller circle, as well as the publication of such league discussions through printing.

The first attempt to discuss a unified worldview took place in March 1902. The topic for discussion was: “What does a unified worldview mean in terms of its concept and value?” The new secretary of the federation, Dr. Hermann Friedmann, had taken on the introductory presentation, but was unable to deliver it due to illness. Mr. Wolfgang Kirchbach kindly stepped in for him to improvise and present his own views. After the Federal Chairman, Dr. Bruno Wille, had pointed out the purpose of the discussion evenings, Miss Maria Holgers read Hölderlin's moving poem “To Nature”. Wolfgang Kirchbach then took the floor:

"The Chairman has just emphasized that it is an equally difficult, challenging and significant task to establish and pursue a monistic worldview. Therefore, today, at our first discussion, I will try to present to you the full difficulty of the problem we face. However, this reference to the difficulty of our task is intended to be purely academic.

The sentence I have to talk about is formulated: What does ‘a unified worldview’, in terms of its concept and value, mean to us, or rather to me? I will briefly present the problem as it relates to me. For those who are not yet familiar with it, I emphasize that the word ‘unified worldview’ here is only a translation of the word “monistic,” which expresses the processing of all conceptual and other knowledge into a worldview of the unity of being, of the existence of the world in a unity. The word ‘unified worldview’ would probably describe the meaning more aptly.

But if we establish a unified worldview, we cannot deny ourselves the question of the value of such a worldview, the areas in which it is of value and the areas into which it breaks down.

To seek unity in the realm of the cosmos, as nature and its laws are popularly called, would be one side of a unified research and thinking. However, as it stands at present, science does not yet give those who have penetrated more deeply into it the right to speak objectively of unity in the cosmos. We are accustomed to thinking of this world as quantitatively represented in terms of matter and, in connection with it, the concept of force. The dualism that adheres to this combination of concepts has led to attempts to dissolve it into a unity. It was said that force is a function, an expression of matter, and in this way a certain unity was gained by conceiving of matter as something essentially one. In a completely different way, actual natural science has developed the concept of matter. With the help of its analytical methods, it has isolated more and more elements from the surrounding cosmos and, through empirical work, has found about seventy different elements, that is, materials, instead of a monistic matter. Thus the term “matter” has only the value of a linguistic abstraction, like the term “animal”. It does not correspond to any real individual, but the unity of these seventy elements is for the time being only a hypothesis.

We find the same thing with regard to the concept of force since Robert Mayer's discovery of the unity of force and the transformability of energy. They are faced with the tremendous mystery that the mechanical force and perhaps the same force that sets the globe and the sun in permanent relation and causes the rotation of the stars, that perhaps the same force, converted and transformed, represents those phenomena that a thunderstorm, for example, presents to us. But the fact remains that this phenomenon of electricity manifests itself differently than, say, the force that drives a stone to the center of the earth. Thus, science has not yet shown that we must assume a unity of nature in the sense that the various forms of energy are one. The different phenomena have not yet been bridged; here, too, we are only faced with hypotheses.

The same applies to a whole series of other phenomena. For example, we do not know where to draw the line between the higher concept of life of the organic and that of the inorganic. The entire explanation of nature is in the throes of a lively dispute on this point.

Since we have to tie in with this aspect of the world view with the material that science provides us, we must therefore admit that, objectively, the unity of the universe has not yet been proven as a fact.

But what about the other question that needs to be addressed in our overall quest for a unified world view? It is the question: How does our own thinking, which is based on unity, relate to its object, the world? Here we are faced with an apparent dualism. We see: there is something outside, and here is something that absorbs this outside. We have a duality here. But now we ask: To what extent can and may we assume that the functions of our brain, the forms of expression, categories of our mind form a unity with the world? The fact that you relate all the functions of your mind to a unity could at best be deduced from the fact that you localize them together in your body. First of all, the activity you perform when you research the cause that causes a stone to fall towards the earth is quite different from asking: Is it possible under the given conditions that this fall occurs? It could well be that the ideas supplied by the various mental activities come into conflict with each other and thus there would be no unity within you. A further question would be how the unified picture of the world that you carry within you corresponds to objective reality. To what extent do the laws that prevail in my mind also operate in the external world? In doing so, we will first have to think dualistically. Resolving this dualism into a monism is, however, a supreme urge in thinking itself; but epistemology is faced with a major problem here. Since Kant, dealing with it has been a duty for anyone who deals with questions of world view.

Thus, in constructing a unified worldview, we have to perform two operations: on the one hand, to empirically trace the infinite multiplicity of the world down to its smallest differentiations, and on the other hand, to always form our thinking in an epistemological sense into a monism, into a unification of that multiplicity into a unity.

In working with the material in this direction, we would soon encounter difficulties, not to mention those in the ethical realm. The question would soon arise before us as to what extent we can judge the moral life in man himself and the processes in the cosmos from the point of view of unified moral laws. For we cannot let any process of this world affect us without at the same time processing it ethically. The joy of the cosmos, the contemplation of harmony in infinite diversity, is at the same time a moral engagement. So the question arises: Can we arrive at a monistic view in ethical thinking itself and connect it with the rest of the monistic contemplation? — At the same time, the question arises for us: Could our moral feeling not also find satisfaction through a different contemplation? Why, for example, does the devout Christian consider his doctrine, which recognizes only one God, to be so infinitely higher than paganism, which has several deities? And how has the Christian nevertheless arrived at a dualism, even at the assumption of an even greater multiplicity in the supernatural world?

If scientific considerations were to yield proof of dualism, we would have to declare ourselves satisfied with that. To establish a monism just for the sake of being monistic would be worthless. But we have in mind a monism, a being of things themselves, by which we can measure the value of all our views: the true, the truth. There is only one lasting evaluation for every single science, for every knowledge: that its statements are true, that is, that they correspond to objective processes. This is also the only valid assessment for a worldview. Only if a monistic mode of explanation proved to be true in all objective circumstances, as in our subjective actions, in all manifestations of the diversity of life, would it be valuable; I could see no other criterion for judging the value of this world view. This monon of truth, which can never become untrue, is so far the only recognizable eternal unity, to which objective phenomena in their multiplicity and transitoriness interact with the spirit."

After these words of Kirchbach, Dr. Rudolf Steiner rose to give the following remarks:

"I would like to stick closely to the question: What does a unified worldview mean in terms of its concept and values? In doing so, I am in direct opposition to the previous speaker. If I ask myself: From the standpoint of our modern natural science and spiritual science, are we justified in considering the world to be a unity? I have to say that we are, we are at least placed in the position of having to search for it. In the face of the manifold diversity into which the specialization of the sciences has undoubtedly led us, I ask: Where should we look for unity? To say from the outset that this or that must first be demonstrated as a unity seems to me to be the exaggerated demand of an extreme epistemology. For me, the pursuit of a unified worldview is justified by the simple fact that it is an indelible need of the human spirit that has existed at all times, perhaps more clearly in pre-Christian times, when it had not yet been suppressed by the dogmas and views of the church, which a union that seeks to build on Giordano Bruno's legacy has a particular duty to fight against.

Meanwhile, I find that the results of the natural sciences also meet this need. Chemistry has found seventy elements and will perhaps increase this diversity; but at the same time it has found something very special: Between these elements, it has found certain relationships with regard to atomic weight, for example, according to which a scale of the elements can be constructed that is also a classification of these elements according to their acoustic, optical and other physical properties. From a gap in this scale, one has inferred missing elements, partially predicted their properties and actually discovered them afterwards. Thus the phenomenal elements, although different, nevertheless represent a great unity, which we can follow with the calculation.

However, the chemist is forced to look for the unity elsewhere than in the brutal concept of a unified substance, namely in a system of lawful relationships. Professor Ostwald spoke out in this direction at a congress of natural scientists. Recently a journal has been founded to further develop the outdated materialism in this new natural philosophical sense. So we are standing in front of a new world view, which we cannot yet conclude, but to which a perspective has been opened up, and indeed a perspective on unity.

The same applies to the uniformity of force. In terms of phenomena, we will probably never be able to trace electricity back to pure gravitation, but in the mathematical formula we use to calculate and convert it, we have something real and fundamental; and thus a perspective has been opened up for us regarding the unity of force.

Without wanting to take the exact position of Goethe's metamorphosis theory, which was the first to seek a unifying principle in the organic realm, I do think, however, that it also represents an important step towards a unified world view. Added to this is the biogenetic law, according to which every being, in its embryonic development, once again passes through the forms of the species from which it originated. Since it has become possible to produce organic substances in the laboratory, we are offered a clear prospect of unity here as well.

If one does not want to demand unity in the phenomenal, this perspective shows us where to look for the monon. And it is becoming increasingly clear to us what all great philosophers had no doubt about: that what we experience in the external world is equivalent to what we experience in the mind. If we proceed from external to internal experience, we will arrive at a unified world view. For those seeking unity, the last decades of science are quite comforting, for from all fields elements are flowing to them that open up a unified worldview.

Its value lies in the fact that it satisfies a spiritual need, which, just as necessary as air and light, belongs to the happiness of a spirit that develops this need within itself.

Mr. Kirchbach replied as follows: “Regarding the question: How do we arrive at a unified worldview and how do we imagine it? Dr. Steiner has given many suggestions with which I fully agree. But there are individual points that can be argued about. The example given by the previous speaker of Goethe's doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants shows how even a great mind could believe that he had found a unifying principle in a point that later turned out to be questionable. Goethe believed that the same morphological principle applied to the chlorophyll leaf as to the stem, and he saw the principle of the leaves recurring in the shape of the petals and in the pistil, so that to him all parts of the plant were only modifications of one and the same morphological principle. On the other hand, it is a fact that in the rose the stem leaf has only one median channel, while the petal has three, so there is indeed a fundamental difference in the morphological structure of the rose, as well as a chemical one.

The newer cell theory seeks unity in a completely different area than in this apparent morphology. Here the cell is the formative principle and brings about the overall structure through the sum of all factors to which it is subject. Perhaps it will be similar with some of the concepts of Darwinism.

I have used this example to show how difficult it is to find unity even in natural phenomena, because we must first learn to group the phenomena correctly according to mere observation before we can conclude their essential unity through mathematical or other logical mediation.

Dr. Bruno Wille: “You have just heard two representatives of worldviews that, I think, agree on the fundamentals, apart from a few points of difference. First of all, certain difficulties were pointed out that apparently stand in the way of developing a unified worldview. We do, of course, first experience nature as a multitude, as an enormous amount of different sensations. Only when we compare this diversity in a spirit of seeking unity and partly bridge the differences, partly dissolve them, can we come closer to a unified world view.

To seek such unity is indeed, as Dr. Steiner says, a general human need; first of all a logical need. Our cognitive apparatus, which seeks to comprehend the world, tends to think of all that is multiple as a unity. Thus, despite all their differences, we see a certain commonality in the trees of our forests in Brandenburg and combine them into a single unit, for example, in the term “pine”. We then order the pines together with the birches, oaks and aspens, with the blueberries, ferns and mosses into an even higher unit, into the term “plant”. If we compare a plant with ourselves, then here again a unity is present; we are dealing with organic living beings. Thus our thinking is constantly in search of overarching associations and contexts. This, of course, raises the important question of epistemology: Does our thinking correspond to the world independent of us? Is the unity of nature more than a mere subjective, intellectual experience? The answer is highly complex. Today I am content with a simple 'Yes', while I still note: I also seek the monism in that, unlike Kant, I understand subject and object, spirit and nature as an inseparable unity and, like the medieval 'realists', see a real, not just nominal identity in the concept.

For our moral endeavors, too, doubt about what is morally true, right, and salutary can only be dispelled if we can derive the individual moral ideas from a supreme unity. If there were two or more world principles that were in absolute opposition to each other, contradictory principles for our moral life would also be derived from them; and in fact we would end up in terrible contradictions in all areas of our lives. Thus, our entire idealism points us to monism, to the search for the eternal One.

Of course, science has not yet given a clear and unequivocal answer to the question of why we have to look for the One in the seemingly manifold world; but, as Dr. Steiner very rightly emphasized, the magnificent development of science in the last century was so fruitful for the cause of a unified world view that the monistic philosopher must not fail to make full use of these fruits. On the other hand, the natural scientist should not look down on the millennia-old work of philosophy with contempt, but rather take the doubts raised by philosophy seriously and seek to answer them. I am pleased that Dr. Steiner has acknowledged that old materialism has become untenable. This insight is a fruit of philosophical criticism. And so philosophy and natural science belong together as complementary ways of looking at the world.

To supplement the scientific facts, in which Dr. Steiner rightly sees important aspects of monism, I would like to refer to the following pages of my unified world view. Above all, I would like to emphasize that we find a comprehensive natural law in all world processes and phenomena, for which we have never been able to establish an exception: the law of causality. It is a fact that every process follows, in terms of thought, from another, which we can call the cause of the following. I now think that in this context, cause and effect mean nothing other than what we call development. We can understand the emergence of the effect from the system of its conditions as the further development of the cause. The law of causality thus permeates all world processes, for which we can in turn determine special rules, the special laws of nature. According to such 'eternal, ironclad, great laws', the world comes together for us as a unity, in contrast to the dualistic world view, which admits of miracles, i.e. exceptions to the laws of nature, which it cannot plausibly explain without 'higher counsel', that is, without admitting human ignorance.

I find a further unity of the world in the fact that everything I know about the universe is an experience, either an experience for me or an experience for other beings, as well as an experience of the self. If by this is not meant only the experience of ideas, which would bring us closer to the idealistic view that regards only the idea as the real thing in the world, then I think we can all agree on this sentence; for no one would be able to prove that there is any existence that is not an experience. In this fundamental principle of my world view, I have achieved a reconciliation of significant contradictions, which give cause for concern in any one-sided materialistic or mechanistic monism. Thus I have overcome the contradiction between matter and spirit, which I unite by understanding all that is physical as experience, not, of course, as mere phenomenon for our senses, but as a way in which the eternal One experiences Itself. In general, my monism denies all absolute contradictions. For me, death means another side of life. I can only imagine the emergence of the organic from the inorganic if there is no absolute contradiction between the two natural kingdoms. In the moral life, I regard evil only as an immature form, a lower stage of the good; thus I do not accept any absolute evil, only a relative one. So too is error only an immature truth, a certain stage of development on the way to knowledge.

I seek a unified worldview, as you can see, also in the sense that I strive for a subjective unity, a unity between my various spiritual aspirations, my manifold experiences and personality forces. I have overcome the opposition between head and heart, between sentiment and reason, between true religiosity and scientific knowledge, as well as the opinion that art is only an illusion, a sweet deception that stands in the way of cool insight. So I emphasized at the founding of our association that in cultivating a unified worldview, people should be guided to transform the tearing hostilities in their inner life into harmony – into a reconciliation; not, of course, into a sentimental reconciliation, but into a clear unity of their highest spiritual deliberations.

Wolfgang Kirchbach: “In concluding this discussion, I would like to ask you to consider the conversation that has taken place between the three gentlemen as the preface to the discussions that follow. In the upcoming discussions, we may perhaps refrain from continuing them in this general way. Lines have been described along which an inner consensus can be followed. In the next discussions, we want to pick out specific questions. All speakers agree that a unified worldview is an unavoidable need. So our main task would be to determine how far these efforts have come and to limit the question to specific points. I do not want to give any further details about this yet and so I will end the novel with a “to be continued” for today, to whet your appetite: “How will it continue?”

An introductory lecture by Rudolf Steiner: “Before which forum can a decision be made regarding ‘a unified worldview?’ — An attempt at an answer to the question of ‘Truth and Science’ ”; followed by discussion.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner, as speaker: I was once inspired to pose our question “Before which forum must a unified worldview be decided?” by the earlier discussions of our association, which, after all, wants to cultivate a monistic worldview, and also by my personal involvement in the dispute over Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle). Here in the group, the questions were often considered: What is the essence of a unified worldview, what is its value, do we actually have the right to speak of a specifically monistic one? It was emphasized once that according to the present standpoint of science we have no right to speak of unity in material respects, and on another occasion Dr. Penzig explained that in the striving after a unified world picture embracing the whole of nature and the spiritual world one could not but round off the objective picture given by the individual sciences, thus forcing the facts. Even then I noticed that the greatest advances often originated from such supposed falsifications. The Copernican system, for example, was a “falsification” of the facts available for its time, just as the Lamarck-Darwin theory of evolution is nothing more. Just as Tycho de Brahe provided the only possible world view for his time, so it is easy for the fact fanatic, who does not want to go beyond the objectively given facts with his thinking, to prove the “falsifications” that Lamarck-Haeckel's theory of evolution contains according to the current state of science. Nevertheless, I believe that, like Copernicus, Haeckel will be proved right. At the time, I strongly supported the much-debated “Welträtsel” because I admired the consistency and extreme boldness with which a mind creates and “falsifies” a world view from a one-sided point of view. Although my basic philosophical views are only opposed to his in what he fights against in them and agree with him in what he presents positively. At the same time, however, I was described as one of Haeckel's main opponents, an experience that seems symptomatic to me of our time, in that the author's world of ideas takes on a completely different image in someone else's mind. We use our terms, based on their usual position in intellectual life, to put forward ideas that mean something other than what we want to express.

In the course of these arguments about Haeckel and in the discussions within the Bund, a question has been brought to life for me that I have often asked myself: What is the relationship between truth and science? Does science contain truth? Does it contain any elements that could lead to the construction of a unified world view? Do we have the right to construct a unified world view or any world view at all on the basis of science?

This question, which has occupied people for centuries, has been closer to being solved in the past than in modern times, and has been obstructed in

way of solution by the so-called theory of knowledge has blocked itself, one must realize before which forum anything at all can be established in relation to truth and science, in relation to the truth content of science.

Nowadays, after all the developments of the 19th century, we have the idea of truth as something that must correspond to objective reality. We find ourselves in an intensive fanaticism of facts that does not allow us to go beyond mere registration. If truth is only a conceptual repetition of what exists outside of us, then, according to the perception of those who today strive for a worldview, this is also nothing more than a counter-image of facts existing outside of us, of the reality already finished in the world outside of us. If it were possible to take a photograph of the world from some corner in the most favorable perspective possible, the ideal of a worldview would be achieved. But to construct such a world view would actually be superfluous, a mere luxury of the human mind, if, like science, it were to be nothing more than a mere repetition, a kind of photographic counter-image of what is going on in the world, what is available in a completed form. The fact that the individual still forms an individual counter-image alongside science would be completely superfluous, infinitely unimportant for the whole world context. If nature has provided and developed everything for us except the final point, then what the human spirit dreams and creates does not belong to reality. For this point of view, which appears grotesquely in today's science, even in Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle), man is nothing more than a mere speck of dust in the cosmos, differing from the worm only quantitatively. If he forms a picture of the world, he lives a life of luxury, doing something that adds not the slightest thing to the evolution of the world. Rather, he is required never to contribute anything of his own that is not found in the rest of nature, but only to register, compare, and logically combine.

We ask: Is this procedure of merely confronting objective nature logically, never adding anything beyond the current state of affairs, consistent with the course of nature's entities; is there perhaps nothing in the direction of nature's development that compels us to add anything to reality? Nature gives us the answer itself. In particular, it should give it to the evolution theorist.

Allow me to explain this to you in a concise way, assuming that nature is at the stage of its development that there were only monkeys and no humans. The monkeys would have investigated the phenomena of the world, they would have found what lies beneath them, and monkeys too. If they had taken the empirical standpoint, they would have been satisfied with the realization that the world ends with monkeys. Perhaps they would have founded a monkey ethic based on general monkey perception, so that nothing new would have been added to the world here and they would have remained at their standpoint. But from our standpoint of knowledge, we know that in the principle of development there was indeed something that led beyond the ape genus, that, because it was a productive principle, because it led beyond what was present as a completed reality, , led to the development of man, something that was not limited to the actual, which, as a real imagination, as it were, real intuition in nature, leads it beyond its individual stages and lifts it beyond the immediate present.

Man, too, as a product of evolution, as a being in nature, is there to live for evolution, not merely to look back and form a picture of evolution and regard himself as the end of the series. A Weltanschhauung that seeks to summarize the content of all his thinking and doing will therefore not only be theoretical and contemplative, but also practical and postulating. Man should therefore not only repeat nature in some way, but see if there are not forces within him that lead beyond the immediately given. He should make the development spiritually, ideally alive in himself, should seek the forces that drive the species forward, that bring about progress, not merely examine his mental powers to see if they correspond to reality. The question “Can we penetrate to the thing in itself, see into the essence of the world?” is a disaster, an obstacle for man. But when he places himself in the process of evolution, intervening in nature to advance it a step further, he comes to a sense of his exalted task, of his position within the world.

There are in fact rudiments for the formation of this superscientific standpoint, which fully recognizes science but rises above what science offers it as the lawfulness of logical thought. Maeterlinck, for example, has advanced similar views in one of his more recent books, in which he describes the marriage of the bees. One wonders: can we speak of truth in the sense of scientific truth, of agreement with the given reality, which is always in the material small print, if it is to be the content of a world view, or does it, as a world view , does it lead beyond the purely objective truth in a similar way to the poetic truth according to the view of those who understand it in the Goethean sense, as the poetic truth leads beyond the immediate naturalistic truth?

Such approaches can be found in many forms today, to the delight of those who see truth in living life, and to the horror of fact fanatics like Tycho de Brahe or Haeckel's opponents. But it does not belong in their forum. The truth, which wants to fertilize, will always be a search, will always have to “falsify” the image of the fact fanatics; but it stands infinitely above this, in that it develops something intuitive, spiritual in man, adding something new to nature, which would not be without the human spirit. Thus, what man cherishes in his dreams, what he creates in his mind, acquires more than the significance of mere luxury; in life, it becomes a cosmic truth, something that man has newly generated. Thus, on the foundation of science, he rises to productive work that flows freely from his soul as original intuition. At the highest level of development, he has a task that no other being in the world has; he adds something that would not exist forever without him.

These views may be abhorrent to the pure scientist, but I believe it is a correct insight that man has the right to be productive in his world view, a feeling that was different times, when we had not yet been blinded by a fanatical belief in facts and by epistemology, times that were convinced from the outset of the cosmic character of this addition.

Let me conclude with the words of Angelus Silesius, which express the realization of the unique significance of the human spirit in the world:

Without me, God could not create a single little worm; if I became nothing, it would have to break into nothingness.

Schäfer, former spokesperson for the Free Religious and Humanist Community in Berlin, objects to the term “falsification” for Copernicus' error. If he had assumed a circular motion instead of an elliptical one, then that would have been an inadequate conception, which, like many similar ones, has been clarified by the advancing human spirit, as it will always be the fate of man to have to stop in front of imperfections of his conceptions, which will only be resolved later.

The speaker would have preferred to have seen the topic formulated as follows: “By what forum, by what court can a judgment be passed on a Weltanschhauung, on truth and untruth, and thus on its right and wrong?”

This forum can only be the personality, its sovereignty. From this position then flows the feeling of responsibility.

Dr. Stern: “An important basis for our discussion is the question as to whether a world view, that is, a general philosophical view of the true nature of the world and of all that exists, is possible at all. This question has been answered very differently. While on the one hand it is considered unobjectionable to create a dogmatic world view based on experience, another opinion, to which I subscribe, is critical positivism, which, starting from scientific knowledge, does not stop at the individual fact, but still does not consider it possible to gain a true picture of the cosmos.

To justify the dogmatic method, reference is made to the metaphysical drive that undoubtedly exists in man, even in the child who breaks the toy in order to get to the bottom of the matter.

In the formation of metaphysical systems to satisfy this urge, however, two psychological errors have crept in: Greek philosophy singled out one of the various parts of the universe and made it the subject, the true essence of nature. So Thales the water. In more recent times, people have fallen back on the idea of considering various psychological abilities of human nature individually and, fantastically magnified, of imposing them on nature as an entity. Thus Hegel makes reason the world principle, Schopenhauer blind will. Lotze assumes a comprehensive consciousness that mediates all interaction. Thus philosophy has happily returned to where it started, in hylozoism.

I consider it impossible to find a general, true and correct worldview, on the one hand because of the subjective nature of the human mind, which sees everything through subjective glasses and, according to Kant, can never recognize the thing in itself, and on the other hand for the objective reason that all our research covers only such a small part of the universe and it is generally impossible that such a large part of what is happening will ever enter into the circle of our experience that we can draw universally valid conclusions about the whole world from it.

Benedikt Lachmann: “Dr. Steiner seems to me to be positing a contradiction between human beings and nature. The essence of the human being, like that of every other form of existence, can be dissolved into a play of forces, of movement and resistance, that fight with each other in vain. It cannot be a matter for human beings to rise above these forces, but rather they must seek to engage with them as best they can.

Wolfgang Kirchbach: “Dr. Steiner said that it is a danger, indeed a necessity of the human spirit, to arrive at a falsification if it does not want to content itself with a simple image, an imitation of reality. In contrast to this, Baco of Verulam believed that he could build a correct world view based solely on the perceptionibus sensuum, and he rejected the Copernican system because it contradicted his conception of the perceptiones.

When determining the truth, it depends on the knowledge that man has of his powers and abilities, which are given to him to judge reality. This includes, for example, mathematical judgment, which corrects perceptions. One can only speak of falsification in the sense that man unilaterally renounces one or the other ability. There have also been minds that thought in full possession of all their mental abilities at a certain level of maturity, which we call reason. When Mr. Schäfer says that the forum of a worldview is the sovereignty of my personality, he certainly meant that this forum is the total possession of the mental powers of my personality, and we can agree on the name reason.

The rational grasp of truth demands that every judgment be reconciled with reality for every thought, in science as well as in world view, and requires observation, perception, correction of perception, to find the concept, the expression that expresses the greatest sum of known facts according to the respective state of knowledge, that expresses the greatest concordance of our judgments with reality.

This is the only way to make research and imagination productive, to protect oneself from error, which is refuted by reality, without content and unproductive. Only in this way is it possible to add something productively to nature. Even if the poet gives us a view of the world, we think it better that he creates realistic figures in which a social or other general law can be observed in his work. His work is also only a reflection of reality, but the act of finding the real inner symbol is an eminently productive activity, just as in science the act of finding the comprehensive, fruitful generic term from the sum of the opposing and restrictive data.

It does, however, require a productive imagination, but this also needs a rational regulator, a restriction of fantasy through reality.

This method has added something to the world by creating new organs. Through methodical and reasonable observation, Kant has added a completely new element to what we commonly call nature in the moral realm, the world of sensation and feelings of pleasure, which extends far beyond empirical nature: the categorical imperative.

Dr. Steiner: “I must confess that the attacks have not touched on what I have said today at all. I did not speak of a contradiction between humanity and nature. I was speaking rather from the standpoint of the most consistent point of view in the theory of evolution, that I regard all stages of nature, from the lowest to the highest stirrings of the spirit, as unified, and only appearing in different forms. But an amoeba is not a human being, and it is not a matter of blurring all distinctions. But if I say that in nature everything is only force, resistance, motion, then it is too reminiscent of the sentence: All cats are gray at night. It is not possible to get to the bottom of the world in the twinkling of an eye. Only when I have distinguished things can I look for a unifying, connecting principle. In the sense of the connecting principle of development, I have spoken of the task of man as one within nature, given by the facts of development.

I fully agree that we must adhere to reality if we want to be productive, and that we must correct our imagination in line with it. I only pointed out that efforts to present a world view that is only a copy of reality, as Büchner wants, have not yet met these requirements, and that, for example, this too is forced to do violence to the facts. It is not the intention that is important here, but the result. One behaves as if one wanted to give a picture of reality, but cannot. My principle is therefore not a theoretical, but a practical going beyond reality in the sense in which I see it in the principle of development, where creatures go beyond their own kind. This aspect of the problem has not been touched upon in the discussion.

I did not use the word falsification in the sense of the imperfection of a presentation that will only be clarified later, but rather meant that researchers are always forced into deliberately false representation for the sake of the system when they seek comprehensive unity, and therefore asked whether what we are entitled to call reality in the highest sense at all coincides with what the naturalist thinks of as reality. When Haeckel illustrates three stages of embryonic development with the same stereotype, he is forced to falsify in order to be able to provide evidence according to the scientific method. I mean that such forgers are nevertheless right, as Haeckel is in relation to his opponents who cling to the purely factual nature of the scientific method, because they intuitively see beyond the individual facts, not in a fanciful way.

But when Dr. Stern rejects the possibility of a world picture, of an overall view in principle, and in doing so draws on the diversity of philosophical systems to support his view, it is a fable convenue based on incomplete ideas of the individual systems. The most significant attempts at truth that have been made, from Vedanta philosophy through Greek to German, are approximations to the truth in varying degrees.

The forum before which the legitimacy of one or the other view is decided can only be the forum of the human being, his sovereign personality, as I agree with Dr. Schäfer. This sentence seems to me to be a truly real one, which has been formed not out of theoretical fantasies but out of the experience of men who have worked practically. But just as it is true that the personality is the ultimate forum, so it is certainly true that then the personality must always feel the responsibility of this position and the duty to constantly develop, to educate the depths of the personality. The child cannot be a forum in the same way as someone who is at the height of knowledge. The question therefore arises: Where in us humans lies the potential for development, the productive element? What in us corresponds to that which nature drives forward, which allowed apes to leave their species and become human?

If I regard man as a product of evolution, then I can indeed see him as the highest possible forum. But I also have the obligation to constantly call the highest human in me into existence and have no right in any moment of my life to recognize myself as the final and absolute forum, but I can, as I am in development, give myself up to the expectation that in every moment of my existence a higher point of knowledge than I now have can arise. The further development of the personality must be based on science, but it must also go beyond it, as art and poetry do. Just as art and poetry cannot be reduced to blind phantasms, so, when people control their personality by means of the principle of development, however far they go beyond objective nature, agreement will arise in the most diverse people, as the agreement of philosophical systems of all times shows.

The solution to the question “To what extent does science contain truth? Can it alone lead to truth?” lies in this sovereign meaning of human personality.

The world, especially for science, is in many respects dualistically constructed. Evolution is only possible because nature has prepared the future in it in a twofold way. Nature presents itself to man as an apparent, seemingly irreconcilable contradiction that cannot be resolved by science, as force, matter, and so on.

This is where the significance of human personality comes in. Only the life activity of man can be unifying, monistic. It consists in dissolving these apparent contradictions into a higher, productively generated view of life, in the life of development, in the uniting of contradictions, in living action.

Therefore, the question of the validity of the world view is to be decided before the forum of life, not before the forum of knowledge.

Lecture by Rudolf Steiner at the Giordano Bruno League

Dr. Steiner begins by saying that in the current state of German intellectual life, a man who is worldly-wise in the ordinary sense would not speak publicly on such a topic, because there is hardly any other that would be so likely to compromise him, and then continues: “Theosophy is a name often claimed by people who want to explore their destiny in spiritualistic circles. And yet, even though it has a whiff of fraudulence about it, I am fully aware of the topic when discussing its connection to German intellectual life. I much preferred being in my chemical laboratory to being in any spiritualist circle, and I know that one can get one's hands dirty in such circles, but I have also washed my hands and hope that I will be able to give you an understanding of the word theosophy as a serious worldview. It must be clearly stated that a serious world view can only be sought on the basis of modern natural science. I will never deviate from the idea that only in it is salvation to be found. But science still fills hearts and minds with its materialistic philosophy, and even if individual enthusiasts claim that we have long since passed the age of Büchner and so forth, if we

the materialism of the 1850s will continue to conquer the world. Almost all natural scientists of the present day are materialists, even if they deny it.

Natural science has shown us how gradually beings came into existence and perfected themselves until man appeared. But here, according to Haeckel in the 22nd link of his organic ancestral series, it stopped. David Friedrich Strauß praised the fact that natural science has freed us from miracles, from the miracle in the sense in which Linné said in the 18th century: “

How can we restore the harmony that existed for the ancient religions, and even for the early Middle Ages? With St. Augustine, this discord gradually emerged, leading to the two great dualistic currents in the contrast between scholasticism and Galileo and so on. Science was like a son who returns home from abroad and can no longer be understood by his father, and Protestantism is nothing more than the father's declaration that he wants to disinherit the son, and Kantianism is the conclusion, the last phase of this process!

The first great attempt to overcome this dichotomy was made by the German idealist philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Three years after Hegel's death, Fichte's son published a book on human self-knowledge. It deals with this as a task that natural science itself has set. I.H. Fichte says something like: When we observe natural beings, we see their eternal laws. But when we regard the human soul itself as a natural process, we are faced with a change in our understanding. The laws of nature lie outside our personality in the natural basis from which we have emerged, but in our soul we do not see finished natural laws; we are natural law ourselves. There nature becomes our own deed, there we are development. We do not merely recognize, we live. We now have the task of creating eternal iron laws, no longer merely recognizing them. I.H. Fichte then suggests: at this point, man not only lives in his knowledge of nature, at this point he realizes and lives the divine, the creative, at this point philosophy passes over into theosophy!

This is how the concept of theosophy appears in German intellectual life. We can now perhaps see more clearly that theosophy is nothing other than the ultimate demand of a true monism between knowledge of nature and knowledge of the self. This gives us a perspective for reconciling the contradictions between religion and science. We now know that there is no other divine power that can elevate the worm to man; we know that we ourselves are this divine power.

One may ask: But what is the use of such knowledge? Well, I would reply, what significance does the simple recording of facts have, which is usually called knowledge? Those who I would call cosmic loafers are satisfied with that.

Those who understand the concept of theosophy in this way will also understand Fewerbach, who says that man has created God in his own image. We are quite willing to admit that the concept of God is born of the human heart, and that God, as a symbol of an inner ideal, can develop man beyond man.

In this way we shall gain a divine wisdom that will express the divinity of nature. We are now living in a time that could become an important turning-point in the spiritual development of Europe, as it was for the age in which Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo lived and founded modern natural science. But the latter has not known how to celebrate its reconciliation with religion. We are faced with this task, we must fulfill it. No matter how inadequate these attempts may be, there are currents in modern intellectual life that are moving in this direction. Religions are not founded as such, and so there are no religious geniuses in the sense that there are scientific and artistic geniuses. But there are personalities who express the content of knowledge of their time as religious feeling. I am well aware of the great defects and errors of the theosophical movement. Duboc has called theosophy a feminine philosophy. We can change that by making it a masculine one in critical Germany.

I know that there can be no salvation outside of science, but we must find new methods of soul research based on natural science in order to do what all the old religious views were able to do: establish a great unity between religious need and science. Theosophy in the sense I have characterized it has nothing to do with the reports of facts of hypnotism and somnambulism that are often lumped together with it; indeed, one could reject these and still be a theosophist, but these appearances of abnormal mental life are not to be rejected at all, and in the scientific interpretation of these facts, undertaken particularly by French and English scholars, I see the first tentative attempts at real soul research.

Dr. Steiner concluded his programmatic lecture with a reference to a painting by the Belgian Wiertz, “Man of the Future”. It shows a giant holding cannons and other attributes of the culture of our time, smiling as he shows them to his wife and children, who have shrunk to the size of pygmies in comparison. It will be our task to ensure that we do not appear so pygmy-like in front of the man of the future.

First, O. Lehmann-Rußbüldt gave a lecture on Dr. Steiner's lecture for orientation purposes, adding that it was his personal wish that not only the 250 to 300 listeners to the lecture would have been present, but also the 2000 to 3000 people who make up the spiritual public life in Germany. Dr. Steiner's call to make theosophy, if it is a female philosophy according to Duboc, into a male one in critical Germany, should be underlined thickly, so that it would take up a whole page in print, because there is certainly no small danger in the theosophical movement. The speaker acknowledged that, despite electricity and precision mechanics, our intellectual culture could be called crude compared to the harmony that existed between science and religion in the great cultures of antiquity, but, he added emphatically, we do not want to despair of ourselves because of that. The obvious superiority of our intelligence, as it manifests itself in the machine age, could be a guarantee that we will deepen and expand what the culture of antiquity only had a presentiment of, albeit in the most magnificent way. To this end, the speaker quoted a passage from Count Gobineau's racial work about the spiritual disposition of the Aryan, which can certainly also be applied to the peoples of the Atlantic world, i.e. Western Europe and North America:

"The Aryan is thus superior to other men mainly to the extent of his intelligence and energy, and thanks to these two abilities, if he succeeds in conquering his passions and his material needs , he is likewise granted the ability to achieve an infinitely higher morality, although in the ordinary course of things one can find as many reprehensible actions in him as in individuals of inferior races.” The speaker concluded by saying that, in his opinion, science would develop from the defamed hypnotism and somnambulism into an expanded and refined psychology, which would mean as much to us for the knowledge of the soul as astronomy and chemistry mean for the knowledge of nature, despite the fact that these sciences have developed from astrology and alchemy.

In the discussion that followed, Nicolai was the first to criticize the fact that it was not explained what Theosophy actually wanted and could do.

Dr. Steiner replied that his lecture had only wanted to emphasize the connection between monism and the world view, which was already moving in modern tracks in the days of Vedanta philosophy in India. The dualism that has been emerging in Christianity since the 4th century consists in the fact that it may well accept the eye and the senses for the knowledge of the world of phenomena, but for the knowledge of our origin and our destination, it does not allow the means of our knowledge either, but refers us to faith, to the revelations of old books and prophets. But monism promises a development of knowledge, just as it has been able to establish a development of species for living beings. In the writings of Vedanta philosophy, there is a conversation in which a disciple asks the teacher: What happens when I die? The teacher replies: The solid and liquid parts of your body will become solid and liquid again, because man is like a stone and an animal; even the expressions of your thoughts and actions dissolve into your surroundings, but what remains is the “development,” the reason for what has formed your personality. — Thus, Vedanta philosophy is already monistic in its core. What lives only in the unconscious in animals, namely the urge to develop their personality, must enter into fullest consciousness in humans and merge with consciousness as an ideal.

Fritz Sänger polemicized against Dr. Steiner. The Theosophists always pretend that they already possessed and still possess the results of modern natural science, but they have never given any examples of such superiority. He feared that a movement of this kind was only too well suited to undermine the results of modern natural science; despite the most careful observation, he had only been able to find the expression of idiocy in spiritualism, but he had to acknowledge the fact of hypnotism.

After Köhn had spoken in warm and urgent words in favor of Dr. Steiner, O. Lehmann-Rußbüldt remarked that Mr. Sänger's remarks were typical of the representatives of so-called natural science of all times. Fifteen years ago, Sänger would have declared as nonsense the fact, demonstrated by Krafft-Ebing among others, that a lime-leaf laid on a hypnotized person causes a burn like a glowing piece of iron if the hypnotized person is to regard it as such; just as a hundred years ago the French materialists declared it to be nonsense that meteorites can fall from space onto the earth.

Dr. Steiner then once again vigorously opposed the confusion of Theosophy and spiritualism. If Mr. Sänger had encountered such Theosophists who gave cause for this, then he should stick to them, but he, Dr. Steiner, firmly rejected this. He considers it immoral in the philosophical sense to seek teachings about destiny and human nature through the manifestations of so-called spirits; that would be gross materialism. He also does not place any particular value on the name Theosophy. Above all, he finds the high ethics of Theosophy meaningful in his sense, which, for example, leads to the most serious consequences in education. What a perspective for the mind of the educator when he is aware that he has to unfold a seed of divinity in the child! ^{1Our reporter, Mr. Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, the second chairman of the Bruno-Bund, feels the need to add to the report here that he also sees this lecture, alongside so many other significant phenomena in the spiritual life, as a nucleus of a new, noble culture. “Times of great upheaval do not come upon us like a mystical something; if we create them, they are there.” I would welcome the ‘Cheosophical’ movement with a program as formulated by Dr. Steiner. Let us hope that the newly emerging life forces of rejuvenation can create, above all, more lively, poetically inspiring words; what use are all the ‘isms’ to us! In any case, the golden wheat of genuine theosophy has unfortunately been buried under so much chaff of parroting Indian vocabulary that the philosophical hero who can collect it in a new sheaf, that is, under a new name, is highly welcome.}

When children come to the age of puberty, it is necessary to awaken within them an extraordinarily great interest in the world outside of themselves. Through the whole way in which they are educated, they must be led to look out into the world around them and into all its laws, its course, causes and effects, into men's intentions and goals—not only into human beings, but into everything, even into a piece of music, for instance. All this must be brought to them in such a way that it can resound on and on within them—so that questions about nature, about the cosmos and the entire world, about the human soul, questions of history—so that riddles arise in their youthful souls.

When the astral body¹ becomes free at puberty, forces are freed which can now be used for formulating these riddles. But when these riddles of the world and its manifestations do not arise in young souls, then these same forces are changed into something else.

When such forces become free, and it has not been possible to awaken the most intensive interest in such world-riddles, then these energies transform themselves into what they become in most young people today. They change in two directions into urges of an instinctive kind: first into delight in power, and second into eroticism.

Unfortunately pedagogy does not now consider this delight in power and the eroticism of young people to be the secondary results of changes in things that, until the age of 20 or 21, really ought to go in an altogether different direction, but considers them to be natural elements in the human organism at puberty. If young people are rightly educated, there should be no need whatsoever to speak about love of power and eroticism to them at this age. If such things have to be spoken about during these years, this is in itself something that smacks of illness. Our entire pedagogical art and science is becoming ill because again and again the highest value is attributed to these questions. A high value is put upon them for no other reason than that people are powerless today—have grown more and more powerless in the age of a materialistic world-conception—to inspire true interest in the world, the world in the widest sense ...

When we do not have enough interest in the world around us, then we are thrown back into ourselves. Taken all in all, we have to say that if we look at the chief damages created by modern civilization, they arise primarily because people are far too concerned with themselves and do not usually spend the larger part of their leisure time in concern for the world but busy themselves with how they feel and what gives them pain ... And the least favorable time of life to be self-occupied in this way is during the ages between 14, 15 and 21 years old.

The capacity for forming judgments is blossoming at this time and should be directed toward world-interrelationships in every field. The world must become so all-engrossing to young people that they simply do not turn their attention away from it long enough to be constantly occupied with themselves. For, as everyone knows, as far as subjective feelings are concerned, pain only becomes greater the more we think about it. It is not the objective damage but the pain of it that increases as we think more about it. In certain respects, the very best remedy for the overcoming of pain is to bring yourself, if you can, not to think about it. Now there develops in young people just between 15, 16 and 20, 21, something not altogether unlike pain. This adaptation to the conditions brought about through the freeing of the astral body from the physical is really a continual experience of gentle pain. And this kind of experience immediately makes us tend towards self-preoccupation, unless we are sufficiently directed away from it and toward the world outside ourselves ...

If a teacher makes a mistake while teaching a 10 or 12 year old, then, as far as the mutual relationship between pupil and teacher is concerned, this does not really make such a very great difference. By this I do not mean that you should make as many mistakes as possible with children of this age ...

The feeling for the teacher's authority will flag perhaps for a while, but such things will be forgotten comparatively quickly, in any case much sooner than certain injustices are forgotten at this age. On the other hand, when you stand in front of students between 14, 15 and 20, 21, you simply must not expose your latent inadequacies and so make a fool of yourself ...

If a student is unable to formulate a question which he experiences inwardly, the teacher must be capable of doing this himself, so that he can bring about such a formulation in class, and he must be able to satisfy the feeling that then arises in the students when the question comes to expression. For if he does not do this, then when all that is mirrored there in the souls of these young people goes over into the world of sleep, into the sleeping condition, a body of detrimental, poisonous substances is produced by the unformulated questions. These poisons are developed only during the night, just when poisons ought really to be broken down and transformed instead of created. Poisons are produced that burden the brains of the young people when they go to class, and gradually everything in them stagnates, becomes “stopped up.” This must and can be avoided. But it can only be avoided if the feeling is not aroused in the students: “Now again the teacher has failed to give us the right answer. He really hasn't answered us at all. We can't get a satisfying answer out of him.” Those are the latent inadequacies, the self-exposures that occur when the children have the feeling: “The teacher just isn't up to giving us the answers we need.” And for this inability, the personal capacities and incapacities of the teacher are not the only determining factors, but rather the pedagogical method.

If we spend too much time pouring a mass of information over young people at this age, or if we teach in such a way that they never come to lift their doubts and questions into consciousness, then the teacher—even though he is the more objective party—exposes, even if indirectly, his latent in-adequacies ...

You see the teacher must, in full consciousness, be permeated through and through with all this when he deals with the transition from the ninth to the tenth grades, for it is just with the entire transformation of the courses one gives that the pedagogy must concern itself. If we have children of six or seven, then the course is already set through the fact that they are entering school, and we do not need to understand any other relationship to life. But when we lead young people over from the ninth to the tenth grade, then we must put ourselves into quite another life-condition. When this happens, the children must say to themselves: “Great thunder and lightning! What's happened to the teacher! Up to now we've thought of him as a pretty bright light who has plenty to say, but now he's beginning to talk like more than a man. Why, the whole world speaks out of him!”

And when they feel the most intensive interest in particular world questions and are put into the fortunate position of being able to impart this to other young people, then the world speaks out of them also. Out of a mood of this kind, verve (Schwung) must arise. Verve is what teachers must bring to young people at this age, verve which above all is directed towards imagination; for although the students are developing the capacity to make judgments, judgment is actually borne out of the powers of imagination. And if you deal with the intellect intellectually, if you are not able to deal with the intellect with a certain imagination, then you have “mis-played,” you have missed the boat with them.

Young people demand imaginative powers; you must approach them with verve, and with verve of a kind that convinces them. Scepticism is something that you may not bring to them at this age, that is in the first half of this life-period. The most damaging judgment for the time between 14, 15 and 18 is one that implies in a pessimistically knowledgeable way: “That is something that cannot be known.” This crushes the soul of a child or a young person. It is more possible after 18 to pass over to what is more or less in doubt. But between 14 and 18 it is soul-crushing, soul-debilitating, to introduce them to a certain scepticism. What subject you deal with is much less important than that you do not bring this debilitating pessimism to young people.

It is important for oneself as a teacher to exercise a certain amount of self-observation and not give in to any illusions; for it is fatal if, just at this age, young people feel cleverer than the teacher during class, especially in secondary matters. It should be—and it can be achieved, even if not right in the first lesson—that they are so gripped by what they hear that their attention will really be diverted from all the teacher's little mannerisms. Here, too, the teacher's latent inadequacies are the most fatal.

Now if you think, my dear friends, that neglect of these matters unloads its consequences into the channels of instinctive love of power and eroticism, then you will see from the beginning how tremendously significant it is to take the education of these young people in hand in a bold and generous way. You can much more easily make mistakes with older students, let us say with those at medical school. For what you do at this earlier age works into their later life in an extraordinarily devastating way. It works destructively, for instance, upon the relationships between people. The right kind of interest in other human beings is not possible if the right sort of world-interest is not aroused in the 15 or 16 year old. If they learn only the Kant-Laplace theory of the creation of the solar system and what one learns through astronomy and astrophysics today, if they cram into their skulls only this idea of the cosmos, then in social relationships they will be just such men and women as those of our modern civilization who, out of anti-social impulses, shout about every kind of social reform but within their souls actually bring anti-social powers to expression. I have often said that the reason people make such an outcry about social matters is because men are antisocial beings.

It cannot be said often enough that in the years between 14 and 18 we must build in the most careful way upon the fundamentally basic moral relationship between pupil and teacher. And here morality is to be understood in its broadest sense: that, for instance, a teacher calls up in his soul the very deepest sense of responsibility for his task. This moral attitude must show itself in that we do not give all too much acknowledgement to this deflection toward subjectivity and one's own personality. In such matters, imponderables really pass over from teacher to pupil. Mournful teachers, un-alterably morose teachers, who are immensely fond of their lower selves, produce in children of just this age a faithful mirror picture, or if they do not, kindle a terrible revolution. More important than any approved method is that we do not expose our latent inadequacies and that we approach the children with an attitude that is inwardly moral through and through ...

This sickly eroticism which has grown up—also in people's minds—to such a terrible extent appears for the most part only in city dwellers, city dwellers who have become teachers and doctors. And only as urban life triumphs altogether in our civilization will these things come to such a terrible—I do not want to say “blossoming” but to such a frightful—degeneracy. Naturally we must look not at appearances but at reality. It is certainly quite unnecessary to begin to organize educational homes in the country immediately. If teachers and pupils carry these same detrimental feelings out into the country and are really permeated by urban conceptions, you can call a school a country educational home as long as you like, you will still have a blossoming of city life to deal with ...

What we have spoken about here today is of the utmost pedagogical importance and, in considering the high school years, should be taken into the most earnest consideration.

• 1. A term used to designate all that is sentient in man and in animals.

Before the conference began, Rudolf Steiner addressed the participants gathered in the White Hall of the Goetheanum:

Ladies and Gentlemen, before beginning this lecture course, allow me to bring up an administrative matter. Originally, this course was meant for a smaller group, but it has drawn such a response that it has become clear that we cannot gather in this tightly-packed hall. It would be impossible, and you would soon realize this if you were to attend both the lectures and the translations. Consequently, I have decided to present the lectures twice—the first each day at ten A.M. and again at eleven, for those who wish to hear it translated into English. For technical reasons this is the only way to proceed. Therefore, I will begin the earlier lectures exactly at ten and second at eleven o’clock. I will ask those who came from England, Holland, and Scandinavia to attend the later lectures and everyone else to attend the first.

First of all I would like to express my great joy at meeting so many of you here in this hall. Anyone whose life is filled with enthusiasm for the movement centered here at the Goetheanum is bound to experience happiness and a deep inner satisfaction at witnessing the intense interest for our theme, which your visit has shown. I would therefore like to begin this introductory lecture by welcoming you all most warmly. And I wish to extend a special welcome to Mrs. Mackenzie, whose initiative and efforts have brought about this course. On behalf of the anthroposophic movement, I owe her a particular debt of gratitude.

I would like to add that it is not just a single person who is greeting you here, but that, above all, it is this building, the Goetheanum itself, that receives you. I can fully understand if some of you feel critical of certain features of this building as a work of art. Any undertaking that appears in the world in this way must be open to judgment, and any criticism made in good faith is appreciated—certainly by me. But, whatever your reactions may be to this building, it is the Goetheanum itself that welcomes you. Through just its forms and artistic composition, you can see that the aim here was not to erect a building for specific purposes, such as education, for example. The underlying spirit and style of this building shows that it was conceived and erected from the spirit of our time, to serve a movement and destined to play its part in our present civilization. And because education represents an integral part of human civilization, it is proper for it to be nurtured here at this center.

The close relationship between anthroposophic activities and problems of education will occupy us in greater detail within the next few days. Today, however, as part of these introductory remarks, I would like to talk about something that really is a part of any established movement. In a sense, you have come here to familiarize yourselves with the various activities centered here at the Goetheanum, and in greeting you most warmly as guests, I feel it right to begin by introducing you to our movement.

The aims of this anthroposophic movement, which has been in existence now for some twenty years, are only gradually beginning to manifest. It is only lately that this movement has been viewed by the world at large in ways that are consistent with its original aims. Nevertheless, this movement has gone through various phases, and a description of these may provide the most proper introduction.

Initially, the small circle of its adherents saw anthroposophy as a movement representing a very narrow religious perspective. This movement tended to attract people who were not especially interested in its scientific background and were not inclined to explore its artistic possibilities. Nor were they aware of how its practical activities might affect society as a whole. The first members were mainly those dissatisfied with traditional religious practice. They were the sort of people whose deepest human longings prompted them to search for answers to the problems inherent in the human soul and spirit—problems that could not be answered for them by existing religious movements.

For me it often was quite astonishing to see that what I had to say about the fundamentals of anthroposophy was not at all understood by members who, nevertheless, supported the movement with deep sympathy and great devotion. When matters of a more scientific nature was discussed, these initial members extracted what spoke to their hearts and appealed to their immediate feelings and sentiments. And I can truly say that it was the most peaceful time within the anthroposophic movement, though this was certainly not what I was looking for. Because of this situation, during its first phase the anthroposophic movement was able to join another movement (though only outwardly and mainly from an administrative perspective), which you might know as the Theosophical Society.

Unless they can discern the vital and fundamental differences, those who search with a simple heart for knowledge of the eternal in human nature will find either movement equally satisfactory. The Theosophical Society is concerned primarily with a theoretical knowledge that embraces cosmology, philosophy, and religion and uses the spoken and printed word as its means of communication. Those who are satisfied with their lives in general, but wish to explore the spirit beyond what traditional doctrines offer, might find either movement equally satisfying. But (and only a few members noticed this) once it became obvious that, in terms of cosmology, philosophy, and religion, anthroposophic goals were never intended to be merely theoretical but to enter social life in a direct and practical way according to the demands of the spirit of our times—only then did it gradually become obvious that our movement could no longer work within the Theosophical Society. For in our time (and this will become clear in the following lectures), any movement that limits itself to theories of cosmology, philosophy, and religion is bound to degenerate into intolerable dogmatism. It was the futility of dogmatic arguments that finally caused the separation of the two movements.

It is obvious that no one who is sensible and understands western culture could seriously consider what became the crux of these dogmatic quarrels that led to this split. These quarrels were sparked by claims that an Indian boy was the reincarnation of Christ. Since such a claim was completely baseless, it was unacceptable.

To waste energy and strength on theoretical arguments is not the way of anthroposophy, which aims to enter life directly. When it became necessary to work in the artistic, social, scientific, and—above all—in the educational realm, the true aims of anthroposophy made it necessary to separate from the Theosophical Society. Of course, this did not happen all at once; essentially, all that happened in the anthroposophic movement after 1912 demonstrated that this movement had to fight for its independence in the world, if it was going to penetrate ordinary life.

In 1907, during a Theosophical Society congress in Munich, I realized for the first time that it would be impossible for me to work with this movement. Along with my friends from the German section of the Theosophical Society, I had been given the task of arranging the program for this congress. Apart from the usual items, we included a performance of a mystery play by Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), The Sacred Drama of Eleusis. We decided to create a transition from the movement’s religious theories to a broader view that would encourage artistic activity. From our anthroposophic perspective, we viewed the performance as an artistic endeavor. But there were people in the movement who tried to satisfy their sometimes egotistical religious feelings by merely looking for a theoretical interpretation. They would ask, What is the meaning of this individual in the drama? What does that person mean? Such people would not be happy unless they could reduce the play to theoretical terms.

Any movement that cannot embrace life fully because of a lopsided attitude will certainly become sectarian. Spiritual science, on the other hand, is not the least inclined toward sectarianism, because it naturally tends to bring ideals down to earth and enter life in practical ways.

These attempts to free the anthroposophic movement from sectarianism by entering the artistic sphere represent the second phase of its history. Gradually, as membership increased, a need arose for the thought of philosophy, cosmology, and religion to be expressed artistically, and this in turn prompted me to write my mystery plays. And these must not be interpreted theoretically or abstractly, because they are intended to be experienced directly on the stage. To bring this about, my plays were performed in ordinary, rented theaters in Munich, from 1910 to 1913. And this led to an impulse to build a center for the anthroposophic movement. The changing situation made it clear that Munich was inappropriate for such a building, and so we were led to Dornach hill, where the Goetheanum was built as the right and proper place for the anthroposophic movement.

These new activities showed that, in keeping with its true spirit, the anthroposophic movement is always prepared to enter every branch of human life. Imagine that a different movement of a more theoretical religious character had decided to build a center; what would have happened? First, its members would collect money from sympathizers (a necessary step, unfortunately). Then they would choose an architect to design the building, perhaps in an antique or renaissance style or in a gothic or baroque or some other traditional style.

However, when the anthroposophic movement was in the happy position of being able to build its own home, such a procedure would have been totally unacceptable to me. Anything that forms an organic living whole cannot be assembled from heterogeneous parts. What relationship could any words, spoken in the spirit of anthroposophy, have had with the forms around a listener in a baroque, antique, or renaissance building? A movement that expresses only theories can present only abstractions. A living movement, on the other hand, must work into every area of life through its own characteristic impulses. Therefore, the urge to express life, soul, and spirit in practical activity (which is characteristic of anthroposophy) demanded that the surrounding architecture—the glowing colors of the wall paintings and the pillars we see—should speak the same language that is spoken theoretically in ideas and abstract thoughts. All of the movements that existed in the world previously were equally comprehensive; ancient architecture was certainly not isolated from its culture, but grew from the theoretical and practical activities of the time. The same can be said of the renaissance—certainly of the gothic, but also of the baroque.

To avoid a sectarian or theoretical ideology, anthroposophy had to find its own architectural and artistic styles. As mentioned before, one may find this style unsatisfactory or even paradoxical, but the fact is, according to its real nature, anthroposophy simply had to create its own physical enclosure. Let me make a comparison that may appear trivial but may, nevertheless, clarify these thoughts. Think of a walnut and its kernel. It is obvious that both nut and shell were created by the same forces, since together they make a whole. If anthroposophy had been housed in an incongruous building, it would be as if a walnut kernel had been found in the shell of a different plant. Nature produces nut and shell, and they both speak the same language. Similarly, neither symbolism nor allegory was needed here; rather, it was necessary that anthroposophic impulses flow directly into artistic creativity. If thoughts are to be expressed in this building, they must have a suitable shell, from artistic and architectural points of view. This was not easy to do, however, because the sectarian tendency is strong today, even among those looking for a broadening of religious ideals. But anthroposophy must not be influenced by people’s sympathies or antipathies. It must remain true to its own principles, which are closely linked to the needs and yearnings of our times, as will be shown in the next few days.

And so anthroposophy entered the practical domain—as far as this was possible in those days. At the time, I surprised some members by saying, “Anthroposophy wants to enter all walks of life. Although conditions do not allow this today, I would love to open banks that operate according to anthroposophic principles.” This may sound strange, but it was meant to show that anthroposophy is in its right element only when it can fertilize every aspect of life. It must never be seen merely as a philosophical and religious movement.

We now come to the catastrophic and chaotic time of the World War, which produced its own particular needs. In September 1913, we laid the foundation stone of this building. In 1914, when war broke out, we were building the foundation of the Goetheanum. Here I want to say only that, at a time when Europe was torn asunder by opposing nationalistic aspirations, here in Dornach we successfully maintained a place where people from all nations could meet and work together in peace, united by a common spirit. This was a source of deep inner satisfaction. Those war years could be considered as the second phase in the development of our movement.

Despite efforts to continue anthroposophic work during the war, the outer activities of the anthroposophic movement were mostly paralyzed. But one could experience how peoples everywhere gradually came to feel an inner need for spiritual sustenance, which, in my opinion, anthroposophy was able to offer. After 1918, when the war had ended, at least outwardly, there was an enormous, growing interest in spiritual renewal, such as anthroposophy wished to provide. Between autumn 1918 and spring 1919, numerous friends—many from Stuttgart—came to see me in Dornach. They were deeply concerned about the social conditions of the time, and they wanted the anthroposophic movement to take an active role in trying to come to terms with the social and economic upheavals. This led to the third phase of our movement.

It happened that Southern Germany—Württemberg in particular—was open to such anthroposophic activities, and one had to work wherever this was possible. These activities, however, were colored a little by the problems of that particular region, problems caused by the prevailing social chaos. An indescribable misery had spread over the whole of Central Europe at the time. Yet, seen in a broader context, the suffering caused by material needs was small compared to what was happening in the soul realm of the population. One could feel that humanity had to face the most fundamental questions of human existence. Questions once raised by Rousseau, which led to visible consequences in the French Revolution, did not touch the most basic human yearnings and needs as did the questions presented in 1919, within the very realms where we wished to work.

In this context, awareness of a specific social need began to grow in the hearts of my friends. They realized that perhaps the only way to work effectively toward a better future would be to direct our efforts toward the youth and their education. Our friend Emil Molt (who at the time was running the Waldorf- Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart) offered his services for such an effort by establishing the Waldorf school for his workers’ children, and I was asked to help direct the school. People were questioning everything related to the organization of society as it had developed over the past centuries from its tribal and ethnic elements. This prompted me to present a short proclamation concerning the threefold social order to the German people and to the civilized world in general, and also to publish my book Towards Social Renewal.

Many other activities connected with the social question also occurred, at first in South Germany, which resulted from this general situation and prevailing mood. It was essential then, though immensely difficult, to touch the most fundamental aspirations of the human soul. Despite their physical and mental agony, people were called upon to search, quite abstractly, for great and sublime truths; but because of the general upheaval they were unable to do so. Many who heard my addresses said to me later, “All this may be correct and even beautiful, but it concerns the future of humanity. We have faced death often during the last years and are no longer concerned about the future; we must live from day to day. Why should we be more interested in the future now than when we had to face the guns every day?” Such comments characterize the prevaling apathy of that time toward the most important and fundamental questions of human development.

Before the war, one could observe all sorts of educational experiments in various special schools. It was out of the question, however, that we would establish yet another country boarding school or implement a certain brand of educational principles. We simply wished to heal social ills and serve the needs of humankind in general. You will learn more about the fundamentals of Waldorf education during the coming lectures. For now, I merely wish to point out that, as in every field, anthroposophy sees its task as becoming involved in the realities of a situation as it is given. It was not for us to open a boarding school somewhere in a beautiful stretch of open countryside, where we would be free to do as we pleased. We had to fit into specific, given conditions. We were asked to teach the children of a small town—that is, we had to open a school in a small town where even our highest aspirations had to be built entirely upon pragmatic and sound educational principles. We were not free to choose a particular locality nor select students according to ability or class; we accepted given conditions with the goal of basing our work on spiritual knowledge. In this way, as a natural consequence of anthroposophic striving, Waldorf education came into existence.

The Waldorf school in Stuttgart soon ceased to be what it was in the beginning—a school for the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory. It quickly attracted students from various social backgrounds, and today parents everywhere want to send their children. From the initial enrollment of 140 children, it has grown to more than 600, and more applications are coming in all the time. A few days ago, we laid the foundation stone for a very necessary extension to our school, and we hope that, despite all the difficulties one must face in this kind of work, we will soon be able to expand our school further.

I wish to emphasize, however, that the characteristic feature of this school is its educational principles, based on knowledge of the human being and its ability to adapt those principles to external, given realities. If one can choose students according to ability or social standing, or if one can choose a locality, it is relatively easy to accomplish imaginary, even real, educational reforms. But it is no easy task to establish and develop a school on educational principles closely connected with the most fundamental human impulses, while also being in touch with the practical demands of life.

Thus, during its third phase, our anthroposophic movement has spread into the social sphere, and this aspect will naturally occupy us in greater depth during the coming days. But you must realize that what has been happening in the Waldorf school until now represents only a beginning of endeavors to bring our fundamental goals right down into life’s practicalities.

Concerning other anthroposophic activities that developed later on, I would like to say that quite a number of scientifically trained people came together in their hope and belief that the anthroposophic movement could also fertilize the scientific branches of life. Medical doctors met here, because they were dissatisfied with the ways of natural science, which accept only external observation and experimentation. They were convinced that such a limited attitude could never lead to a full understanding of the human organism, whether in health or illness. Doctors came who were deeply concerned about the unnecessary limitations established by modern medical science, such as the deep chasm dividing medical practice into pathology and therapy.

These branches coexist today almost as separate sciences. In its search for knowledge, anthroposophy uses not just methods of outer experimentation—observation of external phenomena synthesized by the intellect—but, by viewing the human being as body, soul, and spirit, it also utilizes other means, which I will describe in coming days. Instead of dealing with abstract thoughts, spiritual science is in touch with the living spirit. And because of this, it was able to meet the aspirations of those urgently seeking to bring new life into medicine. As a result, I was asked to give two courses here in Dornach to university-trained medical specialists and practicing doctors, in order to outline the contribution spiritual science could make in the field of pathology and therapy. Both here in Dornach and in nearby Arlesheim, as well as in Stuttgart, institutes for medical therapy have sprung up, working with their own medicines and trying to utilize what spiritual science can offer to healing, in dealing with sickness and health. Specialists in other sciences have also come to look for new impulses arising from spiritual science; thus, courses were given in physics and astronomy. In this way, anthroposophic spirit knowledge was called upon to bring practical help to the various branches of science.

Characteristic of this third phase of the anthroposophic movement is the fact that gradually—despite a certain amount of remaining opposition—people have come to see that spiritual science, as practiced here, can meet every demand for an exact scientific basis of working and that, as represented here, it can work with equal discipline and in harmony with any other scientific enterprise. In time, people will appreciate more and more the potential that has been present during these past twenty years in the anthroposophic movement.

Yet another example shows how the most varied fields of human endeavor can be fructified through spiritual science, through the creation of a new art of movement we call eurythmy. It uses the human being as an instrument of expression, and it aims toward specific results. So we try to let anthroposophic life—not anthroposophic theories—flow into all sorts of activities—for example, the art of recitation and speech, about which you will hear more in the next few days.

This last phase with its educational, medical, and artistic impulses is the most characteristic one of the anthroposophic movement. Spiritual science has many supporters as well as many enemies—even bitter enemies. But now it has entered the very stage of activities for which it has been waiting. And so it was a satisfying experience during my stay in Kristiania [Oslo], from November twenty-third to December fourth this year to speak of anthroposophic life to educators and to government economists, as well as to Norwegian students and various other groups. All of these people were willing to accept not theories or religious sectarian ideas, but what waits to reveal itself directly from the spirit of our time in answer to the great needs of humanity.

So much for the three phases of the anthroposophic movement. As an introduction to our course I merely wanted to acquaint you with this movement and to mention its name to you, so to speak. Tomorrow, we will begin our actual theme. Nevertheless, I want you to know that it is the anthroposophic movement, with its deep educational interests, that gladly welcomes you all here to the Goetheanum.

The art of education (about which we will say a great deal during this course of lectures) is based entirely on knowledge of the human being. If such knowledge is to have a deep foundation, however, it must be based on knowledge of the entire universe, because human beings, with all their inherent abilities and powers, are rooted in the universe. Therefore true knowledge of the human being can spring only from knowing the world in its entirety. On the other hand, one can say that the educational attitudes and ideas of any age reflect the general worldview of that age. Consequently, to correctly assess current views on education, we must examine them within the context of the general worldview of our time. In this sense, it will help to look at the ideas expressed by a typical representative of today’s worldview as it developed gradually during the last few centuries. There is no doubt that, since that time, humankind has been looking with great pride at the achievements accomplished through intellectuality, and this is still largely true today.

Basically, educated people today have become very intellectualized, even if they do not admit to it. Everything in the world is judged through the instrument of the intellect. When we think of names associated with the awakening of modern thinking, we are led to the founders of modern philosophy and of today’s attitudes toward life. Such individuals based all their work on a firm belief in human intellectual powers. Names such as Galileo, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno come to mind, and we easily believe that their mode of thinking relates only to scientific matters; but this is not the case.

If one observes without prejudice the outlook on life among the vast majority of people today, one finds a bit of natural scientific thinking hidden almost everywhere, and intellectuality inhabits this mode of thinking. We may be under the impression that, in our moral concepts or impulses and in our religious ideas and experiences, we are free from scientific thinking. But we soon discover that, by being exposed to all that flows through newspapers and popular magazines into the masses, we are easily influenced in our thinking by an undertone of natural science.

People simply fail to see life as it really is if they are unaware that today’s citizens sit down to breakfast already filled with scientific concepts—that at night they take these notions to bed and to sleep, use them in their daily work, and raise their children with them. Such people live under the illusion that they are free from scientific thinking. We even take our scientific concepts to church and, although we may hear traditional views expressed from the pulpit, we hear them with ears attuned to natural scientific thinking. And natural science is fed by this intellectuality.

Science quite correctly stresses that its results are all based on external observation, experimentation, and interpretation. Nevertheless, the instrument of the soul used for experiments in chemistry or physics represents the most intellectual part of the human entity. Thus the picture of the world that people make for themselves is still the result of the intellect.

Educated people of the West have become quite enraptured by all the progress achieved through intellectuality, especially in our time. This has led to the opinion that, in earlier times, humankind more or less lacked intelligence. The ancients supposedly lived with naive and childish ideas about the world, whereas today we believe we have reached an intelligent comprehension of the world. It is generally felt that the modern worldview is the only one based on firm ground. People have become fearful of losing themselves in the world of fantasy if they relinquish the domain of the intellect. Anyone whose thinking follows modern lines, which have been gradually developing during the last few centuries, is bound to conclude that a realistic concept of life depends on the intellect.

Now something very remarkable can be seen; on the one hand, what people consider the most valuable asset, the most important feature of our modern civilization—intellectuality—has, on the other hand, become doubtful in relation to raising and educating children. This is especially true among those who are seriously concerned with education. Although one can see that humanity has made tremendous strides through the development of intellectuality, when we look at contemporary education, we also find that, if children are being educated only in an intellectual way, their inborn capacities and human potential become seriously impaired and wither away. For some, this realization has led to a longing to replace intellectuality with something else. One has appealed to children’s feelings and instincts. To steer clear of the intellect, we have appealed to their moral and religious impulses. But how can we find the right approach? Surely, only through a thorough knowledge of the human being, which, in turn, must be the result of a thorough knowledge of the world as a whole. As mentioned, looking at a representative thinker of our time, we find the present worldview reflected in educational trends. And if one considers all relevant features, Herbert Spencer could be chosen as one such representative thinker.

I do not quote Spencer because I consider his educational ideas to be especially valuable for today’s education. I am well aware of how open these are to all kinds of arguments and how, because of certain amateurish features, they would have to be greatly elaborated. On the other hand, Spencer, in all his concepts and ideas, is firmly grounded in the kind of thinking and culture developed during the last few centuries. Emerson wrote about those he considered representative of the development of humankind—people such as Swedenborg, Goethe, and Dante. For modern thinking and feeling, however, it is Herbert Spencer above all who represents our time. Although such thinking may be tinged with national traits according to whether the person is French, Italian, or Russian, Spencer transcends such national influences. It is not the conclusions in his many books on various aspects of life that are important, but the way he reaches those conclusions, for his mode of thinking is highly representative of the thinking of all educated people—those who are influenced by a scientific view and endeavor to live in accordance with it.

Intellectualistic natural science is the very matrix of all he has to say. And what did he conclude? Herbert Spencer, who naturally never loses sight of the theory that humankind evolved gradually from lower life forms, and who then compares the human being with animals, asks this question: Are we educating our youth according to our scientific ways of thinking? And he answers this question in the negative.

In his essay on education, he deals with some of the most important questions of the modern science of education, such as, Which kind of knowledge is most valuable? He critically surveys intellectual, moral, and physical education. But the core of all considerations is something that could have been postulated only by a modern thinker, that we educate our children so they can put their physical faculties to full use in later life. We educate them to fit into professional lives. We educate them to become good citizens. According to our concepts, we may educate them to be moral or religious. But there is one thing for which we do not educate them at all: to become educators themselves. This, according to Spencer, is absent in all our educational endeavors. He maintains that, fundamentally, people are not educated to become educators or parents. Now, as a genuine natural scientific thinker, he goes on to say that the development of a living creature is complete only when it has acquired the capacity of procreating its own species, and this is how it should be in a perfect education; educated people should be able to educate and guide growing children. Such a postulate aptly illustrates the way a modern person thinks.

Looking at education today, what are Spencer’s conclusions? Metaphorically, he makes a somewhat drastic but, in my opinion, very appropriate comparison. First he characterizes the tremendous claims of education today, including those made by Pestalozzi. Then, instead of qualifying these principles as being good or acceptable, he asks how they are implemented in practice and what life is actually like in schools. In this context, he uses a somewhat drastic picture, suggesting we imagine some five to six centuries from now, when archeologists dig up some archives and find a description of our present educational system. Studying these documents, they would find it difficult to believe that they represent the general practice of our time. They would discover that children were taught grammar in order to find their way into their language. Yet we know well that the grammar children are taught hardly teaches them to express themselves in a living way later in life. Our imaginary archeologists would also discover that a large portion of students were being taught Latin and Greek, which, in our time, are dead languages. Here, they would conclude that the people of those documents had no literature of their own or, if they did, little benefit would be gained by studying it.

Spencer tries to demonstrate how inadequately our present curricula prepare students for later life, despite all the claims to the contrary. Finally, he lets these archeologists conclude that, since the document could not be indicative of the general educational practice of their time, they must have discovered a syllabus used in some monastic order. He continues (and of course this represents his opinion) by saying that adults who have gone through such educational practice are not entirely alienated from society, behaving like monks, because of the pressures and the cruel demands of life. Nevertheless, according to our imaginary archeologists, when having to face life’s challenges, those ancient students responded clumsily, because they were educated as monks and trying to live within an entirely different milieu. These views—expressed by a man of the world and not by someone engaged in practical teaching—are in their own way characteristic of contemporary education.

Now we might ask, What value do people place on their lives after immersion in a natural scientific and intellectualistic attitude toward the world?

With the aid of natural laws, we can comprehend lifeless matter. This leads us to conclude that, following the same methods, we can also understand living organisms. This is not the time to go into the details of such a problem, but one can say that, at our present state of civilization, we tend to use thoughts that allow us to grasp only what is dead and, consequently, lies beyond the human sphere. Through research in physics and chemistry, we construct a whole system of concepts that we then apply to the entire universe, albeit only hypothetically. It is true that today there are already quite a few who question the validity of applying laboratory results or the information gained through a telescope or microscope to build a general picture of the world. Nevertheless, a natural scientific explanation of the world was bound to come and, with it, the ways it affects human feelings and emotions. And if one uses concepts from laboratory or observatory research to explain the origin and the future of the earth, what happens then? One is forced to imagine the primeval nebulae of the Kant-Laplace theory, or, since views have changed since their time, something similar. But this notion of primeval nebulae makes sense only when we apply to it the laws of aeromechanics. Such laws, however, contain nothing of a soul or spiritual character. People who long for such a soul and spiritual element, therefore, must imagine that all sorts of divine powers exist along side the aeromechanical view of the universe, and then these spirit beings must be somehow blended skillfully into the image of the nebulae. The human being, in terms of soul and spirit, is not part of this picture, but has been excluded from that worldview. Those who have gotten used to the idea that only an intellectually based natural science can provide concrete and satisfactory answers find themselves in a quandary when looking for some sort of divine participation at the beginning of existence.

Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 21 A hypothetical concept of the end of the cosmos is bound to follow the laws of physics. In this context, we encounter the socalled second fundamental law of thermodynamics. According to this theory, all living forces are mutually transformable. However, if they are transformed into heat, or if heat is transformed into living forces, the outcome is always an excess of heat. The final result for all earthly processes would therefore be a complete transformation of all living forces into heat. This destruction through heat would produce a desert world, containing no forces but differences of temperature. Such a theory conjures up a picture of a huge graveyard in which all human achievements lie buried—all intellectual, moral, and religious ideals and impulses. If we place human beings between a cosmic beginning from which we have been excluded and a cosmic end in which again we have no place, all human ideals and achievements become nothing but vague illusions. Thus, an intellectual, natural scientific philosophy reduces the reality of human existence to a mere illusion. Such an interpretation may be dismissed simply as a hypothesis, yet even if people today do not recognize the way science affects their attitudes toward life, the negative consequences are nevertheless real. But the majority are not prepared to face reality. Nor do such theories remain the prerogative of an educated minority, because they reach the masses through magazines and popular literature, often in very subtle ways.

And, against the background of this negative disposition of soul, we try to educate our children, True, we also give them religious meaning, but here we are faced above all with division. For if we introduce religious ideas alongside scientific ideas of life, which is bound to affect our soul attitude, we enter the realm of untruth. And untruth extracts a toll beyond what the intellect can perceive, because it is active through its own inner power. Untruth, even when it remains concealed in the realm of the unconscious, assumes a destructive power over life. We enter the realm of untruth when we refuse to search for clarity in our attitudes toward life. This clarity will show us that, given the prevailing ideas today, we gain knowledge of a world where there is no room for the human being.

Let us examine a scientific discovery that fills us with pride, as it should. We follow the chain of evolution in the animal world, from the simplest and most imperfect forms via the more fully developed animals, right up to the arrival of the human being, whom we consider the most highly developed. Does not this way of looking at evolution imply that we consider the human being the most perfect animal? In this way, however, we are not concerned with true human nature at all. Such a question, even if it remains unconscious, diminishes and sets aside any feeling we might have for our essential humanity.

Again I wish to quote Herbert Spencer, because his views on contemporary education are so characteristic, especially with the latest attempts to reform education and bring it into line with current scientific thinking. In general, such reforms are based on concepts that are alien to the human spirit. Again, Spencer represents what we encounter in practical life almost everywhere. He maintains that we should do away with the usual influences adults—parents or teachers—have on children. According to him, we have inherited the bad habit of becoming angry when a child has done something wrong. We punish children and make them aware of our displeasure. In other words, our reaction is not linked directly to what the child has done. The child may have left things strewn all over the room and we, as educators, may become angry when seeing it. To put it drastically, we might even hit the child. Now, what is the causal link (and the scientific researcher always looks for causal links) between hitting the child and the untidy child? There is none.

Spencer therefore suggests that, to educate properly, we should become “missionaries of causal processes.” For example, if we see a boy playing with fire by burning little pieces of paper in a flame, we should be able to understand that he does this because of his natural curiosity. We should not worry that he might burn himself or even set fire to the house; rather, we should recognize that he is acting out of an instinct of curiosity and allow him—with due caution, of course—to burn himself a little, because then, and only then, will he experience the causal connection. Following methods like this, we establish causal links and become missionaries of causal processes.

When you meet educational reformers, you hear the opinion that this principle of causality is the only one possible. Any open-minded person will reply that, as long as we consider the intellectualistic natural scientific approach the only right one, this principle of causality is also the only correct approach. As long as we adhere to accepted scientific thinking, there is no alternative in education. But, if we are absolutely truthful, where does all this lead when we follow these methods to their logical extremes? We completely fetter human beings, with all their powers of thinking and feeling, to natural processes. Thoughts and feelings become mere processes of nature, bereft of their own identity, mere products of unconscious, compulsory participation. If we are considered nothing more than a link in the chain of natural necessity, we cannot free ourselves in any way from nature’s bonds.

We have been opposed by people who, in all good faith, are convinced that the ordinary scientific explanation of evolution can be the only correct one. They equate the origin of everything with the primeval nebulae, comprehensible only through the laws of aeromechanics. They equate the end of everything with complete destruction by heat, resulting in a final universal grave. Into this framework they place human beings, who materialize from somewhere beyond the human sphere, destined to find that all moral aspirations, religious impulses, and ideals are no more than illusions. This may seem to be the very opposite of what I said a few minutes ago, when I said that, when seen as the last link in evolution, human beings loses their separate identity and are therefore cast out of the world order. But because human identity remains unknown, we are seen only as a part of nature. Instead of being elevated from the complexities of nature, humankind is merely added to them. We become beings that embody the causal nexus. Such an interpretation casts out the human being, and education thus places the human being into a sphere devoid of humanity; it completely loses sight of the human being as such. People fail to see this clearly, because they lack the courage. Nevertheless, we have reached a turning point in evolution, and we must summon the courage to face basic facts, because in the end our concepts will determine our life paths.

A mood of tragedy pervades such people. They have to live consciously with something that, for the majority of people, sleeps in the subconscious. This underlying mood has become the burden of today’s civilization. However, we cannot educate out of such a mood, because it eliminates the sort of knowledge from which knowledge of the human being can spring. It cannot sustain a knowledge of the human being in which we find our real value and true being—the kind of knowledge we need if we are to experience ourselves as real in the world. We can educate to satisfy the necessities of external life, but that sort of education hinders people from becoming free individuals. If we nevertheless see children grow up as free individuals, it happens despite of our education, not because of it.

Today it is not enough just to think about the world; we must think about the world so that our thinking gradually becomes a general feeling for the world, because out of such Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 25 feelings impulses for reform and progress grow. It is the aim of anthroposophy to present a way of knowing the world that does not remain abstract but enlivens the entire human being and becomes the proper basis for educational principles and methods.

Today we can already see the consequences of the materialistic worldview as a historical fact. Through a materialistic interpretation of the world, humankind was cast out. And the echo of what has thus lived in the thoughts of educated people for a long time can now be heard in the slogans of millions upon millions of the proletariat. The civilized world, however, shuts its eyes to the direct connection between its own worldview and the echo from the working classes. This mood of tragedy is experienced by discerning people who have decided that moral ideas and religious impulses are an illusion and that humanity exists only between the reality’s nebulous beginning and its ultimate destruction by heat. And we meet this same mood again in the views of millions of workers, for the only reality in their philosophy is economic processes and problems.

According to the proletarian view of life, nothing is more important than economics—economic solutions of the past, labor and production management, the organization of buying and selling, and how the process of production satisfies the physical needs of people. On the other hand, any moral aspirations, religious ideas, or political ideals are viewed as an illusory ideologies and considered to be an unrealistic superstructure imposed on the reality of life—the processes of material production. Consequently, something that was theoretical and, at best, a semi-religious conviction among certain educated social circles has, among the proletariat, become the determining factor for all human activity. This is the situation that humankind faces today. Under these conditions, people are trying to educate. To do this task justice, however, people must free themselves of all bias and observe and understand the present situation.

It is characteristic of intellectuality and its naturalistic worldview that it alienates people from the realities of life. From this perspective, you only need to look at earlier concepts of life. There you find ways of thinking that could very well be linked to life—thoughts that people of the past would never have seen as mere ideologies. They were rooted in life, and because of this they never treated their thinking as though it were some sort of vapor rising from the earth. Today, this attitude has invaded the practical areas of most of the educated world. People are groaning under the results of what has happened. Nevertheless, humankind is not prepared to recognize that the events in Russia today, which will spread into many other countries, are the natural result of the sort of teaching given at schools and universities. There one educates and while the people in one part of the earth lack the courage to recognize the dire consequences of their teaching, in the other part, these consequences ruthlessly push through to their extremes. We will not be able to stop this wheel from running away unless we understand clearly, especially in this domain, and place the laws of causality in their proper context. Then we shall realize that the human being is placed into a reality tht will leave him no room for maneuvering as long as he tries to comprehend the world by means of the intellect only. We will see that intellectuality, as an instrument, does not have the power of understanding realities.

I once knew a poet who, decades ago, tried to imagine how human beings would end up if they were to develop more and more in a onesided, intellectualistic way. In the district where he lived, there was a somewhat drastic idea of intellectual people; they were called “big heads” (grosskopfet). Metaphorically, they carried large heads on their shoulders. This poet took up the local expression, arguing that human development was becoming increasingly centered in the intellect and that, as a result, the human head would grow larger and larger, while the rest of the body would gradually degenerate into some sort of rudimentary organs. He predicted only rudimentary arms, ending in tiny hands, and rudimentary legs with tiny feet dangling from a disproportionately large head—until the moment when human beings would move by rolling along like balls. It would eventually come about that one would have to deal with large spheres from which arms and legs were hanging, like rudimentary appendages. A very melancholic mood came over him when he tried to foresee the consequences of one-sided intellectual development.

Looking objectively at the phenomenon of intellectuality, we can see that it alienates people from themselves and removes them from reality. Consequently, an intellectual will accept only the sort of reality that is recognized by the proletariat—the kind that cannot be denied, because one runs into it and suffers multiple bruises. In keeping with current educational systems (even those that are completely reformed), such people believe that one can draw conclusions only within the causal complex. On the other hand, if they must suffer from deprivation, again they limit their grasp of the situation to the laws of causality. Those who are deprived of the necessities of life can feel, see, and experience what is real only too well; but they are no longer able to penetrate the true causes. While distancing themselves from reality in this way, people become less and less differentiated. Metaphorically, they are, in fact, turning into the poet’s rolling sphere. We will need to gain insight into the ways our universities, colleges, and schools are cultivating the very things we abhor when we encounter them in real life, which, today, is mostly the way it is. People find fault with what they see, but little do they realize that they themselves have sown the seeds of what they criticize. The people of the West see Russia and are appalled by events there, but they do not realize that their western teachers have sown the seeds of those events.

As mentioned before, intellectuality is not an instrument with which we can reach reality, and therefore we cannot educate by its means. If this is true, however, it is important to ask whether we can use the intellect in any positive way in education, and this poignant question challenges us right at the beginning of our lecture course.

We must employ means other than those offered by intellectuality, and the best way to approach this is to look at a certain problem so that we can see it as part of a whole. What are the activities that modern society excels in, and what has become a favorite pastime? Well, public meetings. Instead of quietly familiarizing ourselves with the true nature of a problem, we prefer to attend conferences or meetings and thrash it out there, because intellectuality feels at home in such an environment. Often, it is not the real nature of a problem that is discussed, because it seems this has already been dealt with; rather, discussion continues for its own sake. Such a phenomenon is a typical by-product of intellectuality, which leads us away from the realities of a situation. And so we cannot help feeling that, fundamentally, such meetings or conferences are pervaded by an atmosphere of illusion hovering above the realities of life. While all sorts of things are happening down below at ground level, clever discourses are held about them in multifarious public conferences. I am not trying to criticize or to put down people’s efforts at such meetings; on the contrary, I find that brilliant arguments are often presented on such occasions. Usually the arguments are so convincingly built up that one cannot help but agree with two or even three speakers who, in fact, represent completely opposite viewpoints. From a certain perspective, one can agree with everything that is said. Why? Because it is all permeated by intellectuality, which is incapable of providing realistic solutions. Therefore, life might as well be allowed to assume its own course without the numerous meetings called to deal with problems. Life could well do without all these conferences and debates, even though one can enjoy and admire the ingenuity on display there.

During the past fifty or sixty years, it has been possible to follow very impressive theoretical arguments in the most varied areas of life. At the same time, if life was observed quietly and without prejudice, one could also notice that daily affairs moved in a direction opposite to that indicated by these often brilliant discussions. For example, some time ago, there were discussions in various countries regarding the gold standard, and brilliant speeches were made recommending it. One can certainly say (and I do not feel at all cynical about this but am sincere) that in various parliaments, chambers of commerce, and so on, there were erudite speeches about the benefits of the gold standard. Discriminating and intelligent experts—and those of real practical experience—proved that, if we accepted the gold standard, we would also have free trade, that the latter was the consequence of the former. But look at what really happened; in most countries that adopted the gold standard, unbearable import tariffs were introduced, which means that instead of allowing trade to flow freely it was restricted. Life presented just the opposite of what had been predicted by our clever intellectuals. One must be clear that intellectuality is alien to reality; it makes the human being into a big head. Hence it can never become the basis of a science of education, because it leads away from an understanding of the human being. Because teaching involves a relationship between human beings—between teacher and student—it must be based on human nature. This can be done only by truly knowing human nature. It is the aim of anthroposophy to offer such knowledge.

If you take what was presented to you yesterday and study it in greater depth, you will find that today’s interpretation of the world cannot lead to a real understanding of the human being. And if you go into further detail in your study of what could be only briefly described here and relate it to specific problems of life, you will find confirmation of all that was postulated in yesterday’s lecture.

Now, strangely, exponents of the modern worldview seem unaware of what it means that they cannot reach the specifically human sphere. Nor are they willing to admit that, in this sense, their interpretation of the universe is incomplete. This fact alone is more than enough to justify all the efforts made by spiritual scientific research. We can understand this all the more clearly by observing characteristic examples. When quoting Herbert Spencer, I did not intend to prove anything but only wanted to illustrate modern thinking. Spencer had already formulated his most important and fundamental ideas before Darwinism spread. So-called Darwinism aptly demonstrates how scientific, intellectualistic thinking approaches questions and problems that result from a deep-seated longing in the human soul.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, published in 1859, certainly represents a landmark in modern spiritual life. His method of observation and the way he draws conclusions are exemplary for a modern conceptual discipline. One can truly say that Darwin observed the data offered to his sense perceptions with utmost exactitude; that he searched for the underlying laws in a very masterly way; and he considering everything that such observations could bring to his powers of comprehension. Never did he allow himself to be deflected, not to the slightest degree, by his own subjectivity. He developed the habit of learning from the outer world in a way commensurate with the human intellect.

Observing life in this way, Darwin found links between the simplest, least developed organisms and the highest organism on earth—humankind itself. He contemplated the entire range of living organisms in a strictly natural scientific way, but what he observed was external and not part of the essential nature of human beings. Neither the true human being nor human spiritual aspirations were the object of his enquiry. However, when Darwin finally had to face an impasse, his reaction was characteristic; after having formulated his excellent conclusions, he asked himself, Why would it have pleased the Divine Creator any less to begin creation with a small number of relatively undeveloped and primitive organic forms, which would be allowed to develop gradually, than to miraculously conjure fully developed forms right at the beginning of the world?

But what does such a response imply? It shows that those who have made the intellectual and naturalistic outlook their own, apply it only as far as a certain inner sensing will allow and then readily accept these newly discovered boundaries without pondering too much over whether it might be possible to transcend them. In fact, they are even prepared to fall back on traditional religious concepts. In a subsequent book, The Descent of Man, Darwin did not fundamentally modify his views. Apart from being typical of the time, Darwin’s attitude reveals certain national features, characteristic of Anglo American attitudes and differing from those of Central Europe. If we look at modern life with open eyes, we can learn a great deal about such national traits.

In Germany, Darwinism was initially received with open enthusiasm, which nevertheless spread to two opposite directions. There was, first of all, Ernst Haeckel, who with youthful ardor took up Darwin’s methods of observation, which are valid only in nonhuman domains. But, according to his Germanic disposition, he was not prepared to accept given boundaries with Darwin’s natural grace. Haeckel did not capitulate to traditional religious ideas by speaking of an Almighty who had created some imperfect archetypes. Using Darwin’s excellent methods (relevant only for the non-human realm) as a basis for a new religion, Ernst Haeckel included both God and the human being in his considerations, thus deliberately crossing the boundary accepted by Darwin.

Du Bois-Reymond took up Darwinism in another way. According to his views, naturalistic intellectual thinking can be applied only to the non-human realm. He thus remained within its limits. But he did not stop there, unquestioning and guided by his feelings; he made this stopping point itself into a theory. Right there, where Darwin’s observations trail off into vagueness, Du Bois-Reymond postulated an alternative, stating that either there are limits or there are no limits. And he found two such limits.

The first limit occurs when we turn our gaze out into the world, and we are confronted with matter. The second is when we turn our gaze inward, toward experiences of our consciousness and find these also finally impenetrable. He thus concluded that we have no way of reaching the supra-sensory, and made this into a theory: one would have to rise to the level of “supernaturalism,” the realm where religion may hold sway, but science has nothing to do with what belongs to this religious sphere. In this way, Du Bois-Reymond leaves everyone free to supplement, according to personal needs, everything confirmed by natural science with either mystical or traditionally accepted forms of religious beliefs. But he insists that such supernatural beliefs could never be the subject of scientific scrutiny.

A characteristic difference between the people of Central Europe and those of the West is that the latter lean naturally toward the practical side of life. Consequently, they are quite prepared to allow their thoughts to trail off into what cannot be defined, as happens in practical life. Among Central Europeans, on the other hand, there is a tendency to put up with impracticalities, as long as the train of thought remains theoretically consistent, until an either/or condition has been reached. And this we see particularly clearly when fundamental issues about ultimate questions are at stake.

But there is still a third book by Darwin that deals with the expression of feeling. To those who occupy themselves with problems of the soul, this work seems to be far more important than his Origin of the Species and Descent of Man. Such people can derive great satisfaction from this book—so full of fine observations of the human expression of emotions—by allowing it to work in them. It shows that those who have disciplined themselves to observe in a natural scientific way can also attain faculties well suited for research into the soul and spiritual sphere of the human being. It goes without saying that Darwin advanced along this road only as far as his instinct would allow him to go. Nevertheless, the excellence of his observations shows that a training in natural scientific observation can also lead to an ability to go into the supra-sensory realm. This fact lies behind the hope of anthroposophic work, which, in any task that it undertakes, chooses not to depart by a hair’s breadth from the disciplined training of the natural scientific way of thinking. But, at the same time, anthroposophy wishes to demonstrate how the natural scientific method can be developed, thus transcending the practical limits established by Darwin, crossed boldly by Haeckel’s naturalism, and stated as a theory by Du Bois-Reymond. It endeavors to show how the supra-sensory world can be reached so that real knowledge of the human being can finally be attained.

The first step toward such higher knowledge does not take us directly into the world of education, which will be our central theme during the coming days. Instead, we will try to build a bridge from our ordinary conceptual and emotional life to suprasensory cognition. This can be achieved if—using ordinary cognition—we learn to apprehend the basic nature of our sense-bound interpretation of the world.

To do this, first I would like you to assume two hypotheses. Imagine that, from childhood on, the world of matter had been transparent and clear to our understanding. Imagine that the material world around us was not impermeable to our sight, but that with ordinary sensory observation and thinking we could fully penetrate and comprehend its nature. If this were the situation, we would be able to comprehend the material aspect of the mineral kingdom. We would also be able to understand the physical aspect of human nature; the human body would become completely transparent to our sight.

If such a hypothesis were reality, however, you would have to eliminate something from your mind that real life needs for its existence; you would have remove from your thinking all that we mean when we speak of love. For what is the basis of love, whether it is love for another person, for humankind in general, or for spiritual beings? Our love depends on meeting the other with forces that are completely different from those that illuminate our thinking. If transparent or abstract thoughts were to light up as soon as we met another being, then even the very first seeds of love would be destroyed immediately. We simply would be unable to engender love. You need only to remember how in ordinary life love ceases when the light of abstract thought takes over. You need only to realize how correct we are to speak of abstract thoughts as cold, how all inner warmth ceases when we approach the thinking realm. Warmth, revealing itself through love, could not come into being if we were to meet outer material life only with the intellect; love would be extinguished from our world.

Now imagine that there is nothing to prevent you from looking into your own inner structure; that, when looking inward, you could perceive the forces and weaving substances within you just as clearly as you see colors and hear tones in the outer world. If this were to happen, you would have the possibility of continuously experiencing your own inner being. However, in this case, too, you would have to eliminate something from your mind that human beings need to exist in the world as it is. What is it that lights up within when you turn your sight inward? You see remembered imagery of what you have experienced in the outer world. In fact, when looking inward, you do not see your inner being at all. You see only the reflection, or memory, of what you have experienced in the world.

On the one hand, if you consider that, without this faculty of memory, personal life would be impossible, and, on the other, consider that to perceive your own inner life you would have to eliminate your memory, then you realize the necessity of the built-in limits in our human organization. The possibility of clearly perceiving the essence of outer matter would presuppose a person devoid of love. The possibility of perpetually perceiving one’s own inner organization would presuppose a human being devoid of memory. Thus, these two hypotheses help us to realize the necessity of the two limits placed on ordinary human life and consciousness. They exist for the development of love and because human beings need personal memories for an inner life. But, if there is a path beyond these boundaries into the suprasensory world, an obvious question arise. Can we walk this path without damaging our personal life, on the one hand, and shunning a social life with others, on the other?

Anthroposophy has the courage to say that, with the ordinary established naturalistic approach, it is impossible to attain suprasensory knowledge. At the same time, however, it must ask, Is there any way that, when applied with the strict discipline of natural science, will enable us to enter suprasensory worlds? We cannot accept the notion that crossing the threshold into the supernatural world marks the limit of scientific investigation. It is the goal of anthroposophy to open a path into the suprasensory, using means equally as exact as those used by ordinary science to penetrate the sensory realm. In this way, anthroposophy merely continues along the path of modern science. Anthroposophy does not intend to rebel against present achievements, but it endeavors to bring something that is needed today and something contemporary life cannot provide from its own resources.

If we look at Darwin’s attitude as I have presented it, we might be prompted to say, If science can deal only with what is perceptible to the senses, then we have to fall back on religious beliefs to approach the suprasensory, and we simply have to accept the situation as inevitable. Such a response, however, cannot solve the fundamental, urgent human problems of our time.

In this context, I would like to speak about two characteristics of contemporary life, because, apart from supplementing what has been said, they also illuminate educational matters. They may help to illustrate how modern intellectual thinking—which is striving for absolute lucidity—is nevertheless prone to drift into the dark unconscious and instinctive domains.

If you observe people’s attitudes toward the world in past ages, you will find that ancient religion was never seen as mere faith—this happened only in later times—but that religions were based on direct experience and insight into spirit worlds. Knowledge thus gained was considered to be as real as the results of our modern natural scientific research. Only in subsequent ages was knowledge confined to what is sense perceptible, and suprasensory knowledge was, consequently, relegated to the religious realm. And so, the illusion came about that anything pertaining to metaphysical existence had to be a matter of faith. Yet, as long as religions rested on suprasensory knowledge, this knowledge bestowed great power, affecting even physical human nature. Modern civilization cannot generate this kind of moral strength for people today. When religion becomes only a matter of faith, it loses power, and it can no longer work down into our physical constitution. Although this is felt instinctively, its importance is unrecognized. This instinctive feeling and the search for revitalizing forces have found an outlet that has become a distinctive feature of our civilization; it is a part of all that we call sports.

Religion has lost the power of strengthening the human physical constitution. Therefore an instinctive urge has arisen in people to gain access to a source of strength through outward, Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 39 physical means only. As life tends toward polarity, we find that people instinctively want to substitute the loss of invigoration, previously drawn from his religious experiences, by cultivating sports. I have no wish to harangue against sports. Neither do I wish to belittle their positive aspects. In fact, I feel confident that these activities will eventually develop in a healthy way. Nevertheless, it must be said that sports will assume a completely different position in human life in the future, whereas today it is a substitute for religious experience. Such a statement may well seem paradoxical, but truth, today, is paradoxical, because modern civilization has drifted into so many crosscurrents.

A second characteristic of our intellectual and naturalistic civilization is that, instead of embracing life fully, it tends to lead to contradictions that destroy the soul. Thinking is driven along until it becomes entangled in chaotic webs of thought and contradictions, and the thinker remains unaware of the confusion created. For example, a young child in a certain sense will go through the various stages than humankind has passed through, from the days of primitive humanity up to our present civilization, and this fills certain naturalistic intellectuals with admiration. They observe the somewhat turned-up nostrils of a young child and the position of the eyes, which lie further apart than in later life. They observe the formation of the forehead with its characteristic curvature and also the shape of the mouth. All these features remind people of those found in primitive tribes, and so they see young children as “little savages.” Yet, at the same time, sentiments such as those expressed by Rousseau are trying to rise to the surface—sentiments that completely contradict what has just been said. When contemplating educational aims, some people prefer to “return to nature,” both from a physical and a moral aspect. But, being under the influence of an intellectual atmosphere, they soon aim at arranging educational ideas according to the principles of logic, for intellectuality will always lead to logic in thinking. Observing many illogical features in education today, they want to base it on principles of logic, which, in their eyes, are entirely compatible with a child’s natural development. Logic, however, does not meet the needs of children at all. One close look at primitive races will make one quickly realize that members of such tribes hardly apply logical thinking to their ways of life.

And so some reformers are under the illusion that they are returning to nature by introducing a logical attitude in educating the young, who are supposed to be little savages, an attitude that is completely alien to a child. In this way, adherents of Rousseau’s message find themselves caught in a strange contradiction with an intellectualistic attitude; striving toward harmony with nature does not fit with an intellectualistic outlook. And, as far as the education of the will is concerned, the intellectualistic thinker is completely out of touch with reality. According to this way of thinking, a child should above all be taught what is useful in life. For example, such people never tire of pointing out the impracticability of our modern mode of dress, which does not satisfy the demands of utility. They advocate a return to more natural ways, saying that we should concentrate on the utilitarian aspects of life. The education of girls is especially subjected to sharp criticism by such reformers.

So now they are faced with a paradox; did primitive human beings—the stage young children supposedly recapitulate—live a life of utility? Certainly not. According to archeologists, they developed neither logical thinking nor utilitarian living. Their essential needs were satisfied through the help of inborn instincts. But what captivated the interest of primitive people? Adornment. They did not wear clothing for practical reasons, but through a longing for self-adornment. Whatever the members of such tribes chose to wear—or not to wear, in order to display the patterns on their skin—was not intended for utility, but as an expression of a yearning for beauty as they understood it. Similar traits can be found in the young child.

Those who perceive these contradictions and imperfections in modern life will be ready to look for their causes. They will increasingly recognize how lopsided and limited the generally accepted intellectualistic, naturalistic way of thinking is, which does not see the human being as a whole at all. Usually only our waking state is considered, whereas in reality the hours spent in sleep are just as much part of human life as those of daytime consciousness. You may object by saying that natural science has closely examined the human sleeping state as well, and indeed there exist many interesting theories about the nature of sleep and of dreams. But these premises were made by people while awake, not by investigators who were able to enter the domains of sleep. If people who are interested in education think in rational and logical ways and in terms of what is practical and useful in life, and if, on the other hand, they feel pulled in the direction of Rousseau’s call to nature, they will become victims of strange contradictions. What they really do is pass on to children all that seems of value to themselves as adults. They try to graft onto the child something that is alien to the child’s nature. Children really do seek for beauty—though not in the ways suggested by Rousseau—which for them expresses neither goodness nor utility, but simply exists for its own sake.

In the waking state, human beings not only have consciousness but also experience an inner life and actively participate in life. During sleep, on the other hand, people loses their ordinary consciousness, and consequently they examine sleep while awake. A proper study of this phenomenon, however, requires more than abstract theories. Entering sleep in full consciousness is essential for understanding it.

By experiencing both wonder and astonishment when studying the phenomena of sleep, a serious and unbiased investigator is not likely to advance in ways that, for example, Greek philosophy considered important. According to an ancient Greek adage, every philosophy—as a path toward cognition—begins with wonder. But this indicates only the beginning of the search for insight. One must move on. One must progress from wonder to knowledge.

However, the first step toward suprasensory knowledge must be taken not with the expectation of being able to enter the spiritual world directly, but with the intent of building a bridge from the ordinary sensory world to suprasensory knowledge. One way of achieving this is to apply the discipline we use to observe the phenomena of the sensory world to the phenomena we encounter from the realms of sleep and dreams. Modern people have certainly learned to observe accurately, but in this case it is not simply a matter of observing accurately. To gain insight, one must be able to direct observations toward specific areas.

I would like to give you an example of how this can be done when studying dream phenomena, which infiltrate our waking life in strange and mysterious ways.

Occasionally one still encounters people who have remained aware of the essential difference between waking and sleeping, but their awareness has become only a dim and vague feeling. Nevertheless, they are aware that an awake person is an altogether different from one who is asleep. Therefore, someone tells them that sleep is a waste of time and sleepers are idle and lazy, these simple minds will say that, as long as we sleep, we are free from sin. Thus, they try to say that people, whom they consider sinful while awake, are innocent while asleep. A good instinctive wisdom is hidden in this somewhat naive attitude. But to reach clarity, we need to train our own observation. I would like to give you an example.

Surely there are some here—perhaps every one of you—who have had dreams reminiscent of what might have happened to you in daily life. For example, you may have dreamed that you were taken to a river and that you had to get across somehow. So you searched for a boat, which, after a great deal of trouble, you managed to get hold of. Then you had to work hard to row across. In your dream you might have felt the physical exertion of plying the oars, until at last you managed to get across, just as you might have in ordinary life. There are many such kinds of dreams. Their contents are definite reminiscences of our physical, sensory lives. But there are also other kinds of dreams that do not echo waking life. For instance, someone again may dream that it is necessary to get across a river. Wondering how this urge could possibly be fulfilled, the dreamer is suddenly able to spread wings and—presto!—simply fly across and land safely on the opposite bank. This sort of dream is certainly not a memory of something that could happen in waking life, because, to my knowledge, this is hardly the way ordinary mortals transport themselves across a river in real life. Here we have something that simply does not exist in physical life.

Now, if we accurately observe the relationship between sleep and being awake, we discover something very interesting; we find that dreams in which we experience the toil and exhaustion of waking life, which reflect waking life, cause us to awake tired. On waking, our limbs feel heavy and tiredness seems to drag on throughout the day. In other words, if strains and pains of a life of drudgery reappear in our dreams, we awake weakened rather than refreshed. But now observe the effects of the other kind of dream; if you managed to fly—weightless and with hearty enthusiasm, with wings you do not possess in ordinary life—once you have flown across your river, you awake bright and breezy, and your limbs feel light. We need to observe how these differing dreams affect the waking life with the same accuracy we use to make observations in mathematics or physics. We know quite well that we would not get very far in these two subjects without it. Yet dreams do not generally become the object of exact observations and, consequently, no satisfactory results are achieved in this field. And such a situation hardly encourages people to strive for greater powers of insight into these somewhat obscure areas of life.

This is not just a case of presenting isolated glimpses of something that seems to confirm previous indications. The more we ponder over the relevant facts, the more the reciprocal links between sleep and waking life become evident. For example, there are dreams in which you may see some very tasty food that you then enjoy with a hearty appetite. You will find that usually, after having thus eaten in your dreams, you wake up without much appetite. You may not even eat during the following day, as though there were something wrong with your digestion. On the other hand, if in your dream you had the experience of speaking to an angel, and if you entered fully into a dialogue, you will awake with a keen edge to your appetite, which may persist during the whole day. Needless to say, partaking of food in one’s dream represents a memory from waking life, for in the spiritual world one neither eats nor drinks. Surely you will accept this without further proof. Therefore, enjoying food in a dream is a reminiscence of physical life, whereas speaking to an angel—an event unlikely to occur to people these days—cannot be seen as an echo of daily life.

Such an observation alone could show even an abstract thinker that something unknown happens to us in sleep—something that nevertheless plays into our daily lives. It is wrong to surmise that it is impossible to gain exact and clear concepts in this realm. Is it not a clear discovery that dreams echoing earthly reality—the kind so popular among naturalistic poets, ever eager to imitate earthly life, never ready to enter the suprasensory realms—have an unhealthy effect on our waking lives? If impressions from ordinary life reappear in dreams, these dreams have an injurious effect upon our health. On the other hand, if unrealistic dream images appear—the kind scornfully dismissed as mystical rubbish by an intellectualistic philistine—they make us feel bright and fresh upon awaking in the morning. It is certainly possible to observe the strange interplay and the reciprocal effects between dreaming and sleeping.

And so we can say that something independent of the human physical condition must be happening during sleep, the effects of which we can observe in the person’s physical organism. Dreams cause astonishment and wonder to ordinary consciousness, because they elude us in our waking state. The more you try to collect such examples, the more you will find a real connection between the human sleeping and waking state.

You only need to look closely at dreams to see that they are different from our experiences during waking life. When awake, we are able to link or separate mental images at will, but we cannot do this when dreaming. Dream images are woven as objective appearances beyond the influence of our will. In dreams, the activities of the soul become passive, numb, and immobile.

If we study dreams from yet another aspect, we find that they can reveal other secret sides of human existence. Observe, for instance, your judgment of people with whom you may have a certain relationship. You might find that you keep your full inner feelings of sympathy or antipathy from arising to consciousness, and that your judgment of people is colored by various facts, such as their titles or positions in social life. However, when you dream about such a person, something unexpected may happen; you may find yourself giving someone a good beating. Such behavior, so completely at odds with your attitude in waking life, allows you to glimpse the more hidden regions of your sympathies and antipathies, some of which you would never dare admit, even to yourself, but which the dream conjures up in your soul. Subconscious images are placed before the dreaming soul. They are relatively easy to watch, but if you deeply investigate someone’s inexplicable moods of ill temper or euphoria that seem unrelated to outer circumstances, you find that they, too, were caused by dreams, completely forgotten by those concerned. Experiences in sleep and the revelations of dreams work into the unconscious and may lead to seemingly inexplicable moods. Unless we consider this other side of life, the hidden domain of our sleep life, by making exact investigations, we cannot understand human life in its wholeness.

All these reciprocal effects, however, happen without human participation. Yet it is possible to lift what happens subconsciously and involuntarily into a state of clear consciousness equal to that of someone engaged in mathematics or other scientific investigations. When achieving this, one’s powers of observation are enhanced beyond the indeterminate relationship between waking and sleeping to the fully conscious states of imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

Only through these three capacities is it possible to attain true knowledge of the human being. What life vaguely hints at through the phenomenon of sleep can be developed in full consciousness by applying methods given by anthroposophy, which strive toward a real knowledge of the universe and the human being.

When trying to understand the world through a natural scientific interpretation of its phenomena, whether through cognition or through everyday life, people tend to consider conditions only as they meet them in the moment. Such a statement might seem incorrect to those who merely look at the surface of things, but as we proceed, it will become evident that this is indeed true. We have grown accustomed to investigate the human physical organism with the accepted methods of biology, physics, and anatomy, but (though this may appear wrong at first) in the results we find only what the present moment reveals to us.

For example, we might observe the lungs of a child, of an adult, and of an older person, in their stages from the beginning to the end of life, and we reach certain conclusions. But we do not really penetrate the element of time at all in this way, because we limit ourselves to spatial observations, which we then invest with qualities of time. We are doing the same thing, to use a simile, when we read the time by looking at a clock. We note the position of the hands in the morning, for example, and positions in space indicate the time for us. We may look at the clock again at noon and deduce the passage of time from the spatial changes of its hands. We take our bearing in the course of time from the movements of the clock’s hands from point to point in space. This has become our way of judging time in everyday life. But through this method we cannot experience the true nature of time. Yet only by penetrating time with the same awareness we use to experience space can we correctly assess human life between birth and death. I would like to illustrate these theoretical remarks with examples to show the importance of living into the dimension of time, especially if you want to practice the art of education.

Let us take as our example a child who is full of reverence toward adults. Anyone with a healthy instinct would consider such an attitude in a child as something wholesome, especially if such reverence is justified, as indeed it should be on the part of the adult. However, people usually think no further, but merely attribute a feeling of reverence toward adults to certain aspects of childhood and leave it at that. But we cannot recognize the importance of such reverence unless we include the entire course of a human life in our considerations.

As we grows older, we may have the opportunity to observe old people. We may discover that some of them have the gift of bringing soul comfort to those who need it. Often it is not what they have to say that acts as balm on a suffering soul, but just the tone of voice or the way they speak. If now you follow this old person’s life back to childhood, you find that, as a child, that individual was full of reverence and respect for adults. Naturally, this attitude of reverence will disappear in later life, but only on the surface. Deep down, it will gradually transform, only to reemerge later as the gift of bringing solace and elevation to suffering and troubled minds.

One could also say it this way: If a young child has learned to pray and has learned to develop an inner mood of prayer, this mood will enter the subconscious and transform into the capacity of blessing in the ripeness of old age. When we meet old people whose mere presence radiates blessing upon those around them, you find that in their childhood they experienced and developed this inner mood of prayer. Such a transformation can be discovered only if one has learned to experience time as concretely as we generally experience space. We must learn to recognize the time element with the same awareness with which we experience space. Time must not be experienced only in spatial terms, as when we look at a clock. What I have been trying to illustrate regarding the moral aspects of life needs to become very much a part of our concept of the human being—certainly if we are going to develop a true art of education. I would like to elaborate this in greater detail.

If we compare human beings with the animals, we find that from the moment of birth, animals (especially the higher species) are equipped with all the faculties needed for living. A chick leaving its shell does not need to learn to walk and is immediately adapted to its surroundings. Each animal’s organs are firmly adapted to the specific needs of its species. This is not at all true, however, of human beings, who come into this world completely helpless. Only gradually do we develop the capacities and skills needed for life. This is because the most important period in our earthly life is between the end of childhood and the beginning of old age. This central period of maturity is the most important feature of human life on earth. During that time, we adapt our organism to external life by gaining aptitudes and skills. We develop a reciprocal relationship to the outer world, based on our range of experience. This central period, when human organs maintain the ability to evolve and adapt, is completely missing in the life of animals. The animal is born in a state that is fundamentally comparable to an old person, whose organic forms have become rigid. If you want to understand the nature of an animal’s relationship to its surroundings, look at it in terms of our human time of old age.

Now we can ask whether an animal shows the characteristics of old age in its soul qualities. This is not the case, because in an animal there is also the opposite pole, which counteracts this falling into old age, and this is the animal’s capacity of reproduction. The ability to reproduce, whether in the human or animal kingdom, always engenders forces of rejuvenation. While animal fall prey to the influences of aging too quickly on the one hand, on the other they are saved from premature aging because of the influx of reproductive forces until maturity.

If you can observe an animal or an animal species without preconceived ideas, you will conclude that, when the animal is capable of reproduction, it has reached a stage equivalent to that of old age in a human being. The typical difference in the human being is the fact that both old age and childhood (when the child’s reproductive system is slowly maturing) are placed on either end of the human central period, and during this period the human organism remains flexible, enabling human beings to relate and adapt individually to the environment. Through this arrangement, a human being will be a child at the right time, then leave childhood at the right time to enter maturity. And a person leaves maturity when it is time to enter old age.

If you look at human life from this aspect of time, you also understand certain abnormalities. You may encounter people who (if I may put it this way) slip prematurely into old age. I am not thinking so much of the obvious features typically associated with old age, such as grey hair or baldness; even a bald-headed person may still be childish. I am thinking of the more subtle indications, detectable only by more intimate observations. One could call such features the signs of a senile soul life, manifesting in people who should still be in the central period of flexibility and adaptability. But the opposite may also happen; a person may be unable to leave the stage of childhood at the right time and carry infantile features into the central stage of life. In this case, strange things may happen in the life of that person—the symptoms of which we can only touch on today. When we include the time element in our picture of the human being, we can diagnose aberrations in human behavior.

We know that, as we approach old age, we lose flexibility especially in the head. Consequently, all the capacities that we have acquired during life attain more of a soul and spiritual quality. But this is possible only at the expense of the head as a whole assuming certain animal-like qualities. From a physical point of view, an old person goes through conditions similar to those of a newborn animal. To a certain extent one becomes “animalized.” Thus old people gain something that they may preserve for the rest of their lives, provided their education was right. Their spiritual, soul experiences of the outer world no longer enter fully into the human organization. The cranium becomes ossified and fixed. Old people thus depend more on soul and spiritual links with the surrounding world. They are no longer able to transform outer events into inward qualities as well as they once did. Thus, a kind of animalization of the upper regions takes place.

It is possible for this animalization of the head structure to occur prematurely—during the middle period of life—but because we remain human despite such a tendency, we do not encounter external symptoms. Rather, we must look for certain changes in the soul realm. If the characteristic relationship of the older person to the outer world manifests prematurely—and this can happen even during childhood—a person’s experiences is drawn too much into the physical system, since the general flexibility of the rest of the human organization, typical of the younger age, naturally retains the upper hand. In this case, a person will experience inwardly, and too early, a relationship to the outer world typical of old age. Interaction between inner and outer world would thus be linked too much to the physical organization, bringing about soul properties more like that in the animal world than in normal human beings.

One can say (if you want to express it in this way) that animals have the advantage of a certain instinct over human beings, an instinct that links them more directly and intimately to the environment than is true of the normal human being. It is not simply a myth, but completely reflects the peculiarities of animal life, that certain animals will leave a place that is in danger of a natural catastrophe. Animals are gifted with certain prophetic instincts of self-preservation. It is also true that animals experience far more intensely the changing seasons than do human beings. They can sense the approaching time for migration, because they have an intimate and instinctive relationship with the environment. If we could look into an animal’s soul, we would find—although entirely unconsciously—an instinctive wisdom of life that manifests as the animal’s ability to live entirely within the manifold processes and forces of nature.

Now, if a person falls victim to encroaching age too early, this animal-like instinctive experience of the surroundings begins to develop, though in a sublimated form because it is lifted into the human sphere. Lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy, telekinesis and so on—described correctly or wrongly—occur abnormally in human life and are simply the result of this premature aging in the central period of life. When this process of aging occurs at the proper time, people experience it in a healthy way, whereas if it appears in the twenties, a person gains clairvoyance of a low order. The symptoms of premature aging represent an abnormality in life that does not manifest outwardly but in a more hidden way. If these forms of lower clairvoyance were studied from the aspect of premature aging, a people would gain far deeper insight into these phenomena. This is possible, however, only when people observe life in a more realistic way. It is not good enough to investigate what we see with our eyes at the present moment. People must learn to recognize indications in these symptoms of a time shift from later to earlier stages of life.

We will see in the next few days how healing processes can occur through exact insight into human nature. It is possible that a kind of animalization could manifest not as an outwardly visible aging process but as a close, instinctive relationship to the environment encroaching on the lower regions of the human being and otherwise characteristic of an animal. The resulting phenomena of telepathy, telekinesis, and so on do not become less interesting because they are recognized for what they really are—the intrusion of a later stage of life upon an earlier, not manifestations of the spirit world. By developing time consciousness, we can fathom the very depths of human nature. To live in the dimension of time is to survey the course of time until we can see into both the past and future from the present moment.

You can get a sense of how present-day observation (though externally it may appear otherwise) is very remote from this more inward means of observation, which is more concurrent with time and its flow. Inadequate interpretation of what we encounter in life is the result of modern methods of observation. Contemporary scientific explanations and their effects on life are full of anemic interpretations.

Looking at the course of human life, we discover that the opposite of what we just described can also happen when childishness is carried into maturity. It is characteristic of children that they not only experience the external world less consciously than adults, but their experiences are also much more intimately connected with metabolic changes. When children see colors, their impressions strongly affect the metabolic processes; a child takes in outer sensory impressions all the way into the metabolism. It is not a mere metaphor to say that children digest their sensory impressions, because their digestion responds to all of their outer experiences. An old person develops certain animal characteristics within the physical, but a child’s entire life is filled with a sensitivity toward the vegetative organic processes that also affect the child’s soul life. Unless we are aware of this, we cannot understand a child’s nature.

In later years, human beings leave the digestive and metabolic processes more or less on their own; experiences of the external world are more independent of those processes. They do not allow their soul and spiritual reactions toward the outer world to affect the metabolism to the extent that a child does. The response of adults to their surroundings is not accompanied by the same liveliness of glandular secretion as in children.

Children take in outer impressions as if they were edible substances, but adults leave their digestion to itself, and this alone makes them adults under normal circumstances. But there are cases where certain vegetative and organic forces, which are properly at work during childhood, continue to work in an adult, affecting the psyche as well. In this case, other abnormal symptoms are also liable to occur. An example will make this clear. Imagine, for example, a girl who comes to love a dog that has made a deep impression on her nature. If she has carried childishness into later life, this tenderness will work right into the metabolism. Organic processes that correspond to her feelings of affection will be established. In this situation, digestive processes occur not only after eating or as the result of normal physical activities, but certain areas within the digestive system will develop a habit of secreting and regenerating substances in response to the strong emotions evoked by the love for the animal. The dog will become indispensable to the well-being of her vegetative system. And what happens if the dog dies? The connection in outer life is broken; the organic processes continue by force of inertia, but they are no longer satisfied. Her feelings miss something they had gotten used to, and inner troubles and strange disturbances may follow. A friend may suggest getting a new dog to restore the previous state of health, since the inner organic processes would again find satisfaction through external experiences. We will see later, however, that there are better ways to cure such an abnormality, but anyone may reasonably try to solve the problem this way.

There are of course many other examples, less drastic than a deep affection for a dog. If an adult has not outgrown certain childhood forces that absorb external impressions into the digestive system, and if that adult can no longer satisfy this abnormal habit, certain cravings within the vegetative organism will result. But there are other things that may have been loved and lost that cannot be replaced; then a person remains dissatisfied, morose, and psychosomatic. One must try to find the true causes of the seemingly inexplicable symptoms that arise from the depths of the unconscious. There are people who can sense what needs to be done to alleviate suffering caused by unsatisfied emotions that affect inner organic processes. They manage to coax and to bring to consciousness what the patient wants to recall, and in this way they can help a great deal.

Because of the present condition of our civilization, there are many who have not progressed from childhood to adulthood in the normal way, and the ensuing symptoms, both light and serious, have been widely noted. Whereas this led naturally to conversations in ordinary life among helpful, interested people, the situation has stimulated—in many respects rightly so—psychological research, and a new scientific terminology has sprung up. The patient’s psyche is examined through investigation of dreams or by freely or involuntarily giving oneself away. In this way, unfulfilled urges arise from the subconscious into consciousness. This new branch of science is called psychology or psychoanalysis, the science of probing the hidden regions of the soul. However, we are not dealing with “hidden regions of the soul,” but with the remains of vegetative organic processes left behind and craving satisfaction. When thwarted desires have been diagnosed, one can help patients readapt, and here lies the value of psychoanalysis.

When judging these things, anthroposophy, or spiritual science, finds itself in a difficult position. It has no quarrel with the findings of natural science; on the contrary, spiritual science is quite prepared to recognize and accept whatever remains properly within its realm. Similarly, spiritual science accepts psychoanalysis within its proper limits. But spiritual science tries to see all problems and questions within the widest context, encompassing the entire universe and the whole human being. It feels it is necessary to broaden the arbitrary restrictions laid down by natural science, which even today often investigates in an unprofessional and superficial way. Anthroposophy has no wish and no intention to quarrel and only puts what is stated in a lopsided way into a wider perspective. Yet this approach is distasteful and unacceptable to those who prefer to wear blinders, and, consequently, furious attacks are made against anthroposophy. Spiritual science must defend itself against an imbalanced attitude, but it will never be aggressive. This has to be said regarding the present currents of thought, as we find in psychoanalysis.

A person may draw the last period of life too much into middle age and, with it, experience abnormal relationships with the external world, manifesting as lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy. In this case, one’s horizon extends beyond the normal human scope in an animal-like fashion. It is important to distinguish the two opposing situations, since a person may also move in the other direction by pushing what properly belongs to childhood into later periods of life. As a result, one becomes enmeshed too strongly with the physical organism, with the result that organic surges swamp the psyche, causing disturbances and inner abnormalities. Such a person suffers from a relationship that is too close to one’s own organic system. This relationship has been diagnosed by psychoanalysis, which should nevertheless direct its attention toward the human organs to understand the roots of this problem.

If we desire a comprehensive knowledge of the human being, it is absolutely necessary to include the entire human life between birth and death in our considerations. It is essential to focus on the effects of passing time and to inwardly live with and experience those effects. Spiritual science pursues knowledge of the whole human being by penetrating the suprasensory, using its own specific methods and fully considering the time element, which is generally ignored completely in our present stage of civilization. Imagination, inspiration and intuition, which are the specific methods of spiritual scientific work, must be built on an experience of time.

Imagination, inspiration and intuition, the ways leading to suprasensory cognition, should not be seen as faculties beyond ordinary human life but as a continuation, or extension, of ordinary human capacities. Spiritual science dismisses the bias that maintains we can attain this sort of cognition only through some special grace; spiritual science holds that we can become conscious of certain faculties lying deep within us and that we have the power to train them. The usual kind of knowledge gotten through modern scientific training and in ordinary practical life must certainly be transcended.

What happens when we try to comprehend the world around us—not as scientifically trained specialists but as ordinary people? We are surrounded by colors, sounds, varying degrees of warmth, and so on, all of which I would like to call the tapestry of the sensory world. We surrender to these sensory impressions and weave them without thoughts. If you think about the nature of memories rising in your soul, you will find that they are the result of sensory impressions woven into our thoughts. Our whole life depends on imparting this texture of sensory impressions and thoughts to our soul life. But what really happens? Look at the diagram. Let the line a to b represent the tapestry of the sensory world around us, consisting of colors, sounds, smells, and so on. We give ourselves up to our observation, this tapestry of the senses, and weave its impressions with our thinking (indicated here by the wavy line).

When living in our senses, we unite all our experiences with our thoughts. We interpret the sensory stimuli through thinking. But when we project our thoughts into our surroundings, this tapestry becomes a barrier for us, a metaphorical canvas upon which we draw and paint all our thoughts, but which we cannot penetrate. We cannot break through this incorporeal wall with ordinary consciousness. As the thoughts are stopped by this canvas, they are inscribed upon it.

The only possibility of penetrating this wall is gained by raising one’s consciousness to the state of imagination through systematic and regular meditation exercises. It is equally possible to undergo an inner training in meditation as a method of research in an outwardly directed study of chemistry or astronomy. If you read my book How to Know Higher Worlds and the second part of An Outline of Esoteric Science, you can convince yourselves that, if you want to reach the final goal, the methods for such meditative exercises are certainly not simple and less time-consuming than those needed to study astronomy or chemistry. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to read books giving information about such exercises and, using one’s common sense, examine the truths of spiritual scientific research. You do not have to take these on authority. Even if you cannot investigate the spiritual world yourself, it is possible to test given results by studying the specific methods employed.

Meditative practice is based on freeing ourselves from outer sensory impressions. In meditation, we do not surrender to sensory impressions, but to the life of thinking. However, by dwelling again and again in meditation on a given thought or mental image—one that is easily and fully comprehensible—we gradually bring our life of thought to such a strength and inner substance that we learn to move in it with the same certainty we have in our sensory impressions. You have all experienced the difference between the striking effects of outer sensory impressions and the rather limp and pale world of our thoughts during ordinary consciousness. Sensory impressions are intense and alive. We give ourselves up to them. Thoughts, on the other hand, turn pale and become abstract and cold. But the very core of meditating is learning, through regular practice, to imbue thoughts with the same intensity and life that normally fills our sensory experiences. If we succeed in grasping a meditation with the same inner intensity that we experience through the stimulus of a color, for example, then we have enlivened, in the right way, the underlying thoughts of a meditation. But all this must happen with the same inner freedom employed in the normal weaving of thoughts or ordinary sense perceptions. Just as we do not allow ourselves to be taken over by nebulous moods or mystical dreaming, or become fatuous visionaries when observing the external world, we must not lose our firm ground when meditating in the right way. The same sane mood with which we perceive the world around us must also take hold when we meditate.

This attitude of taking outer sensory perceptions as an example for one’s conduct when meditating is characteristic of the anthroposophic method. There are plenty of vague mystics who disparage sensory perceptions as inferior and advise leaving them behind. They claim that, when you meditate, you should reach a state of mystic dreaming. The result, of course, is a condition of half sleep, certainly not meditation. Spiritual science pursues the opposite goal, considering the quality, intensity, and liveliness of sensory perception as an example to be followed until the meditator moves inwardly with the same freedom with which one encounters sensory perceptions. We need not fear we will become dried up bores. The meditative content (which we experience objectively in meditative practice) saves us from that. Because of the inner content that we experience while freeing ourselves from ordinary life, there is no need to enter a vague, trance-like state while meditating.

Correct meditation allows us to gain the ability to move freely in our life of thinking. This in turn redeems the thoughts from their previous abstract nature; they become image-like. This happens in full consciousness, just as all healthy thinking takes place. It is essential that we do not lose full consciousness, and this distinguishes meditation from a hallucinatory state. Those who give themselves up to hallucinations, becoming futile enthusiasts or visionaries, relinquish common sense; on the other hand, those who wish to follow the methods advocated here must make sure common sense accompanies all their weaving thought imagery. And what does this lead to? Though fully awake, we experience the pictorial quality of the dream world. The significant difference between imagination and dream images is that we are completely passive when experiencing the imagery of dreams. If they arise from the subconscious and enter our waking state, we can observe them only after they have occurred. When practicing imagination, on the other hand, we initiate them ourselves; we create images that are not mere fantasy, but differ in intensity and strength from the fantasy as do dream images. The main point is that we initiate the images ourselves, and this frees us from the illusion that they are a manifestation of the external world. Those given up to hallucinations, however, always believe that what comes to them represents reality, because they know that they did not create what they see. This is the cause of the deception. Those who practice imagination through meditation cannot possibly believe that the images they create represent external reality. The first step toward suprasensory cognition depends on freeing ourselves from the illusion that the images we have created—having the same intensity as those of the dream world—are real. This, however, is obvious, because the meditator remains fully aware of having initiated them in complete freedom. Only the insane would mistake them for outer reality.

Now, in the next step in meditation we acquire the ability to allow these images to vanish without a trace. This is not as easy as one might expect, because, unless the one meditating has created them in full freedom, the images become quite fascinating and fix themselves on the mind like parasites. One has to become strong enough to let such pictures disappear at will. This second step is equally important as the first. In ordinary life, we need the ability to forget; otherwise we would have to go through life with the total of all our memories. Similarly, the complete extinction of meditative images is as important as their initial creation.

When we have thoroughly practiced these exercises, we have done something to our soul life that might be compared to the strengthening of muscles through repeated bending and stretching. By learning to weave and form images and then to obliterate them—and all this is done in complete freedom of the will—we have performed an important training of the soul. We will have developed the faculty of consciously forming images that, under normal circumstances, appear only in dreams, during a state that escapes ordinary consciousness and is confined to the time between falling asleep and awaking. Now, however, this condition has been induced in full consciousness and freedom. Training in imagination means training the will to consciously create images and to consciously remove them from the mind. And through this, we acquire yet another faculty.

Everyone has this faculty automatically—not during sleep, but at the moments of awaking and falling asleep. It is possible that what was experienced between these two points in time comes to us as remnants of dreams, often experienced as though they come from the beyond. Naturally, it is equally possible that what we encounter on awaking surprises us so much that all memories of dreams sink below the threshold of consciousness. In general, we can say that, because dream imaginations are experienced involuntarily, something chaotic and erratic that normally lies beyond consciousness finds its way to us. If, while fully awake, we develop the ability of creating and of obliterating imaginations, we may reach a condition of emptied consciousness. This is like a new awakening, then, from beyond the tapestry of the sensory world; spiritual entities pass through the tapestry to reach us on paths smoothed by the meditation content (see the circle in the diagram). While thus persevering in emptied consciousness, we push through the barrier of the senses, and images come to us from beyond the sensory world, carried by inspiration. We enter the world beyond the sensory world. Through imagination, we prepare for inspiration, which involves the ability to experience consciously something that happens unconsciously at the moment of awaking. Right at the moment of awaking, something from beyond our waking soul life enters consciousness, so that something beyond the conscious sensory world enters us if, through imagination, we have trained our soul as described.

In this way, we experience the spiritual world beyond the world of the senses. The faculties of suprasensory cognition are extensions of those naturally given to us in ordinary life. It is one of the main tasks of spiritual science to train and foster the development of these higher faculties. And grasping the time element in human life is fundamental to such development.

If you look at the preparatory exercises for imagination, inspiration, and intuition as given in How to Know Higher Worlds or An Outline of Esoteric Science, you find that everything said there aims at one thing: learning to experience the flow of time. The human being goes through the various stages of experience in the world, first as a child, then as a mature person, and finally as an old person; otherwise, one may suffer from an abnormal overlap of one stage into the other. It is not imagination itself, but the meditative preparation, that should give the possibility of developing the full potential and of learning how to give ourselves to the world out of the fullness of life. To this end harmony must be brought about between the specific contributions to the world of childhood, middle age, and old age. These must flow together harmoniously into a worldview capable of reaching the spiritual world. Human beings in their wholeness, which includes the domain of time, must be actively engaged in work in the world. To achieve a worldview that reaches beyond the barriers of the sensory world, human beings must preserve the freshness of experience proper to youth; the clarity of thought and the freedom of judgment proper to the central period of life; and the power of loving devotion toward life that can reach perfection in old age. All these qualities are a necessary preparation for the proper development of imagination, inspiration, and intuition.