The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Why do we need Theosophy? As living beings on the physical plane, we are on a descent. Our body is not the same as in ancient times, our bodies are less ensouled, less sustained by the spirit. Just as the plant is permeated by water, so too was the etheric body active in us in ancient times. It permeated the physical body with its constructive powers. Today it has lost its power over the body. Salvation is only possible if we strengthen the spiritual in us. When the astral body permeates with the spiritual, then the human race will also become healthier. It is fate that the human physical body crumbles, but the etheric body can become stronger and have an effect on it. Now, however, people are heading straight for decadence. Theosophy works to revitalize and heal body and soul. What is particularly effective in healing is that which cannot be perceived by the senses or the brain alone. It seems nonsense to the world when we say that we should focus our thoughts on things that cannot be proven externally. But it is childish to want to prove theosophy by means of today's science.

In our thinking about the external world there is an element that is necessarily destructive and has a destructive effect on the physical body. Sleep improves this. Many phenomena of today's cultural life have a destructive effect, for example, in particular, the light images, which certainly damage the etheric body. Light images also excite sensuality. Real art can sensualize what comes from the higher worlds for the benefit of people. In the theosophical world view, we work in union with supersensible powers. Nothing gives a firm inner foothold like Theosophy. Some slave with a firm spiritual foothold in the time of the pharaohs and the Egyptian priesthood was safer in life than many a person in the present time. Today people strive for the stereotypical, for authority. But only through their own inner activity in the awakened inner being can the soul find a firm foothold. The theosophical mood gives people a hold and makes them content, because they have a firm support in their own inner being through what theosophy gives them, which is as necessary for the soul as daily bread is for the body.

We live on a planet that is heading towards disintegration. Gradually, lakes and rivers will dry up. Such changes are altering the face of the earth. Geology already indicates that we are already in a disintegrating epoch. The renowned geologist Sucß confirms that instead of rising, invigorating processes in the earth, decomposition processes are taking place. This is already happening throughout the great last developmental epoch of the earth. It is particularly intense in the small one since 1250. Some researchers and people who are ingenious in their field show some glimmer of insight. For example, Burdach. He notes a change since the Renaissance, but he knows nothing of the change in direction of the earth's axis at the time when the spirits of personality withdrew.

Different spiritual entities intervene in different ways at different times. This gives each age its own character, just as each age of life has its own special task. It would have a destructive, undermining effect if one were to introduce something that is not appropriate to the times, for example old Egyptian teachings that were anchored in the atavistic view of the people and have been preserved in a transformed form as a belief in a supersensible world. It is not what the mind sees, not the external world, that is the object of belief; this has its strong roots in earlier experiences of the soul. The spirits of personality, the archai, are not visible, and yet they are there and intervene. There was a particularly strong intervention of the archai in the Egyptian-Babylonian period. At that time, the spirits of personality were particularly attracted by the earth sphere. Now it is different. Now they are least attracted or sympathetically touched by what is happening on earth. They no longer intervene, not even in the character of people. Since the year 1250, things have changed. In the thirteenth century, an important and significant transformation of the earth's conditions took place. Since then, the archai have ceased to intervene so strongly. They withdrew to acts in the higher worlds. Before that, their activity had been more on the earth itself. Such events are to be appreciated accordingly, for since then other laws prevail.

All progressive spirits in the universe face opponents, in this case those who are retarded spirits of personality. These opponents, the evil spirits of personality, now gain the field. This is connected with the change in the position of the earth's axis around 1250. After all, the earth describes a conical movement in the course of millennia, a dancing movement. Since the fifth or sixth millennium BC, the Earth's axis has turned more and more. Scientifically, this is called the advance of the vernal point, the equinox. The distribution of spring, summer, autumn and winter was also different in the past, more even.

The love of personality, everything connected with it, has its good and bad sides. This also brought about the Renaissance, when it produced people who lived entirely in their personalities. It was all vehement towards the thirteenth century and long afterwards, well into the Renaissance, both in artistic natures and in Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI. It had also been the same with the leaders of the Crusades. During that time, everything took place under the sign of the spirits of personality. The whole of history at that time is permeated by the evil spirits of personality. Man was, as it were, possessed by the spirits of personality.

The souls incarnated in the thirteenth century knew that people could not free themselves from their personality, and the opposing forces gradually made people as materialistic as possible. The people, who were permeated by the evil spirits of personality, could no longer look up to the spiritual worlds. In those days, the connection with the spiritual world was established through faith, and the scholastic church scholars also emphasized this. Faith and knowledge were now strictly separated. This continued to have an effect over the centuries. Kant was one of the last stragglers of that time, his followers were only parrot-like repeaters. Luther, however, still felt the vague influence of the evil spirits of the personality. He threw the inkwell against the materialistic spirit of the time.

This epoch is over. We live in the time of the archangels, with thoughts that can reach up into the region where the archangels and the opponents of the archangels are. The opponents of the archangels no longer assert themselves over great personalities as the archai used to. There are no longer personalities who, like Leonardo da Vinci, are in contact with the good spirits of the personality or, like Pope Alexander VI, with the bad ones. Today people are more stereotyped. Now they are chasing abstract ideals. More and more, these are ideas, opinions, feelings, through which people are obsessed by the opponents of the archangels. As a result, people become enthusiastic about abstract ideals, become fantasists, no longer love their own eternal self, but are driven by all kinds of lusts and passions. They merely cling to the earthly personality, they rave about some unreal fantasy. But only the striving for the spiritual world can truly fill the souls with content.

A secondary effect of the evil spirits of personality arises from wine. Wine becomes an opponent in the human body itself. Abstinence from wine is a consequence for anyone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. But enthusiastic anti-alcoholism and vegetarianism belong to the partial ideals. The same applies, for example, to enthusiasm for Greek physical culture, for the Olympic Games and so on. Today's fad for cold ablutions is also part of this, all enthusiasm for the physically tangible and the physically less tangible. This increases from the reverie of drunken people to the wild propensity for crime, because the opponents of the archai work in this way in the sensual world.

Each person must feel their place in the world, must experience something of what is surging into humanity in the characterized way. Otherwise, instability, insecurity, and loss of balance will become general. People who fluctuate between enthusiasm and materialism find no orientation. There was, for example, a Wagner admirer – you can be a fan of Wagner and understand nothing about it – who went barefoot to Bayreuth, then he became an ascetic, he slept on a wooden board with pebbles, and finally he became an opponent of Wagner together with Nietzsche. Instability of the soul expresses itself in neurasthenia; in contrast to this, a firm support is needed within the soul.

But we need something different from what people in the Middle Ages needed, for whom faith was enough. A seven-year-old child needs something different from a person who is seven times seven years old. Theosophy can tear us out of the passive mold that supports us without making us lose our footing. With stormy strides, the outward splendor of our civilization will crumble. The arts, sciences, everything will fall apart. The forms cannot remain, they scatter: time and the spirit are stronger than man with his desires and passions. Theosophy is a necessity, and the theosophist should realize within himself that it is a necessity.

[ 1 ] We cannot understand Goethe's relation to the natural sciences if we confine ourselves merely to the single discoveries he made. I take as a guiding point of view for the study of this relation the words which Goethe wrote to Knebel from Italy, 18th August, 1787: “After what I have seen of plants and fishes at Naples and in Sicily I should be tempted, if I were ten years younger, to make a journey to India, not in order to discover anything new, but to observe, in my own way, what has already been discovered.” It appears to. me to be a question of the way in which Goethe coordinated the natural phenomena known to him in a view of Nature in harmony with his mode of thinking. Even if all his individual discoveries had already been made, and he had given us nothing but his view of Nature, this would not detract in the least from the importance of his Nature studies. I am of the same opinion as Du Bois-Reymond that “even without Goethe's participation, science would still be as far advanced as it is to-day” ... that “the steps attained by him would have been attained by others sooner or later.” (Goethe und kein Ende S.31.). I cannot, however, apply these words, as Du Bois-Reymond does, to the sum-total of Goethe's work in natural science. I limit them to the individual discoveries made during the course of his work. In all probability we should not be without a single one of them to-day even if Goethe had never occupied himself with botany, anatomy, and so forth. His view of Nature, however, emanated from his personality; none other could have achieved it. The single discoveries as such did not interest him. They arose of themselves during his studies, because in regard to the facts in question, views prevailed which were not reconcilable with his mode of observation. If he could have built up his views with what natural science had to offer he would never have occupied himself with detailed studies. He had to particularize because what was said to him by the investigators of Nature about the particulars did not correspond with his demands. The individual discoveries were made only accidentally, as it were, during the course of these detailed studies. For instance, the question whether man, like other animals, has an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw-bone did not at first concern him. He was trying to discover the plan by which Nature develops the series of animals and, at its summit, Man. He wanted to find the common archetype which lies at the basis of all animal species and finally, in its highest perfection, at the basis of the human species also. The Nature investigators said: there is a difference between the structure of the animal body and that of the human body. Animals have the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw, man has not. Goethe's view was that the human physical structure could only be distinguished from the animal by its degree of perfection, not details. For, if the latter were the case, there could not be a common archetype underlying the animal and the human organisations. He could make nothing of the assertion of the scientists, and so he sought for the intermaxillary bone in man—and found it. Something similar to this can be observed in the case of all his individual discoveries. For him they are never the end in itself; they had to be made in order to justify his ideas concerning natural phenomena.

[ 2 ] In the realms of organic Nature the important thing in Goethe's views is the conception he formed of the nature of life. It is not a question of emphasising the fact that leaf, calyx, corolla, etc., are plant-organs identical with each other and unfolding out of a common basic form. The essential point is Goethe's conception of the whole plant-nature as a living thing, and how he thought of the individual parts as proceeding from the whole. His idea of the nature of the organism is his central, most individual discovery in the realm of biology. Goethe's basic conviction was that something can be perceived in the plant and animal which is not accessible to mere sense observation. What the bodily eye can observe in the organism appears to Goethe to be merely the result of a living whole of formative laws working through one another, laws which are perceptible only to the ‘spiritual eye.’ He has described what his spiritual eye perceived in the plant and in the animal. Only those who are able to see as he did can recapture his idea of the nature of the organism; those who remain stationary at what the senses and experiments give, cannot understand him. When we read his two poems “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” and “The Metamorphosis of Animals,” it appears at first as if the words simply led us from one part of the organism to another, as if the intention was merely to unite external facts together. If, however, we permeate ourselves with what hovered before Goethe as the idea of the living being we feel ourselves transplanted into the sphere of organic Nature and the conceptions concerning the various organs develop from out of one central conception.

[ 3 ] When Goethe began to make independent reflections upon the phenomena of Nature it was the concept of life that claimed his attention above all else. In a letter from the Strasburg period, 14th July, 1770, he writes of a butterfly: “The poor creature trembles in the net, and its fairest colours are rubbed off; even if it is caught uninjured, in the end it perishes there, stiff and lifeless; the corpse is not the whole creature. Something else is required, indeed the essential part, and in this case as in every other, the most essential part: Life.” It was clear to Goethe from the beginning that an organism cannot be considered as a dead product of Nature; that something more exists within it over and above the forces which also live in inorganic Nature. When Du Bois-Reymond says that “the purely mechanical world-construction which to-day constitutes science was no less obnoxious to the princely poet of Weimar than, in earlier days, the ‘Système de la Nature’ to Friederike's friend,” he was undoubtedly right; he was no less right when he said that “Goethe would have turned away with a shudder from this world-construction which, with its primeval generation, borders on the Kant-Laplace theory; from man's emergence out of chaos as the result of the mathematically-determined play of atoms from eternity to eternity; from the icy world-end, from the pictures to which our race adheres with all the insensibility by means of which it has accustomed itself to the horrors of railway travel.” (Goethe und kein Ende. S.35. f.). Naturally Goethe would have turned away in disgust because he sought and found a higher concept of the living than that of a complicated, mathematically-determined mechanism. Only those who are incapable of grasping a higher concept of this kind and identify the living with the mechanical because they can only see the mechanical in the organism, will enthuse over the mechanical world-construction with its play of atoms, and regard without feeling the pictures which Du Bois-Reymond sketches. Those, however, who can assimilate the concept of the organic in Goethe's sense will dispute its justification as little as they dispute the existence of the mechanical. We do not dispute with those who are colour-blind concerning the world of colours. All views which represent the organic mechanically incur the judgment which Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles:

“Who would describe and study aught alive.
Seeks first the living spirit thence to drive;
Then are the lifeless fragments in his hand,
There only fails, alas! the spirit band.”

[ 4 ] The opportunity of concerning himself more intimately with plant life came to Goethe when Duke Karl August presented him with a garden (21st April, 1776). He was also stimulated by excursions in the Thuringian forest, where he could observe the living phenomena of lower organisms. Mosses and lichens claimed his attention. On October 31st he begged Frau von Stein to give him mosses of all kinds, if possible with the roots and moist, so that he could use them for observing the process of propagation. It is important to bear in mind that at the beginning of his botanical studies Goethe occupied himself with lower plant forms. He only studied the higher plants when later he was forming his idea of the archetypal plant. This was certainly not because the lower kingdom was strange to him, but because he believed that the secrets of plant-nature were more clearly manifested in the higher. His aim was to seek the idea of Nature where it revealed itself most distinctly and then to descend from the perfect to the imperfect in order to understand the latter by means of the former. He did not try to explain the complex by means of the simple, but to survey it at one glance as a creative whole, and then to explain the simple and imperfect as a one-sided development of the complex and perfect. If Nature is able, after countless plant forms, to create one more which contains them all, on perceiving this perfect form, the secret of plant formation must arise for the mind in direct perception, and then man will easily be able to apply to the imperfect what he has observed in the perfect. Nature investigators go the opposite way to work, for they regard the perfect merely as a mechanical sum-total of simple processes. They proceed from the simple and derive the perfect from it.

[ 5 ] When Goethe looked around for a scientific guide in his botanical studies he could find no other than Linnæus. We first learn of his study of Linnæus from his letters to Frau von Stein in the year 1782. The earnestness with which Goethe pursued his studies in natural science is shown by the interest he took in the writings of Linnæus. He admits that after Shakespeare and Spinoza he was influenced most strongly by Linnæus. But how little could Linnæus satisfy him! Goethe wanted to observe the different plant forms in order to know the common principle that lived in them. He tried to discover what it is that makes all these forms into plants. Linnæus was satisfied with classifying the manifold plant forms in a definite order and describing them. Here Goethe's naive, unbiased observation of Nature, in one special instance, came into contact with the scientific mode of thought that was influenced by a one-sided conception of Platonism. This mode of thought sees in the separate forms manifestations of original, co-existing Platonic Ideas, or creative thoughts. Goethe sees in the individual formation only one special form of an ideal archetypal being which lives in all forms. The aim of the former mode of thought is to distinguish the separate forms with the greatest possible exactitude in order to discern the manifoldness of the ideal forms or of the plan of creation; Goethe's aim is to explain the manifoldness of the particular from out of the original unity. That many things are present in manifold forms is clearly evident to the former mode of thought, because for it the ideal archetypes are already manifold. This is not evident to Goethe, for according to his view the many only belong together when a unity reveals itself in them. Goethe therefore says that what Linnæus “sought to hold forcibly asunder, had to strive for union, in order to satisfy the innermost need of my being.” Linnæus simply accepts the existing forms without asking how they have arisen from a basic form. “We count as many species as there are different forms that have been created in principle.” This is a basic statement. Goethe sought the active element in the plant kingdom that creates the individual through the specific modifications of the basic form.

[ 6 ] In Rousseau Goethe found a more naïve relationship to the plant world than was the case with Linnæus. He writes to Karl August, 16th June, 1782: “In Rousseau's Works one finds the most delightful letters on botany in which he gives a very clear and charming exposition of this science to a lady. It is a fine example of the way one ought to give instruction, and is a supplement to Emil. It makes me want to recommend the beautiful kingdom of flowers anew to my friends of the fair sex.” In the “History of my Botanical Studies” Goethe tells us what attracted him to Rousseau's botanical ideas: “His relation to plant lovers and connoisseurs, specially to the Duchess of Portland, may have widened his penetrating sight, and a spirit such as his, which felt called to prescribe law and order to nations, was forced to suppose that in the immeasurable kingdom of plants no such great diversity of forms could appear without a basic law, be it ever so concealed, which brings them back collectively to a Unity.” Goethe was seeking for a fundamental law which leads back the manifold to the unity from which it has originally proceeded.

[ 7 ] Two works of Freiherr von Gleichen, called “Russwurm,” came at that time to Goethe's knowledge. Both of them deal with the life of plants in a manner which proved fruitful for him; they are ‘Das Neueste aus dem Reiche der Pflanzen’ (Nürnburg, 1764), and ‘Auserlesene Mikroscopische Entdeckungen bet den Pflanzen’ (Nürnburg, 1777/1781.) These books deal with the processes of fructification in plants; pollen, stamens and pistils are minutely described and the processes of fructification presented in well-executed diagrams. Goethe himself now makes attempts to observe with his own eyes the results described by Gleichen-Russwurm. He writes to Frau von Stein, 12th Jan., 1785: “Now that Spring is approaching my microscope is set up in order to observe and check the experiments of Gleichen-Russwurm.” At the same time Goethe studied the nature of the seed, as may be gathered from an account which he gives to Knebel, 2nd April, 1785: “I have reflected on the seed substance as far as my experiences extend.” These observations of Goethe only appear in the right light when one considers that even at that time he did not stop at them, but tried to acquire a general perception of natural processes which should serve to support and strengthen them. On April 8th of the same year he tells Knebel that he is not merely observing facts, but that he has also made “fine combinations” of these facts.

[ 8 ] The share Goethe took in Lavater's great work, “Physiognomic Fragments for the furtherance of Human Knowledge and Human Love,” which appeared in the years 1775 to 1778, had a considerable influence on the development of his ideas concerning the workings of organic Nature. He himself contributed to this work, and his later mode of regarding organic Nature is already foreshadowed in the way he expresses himself in these contributions. Lavater goes no further than treating the form of the human organism as the expression of the soul. He wanted to indicate the character of soul from the forms of the body. Goethe began even then to observe the external form in itself, to study its own laws and formative force. He began at the same time to study the writings of Aristotle on physiognomy and endeavoured, on the basis of the study of the organic form, to confirm the distinction between man and the animals. He finds this in the prominence of the head which is determined by the human structure as a whole, and in the perfect development of the human brain to which all parts point as to an organ by which they are determined. In the animal, on the other hand, the head is merely appended to the spine; the brain and spinal cord comprise no more than is absolutely necessary for the execution of subordinate life-principles and sense-activities pure and simple. Goethe was already then seeking for the distinction between man and the animals, not in any one detail, but in the different degrees of perfection which the same basic form attains in one case or the other. Already there hovers before him the picture of a type which occurs both in the animal and in man, but which is developed in the former in such a way that the entire structure subserves animal functions, whereas in the latter the structure furnishes the scaffolding for the development of the spirit.

[ 9 ] Goethe's specific studies in anatomy grew out of such considerations. On Jan. 22nd, 1776, he writes to Lavater: “The Duke has sent me six skulls, and I have made some magnificent observations which are at your service if you have not already found the same things without me.” In Goethe's Diary, under the date, 15th Oct., 1781, we read that he studied Anatomy in Jena with Einsiedel, and in the same year began to enter more deeply into this science under the guidance of Loder. He speaks of this in letters to Frau von Stein, 29th Oct., and to the Duke, 4th Nov., 1781. He also had the intention of “explaining the skeleton” to the young people at the Drawing Academy, “and guiding them to a knowledge of the human body.” “I do it,” he says, “for my own sake as well as for theirs; the method I have chosen will give them this winter a real acquaintance with the basic structures of the body.” The Diary shows that these lectures were, in fact, given. During this time he also had many conversations with Loder concerning the structure of the human body. Again it is his general view of Nature which is the motive force and the real aim of these studies. He treats “the bones as a text to which all life and everything human may be appended.” (Letters to Lavater and Marck, 14th Nov., 1781.)

Goethe's mind was occupied at that time with conceptions relating to the workings of organic Nature and the connection between human and animal development. That the human form is simply the highest stage of the animal, and that man produces the moral world out of himself as a result of this more perfect stage of animal life, is an idea which is already expressed in the ode “The Divine”—written during the year 1782. “Let man be noble, helpful and good; for that alone distinguishes him from all the beings known unto us. According to laws mighty, rigid, eternal, must all we mortals complete the orbit of our existence.” [ 10 ] The “eternal, rigid laws” work in man just as they work in the rest of the world of organisms; in him alone they reach a perfection which makes it possible for him to be “noble, helpful and good.”

[ 11 ] While such ideas were establishing themselves in Goethe's being more and more firmly Herder was working at his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.” All the thoughts of this book were discussed by the two men. Goethe was satisfied with Herder's comprehension of Nature; it harmonised with his own conceptions. Frau von Stein writes to Knebel, 1st May, 1784: “Herder's work makes it probable that we were first plants and animals. ... Goethe is now brooding profoundly over these things and whatever has passed through his mind becomes supremely interesting.” Goethe's words to Knebel, 8th Dec., 1783, afford the justification for arriving at his ideas from Herder's. “Herder is writing a Philosophy of History, fundamentally new, as you may well imagine. We read the first chapters together the day before yesterday—and very excellent they are.” Sentences such as the following entirely harmonise with Goethe's mode of thought: “The human race is the great coalescence of lower organic forces.” “And so we assume that man is the central creation among animals, i.e., the developed form wherein the features of all species around him are summed up superbly.” [ 12 ] The view of anatomists at that time that the tiny bone which animals have in the upper jaw, the intermaxillary bone which contains the upper incisors, is lacking in man, was of course irreconcilable with such conceptions. Sommering, one of the most noted Anatomists of the time, writes to Merck, 8th Oct., 1782: “I wish you had consulted Blumenbach on the subject of the os intermaxillane which, ceteris paribus, is the only bone which all animals possess from the apes onward, including even the orang-utan, but which is never to be found in man; with the exception of this bone there is nothing in man which cannot be attributed to the animals. I am sending you therefore the head of a hind in order to convince you that this os intermaxillane, as Blumenbach, or os incis as Campa calls it, also exists in animals which have no incisors.” That was the general view of the time. Even the famous Camper, for whom Merck and Goethe had the deepest respect, admitted it. The fact that the intermaxillary bone in man coalesces left and right with the upper jaw bone without any clear demarcation in the normally developed individual, led to this view. If the learned men were correct in this it would be impossible to affirm the existence of a common archetype for the structure of the animal and human organism; a boundary between the two forms would have to be assumed. Man would not be created according to the archetype which lies at the basis of the animal. Goethe had to remove this obstacle to his world-conception. This he succeeded in doing, in conjunction with Loder, in the Spring of 1784. Goethe proceeded according to his general principle that Nature has no secret which “she does not somewhere place openly before the eye of the attentive observer.” He found the demarcation between upper jaw and intermaxillary bone actually existing in some abnormally developed skulls. He joyfully announced his discovery to Herder and Frau von Stein (27th March). To Herder he wrote: “It should heartily please you also, for it is like the keystone to man; it is not lacking; it is there! But how?” “I have thought of it in connection with your ‘Whole’ and it will indeed be a fair link in the chain.” When Goethe sent the treatise he had written on the subject to Knebel in Nov., 1784, he indicated the significance which he attributed to this discovery in his whole world of ideas by the words: “I have refrained from pointing to the logical outcome which Herder already indicates in his ideas, that the distinction between man and the animal is not to be looked for in any single detail.” Goethe could gain confidence in his view of Nature only when the erroneous view about this fatal little bone had been rejected. He gradually found the courage to extend to all kingdoms of Nature, to her whole realm, his ideas concerning the manner in which, playing as it were with one basic form, she produces life in all its diversity. In this sense he writes to Frau von Stein in the year 1786.

[ 13 ] The book of Nature becomes more and more legible to Goethe after he has deciphered the one letter. “My long ‘spelling out’ has helped me; now at last it works, and my silent joy is inexpressible.” He writes thus to Frau von Stein, 15th May, 1785. He now regards himself capable of writing a small botanical treatise for Knebel. Their journey together to Karlsbad, in 1785, becomes a formal journey of botanical study. After their return the kingdom of fungi, mosses, lichens and algae were studied with the help of Linnæus. He informs Frau von Stein, 9th November: “I continue to read Linnæus, indeed I must, for I have no other book with me: it is the best way of reading a book conscientiously and I must cultivate the practice, for it is not easy for me to read a book to the end. This book is not compiled for reading but for repeated study, and is of the very greatest service to me because I have thought for myself on most of the points.” During these studies the basic form out of which Nature fashions all the manifold plant forms assumes separate contours in his mind, even if they are not yet quite definite. In a letter to Frau von Stein, 9th July, 1786, we find these words: “It is a perception of the form with which Nature is, as it were, always playing, and in her play producing life in its diversity.”

[ 14 ] In April and May, 1786, Goethe made microscopical observations of lower organisms which develop in infusions of different substances—plantain pulp, cactus, truffles, peppercorn, tea, beer, and so on. He carefully noted the processes which he perceived in these organisms and prepared drawings of them. It is apparent also from these notes that Goethe did not try to approach the knowledge of life through such observation of the lower and simpler organisms. It is quite apparent that he thought he could grasp the essential features of life-processes in the higher organisms just as well as in the lower. He is of the opinion that in the infusoria the same kind of law repeats itself as the eye of the mind perceives, for instance, in the dog. Observation through the microscope only yields information of processes which are, in miniature, what the unaided eye sees on a larger scale. It merely affords an enrichment of sense-experiences. The essential nature of life reveals itself to a higher kind of perception, and not to observation that merely traces to their minutest details, processes that are accessible to the senses. Goethe seeks to cognise this essential nature of life through the observation of higher plants and animals. He would undoubtedly have sought this knowledge in the same way, even if in his age the anatomy of plants and animals had advanced as far as it has to-day. If Goethe had been able to observe the cells out of which the bodies of plants and animals are built he would have asserted that these elementary organic forms reveal the same conformity to law as is to be perceived in the most complex. He would have explained the phenomena in these minute entities by means of the same ideas by which he interpreted the life-processes of higher organisms. [ 15 ] It is in Italy that Goethe first finds the thought which solves the riddle facing him in organic development and metamorphosis. On September 3rd he leaves Karlsbad for the South. In a few but significant sentences he describes in the History of my Botanical Studies the thoughts stimulated in him by the observation of the plant world up to the moment when, in Sicily, a clear conception comes to him of how it is that “a fortunate mobility and plasticity is bestowed on plant forms, together with a strong generic and specific tenacity, so that they can adapt themselves to the many conditions working upon them over the face of the earth and develop and transform themselves accordingly.” The “variability of plant forms” was revealed to him as he was crossing the Alps, in the Botanic Gardens of Padua, and in other places. “Whereas in the lower regions branches and stalks were stronger and more bounteous in sap, the buds in closer juxtaposition, and the leaves broader, the higher one got on the mountains the stalks and branches became more fragile, the buds were at greater intervals, and the leaves more lancelate. I noticed this in the case of a willow and of a gentian, and convinced myself that it was not a case of different species. So also near the Walchensee I noticed longer and thinner rushes than in the lowlands” (Italian Journey, 8th September). On October 8th, by the seashore in Venice, he finds different plants wherein the relation between the organic and its environment becomes specially clear to him. “These plants are all both robust and virile, succulent and hardy, and it is apparent that the old salt of the sandy soil, and still more the saline air, gives them this characteristic; they are swollen with juices like water-plants; they are fleshy and hardy like mountain-plants; if their edges have the tendency to form prickles, like thistles, they are exceedingly strong and highly pointed. I found such leaves on bushes; they appeared to me to resemble our harmless coltsfoot, but here they were armed with sharp weapons, the leaves like leather, as also the seed capsules and the stalk, everything very thick and succulent.” (Italian Journey). In the Botanical Gardens at Padua the thought of how all plant-forms could be developed out of one, assumes more definite shape in Goethe's mind. In November he writes to Knebel: “The little botany I know has for the first time become a pleasure to me in this land with its brighter, less sporadic vegetation. I have already made fine general observations which will subsequently be acceptable to you also.” On 25th March, 1787, there comes to him “considerable illumination regarding botanical phenomena.” He begs that “Herder may be told that he is very near to finding the archetypal plant.” Only he fears “no one will be willing to recognise the rest of the plant world therein.” On April 17th he goes to the Public Gardens “with a firm, calm determination to continue his poetical dreams.” But all of a sudden the plant-nature catches him up like a ghost. “The many plants which I was formerly only accustomed to see in pots and tubs, indeed only behind glass windows for most of the year, stand here fresh and gay under the open sky, and thus fulfilling their destiny, they become clearer to us. Amongst so many formations, some new, some familiar, the old fancy again occurred to me as to whether I could not discover among the multitude the archetypal plant. There must be such a thing: how otherwise should I recognise this or that form to be a plant if they were not all fashioned after one type?” He tries hard to distinguish the divergent forms, but his thoughts are guided ever and again to an archetype that lies at the basis of them all. Goethe starts a Botanical Diary in which he notes all his experiences and reflections on the subject of the plant world during the journey. (Goethe's Werke. Weimar Edition Bd. 17. S.273). These diary leaves show how untiringly he is occupied in seeking out specimens of plants fitted to lead him to the laws of growth and reproduction. When he thinks he is on the track of any law he first puts it into hypothetical form, in order to confirm it in the course of his further experiences. He makes careful notes of the processes of generation, of fructification, of growth. More and more it dawns upon him that the leaf is the basic organ of plants, and that the forms of all other plant organs are best understood if they are considered as transformed leaves. He writes in his Diary: “Hypothesis: all is leaf, and through this simplicity the greatest diversity becomes possible.” And on May 17th he writes to Herder: “I must further confide to you that I am very near to the secret of plant generation and organisation, and that it is the simplest thing conceivable. Under this sky the finest observations are possible. I have found clearly and indubitably the cardinal point where the germ is concealed: already I see everything else in its entirety, and only a few details have yet to become more definite. The archetypal plant is the most wonderful creation in the world, for which Nature herself should envy me. With this model, and its key, one can invent plants ad infinitum, and consequently, that is to say, plants which could exist, even if they do not exist, and are not as it were artistic or poetic shadows and fancies but have an inner truth and necessity. The same law may be applied to all else that lives. ... Forwards and backwards the plant is ever only leaf, so indissolubly united with the future germ that one cannot think of the one without the other. To grasp such a concept, to sustain it, to discover it in Nature, is a task which places us in a condition that is almost painful, despite its joy.” (Italian Journey).

[ 16 ] For an explanation of the phenomena of life Goethe takes a path entirely different from those which scientists usually travel. Investigators of Nature may be divided into two classes. There are those who advocate the existence of a life-force working in organic Nature, and this life-force represents a special, higher form of force compared with other Natural causes. Just as the forces of gravity, chemical attraction and repulsion, magnetism, and so on, exist, so there must also exist a life-force which brings about such an interaction in the substances of the organism, that it can maintain itself, grow, nourish and propagate itself. These investigators of Nature say: In the organism work the same forces as in the rest of Nature, but they do not work as in a lifeless machine. They are taken up, as it were, by the life-force and raised to a higher stage of activity. Other investigators oppose this view, believing that no special force works in the organism. They regard the phenomena of life as more highly complicated chemical and physical processes and hope that some time it will be possible to explain an organism just as it is possible to explain a machine, by reducing it to the workings of inorganic forces. The first view is described as the theory of vitalism, the second as mechanistic theory. Goethe's mode of conception differs essentially from both. It appears to him self-evident that in the organism something is active as well as the forces of inorganic Nature. He cannot admit a mechanical explanation of living phenomena. Just as little does he seek a special life-force in order to explain the activities in an organism. He is convinced that for the understanding of living processes there must be a perception of a kind other than that through which the phenomena of inorganic Nature are perceived. Those who decide in favour of the assumption of a life-force realise, it is true, that organic activities are not mechanical, but at the same time they are not able to develop in themselves that other kind of perception by means of which the organic could be understood. The conception of the life-force remains obscure and indefinite. A more recent adherent of the theory of vitalism, Gustav Bunge, thinks that “All the riddles of life are contained in the tiniest cell, and with the existing means at our disposal we have already reached the boundary line.” (Vitalismus und Mechanismus, Leipsig. 1886, S.17). One may answer, entirely in the sense of Goethe's mode of thinking: “That power of perception which only cognises the nature of inorganic phenomena has arrived at the boundary which must be crossed in order to grasp what is living.” This power of perception, however, will never find within its sphere the means adequate to explain the life of even the tiniest cell. Just as the eye is necessary for the perception of colour phenomena, so the understanding of life is dependent on the power of perceiving directly in the sensible a supersensible element. This supersensible element will always escape one who only directs his senses to organic forms. Goethe seeks to animate the sensible perception of the plant forms in a higher sense and to represent to himself the sensible form of a supersensible archetypal plant. (Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums. Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33. S.80). The Vitalist takes refuge in the empty concept of the “life-force” because he simply does not see anything that his senses cannot perceive in the organism; Goethe sees the sensible permeated by a supersensible element, in the same sense as a coloured surface is permeated by colour.

[ 17 ] The followers of the mechanistic theory hold the view that some day it will be possible to produce living substances artificially from inorganic matter. They say that not many years ago it was maintained that substances existed in the organism which could only arise through the activity of the life-force and not artificially. To-day it is already possible to produce some of the substances artificially in the laboratory. Similarly, it may one day be possible to produce a living albumen, which is the basic substance of the simplest organism, out of carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salts. The mechanists think that this will provide the irrefutable proof that life is nothing more than a combination of inorganic processes—the organism just a machine that has arisen in a natural way.

[ 18 ] From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception it may be said that the mechanists speak of substances and forces in a way that has no justification in experience. And people have grown so accustomed to speak in this way that it becomes very difficult to maintain the clear pronouncements of experience in the face of such concepts. Let us, however, consider, without bias, a process of the external world. I/it us take a quantity of water at a definite temperature. How do we know anything about this water? We observe it, notice that it takes up space and is enclosed within definite boundaries. We put a finger or a thermometer into it and find that it has a definite degree of warmth. We press against the surface and find that it is fluid. This is what the senses tell us concerning the condition of the water. Now let us heat the water. It will boil and finally change into steam. Again one can acquire knowledge through sense-perception of the constitution of the substance, of the steam into which the water has changed. Instead of heating the water, it can be subjected to an electric current, under certain conditions. It changes into two substances, hydrogen and oxygen. We can learn about the nature of these two substances also through the senses. Thus in the corporeal world we perceive states, and observe at the same time that these states can, under certain conditions, pass over into others. The senses inform us of these states. When we speak of something else besides states which change we no longer keep to pure facts, but we add concepts to these. When it is said that the oxygen and the hydrogen which have developed out of the water as a result of the electric current were already contained in the water, but so closely united that they could not be perceived individually, a concept has been added to the perception—a concept by means of which the development of the two bodies out of the one is explained. When it is further maintained that oxygen and hydrogen are substances, as is shown by the fact that names have been given to them, again a concept has been added to what has been perceived. For, in reality, in the space occupied by the oxygen, all we can perceive is a sum of states. To these states we add, in thought, the substance to which they are supposed to belong. The substantiality of the oxygen and hydrogen that is conceived of as already existing in water is something that is added in thought to the content of perception. If we combine hydrogen and oxygen into water by a chemical process we can observe that one collection of states passes over into another. When we say: “the two simple substances have united to form a compound,” we have there attempted to give a conceptual exposition of the content of observation. The idea “substance” receives its content, not from perception but from thought. The same thing holds good with “force” as with “substance.” We see a stone fall to the earth. What is the content of perception? A sum-total of sense impressions, states, which appear at successive places. We try to explain this change in the sense-world and say: “the earth attracts the stone; it has a ‘force’ by which it draws the stone to itself.” Again our mind has added a conception to the actuality and given it a content which does not arise out of perception. We do not perceive substances and forces, but states and their transitions into each other. These changes of states are explained by adding concepts to perceptions. [ 19 ] Let us conceive of a being who could perceive oxygen and hydrogen but not water. If we combined oxygen and hydrogen into water before the eyes of such a being the states it perceived in the two substances would disappear into nothingness. If we now described the states which we perceive in water, such a being could form no idea of them. This proves that in the perceptual contents of hydrogen and oxygen there is nothing from which the perceptual content water can be derived. When one substance arises out of two or more different ones that means: Two or more perceptual contents have transformed themselves into a content which is connected with them but is absolutely new. [ 20 ] What would have been achieved if it were found possible to combine carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salt into a living albumenous substance in the laboratory? We should know that the perceptual content of many substances could combine into one perceptual content. But this latter perceptual content cannot in any sense be derived out of the former. The state of living albumen can only be observed in itself; it cannot be developed out of the states of carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salt. In the organism we have something wholly different from the inorganic constituents out of which it can be formed. The sensible contents of perception change into sensible-supersensible when the living being arises. And those who have not the power to form sensible-supersensible conceptions can as little know anything of the nature of an organism as they could experience water if the sensible perception of it were inaccessible to them.

[ 21 ] In his studies of the plant and animal world Goethe tried to conceive of germination, growth, transformations of organs, nutrition and reproduction of the organism, as sensible-supersensible processes. He perceived that this sensible-supersensible process is the same, ideally, in all plants and that it only assumes different forms in its outer manifestation. He was able to establish the same thing concerning the animal world. When man has formed in himself the idea of the sensible-supersensible archetypal plant he will find this again in all single plant-forms. Diversity arises because things, the same ideally, can exist in the perceptual world in different forms. The single organism consists of organs which can be traced back to one basic organ. The basic organ of the plant is the leaf with the nodes from which it develops. This organ assumes different forms in external appearance: cotyledon, foliage, leaf, sepal, petal, etc. “The plant may sprout, blossom, or bear fruit, but it is always the same organs which in manifold conditions and under frequently changed forms fulfil Nature's prescription.”

[ 22 ] In order to get a complete picture of the archetypal plant Goethe had to follow, in general, the forms which the basic organ passes through in the progress of the growth of the plant from germination to the ripening of the seed. In the beginning of its development the whole plant-form rests in the seed. In this the archetypal plant has assumed a form, through which it conceals, as it were, its ideal content in outward appearance.

“Simply slumbered the force in the seed; a germ of the future
Peacefully locked in itself, 'neath the integument lay,
Leaf and root and bud, still void of colour and shapeless;
Thus does the kernel, while dry, cover that motionless life.
Upward then strives it to swell, in gentle moisture confiding,
And from the night where it dwelt, straightway ascendeth to light.”

(Translation by A. E. Bowring).

[ 23 ] Out of the seed the plant develops its primary organs, the cotyledons, after it “has left behind its coverings more or less in the earth” and has established “the root in the soil.” And now, in the further course of growth, impulse follows impulse, nodes upon nodes are piled one above the other, and at each node we have a leaf.

The leaves appear in different forms, the lower still simple, the upper much indented, notched, and composed of many tiny leaves. The archetypal plant at this stage of development spreads out its sensible-supersensible content in space as external sense appearance. Goethe imagines that the leaves owe their progressive development and improvement to the light and the air. “When we find these cotyledons produced in the enclosing seed-walls, filled as it were with a crude sap, almost entirely unorganised, or at any rate only crudely organised and unformed, so do we find the leaves of those plants which grow under water more crudely organised than others that are exposed to the free air; indeed even the same plant species develops smoother and less perfect leaves if it grows in deep, moist places; whereas, on the contrary, in higher regions it produces fibrous and more finely developed leaves, provided with tiny hairs” (Goethe's Werke, Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33. S25.).

In the second epoch of growth the plant again contracts into a narrower space what was previously spread out.

“Less abundantly yielding the sap, contracting the vessels,
So that the figure 'ere long gentler effects doth disclose.
Soon and in silence is checked the growth of the vigorous branches
And the rib of the stalk fuller becometh in form.
Leafless however and quick the tenderer stem then upspringeth,
And a miraculous sight doth the observer enchant.
Ranged in a circle, in numbers that now are small, and now countless,
Gather the smaller-sized leaves, close by the side of their like,
And as the perfectest type, brilliant-hued coronals form.”

(Translation by A. E. Bowring).

[ 24 ] In the calyx the plant form draws itself together, and in the corolla again spreads itself out. The next contraction follows in the pistils and stamens, the organs of generation. In the previous periods of growth the formative force of the plant developed uniformly as the impulse to repeat the basic form. At this stage of contraction the same force distributes itself into two organs. What is separated seeks to re-unite. This happens in the process of fructification. The male pollen existing in the stamens unites with the female substance in the pistils, and the germ of a new plant arises. Goethe calls this fructification, a spiritual anastomosis, and sees in it only another form of the process which occurs in the development from one node to another. “In all bodies which we call living we observe the force to produce its like. When we perceive this force divided, we speak of the two sexes.”

The plant produces its like from node to node, for nodes and leaf are the simple form of the archetypal plant. In this form production means growth. If this reproductive force is divided among two organs we speak of two sexes. In this sense Goethe believes he has brought the concepts of growth and generation nearer to each other. At the stage of fruit-formation the plant attains its final expansion; in the seed it appears again contracted. In these six steps Nature accomplishes a cycle of plant development, and begins the whole process over again. Goethe sees in the seed only another form of the nodule which develops on the leaves. The shoots developing out of the node are complete plants which rest on a mother-plant instead of in the earth. The conception of the basic organ transforming itself stage by stage, as on a “spiritual ladder” from seed to fruit is the idea of the archetypal plant. In order to prove to sense perception, as it were, the transforming power of the basic organ, Nature, under certain conditions, at one stage allows another organ to develop instead of the one that should arise in conformity with the regular course of growth. In the double poppy, for example, petals appear in the lilace where the stamens should arise. The organ destined ideally to become a stamen has become a petal. In the organ that has a definite form in the regular course of plant development there is the possibility to assume another.

[ 25 ] As an illustration of his idea of the archetypal plant Goethe considers the bryophyllum calycinum, a plant species which was brought to Calcutta from the Molucca Islands, and thence came to Europe. Out of the notches in the fleshy leaves these plants develop fresh plantlets, which grow to complete plants after their detachment. In this process, sensibly and visibly presented, Goethe sees that ideally a whole plant slumbers in the leaf. (Goethe's Notes on Bryophyllum Calycinum. Weimar Edition, Part 2. Vol. VII.).

[ 26 ] One who develops the idea of the archetypal plant in himself, and keeps it so plastic that he can think of it in all possible forms which its content permits, can explain all formations in the plant kingdom by its help. He will understand the development of the individual plant, but he will also find that all sexes, species, and varieties are fashioned according to this archetype. Goethe developed these views in Italy and recorded them in his work entitled Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären which appeared in 1790.

[ 27 ] In Italy Goethe also makes progress in the development of his ideas concerning the human organism. On January 20th he writes to Knebel: “As regards anatomy, I have only a very indifferent preparation, and it is not without some labour that I have succeeded in acquiring a certain knowledge of the human frame. Constant examination of the stages here leads one to a higher understanding. In our Academy of Medicine and Surgery it is merely a question of knowing the part, and for this a wretched muscle serves just as well. But in Rome the parts mean nothing unless at the same time they present a noble form. In the great hospital San Spirito they have prepared, for the sake of artists, a very beautiful body displaying the muscles, so that one marvels at its beauty. It could really pass for some flayed demi-god, for a Marsyas. Thus one does not study the skeleton as an artificially arranged mask of bones, but rather after the example of the ancients, with the ligaments by which it receives life and movement.”

After his return from Italy Goethe applied himself industriously to the pursuit of anatomical studies. He feels compelled to discover the formative laws of the animal form just as he had succeeded in doing in the case of the plant. He is convinced that the uniformity of the animal organisation is also based on a fundamental organ which can assume different forms in its external manifestation. When the idea of the basic organ is concealed the organ itself has an undeveloped appearance. Here we have the simpler organs of animals: when the idea is master of the substance, forming the substance into a perfect likeness of itself, the higher, nobler organs arise. That which is present ideally in the simpler organs manifests itself externally in the higher. Goethe did not succeed in apprehending in a single idea the law of the whole animal form as he did for the plant form. He found the formative law for one part only of this animal form—for the spinal cord and brain, with the bones enclosing these organs. He sees in the brain a higher development of the spinal cord. He regards each nerve centre of the ganglia as a brain which has remained at a lower stage (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 8.).

He explains the skull-bones enclosing the brain as transformations of the vertebrae surrounding the spinal cord. It had occurred to him previously that he must regard the posterior cranial bones (occipital, posterior and anterior sphenoid bones) as three transformed vertebrae; he maintains the same thing in regard to the anterior cranial bones, when in the year 1790 he finds in the sands of the Lido a sheep's skull, which is, by great good fortune, cracked in such a way that three vertebrae are made visible to immediate sense perception in a transformed shape in the hard palate—the upper jaw-bone, and the intermaxillary bone.

[ 28 ] In Goethe's time the anatomy of animals had not yet advanced so far that he was able to cite a living being which really has vertebrae in place of developed cranial bones, and which thus presents in sensible form that which only exists ideally in developed animals. The investigations of Karl Gegenbauer, published in the year 1872, made it possible to instance such an animal form. Primitive fish, or selachians, have cranial bones and a brain which are obviously terminal members of the vertebral column and spinal cord. According to this discovery a greater number of vertebrae than Goethe supposed, at least nine, appear to have entered into the head formation. This error in the number of vertebrae, and, in addition, the fact that in the embryonic condition the skull of higher animals shows no trace of being composed of vertebral parts but develops out of a single cartilaginous vesicle, has been adduced as evidence against the value of Goethe's idea concerning the transformation of the spinal cord and vertebrae. It is indeed admitted that the skull has originated from vertebrae, but it is denied that the cranial bones, in the form in which they appear in the higher animals, are transformed vertebrae. It is said that a complete amalgamation of vertebrae into a cartilaginous vesicle has taken place, and that in this amalgamation the original vertebral structure has entirely disappeared. The bony forms which are to be perceived in the higher animals have developed out of this cartilaginous capsule. These forms have not developed in accordance with the archetype of the vertebra, but in accordance with the tasks they have to fulfil in the developed head. So that in seeking an explanation of the forms of any cranial bone the question is not, “How has a vertebra been transformed in order to become the bones of the head?”—but “What conditions have led to this or that bony form separating out of the simple cartilaginous capsule?” It is believed that there is a development of new forms, in conformity with new formative laws, after the original vertebral form has passed over into an unorganised capsule. A contradiction between this view and Goethe's can only be found from the standpoint of “fact-fanaticism.” The vertebral structure that is no longer sensibly perceptible in the cartilaginous capsule of the skull does nevertheless exist in it ideally and re-appears as soon as the conditions for this appearance are there. In the cartilaginous skull-capsule the idea of the vertebral basic organ is concealed within matter; in the developed cranial bones it re-appears in outer manifestation.

[ 29 ] Goethe hopes that the formative laws of the other parts of the animal organism will be revealed to him in the same way as was the case with those of brain, spinal cord, and their enveloping organs. With regard to the Lido discovery he informs Herder, through Frau von Kalb, April 30th, that he “has come much closer to the animal form and its many transformations and indeed through a most curious accident.” He believes himself to be so near his goal that he wants to complete, in the very year of his discovery, a work on animal development which may be placed side by side with the “Metamorphosis of Plants” (Correspondence with Knebel, pp 98.).

During his travels in Silesia, July, 1790, Goethe pursues studies in Comparative Anatomy and begins to write an Essay On the Form of Animals (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 8, p. 261.). He did not succeed in advancing from this happy starting point to the formative laws of the whole animal form. He made many an attempt to find the Type of the animal form, but nothing analogous to the idea of the archetypal plant resulted. He compares the animals with each other, and with man, and seeks to obtain a general picture of the animal structure, according to which, as a model, Nature fashions the individual forms. This general picture of the animal type is not a living conception that is filled with a content in accordance with the basic laws of animal formation, and thus recreates, as it were, the archetypal animal of Nature. It is only a general concept that has been abstracted from the special appearances. It confirms the existence of the common element in the manifold animal forms, but it does not contain the law of animal nature.

“All the members develop according to Laws Eternal.
And the rarest of forms secretly preserves the Archetype.”

(The Metamorphosis of Animals.)

[ 30 ] Goethe could not evolve a uniform conception of how the archetype, through the transformation according to law of a basic member, develops as the many-membered archetypal form of the animal organism. The Essays on The Form of Animals and the Sketch of Comparative Anatomy proceeding from Osteology, which were written in Jena in 1795, as well as the later and more detailed work, Lectures on the first three Chapters of an Outline of a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, only contain indications as to how the animals are to be compared suitably in order to obtain a general scheme according to which the creative power “produces and develops organic beings,” in accordance with which these descriptions are worked out and to which the most diverse forms are to be traced back, since such a norm may be abstracted from the forms of different animals. In the case of plants, however, Goethe has shown how through successive modifications an archetype develops, according to law, to the perfect organic form.

[ 31 ] Even if Goethe could not follow the creative power of Nature in its formative and transforming impulse through the different members of the animal organism, yet he did succeed in finding single laws to which Nature adheres in the building of animal forms, laws which do indeed conform to the general norm but vary in their manifestation. He imagines that Nature has no power to change the general picture at will. If in some creature one member is developed to a high degree of perfection, this can only happen at the expense of another. The archetypal organism contains all the members that can appear in any one animal. In the single animal form one member may be developed, another only indicated; one may develop completely, another may be imperceptible to the senses. In the latter case Goethe is convinced that the elements pertaining to the general type that are not visible in an animal exist, nevertheless, in the idea. “If we behold in a creature some special excellence we have merely to question and find where something is lacking. The searching spirit will find somewhere the existence of a defect and at the same time the key to the whole of creation. Thus we can find no beast who carries a horn on its head and has perfect teeth in the upper bone of the jaw; the Eternal Mother, therefore, could never have created a lion with horns even by the exercise of all her power. For she has not enough substance to implant the full series of teeth and at the same time bring forth horns and antlers.” (Metamorphosis of the Animals.)

[ 32 ] All members are developed in the archetypal organism and maintained in equilibrium; the diversity arises because the formative force expends itself on one member and, as a result, another remains in an absolutely undeveloped state or is merely indicated in external manifestation. This law of the animal organism is called to-day the law of the correlation or compensation of organs.

[ 33 ] Goethe's conception is that the whole plant world is contained in the archetypal plant and the whole animal world in the archetypal animal, as idea. Out of this thought arises the question: How is it that in one case these definite plant or animal forms arise, and in another, others? Under what conditions does a fish develop out of the archetypal animal? under what conditions a bird? In the scientific explanation of the structure of organisms Goethe finds a mode of presentation that is distasteful to him. The adherents of this mode of conception ask in regard to each organ: What purpose does it serve in the living being in whom it occurs?—Such a question is based on the general thought that a divine Creator, or Nature, has predetermined a definite purpose in life for each being and has then bestowed upon it a structure which enables it to fulfil this purpose. In Goethe's view this is just as absurd as the question: To what end does an elastic sphere move when it is pushed by another? An explanation of the motion can only be given by discovering the law by which the sphere is set in motion through a blow or other cause. One does not ask: “What purpose is served by the motion of the sphere?” but, “Whence is the motion derived?” In Goethe's opinion one should not ask: “Why has the bull horns?” but rather: “How can he have horns?” Through what law does the archetypal animal appear in the bull as a horn-carrying form? Goethe sought for the idea of the archetypal plant and animal in order to find in them the reasons for the diversity of organic forms. The archetypal plant is the creative element in the plant world. If one wants to explain a single plant species then one must show how this creative element works in this special case. The thought that an organic being owes its form, not to the forces formatively acting in it, but to the fact that the form is imposed upon it from without for certain ends, was repulsive to Goethe. He writes: “In a pitiful, apostolically monkish declamation of the Zurich prophet I recently found this stupid sentence: ‘Everything that has life, lives through something outside of itself’—or words to that effect. Only a proselytiser of the heathen could write such a thing, and on revising it, his genius does not pluck him by the sleeve” (Italian Journey, 5th Oct., 1781). Goethe thinks of the organic being as a “little” world, a microcosm which has arisen through itself, and fashions itself according to its own laws. “The conception that a living being is produced from outside for certain extraneous ends, and that its form is determined by a purposive primeval force, has already delayed us many centuries in the philosophical consideration of Nature, and still holds us back, although individual men have vigorously attacked this mode of thought, and have shown the obstacles which it creates. It is, if one may so express it, a paltry way of thinking, which like all paltry things is trivial just because it is convenient and sufficient for human nature in general” (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 7, p.217). It is, of course, convenient to say that a Creator, when forming an organic species, has based it on a certain purposive thought, and has therefore given it a definite form. Goethe's aim, however, is not to explain Nature by the intentions of some supernatural being, but out of her inherent formative laws. An individual organic form arises because the archetypal plant or animal assumes a definite form in a special case. This form must be of such a kind that it is able to live in the conditions surrounding it. “The existence of a creature which we call fish is only possible under the condition of an element that we call water.” (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 7. p. 221). When Goethe is seeking to comprehend the formative laws which produce a definite organic form he goes back to his archetypal organism. This archetypal organism has the power to realise itself in the most manifold external forms. In order to explain a fish Goethe would investigate what formative forces the archetypal animal employs in order to produce this particular fish form from among all the forms which exist in it ideally. If the archetypal animal were to realise itself in certain conditions in a form in which it could not live it would not survive. An organic form can only maintain itself within certain conditions of life if it is adapted to them.

“Thus by the animal's form is its manner of living determined,
Likewise the manner of life worketh
back on every creature, And so the organised form firmly makes its appearance,
yet with the power to change, through outer conditions of Nature.”

(The Metamorphosis of Animals.)

[ 34 ] The organic forces surviving in a given life-element are conditioned by the nature of the element. If an organic form were to leave one life-element for another it must transform itself accordingly. This can happen in definite cases because the archetypal organism which lies at its base has the power of realising itself in countless forms. The transformation of one form into another is, however, according to Goethe's view, not to be conceived of in such a way that the external conditions immediately remould the form in accordance with their own nature, but that they become the cause through which the inner being transforms itself. Changed life-conditions provoke the organic form to transform itself in a certain way according to inner laws. The external influences work indirectly, not directly, on the living being. Countless forms of life are contained in the archetypal plant and animal ideally: those on which external influences work as stimuli come to actual existence.

[ 35 ] The conception that a plant or animal species can in the course of ages, as a result of certain conditions, be transformed into another, has its full justification in Goethe's view of Nature. Goethe's view is that the force which produces a new being through the process of procreation is simply a transformation of that force which brings about the progressive metamorphosis of organs in the course of growth. Reproduction is a “growing-beyond” the individual.

As the basic organ during growth undergoes a sequence of changes which are ideally the same, similarly, a transformation of the external form can also occur in reproduction, while the ideal archetype remains the same. If an original organic form existed, then its descendants in the course of great epochs of time could pass over through gradual transformations into the manifold forms peopling the earth at present. The thought of an actual blood-relationship uniting all organic forms flows out of Goethe's basic conceptions. He might have expressed it in its completed form immediately after he had formed his idea of the archetypal animal and plant. But he expresses himself with reserve, even indefinitely, when he alludes to this thought.

In the Essay, Versuch einer allgemeinen Vergleich-ungslehre, which was probably written shortly after the Metamorphosis of Plants, we read: “And how worthy it is of Nature that she must always employ the same means in order to produce and nourish a creature. Thus one will progress along just these paths, and just as one at first only regarded the inorganic, undetermined elements as vehicles of organised beings, so will one now progress in observation, and again regard the organised world as a union of many elements. The whole kingdom of plants, for example, will again appear to us like a great ocean, which is just as necessary to the limited existence of the insects, as the waters and rivers are to the limited existence of fishes, and we shall see that a vast number of living creatures are born and nourished in this ocean of plants; we shall, finally, again regard the whole animal world as a great element where one race maintains itself out of and through the other if not arising from it.” There is less reserve in the following sentence from Lectures on the first three Chapters of an Outline of Comparative Anatomy (1796): “We should also have come to the point where we could fearlessly maintain that all the more perfect organic beings, among which we reckon fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the summit of the last, Man, are formed according to one archetype, which only in its constituent parts inclines hither and thither and daily develops and transforms itself through procreation.” Goethe's caution regarding the thought of transformation is comprehensible. The epoch in which he elaborated his ideas was not unfamiliar with this thought. It had, however, been developed in the most confused sense. “That epoch,” writes Goethe, “was darker than one can conceive of now.” It was stated, for example, that man, if he liked, could go about comfortably on all fours, and that bears, if they remained upright for a period of time, could become human beings. The audacious Diderot ventured to make certain proposals as to how goat-footed fauns could be produced and then put into livery, to sit in pomp and distinction on the coaches of the mighty and the rich! Goethe would have nothing to do with such undue ideas. His aim was to obtain an idea of the basic laws of the living. It became clear to him here that the forms of the living are not rigid and unchangeable, but are subject to continual transformation. He had, however, no opportunity of making observations which would have enabled him to see how this transformation was accomplished in the single phenomenon. It was the investigations of Darwin and the reflections of Haeckel that first threw light on the actual relationship between the single organic forms. From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception one can only give assent to the assertions of Darwinism in so far as they concern the actual emergence of one organic species from another. Goethe's ideas, however, penetrate more deeply into the nature of the organic world than modern Darwinism. Modern Darwinism believes that it can do without the inner impelling forces in the organism which Goethe conceives of in the sensible-supersensible image. Indeed it would even deny that Goethe was justified in arguing, from his postulates, an actual transformation of organs and organisms. Jul. Sachs rejects Goethe's thoughts by saying that he transfers “the abstraction evolved by the intellect to the object itself when he ascribes to this object a metamorphosis which, fundamentally speaking, is only accomplished in our concept.” According to this view Goethe has presumably gone no further than to reduce leaves, sepals, petals, etc., to one general concept, designating them by the name ‘leaf.’ “Of course the matter would be quite different if we could assume that the stamens were ordinary leaves in the ancestors of the plant-forms lying before us, etc.” (Sachs, History of Botany. 1875, p. 169).

This view springs from that “fact-fanaticism” which cannot see that the ideas belong just as objectively to the phenomena as the elements that are perceptible to the senses. Goethe's view is that the transformation of one organ into another can only be spoken of if both contain something in common over and above their external appearance. This is the sensible-supersensible form. The stamens of a plant-form before us can only be described as the transformed leaf of the predecessors if the same sensible-supersensible form lives in both. If that is not the case, if the stamen has developed in the particular plant-form simply in the same place in which a leaf developed in its predecessors, then no transformation has occurred, but one organ has merely appeared in the place of another. The Zoologist Oscar Schmidt asks: “What is it that is supposed to be transformed according to Goethe's views? Certainly not the archetype!” (War Goethe Darwinianer? Graz. 1871, p. 22.). Certainly the archetype is not transformed, for this is the same in all forms. But it is just because this remains the same that the external forms can be different, and yet represent, a uniform Whole. If one could not recognise the same ideal archetype in two forms developing out of each other, no relation could be assumed to exist between them. Only the conception of the ideal archetypal form can impart real meaning to the assertion that the organic forms arise by a process of transformation out of each other. Those who cannot rise to this conception remain chained within the mere facts. The laws of organic development lie in this conception. Just as Kepler's three fundamental laws make the processes in the solar system comprehensible, so can the forms of organic Nature be understood through Goethe's ideal archetypes.

[ 36 ] Kant, who denies to the human spirit the power of understanding, in the ideal sense, a Whole by which a multiplicity is determined in its appearance, calls it “a risky adventure of reason” to seek to explain the various forms of the organic world by an archetypal organism. For him man is only in a position to gather the manifold, individual phenomena into one general concept by which the intellect forms for itself a picture of the unity. This picture, however, exists only in the human mind and has nothing to do with the creative power by which the unity really causes the multiplicity to proceed out of itself. The “risky adventure of reason” consists in assuming that the Earth first allows the more simple organisms to proceed out of her womb and that these then produce from themselves forms with more deliberate purpose; that from these again, still higher forms develop, up to the most perfect living being. Kant holds that even if such a supposition is made, it can only be based on a purposive creative force, which has given evolution such an impulse that all its various members develop in accordance with some goal. Man perceives a multitude of different organisms; and since he cannot penetrate them in order to see how they themselves assume a form adapted to the life-element in which they develop, he must conceive that they are so adapted from without that they can live within these conditions. Goethe, however, claims the faculty of being able to recognise how Nature creates the particular from the whole, the outer from the inner. He is willing to undertake courageously what Kant calls the “adventure of reason” (cp. the Essay: Anschauende Urteilskraft Kürschner. Bd. 34.). If we had no other proof that Goethe regarded as justifiable the thought of a blood-relationship among all organic forms within the limits here specified, we should have to conclude it from this judgment of Kant's “adventure of reason.”

[ 37 ] A sketch, Entwurf einer Morphologie, which still exists, suggests that Goethe intended to present, in their sequence, the special forms which his archetypal plant and archetypal animal assume in the main forms of living beings. He wanted first to describe the nature of the organic as it appeared to him through his contemplation of animals and plants. Then he wanted to show how the organic archetypal being, “proceeding from a centre,” develops on the one side to the manifold plant world, on the other to the multiplicity of animal forms, and how particular forms of worms, of insects, of higher animals and the form of man can be derived from the general archetype. He intended even to shed light on physiognomy and phrenology. He made it his task to present the external form in its connection with the inner spiritual faculties. He was impelled to follow the organic formative impulse, which in the lower organisms is portrayed in a simple external appearance, in its striving to fulfil itself stage by stage in ever more perfect forms until it produces in man a form which makes him able to be the creator of spiritual production.

[ 38 ] This plan of Goethe's was never completed, any more than was another, the commencement of which is to be found in the fragment, Vorarbeiten zu einer Physiologie der Pflanzen (cp. Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 6, pp. 286 ff.). Goethe tried to show how the various branches of material knowledge,—Natural History, Physics, Anatomy, Chemistry, Zöonomy and Physiology—must work together, in order to be applied in a higher mode of perception to explain the forms and processes of living beings. He wanted to bring forward a new science, a general morphology of organisms, new indeed “not in reference to its subject-matter, for this is known, but in its outlook and method, which must give an individual form to the doctrine as well as establish a place for it among other sciences.” What Anatomy, Natural History, Physics, Chemistry, Zöonomy, Physiology have to offer as the various laws of Nature, would be taken up by the living idea of the organic and placed on a higher level, just as the living being itself takes up the different processes of Nature in the cycle of its development and places them on a higher level of activity.

[ 39 ] Goethe reached the ideas which guided him through the labyrinth of living forms along paths of his own. The prevailing conceptions in regard to important regions of Nature's activity contradicted his own general world-conception. Therefore with regard to these regions he had to form for himself conceptions in accordance with his own being. He was convinced, however, that there was “nothing new under the sun,” and that one “could certainly find one's own perceptions already indicated in traditions.” For this reason he sent his work on the Metamorphosis of the Plants to learned friends, and begged them to tell him whether anything had already been written or handed down concerning the theme in question. He was glad to be told, by Friedrich August Wolf, of an “admirable precursor,” one Caspar Friedrich Wolf. Goethe became acquainted with his Theoria Generationis which had appeared in 1759. But this very work shows that it is possible to hold a correct view of the facts and yet that a man cannot come to the full idea of organic development unless he is capable of arriving at the sensible-supersensible form of life through a power of perception higher than that of the senses. Wolf was an excellent observer. He sought to discover the beginnings of life by means of microscopical investigations. He recognised transformed leaves in the calyx, corolla, pistils, stamens and seed. But he ascribed the process of transformation to a gradual decrease of the life-force, which diminishes in proportion to the length of time the plant exists, until it finally disappears. Calyx, corolla, etc., are, therefore, for him an imperfect development of the leaf. Wolf came forward as the opponent of Haller, who advanced the theory of Pre-formation or “Encasement.” According to this theory, all the members of a fully-grown organism are already represented on a small scale in the germ, and, indeed, in the same shape and mutual arrangement as in the developed living being. The development of an organism is thus simply an unfolding of what already exists. Wolf would only accept validity in what he saw with his eyes. And since the encased condition of a living being could not be discovered even by the most careful observations, he regarded development as an actually new formation. According to his view, the shape of an organic being is not yet present in the germ. Goethe is of the same opinion in reference to the external manifestation. He, too, rejects the “Encasement Theory” of Haller. For Goethe the organism is indeed pre-figured in the germ, not according to its external appearance but according to the idea. He regards the external appearance as a new formation, but reproaches Wolf with the fact that where he sees nothing with the eyes of the body, he also sees nothing with the eyes of the spirit. Wolf had no conception of the fact that something may still exist in the idea even if it does not pass into external manifestation. “Therefore he is always concerned with penetrating to the beginnings of the development of life by means of microscopical investigations and so following the organic embryos from their earliest appearance up to their development. However admirable this method may be, yet the excellent man did not think that there is a distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing,’ that the eyes of the spirit have to work in constant, living union with the eyes of the body because otherwise one may fall into the danger of seeing and yet overlooking. ... In the plant-transformation he saw the same organ continually contracting, continually diminishing, but he did not see that this contraction alternated with an expansion. He saw that it diminished in volume, but did not observe that at the same time it became more perfect, and he therefore absurdly attributed the path towards perfection to a process of impoverishment.” (Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33.).

[ 40 ] Until the very end of his life Goethe was in touch with innumerable scientific investigators, both in personal and written intercourse. He followed the progress of the science of living beings with the keenest interest; he saw with joy how modes of thought resembling his own gained entrance into this department of knowledge, and how his doctrine of metamorphosis was also recognised and made fruitful by individual investigators. In the year 1817 he began to gather his works together and to publish them in a periodical which he founded under the title, Zur Morphologie. In spite of all this, however, he made no further progress, through personal observation or reflection, in the growth of his ideas concerning organic development. On two other occasions only did he feel compelled to occupy himself more deeply with such ideas. In both cases he was attracted by scientific phenomena in which he found the confirmation of his own thoughts. The one case was the Course of Lectures held by K. F. Martius on “The Vertical and Spiral Tendency of Vegetation” at the Conference of Natural Scientists in the years 1828 and 1829, of which the periodical “Isis” published extracts; the other was a scientific dispute in the French Academy which broke out in the year 1830 between Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier.

[ 41 ] Martius conceived of the growth of plants as being dominated by two tendencies by a striving in the vertical direction which governs the root and stem, and by another which causes the leaves, the organs of the blossoms and so on, to incorporate themselves into the vertical organs of the form of a spiral line. Goethe took these thoughts and brought them into connection with his idea of metamorphosis. He wrote a long essay (Kürschner Bd. 33), into which he collected all his experiences of the plant-world which appeared to him to point to the existence of these two tendencies. He believed that he had to merge these tendencies into his idea of metamorphosis. “This much we must assume: there prevails in vegetation a general spiral tendency, whereby, in union with the vertical striving of the whole structure, each formation in the plant is brought about in accordance with the laws of metamorphosis.” Goethe regarded the existence of spiral vessels in the various plant organs as a proof that the spiral tendency dominates the life of plants throughout. “Nothing is more in accordance with Nature than the fact that what she intends in the Whole she activates through the minutest detail.” “Let us in summer look at a stake planted in the soil up which a bindweed (convolvulus) climbs from below, winding its way to the heights and—clinging closely—maintains its living growth. Let us think now of the bindweed and stake as both equally living and ascending upwards from one root, producing each other alternately and so progressing unchecked. Those who can transform this picture into an inner perception will find the idea considerably easier. The twining plant seeks outside itself that which it should itself produce, but cannot.” Goethe uses the same comparison in a letter to Count Sternberg, 15th March, 1832, and adds these words: “Of course the comparison does not entirely fit, for in the beginning the creeper must wind itself round the stem in barely perceptible circles. The nearer it approaches the summit, however, the quicker must the spiral line turn in order finally (in the blossom) to collect itself in a circle on the disc. This process resembles the dances of one's youth, where half reluctantly one was often pressed in the close embrace of affectionate children. Pardon these anthropomorphisms!” Ferdinand Cohn remarks in reference to this passage: “If only Goethe had known Darwin! How pleased he would have been with this man, who through his strictly inductive methods knew how to find clear and convincing proofs for his ideas.” Darwin thinks that in nearly all plant organs he can show that in the period of their growth they have the tendency to spiral movements which he calls circummutation.

[ 42 ] In September, 1830, Goethe refers in an essay to the dispute between the two investigators, Cuvier and Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire; in March, 1832, he continues this essay. In February and March, 1830, Cuvier, the “fact-fanatic” came forward in the French Academy in opposition to the work of Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire, who, in Goethe's opinion, had attained to a “lofty mode of thought in conformity with the idea.” Cuvier was a master of the distinctions existing between the various organic forms. Saint-Hilaire tried to discover the analogies in these forms and to prove that the organisation of animals is “subject to a general plant only modified here and there, whence the differences can be derived.” He tried to acquire knowledge of the relationship between the laws and was convinced that the particular could develop stage by stage from the whole. Goethe regards Saint-Hilaire as a man of like mind with himself and he expresses this to Eckermann, 2nd August, 1830, in the words: “Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire is now our ally, and with him all important followers and adherents in France. This occurrence is of inconceivable value to me and I justly rejoice at this final victory of a matter to which I have devoted my life and which is my own special concern.” Saint-Hilaire practises a mode of thought which is also that of Goethe, for he seeks to lay hold in experience of the idea of unity simultaneously with the sensible manifold. Cuvier clings to the manifold, to the particular, because in his observation of the particular the idea does not immediately arise. Saint-Hilaire had a right perception of the relation of the sensible to the idea; Cuvier had not. Therefore he describes Saint-Hilaire's all-inclusive principle as presumptive—nay even inferior. One can often experience, especially in the case of investigators of Nature, that they speak in a derogatory sense of something merely ideal, of something merely “thought.” They have no organ for the ideal, and therefore do not know its mode of working. It was because Goethe possessed this organ in a highly perfect state of development that he was led from his general world-conception to his deep insight into the nature of the living. His power of allowing the spiritual eye to work in constant living union with the eye of the body made it possible for him to behold the uniform sensible-supersensible essence which permeates organic evolution. He was also able to recognise this essence where one organ develops out of the other, and where, by its transformation, it conceals its relationship and similarity to its predecessor, even belying it, and changing, both in its function and in its form, to such a degree that no parallel, according to external characteristics, can be found with its earlier stages (cp. the essay on Joachim Jungius, Kürschner, Nat. Lit. Bd. 33.). Perception with the eye of the body imparts knowledge of the sensible and material; perception with the eye of the spirit leads to the perception of processes in human consciousness, to the observation of the world of thinking, feeling and willing; the living union of the spiritual and bodily eye makes possible the knowledge of the organic which, as a sensible-supersensible element, lies between the purely sensible and the purely spiritual.

Dear attendees! For many years I have had the privilege of speaking here in this place about anthroposophical spiritual science, its essence and significance for the present spiritual life of humanity. Since I last had the opportunity to do so, the School of Spiritual Science courses have taken place at the Goetheanum in Dornach in September and October of this year. These School of Spiritual Science courses were also intended to demonstrate in practical terms the task that the anthroposophical spiritual science in question seeks to fulfill in relation to the other sciences and to practical life. About thirty personalities from the various branches of science, artistic creation, and also practical life, industrial and commercial life, contributed to this; through them it should be shown how spiritual science can have a fruitful effect not only on the individual branches of science and on artistic creation, but also, and above all, on practical life. Spiritual science should not be limited to theoretical discussions and sentimental descriptions, but should show how it has the means to do precisely that which, in many respects, cannot be done by other sides in the present and in the near future, but which can be undertaken by spiritual science.

Those who are more familiar with the course of intellectual life in the present day know that the opinion and feeling is widespread throughout the individual branches of science that the individual sciences are coming up against certain limits that it is impossible for them to cross. Often it is even thought that it is impossible for humans to go beyond such limits.

But on the other hand, there is also practical life in relation to science. Science should and wants to intervene in practical life. And anyone who is involved in the life of science will not be able to deny that the limits that the various sciences find themselves up against — I need only draw attention to medicine —, that these limits can be settled by philosophical-theoretical arguments that are intended to justify these boundaries, but rather that life often demands human action precisely where science is confronted with such boundaries. The fact that it is indeed possible, through the special method of spiritual science, to enter precisely those areas that modern science points to as boundaries, should be shown on the one hand in the Dornach School of Spiritual Science. It should be shown, not by individual personalities who are merely familiar with spiritual science, but precisely by all people, by personalities who have thoroughly mastered their individual subject just as others have and who are immersed in it, who are the only ones who are able to show how this subject can be stimulated and fertilized by spiritual science. It was also of very special importance that personalities in practical life showed that this special way of thinking, which is based on reality, on full, total reality, to which the spiritual forces of the world certainly belong, that this way of looking at things is capable of accomplishing in practical life what has often had to remain unaccomplished in modern times, and which has indeed been outwardly documented as unaccomplished by the social and other necessities of life in our present time.

Of course, at this point we cannot yet say how successful this anthroposophical spiritual science has been in demonstrating its legitimacy in the spiritual life of the present day through such practical measures. On the other hand, however, it can be said that despite the attacks, of which you have been informed in the preparatory remarks, that despite these attacks, it has been recognized in recent times, even by serious parties, that what is believed by many is not true at all, that one has to deal with anthroposophy [as] with the activity of some obscure sect or the like.

I would like to give just one example to show you how, despite all the opposition, which is not always well-intentioned and, above all, not always well-meaning; how, despite all the opposition, spiritual science is slowly coming to what it must come to, at least to recognition of its earnest striving and its open eye for the cultural needs of the present.

I would like to cite just this one example. The opposing writings are gradually growing into books, and a book has been published in recent weeks called “Modern Theosophy”. For a reason that is, of course, strange, the author states that he is concerned with nothing but spiritual science. He says in the following remarks: Wherever the talk is of theosophy and theosophists, this is always the mode of expression that is more familiar than the expressions anthroposophy and anthroposophists.

Now, one cannot say – and this is addressed to those present – that the author of this writing, Kurt Leese, who has a licentiate in theology, is appreciative of anthroposophy. On the contrary, the whole book is written as a refutation. Nor can it be said that the author of the book understands an enormous amount about anthroposophy. But what he presents on the very first page and repeats many times in the book is something that shows that even from the position of an opponent, it is gradually no longer possible to deny the seriousness of anthroposophy's intentions. Here is what an opponent says:

“If Theosophy were only the random ideas of a small sect fishing in troubled waters, it would not be worth the effort to pay it any attention.”

And then he says that one is dealing with something that shows the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully interwoven with an ethical spirit. The fact that this ethical spirit remains even if one negates everything else in anthroposophy is something that the author of this book openly admits:

"Its most active contemporary promoter, Rudolf Steiner, with the tools of great reading and undeniable acumen, has compiled a great wealth of religious-historical, scientific and philosophical material in detail, in order to lay the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

Nevertheless – and now I come to the positive part of my argument – this opponent, who strives to be objective, wants to look for the reasons for refuting anthroposophy from within anthroposophy itself. He wants to take up what the anthroposophist says and prove contradictions and the like, namely, to demonstrate an unscientific character. But at one point he betrays himself in a very strange way. He says, at a particularly characteristic point, that Anthroposophy has an inflammatory effect and is “ill-tempered”.

Such feats of tricky distinctions, which from the outset are in the service of an ideational preconceived scheme, make reading Steiner's writings not only difficult, where multiple misunderstandings of the uninitiated could occasionally occur, but also annoying and unpleasant.

So not only challenging logical judgment, challenging scientific judgment, but challenging feelings and emotions, that is how one views anthroposophy! And why is this so? This is certainly connected with the very special way in which anthroposophy, precisely because it wants to be as scientific as any other science, relates to the paths of knowledge of mankind.

Anthroposophy – of course, as I have said here very often – Anthroposophy would certainly not be taken seriously if it were somehow foolishly dismissive of the great, the significant achievements of the scientific method in modern times. Nor would it be taken seriously if it were to behave in some dilettantish way towards the spirit, the whole inner attitude of scientific research. It starts out from an acknowledgement of modern scientific endeavor. It does this by seeking to deepen its understanding of the scientific method, but at the same time it seeks a path from the comprehension of the external sense world into the comprehension of the spiritual world. And she would like to answer the questions that matter, the questions about the path of knowledge, in such a way that the spiritual realm is given its due, just as the sensory realm is given its due through scientific research. In doing so, she sees herself compelled — not by the scientific method as it is commonly practiced, in which one believes one is limited if one only works in the sensory world — she feels compelled by this scientific method, as it is commonly practiced, not to stop. It devotes itself more to the education, the inner discipline of research than to scientific methods, and for this reason cannot accept what is often dogmatically stated today as to the necessity of remaining in the world of sense and in the world of appearances through understanding.

And from this point of view, spiritual science seems provocative, as this critic says, and “unpleasant”. For on the whole, today's man is not inclined to accept any method of knowledge that does not arise from the ordinary characteristics of human nature, that one has in the world, that one has been educated to, or that follow from the course of ordinary life. The great and most wonderful achievements of modern natural science are based on the fact that one remains at a certain point of view of sense observation, of experiment and of combining through the intellect, that one carries out this kind of research further and further, conscientiously, but that one wants to remain with the point of view that one has once adopted in this way.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, cannot remain at this point of view, but it must, it feels compelled, precisely because of the strict scientific education that the spiritual scientist has to undergo. It feels compelled – not only to knowledge applied in natural science, to expand it, to make it more precise through all kinds of aids — but she feels compelled to develop a completely different kind of knowledge in the soul, a different way of knowing than the one used in natural science today. She therefore feels compelled to continue the work of the scientist into the spiritual realm, so that the development of this spiritual scientific method can be characterized more as a natural outgrowth of the scientific method than as a mere extension of it. And so one arrives at what has been expressed by me from the most diverse points of view over the years.

One comes to the conclusion that in the life of the human soul there are certain forces that are hidden, just as they are hidden from ordinary perception and from ordinary scientific perception, just as those soul forces that only emerge after five or ten years are hidden in a ten-year-old child. What must be borne in mind is a real growth of the human being, a sprouting forth of that which is not yet there in the tenth year but continues into the fifteenth or twentieth year. And this is discovered by the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, that even if one has developed to the point of having the methods by which one can conduct scientific research in the most conscientious way, it is still possible – so that it can be compared with a real growth of the human being – to soul forces, that it is possible to extract soul forces from the human soul, which the world can now not only see, I would like to say, more precisely with a microscope or more closely with a telescope, but which see the world quite differently, namely spiritually and soulfully, in contrast to the merely sensory view.

And it is not attempted – esteemed attendees – to somehow explore the spiritual through external measures or external experiments. How could one recognize the supernatural through laboratory experiments! That is what those who are inclined towards spiritualism want, that is what those people who gather around Schrenck-Notzing or others want. The anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here takes precisely this view, that what can be observed externally through measures that are modeled on the external scientific experiment - however astonishing they may be - that by world in some way, be it by deepening or refining it, or by allowing it to work more into the etheric in some way —, that by remaining in the sensory world, one can by no means gain knowledge of the supersensible world. But modern man often finds this unacceptable, that he should now do something with his soul forces, that he should develop these soul forces himself before he can research in the spiritual world.

It is, however, necessary to develop a certain intellectual modesty, which consists in saying to oneself: the powers that are so well suited for the sensory world, such as those applied by modern science, cannot be used to enter the spiritual world. Man must first awaken his own supersensible when he wants to explore the supersensible in the external environment, to which he belongs as a spiritual-soul being just as he belongs to the physical world through his sense of being, when he wants to explore this spiritual-soul entity in the environment.

It is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, dear attendees, to become a spiritual researcher; but if one does not want to become a spiritual researcher, it is nevertheless not acceptable to say that spiritual science is idle because it opens up a field that only those who, in a certain sense, develop their soul powers can see into.

Modern humanity as a whole does not follow the path into the scientific method itself; but modern life is permeated by the ideas that we bring into it through science. We are simply compelled by common sense to accept what radiates from the natural sciences, to incorporate it into life, and to apply it in other ways to the human condition. Just as the researcher in the laboratories carries out his experiments, which then go out into the world, so too will there be a new spiritual research. But humanity in general wants to be able to relate to the results of spiritual research in the same way as it can relate to those of natural science, without having to face the reproach that something has been accepted on mere faith or on authority.

What is indicated as this special inner, intimate soul method is to be sought in a straightforward development of human soul forces that already exist in ordinary life and in ordinary science. I would like to say that it comes to mind that there must be something like this when one brings to mind the actual meaning of knowledge in modern scientific life.

I am certainly no Kantian, dear attendees. Everything that arises for me from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is basically anti-Kantian. But I may refer to one of Kant's sayings here, because what lies in this saying has basically been verified by the whole of more recent scientific development, insofar as this whole more recent scientific development really strives to be knowledge of the world, comprehensible knowledge of the world. There is Kant's dictum: In every science, there is actually only as much real science to be found as there is mathematics present in it.

Now, my dear attendees, this is not something that we need merely believe about Kant; rather, we see it as true everywhere in the scientific development of modern times, especially in the development that most clearly and most directly leads to a world view, in the physical sciences. Mathematical thinking is applied, experiments are carried out, and not only observed, but the observations are permeated with mathematics. What does that actually mean?

Yes, it means that one only has the feeling of bringing intellectual light into what can be observed in the external world when one has verified the observations in a mathematical way. And how is that? Yes, it is because one comprehends mathematical insights through oneself, and does not become acquainted with mathematical insights through external observation. The one who once knows through inner contemplation that the three angles of a triangle are 180°, who can grasp this for himself through his own contemplation, in ordinary Euclidean geometry, he knows it. He knows it clearly through his own intuition, even if millions of people were to contradict him, he knows it. He can affirm it as a truth for his inner contemplation. It is therefore the inner work of contemplation through which one comes to mathematical truths, through which one, so to speak, inwardly experiences mathematical truths. And external observation becomes scientific in that one carries what one has observed inwardly into these external observations and connects it with them.

Especially when one has experienced this urge of the modern scientific direction in oneself through mathematics, that is, through an inwardly clear, light-filled pursuit of certain ideas in order to arrive at scientific paths that also satisfy the human need for knowledge, then one is pushed further. And then something else arises. I would say that it arises from the depths of life. From the depths of our soul, all kinds of needs for knowledge arise in the face of the great riddles of existence.

At first, in a very vague way, the human being wants to know something about what his or her essential core is. He wants to know something, or at least, one can say, he assumes that there is something to know about that which lies beyond birth and death. He also assumes that, however dark his path may be with regard to what he calls his fate, there may be a path of knowledge that allows him to somehow see through the seemingly so confused threads of human destiny. In the very act of experiencing such surging up from the soul, the human being will, I would say, become more and more aware through inner soul practice of how he is prompted when he wants to observe his inner soul , this thinking, feeling and willing that is in him, when he wants to observe it in a similar transparent way to how he already manages to a certain extent today to penetrate the outer world with mathematical concepts. And from what one experiences there as a driving force for knowledge, the spiritual researcher starts from there, he comes to the conclusion that one can further develop certain soul powers than are present in ordinary life, that one can further develop certain soul powers that are absolutely necessary for a healthy human existence in ordinary life.

Now, one of these ordinary soul abilities, without whose normal functioning we cannot be mentally healthy, is the ability to remember. My dear attendees! We all know this ability to remember; but we also know how necessary it is for a healthy, normal soul life. We know of pathological cases in which the thread of memory is interrupted up to the point of childhood, which is the furthest we can remember in life, where we cannot look back at the life we have gone through since our birth. When a person's thread of memory, his stream of memory, is interrupted in this way, then he feels, as it were, hollowed out inside. His soul life is not healthy and he cannot find his way healthily into the outer life, neither into social life nor into natural life. So the ability to remember is something that is, so to speak, absolutely intertwined with normal human life. Memory is connected to what we experience through our senses, what we go through in our interaction with the outer world. How does this memory present itself to us?

We can summon it quite well in our being if we do so through an image. In a sense, our life lies behind us at every moment like an indeterminate stream. But we live in our soul in such a way that from this state indefinite currents can emerge, the images of individual experiences, that we can bring up these images through more or less arbitrary inner actions, that they also come to us involuntarily and the like. It is as if a stream of our being were there and from this stream these images of our memory could emerge like waves.

Those who do not think with prejudice but truly from the spirit of modern science know how closely this ability to remember is connected with the human body, with the physical nature of the human being. We can, we need only point to what physiology and biology can tell us in this regard: how the ability to remember is somehow connected with the destruction of the body. And we will see how all this points to the fact that a truly inwardly healthy body is necessary for the human being to have the ability to remember in a healthy state.

This ability to remember is such that, in the right way, I would say the vividness of the external sensory perceptions that we experience in our connection with the external world, that this vividness of external sensory perception must [fade] in a certain way. We may recall the images of our experiences only in a faded state, and we must recall these images in such a way that we can participate with our will in an appropriate manner in this recall. These images must emerge in our inner soul life in a pale and somewhat arbitrary manner. And it is well known that when these images of memory emerge with a certain vividness and intensity, and when the human will, when the structure of the ego, must recede before these images, when a person cannot firmly persist in his ego in the face of these images, then hallucinations, visions, everything arises through which the human being is actually deeper in his body than he is connected when he is in the ordinary life of perception and memory.

This must be assumed in order to avoid misunderstanding spiritual science, especially with regard to its method, that spiritual science is quite clear about it in the moment when what is called a vision, what is called a hallucination, what you can call more intense images of fantasy, that in that moment the person is not freer from his physical life, but that he is more dependent on the physical life through some pathological condition than he is in ordinary external existence. The belief that spiritual science has anything to do with such pathological conditions of the soul must be fought against. On the contrary, it emphasizes more sharply than the external life that those who believe that one can look into the spiritual world by indulging in such abnormal soul phenomena, caused only by pathological bodily conditions, as they are, for example, those that occur in mediumship, that occur as hallucinations, as visions and the like, are quite on the wrong track.

What the spiritual researcher does as an inner activity of the soul is much more – my dear audience – than that. This is brought into a state of mind that is entirely modeled on the way this soul proceeds when it devotes itself to mathematical thinking. Just as mathematical thinking is completely permeated by the ego, which is constantly in control of itself. And just as every transition is made in such a way that one is, as it were, everywhere inside and knows how one thing passes into another, so too must the spiritual researcher's method in the inner life of the soul proceed in such a state of mind. Starting from the ability to remember, he draws on the most important quality of this ability to remember. It consists in the fact that memory makes permanent that which we otherwise experience only in the moment. What we have experienced in the moment remains with us for our lifetime. But how does it remain permanent for us?

If we take what I have already said, the dependence of normal human mental life on the body, then we have to realize that we maintain our memory normally when it is based on our body helping us to have this ability to remember. It is based on the fact that we do not have to work with just our soul when we want to remember. We know, after all, that what later comes up as a memory has descended into the indeterminate depths of bodily life. And again, it also comes up from the indeterminate depths of life. These depths, so to speak, pass on to our bodily life what is brought about in us through sensory impressions and through the intellectual processing of these impressions. We then bring it up again by lifting that which is experienced bodily in the time between the bodily life and the memory, by lifting it up into the imagination. We thus borrow our ideas, by becoming memories, the clear perception, to which we devote ourselves in mathematical thinking.

The spiritual researcher nevertheless ties in with precisely this lasting of the ideas in the memory. And that then leads him to what I have called the appropriate meditation in my writings, especially in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science: An Outline”. There it shows itself, I have characterized it many times, and you will find it discussed in more detail in the books mentioned. You bring into your consciousness an individual set of ideas or a complex of ideas and hand over — as I said — so that any reminiscences that emerge from the subconscious do not enter what you are to do only through human will, just as you do mathematical connecting and analyzing through human will. So you place certain ideas, which you have guessed or somehow obtained, at the center of your consciousness for a long time – and with the same completely clear, mathematically clear day consciousness – such ideas that you, so to speak, perform the activity, perform it mentally: to rest on ideas, as can otherwise only be achieved with the help of the physical body.

And then we see that this resting on certain ideas does indeed have a success. Then we see that we become aware of forces resting within our soul that have nothing to do with the physical body, that do not at all lead into the realm of hallucination or vision, that remain entirely within the realm in which the soul moves when it develops mathematics. But it is also an inner development of ideas, it is a spiritual experience of ideas. It is only necessary to bring other ideas than mathematical ones to the center of the soul's life, then a different ability than that of mathematical thinking will develop.

And one should not imagine that this is particularly easy and comfortable. Such exercises must be continued for years by those who want to become genuine spiritual researchers. But then it also turns out that forces were previously latent in the soul, hidden, which are now brought out. He then feels he has certain powers. Above all, the soul's ability to perceive, to perceive spiritually and mentally, is added to the ability to perceive sensually and intellectually that he had before. The human being becomes capable, as it were, of developing in real terms from within what Goethe more symbolically called the 'eye of the mind' and the 'ear of the mind'. The human being becomes capable of seeing differently than before, and above all, he first sees his own soul life differently.

I have pointed out that we have experienced this soul life since birth in an initially indeterminate stream, which we actually only have in mind in a very vague way, and from which the memory images then emerge. But it must be added that we ourselves are actually this stream. Just try to apply the “know thyself” correctly. You will see that in ordinary life you are actually nothing other than this stream, this stream that is so indeterminate, but from which all kinds of things we have experienced can emerge again and again. One is the Self. But one ceases to be the Self in a certain sense when one meditates in the way I have just indicated. I just called meditation this resting on certain ideas, although in practice it is necessary to develop the previously hidden soul powers within the human being. And the first success of this is that what we are otherwise always immersed in, what we are otherwise always, the context of our memories – because otherwise, in our ordinary state of consciousness, we are basically nothing but the stream of our memories – that this becomes more objective for us, that it becomes something external for us, that we learn to look at it.

That we have thus lifted ourselves out of it in full mathematical clarity and that we look at it. That is the first experience we have. In a certain moment of our consciousness, as a result of meditation, we have our life in front of us like a memory tableau, at least almost back to birth, like a unified whole, like a totality, like a panorama. It is not exactly what we have before us as memory images, but what we have before us is actually our inner self, inasmuch as we experience what existence has made of us, as in a totality. I would like to say that the whole stream, which we are otherwise ourselves, lies before us. We have lifted ourselves out of this stream.

This is the first experience that we have of ourselves in time, in the duration of the overview, that we actually do not merely remain in the moment through practical inner soul-making, but that we overview life as such.

But we learn something else through this as well. By making our soul life objective in this way, we learn to educate ourselves about processes that we actually go through every day, that we also observe externally, but that we certainly cannot observe from within in everyday life. This is the process of falling asleep, the process of waking up in ordinary life. One would indeed succumb to a bitter contradiction if one wanted to believe that what the soul contains dies every time one falls asleep and is reborn every time one wakes up. This soul content is there from falling asleep to waking up. But since in ordinary life a person can only have consciousness through the interaction of his soul with his body, but in the state of sleep the soul has detached itself from the body, so from falling asleep to waking up, within the ordinary consciousness, the person cannot know anything about himself.

But by having ascended to such a realization, as I have just characterized it, by having one's life as a continuous presence beside one, one can also enlighten oneself about the process of falling asleep and waking up. Because the human being is, by moving out of his ordinary experience, by learning to look at himself, he is in the same state – he learns to recognize that he is in the same state from direct experience, that he is in the state – in which he is otherwise, unconsciously, when he is between falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize the process of falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize that one knows: Now you have placed yourself in a state where you can see your life. But this is only a brief state of realization. Then you go back to ordinary life. So you have the state of the soul outside of ordinary experience and the ordinary state in which you are otherwise, where you are within your experiences. This re-entry into the state of ordinary life is exactly the same as waking up. And going out of oneself is learned by direct observation; going out and objectivizing of life is exactly the same as, when seen inwardly, falling asleep. So you learn to look at these two processes inwardly. But through that you get the elements to look at something else.

However, then there must be a certain expansion of what I have mentioned. I have said that today I can only point out – my dear audience – how the spiritual researcher puts certain ideas at the center of his consciousness. But he must actually attach very special importance to not just being able to rest with his consciousness on such ideas, but he must also be able to arbitrarily — and that must happen through completely different exercises, you can read about them in the books mentioned — he must be able to arbitrarily suppress these ideas again, to embrace them with his consciousness. He must thus inwardly become master — if I may repeatedly use the expression — over these ideas, which are essentially like pictures, viewed pictures, colored viewed pictures. No matter how people laugh at what Goethe called and what I also described in my “Theosophy” as “viewing images in the imagination,” what Goethe called “sensual-supersensory viewing.” Just as one can speak of a colored looking, just as one can speak of a colored looking towards the outside world, so one can speak of a colored looking at the inner images. It arises from the fact that something becomes objective. And the soul life becomes objective, as I have described it, through meditation.

But the person must also be able to remove all of this again. As you know, he is not capable of this in the case of a pathological state of mind. With mathematical clarity, the person must move in this bringing up of the ideas and in this removing of the ideas again. In that the human being, in this way, swings back and forth in his consciousness between ideas that he brings into his consciousness at will and then removes again, he practices a kind of systole and diastole, a kind of exhaling and inhaling. The spiritual-soul inner mobility comes about through this.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the method of entering the spiritual worlds that is entirely appropriate for our age. It is appropriate to enter the spiritual worlds consciously. In the old days, when people instinctively plunged into the spiritual worlds, especially through the Oriental method, they tried to consciously elevate the breathing process, thus also trying to perform an inner activity by striving to inwardly oversee the breathing process, and then to see in the breathing process that which is present as the inner being of the human being. This process does not lead people into the spiritual world in an appropriate way in the present time. Those who want to bring it back, to bring back old institutions, are actually acting against the development of humanity. Today it is appropriate for humanity to replace this method of physical breathing with a different systole and diastole – with that which I have just characterized as a sitting down of the images brought about by the will and then again arbitrarily bringing these images out of consciousness.

On the one hand, by coming to imagination and thereby describing the reverse path – and by moving further and further away from what I have described here as a conscious back and forth in meditative life – man then learns to recognize how to expand what one grasps elementarily in inhaling and exhaling. And one gets to know this as a soul process that is essentially based on a kind of longing for the body after being outside of the body for a period of time. And you learn to recognize what you experience with your soul from birth to death, how that brings the soul into the inner state in which you feel compelled to devote yourself to an [antipathy] towards life again for a while.

You then expand these ideas, but not through philosophical speculation, but by expanding your inner capacity for knowledge. And in this way one arrives at — just as one otherwise advances from a simpler species to a more complicated one — one arrives at inwardly beholding, from the inward beholding comprehension of [awakening], the complicated process that is present when the permanent part of a person, through birth or conception from the spiritual world into the physical body, when it develops the greater desire not only to return to the existing body as in waking up, but to embody itself in a new body, having been in the spiritual world for a while, having now embodied itself again.

And one learns to recognize from falling asleep, by getting to know the moment of dying in an embodiment, one learns to recognize: Through the gate of death, the soul that outlasts the course of a person's life goes to continue living in the spiritual world. One does not learn through a logical or elementary force, for example, but by falling asleep and waking up, the processes of being born and dying, or by becoming familiar with these processes in nature, but rather by moving from element to element of inner experience with mathematical clarity.

But this, dear attendees, is how one arrives at the second stage of a higher consciousness, which I have always called – please don't take offense at the term, it is just a terminology that one has to use – inspiration – through which one looks back at the lasting in ordinary physical life as at a flowing panorama. Through inner contemplation and spiritual science, it is possible to grasp the eternal in the human being. And it is possible to grasp this eternal in man. It is possible for man to recognize his connection with the supersensible-eternal just as man recognizes his connection with the sense world when he awakens the consciousness in himself through which man beholds his connection in the physical world.

These things, they certainly enter into present consciousness, my dear audience, in the same way as the Copernican worldview, for example, once entered, contradicting everything that came before, the Copernican worldview or similar. But even if what I have just mentioned still seems paradoxical to so many people today, we must remember that the Copernican worldview also seemed quite paradoxical to people at the time of its emergence.

And then, my dear audience, you also learn how to develop another human soul power, that of memory, which is trained in a way that I have just described. One learns not only to recognize this, but also another human soul power, which now also leads into ordinary normal life, only, I would say, leads into it, nevertheless, its origin is a physical one, in a more moral way into the higher life. One learns to recognize how this soul power is capable of a different development than that which it has in ordinary life. One learns to recognize how love can become a power of knowledge.

I am well aware, esteemed attendees, of how contradiction must arise from today's world view when one says: Love will be made into a power of knowledge. After all, love is seen as subjective, as that which must be excluded from all science. Nevertheless, anyone who experiences such things in their soul, as I have described to you, by developing into a spiritual researcher, knows that what develops in ordinary life as love is a human ability that is connected with the human being, and that this love cannot only be experienced by the human being when he is confronted with some beloved external object, but that it can also be experienced inwardly by the human being as a general human characteristic. It can be heightened spiritually, and I might say quite intimately, by developing that which one also applies in ordinary life. Precisely when we extend the ability to remember, to concentrate on any single content of consciousness, any object, just as in the past one repeatedly and repeatedly raised images arbitrarily in duration [by concentrating on the object, initially arbitrarily], by being in a certain interaction with the external world. By developing our will into concentration, we learn to recognize how that which otherwise expresses itself through the physical body of man as love can be grasped by the soul, how it can be detached from the body by the soul, just as in the ability characterized earlier.

But through this – my dear attendees – by learning to recognize how a person is inwardly constituted as a loving being, which otherwise only ignites in interaction with external beings, by absorbing these inner qualities, this inner impulsivity of the human being into the soul — the individual exercises for this you can also find in the books mentioned —, in this way one arrives at what I characterized earlier, this being born and dying as a physical waking up and falling asleep, not only to look at this inwardly, but also to see through it inwardly. But through this, human life is moved into a completely different sphere.

Let us take a look at this human life as it touches us by fate. We face this human life, meet hundreds and hundreds of people. In a place where life has brought us, something ignites in this or that being that brings us into a meaningful connection with fate. The one who only looks at life with an ordinary consciousness speaks of coincidence, speaks of the one that has just happened to him from the inexplicable depths of life. But the one who has brought the soul forces, which are otherwise hidden, out of his soul to the degree that I have characterized it so far, he certainly sees how, in the subconscious depths, not illuminated by ideas for the ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious depths, in man, there rests that which is akin to desire, which drives one in life.

When you have prepared yourself to survey your life like a panorama, when you have become aware of the permanent, the eternal, that goes through birth and death, when you have developed the abilities to can see this, then – my dear attendees – then these abilities, when they are still warmed by a special training of the ability to love, then abilities in life develop in such a way that we learn how we have shaped our lives, in order to bring it – let us say – in individual cases, to the point where we have been affected by this or that stroke of fate.

We learn to recognize how life is connected in relation to what otherwise lies in the subconscious. And from there, the realization goes, how what now underlies this fateful connection of life points to repeated earthly lives. How that which we can follow with the developed soul powers, in the course of our destiny, warmed by the power of knowledge of the ability to love, how that brings us the awareness that we have gone through many earth lives and will still go through many earth lives. And that between the lives on earth there are always stays in the purely spiritual-soul world, in which the soul experiences what is conceptual from previous lives on earth, that which we have raised up into thinking above all, how this is transformed into an inner soul metamorphosis, into desire, which then pushes towards a new life on earth. This new life on earth is shaped in this way. What is the fateful connection of life becomes transparent.

Now, my dear attendees, I have only been able to sketch out the results that spiritual science, which is based on scientific education but which also develops this scientific education further, comes to. That this spiritual science is not a theory, not a collection of mere thoughts and ideas, is obvious when one considers its value for human life. At the same time, however, one must point out what this spiritual science can be, especially for people of the present and the near future and for humanity in various times.

It is very remarkable how the critic I spoke to you about earlier, who only speaks from the consciousness of the present and criticizes spiritual science to no end, nevertheless recognizes the value of which I spoke to you earlier, how this man speaks of the evaluation of life. This man is full of ideas about what he imagines to be the scientific nature of the present. He wants to evaluate spiritual science, but he has hardly got to know it, he has read everything that has been published, he claims. But then he can ask the following question:

What is all the talk of service [of knowledge, of the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the momentum if, despite all the momentum, it leads to primeval depths and remoteness, if the theosophist]

— as I said, he means anthroposophist —

[cannot say] why it is better to be an I than a non-I.

Now, my dear attendees, imagine a person who states: What is all this talk about spiritual worlds for, if one cannot come to know why it is better to be a 'I than a non-I'? The answer to this question cannot be given theoretically. And the science that the man is talking about can actually only satisfy theorists. What does the science that the man is talking about actually have to say about everything? As I said, it is precisely from the humanities that the full value of the modern scientific method for the external sense practice should be fully recognized. It would certainly be foolish not to recognize what the X-ray method, what microscopy, what the telescope and numerous other [methods and instruments] have achieved in recent times for the knowledge of the external sense world. And it would be foolish, and above all amateurish, not to recognize the value of scientifically conscientious methods for disciplining the human capacity for knowledge. But everything that works in external experimentation, in external observation and in the mathematical processing of external observations, is basically only something that works on the human intellect. And however paradoxical it may sound, anyone who does not go through these things, I would even say not just professionally but in their whole way of life, comes to ask themselves: What can the ordinary scientific method, when it develops a world view, give us about human life? One sees it in such results. People with such a method then ask: Why is it more valuable to be “I than not-I”? Why not live as an unconscious [atom] in the universe? Why live as a conscious I?

Spiritual science, by looking more deeply, must say: What is it that gives you life, the science that has indeed achieved such great triumphs for the inner life of the soul? Does this science give us more than knowledge of the digestive processes, of the nutritional content of food for hunger? It gives us the intellectual, it gives us what can be described. It also provides clues as to how what is done instinctively can be done rationally in a certain way. But science as such can say how hunger should be satisfied, what is in the foods that satisfy hunger. But it could never satisfy hunger itself with its descriptions.

We must, however, translate this from the physical into the spiritual-soul realm. And here it must be said that spiritual-scientific knowledge, even if it has to be expressed in ideas and concepts, can be grasped by immersing oneself in these concepts and in what spiritual researchers are able to say about them from the spiritual worlds. By learning to recognize the enduring, the eternal, and the repeated earthly lives in the physical life of a person, the eternal, repeated earth-lives, the connection with destiny and thus also a world picture in connection, as it is presented in my “Occult Science in Outline”, in a spiritual-scientific way. He who lives into all this does not bring forth concepts that merely describe something about the human being, as the various scientific concepts do. Rather, they bring forth real images that, when experienced, have the power to affect the whole human being, to take hold of the feelings and will impulses of this whole human being and, so to speak, are simply soul food, spiritual-soul food — it is not just spoken of the thing — and which therefore also work into the spiritual-soul. So that the I does not have to answer the question theoretically, why it would be better to be an 'I than a non-I', but by giving itself to what radiates out of this spiritual science with all the warmth, with all the light of the spiritual, it does not merely have the possibility of giving a description from outside, but it lives in the concept the essence of the matter itself. The concepts are only the bearers of the matter itself.

This is the peculiar thing that is not at all seen in spiritual scientific literature, that it is spoken differently, not just words about something, but that the words are rooted in real experience, they are the carriers of the living experience. And that, indeed, anyone who listens carefully, if they have an ear for it, can feel all of this in the words, that they are not just descriptions of spiritual and mental processes, but these spiritual and mental processes themselves.

This, ladies and gentlemen, shows us that this spiritual science can indeed be of use in our practical lives. And it has indeed already tried to find practical application in a wide variety of fields, as I mentioned at the beginning. It has done so in a particularly important area. We have founded the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart. It is based entirely on the idea of those schools that will one day be there when the threefold social order, as I have described it in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as I have also presented it here and repeatedly presented it in Bern, will become a fact.

This Waldorf School is a truly independent school. That is to say, it is governed by its own teaching body, which is a direct consequence of the loophole in the Württemberg education laws. The teachers are completely sovereign as a teaching body. The school is administered by the teachers. And the administration of the school itself is just as much a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses as what is taught is a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses.

Of course, there is no longer time to describe to you in detail the principles of this Waldorf school. I will just say that an attempt was made not to found a school based on a particular worldview. Catholic priests teach Catholic religious education there, and Protestant priests teach Protestant religious education there. Those children who, through their own will or that of their parents, do not have such a religion, are instructed in a free religious education. But it is not at all intended to impose any kind of world view on the children. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view! What is to prevail from the roots of anthroposophical spiritual science is merely the art of pedagogy and didactics, the way in which one teaches. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory; anthroposophy wants to be transferred into the practical handling of life. It has already proven itself in this way, although of course after one year one cannot say anything special, and especially in the pedagogical-didactic art of the Waldorf school.

I would like to mention just one thing from the end of the previous school year and the beginning of this school year. At the end of the last school year, we saw how it affects children when they are given the kind of report cards that we gave them at the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and established by me. There are sometimes classes at the Waldorf School with fifty children, or even more than fifty children in the last school year. Nevertheless, it was possible to depart from the usual way in which teachers assess their pupils. All these patterns of 'sufficient', 'almost sufficient', 'halfway, almost satisfactory' and so on and so forth, you can't find your way around at all, you don't know how to grade it, where to take it from. All these things were left out in the Waldorf school. Each child was described individually, how they had been received at the school, how they had behaved, so that the teacher could see from the report what the child had gone through in that one school year. And each child was given a saying that was individually tailored to their soul life. Despite the fifty pupils in each class, the way in which the teachers practised the art of pedagogy and didactics, based on the spirit of the anthroposophical worldview, meant that they were able to formulate a life verse, a life force verse, for each individual child, which was included in the report card and which the child would visualize in his or her soul. And we have seen – for we seek the art of education in a living psychology, in a living study of the soul – how it affected the child, in that it allowed him to see himself in the mirror, so to speak. And if I may mention something else: when the children came back from their vacations, it was really the case that they came back with a different state of mind than children are usually seen to have after vacations in schools. They longed to go back to school.

And there is something else I want to tell you. Every time I came to this school for an inspection – esteemed attendees – I did not fail to ask a question very systematically, again and again, among other things: Do you love your teachers? And one can distinguish, my dear attendees, whether something comes wholeheartedly from the human soul or whether it is just some conventional answer. When this “Yes!” resounded directly and fundamentally from the soul, then one could see how what had been attempted as a pedagogical-didactic art from anthroposophical spiritual science had indeed found validity.

We are not yet allowed to work unhindered in many areas of life. But where it is possible, it must also be done in such a way that, on the one hand, what can be brought from spiritual science, as it is meant here, and, on the other hand, what corresponds to the needs, longings and hardships of our time in the true sense of the word, is brought together. In this context, it is also important to point out how numerous personalities in history who devote themselves to artistic creation instinctively seek new paths.

Such a new artistic path, but now not at all out of some theory, not out of ideas, for example through symbolism or straw-like allegory, but through living feeling, such a path was also sought in Dornach itself through the construction of the Goetheanum. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, was not in a position to simply take a master builder and say: Build me a building here in such and such a style, and there we will practice spiritual science in this building. No, my dear audience, spiritual science is something that life works because it is life. And so spiritual science, as it is meant here, as I said, cannot be allegorized, cannot be symbolized, but by looking at the human being at the same time, by working on the whole human being, it can stimulate the forces of artistic creation and the forces of artistic enjoyment. In this way it can also point the way for the future in the same way as it points the way for the new needs of the present in intellectual life, and can increasingly point the way for the future in artistic matters.

We need not only – my dear audience – see how the artistic has developed in the course of human development, how this artistic, which in the course of human development has indeed come to light in such peaks as in Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, how this artistic presupposes, in that it has always been drawn from the supersensible, how it presupposes that the sensory, the outwardly sensory, really strives towards what one wants to experience in the idealized. And this idealization is what basically characterized the artistic epoch that artistic personalities in particular feel is over and that new paths must be sought in relation to it. When one stands before the Sistine Madonna, one is confronted with something that is thoroughly material. But at the same time, one is confronted with something in relation to which one must say: the artist experienced it in such a way that the spiritual emerged directly from the material. He rose up out of the material into the spiritual; he idealized the material.

Now we are entering a stage of human development in which, in the spiritual life, in the life of knowledge, we must really look — as I have indicated — at the spiritual as such, so that the spiritual can be seen directly. We are thus also faced with the path that is artistically most appropriate for humanity in the present and near future. If an old art idealized, a new art must realize.

Spiritual beholding also longs for realization, just as sensual beholding longs for idealization. And just as one does not arrive at a truthful or dominant artistic creation by only having artistic spirit through idealization, so too does one not arrive at an allegorical or symbolic artistic creation by realizing what has been spiritually beheld. Those who, I might say, theoretically defame what can be seen in Dornach find all kinds of symbols and allegories, but they see them themselves. There is not a single symbol or allegory in the whole of the Dornach building, the Goetheanum. What can be found there has been seen in the spiritual world and realized out of the spiritual world. The architectural and sculptural elements of the building are there as a result of what was seen in the spiritual world and realized in the material world. What was seen spiritually is not shaped into ideas or concepts, but is actually seen. It is seen in full, living concreteness. And it is only incorporated into the material in a living way. It is seen in full concreteness.

This shows, dear attendees, how spiritual science can indeed also have a fruitful effect on artistic creation and enjoyment. And by leading people through its results to a life together with the spirit from which they themselves come, and towards which they seek their path out of the sensual world, which they hope for after death, out of which they know they are born if they only look at existence correctly; by Spiritual science brings man together precisely with regard to that which wants to develop most clearly, brightly, and luminously in him through the life of imagination, which otherwise remains only in abstractions that are foreign to life. It deepens in man that feeling which is the actual religious feeling. And that should be seen in the right light. One should not strive to block the path of this spiritual science based on denominations. For one can show by the example of Christianity itself what spiritual science can be for religious feeling, for the whole religious life.

What then does Christianity depend on, my dear audience? Christianity depends on the Mystery of Golgotha being understood in the right way. If one does not understand how, through the Mystery of Golgotha, something we call the Christ united with earthly life from extraterrestrial worlds, if one does not understand that there is something in the Mystery of Golgotha that cannot be exhausted by observation from the sense world, but must be grasped through spiritual contemplation, then one cannot do justice to the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why even the most modern theology has come to omit from the Mystery of Golgotha that which can only be grasped spiritually, and to speak only – in a sense naturalistically – of the simple man from Nazareth. Modern theology speaks of a man, however outstanding he may be, who at most had the consciousness of God within him. While spiritual science will bring back the Christian consciousness to grasp the mystery of Golgotha as a supersensible event in itself, as an event through which not only a man stands in the course of human development, who developed the consciousness of God a certain way, but who was the bearer of an entity that came from extraterrestrial worlds at a certain point in the development of the earth in order to henceforth, renewing human life, continue to exist with this human life.

The Christ event, in turn, is grasped by spiritual science as an impact from the extraterrestrial, from the spiritual-supernatural into earthly life. And the whole of earthly development is understood in such a way that it is a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, a leaning towards the Mystery of Golgotha of everything that has gone before, and a streaming forth of the impulse of this Mystery of Golgotha through the events that follow.

But one also learns to understand the difference between the event of Golgotha, which stands for itself and can be grasped by everyone according to their abilities, and what is taught about this mystery of Golgotha in any given time.

The first Christian centuries took their concepts from the Oriental world view and made the mystery of Golgotha vivid and explainable from these concepts. Then, gradually, another world emerged in the spiritual life of Western humanity. The natural sciences arose. The human spirit has become accustomed to other ways of understanding. We see today how these ways of understanding have also taken hold of theology in the nineteenth century, where it has tried to become progressive, how they have made of the Christ-Jesus being the “simple man from Nazareth”. And however much power may be brought to bear against what comes from this side, this battle will not be won unless the mystery of Golgotha is again grasped from the spiritual-scientific side, unless it can be said anew from the spirit how an extraterrestrial spirit entered into earthly life through the man Jesus of Nazareth. The explanation must be a new one in relation to human progress; it must become a new experience.

Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion, it only wants to fuel consciousness in accordance with the knowledge of modern times. It wants to show that which once gave meaning to the development of the earth in the light that this humanity needs for the culture of the present and future. Thus spiritual science, as I can show from this Christian example, can deepen a person's religious life. It can give him that which, according to modern consciousness, cannot be given to him in any other way; it can give him that.

Oh, he is timid towards Christianity who believes that through spiritual science, Christianity can be destroyed. No, on the contrary, only he looks at Christianity in the right way who has the courage to confess that, as with the physical, so the spiritual discoveries are also made. What is the Christian impulse cannot thereby appear in some lesser, weaker light, but in an ever stronger and stronger light. He would prove to be truly Christian who, out of a deep yearning, would accept the affirmations that, precisely from spiritual science, can lead to the realization of the mystery of Golgotha.

But it seems that humanity in the present truly needs religious deepening, my dear audience. For we are indeed experiencing strange things today. And I would like to mention one more example to conclude.

In Dornach, at an outstanding location in the Goetheanum, an installation is to be created that is directly related to the Mystery of Golgotha. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group is to be installed. We have been working on this sculpture for several years. At the center of this sculpture stands a figure of Christ. It is finished at the top in the head and chest parts, but still a block of wood below. The head is thoroughly idealized. Those who have seen it will certainly testify that I said: From a spiritual-scientific perspective, this image of Christ arises in me, as he walked in Palestine. I do not impose it on anyone, but it is developed out of humanity, when one projects into a human being that which one projects when one seeks the soul in the whole human being, not only in individual human physiognomic features in the face, but seeks the soul in the whole human countenance. But things are said and seen without knowing what is actually being done in Dornach.

Now, among the many writings by opponents, there is a very remarkable one. In it you will find the following sentence – I won't detain you long – you will find the following sentence:

Anthroposophy starts with the human being and its goal is the ideal human being. This and God are apparently one and the same. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high... with animal features at the bottom is currently being built in Dornach.

Now, dear attendees, I have told you about people who were there and know what has been worked on this group so far. Anyone who wants to see something like this in a wooden figure, which has an idealized human head at the top and is just a block of wood at the bottom, not yet finished, and which sees Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, reminds me of the anecdote that is often mentioned about how you can tell in the evening whether you are sober or drunk. You put a top hat on the bed. If you can see it clearly, you are still sober; if you see two of them, you are drunk.

Now, dear readers, anyone who, when looking at the woodcarving group in Dornach, sees a human being with 'Luciferian features' at the top and 'bestial characteristics' at the bottom, should not, in his drunkenness, complain about the fantasies or illusions of the anthroposophists! For anyone who is truly devoted to anthroposophy will certainly not be taken in by the same illusion, the same fantasy, which are also objective untruths. But this is how someone works with the truth — my dear audience — who can write on the title page the capital <«D> in front of his name, who is a doctor of theology.

Yes, my dear audience, we need a deepening, a refinement of religious consciousness. Those who are appointed guardians treat the truth in this way. From this it can be seen that we need a deepening of the sense of truth. After all, what is the science of a person who has only enough scientific conscientiousness to present an objective untruth of this kind in a single case in just such a way?

Now, my dear audience, as I said, it requires precisely this internalization of the human being, which will also be connected with a refinement of religious feeling, with a deepening of religious feeling. Spiritual science will be able to radiate its impulses into the most diverse branches of life. It wants to be completely practical, but it also does not want to go beyond scientific education. It wants to be scientifically grounded in that it arises out of the attitude, out of methodical conscientiousness, as only some mathematical method, combined with external observation, can arise out of the human soul in full scientificness.

Now, in conclusion, just a few personal words. When it is pointed out today, as it has been by Christian luminaries, for example, that this anthroposophical spiritual science in Dornach is not addressed to scholars but to educated laypeople, then one thing may be said. To a certain extent, this is still its fate today. I myself – if I may make a personal comment – began in the 1880s to develop something that is entirely in line with the whole direction of anthroposophical spiritual science, although it is only present in the elements, and although it was only later developed into details. What was then the guiding force is already contained in it. I was not always as much of a heretic as I am today. I was not always treated as badly by the sciences as I am today by the sciences, or from the point of view of religious denominations, but those writings that I wrote about Goethe at the time have already become known to a certain extent.

People just think that I have become a fool and a fantasist since that time, since it has become clear to me that what flowed out of that time should flow into the well-founded anthroposophical spiritual science. But what I actually often called for in my Goethe writings, and was not achieved even then, such as “Goethe's World View”, “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom”, namely contained in my “Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, whoever assumes this, will see that for me it was not just about Goethe having this or that world view, but about standing up for this world view itself, asserting it, bringing it to its right and also developing it further.

The aim was not to develop a Goetheanism that died with the year 1832 and is merely historical, but to show the living Goetheanism as it has remained capable of development up to the present day. That Goethe's ideas were to some extent met, some have admitted. But that is also what is done out of habit in our time. People liked to boast: Yes, Goethe, Kant and so on had this or that idea. But to stand up for an idea with the full power of one's personality and help it to victory is not what lives in the thinking habit, especially not in the mental habits of the present. And so I must say that although I have been proved right in many respects in the explanation of Goethe's world view, I wanted something else: to advocate what can arise from it as spiritual science, as anthroposophical spiritual science, through the further development of Goethe's world view.

And what I wrote at the time was written entirely in the forms of science. I also spoke in this way; on the contrary, it was found to be too remote from ordinary life. At that time, those who were involved in science would have had the opportunity to address the matter. They did not take this opportunity. Therefore, it became necessary to address the educated lay public and speak to the heart and intellect of the educated lay public. Because, my dear attendees, that which is to be incorporated as truth into the development of humanity must be incorporated into it. Therefore, spiritual science must not be reproached, as is often done by its critics today, for not initially presenting itself to science as such – which it has now sufficiently done in Dornach, by the way – but in a true way, for that is what it has done. And it only approached the educated lay public when scholarship did not want to. But something like that has to happen! Why? Well, anyone who is imbued with the impulse, with the truth impulse of spiritual science, who knows the needs of our time, who knows the longings of our time, or at least believes he knows them, will have to say to himself: the truth must go out into the world, and if it does not succeed in penetrating the world through the one path, which might perhaps be the outwardly correct one, then other paths must be sought. If scholars do not want to, they may want to, when spiritual science takes hold in the hearts of educated laymen out of a natural, elementary sense of truth, and then forces those who have lagged behind it, even if they are scholars, to follow suit. Truth must come into the world. And if it does not come through one way, then the other must be sought.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy, as it is to be cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach, still finds the most diverse opponents today - opponents who stand on the ground of church theology with their views, even from the artistic side many opponents have shown up, especially opponents who do not always start from thoroughly objective points of departure and come from the most diverse party directions and from the most diverse areas of social life. I will not deal with all these adversaries today, my dear audience, but what I would like to do today is to deal with the misunderstandings and antagonism that anthroposophical research has encountered from the scientific community. For it is my conviction that, although it seems absolutely necessary to oppose the various other opponents, these will gradually disappear of their own accord once the debate between anthroposophy and science has been brought into the necessary forms so that present-day official science and anthroposophy can really understand each other. At the moment, the situation is such that it is precisely from the scientific side that anthroposophical research is met with the greatest misunderstandings.

But first of all, I would like to emphasize that the anthroposophical research method that I represent – for that is how I would actually like to call it – definitely wants to stand on scientific ground and that it would like to set up all its arguments in such a way that this scientific ground becomes possible, excluding any kind of dilettantism and so on. The starting point for the anthroposophical research method is such that the scientific requirements and the whole scientific attitude of modern times have been taken into account. Anthroposophy does not place itself in opposition to modern science. On the contrary, it seeks to take up what has emerged over the course of the more recent development of civilization in the way of scientific conscientiousness and exact scientific methods, especially in the field of natural science, over the last three to four hundred years, but particularly in the nineteenth century and up to the present. Although it must go beyond the results and also the field of actual natural science, as it is usually understood today, it would like to include what underlies it as scientific discipline, as scientific methods, in the inner education for the anthroposophical method. Today I will not be able to give a fundamental lecture, but will only touch on certain points, in order to then be able to draw some connecting lines to the scientifically recognized fields of today.

What is initially claimed by anthroposophy are special methods of knowledge - methods of knowledge that differ from what is generally considered to be the usual methods of knowledge today, but which nevertheless grow out of them quite organically. Today, it is generally assumed that one can only conduct scientific research if one is grounded in knowledge as it arises in ordinary life, after having undergone a normal school education and then approaching the various fields of external natural existence, including that of man, by experimenting, observing and thinking in a materialistic sense.

Anthroposophy cannot be based on this, but rather it assumes that it is possible, that just as one first develops one's mental abilities from early childhood to what today is called a normal state of mind or what is regarded as such, further cognitive abilities can be developed by taking one's soul life, if I may use the expression, freely and independently, starting from this so-called normal state of mind. And through these cognitive abilities, one is then able to gain deeper insights into the nature and human existence, into world phenomena, than is possible without such particularly developed abilities. These abilities are not developed by an arbitrary handling of the soul life, but they are developed in a very systematic way, only that one is not dealing with the training of certain external manipulations, with the application of the laws of thought recognized by ordinary logic, but with the development of the intimate soul life itself.

I can only hint at the methods used to develop such supersensible soul faculties. In my various books, especially in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”, I have given detailed descriptions of how a person can proceed in order to soul-life to such abilities by means of which one can — if I may express myself trivially — see more than one can explore with ordinary intellectual thinking, with experimentation and observation.

I have already mentioned imaginative cognition as the first step towards such knowledge. This imaginative cognition does not mean that one should develop the ability to cultivate illusions or phantasms in the soul, but rather that it is a pictorial cognition, as opposed to ordinary abstract cognition, which is simply needed to explore the real secrets of existence. This pictorial knowledge is acquired, as I said, by way of long soul-searching. It depends on individual ability: one person needs a long time, another only a short time, to try to apply a meditative life to the point of enhancing one's inner soul abilities. This meditative life consists, for example, as already mentioned, and described in more detail in the books mentioned, of easily comprehensible ideas, that is, ideas that one either forms in the moment, so that one can grasp them in all their details, or that you can have them given to you by someone who is knowledgeable in such matters, that you can have such ideas present with all your strength in your ordinary consciousness, that you can, so to speak, concentrate all of your soul abilities on such easily comprehensible ideas.

What is achieved by this? Well, I would like to express what is achieved by this through a comparison. If someone uses the muscles of his arm continually, especially if he uses them in a very definite, systematic way, then he will grow in strength for these muscles. If someone applies the soul abilities in such a way that he concentrates them on a self-appointed goal, on a self-appointed inner soul content, then the soul powers as such will grow stronger, will gain strength. And by doing so, one can achieve – as I said, it takes a long time to do these exercises – one can achieve, inwardly, without paying attention to external sense impressions, a strength of soul that is otherwise only applied to the external sense impressions themselves.

The outer sense impressions are concrete, pictorial. Everyone who has a certain self-contemplation knows that he develops a greater intensity of his soul life when he lives in the outer sense impressions than when he lives in abstract ideas or in memories, when he lives in that which remains for him when he turns his perceptive abilities away from the outer sensory life and limits himself only to his soul as such, as it arises, I might say, as an echo, as an after-effect, through the lively, saturated outer sensory impressions. What is important, ladies and gentlemen, is that the inner life of the soul is so strengthened that one can have something in this inner strengthening that one can otherwise only have in the present human life between birth and death when one is given over to the strength of the external sense impressions. One arrives at a pictorial imagining, an imagining that actually differs from the usual abstract imagining – let us say, if we want to speak scientifically, from that imagining by which one visualizes natural laws on the basis of observation and experiment. One comes to develop such inner strength that one has not only the kind of thinking, the kind of inner soul life that is present, for example, in grasping the laws of nature, but also the kind of inner soul life that is present in grasping outer pictorialness. One attains an inner pictorialness of thinking. One comes to live, not merely in thoughts of an abstract kind, but in inner pictures.

In the moment when one characterizes such a developed inner vision, it is immediately asserted: Yes, anthroposophy wants to develop something that is actually known as subordinate soul abilities, as soul abilities that play over half or completely - as one now wants to take it - into the pathological. And further one says: Those who strengthen their inner vision to such an extent that they develop the ability to see inner images without taking these images from the external sense world are surrendering themselves to an ability that is the same as the hallucinatory ability, to the ability to imagine all kinds of pathological phantasms and the like. And indeed, representatives of today's science have repeatedly objected that what anthroposophy claims as its inner vision in images must be traced back to suppressed nervous forces, which then, at the appropriate moment, arise from the inner being through the intensified inner life, so that one actually has nothing other than a suppressed nervous life in these images. Those representatives of science who confuse anthroposophical vision with hallucinations, as they are called in the trivial life, have simply not thoroughly studied what anthroposophical vision really is. Firstly, one could counter such objections by pointing out that anthroposophy insists that it proceeds in exactly the same strict way as the external natural sciences with regard to what the natural sciences deal with, and that it takes recognized scientific methods as its most important preparation and that it rises only from these, so that one should not really speak of the fact that someone who stands on the true ground of anthroposophy would show signs of indulging in a vision like some random medium or some random fantasist. We will not see any medium or fantasist placing themselves firmly on the ground of scientific research and taking this as their starting point, and then wanting to let what is to become a vision emerge from these strict scientific methods. But I do not want to talk about that at all. Instead, I would like to point out that anthroposophy demands a more thorough and exact method of thinking than is usually evident or applied in such objections.

The main point here is that, above all, such objections do not yet arise from a truly thorough knowledge of the soul or psychology. Our knowledge of the soul still leaves much to be desired today. It is by no means commensurate with the exact methods of external natural science. In many respects, it is actually a chaos of ideas handed down from ancient times and extracted to the point of mere words, and all kinds of abstractions. It is not based on real observation of the life of the soul, on exact empiricism of the life of the soul. Above all, such exact psychological empiricism must ask itself the question: What is the actual state of our sensory perception? What actually works in our sensory perception?

In our overall soul life, there is imagination, feeling and will. But our soul life is not such that we can separate imagination, feeling and will from one another other than in abstraction; rather, imagination, feeling and will are involved in everything that our soul is capable of in some way. We can only say that when we are in the life of imagination, feeling and willing play a part in it. When we form an affirmative or negative judgment within the life of imagination, our soul life is oriented outwards, but the affirmation or negation is carried out by an impulse of the will. This impulse of the will plays a definite part in our life of imagination. And only he can get an exact idea of the soul life and its various expressions who is clear everywhere about what is the part of feeling in willing, or, conversely, of imagining in willing, and so on.

Now it is relatively easy to see that the will plays a role in our imaginative life. I have just drawn attention to the process of judging, and anyone who really studies judging will see how the will plays a role in imagining. But also – and this is important, dear readers – the will plays a role in our sensory perception. And here I must draw attention to something that is usually not even known in today's psychology, or at least not sufficiently characterized. Will most certainly plays a part in our sensory perception, in all our seeing, hearing and other sensory perceptions. What actually takes place in sensory perception?

In the act of perceiving, we are inwardly active in every act of the soul, even in those in which we appear to be passively confronting the outside world. In what we bring to the outer world through inner activity, that is, expose ourselves to some kind of sensory perception, the will certainly lives – albeit, I would say, diluted and filtered – but the will lives in it. And the essence of sensory perception is that this will – I could go on for hours explaining this in detail, but here I can only hint at it – that this will, which we expose from the inside out, so to speak, is repulsed by the various agents. And we shall only comprehend the nature of the stimulus, the nature of the total sensory perception, when we can visualize this play of the will from the inside out and the counter-strike of the natural agents from the outside in. become aware of how in every act of sensory perception there is a reaction of the will and how everything that remains of sensory perception in memories or other forms of perception is actually a withdrawn will impulse. And so we can distinguish, by exposing ourselves sensually, that which plays in such a way from the will, from that which, starting from the whole act and following on from it, then continues in the life of imagination.

In the life of the imagination, as I have already indicated, the will also lives, but it lives in such a way that the inner man has a much greater share in this unfolding of the will into the life of the imagination than in the unfolding of the will into the life of the senses. First of all, our will remains much more active, much more subjective, much more personal in imagining than in sensing. You see, dear Reader, everything I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the development of supersensible knowledge, aims to raise to full consciousness the will that plays into sensory perception and that must therefore be applied, even in the most exact natural research. And now one must organize one's inner life of imagination in such a way that in this life of imagination not the subjective arbitrary will - if I may express it in this way - lives, as it otherwise lives in imagining, but the same objective will that lives in sensory perception. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I understand it, does not aim to bring up all sorts of things from the depths of the soul in a nebulous, mystical way, in order to force a subjective will into the life of ideas. This subjective will is already present in ordinary life, but it must be released from the life of imagination precisely through the exercises for attaining higher knowledge, and the will that one carefully trains oneself to see through, and that lives precisely in sensory perception - and only in sensory perception - must discipline and permeate the life of imagination.

If I may express it in this way, something tremendous has been achieved. The entire life of the imagination has acquired the character that otherwise only sense perception has. This is something that each individual must make as his personal discovery. Man knows, he can imagine all sorts of things; the will can play a part in this by turning the judgment one way or the other. What a wealth of life there is in the imagination! But when a person uses his senses, the external world imposes the discipline of the will on him – in the way that the will can be applied to sensory perception – and then it is impossible to bring inner subjectivity into play in an arbitrary way. I would remind you that anthropological psychology has already shown how the will comes to life in sensory perception – I need only remind you of Lotze's local signs and so on. But only when one comes to bring this will, which leaps into objectivity, into the life of the imagination, does one shape the life of the imagination in such a way that it becomes imaginative cognition, that it participates in objectivity in the same way that sense perception otherwise participates in objectivity.

You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, in the face of what I have only been able to hint at in a few strokes, in the face of what is meant in the most exact sense, but which is not meant in such a way that one indulges in all kinds of fantastic ideas about the development of the soul – as is also the case with clear-headed mystics – all the objections, even those raised today by official science, are basically extremely amateurish for anyone who is familiar with the subject. For in comparison with everything that can ever flow into hallucinations, dreams, and everything that arises subjectively only from the human being's organization, in comparison with that, that is, where the person lives without objective orientation, where he is completely devoted only to his inner being, in comparison with that, an imaginative life is developed that is modeled on the outer sense life with its objectivity. In a sense, then, the objectivity of sensory perception is extended inwardly through the life of imagination. In all that is present in mediumship, in all that is somehow present in pathological clairvoyance, on the other hand, what leads to pictorialness, to hallucinatory life, is brought up from within the human being.

But that is not at all the case with those methods that are used for anthroposophical research. Here one does not proceed from the inside outwards, as basically every mysticism has done so far, but one proceeds from the outside inwards. Here one does not learn from one's inner mystical feeling, but one learns precisely from external sensory perception how to relate objectively to the world. And then you discover that by learning in this way through sensory perception, you are able to shape the life of imagination in a way that is just as concrete and just as internally saturated as you would otherwise only have with sensory perception. And when one comes to such an inwardly saturated imagination, which now, just as sensory perception, flows into something objective – that is, it is not merely subjectively oriented – only then is one in a position to ascend from a certain stage of knowledge of nature to another stage, which I will characterize in a moment.

But first of all, I would like to say that the anthroposophical spiritual science, as I understand it, has made a sincere effort to create clarity on all sides regarding the position of such imaginative knowledge. And allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to make a brief personal statement, which is not meant to be personal at all, but is entirely objective and related to to how I myself came to not only develop such anthroposophical methods, but also to truly believe in such anthroposophical methods, to see in them a right to knowledge. For do not believe, ladies and gentlemen, that anyone who takes these things seriously is uncritical, that he does not want to thoroughly examine the most thorough and exact methods of critical knowledge of the present day. As I said, allow me to make a personal remark.

I was about thirteen years old when I came across a treatise that – as was particularly prevalent in the 1770s – was primarily concerned with the exact mathematical investigation of external natural phenomena and actually only accepted as natural laws what could be calculated. This essay endeavored to expel even the last mystical concepts from the knowledge of nature. This essay viewed the force of gravitation, the force of attraction in the sense of Newton, as one such mystical concept. This essay was called “The Force of Attraction Considered as an Effect of Movement”. And the mystical concept of attraction was not to be used, in which two material bodies somehow attract each other through space, but an attempt was made to explain attraction in an extraordinarily exact mathematical way: Ponderable matter is in a world gas, and thus a certain number of impacts between, say, neighboring material bodies can be calculated. If you now compare the number of impacts coming from the inside with the number of impacts coming from the outside, you arrive at a pure, mysticism-free explanation of gravitation.

I mention this for the reason that, as I said, this treatise fell into my thirteenth year. In order to understand this treatise - you can imagine that this is not exactly easy for a thirteen-year-old boy - I had to make an effort to master differential and integral calculus at the age of thirteen, because only by doing so can one really master these ideas. And in doing so, I had the opportunity to gain a starting point for everything that followed, which is actually needed to come to terms with such ideas, which have always lived in me with an indeterminate certainty, in a critical way. You really have to get an idea of how you actually use mathematical laws or laws of phoronomy in all your sensory observation, how you actually proceed, what you bring of yourself to the outside world, and so on. In short, for me that was the starting point for exploring how far this strange inner realm of the soul, which we call mathematics, can actually govern external reality.

Heinrich Schramm, the author of this essay - I still consider it extremely important today - was thoroughly convinced that you can go anywhere with mathematics, that you simply have to assume matter, space, motion and that you can then go anywhere with mathematics. He was convinced that the most diverse properties of natural phenomena in ordinary mechanics, in thermodynamics, in optics, in the field of magnetism and electricity, that one can grasp all these different phenomena with mathematics, that one can correctly arrive at all these different phenomena if one only applies mathematics correctly. So, if you apply this mathematical research to a hypothetical material process, the magnetic application springs to mind; if you apply it to a different process, the electrical application springs to mind. In short, all natural phenomena are explained as an effect of motion. One becomes quite free of mysticism; one limits oneself to the concrete, which one can grasp in purely mathematical presentation. This struggle, one must have gone through it once, this struggle with a knowledge that proceeds mathematically in relation to the external world and now wants to grasp the sense perceptions mathematically, because the external world must be grasped somehow, no matter how mathematically one proceeds.

But now another one presented itself to me in this way. I immersed myself in what is called the probability problem in mathematics, where you try to calculate the probability that - let's say, for example - you get a certain throw with two dice, where one, two, and so on, is on top, so you calculate probabilities. This mathematical field, this probability calculation, plays a very important role in the insurance business. There, probability calculation has a very real application. From the number of deaths within a larger number of people, one calculates the probability that any given person, let's say a thirty-year-old, will still be alive at the age of sixty, and then one determines their ability to take out insurance and also their insurance premium. So here we are calculating something, and in doing so we are using calculation to place ourselves in reality in a very strange way. You can see from the fact that, in theory, anyone can calculate their lifespan in such a way that it is fully sufficient for the insurance industry that calculation places us in reality. For example, I could have decided to insure my life at the age of thirty. It would have been perfectly possible to calculate how long my probable lifespan would be and therefore how much I would have had to pay. But no one will believe that they really have to die when this probable lifespan has expired.

We have here a field in which mathematics is valid for what it wants, but where the individual life as such does not fit into the mathematical formula, where life as such is not included in the mathematical formula. In this way, in certain areas of natural science, we have an inner satisfaction of knowledge when we start from the assumption that what has been mathematically understood is adequate to what appears externally in the sense world. But precisely in those areas where probability theory plays a role, there is something where we have to say to ourselves: Mathematics is sufficient for the outer life, for what takes place in outer observation, but one can never be convinced that the inner life is mastered by it.

I would have to tell a great deal more about the intermediate links if I were now to show how, starting from such ideas, I came to the chapter in my “Philosophy of Freedom” (the first edition of which appeared in 1893) on the value of life, on the value of human life. There I was dealing, above all, with a fight against pessimism as such. At that time, this pessimism dominated the philosophical outlook of certain circles much more than was the case later. This pessimism originated in principle with Schopenhauer, but it was systematically founded by Eduard von Hartmann. Eduard von Hartmann now started from the point of view of calculation with reference to the sphere of ethical life, of socioethical life. If you look up his calculations today, they are extremely interesting. He tries to calculate how, on the one hand, everything that brings people pleasure and joy, happiness and so on in life can be positively assessed, and how, on the other hand, everything that brings people suffering, pain, misfortune and so on can be negatively assessed. And he subtracts and actually comes up with a plausible conclusion that for most people the unhappy things, the painful things predominate, that the negative positions predominate.

You can think what you like about such philosophical “trifles”; for those who want to get to the very foundations of knowledge, these are not trifles, and they must not remain so if we want to escape from the misery of today's knowledge. This became a very important problem for me, because I said to myself, a person does not feel it the way it is calculated here. That is nonsense — you can see that the moment you ask people: If you were to add up your happiness and unhappiness, you would come out with a larger number on the negative side. Would you therefore consider your life a lost one? Would you therefore consider yourself ripe for suicide, as Eduard von Hartmann suggests, that every person should actually do so if they were reasonable? For Eduard von Hartmann, the calculation says yes, but life never says yes. Why not?

Now, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” I have shown that this subtraction, which Eduard von Hartmann carried out, simply cannot be carried out. if one wants to apply an arithmetic operation at all, one must apply a completely different one. you have to use a fraction or a division: the numerator or dividend contains everything that is fortunate, pleasurable, everything that brings satisfaction, and the denominator or divisor contains everything that brings suffering, unhappiness, pain and so on. If you apply the division calculation, then you would have to have an infinite denominator if you want to get a number that means zero as a life conclusion. If you can only divide a finite number of suffering and pain through it, then you will never get a life conclusion that is zero. The human being does not commit suicide as a result of subtraction. And when I showed that here one cannot just subtract, but instead divide, or that a fractional approach must be taken, I was also able to show that for mathematics in a certain case one is obliged to start from life, that one must therefore gain access to life, gain an immediate insight into life, before making a mathematical approach.

Here I have the three points together: on the one hand, in natural science, the mathematical approach, which in probability theory can adequately describe the external facts, but which is nevertheless insufficient when it comes to reality. Then there is reality itself, as it is grasped in its real individual form, and finally there is reality itself, which is directly observed as the master of the mathematical approach. There we have the limit of what is mathematically possible, insofar as we start from mathematics itself. And when one recognizes in this way that it is necessary to go beyond the mathematical when wrestling with this problem, then, on the other hand, when one has gained that conception of which I have spoken today, one finds that one has now made this leap in reality, where one has gone beyond the abstract thinking that we encounter most purely in mathematics and entered into direct reality. And only from there did the possibility arise – one might say in an epistemological way, which Goethe himself could not yet have given – to grasp Goethean morphology in the first place and, secondly, to deepen and expand it. For now, once you have gained that imaginative conception, you begin to grasp what Goethe actually meant when he developed his primal plant, that is, an inwardly and spiritually conceived form that underlies all the various outwardly diverse plant forms. Once you have grasped this archetypal plant, he said, you can theoretically invent plants in the most diverse ways with the possibility of growth, that is, you can inwardly recreate the natural process. We have an inner soul process by which we can, anticipating the natural process, allow the most diverse plant forms to emerge from the one primal plant, to recreate them inwardly, just as nature creates the most diverse plant forms from the one typical primal plant. There Goethe has already made the transition from pure abstract thinking to what I would now like to call 'thinking in forms'. That is why Goethe arrived at a true morphology.

This thinking in forms – perhaps I may still characterize it that way. What do we actually do in geometry? There we are dealing with forms, especially in plane geometry as well as in stereometry. But actually we are trying to master the forms through numbers, because measurement can, after all, be traced back to something numerical. So we try to force the forms into the abstraction of numbers. But the mathematical, as I have just explained, is limited. We have to leave it if we want to get out into reality. And we can also find the transition from merely reducing the geometric forms to numbers to directly grasping the geometric form. Once we have taken this serious approach to an inner grasp of geometry, we can also find the transition to other forms – to those forms that Goethe meant when he spoke of the primal plant, which then develops inwardly in the most diverse ways into the most varied plant forms. Just as a triangle can have one angle greater and the other smaller, thus creating the various special triangles, so too the most diverse plant forms arise from the primal plant once its law has been grasped. I would like to say that Goethe arrived at his morphology in a subjective way and only developed it to a certain degree. But that which one develops in a systematic way, by driving the will, which otherwise only lives in sensory perception, into the life of thinking, what one develops there as imaginative thinking, that is thinking in forms.

And we come to the point where we can now survey the stage of knowledge of nature where we have natural laws that can be grasped in abstract thoughts - we can apply this thinking to the inorganic, to the inanimate world. At the moment we want to ascend into the organic world of plants, we need thinking in forms. Dearly beloved, let no one rail against this thinking in forms; let no one say that real science can only progress in a discursive way, can only advance from one thought to another, that is, according to the method that is recognized today as the logical method; let no one say that only this is true science. Yes, one may decree for a long time that this is true science – if nature does not yield to this science, if nature, for example the plant world, does not allow itself to be molded into this science, then we need a different science. If purely discursive thinking, purely abstract thinking, is not enough, then we need thinking in forms, in inner pictorialness. And this thinking in inner pictorialness makes the plant world understandable to us on the outside, and makes the unity of our entire life between birth and death understandable to us on the inside.

I have often stated in my books and lectures that in those moments when one has truly developed this imaginative thinking, it turns out that life from the time one has learned to say “I” to oneself, when the ability to remember begins, to the present moment shows itself as if unfolding in a single tableau. Just as one normally regards one's external physical body as belonging to oneself and looks at it at any given moment, so one also has one's previous life on earth in the course of time before one, as in a panorama of images. This is the first achievement of truly anthroposophical science: to survey one's inner life as a tableau right up to one's birth, so that one now really has an overview of this time organism. What is called the etheric body of man or the body of formative forces in my various books - what is that other than what is achieved through imaginative visualization? We come to survey our life between birth and the present moment, presenting itself as a unity in the immediate present, at the same time as the impulses that carry us beyond the present moment into our further life on earth. And when we have achieved this, the second step of supersensible knowledge presents itself: it is difficult even today to find a name for this step; inwardly, as a method I have called it inspired knowledge. Do not let the term bother you. It does not refer to anything handed down by tradition, but only to what I have just hinted at in my books and what I will also hint at here in principle.

I have said that imaginative visualization is achieved by placing certain easily comprehensible ideas at the center of our consciousness and that this strengthens that consciousness. Just as we, in a sense, recreate memory when we place such ideas at the center of our consciousness, we must now also develop forgetting as an act of the will in our lives. Just as we can concentrate all the powers of our soul on certain ideas, which we place in our consciousness in the way I have characterized, we must also be able to drive these ideas out of our consciousness whenever we want, through inner arbitrariness. We must therefore also reproduce forgetting just as we artificially reproduce, if I may express it this way, remembering.

If we do these exercises, we will see that such an idea, which we bring into the center of our consciousness in this way, initially attracts all kinds of other ideas – like bees, they come in from all sides, these other ideas. We must learn to exclude them; in fact, we must learn to exclude all imagining. We must learn, so to speak, after we have developed such images, to be able to make the consciousness empty without falling asleep in the process. Just try to imagine what that means! This must be practiced, because as soon as a person, with only the usual strength of consciousness, tries to empty his consciousness - especially after he has first concentrated on a particular idea - he inevitably falls asleep. But that is precisely what must be avoided: empty consciousness after imaginative ideas, that is, initially without subjective content. And at that moment, when this has been achieved, the spiritual world streams into the soul life thus prepared. At this moment one is able to see a world that is not there for external sensory perception, but which is the world that we now see not only as part of our earthly life, as in imaginative knowledge, where we see up to birth, but we see the world that contained us as beings before we descended into earthly life. There we get to know ourselves as spiritual beings in a purely spiritual world. There we get to know that within us that has created this organism that lives here in the earthly world. There we get to know through knowledge the immortal part of the human being.

And from there it is then - I just want to mention this - one step to intuitive knowledge, to also gain the insight that the earthly lives of human beings repeat themselves. But you will have gathered from what I have only been able to hint at that it is a matter of using strict systematic schooling of the inner being to prepare the consciousness, not to create any world out of the inner being, but on the contrary, to free the consciousness after prior imagination for the contemplation of the spiritual world. Just as we encounter the outer world with our outer senses, in that the will lives in these outer senses and enters into a relationship with objectivity, so, after we have completely freed our inner soul life from the physical, we prepare the soul to see the spiritual world as it sees the physical world through the senses. There we get the opportunity to see what being has built us, in that we are built out of individuality, not out of the cosmos, and how this being lived in the spiritual world as a pre-existent being before we accepted the physical body through the hereditary stream through generations. And then we learn to recognize that which, in turn, passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world when we discard this physical body. We learn to recognize what builds up this physical body, what undergoes a certain transformation in this physical body through birth, what is rekindled through the experiences of life and then, through death, enters the spiritual-soul world again. So we are not striving for a fantasy, not for philosophizing, not for speculating about the immortality of man, but we are striving for a real insight into what lives in us as immortal. And when we deepen our spiritual life in this way, then we are standing in a spiritual objectivity, and it cannot be said that this standing in a spiritual objectivity can in any way be compared with hallucinations arising from the mere inner life or with any subjective fantastic creations.

Now I would like to show – albeit more comparatively – how one can arrive at not only an anthropology, but also a cosmology, in this way. Time is pressing, so I can only hint at it.

How does our ordinary life between birth and death unfold? We see, my dear attendees, how we have external experiences through our sensory experiences, how these sensory experiences trigger and develop ideas, and how, after the ideas have been developed, these ideas can in turn be evoked by the powers of memory. So we see, when we survey our soul life, that in what we carry within us we have, so to speak, the images of what we have experienced in the outside world. I am seeking a particular mental image from the very depths of my soul life. This mental image brings something to my mind in the present moment that I may have experienced fifteen years ago: an objective event experienced completely subjectively. But if my entire inner soul life is healthy, if what I am imagining as a memory is in a healthy connection with the rest of my soul life and, in particular, if I am able to orient myself properly through the senses at all times , then I am also able to tell myself what the external objective experience was like fifteen years ago from what I currently have in front of me – by drawing on everything with which it is related.

Between birth and death, we initially carry the world of our experiences within us in our soul. But, esteemed attendees, we also carry other things within us. If we only look at our lives as we usually survey them in our soul life, we are only aware of what I have just mentioned. But we carry other things within us, and through what I have described to you as supersensible knowledge, we look deeper into ourselves - not through nebulous mysticism, but through exact methods related to mathematics. We carry organs within us, the organs of our inner being. They are built out of our pre-existent being; they are built out of the spiritual world.

Those who, with the help of such exact anthroposophy as I have described, not only survey their soul life, which they have gathered together between birth and the present moment, but who learn to recognize the nature of the forces that prevail in the inner organs, he comes to know the world in its development through his organs, which he spiritually understands. And it is not, my dear audience, some reminiscence of some old superstition, of some old star belief or the like, when today anthroposophy speaks of a world development, but it is based on an insight into the human being that recognizes the inner human being in such a way that the mere life of the soul is recognized as an image of the events experienced since birth that are connected with us.

In this way we experience a connection with the whole world. Just as our memories are inner images of our experiences since birth, so our whole inner being - when we learn to understand it - is an image of the whole development of the world. This is what it means to “read the Akasha Chronicle” - not all the confused ideas that are held against anthroposophy. It means that we can gain knowledge of the world from true knowledge of the human being. However, we must not simplify matters, as is often the case today, when we believe that we can grasp something that is contained in a precise process of knowledge with a few concepts that have been pinned up. Nobody today would dare to grasp or even criticize the system of mathematics with a few pinned-up concepts. On the other hand, what is acquired in a much more complicated way, but with true striving, is today casually tried to be characterized with a few concepts. He who takes care to use all inner precautions in order not to fall into subjectivity but to completely immerse himself in objectivity — that is, to first shape the consciousness so that it can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity — is, I might say, slandered in such a way that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinations arise from this. can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity – is, I might say, slandered in that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinatory images are developed.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, without wishing to lapse into a counter-criticism, I will merely characterize how it is currently being done, and at the end I will show you this by means of a small example. A pamphlet appeared recently in which the author seeks to show that what the anthroposophist finds can, to a certain extent, be readily admitted, for the simple reason that today's science also finds that the strangest experiences of the soul can arise from the subconscious. And so, as the author of this work believes, it is quite possible to admit to the anthroposophist that he experiences all kinds of things as they are experienced by mediums, as they are experienced when people are put under hypnosis or taught suggestions, or even when they create suggestions for themselves. In particular, what is most essential about anthroposophy is traced back to self-suggestion.

And now something very worthy is being done. It is shown how the most wonderful effects are possible from the soul, how one can develop remarkably extensive healing processes for tuberculosis, metritis, fibroids and so on from the soul life, how even tuberculous deformations of the spine can be balanced out by the soul life: Why should it not be possible to admit that an anthroposophist also draws all kinds of things from his soul life, especially when he first puts himself into self-suggestion? And now it is shown that such subjective life exists, and such subjective life, especially of autosuggestion, of self-suggestion, the anthroposoph should also be devoted. And there is, for example, the following claim:

By means of his....

- that is, by means of the spiritual and soul development as I have described it

... self-aware action, that is, self-reflection in a trance, is made possible.

Now, dear attendees, I had not spoken of trance. I had only told you that consciousness comes to clearer, brighter levels, not that it is led back into darkness and gloom as in trance!

And self-contemplation, in turn, is the prerequisite for supersensible seeing. In other words, the so-called transcendental experiences are products of methodically generated self-contemplation in a trance state under the simultaneous effect of systematic suggestion. The actual agent here is self-suggestion. Proof of this is, among other things, Rudolf Steiner's explicit assurance that “to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.”

So, here it is claimed that I said in a lecture in Bern on July 8 that to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.

Now, first of all, something that shows how curiously exactly today's scientific papers are written! For example, on the same page it is said how such suggestions can actually be carried out, how something can be suggested to someone so that an idea is taught to him, and how he then becomes completely absorbed in this idea and even creates all sorts of things out of himself as a result of this absorption in this idea. And now the author says:

These successes are mainly based on the fact that Coue once understood suggestion as an independent, will-independent (ideo-dynamic) force.

– “ideo-dynamic” is in brackets, this is very important! –

... and that he has recognized the significance of this subconscious power.

So, we are dealing with an ideodynamic force that is independent of the will. Nevertheless, this ideodynamic force, which is independent of the will, is to be utilized by me, by saying that one must drive one's will into the imagination. Now, let us take the sentence first of all as the author claims I said it in Bern: One must force one's will into the imagination.

Today I also spoke about how one must develop the will, which one first gets to know through sensory perception, into the life of the imagination. In this way one fights precisely those influences that are merely suggestive. In this way one works in precisely the opposite sense. This application of the will is precisely what destroys all suggestive possibilities of influence. What I have described takes place in the opposite direction to suggestive influence. This is actually already evident from the fact that these suggestive influences are called “ideo-dynamic impulses”, i.e. not impulses of the will, but ideo-dynamic impulses. And yet, the author has a presentiment that he is not yet able to express properly: One must indeed summon up one's willpower when one wants to introduce subjective ideas into the ideas, but this happens without the person to whom it happens, who experiences the suggestion, applying his own will.

Everywhere I have described that the person who wants to become an anthroposophical researcher applies his will, thus standing out from the possibilities of suggestion. Therefore, I could not say - I read this in this brochure and said to myself: Did I really let my tongue be paralyzed in Bern on July 8, 1920, did I really say that in order to gain higher knowledge, one must force one's will into one's ideas? For anyone can do that, for suggestion can also happen without any activity on the part of the one to whom something is being suggested.

Now I have taken the trouble to look at the shorthand notes of my Bern lecture on July 8, 1920, which I fortunately found today. And now see what I really said in Bern at the time. Everywhere I tried to show how the opposite approach to suggestion should be taken. And then I said:

We must apply ever greater and greater strength. And it is the application of this strength that matters; it matters that we drive the will, with all our might, into the life of the imagination, into the act of imagining, that we actually grow stronger in this driving of the will into the life of the imagination.

That is something else. You can only drive ideas into the images. When one speaks of driving the will into the life of the images, it means precisely not allowing the images to be influenced by suggestions, but taking control of the free life of the images and the nature of the images, which is ruled by the will. You see, it is quoted in quotation marks, and the opposite of what I really said is said in quotation marks.

But this is only one example, ladies and gentlemen, of the way in which anthroposophy is often discussed today, especially from a scientific point of view, and how it is misunderstood. This is extremely characteristic, and the whole brochure actually has this tendency. My dear audience, as for what mediumistic phenomena are, what hallucinations are, what kind of visions arise from within – I have always strictly excluded them from the field of anthroposophical life and explained that I consider all of this to be pathological, that it goes below the level of the sense life, not above it. And I have done this everywhere, in many places in detail, as what Anthroposophy wants, what Anthroposophy gives as descriptions of spiritual-soul worlds, arises from completely different foundations than what is asserted here. And now there is a strange tendency for precisely that which I reject, that which I regard as morbid, pathological, to be seen as the justified thing about anthroposophy! That is, they reverse the facts. They make people believe that I am describing something that is hallucinations or the like. Well, they do exist, he says, so we will readily admit that to the anthroposophist, he is entitled to that. But he must not talk about higher worlds, for there he enters a philosophical realm that is to be valued only as theosophical doctrine, as imagination conditioned by theosophical doctrine.

But something highly characteristic, my dear audience: the man who crystallizes out here first of all, who wants from anthroposophy - although it is the opposite of what anthroposophy really gives - says: What I concede to anthroposophy, we know today; telepathy, clairvoyance, teleplasty and so on are known. But all that belongs to the pathological field, perhaps also to the therapeutic field – the things are connected, after all. I would have to go into what I have repeatedly said in medical courses: how a pathology and a therapy can certainly be derived from anthroposophy that legitimately go beyond what today's merely materialistic view can give. But by first distorting what anthroposophy can give, and then by acknowledging this distortion, it is said: Yes, you can suggest all kinds of things to people, but you have never experienced people experiencing something like astral or mental fairy-tale lands in a trance.

But that is precisely the point! He calls it fairy-tale land because he passes it off as fantasies. That, he says, cannot be experienced by suggestion. Yet it is experienced. A strange polemic! First, what one believes one can understand is selected from the anthroposophical results, although one does not understand it at all. This is then categorized as hallucination and so on; that is accepted. But the other part is dismissed as fairyland, yet it is said that it cannot be suggested. It cannot be suggested either, but must be conquered by exact inner methods as inner knowledge. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I do not blame anyone for misunderstanding in such a grotesque way what anthroposophy can give. I do not blame this respected (and rightly so) collection of scientific, medical and other essays, published in Munich and Wiesbaden by J. F. Bergmann, for including such grotesque criticism of anthroposophy, because the whole booklet by Albert Sichler is actually well-intentioned. He wants to do justice to the matter. He cannot do so because, for the time being, there is still an abyss between what is recognized as official science today and what is needed to really make progress, because ultimately there is an inner connection in spiritual life, between our entire civilized life and the scientific life in modern times. And the bridge must be built over to ethics, to social life. This cannot be done by a science that gets stuck only in the material or at most makes hypotheses about the non-material. This can only be done by a science that truly penetrates into the spiritual, because it is in the social that the spiritual is active, and social laws can only be found by someone who also finds laws, forms, transformations of the spiritual in nature.

Now, in the short time available to me today, I have only been able to give a few points of view, my dear audience. I wanted to show you how anthroposophy strives to work in the spirit of true science, how it takes its scientific and epistemological seriousness very seriously indeed in its quest to arrive at a method modelled on mathematics. On the other hand, however, it still faces many prejudices today, even though it is actually needed by our civilization as something tremendously necessary, because it alone is capable of providing man with a real, satisfying elucidation of his own nature in terms of knowledge.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, as I said, I believe that the antagonisms will disappear once an objective basis is gained for creating harmony and mutual understanding between today's science and the anthroposophical research method. We must wait for that. Until this is achieved, opponents will come from all sides, from political parties or from religion, theology or other fields, who will operate on purely subjective ground. But anyone who is familiar with this anthroposophy, anyone who is serious about it, serious about everything that has its source in Dornach, will say to himself, because he knows how seriously research is conducted within this anthroposophical field, ic field, he says to himself: however great the misunderstandings may be, a balance, a harmony must ultimately be found from the seriousness of modern scientific methods and attitudes. And this is a consciousness that one can have when one is on one's own ground, that in everything one seeks in anthroposophy, one first presents the conscientious demands for examination that are otherwise applied in science today. And that is what makes one expect the external balance. If one proceeds seriously, one can be convinced that from today's science and from what anthroposophy has so far endeavored to achieve - at least for those who know both, contemporary science and anthroposophy - the balance, the harmony can certainly be found today. And this awareness gives confidence that the scientific understanding will come about. And then the other antagonisms against Anthroposophy will disappear by themselves.

There are no requests to speak.

Rudolf Steiner: My dearest attendees! It is of course only possible to consider a few guidelines in a lecture, especially one that is intended as an introductory lecture to a whole series of lectures on Anthroposophy. And so I was unable to consider one thing in particular that would have been very close to my heart: to show the bridge that leads from the cognitive side of anthroposophy to the social, practical-ethical and religious side of it. And about that - we only have time until 10 o'clock - allow me to say a few words. If we consider the scientific world view – I am not saying the natural science, but the scientific world view – as it is widely held today, especially among laypeople, but also among people who do not believe they are laypeople, but who, as members of various monist and other associations, today embrace the scientific ideas of thirty years ago as a religious confession, if one considers what has emerged as a kind of worldview that is more or less materialistic. There is no bridge from what many people today consider to be the only possible way of researching to the reality of ethical ideals and social ideals.

Today, seeing all that science gives us, we are faced with the necessity of forming ideas for a worldview, for example, about the beginning and end of the earth. I can only hint at these things as well. We have the Kant-Laplace theory of the earth's beginning from the primeval nebula, which is presented according to the laws of aerodynamics and aeromechanics. One imagines how the planetary solar system formed out of a primeval nebula, how the earth split off. The question of how living beings could have come into being is, however, continuously critically treated – whereby one will reach the limits of knowledge – and then it is treated how organic life now also sprouts from what was initially only present in the primeval nebula, how man then emerged from this and how he experiences himself today in the self-confident ego.

Now I have met people – and basically life is the greatest teacher, if you only know how to take it correctly – I have met people who took this scientific worldview seriously. I remember one person in particular who is typical of many others. The others often do not realize it, but they set up an altar of faith, an altar of knowledge. Those who take the scientific ideas seriously cannot do this; they come to such hypothetical ideas about the beginning and end of the earth, for example from thermodynamics and entropy theory, which leads to imagining how everything finally merges into a heat death. One meets only few people who have the inner courage to admit from a fully human point of view, in which situation man is placed with his inner being today, if he takes these things seriously as the only ones that apply.

Herman Grimm, for example, says – forgive the somewhat drastic saying that I am quoting – from his feeling, by realizing what is to develop on earth between the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula and the state to which the theory of entropy is supposed to lead us: A carrion bone round which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing piece than this world picture, which is already presented to people in schools today. And future ages will struggle to explain how a particularly pathological age once came to form such ideas about the beginning and end of the earth. It will be impossible to understand how something like this could be taken seriously.

Well, my dear audience, the science that stands before us today as natural science – as I said, anthroposophy does not in the least find fault with it – fully recognizes it in its field. Anthroposophy is based on a scientific attitude, because scientifically conscientious methodology and inner discipline, as they have developed, must be recognized as a model, only they must be further developed in the sense that I have characterized today.

But this also leads to a true knowledge of man. This knowledge of man is not as easy to gain as the one we gain today from physiological and biological views. This knowledge of man finally shows us how man is actually a being that is organized quite differently internally according to the head and the metabolic-limb system - these are the two poles of the human being. What I am now briefly hinting at, I have explained in great detail in a series of lectures. But I want to show right away how wrong it is to say, for example, that our thinking arises from processes in our brain. That would be just as if a car were to move along a road that has become soft and were to make its impressions there: you can follow the path of the impressions of the car in the road that has become soft. But consider, someone comes and says: You should explain these impressions by forces that are down there in the earth; you must explain these configurations from these underground forces! — It is the same with the methods used today to explain the brain convolutions, the nerve structure, from the forces of the organs. The nerve structure can be explained by the effects of the spiritual and soul, just as the furrows in a softened road can be explained by the car driving over them.

It is only an image. But in a perfectly exact scientific way, anthroposophy leads us to recognize how thinking and imagining is a spiritual and soul process that only has the brain as a basis. And it has the brain as a substrate because it is not based on the brain's growth processes, on organic processes, but precisely on the brain's slow dying processes. The nervous system does not actually have a life, but rather the opposite of a life, a decline in life. Space must first be made for thought. The nerve centers must die away, and a continuous dying, a constant clearing out of the material processes, must occur so that the spiritual-soul processes can take hold. This must always be compensated for by the limb metabolism system during sleep or other processes. What arises in this way, the consciousness-paralyzing processes, those processes of which physiology speaks today, do indeed abolish imagining, extinguish it. Precisely when these processes are toned down, passing over into a kind of partial dying, then imagining, thinking arises, so that we continually carry life and dying, being born and dying within us. And the moment of dying, it is only, I would like to say, the integral of the differentials that make up life, of the differentials of a continuous dying that make up human existence.

If we continue this train of thought, we come to recognize something that is virtually denied in today's accepted science, but which lies in the real continuation of this science: that the human being has real processes of decomposition and continuous processes of dying within him. The ethical ideals develop in the context of these dying processes, so that these ethical ideals are not dependent on the continuation of organic processes, but on suppressed, regressing organic processes. But this in turn leads to the following: When our Earth reaches a state, whatever its mineral-biological state, when the Earth - for my sake, let's take the hypothesis as valid, it is not quite, but in a certain sense it is - when it reaches heat death - when no other processes are possible because everything has formed according to the second law of the mechanical theory of heat as the remnants that are always there when heat is released into the environment, when heat is converted, when this state has occurred, then what has lived in man as ethical ideals has come to its greatest expression of power. And that carries earthly existence out to new planetary formation.

We discover in our moral ideals the germs for later worlds, for later worlds based on our present-day morals. This gives our ideals a real value. Contemporary philosophy is obliged to speak of mere values. But what is there for a possibility when one speaks of values that arise in man as mere ideas, but which are not the germs of future realities, what is there for another prospect than to say to oneself: We come from the Kant-Laplacean world nebula, and somehow the moral ideals emerge in our self-awareness, but these moral ideals live in us only like haze and fog. That was the personality I was talking about earlier, who accepted the modern scientific development as a law and said to himself: Man is cheated in the world. Natural scientific development has brought him this far, then the moral ideals arise as foam, dissolve again, and everything enters into the heat death, into the great cemetery, because the moral ideals are indeed experienced, but have no possibility of becoming reality.

By following the regressive processes in which moral ideals have been at work, anthroposophy shows us that these moral ideals have only an ideal existence in us, but that, as they develop in the human being, they are seeds for the future. Just as we see in the germ of the plant that will develop in the next year, so anthroposophy allows us to see in moral ideals the germs of future worlds. And we see the idealities of the past as the seeds of the present world, behind the Kant-Laplacean primeval fog. The present world is the realization, the actualization of what was once only thought, just as the present plant is the realization of last year's seed. And what is currently experienced only as moral value is the real seed of future worlds.

We are not only part of the cosmos through our natural organic processes, we are also part of the cosmos through what we experience as moral and social values within us. We are acquiring a cosmology that does not only include natural processes and laws as its agents, we are acquiring a cosmology in which our entire moral world is also a reality. Anthroposophy builds the bridge from the natural to the ethical and religious world.

This is what I wanted to mention in a brief closing word, because it was no longer possible in the lecture.

Leipzig 1890

A few weeks ago, German philosophy was enriched by a valuable book written in Weimar. The fact that the author of the work is the archdeacon Dr. Eduard Grimm, and the scholarly importance attached to it, justify it sufficiently if we express at this point the deep satisfaction that reading it has given us. We found one of the most interesting epochs in the development of science discussed in a truly exemplary manner. The book sets itself the task of explaining the teachings of the five English philosophers: Francis Bacon (1561 to 1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1709), George Berkeley (1685-1753), David Hume (1711-1776) for epistemology, that is for that science which is concerned with answering the question: to what extent is man capable of solving the riddles of the world and investigating the laws of nature and life through his thinking?

The scientific period to which these five thinkers belong is so extraordinarily significant because it marks one of the most important turning points in scientific life. The wisdom of the Middle Ages had contented itself with continuing along the paths trodden by Aristotle, the great teacher of Alexander the Great. The way in which he approached the tasks of the sciences, the goals he set, were still considered incontestable even when new observations and experiences could no longer be properly reconciled with them. This, however, hindered all progress and made the free development of the free and independent thinking demanded by discoveries in the field of science impossible. Then Francis Bacon appeared on the scene. His aim was to purify science of all traditional prejudices and to completely rebuild it on the basis of the new achievements of the time. Grimm is a master at capturing Bacon precisely at the point where his great significance for the development of European thought is most evident. By clinging to principles that belonged to a time long past and could only have validity and value for the life of that time, science had become alienated from the life of the immediate present, indeed had become completely useless for it. But "all science has emerged from life and takes from it the right and the basis of its existence. If it departs too far from its origin, life itself cannot fail to oppose it with its own direct force and urge a new formation of science. Francis Bacon of Verulam confronts the science of his time in this way. He reproaches it with resembling a plant which, torn from its stem, no longer has any connection with the body of nature and therefore no longer receives any nourishment from it." (Cf. Grimm, Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnisproblems, pp. 5-6.) Grimm explains with as much thoroughness as truly philosophical superiority how Bacon, by establishing an infallible method of observation and experimentation, wants to put science on the right track, how he, by ruthlessly combating all prejudices and errors among scholars as well as all other educated people, wants to provide access only to absolutely certain knowledge. To this, as to the whole book in general, we must praise the only historically correct method, which does full justice to the thinkers under consideration by letting them speak for themselves wherever it seems necessary. The beneficial effect produced by the book is due in no small part to the fact that the author does not, as so many recent historians of science do, emphasize his own scientific views in assessing the thought of others, but places his personal ability, which is visible to the discerning reader everywhere, at the service of an all-round objective development of the systems of thought dealt with.

The Baconian school of thought, for all its great importance, was guilty of a one-sided overestimation of the mere observation of things at the expense of independent thinking that draws from man's own breast. This deficiency became even greater with Thomas Hobbes, who saw thinking as nothing more than a faculty mediated by language. "Understanding is the understanding of words." (Grimm, p.87.) Hobbes denies that thinking can come to knowledge by itself and through itself. "Sensual perception, imagination, and the succession of our ideas, which we call experience, is what is given to us by nature." (Grimm,.85-86.) "Hobbes calls reason that activity by which we compose ideas and words." (Grimm, p. 87.) Thus, according to Hobbes, science is not based on a thinking comprehension of the world, but merely on the rational use and correct understanding of words. The fact that words convey ideas and that our knowledge is based on them is a proposition that does not exist for Hobbes. It is understandable that under such circumstances knowledge can no longer have an independent purpose. Therefore Hobbes finds: "Knowledge is there for the sake of skill, mathematics for the sake of mechanics, all speculation for the sake of some work, some action." (Grimm,. 99.) Certainly, knowledge that consists only of words can have no independent value. However, Hobbes believed that he could only achieve what he wanted by giving science this twist. What we observe and experience in individual cases has only a limited truth. We can never know whether it is true in all the cases we have not observed. Words, on the other hand, we determine arbitrarily, so we know exactly how far what they claim is valid. This view proved fatal to Hobbes in his foundation of the doctrine of morals and the state. For if everything that has objective validity is based only on the arbitrariness of words, then any real distinction between "good" and "evil" ceases to exist. These concepts, too, become arbitrary creations of man. "There is no general rule about good and evil taken from the nature of things themselves." (Grimm,. 135-136.) And in the state, order cannot be maintained by people controlling their instincts through reason, through free insight, but only by a despotic ruler enforcing the observation of arbitrarily established moral laws.

John Locke is at the center of Grimm's work. After all, he is "the first philosopher to place the question of knowledge at the center of research as a completely independent and independent task". (Grimm, 5.173.) On the continent, Ren& Descartes (Cartesius 1596-1650) is the founder of a new philosophy that frees itself from the bonds of Aristotle. He sees the reason why we can arrive at unconditional and unquestionable knowledge in the fact that certain ideas are innate to us. We need only raise them from the hidden depths of our soul and place them in the full light of consciousness. Locke now opposed this view with the proposition that we have no innate, but only acquired knowledge. According to Locke, we do not bring any knowledge into the world with us, but only the ability to acquire it. Starting from this insight, he seeks to investigate the sources and validity of our knowledge. In doing so, he arrives at a proposition that is now a part of modern consciousness, namely that only mass, shape, number and motion are properties that really exist in bodies, while color, sound, heat, taste and so on are only effects of the bodies on our senses, but not something in the bodies themselves.

George Berkeley now claims that the first-mentioned qualities also have no existence independent of our imagination, but that they only exist insofar as we imagine them. There are no things at all that correspond to our ideas. Berkeley denies the existence of a corporeal world and allows only spirits to exist in which the divine being, through its all-dominant power, evokes the ideas. "What I perceive, I must also imagine; something of which I have no conception at all cannot be the object of my perception or experience, it does not exist for me at all." "Therefore, there is no perception, no existence, no experience beyond the limit of imagination." (Grimm, p. 385.)

Finally, David Hume takes up Locke's view that we can only gain all our knowledge through observation. But as we can only ever obtain information about individual cases by observation, we have only such knowledge as relates to particulars and no generally valid knowledge. When I see that one thing always follows another, I call the latter cause, the former effect. I expect that in similar cases the same cause will produce the same effect. That this must be so, I can never know. All our conviction rests on the habit of always presupposing what we have often found to be true. Thus Hume arrives at a complete doubt of all actual knowledge.

This doubt, by his own admission, roused Kant from his scientific slumber and inspired him to write his great work, the Critique of Pure Reason, which stirred the scientific world in all its depths. As a result, Hume, and insofar as he was based on his predecessors, also exerted a decisive influence on German science.

Knowing the development of thought and the significance of the scholars treated by Grimm is an absolute necessity for understanding modern philosophy. The author has therefore earned a lasting merit through his book. With penetrating clarity, he shows us the threads that link the five men together, and with admirable acuity he always points to the aspect in which each of them has developed one and the same basic idea. It is actually a question that they all deal with, but the different light they shed on it always leads to different conclusions. They are all inspired by the striving for satisfactory knowledge, and they are likewise imbued with the conviction that only observation and experience provide us with true knowledge. No less excellent than the presentation of the interdependence of the individual explanations is Grimm's illumination of the course of development they have undergone. This is particularly characteristic of Berkeley and Hume. In clarifying these relationships, Grimm also proves himself to be a master of psychological analysis.

We do not think we are saying too much when we culminate our judgment of Grimm's book in these words: For the specialist, it is a work that he must not pass by if he wants to approach the epoch in question; for the educated, it is an interesting lectern that will orient him on countless questions.

[ 1 ] This study of the theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world-conception was written in the middle of the decade 1880–90. My mind was then vitally engaged in two activities of thought. One was directed toward the creative work of Goethe, and strove to formulate the view of life and of the world which revealed itself as the impelling force in this creative work. The completely and purely human seemed to me to be dominant in everything that Goethe gave to the world in creative work, in reflection, and in his life. Nowhere in the modern age did that inner assurance, harmonious completeness, and sense of reality in relation to the world seem to me to be as fully represented as in Goethe. From this thought there necessarily arose the recognition of the fact that the manner, likewise, in which Goethe comported himself in the act of cognition is that which issues out of the very nature of man and of the world.

In another direction my thought was vitally absorbed in the philosophical conceptions prevalent at that time regarding the essential nature of knowledge. In these conceptions, knowledge threatened to become sealed up within the being of man himself. The brilliant philosopher Otto Liebmann had asserted that human consciousness cannot pass beyond itself; that it must remain within itself. Whatever exists, as the true reality, beyond that world which consciousness forms within itself—of this it can know nothing. In brilliant writings Otto Liebmann elaborated this thought with respect to the most varied aspects of the realm of human experience. Johannes Volkelt had written his thoughtful books dealing with Kant's theory of knowledge and with Experience and Thought. He saw in the world as given to man only a combination of representations¹ based upon the relationship of man to a world in itself unknown. He admitted, to be sure, that an inevitability manifests itself in our inner experience of thinking when this lays hold in the realm of representations. When engaged in the activity of thinking, we have the sense, in a manner, of forcing our way through the world of representations into the world of reality. But what is gained thereby? We might for this reason feel justified, during the process of thinking, in forming judgments concerning the world of reality; but in such judgments we remain wholly within man himself; nothing of the nature of the world penetrates therein.

[ 2 ] Eduard von Hartmann, whose philosophy had been of great service to me, in spite of the fact that I could not admit its fundamental presuppositions or conclusions, occupied exactly the same point of view in regard to the theory of knowledge set forth exhaustively by Volkelt.

[ 3 ] There was everywhere manifest the confession that human knowledge arrives at certain barriers beyond which it cannot pass into the realm of genuine reality.

[ 4 ] In opposition to all this stood in my case the fact, inwardly experienced and known in experience, that human thinking, when it reaches a sufficient depth, lives within the reality of the world as a spiritual reality. I believed that I possessed this knowledge in a form which can exist in consciousness with the same clarity that characterizes mathematical knowledge.

[ 5 ] In the presence of this knowledge, it is impossible to sustain the opinion that there are such boundaries of cognition as were supposed to be established by the course of reasoning to which I have referred.

[ 6 ] In reference to all this, I was somewhat inclined toward the theory of evolution then in its flower. In Haeckel this theory had assumed forms in which no consideration whatever could be given to the self-existent being and action of the spiritual. The later and more perfect was supposed to arise in the course of time out of the earlier, the undeveloped. This was evident to me as regards the external reality of the senses, but I was too well aware of the self-existent spiritual, resting upon its own foundation, independent of the sensible, to yield the argument to the external world of the senses. But the problem was how to lay a bridge from this world to the world of the spirit.

[ 7 ] In the time sequence, as thought out on the basis of the senses, the spiritual in man appears to have evolved out of the antecedent non-spiritual. But the sensible, when rightly conceived, manifests itself everywhere as a revelation of the spiritual. In the light of this true knowledge of the sensible, I saw clearly that “boundaries of knowledge,” as then defined, could be admitted only by one who, when brought into contact with this sensible, deals with it like a man who should look at a printed page and, fixing his attention upon the forms of the letters alone without any idea of reading, should declare that it is impossible to know what lies behind these forms.

[ 8 ] Thus my look was guided along the path from sense-observation to the spiritual, which was firmly established in my inner experiential knowledge. Behind the sensible phenomena, I sought, not for a non-spiritual world of atoms, but for the spiritual, which appears to reveal itself within man himself, but which in reality inheres in the objects and processes of the sense-world itself. Because of man's attitude in the act of knowing, it appears as if the thoughts of things were within man, whereas in reality they hold sway within the things themselves. It is necessary for man, in experiencing the apparent,² to separate thoughts from things; but, in a true experience of knowledge, he restores them again to things.

[ 9 ] The evolution of the world is thus to be understood in such fashion that the antecedent non-spiritual, out of which the succeeding spirituality of man unfolds, possesses also a spiritual beside itself and outside itself. The later spirit-permeated sensible, amid which man appears, comes to pass by reason of the fact that the spiritual progenitor of man unites with imperfect, non-spiritual forms, and, having transformed these, then appears in sensible forms.

[ 10 ] This course of thought led me beyond the contemporary theorists of knowledge, even though I fully recognized their acumen and their sense of scientific responsibility. It led me to Goethe.

[ 11 ] I am impelled to look back from the present to my inner struggle at that time. It was no easy matter for me to advance beyond the course of reasoning characterizing contemporary philosophies. But my guiding star was always the self-substantiating recognition of the fact that it is possible for man to behold himself inwardly as spirit, independent of the body and dwelling in a world of spirit.

[ 12 ] Prior to my work dealing with Goethe's scientific writings and before the preparation of this theory of knowledge, I had written a brief paper on atomism, which was never printed. This was conceived in the direction here indicated. I cannot but recall what pleasure I experienced when Friedrich Theodor Vischer, to whom I sent that paper, wrote me some words of approval.

[ 13 ] But in my Goethe studies it became clear to me that my way of thinking led to a perception of the character of the knowledge which is manifest everywhere in Goethe's creative work and in his attitude toward the world. I perceived that my point of view afforded me a theory of knowledge which was that belonging to Goethe's world-conception.

[ 14 ] During the 'eighties of the last century I was invited through the influence of Karl Julius Schröer, my teacher and fatherly friend, to whom I am deeply indebted, to prepare the introductions to Goethe's scientific writings for the Kürschner National-Literatur, and to edit these writings. During the progress of this work, I traced the course of Goethe's intellectual life in all the fields with which he was occupied. It became constantly clearer to me in detail that my own perception placed me within that theory of knowledge belonging to Goethe's world-conception. Thus it was that I wrote this theory of knowledge in the course of the work I have mentioned.

[ 15 ] Now that I again turn my attention to it, it seems to me to be also the foundation and justification, as a theory of knowledge, for all that I have since asserted orally or in print. It speaks of an essential nature of knowledge which opens the way from the sense world to a world of spirit.

[ 16 ] It may seem strange that this youthful production, written nearly forty years ago, should now be published again, unaltered and expanded only by means of notes. In the manner of its presentation, it bears the marks of a kind of thinking which had entered vitally into the philosophy of that time, forty years ago. Were I writing the book now, I should express many things differently. But the essential nature of knowledge I could not set forth in any different light. Moreover, what I might write now could not convey so truly within itself the germ of the spiritual world-conception for which I stand. In such germinal fashion one can write only at the beginning of one's intellectual life. For this reason, it may be well that this youthful production should again appear in unaltered form. The theories of knowledge existing at the time of its composition have found their sequel in later theories of knowledge. What I have to say in regard to these I have said in my book Die Rätsel der Philosophie.³ This also will be issued in a new edition at the same time by the same publishers. That which I outlined many years ago as the theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world-conception seems to me just as necessary to be said now as it was forty years ago.

Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, November 1923

• 1. Vorstellungen, single concepts corresponding to single percepts.
• 2. in einem Schein-Erleben
• 3. The Riddles of Philosophy—not yet translated into English

[ 1 ] Let us now take a look at pure experience. What does it contain, as it sweeps across our consciousness, without our working upon it in thinking? It is mere juxtaposition in space and succession in time; an aggregate of utterly disconnected particulars. None of the objects that come and go there has anything to do with any other. At this stage, the facts that we perceive, that we experience inwardly, are of no consequence to each other.

[ 2 ] This world is a manifoldness of things of equal value. No thing or event can claim to play a greater role in the functioning of the world than any other part of the world of experience. If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact has greater significance than another one, we must then not merely observe the things, but must already bring them into thought-relationships. The rudimentary organ of an animal, which perhaps does not have the least importance for its organic functioning, is for experience of exactly the same value as the most essential organ of the animal's body. This greater or lesser importance will in fact become clear to us only when we begin to reflect upon the relationships of the individual parts of observation, that is, when we work upon experience.

[ 3 ] For experience, the snail, which stands at a low level of organization, is the equal of the most highly developed animal. The difference in the perfection of organization appears to us only when we grasp the given manifoldness conceptually and work it through. The culture of the Eskimo, in this respect, is also equal to that of the educated European; Caesar's significance for the historical development of humanity appears to mere experience as being no greater than that of one of his soldiers. In the history of literature, Goethe does not stand out above Gottsched, if it is a matter of merely experienceable factuality.

[ 4 ] At this level of contemplation, the world is a completely smooth surface for us with respect to thought. No part of this surface rises above another; none manifests any kind of conceptual difference from another. It is only when the spark of thought strikes into this surface that heights and depths appear, that one thing appears to stand out more or less than another, that everything takes form in a definite way, that threads weave from one configuration to another, that everything becomes a harmony complete within itself.

[ 5 ] We believe that these examples suffice to show what we mean by the greater or lesser significance of the objects of perception (here considered to be synonymous with the things of experience), and what we mean by that knowing activity which first arises when we contemplate these objects in their interconnection. At the same time, we believe that in this we are safe from the objection that our world of experience in fact shows endless differences in its objects even before thinking approaches it. After all, a red surface differs from a green one even if we do not exercise any thinking. This is correct. If someone wanted to refute us by this, however, he would have misunderstood our argument totally. This is precisely our argument, that an endless number of particulars is what experience offers us. These particulars must of course differ from one another; otherwise they would not in fact confront us as an endless, disconnected manifoldness. It is not at all a question of perceived things being undifferentiated, but rather of their complete unrelatedness, and of the absolute insignificance of the individual sense-perceptible facts for the totality of our picture of reality. It is precisely because we recognize this endless qualitative differentiation that we are driven to our conclusions.

[ 6 ] If we were confronted by a self-contained, harmoniously organized unity, we could not then say, in fact, that the individual parts of this unity are of no significance to one another.

[ 7 ] If, for this reason, someone does not find the comparison we used above to be apt, he has not grasped it at the actual point of comparison. It would be incorrect, of course, for us to want to compare the world of perception, in all its in finitely diverse configuration, to the uniform regularity of a plane. But our plane is definitely not meant to represent the diverse world of phenomena, but rather the homogeneous total picture we have of this world as long as thinking has not approached it. After the activation of our thinking, each particular of this total picture no longer appears in the way our senses alone communicate it, but al ready with the significance it has for the whole of reality. It appears then with characteristics totally lacking to it in the form of experience.

[ 8 ] In our estimation, Johannes Volkelt has succeeded admirably in sketching the clear outlines of what we are justified in calling pure experience. He already gave a fine characterization of it five years ago in his book on Kant's Epistemology, and has then carried the subject further in his most recent work, Experience and Thinking. Now he did this, to be sure, in support of a view that is utterly different from our own, and for an essentially different purpose than ours is at the moment. But this need not prevent us from introducing here his excellent characterization of pure experience. He presents us, simply, with the pictures which, in a limited period of time, pass before our consciousness in a completely unconnected way. Volkelt says: “Now, for example, my consciousness has as its content the mental picture of having worked hard today; immediately joining itself to this is the content of a mental picture of being able, with good conscience, to take a walk; but suddenly there appears the perceptual picture of the door opening and of the mailman entering; the mailman appears, now sticking out his hand, now opening his mouth, now doing the reverse; at the same time, there join in with this content of perception of the mouth opening, all kinds of auditory impressions, among which comes the impression that it is starting to rain outside. The mailman disappears from my consciousness, and the mental pictures that now arise have as their content the sequence: picking up scissors, opening the letter, criticism of illegible writing, visible images of the most diverse written figures, diverse imaginings and thoughts connected with them; scarcely is this sequence at an end than again there appears the mental picture of having worked hard and the perception, accompanied by ill humor, of the rain continuing; but both disappear from my consciousness, and there arises a mental picture with the content that a difficulty believed to have been resolved in the course of today's work was not resolved; entering at the same time are the mental pictures: freedom of will, empirical necessity, responsibility, value of virtue, absolute chance, incomprehensibility, etc.; these all join together with each other in the most varied and complicated way; and so it continues.”

[ 9 ] Here we have depicted, within a certain limited period of time, what we really experience, the form of reality in which thinking plays no part at all.

[ 10 ] Now one definitely should not believe that one would have arrived at a different result if, instead of this everyday experience, one had depicted, say, the experience we have of a scientific experiment or of a particular phenomenon of nature. Here, as there, it is individual unconnected pictures that pass before our consciousness. Thinking first establishes the connections.

[ 11 ] We must also recognize the service rendered by Dr. Richard Wahle's little book, Brain and Consciousness (Vienna, 1884), in showing us in clear contours what is actually given by experience divested of everything of a thought-nature, with only one reservation: that what Wahle presents as the characteristics applying absolutely to the phenomena of the outer and inner world actually applies only to the first stage of the world contemplation we have characterized. According to Wahle we know only a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. For him there can be absolutely no question of a relationship between the things that exist in this juxtaposition and succession. For example, there may after all be an inner connection somewhere between the warm rays of the sun and the warming up of a stone; but we know nothing of any causal connection; all that becomes clear to us is that a second fact follows upon the first. There may also be somewhere, in a world unaccessible to us, an inner connection between our brain mechanism and our spiritual activity; we only know that both are events running their courses parallel to each other; we are absolutely not justified, for example, in assuming a causal connection between these two phenomena.

[ 12 ] Of course, when Wahle also presents this assertion as an ultimate truth of science, we must dispute this broader application; his assertion is completely valid, however, with respect to the first form in which we become aware of reality.

[ 13 ] It is not only the things of the outer world and the processes of the inner world that stand there, at this stage of our knowing, without interconnection; our own personality is also an isolated entity with respect to the rest of the world. We find ourselves as one of innumerable perceptions without connection to the objects that surround us.

[ 1 ] For cognition the concept of a tree is conditioned by the perception of the tree. When confronted with a particular perception I can lift out only one definite concept from the general system of concepts. The connection between concept and perception is determined indirectly and objectively through thinking according to the perception. The connection of the perception with its concept is recognized after the act of perception; but that they belong to one another is already inherent in the object itself.

[ 2 ] The process is different when the relation of man to the world is considered, as it arises within knowledge. In the preceding explanation the attempt has been made to show that it is possible to throw light on this relation if one observes it without prejudice. A real understanding of such an observation leads to the insight that thinking can be directly experienced as a self-contained reality. In order to explain thinking as such, those who find it necessary to add something to it, such as physical brain-processes or unconscious spiritual processes lying behind the conscious thinking which is being observed, underestimate what can be seen when thinking is observed without prejudice. During his observation of thinking, the observer lives directly within a spiritual, self-sustaining activity of a living reality. Indeed one can say that he who wants to grasp the reality of spirit in the form in which it first presents itself to man, can do this in his own self-sustaining thinking.

[ 3 ] When thinking is observed, two things coincide which elsewhere must always appear apart: concept and perception. If this is not recognized, then in the concepts which have been worked out according to perceptions, one is unable to see anything but shadowy copies of the perceptions, and will take the perceptions to be the full reality. Further, one will build up a metaphysical sphere on the pattern of the perceived world, and each person, according to his views, will call this world a world of atoms, a world of will, a world of unconscious spirit, and so on. And he will not notice that with all this he merely hypothetically builds up a metaphysical world on the pattern of his world of perceptions. But if he realizes what he has before him in thinking, then he will also recognize that in the perception only a part of reality is present, and that the other part that belongs to it and first allows it to appear as full reality, is experienced in the act of permeating the perception with thinking. Then in what arises in consciousness as thinking, he will also see not a shadowy copy of some reality, but spiritual reality itself. And of this he can say that it becomes present in his consciousness through intuition. Intuition is a conscious experience of a purely spiritual content, taking place in the sphere of pure spirit. Only through an intuition can the reality of thinking be grasped.

[ 4 ] Only when, by observing thinking without prejudice, one has wrestled one's way through to recognizing the truth that the nature of thinking is intuitive, is it possible to gain a real understanding of the body-soul organization of man. Then one recognizes that this organization cannot affect the nature of thinking. Quite obvious facts seem to contradict this at first. For ordinary experience, human thinking only takes place connected with, and by means of, the organization. This comes so strongly to the fore that the true facts can only be seen when it has been recognized that nothing from the organization plays into thinking as such. And then it is impossible not to notice how extraordinary is the relation of the human organization to thinking. For this organization has no effect at all on thinking; rather it withdraws when the activity of thinking takes place; it suspends its own activity, it makes room, and in the space that has become free, thinking appears. The spiritual substance that acts in thinking has a twofold task: first it presses back the human organization in its activity, and next, it steps into the place of it. The first, the pressing back of the bodily organization, is also a consequence of the thinking activity, and indeed of that part of this activity which prepares the manifestation of thinking. This explains the sense in which thinking finds its counterpart in the bodily organization. And when this is recognized, one will no longer mistake this counterpart for thinking itself. If someone walks over soft ground, his feet leave impressions in the soil. But one is not tempted to say that the forces of the ground have formed these imprints from below. One will not ascribe to these forces any participation in the creating of the footprints. So too, one who, without prejudice, observes the nature of thinking will not ascribe to the imprints in the bodily organization any participation in the nature of thinking, for the imprints in the organization come about through the fact that thinking prepares its manifestation through the body. [The significance of the above view in relation to psychology, physiology, etc., in various directions has been set forth by the author in works published after this book. Here the aim is only to characterize what can be recognized by an unprejudiced observation of thinking.]

[ 5 ] Now a significant question arises. If the human organism does not partake in the spiritual substance of thinking, what significance has this organism within man's being as a whole? Now what happens in this organism through thinking has nothing to do with the nature of thinking, but indeed it has to do with the arising of the I-consciousness within thinking. The real “I” exists within the being of thinking, but not so the I-consciousness. This will be recognized if only thinking is observed without prejudice. The “I” is to be found within thinking; the “I-consciousness” arises through the fact that the imprints of the activity of thinking are engraved upon the general consciousness in the sense explained above. (The I-consciousness therefore arises through the bodily organism. But by this is not meant that the I-consciousness, once it has arisen, remains dependent on the bodily organism. Once arisen, it is taken up into thinking and henceforth shares its spiritual nature.)

[ 6 ] The human organism is the foundation of the “I-consciousness.” It is also the source of will-activity. It follows from the preceding explanation that an insight into the connection between thinking, conscious I, and will activity can only be obtained if we first observe how will-activity issues from the human organism.^44b

[ 7 ] The factors to be considered in a particular act of will are the motive and the driving force. The motive is either a concept or a representation; the driving force is the will element and is directly conditioned by the human organism. The conceptual factor, or motive, is the momentary source from which the will is determined; the driving force is the permanent source of determination in the individual. A motive of will may be a pure concept or a concept with a definite reference to what is perceived, i.e. a representation. General and individual concepts (representations) become motives of will by influencing the human individual and determine him to act in a particular direction. But one and the same concept, or one and the same representation, influences different individuals differently. It impels different people to different actions. Will, therefore, does not come about merely as a result of the concept, or representation, but also through the individual disposition of human beings. This individual disposition we will call—in this respect one can follow Eduard von Hartmann ⁴⁵—the characterological disposition. The way in which concepts and representations influence the characterological disposition of a person gives his life a definite moral or ethical stamp.

[ 8 ] The characterological disposition is formed through the more or less constant life-content of our subject, that is, through the content of our representations and feelings. Whether a present representation stimulates me to will or not, depends on how the representation is related to the content of the rest of my representations, and also to my particular feelings. The content of my representations is determined in turn by all those concepts which in the course of my individual life have come into contact with perceptions, that is, have become representations. This again depends on my greater or lesser capacity for intuition, and on the range of my observations, that is, on the subjective and the objective factors of experience,⁴⁶ on my inner determination and my place in life. The characterological disposition is more particularly determined by the life of feeling. Whether I make a definite representation or concept the motive of my action will depend on whether it gives me pleasure or pain.—These are the elements which come into consideration in an act of will. The immediately present representation or concept which becomes motive, determines the aim, the purpose of my will; my characterological disposition determines me to direct my activity toward this aim. The representation, to go for a walk in the next half-hour, determines the aim of my action. But this representation is elevated to a motive of will only if it meets with a suitable characterological disposition, that is, if during my life until now I have formed representations concerning the purpose of walking, its value for health, and further, if the representation of walking combines in me with a feeling of pleasure.

[ 9 ] We therefore must distinguish: 1) the possible subjective dispositions which are suitable for turning definite representations and concepts into motives; and 2) the possible representations and concepts which are capable of so influencing my characterological disposition that willing is the result. The first represents the driving force, the second, the aims of morality.

[ 10 ] We can find the driving force of morality by investigating the elements which comprise individual life.

[ 11 ] The first level of individual life is perceiving, more particularly, perceiving by means of the senses. Here we are concerned with that region of our individual life where perceiving, without a feeling or a concept coming between, is directly transformed into willing. The driving force in man, which comes into consideration here, we shall simply call instinct. The satisfaction of our lower, purely animal needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.) takes place in this way. What is most characteristic of instinctive life is the immediacy with which a particular perception releases the will. This kind of determination of the will, which is characteristic only of lower sense-life to begin with, can also be extended to the perceptions of the higher senses. We let a deed follow upon the perception of some event or other in the outer world without further reflection and without linking any particular feeling to the perception, as in fact happens in conventional social life. The driving force of such conduct is what is called tact or moral etiquette. The more often such a direct release of activity by a perception takes place, the more the person concerned is able to act purely under the guidance of tact, that is: tact becomes his characterological disposition.

[ 12 ] The second level of human life is feeling. Definite feelings link themselves to the perceptions of the outer world. These feelings can become the driving forces of deeds. When I see a starving person, pity for him can become the driving force of my action. Such feelings, for example, are shame, pride, honor, humility, remorse, pity, revenge, gratitude, piety, loyalty, love and duty.^46a

[ 13 ] The third level of life is thinking and forming representations. A representation or a concept can become motive for an action through mere reflection. Representations become motives because in the course of life we continuously link certain aims of will with perceptions which keep returning in more or less modified form. This is why, when people not entirely without experience have certain perceptions, there always also enter into their consciousness representations of deeds which they themselves have carried out in a similar instance, or have seen carried out. These representations hover before them as determining models for all later decisions; they become united with their characterological disposition. We could call this driving force of the will, practical experience. Practical experience gradually merges into purely tactful conduct. This happens when definite typical pictures of actions have become so firmly connected in our consciousness with representations of certain situations in life that in any given case we skip over all deliberation based on experience and pass over directly from perception into willing.

[ 14 ] The highest level of individual life is that of conceptual thinking without reference to a definite perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition from the ideal sphere. Such a concept contains no reference to definite perceptions at first. If we pass over into willing under the influence of a concept pointing to a perception, that is, a representation, then it is this perception which determines us indirectly via the conceptual thinking. When we act under the influence of intuitions, then the driving force of our deed is pure thinking. Since in philosophy it is customary to call the faculty of pure thinking, reason, it would be justifiable to call the moral driving force characteristic of this level, practical reason. The clearest account of this driving force of the will has been given by Kreyenbühl.⁴⁷ (Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. XVIII, No. 3). (Ethical-Spiritual Activity in Kant) I count his article on this subject among the most important contributions to present-day philosophy, particularly to ethics. Kreyenbühl characterizes this driving force as practical a priori, that is, an impulse to action springing directly from my intuition.

[ 15 ] It is clear that in the strictest sense of the word, such an impulse can no longer be considered as belonging to the characterological disposition. For here what acts as driving force is no longer something merely individual in me, but is the ideal and therefore the universal content of my intuition. As soon as I see the justification for making this content the foundation and starting-point of an action, I pass over into willing, irrespective of whether I had the concept already, or whether it enters my consciousness only immediately before acting, that is, irrespective of whether or not it was already present in me as disposition.

[ 16 ] An action is a real act of will only when a momentary impulse of action, in the form of a concept or representation, influences the characterological disposition. Such an impulse then becomes the motive of will.

[ 17 ] Motives of morality are representations and concepts. There are philosophers of ethics who also see in feeling a motive for morality; they maintain, for example, that the aim of moral conduct is the furtherance of the greatest possible quantity of pleasure in the individual who acts. But in itself a pleasure cannot be a motive; only a represented pleasure can. The representation of a future feeling, but not the feeling itself, can influence my characterological disposition. For in the moment of acting the feeling itself is not yet there; moreover it is to be produced by the action.

[ 18 ] The representation of one's own or someone else's welfare, however, is rightly regarded as a motive of will. The principle: through one's deed to bring about the greatest amount of pleasure for oneself, that is, to attain personal advantage, is egoism. It is striven for either by ruthlessly considering only one's own welfare, even at the cost of the happiness of others (pure egoism), or by furthering the welfare of others because indirectly one expects a favorable influence upon one's own self through the happiness of others, or because one fears to endanger one's own interest by injuring others (morality of prudence). The particular content of egoistical principles of morality will depend upon what representations a person has of his own or of another's happiness. A person will determine the content of his egoistical striving according to what he considers to be the good things in life (luxury, hope of happiness, deliverance from various misfortunes, etc.).

[ 19 ] Another motive is the purely conceptual content of actions. This content does not refer to a particular action only, as in the case of the representation of one's own pleasures, but to the reason for an action derived from a system of moral principles. In the form of abstract concepts these moral principles may govern moral life without the single individual troubling himself about the origin of the concepts. In that case, we simply feel the subjection to the moral concept which, like a command, overshadows our deeds as a moral necessity. The reason for this necessity we leave to those who demand our moral subjection, that is, to the moral authority we acknowledge (the head of the family, the state, social custom, the authority of the church, divine revelation). A particular instance of these moral principles is when the command announces itself to us, not through an external authority, but through our own inner being (moral autonomy). In this case, within ourselves we sense the voice to which we have to submit. This voice finds expression in conscience.

[ 20 ] It means moral progress when man does not simply take the command of an outer or inner authority as motive for his action, but strives to recognize the reason why a particular principle of conduct should act as motive in him. This is the advance from morality based on authority, to conduct based on moral insight. At this level of morality the person will consider the needs of moral life and will let this knowledge determine his actions. Such needs are: 1) the greatest possible welfare of humanity, purely for its own sake; 2) the progress of culture, or the moral development of mankind to ever greater perfection; 3) the realization of individual aims of morality, which are grasped purely intuitively.

[ 21 ] The greatest possible welfare of humanity will naturally be understood differently by different people. The above principle does not refer to a definite representation of this welfare, but to the fact that each person who acknowledges this principle strives to do what in his opinion best furthers the welfare of humanity.

[ 22 ] The progress of culture is seen as a special instance of the above-mentioned moral principle by those who connect feelings of pleasure with the advantages of culture, but they will have to accept into the bargain the decline and destruction of much that also contributes to the welfare of mankind. However, it is also possible that in the progress of culture someone sees a moral necessity, quite apart from the feeling of pleasure connected with it. Then for him, the progress of culture is a particular moral principle, distinct from the one mentioned previously.

[ 23 ] The principle of the general welfare, as well as that of the progress of culture, is based upon a representation, that is, upon how one relates the content of moral ideas to certain experiences (perceptions). But the highest thinkable principle of morality is one which contains no such relation from the start, but springs from the source of pure intuition and only afterward seeks the relation to perceptions (to life). Here the decision as to what is to be willed proceeds from a different sphere than that of the previous examples. In all his conduct, one in favor of the principle of the general welfare will first ask what his ideals will contribute to this general welfare. He who acknowledges the moral principle of the progress of culture, will do the same. But at this level he could do something even higher: if in a particular case he were not to proceed from one single definite aim of morality, but were to recognize a certain value in all principles of morality and were always to ask whether the one or the other would be more important here. It may happen that in certain circumstances one considers the progress of culture, in others, the general welfare, and in yet others, the furtherance of his own welfare, to be the right aim and motive of his actions. But when all such reasons take second place, then first and foremost the conceptual intuition itself comes into consideration. When this happens, then all other motives retreat from the leading position and the idea-content of the action alone is effective as its motive.

[ 24 ] Among the levels of characterological disposition, we have shown the one which acts as pure thinking, as practical reason, to be the highest. From the motives, we have now shown conceptual intuition to be the highest. On closer consideration, it will soon be seen that at this level of morality driving force and motive coincide, that is, neither a predetermined characterological disposition nor an external moral principle accepted on authority, influences our conduct. The deed therefore is neither a conventional one, carried out according to some rule or other, nor one automatically performed in response to an external impulse; rather it is one which is determined solely through its ideal content.

[ 25 ] Such conduct presupposes the capacity for moral intuition. Whoever lacks the ability to experience the moral principle that applies in a particular instance, will never achieve truly individual willing.

[ 26 ] The exact opposite to this moral principle is the Kantian: Act so that the principles of your actions can be valid for all men. This principle is death to all individual impulses of action. How all men would act cannot be a standard for me, but rather what is right for me to do in the particular instance.

[ 27 ] To this, a superficial judgment could perhaps object: How can an action be individually adapted to the particular instance and the particular situation, and yet at the same time be determined purely ideally by intuition? This objection is due to a confusion of the moral motive and the perceptible content of the action. The perceptible content could be a motive, and is one, for example, when an act is done for the progress of culture or out of pure egoism, etc., but it is not the motive when the reason for action is a pure moral intuition. My I naturally takes notice of this perceptual content, but is not determined by it. This content is used only to form a cognitive concept, but the moral concept that belongs to it, the I does not take from the object. The cognitive concept of a given situation confronting me is also a moral concept only if I base my view on a particular moral principle. If my viewpoint is limited to the general moral principle of the progress of culture, then I go through life along a fixed route. From every event I perceive which can occupy me, a moral duty also springs, namely, to do my best toward placing the particular event in the service of the progress of culture. In addition to the concept which reveals to me the natural law inherent in an event or object, there is also a moral label attached to it which contains for me, as a moral being, an ethical direction as to how I am to behave. This moral label is justified at a certain level, but at a higher level it coincides with the idea that arises in me when I face the concrete instance.

[ 28 ] Men differ greatly in their capacity for intuition. In one person ideas bubble up easily, while another person has to acquire them with much labor. The situation in which men live, which is the scene of their actions, is no less different. How a man acts will therefore depend on the way his capacity for intuition functions in the face of a given situation. The sum of ideas active within us, the actual content of our intuitions, is what, for all the universality of the idea-world, is individually constituted in each human being. Insofar as this intuitive content is directed toward action, it is the moral content of the individual. To let this content come to expression is the highest moral driving force and also the highest motive for the one who has recognized that ultimately all other moral principles unite in this content. This standpoint can be called ethical individualism.

[ 29 ] The discovery of the quite individual intuition which corresponds to the situation, is the deciding factor in an intuitively determined action. At this level of morality one can speak only of general concepts of morality (norms, laws) insofar as these result from the generalization of individual impulses. General norms always presuppose concrete facts from which they can be derived. But facts must first be produced by human deeds.

[ 30 ] When we look for the laws (concepts) underlying the conduct of individuals, peoples and epochs, we obtain a system of ethics, not as a science of moral rules, but as a natural philosophy of morality. It is true that laws obtained in this way are related to human conduct, as the laws of nature are related to a particular phenomenon. But they are not at all identical with the impulses upon which we base our conduct. If one wants to grasp the means by which man's action springs from his moral will, then one must first consider the relation of this will to the action. One must first select actions where this relation is the determining factor. If I, or someone else, reflect on such an action later, then can be discovered upon what principle of morality the action is based. While I am acting I am moved to act by the moral principle insofar as it lives in me intuitively; the moral principle is united with my love for what I want to accomplish by my deed. I ask no man and no code, Shall I do this?—rather I do it the moment I have grasped the idea of it. This alone makes it my action. The deeds of a person who acts solely because he acknowledges a definite moral standard, come about as a result of a principle which is part of his moral code. He is merely the agent. He is a higher kind of automaton. If some impulse to action enters his consciousness, then at once the clockwork of his moral principle will be set in motion and run to rule, in order to bring about a deed which is Christian, or humane, or is deemed unselfish, or to further the progress of culture. Only when I follow my love for the object is it I myself who acts. At this level of morality I do not act because I acknowledge a ruler over me, an external authority, or a so-called inner voice. I do not acknowledge any external principle for my conduct, because I have found the source of my conduct within myself, namely, my love for the deed. I do not prove intellectually whether my deed is good or bad; I do it out of my love for it. My action will be “good” if my intuition, immersed in love, exists in the right way within the relationship between things; this can be experienced intuitively; the action will be “bad” if this is not the case. Nor do I ask myself: How would another person act in my place?—rather I act, as I, as this particular individuality, find my will motivated to act. I am not guided directly by what happens to be the usual thing, the general habit, some general human code or moral standard, but solely by my love for this deed. I feel no compulsion—neither the compulsion of nature which rules me through my instincts, nor the compulsion of moral commands. Rather, I simply carry out what lies within me.

[ 31 ] Those who defend general moral standards will perhaps object: If each person strives to express and do only what he pleases, then there is no difference between a good deed and a crime; every depraved impulse in me has the same right to express itself as has the intention to do my best. The fact that I have a deed in mind, according to an idea, cannot set my standard as a moral human being, but only the test as to whether it is a good or evil deed. Only if it is good should I carry it out.

[ 32 ] My reply to this obvious objection, which nonetheless is based on a misunderstanding of what is meant here, is this: One who wants to understand the nature of human will must differentiate between the path which brings this will to a certain degree of development, and the unique character which the will assumes as it approaches its goal. On the way toward this goal standards do play their justified part. The goal consists in the realization of aims of morality, grasped purely intuitively. Man attains such aims to the degree that he is at all able to raise himself to the intuitive idea-content of the world. In particular instances such aims are usually mixed with other elements, either as driving force or as motive. Nevertheless, in the human will intuition can be the determining factor, wholly or in part. A person does what he ought to do, he provides the stage upon which “ought” becomes deed; it is absolutely his own deed which he brings to expression. The impulse here can only be completely individual. And, in fact, only an act of will which springs from intuition can be individual. To call the acts of criminals and what is evil an expression of the individuality, in the same sense as the embodiment of pure intuition, is only possible if blind urges are reckoned as part of the human individuality. But the blind urge which drives a person to crime does not spring from intuition and does not belong to what is individual in man, but rather to what is most general in him, to what is equally valid in all men, and out of which man works his way by means of what is individual in him. What is individual in me is not my organism with its urges and feelings, but rather the universal world of ideas which lights up within this organism. My urges, instincts, passions confirm nothing more than that I belong to the general species, man; the fact that something ideal comes to expression in a particular way within these urges, passions and feelings, confirms my individuality. Through my instincts and urges I am a person of whom there are twelve to the dozen; through the particular form of the idea, by means of which I name myself “I” within the dozen, I am an individual. Only a being other than myself could distinguish me from others by the difference in my animal nature; through my thinking, that is, through the active grasp of what expresses itself as an ideal within my organism, do I distinguish myself from others. Therefore one definitely cannot say that the action of a criminal springs from the idea in him. Indeed, this is just what is characteristic of a criminal deed: it stems from elements in man which are external to the ideal-element in him.

[ 33 ] An action is felt to be free insofar as the reason for it springs from the ideal part of my individual being; any other part of an action, irrespective of whether it is carried out under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation of a moral code, is felt to be unfree.

[ 34 ] Man is free insofar as he is able, in every moment of his life, to follow himself. A moral deed is my deed only if it can be called free in this sense. What here have to be considered are the presuppositions necessary for a willed action to be felt as free; how this purely ethically grasped idea of freedom realizes itself in human nature, will be seen in what follows.

[ 35 ] A deed done out of freedom does not at all exclude, but includes moral laws, but it will be a deed done from a higher sphere compared with those dictated solely by such laws. Why should my deed serve the general welfare any less when it is done out of love, than when I do it solely for the reason that I feel that to serve the general welfare is a duty? The concept of mere duty excludes freedom because it does not include what is individual, but demands subjection of the individual to a general standard. Freedom of action is thinkable only from the standpoint of ethical individualism.

[ 36 ] But how is it possible for people to live in a community if each person strives to assert only his own individuality? This objection is characteristic of misunderstood moralism. A person holding this viewpoint believes that a community of people is possible only if all men are united by general fixed moral rules. He simply does not understand the oneness and harmony of the idea-world. He does not realize that the idea-world which is active in me is none other than the one active in my fellow-man. This unity of ideas is indeed nothing but a result of men's experience of life. Only this can it be. For if the unity of the idea-world could be recognized by any means other than by individual observation, then general rules and not personal experience would be valid in its sphere. Individuality is possible only when each individual is acquainted with others through individual observation alone. The difference between me and my fellow men is not at all because we live in two quite different spiritual worlds, but because from the world of ideas which we share, he receives different intuitions from mine. He wants to live out his intuitions, I mine. If we both really draw from the idea, and are not obeying any external impulses (physical or spiritual), then we cannot but meet in the same striving, in having the same intentions. A moral misunderstanding, a clash between men who are morally free, is out of the question. Only the morally unfree who follow natural instincts or some accepted command of duty, turn away from a fellow-man if he does not follow the same instinct and the same command as themselves. To live in love of the action and to let live, having understanding for the other person's will, is the fundamental principle of free human beings. They know no other “ought” than that with which their will is intuitively in accord; how they shall will in a particular instance, their power of ideation will tell them.

[ 37 ] If human nature were not fundamentally social, no external laws could make it so! Only because individual human beings are one in the spiritual part of their being, can they live out their lives side by side. The free man is confident that others who are free belong to the same spiritual world as he does, and that they will meet him in their intentions. The free man does not demand agreement from his fellow men, but he expects it, because it lies in human nature. This does not refer to the existing necessity for this or that external arrangement, but rather to the disposition, the attitude of soul through which man, in his experience of himself among fellow men for whom he cares, comes nearest to doing justice to human dignity.

[ 38 ] There are many who will say that the concept of a free human being outlined here is a chimera, is nowhere to be found as a reality, and that we have to deal with real people from whom one can hope for morality only when they obey some moral law, when they regard their moral mission as a duty, and do not freely follow their inclinations and preferences.—I certainly do not doubt this. Only a blind man could do so. But then, away with all hypocrisy of morality if this is to be the ultimate conclusion. Then simply say: Human nature must be compelled as long as it is not free. Whether the unfreedom is dealt with by physical means or through moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his immeasurable sexual instinct, or because he is hemmed in by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view. But one should not maintain that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, for he is driven to them by external powers. But there are human beings who raise themselves above all these compelling rules, free spirits who find their own self in the jumble of habits, regulations, religious observance, etc. They are free insofar as they follow only themselves; unfree insofar as they submit themselves. Which of us can say that he is really free in all that he does? But in each of us exists a higher being in whom the free man comes to expression.

[ 39 ] Our life is composed of free and unfree deeds. But we cannot complete the concept of man without including the free spirit as the purest characteristic of human nature. After all, we are truly human only insofar as we are free.

[ 40 ] That is an ideal, many will say. Without doubt—but it is an ideal which works itself to the surface from within our nature as a reality. It is no “thought out” or imagined ideal, but one in which there is life, one which clearly announces its presence even in its least perfect form of existence. If man were merely a product of nature, the search for ideals, that is, for ideas which for the moment are inactive but whose realization we demand, would not be possible. In the case of external objects the idea is determined by the perception. We have done our share when we have recognized the connection between idea and perception. But with man this is not so. His content is not determined without him; his true concept as a moral being (free spirit) is not objectively united with the perceptual picture “man” from the start merely in order to be confirmed by knowledge later. By his own activity man must unite his concept with the perception, man. Concept and perception only coincide here if man himself brings it about. But he cannot do this till he has found the concept of the free spirit, that is, his own concept. In the objective world a line of division is drawn by our organization between perception and concept; cognition overcomes this division. In our subjective nature this division is no less present; man overcomes it in the course of his development by bringing his concept to expression in his outward existence. Both man's intellectual as well as his moral life point to his twofold nature: perceiving (direct experience) and thinking. In the intellectual life the two-foldness is overcome through knowledge; in the moral life through actually bringing the free spirit to realization. Every being has its inborn concept (the law of its existence and activity), but in external objects the concept is indivisibly connected with the perception and separated from it only within our spiritual organism. In man concept and perception are to begin with, actually apart, to be united by him just as actually. One could object: To our perception of a man a definite concept corresponds at every moment of his life, just as is the case with everything else. I can form a concept of a typical man, and I may also find such a man given to me as a perception. If to this I also bring the concept of the free spirit, then I have two concepts for the same object.

[ 41 ] This line of thought is one-sided. As perceptual object I am subjected to perpetual change. As a child I was one thing, another as a youth, yet another as a man. In fact, at every moment the perceptual picture of myself is different from what it was a moment ago. These changes may take place in such a way that either it is always the same (the typical) man who expresses himself in them, or they become the expression of the free spirit. The perceptual object of my action is subjected to these changes.

[ 42 ] In the perceptual object “man” the possibility of transformation is given, just as in the plant-seed there lies the possibility of becoming a fully developed plant. The plant transforms itself because of the objective laws which are inherent in it; man remains in his imperfect state unless he takes hold of the substance to be transformed within him and transforms it through his own power. Nature makes man merely into a product of nature; society makes him into a being who acts rationally, but he alone can make himself into a free being. At a definite stage in his development nature releases man from its fetters; society carries his development a stage further; the final polish he can only apply himself.

[ 43 ] Therefore, from the standpoint of free morality it is not asserted that as free spirit is the only form in which a man can exist. Free spirituality is the ultimate stage of man's development. And it is not denied that conduct according to rules has its justification as a stage of development. However, this cannot be acknowledged as the highest level of morality. But the free spirit in man overcomes rules in the sense that he does not accept only commands as motives, but also regulates his conduct in accordance with his impulses (intuitions).

[ 44 ] When Kant says of duty: ⁴⁸ “Duty! You sublime, you great name, you encompass nothing beloved or endearing, but you demand submission,” you “lay down a law ... before which all inclinations become silent, even if in secret they also go against it,” then man, conscious of the free spirit, answers: “Freedom! You friendly, humane name, you encompass all that is morally beloved, all that is most worthy of my humanity, you make me no one's servant, you do not merely lay down a law, but wait for what my moral love will of itself recognize as law, because it feels unfree when faced with any law simply forced upon it.”

[ 45 ] This is the contrast between mere law-abiding morality and morality born of freedom.

[ 46 ] The philistine who sees morality embodied in some external rule, may perhaps even regard the free spirit as a dangerous person. But this is simply because his view is limited to a certain period of time. If he were able to see beyond this, he would soon find that the free spirit need go beyond the laws of his state as seldom as the philistine himself, and is never in any real opposition to them. For all the laws of the state have sprung from the intuitions of free spirits, just as have all other objective laws of morality. No law is exercised through a family authority which was not at some time intuitively grasped and laid down by an ancestor. Similarly the conventional laws of morality were first laid down by definite people and so too the laws of the state first arise in the head of a statesman. These individualities have established laws over other people, and only he is unfree who forgets this origin and either looks upon these laws as extra-human commands, that is, as objective moral concepts of duty independent of man, or turns them into the commanding voice thought of—in a falsely mystical way—as compelling him in his own inner being. However, he who does not forget the origin of such laws, but looks for it in man, will reckon with them as belonging to the same idea-world as that from which he too draws his moral intuitions. If he believes his own intuitions to be better, then he will try to replace those in existence with his own; but if he finds the existing ones justified, he will act in accordance with them as if they were his own.

[ 47 ] The formula must not be coined: Man is meant to realize a moral world order which exists independent of him. Insofar as knowledge of man is concerned, one maintaining this stands at the point where natural science stood when it believed that the goat has horns in order to be able to butt. Fortunately natural scientists have rejected such a concept of purpose as a dead theory. It is more difficult to get rid of such theories in ethics. However, just as horns do not exist because of butting, but butting exists through horns, so man does not exist because of morality, but morality exists through man. The free human being acts morally because he has a moral idea, but he does not act in order that morality may come about. Human individuals, with the moral ideas belonging to their nature, are the presupposition for a moral world-order.

[ 48 ] The human individual is the source of all morality and the center of earthly life. State and society have come about only because they are the necessary results of life shared by individual human beings. That state and society should react in turn upon the life of the individual is understandable, just as it is understandable that butting, which exists through the horns, reacts in turn upon the further development of the goat's horns, which would waste away by prolonged disuse. Similarly, the individual would waste away if he led a separate existence outside a human community. This is just why the social order arises, so that it can react favorably upon the individual.

• 44b. Note by Rudolf Steiner: The passage from page 161 to this point was added, or rewritten for the Revised Edition, 1918.
• 45. Eduard von Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, German ed. p. 451. Born 1842, von Hartmann was originally an officer in the Prussian army. Because of an illness, he retired from military service and took up an intensive study of philosophy. In 1869 his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) appeared, and made him famous almost overnight. Of the many other works he wrote, this book remained his most famous. Rudolf Steiner describes a personal impression of von Hartmann, whom he visited in Berlin in 1888 following a philosophical correspondence with him over some years. This account may be found in Chapter IX of Steiner's autobiography. Steiner's Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Knowledge), published in this present volume, was dedicated to von Hartmann. The latter died in 1906.
• 46. .The German text here reads Faktor der Erfahrungen.—Tr.
• 46a. Note by Rudolf Steiner: A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of metaphysical realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness.
• 47. Ger. Welterfahrung.—Tr.
• 48. Immanuel Kant: Theory of Ethics, transl. by Abbott, p. 180. The Critique of Practical Reason, Ch. III.

Human life swings between work and idleness. The activity we are to discuss today, known as asceticism, is regarded either as work or as idleness according to the preconceptions of one person or another. An objective, unbiased study, such as Spiritual Science demands, is impossible unless we observe how what is called asceticism—in the highest sense excluding misuse of the word—influences human life, and either helps or harms it.

It is quite natural that most people today should have a somewhat false idea of what the word asceticism ought to mean. In its original Greek form it could apply as well to an athlete as to an ascetic. But in our time the word has acquired a particular colouring from the form taken by this way of life during the Middle Ages; and for many people the word has the flavour that Schopenhauer gave it in the 19th century.³⁵ Today the word is again acquiring a certain colouring through the manifold influences of oriental philosophy and religion, particularly through what the West usually calls Buddhism. Our task in this lecture is to find the true origin in human nature of asceticism; and Spiritual Science, as characterised in previous lectures, is called upon to bring clarity into this discussion, the more so because its own outlook is connected with the original meaning of the Greek word, askesis.

Spiritual Science and spiritual research, as they have been represented here for some years, take a quite definite attitude towards human nature. They start from the postulate that at no stage in the evolution of mankind is it justifiable to say that here or there are the limits of human knowledge. The usual way of putting the question, “What can man know, and what can he not know?”, is for Spiritual Science misdirected. It does not ask what man can know at a certain stage in his evolution; or what the boundaries of knowledge are at that stage; or what remains hidden because at that time human cognition cannot penetrate it. All these matters are not its immediate concern; for Spiritual Science takes its stand on the firm ground of evolution, in particular the evolution of human soul-forces. It says that the human soul can develop. As in the seed of a plant the future plant sleeps and is called forth by the forces within the seed and those which work on it from without, so are hidden forces and capacities always sleeping in the human soul. What we cannot know at one stage of development we may know later, when we have advanced a little in developing our spiritual faculties.

Which are the forces that we can develop in ourselves for a deeper understanding of the world and the attainment of an ever-wider horizon? That is the question asked by Spiritual Science. It does not ask where the boundaries of our knowledge are, but how man can surpass the bounds that exist at any given period by developing his capacities. Not through vague talk, but in a quite definite way, it shows how man can surpass the cognitive faculties that have been bestowed on him by an evolutionary process in which his own consciousness has not participated. In the first instance, these faculties are concerned only with the world perceived by our senses and grasped by our reason. But by means of the forces latent in the soul, man is able to penetrate into the worlds which are at first not open to the senses and cannot be reached by a reason bound up with the senses. In order that we may from the beginning avoid the charge of vagueness, I will describe quite briefly what you will find given fully in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved?

When we speak of passing beyond the ordinary bounds of knowledge, we must take care not to wander off into the blue, but rather find our way from the solid ground under our feet into a new world. How is it to be done?

In the normal human being of today, we have an alternation of the two conditions called “waking” and “sleeping”.³⁶ Without going into details, we may say that for ordinary knowledge the difference lies in this, that while man is awake, his senses and the sense-bound intellect are under constant stimulus. It is this stimulus which wakens his external cognition, and during waking hours he is given up to the external sense-world. In sleep we are removed from that world. A simple logical consideration shows that it is not irrational for Spiritual Science to maintain that there is something in human nature which separates itself during sleep from what we usually call the human body. We know that for Spiritual Science the physical body, which can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hand, is only part of man. He has a second part, the so-called etheric or life-body. When we are asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, and we separate from them what we call the consciousness body or—don't be put off by the terminology—the astral body, the bearer of desire and pain, pleasure and sorrow, of impulse and passion. In addition we have a fourth part, one which makes man the crown of earthly creation: the ego. These last two parts split off during sleep from the physical and the etheric bodies. A simple consideration, as I said, can teach us that it is not irrational for Spiritual Science to declare that what we have as pleasure and pain, or as the ego's power of judgment, cannot vanish during the night and be reborn anew every morning, but must remain in existence. Think, if you will, of this withdrawal of the astral body and the ego as a mere picture; in any case it is undeniable that the ego and the astral body withdraw from what we call the physical and the etheric bodies.

Now the peculiar thing is that these inmost parts of the human being, the astral body and the ego, within which we live through what we call soul-experience, sink down during sleep into an indefinite obscurity. But this means simply that this inmost part of the human being needs the stimulus of the external world if it is to be conscious of itself and of the external world. Hence we can say that at the moment of falling asleep, when this stimulus ceases, man cannot develop consciousness in himself. But if, in the normal course of his existence, a human being were able so to stimulate the inner parts of his being, so to fill them with energy and inner life, that he had a consciousness of them even when there were no sense-impressions and the sense-bound intellect was inactive and free from the stimulus of the external world, he would then be able to perceive other things than those which come through the stimulus of the senses. However strange and paradoxical it may sound, it is true that if a man could reproduce a condition which on the one hand resembles sleep, and yet is essentially different from it on the other, he could reach super-sensible knowledge. His condition would resemble sleep in not depending on any external stimulus; the difference would be that he would not sink into unconsciousness but would unfold a vivid inner life.

As may be shown from spiritual-scientific experience, man can come to such a condition: a condition of clairvoyance, if the word is not misused, as it so often is today. I will give you briefly one example of the numerous inner exercises through which this condition can be attained.

If we wish to experience this condition safely, we must always start from the external world. The external world gives us mental images, and we call them true if we find that they correspond with external facts. But this kind of truth cannot raise us above external reality. Our task, therefore, is to bridge the gulf between external perception and a perception which is independent of the senses and yet can give us truth. One of the first stages towards this form of knowledge is concerned with pictorial or symbolic concepts. As an example, let us take a symbol which is of use for spiritual development, and expound it in the form of a conversation between a teacher and his pupil.

In order to make his pupil understand this kind of symbolic picture,³⁷ the teacher might speak as follows: “Think of the plant, how it is rooted in the earth and grows from it, sends forth green leaf after green leaf and develops to flower and fruit.” (We are not here concerned with ordinary scientific ideas, for, as we shall see, we are not discussing the essential difference between man and plant, but trying to get hold of a useful pictorial idea). The teacher may continue: “And now look at man. He certainly has a great deal that is not present in the plant. He can experience impulses, desires, emotions, a whole range of concepts which can lead him up the ladder from blind sensation and instinct to the highest moral ideals. Only a scientific fantasy could attribute similar consciousness to plants and to men; but on a lower level a plant has certain advantages. It has certainty of growth, without possibility of error, while man can deviate at any moment from his right place in the world. We can see how in his whole structure he is permeated with instincts, desires and passions which may bring him into error, delusion and falsehood. In contrast, the plant is in substance untouched by these things; it is a pure, chaste being. Only when man has purified his whole life of instinct and desire can he hope to be as pure on his higher level as the plant is in its certainty and security on the lower level.”

Then we can pass to a further picture. The plant is permeated with the green colouring matter, chlorophyll, which steeps the leaves in green colour. Man is permeated with the vehicle of instincts and emotions, his red blood. That is a sort of evolution upwards, and in its course man has had to accept characteristics not found in the plant. He must hold before his eyes the high ideal of one day attaining on his own level to the inner purity, certainty and self-control of which we have a picture at a lower level in the plant. So we may ask what we must do in order to rise to that level.

Man must become lord and master of the instincts, passions and cravings which surge around, unsought, within him. He must grow beyond himself, kill within him all that normally dominates him, and raise to a higher level all that is dominated by the lower. This is how man has developed from the plant, and all that has been added since the plant stage he must look on as something to be conquered, in order to derive from it a higher life. That is the proper direction of man's future, indicated by Goethe in the fine stanza:

Whoever cannot say
Die and renew thyself!
On our dark earth will be
A mournful guest!³⁸

This does not mean that man must kill his instincts and emotions, but that he cleanses and purifies them by removing their mastery over him. So, in looking at the plant, he can say: “Something in me is higher than the plant, but I have to conquer and destroy it.”

As a picture of what we have to overcome in ourselves, let us take that part of the plant which is no longer capable of life, the dry wood, and set it up in the form of a cross. The next task is to cleanse and purify the red blood, the vehicle of our instincts, impulses and cravings, so that it may be a pure, chaste expression of our higher being, of what Schiller meant when he spoke of “the higher man in man”. The blood will then be, as it were, a copy in man of the pure sap which flows through the plant.

“Now”—the teacher will resume—“let us look at a flower in which the sap, rising up continuously, stage by stage, through the leaves, finally merges into the colour of the flower, the red rose. Picture the red rose as an image of your blood when your blood has been cleansed and purified. The sap of the plant pulses through the red rose and leaves it without impulses or desires; but your impulses and desires must come to be the expression of your purified ego.” Thus we supplement our picture of the wood of the cross, which symbolises what we have to overcome, by hanging a garland of red roses upon the cross. Then we have a picture, a symbol, which does not appeal only to dry reasoning, but by stirring our feelings gives us an image of human life raised to the level of a higher ideal.

Someone may now say: Your picture is an invention which corresponds to nothing true. All that you conjure up, the black cross and the red rose is mere fancy. Yes, undoubtedly, this picture, as brought before the inner eye of anyone who wishes to rise into spiritual worlds, is an invention. That is just what it has to be! Its purpose is not to portray something that exists in the external world. If that were its function, we would not need it. We would be satisfied with the impressions of the outer world that come to us directly through our sense-perceptions. But the picture we create, though its elements are drawn from the external world, is based on certain feelings and ideas that belong to our own inner being. The essential thing is that we should be fully conscious of each step, so that we keep a firm hold on the threads of our inner processes; otherwise we should be lost in illusion.

Anyone who wants to rise to higher worlds through inner meditation and contemplation does not live only in abstract pictures, but in a world of concepts and feelings which flow from these pictures he creates. The pictures call forth a number of activities in his soul, and by excluding every external stimulus he concentrates all his powers on contemplating the pictures. They are not meant to reflect external circumstances, but to awaken forces that slumber within him. If he is patient and perseveres—for progress comes slowly—he will notice that quiet devotion to pictures of this kind will give him something that can be further developed. He will soon find that his inner life is changing: a condition emerges that is in some respects akin to sleep. But while sleep brings a submergence of conscious soul-life, the devotion I have mentioned, and meditation on the symbolic pictures, cause inner forces to awaken. Very soon he feels that a change is going on within him, although he has excluded all impressions of the outer world. So through these quite unrealistic symbols he awakens inner forces, and he soon realises that he can put them to good use.

Someone may object again by saying: “That is all very well, but even if we develop these forces and really penetrate into the spiritual world, how can we be sure that what we perceive is reality?” Nothing can prove this except experience, just as the external world can be proved to exist only by experience. Mere concepts can be very strictly distinguished from perceptions and the two categories will be confused only be someone who has lost touch with reality. Especially in philosophical circles today, a certain misunderstanding has been gaining ground. Schopenhauer,³⁹ for instance, in the first part of his philosophy starts with the assumption that the world of man is a concept. Now you can see the difference between a percept and a concept by looking at your watch. As long as you are in contact with your watch, that is percept; if you turn round, you have a picture of the watch in your mind; that is concept. In practical life we very soon learn to distinguish between percept and concept, or we should go badly astray. If you picture a red-hot iron, however hot it is, you will not be burnt, but if you touch it you will soon realise that a percept is something other than a concept.

It is the same with an example given by Kant;⁴⁰ from a certain point of view it is justified, but during the last century it has been the source of much error. Kant tried to upset a certain concept of God by showing that there is no difference in content between the idea of a hundred shillings and a hundred real shillings. It is wrong, however, to maintain that there is no difference in the content, for then it is easy to confuse a perception, which gives us direct contact with reality, with the content of a mere concept. Anyone who has to pay a debt of a hundred shillings will soon find out the difference.

It is the same with the spiritual world. When we awaken the forces and faculties which are latent within us, and when around us is a world we have not known before, a world which shines out as though from a dark spiritual depth, then someone who enters this realm uninitiated might well say that it is all illusion and auto-suggestion. But anyone who has had real experiences on this level will be well able to distinguish reality from fantasy, just as in ordinary life we can distinguish between an imaginary piece of hot steel and a real one.

Thus we can see that it is possible to call forth a different form of consciousness. I have given you only one brief example of how inner exercises can work on the sleeping faculties of the soul. Of course, while we are still practising the exercises, we do not see a spiritual world; we are occupied in awakening the faculties required. In some circumstances this may last not merely for years, but for a whole life or lives. In the end, however, the result of these exercises is that the sleeping forces of cognition are awakened and directed towards a spiritual world, just as we have learnt to adapt the eye with the help of unknown spiritual powers to observing the external world. This work on one's own soul, this development of the soul to the stage of perceiving a world in which we are not yet living but to which we gain access through what we bring to it—this training can be called asceticism in the true sense of the word. For in Greek the word means working on oneself, making oneself capable of accomplishing something, transforming sleeping forces into active ones. This original meaning of the word can still be its meaning today if we refuse to be led astray by the false use of the term which has become common down the centuries. We shall understand the true meaning of asceticism as described here, only if we remember that the purpose of this working on oneself is to develop faculties which will open up a new world.

Now, having discussed asceticism in relation to the spiritual world only, it will be helpful to see how the term applies to certain activities in the external world. There it can signify the training of certain forces and capabilities which are not going to be used immediately for their final purpose, but are first to be exercised and made ready for it. An example close at hand will illustrate this, and will also show how an incorrect use of the term can have harmful results. The term can be rightly applied to military manoeuvres; this is quite in keeping with the original Greek usage. The deployment and testing of military forces on these occasions, so that in real war they may be ready and available in the right numbers—that is asceticism exercise. Whenever forces are not used for their final purpose, but are tested in advance for efficiency and reliability, we have asceticism. Manoeuvres bear the same relation to warfare as asceticism does to life in general.

Human life, I said earlier, swings between work and idleness. But there are all sorts of intermediate stages: for example, play. Play, when it really is play, is the opposite of asceticism. And from its opposite one can see very well what asceticism is. Play is the active use of energies in the outer world for the sake of immediate gratification. The material of play is not, so to speak, the hard, unyielding substance of the external world that we encounter during hours of work. In relation to our energies it is malleable, amenable to our exertions. Play is play only when we do not knock up against the resistance of outer forces, as we do in work. Play is concerned with a direct release of energies which are transformed into achievement, and therein lies the satisfaction we get from it. Play does not prepare us for anything; it finds fulfillment in and through itself.

It is just the opposite with asceticism, if we take the term in its proper sense. In this case no gratification is gained from anything in the outer world. Whenever we combine things in asceticism, if only the cross and the red roses, the combination is not significant in itself, but only in so far as it calls our inner forces into activity, an activity which will find application only when it has ripened fully within ourselves. Renunciation comes in because we work inwardly on ourselves while knowing that at first we are not to be stimulated by the outer world. Our aim is to bring into activity our inner forces, so that they may be applied to the outer world later on. Play and asceticism, accordingly, are opposites.

How does asceticism, in our sense of the word, enter practically into human life? Let us keep to a sphere where asceticism can be practised both in a right and in a wrong way. We will take the case of someone who makes it his aim to ascend into spiritual worlds. If, then, a super-sensible world comes by some means or other to his attention, whether through another person or through some historical document, he may say: There are statements and communications concerning the super-sensible worlds, but at present they are beyond my comprehension; I lack the power to understand them. Then there are others who reject these communications, refuse to have anything to do with them. What is the source of this attitude? It arises because a person of this type rejects asceticism in the best sense of the word; he cannot find in his soul the strength to use the means I have described for developing higher faculties. He feels too weak for it.

I have repeatedly emphasised that clairvoyance is not necessary for understanding the findings of clairvoyant research. Clairvoyance is indeed necessary for gaining access to spiritual facts, but once the facts have been communicated, anyone can use unprejudiced reason to understand them. Impartial reason and healthy intellect are the best instruments for judging anything communicated from the spiritual worlds. A true spiritual scientist will always say that if he could be afraid of anything, he would be afraid of people who accept communications of this kind without testing them strictly by means of reason. He is never afraid of those who make use of unclouded intelligence, for that is what makes all these communications comprehensible.

However, a man may feel too weak to call forth in himself the forces necessary for understanding what he is told concerning the spiritual world. In that case he turns away from all this through an instinct for self-preservation which is right for him. He feels that to accept these communications would throw his mind into confusion. And in all cases where people reject what they hear through Spiritual Science, an instinct of self-preservation is at work; they know that they are incapable of doing the necessary exercises—that is, of practising asceticism in the true sense. A person prompted by the instinct for self-preservation will then say to himself: If these things were to permeate my spiritual life, they would confuse it; I could make nothing of them and therefore I reject them. So it is with a materialistic outlook which refuses to go a step beyond the doctrines of a science it believes to be firmly founded on facts. But there are other possibilities, and here we come to a dangerous side of asceticism. People may have a sort of avidity for information about the spiritual world while lacking the inner urge and conscience to test everything by reason and logic. They may indulge a liking for sensationalism in this field. Then they are not held back by an instinct for self-preservation, but are driven on by its very opposite, a sort of urge for self-annihilation. If anyone takes something into his soul without understanding it, and with no wish to apply his reason to it, he will be swamped by it. This happens in all cases of blind faith, or when communications from the spiritual worlds are accepted merely on authority. This acceptance corresponds to an asceticism which derives not from a healthy instinct for self-preservation, but from a morbid impulse to annihilate the self, to drown in a flood of revelations. This has a significant shadow-side in the human soul: it is a bad form of asceticism when someone gives up all effort and chooses to live in faith and in reliance on others.

This attitude has existed in many forms in many epochs. But we must not assume that everything which looks like blind faith is so. For example, we are told that in the old Pythagorean Mystery Schools⁴¹there was a familiar phrase: The Master has said. But this never meant: The Master has said, therefore we believe it! For his students it meant something like this: The Master has said; therefore it demands that we should reflect on it and see how far we can get with it if we bring all our forces to bear upon it. To “believe” need not always imply a blind belief springing from a desire for self-annihilation. It need not be blind belief if you accept communications springing from spiritual research because you trust the researcher. You may have learnt that his statements are in strictly logical form, and that in other realms, where his utterances can be tested, he is logical and does not talk nonsense. On this verifiable ground the student can hold a well-founded belief that the speaker, when he is talking about things not yet known to the student, has an equally sure basis for his statements. Hence the student can say: I will work! I have confidence in what I have been told, and this can be a guiding star for my endeavours to raise myself to the level of the faculties which will make themselves intelligible of their own accord, when I have worked my way up to them.

If this healthy foundation of trust is lacking and a person allows himself to be stirred by communications from the invisible worlds without understanding them, he will drift into a very wretched condition that is not compatible with asceticism. Whenever a person accepts something in blind faith without resolving to work his way to an understanding of it, and if therefore he accepts another person's will instead of his own, he will gradually lose those healthy soul-forces which provide the inner life with a sure centre and endow us with a true feeling for what is right. Lies and a proneness to error will beset a person who is unwilling to test inwardly, with his reason, what he is told; he will tend to drown and to lose himself in it. Anyone who does not allow himself to be guided by a healthy sense of truth will soon find how prone he is to lies and deceptions even in the outer world. When we approach the spiritual world we need to reflect very seriously that through this surrender of our judgment we can very easily fall into a life which no longer has any real feeling for truth and reality. If we seriously practise the exercises and wish to train our inner powers, we must never give up bringing before our souls the kind of knowledge I have been describing.

We can now penetrate further into what may be called the ascetic training of the soul in a deeper sense. So far we have considered only people who are not capable of developing these inner forces in a healthy way. In one case a sound instinct of self-preservation made a person refuse to develop these forces because he did not want to develop them; in the other case a person did not absolutely refuse to develop them, but he refused to bring his judgment and intelligence to bear on them. In all such cases the impulse is always to remain on the old level, at the old standpoint. But let us suppose a case where a person really does try to develop these inner faculties, and makes use of such forms of training as those we have described. Again there may be a dual result. It may be the result we always aim at, where Spiritual Science is taken seriously and worthily. A person will then be guided to develop his inner forces only in so far as he is capable of using them in a right and orderly way. Here, then, we are concerned with how a person has to work on himself—as is described in greater detail in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved?—in order to awaken the faculties which will open the spiritual world to his inner sight. But at the same time he must be competent to discipline his faculties and to establish the right balance between his work on himself and his dealings with the outer world. The necessity of this has been proved by spiritual researchers down the ages.

If a person fails to apply his inner forces properly to his handling of the outer world and gives way to an almost uncontrollable urge to develop his soul-powers more and more to bring about all possible movement in his soul, so that he may thereby open his spirit-eyes and spirit-ears; and if he is too indolent to absorb slowly and in the right way the available facts of Spiritual Science and to work on them with his reason, then his asceticism may do him great harm. A person can develop all sorts of faculties and powers and yet not know what to do with them or how to apply them to the outer world. This, indeed, is the outcome of many forms of training and it applies to those who fail to pursue energetically the methods we have described, whereby the student is continually strengthening himself.

There are other methods with a different aim: they may be more comfortable but they can easily cause harm. Such methods aim at doing away with the hindrances imposed on the soul by the bodily nature, in order to enhance the inner life. This was in fact the sole endeavour of mediaeval ascetics, and it survives in part today. Instead of true asceticism, which sets out to give the soul an ever-richer content, false asceticism leaves the soul as it is and sets out to weaken the body and to reduce the activity of its forces. There are indeed ways of damping down these forces, so that the functioning of the body gradually weakens, and the result may then be that the soul, though itself remaining weak, gets the upper hand over the weakened body. A correct asceticism leaves the body as it is and enables the soul to master it; the other asceticism leaves the soul as it is, while all sorts of procedures, fasting, mortifications and so on, are used to weaken the body. The soul is then relatively the stronger and can achieve a kind of consciousness, although its own powers have not increased. That is the way of many ascetics in the Middle Ages: they kill the vigour of the body, lower its activities, leave the soul as it is, and then live in the expectation that the content of the spiritual world will be revealed to them with no contribution on their part.

That is the easier method, but it is not a truly strengthening one. The true method requires a person to cleanse and purify his thinking, feeling and willing, so that these faculties will be strengthened and able to prevail over the body. The other method lowers the tone of the body, and the soul is then supposed to wait, without having acquired any new capacities, until the divine world flows into it.

You will find plenty of references to this method under the heading of “asceticism” in the Middle Ages. It leads to estrangement from the world and is bound to do so. For at the present stage of human evolution there is a certain relationship between our capabilities of perception and the outer world, and if we are to rise above this stage we can do so only by heightening our capabilities and using them to understand the outer world in its deeper significance. But if we weaken our normal forces, we make ourselves incapable of maintaining a normal relationship with the outer world; and especially if we tone down our thinking, feeling and willing and give our souls over to passive expectation, something will then flow into our souls which has no connection with our present-day world, makes us strangers there, and is useless for working in the world. While the true asceticism makes us more and more capable in our dealings with the world, for we see more and more deeply into it, the other asceticism, associated with the suppression of bodily functions, draws a person out of the world, tends to make him a hermit, a mere settler there. In this isolation he may see all sorts of psychic and spiritual things—this must not be denied—but an asceticism of this kind is of no use for the world. True asceticism is work, training for the world, not a withdrawal of oneself into remoteness from the world.

This does not imply that we have to go to the opposite extreme; there can be accommodation on both sides. Even though it is true in general that for our period in human evolution a certain normal relationship exists between the external world and the forces of the soul, yet every period tends to drive the normal to extremes as it were, and if we want to develop higher faculties we need pay no attention to opposition that comes from abnormal trends. And because we find the opposition in ourselves, we can under certain circumstances go rather further than would be necessary if the times were not also at fault.

I say this because you have perhaps heard that many followers of Spiritual Science lay great stress on a certain diet. This does not at all imply that such a mode of life can do anything for the attainment or even the understanding of higher worlds and higher relationships. It can be no more than an external aid, and should be seen only in relation to the fact that anyone wishing to gain understanding of the higher worlds may find a certain obstacle in the customs and conventions he has to live with at the present day. Because these conventions have drawn us down too deeply into the material world, we must go beyond the normal in order to make the exercises easier. But it would be quite mistaken to regard this as a form of asceticism which can be a means of leading us to higher worlds. Vegetarianism will never lead anyone to higher worlds; it can be no more than a support for someone who thinks to himself: I wish to open for myself certain ways of understanding the spiritual worlds; I am hindered by the heaviness of my body, which prevents the exercises from having an immediate effect. Hence I will make things easier by lightening my body. Vegetarianism is one way of producing this result, but it should never be presented as a dogma; it is only a means which can help some people to gain understanding of the spiritual worlds. No-one should suppose that a vegetarian way of life will enable him to develop spiritual powers. For it leaves the soul as it is and serves only to weaken the body. But if the soul is strengthened, it will be able though the effects of vegetarianism to strengthen the weakened body from the centre of its own forces. Anyone who develops spiritually with the aid of vegetarianism will be stronger, more efficient and more resistant in daily life; he will be not merely a match for any meat-eater but will be superior in working capacity. That is the very opposite of what is believed by many people when they say of vegetarians within a spiritual movement: How sad for these poor folk who can never enjoy a little bit of meat!

So long as a person has this feeling about vegetarianism, it will not bring him the slightest benefit. So long as a desire for meat persists, vegetarianism is useless. It is helpful only when it results from an attitude that I will illustrate with a little story.

Not very long ago, someone was asked: “Why don't you eat meat?” He replied with a counter-question: “Why don't you eat dogs or cats?” “One just can't”, was the answer. “Why can't you?” “Because I would find it disgusting.” “Well, that is just what I feel about all meat.”

That is the point. When pleasure in eating meat has gone, then to abstain from meat may be of some use in relation to the spiritual worlds.

Until then, breaking the meat-eating habit can be helpful only for getting rid of the desire for meat. If the desire persists, it may be better to start eating meat again, for to go on tormenting oneself about it is certainly not the right way to reach an understanding of Spiritual Science.

From all this you can see the difference between true and false asceticism. False asceticism often attracts people whose sole desire is to develop the inner forces and faculties of the soul; they are indifferent towards gaining real knowledge of the outer world. Their aim is simply to develop their inner faculties and then to wait and see what comes of it. The best way of doing this is to mortify the body as far as possible, for this weakens it, and then the soul, though itself remaining weak, can see into some kind of spiritual world, however incapable it may be of understanding the real spiritual world. This, however, is a path of deception, for directly a person closes off his means of return to the physical world, he encounters no true spiritual world, but only delusive pictures of his own self. And these are what he is bound to encounter as long as he leaves his soul as it is. Because his ego keeps to its accustomed standpoint, it does not rise to higher powers, and he puts up a barrier between himself and the world by suppressing the functions which relate him to the world. It is not only that this kind of asceticism estranges him from the world; he sees pictures which can deceive him as to the stage his soul has reached, and in place of a true spiritual world he sees a picture clouded over by his own self.

There is a further consequence which leads into the realm of morality. Anyone who believes that humility and surrender to the spiritual world will set him on the right course of life fails to see that he is involving himself most strongly in his own self and becoming an egoist in the worst sense, for it means that he is content with himself as he is and has no wish to progress any further. This egoism, which can degenerate into unrestrained ambition and vanity, is the more dangerous because the victim of it cannot see it for himself. Generally he looks on himself as a man who sinks down in deepest humility at the feet of his God, while really he is being played on by the devil of megalomania. A genuine humility would tell him something he refuses to recognise, for it would lead him to say to himself: The powers of the spiritual world are not to be found at the stage where I am standing now: I must climb up to them; I must not rest content with the powers I already have.

So we see the results of the false asceticism which relies primarily on killing off external things instead of strengthening the inner life: it conduces to deception, error, vanity and egotism. In our time, especially, it would be a great evil if this course were followed as a means of entering the spiritual world. It serves merely to engross man in himself. Today the only true asceticism must be sought in modern Spiritual Science, founded on the firm ground of reality. Through it a person can develop his own faculties and forces and thus rise to a comprehension of a spiritual world which is itself a real world, not one that a man spins round himself.

This false asceticism has yet another shadow-side. If you look at the realms of nature around us, leading up from plants through animals to man, you will find the vital functions changing in character stage by stage. For example, the diseases of plants come only from some external cause, from abnormal conditions of wind and weather, light and sunshine. These external circumstances can produce illness in plants. If we go on to consider animals, we find that they also, if left to themselves are greatly superior to human beings in their fund of natural health. A human being may fall ill not only through the life he leads or through external circumstances, but also as a result of his inner life. If his soul is not well suited to his body, if the spiritual heritage he brings from earlier incarnations cannot adapt itself completely to his bodily constitution, these inner causes may bring about illnesses which are very often wrongly diagnosed. They can be symptoms of a maladjustment between soul and body.

We often find that people with these symptoms are inclined to rise to higher worlds by killing off their bodily nature. This is because the illness itself induces them to separate their souls from bodies which the soul has not fully permeated. In such people the body hardens itself in the most varied ways and closes in on itself; and since they have not strengthened the soul, but have used its weakness in order to escape from the influence of the bodily nature, and have thus drawn away from the body the health-giving strengthening forces of the soul, the body is made susceptible to all sorts of ailments. While a true asceticism strengthens the soul, which then works back on the body and makes it resistant to illness coming from outside, a false asceticism makes a person vulnerable to any illness of that kind.

That is the dangerous connection between false asceticism and the illnesses of our time. And it is this that gives rise in wide circles, where such things are easily misunderstood, to manifold errors as to the influence a spiritual-scientific outlook can have on those who adopt it. For people who seek to come to a sight of the spiritual world by way of a false asceticism are a fearful spectacle for onlookers. Their false asceticism opens up a wide field of action for harmful influences from the outer world. For these people, far from being strengthened to resist the errors of our time, are well and truly exposed to them.

Examples of this can be seen in many theosophical tendencies today. Merely calling oneself a “Theosophist” does not automatically guarantee the ability to act as a spiritual impulse against the adverse currents of the present time. When materialism prevails in the world, it is to some extent in tune with the concepts which are formed in observing the sense-world. Hence we can say that the materialism which applies to the external world and knows nothing of a spiritual world is in a certain sense justified. But in the case of an outlook which sets out to impart something about the spiritual world and takes into itself a caricature of the materialistic prejudices of our day because it is not founded on a real strengthening of spiritual forces, the result is much worse. A theosophical outlook permeated by contemporary errors may in some circumstances be much more harmful than a materialistic outlook; and it should be remarked that thoroughly materialistic concepts have spread widely in theosophical circles. So we hear the spiritual spoken of not as Spirit, but as though the spirit were only an infinitely refined form of nebulous matter. In speaking of the etheric body, these people picture only the physical refined beyond a certain point, and then they speak of etheric “vibrations”. On the astral level the vibrations are still finer; on the mental level they are finer still, and so on. “Vibrations” everywhere! Anyone who relies on these concepts will never attain to the spiritual world; he will remain embedded in the physical world to which these concepts ought to be confined.

In this way a materialistic haze can be thrown over the most ordinary occasions in daily life. For instance, if we are at a social gathering which has a pleasant atmosphere, with people in harmony, and someone remarks on it in those terms, that may be a humdrum way of putting it; but it is a true way and leads to a better understanding than if at a gathering of theosophists one of them says how good the vibrations are. To say that, one has to be a theosophical materialist with crude ideas. And for anyone with a feeling for such things, the whole atmosphere goes out of tune when these vibrations are said to be dancing around. In these cases one can see how the introduction of materialistic ideas into a spiritual outlook produces a horrifying impression on outsiders, who may then say: These people talk about a spiritual world, but they are really no different from us. With us, the light waves dance; with them the spiritual waves dance. It is all the same materialism.

All this needs to be seen in its true light. Then we shall not get a wrong idea of what the spiritual-scientific movement has to offer in our time. We shall see that asceticism, by strengthening the soul, can itself lead to the spiritual world and so bring new forces into our material existence. These are forces that make for health, not for illness; they carry healthy life-forces into our bodily organism. Of course it is not easy to determine how far a given outlook brings healthy or unhealthy forces with it, for the latter are strongly evident, as a rule, while healthy forces are usually not noticed. However, a close observer will see how persons who stand in the stream of true Spiritual Science are fertilised by it and draw from it health-giving forces which work right down into the physical. He will see also that signs of illness appear only if something alien to a spiritual stream is introduced into it. Then the result can be worse than when the alien influence takes its course in the outer world, where people are shielded by conventions from carrying certain errors to an extreme.

If we see things in this light, we shall understand true asceticism as a preparatory training for a higher life, a way of developing our inner forces; and we shall then be taking the good old Greek word in its right sense. For to practise asceticism means training oneself, making oneself strong, even “adorning” oneself (sich schmucken), so that the world can see what it means to be human. But if asceticism leads you to leave the soul as it is and to weaken the bodily organism, the effect is that the soul is sundered from the body; the body is then exposed to all sorts of harmful influences and the asceticism is actually the source of all manner of ailments.

The good and bad sides of egoism will emerge when we come to consider its nature. Today I have shown how true asceticism can never be an end in itself, but only a means of reaching a higher human goal, the conscious experiencing of higher worlds. Anyone wishing to practise this asceticism must therefore keep his feet firmly planted on solid ground. He must not be a stranger to the world in which he lives, but must always be extending his knowledge of the world. Whatever he can bring back from higher worlds must always be measured and assessed in relation to his work in the world; otherwise those who say that asceticism is not work but idleness could well be right. And idleness can easily give occasion for false asceticism, especially in our time. Anyone, however, who keeps a firm foothold on the earth, will regard asceticism as his highest ideal in relation to so serious a subject as our human faculties. Our ideas can indeed rise high if we have before us an ideal picture of how our faculties should work in the world.

Let us look for a moment at the opening of the Old Testament: “And God said, Let there be light.” Then we hear how God caused the physical sense-world to arise day by day from the spiritual, and how at the end of each day God looked at his creation and “saw that it was good.”

Similarly we must maintain our healthy thinking, our reliable character, our unerring feelings on the firm ground of reality, in order that we may rise to higher worlds and discover there the facts which give birth to the entire physical world. Then, when as searchers we come to know the spirit, and when we apply to the world around us the forces we have developed and see how well adapted to it they are, we can see that this is good. If we test the forces we have acquired through true asceticism by putting them to work in the world, then we have the right to say: Yes, they are good.

• 35. For his concept of asceticism see The World as Will and Representation, Book IV. Particularly from par. 68.
• 36. Cf. also the chapter “Sleep and Death” in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline.
• 37. Cf. also the chapter “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline.
• 38. Last verse of the poem “Selige Sehnsucht” from the Westöstliche Divan.
• 39. See note 20.
• 40. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Second Division, Book 11, Chapter III, Section 4: “The impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God”.
• 41. Pythagoras of Samos, c. 580–495 B.C. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Riddles of Philosophy.

I would well understand if anybody considered the whole idea of this talk as an aberration. I would also understand if anybody said how one can abuse Goethe's name while making a relationship to spiritual science, because it is sufficiently known that Goethe's view is typical just because it is directed to the outer nature, and it regarded it as rather dubious to raise the lawfulness of the world to ideal heights, as Schiller did it. Then one can say how Goethe would have behaved negatively if one had related his mental pictures to that which accepts a concrete real spirit from particular inner experiences that places itself beside the natural world. I know very well that to the production of such relation such a rich spirit can be abused like Goethe. Since if one still brings in so many remarks of Goethe to confirm this or that own view, it is always possible of course to bring in other remarks of Goethe to confirm the opposite opinion. However, compared with all that I am allowed to mention from the start that I never wanted in case of my really long-standing occupation with Goethe and the Goethean worldview to state these or those contents of a Goethean sentence to confirm the worldview meant here. I always wanted to characterise the whole way, the inner structure of Goethe's soul life in its relation to the natural phenomena. Since it seems to me if one goes into the inner structure of Goethe's nature that one will also gain an understanding of the fact that such a spirit like Goethe expressed apparently opposite views about the same. One can always easily argue something can from the most different sides against the intention to connect Goethe with the investigation of spiritual life.

At first the philosophers feel called because of their ability of thinking if it concerns the investigation of the supersensible compared with the sensory. One has always reminded that Goethe characterised the whole way of his position to the world repeatedly while he said, he owes everything that he got as knowledge about the world to the fact that he never thought about thinking. With it, the whole philosophical attitude of Goethe seems to be condemned to many philosophically thinking people.

It seems necessary to reject Goethe's nature for the investigation of the world as far as one has to exceed with such an investigation what it presents immediately to the senses. On the other side, religious people who want to direct the soul to a world that is beyond the sensory, of course, are irked by such a concise sentence as he did. He always felt it unpleasant to the highest degree to speak of things of another world. He expresses himself even once about the fact in such a way that he says, as a spot is in the eye, which sees, actually, nothing, a cavity is in the human brain. If this hollow place, which actually sees nothing, dreams all kinds of stuff in the world, so one speaks of such nullities like of the things of another world. When Goethe said this, he also pointed to the fact, that such a person inclined to the spiritual like Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was worried if one spoke only of the things of another world. Goethe agrees with Hamann in this respect completely. In the most vigorous way, Goethe refused to speak of the things of another world. Yes, the naturalists themselves, although on them the influence of Goethe has worked strongly, can refer if they stand quite sincerely on the ground of modern natural sciences to the fact that Goethe showed, for example, in his theory of colours that he never could penetrate into the strictly scientific way of research that this never was adequate to him, and that he came just thereby to a view deviating from the ruling theory of colours.

Now here it cannot be my task to justify the Goethean natural sciences. I have done this in a number of writings. Today it should be only my task to attach some connections from spiritual science to the Goethean natural sciences. Above all, I would like to go back to something that is exceptionally typical with this spirit for someone who approaches Goethe: the refusal of thinking about thinking. One has the sensation with the Goethean worldview where one only wants to recognise it, that Goethe himself was afraid instinctively of submitting the thinking itself to a consideration. He shrank from it as from something that constitutes, otherwise, the strength of his worldview. At such a place where Goethe characterises himself, you have to stop, because you can rather deeply look from here into the structure of the Goethean mind. If one considers just philosophically disposed people who have struggled with that which the thinking means for the human soul, you can realise if you make the thinking an object of observation like other objects of our world experience that you always evoke something in the soul that appears like an insurmountable obstacle. While you direct the thinking to the thinking itself, you cause a sum of uncertainties in the human being. Although you have always to ask yourself if you want to investigate the supersensible seriously: is this human thinking able to penetrate into the spiritual world?—You still face doubt, indecision.

As a single factual proof of it which could be increased a hundred times I would like to quote the sentence of a thinker who is less famous, indeed, who, however, is counted by those who know him among the deepest ones, among the most impressive thinkers of our time, Professor Gideon Spicker (1840-1912), the philosopher with the strange destiny who has worked his way out of a confessional ecclesiastical worldview to a free philosophical viewpoint. You can pursue how there once a thinking really soared by own power from a traditional viewpoint to a free one if you read his book At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. The Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin that appeared in 1910 as a kind of philosophical autobiography. You find the following sentence there that describes a self-experience with the thinking:

“To whichever philosophy you confess—whether to a dogmatic or skeptical one, to an empiric or transcendental one, to a critical or eclectic one—any without exception takes an unproven and unprovable sentence as starting point, namely the necessity of the thinking. No investigation figures this necessity out one day, as deeply as it may prospect. One must accept it and one can reason it with nothing; every attempt to prove its correctness already requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a spooky darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know where from it comes nor where to it leads. It is uncertain whether a merciful god or a bad demon put it in the reason.”

This is a self-experience of a thinking which tried to bring to mind what is, actually, a thinking which has struggled to grasp the human being in the point where it thinks to find that in this point where the temporal, the transient of the human being is connected with the everlasting. To this point everybody must come who wants to approach the everlasting nature of the human being. However, what does Gideon Spicker find? He finds if one has arrived at the place where one can consider the thinking, indeed, the necessity of the thinking appears, but there also a bottomless abyss appears. Since beyond this thinking—what is there? Is it a merciful god or a bad demon who put the thinking in the reason? An abyss, a desolate darkness is that what Gideon Spicker sees. One can find out immediately that those who cannot get further with the pursuit of thinking than up to the thinking cannot still satisfy themselves within this thinking.

All that is like a spiritually instinctive experience in Goethe's healthy worldview. One cannot say that he was prepared in his inside one day to bring the bottomless abyss home to himself of which Gideon Spicker speaks. However, Goethe felt that such a thing could happen if one wants to solve the world riddles only with the mere thinking. Hence, he did not approach at all this point. We will see immediately which deeper impulses formed the basis of this Goethean instinct. For the time being I only wanted to point out that Goethe was very well at that point where the philosophers are if they want to investigate the everlasting in the human being and in the world that he avoided, however, this point, did not approach it.

You can understand Goethe's character immediately if he does not defer to things of another world. There just the oppose impulse appears with him who argued from immediate spiritual instinctiveness that one does not need to go out of the world which presents itself immediately to the senses to find the spirit. Goethe was clear in his mind that someone who is able to find the spirit does not need to search it in another world, and vice versa, that someone who feels nature as little filled with spirit so that he needs to reflect on another world can only find fantastic, dreamy things in another world but never really the spirit. Goethe searched the spirit so much within the things of this world that he had to refuse to search it in any other world. He already regarded the feeling that one must leave this world to get to the spirit as something brainless.

In particular, you get an impression of the kind of the Goethean world observation if you look at how Goethe behaved to the phenomena of nature how he searched the spirit and the spiritual life really in nature. You know that Goethe did not study the various fields of natural sciences during his school years but approached them only later in his life and that he had to manage the phenomena of nature with mental pictures that he had compiled in his life. Herman Grimm emphasised rightly as a significant characteristic feature in the life of Goethe that, while others are introduced by teachers gradually methodically in this or that scientific approach, Goethe approached scientific attempts as a ripe man by life praxis, so that he had to form own mental pictures of these or those natural phenomena with a certain maturity.

As a rule, he got to mental pictures, which deviated significantly from that what about the same things just the authoritative scientists of his time meant. One can say that the Goethean viewpoint is diametrically opposed not only to the natural sciences of his time but also to the natural sciences of the present in a certain respect.

It is inadmissible if from some side single remarks of Goethe are picked out repeatedly to prove the views of Haeckel or also of his opponents one-sidedly. One can prove and confirm everything with Goethe if one wants it. Goethe got to botany because he wanted to care about the agriculture in the Grand Duchy of Weimar, so out of life praxis. He got to geology by the Ilmenau (little town in Thuringia) mining, to physics because the scientific collections of the University of Jena had been assigned to him. Therefore, from necessity of life he tried to get mental pictures by which he could penetrate into the secrets of nature. You know that he formed views this way that found their confirmation partly in the course of the nineteenth century, as far as they point to outer scientific facts. However, Goethe did not get these views like other naturalists, but rather he was urged by his enclosing way of thinking to think in a way about certain natural processes and essentialities. You can say that immediately with his first, epoch-making discovery this is the case.

When Goethe became acquainted with zoology and human biology by observing the anatomical and physiological collections in Jena, he also familiarised himself with all kinds of teachings which were usual in natural sciences at that time about the human being as sensory being. One looked in those days still for outer differences of the human being and the animals. One looked in a way that the modern natural sciences do no longer understand.

One linked, for example, the difference to a detail, while one stated that in the upper jaw of the human being no intermaxillary existed, while all higher animals would have this bone. Goethe disliked this, simply because he could not imagine at first that the remaining skeleton of the human being would differ in such an unimportant detail. Now Goethe looked, while he himself became an anatomical researcher, while he investigated skeleton after skeleton and compared the human construction to the animals in relation to the upper jaw whether that had an inner significance what the anatomists said. Then Goethe could show really that there is no difference between the human and the animal skeletons in this respect. He already consulted the embryological research that became especially important later and showed that with the human being relatively early during the embryonic development the other parts of the upper jaw grow together with the intermaxillary so that it does not seem to exist with the human being. Goethe had become clear in his mind that it was right what he had felt first that the human being is different from the animals not by such an anatomical detail, but only by his whole posture. Of course, Goethe thereby did not become a materialistic thinker. However, he could get closer to the ideas that immediately suggested themselves to him, above all, by his acquaintance with Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803) who wanted to extend an enclosing way of thinking to all world phenomena, so that the evolution of the world shows an inner necessity that finally generates the human being at its summit.

How can one imagine, Goethe thought in harmony with Herder, that in the evolution a big harmony, an inner lawful necessity prevails, and that then suddenly somewhere a line is drawn so that on this side of the line the complete animal development is and beyond this line the human development which should be different by such an unimportant detail? One can realise from how Goethe speaks, what was near and dear to him, actually. Not to make a single scientific discovery, but to behold a harmonious order in the whole enclosing nature, so that the details put themselves everywhere in a whole so that jumps are nowhere to be found in the evolution of the world. You can notice in a letter to Herder in which he informed his discovery joyfully with the words: “It is there too, the small bone!” that Goethe found something like a confirmation of his worldview in this single fact.

He continued this view just in relation on the animal forms. There he got also to single facts that were important, however, for him not as those, but confirmed his worldview only. He himself tells that he found an animal skull at his stay in Venice on a cemetery that showed him clearly that the cranial bones are nothing but transformed vertebrae. He thought that the ring-shaped vertebrae contain concealed possibilities of growth, can be transformed into the cranial bones that surround the brain. Goethe thereby got to the idea that the human being and the animal, the different beings of organic life generally, are built from relatively simple entities that develop in living metamorphosis into each other or diverge.

One can immediately receive the sensation with the research intentions of Goethe that he wanted to apply this idea of metamorphosis not only to the skeleton, but also to all other parts of the human being. He could carry out his research only on a special field because one human being cannot do everything, and because he worked with limited research means. Someone who knows Goethe's scientific writings knows that Goethe carefully indicated the cranial bones as transformed dorsal vertebrae. However, one can just have the feeling that Goethe's ideas advanced farther in this field. He would generally have had to carry the view in his mind that the complete human brain is only a transformed part of the spinal cord as a physical-sensory organ that the human formative forces are able to transform what is only a part of the spinal cord on a low level into the complex human brain.

I had this feeling when I received the task in the end of 1889 to incorporate the handwritten notes in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive into Goethe's scientific writings published until then. It was especially interesting to me to pursue whether such ideas have really lived in Goethe from which one could have the feeling that they must have been there, actually, with him. In particular, it interested me whether Goethe really had the idea to regard the brain as a transformed part of the spinal cord. Lo and behold, with the examination of the manuscripts it really resulted that Goethe had written the following sentence in a notebook with pencil like an intuition: “The brain is only a transformed cerebral ganglion.” Then the anatomist Bardeleben (Karl von B., 1849-1919) revised this part of Goethe's scientific writings.

Then Goethe applied the same way of thinking to the plant realm. There his views concerning the outer facts have found just as little contradiction as in anatomy. Goethe interprets, actually, the whole plant as composed of a single organ. This organ is the leaf. Backward and forward, the plant is always leaf. The coloured petal is the transformed green leaf, also the stamens and the pistil are to him only transformed leaves, and everything of the plant is leaf. That what lives in the plant leaf as formative force can accept all possible outer forms. Goethe explained this so nicely in his writing Metamorphosis of Plants (1790).

Howsoever one may behave now to the details with Goethe, the way is important how he generally did research. This was and is to many people something strange. Goethe himself was clear about that. Imagine how the human soul that looks at the organic world in Goethe's sense sees such an organ like the plant leaf changing into the petal, then into the filamentous stamen, even into the root. Imagine a simple ring-shaped dorsal vertebra fluffed and flattened by laws of growth, so that it is qualified for enclosing not only the spinal cord, but also the brain which itself is transformed from a part of the spinal cord, and that the inner mobility of his thinking is necessary. He probably felt what prevents us from looking at the world phenomena this way. Someone who has a rigid thinking who wants to develop sharply outlined concepts only forms the firm concept of the green leaf, of the petal and so on; however, he cannot go over from one concept to the other. In doing so, nature breaks into nothing but details. He does not have the possibility because his concepts have no inner mobility to penetrate into the inner mobility of nature.

However, thereby you become able to settle down in Goethe's soul and to convince yourself of the fact that with him cognition is generally something else than with many other people. While with many other people, cognition is joining of concepts which they form apart, cognition is with Goethe immersing in the world of the beings, pursuing that what grows and becomes and transforms perpetually, so that his thinking changes perpetually. Briefly, Goethe sets that in inner motion, which is mere thinking, otherwise. Then it is no longer a mere thinking. About that, I will speak in detail in the next talks. It matters that the human being arouses the only inferring thinking to the inner living thinking. Then thinking is a life in thoughts. Then one can also no longer think about the thinking, but then it generally changes into something else.

Then the thinking about the thinking changes into a spiritual view of thinking, then one faces the thinking as usual outer sensory objects, save that one perceives these with eyes and ears, while one faces the thinking mentally. Goethe wanted to go over everywhere from the mere thinking to the inner spiritual views, to the beholding consciousness as I have called it in my book The Riddle of Man. Hence, Goethe is dissatisfied because Kant said that the human being cannot approach the so-called “things in themselves” or generally the secret of existence, and that Kant called it an “adventure of reason” if the human being wants to ascend from the usual faculty of judgement up to the “beholding faculty of judgement.”

Goethe said, if one accepts that the human being can ascend by virtue and immortality—the so-called postulates of practical reason with Kant—to a higher region, why one should not stand the “adventure of reason” courageously while beholding nature? Goethe demands from the human being this beholding faculty of judgement. From this point, one can understand why Goethe avoided the thinking about the thinking. Goethe knew that if one wants to think about the thinking one is, actually, in the same position, as if one wanted to paint the painting. One could imagine that anybody wants to paint the painting even that he does it. However, then he exceeds the real painting.

In the same way, you have to exceed the thinking if it should become concrete. Goethe knew from a spiritual instinct that the human being can wake concealed forces and abilities in himself and get to the beholding consciousness, so that the spiritual world is around him, just as, otherwise, the sensory world is around his senses. Then you leave as it were not only your usual sensory life but also your usual thinking. Then you look at the thinking as a reality. You cannot think the thinking; you can behold it. Hence, Goethe always understood if philosophers approached him who believed to have the ability to look at the thinking spiritually. He could never understood if people stated, they could think about the thinking. Only a higher ability lets the thinking appear before the human being. Goethe had this ability. This simply shows the kind of his view of nature. Since the ability to put the thinking in living motion to pursue the metamorphosis of the things is on a lower level the same as the beholding consciousness on a higher level. Goethe felt thinking while looking. However, Goethe had a special peculiarity.

There are certain persons who have a kind of naive clairvoyance, a kind of naive beholding consciousness. Now it is far from my mind to state that Goethe had a kind of naive beholding consciousness only, but Goethe had a special disposition by which he differs from someone who only is able to get to the beholding consciousness by the conscious development of the deeper abilities of his soul. Goethe had this beholding consciousness not from the start as the naive clairvoyants have it, but he could put his thinking, the whole structure of his soul in such a motion that he could do research really not only externally and got thereby to physical laws grasped in thoughts, but he could pursue the inner life of the natural phenomena in their metamorphoses.

It is peculiar that this predisposition, if one wants to develop the ability of the spiritual beholding consciously, is impaired at first, it is even extinguished. Goethe had this natural predisposition in himself to develop a certain beholding consciousness gradually in himself with natural phenomena. He did not want such rules, as I have described them in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Goethe did not have the beholding consciousness from the start, but in the course of his development it was to him a self-evident fact to develop certain abilities unlike other people do. This naive talent would have been extinguished at first. If the talent does not exist, one does not want to extinguish it, and then one can quietly develop these abilities consciously. Because it existed with Goethe as an inner spiritual desire, he did not want to disturb it; he wanted that it was left to itself. Hence, his shyness to look at the thinking, which he only wanted to behold, with the thinking. Otherwise, one has to try to go to the point of thinking to grasp the thoughts themselves and to transform them gradually into forces of beholding.

This is a special peculiarity of Goethe that he felt those forces growing up which can be also developed artificially. He did not want to destroy this naive while he spread, I would like to say, too much consciousness about it. However, this shows that it is not unjustified to observe not only how his soul forces work internally, but also how his soul forces immerse in nature. Then without fail Goethe is a model of the development of the beholding consciousness, of those spiritual forces, which really lead into the spiritual world, into the everlasting.

If you settle in Goethe's natural sciences in such a way that you observe them not only externally, but that you try to observe how you yourself become, actually, if you activate such forces in yourself, you can also transfer that what Goethe pursued with his view of nature to the human soul itself. Then comes to light what Goethe omitted because his senses were directed outward at first, to nature which he considered spiritually in her spirituality, namely that one has to look at the human soul life also under the viewpoint of metamorphosis. Goethe became aware of nature due to his special predisposition, and because this predisposition was especially strong, he looked less after the soul life.

However, you can apply his way of looking at the world to the soul life. Then you are led beyond the mere thinking. Most people who deal with these things simply do not believe this. They believe that one can think about the soul exactly the same way as one can think about something else. However, one can direct thoughts only to that what can be perceived outwardly. If you want to look back at the soul itself, on that what activates the human thinking, then you cannot do it with the thoughts. You need the beholding consciousness that exceeds the mere thinking; you get to the Imaginative knowledge, as I called it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other books. One cannot apply the same abstract, pale thoughts with which one grasps nature to the human soul life. One simply does not grasp it with them. Such thoughts are like a sieve, through which you pass the human soul life.

This occurred once in a great historical moment when Goethe and Schiller (1759-1805, German poet) met. Just in this point, you can realise what happens if you want to enter from Goethe's view of nature into a soul view. Schiller had written an important treatise, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794). I want to indicate only briefly, which soul riddle Schiller had in mind. Schiller wanted to solve the problem of the artistic. He wanted to answer the question to himself: what happens, actually, in the human soul if the human being creates or feels artistically if he puts himself in the world of beauty? Schiller found, if the human being is only given away to his sensory drives, he is subject to the physical necessity.

As far as the human being is subject to the physical necessity, he cannot approach beauty and art. Also, not if he dedicates himself only to the thinking if he follows the logical necessity only. However, there is a middle state, Schiller thinks. If the human being impregnates everything that the sensory gives him with his being so that it becomes like the pure spirituality, if he raises the sensory to spirituality and presses the spirituality down into the sensory, so that the sensory becomes spiritual and the spiritual becomes sensory, then he is in beauty, then he is in the artistic. The necessity seems to be reduced by the desire, and the desire seems to be improved by the spirit. Schiller spoke a lot about his intention to Goethe to invigorate the human soul forces so that in the harmony of the single soul forces this middle state appears which enables the human being to create or feel the artistic. In the nineties, from the deeper acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller on, this important life riddle played a big role in the correspondence and in the conversations of Schiller and Goethe. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller tried to solve this problem philosophically. Goethe also dealt with this problem because this problem occupied Schiller so much. But Goethe had the beholding consciousness which Schiller did not have; this enabled him to submerge with his thoughts in the world of the things themselves, but also to grasp the soul life more intimately.

He could realise that the human soul life is much more extensive, is much more immense than that what one can grasp with abstract thoughts, as Schiller did in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Goethe did not want simply to put such dashes, such contours of thoughts to characterise this richly structured human soul life. Thus, a little work of quite different nature originated about the same problem.

It is very interesting to consider more closely this point of the acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller. What did Schiller want, actually? Schiller wanted to show that in every human being a higher human being lives, as compared with what the usual consciousness encloses is a lower one. Schiller wanted to announce this higher human being who carries his desires up to the spirit and brings the spirit down to the desires, so that the human being, while he connects the spiritual and sensory necessities, grasps himself in a new way and appears as a higher human being in the human being. Goethe did not want to be so abstract. However, Goethe also wanted to strive for what lives as a higher human being within the human being. This higher being in the human being appeared to him so rich in its single member that he could not grasp it with mere thinking, so he put it in mighty, important pictures. Thus, The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) originated from forms at the end of Conversations of German Emigrants.

Someone who symbolises a lot in this fairy tale does not come close to its deeper sense. The different figures of this fairy tale, they are about twenty, are the soul forces, personified in their living cooperation which lift the human being beyond themselves and to the higher human being. This lives in the composition of The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Only in pictures, Goethe could grasp the problem that Schiller grasped in thoughts philosophically; but in pictures which are an entire world.

You do not need to grasp the soul life pedantically only in Goethean way, so, actually, only in poetic pictures, but one realises—just if one goes into the inner structure of the Goethean worldview if one applies this to the soul life in same way, as Goethe applied his ramble spirituality in the metamorphosis—that the metamorphosis of the soul forces grasps the human being vividly and leads him from the transient that he experiences in the body to the imperishable that he experiences as that which is in his inside and goes through births and deaths. The usual psychology deals a lot with the question: should one take the one or the other soul force as starting point? Is the will original, is the imagination, or is the thinking original? How should one imagine the mutual relation of imagination, thinking, feeling, and percipience? One applied a lot of astuteness to grasp the cooperation of the different soul forces in such a way as the outer natural sciences grasp the interaction of green leaf and petal or the interaction of cranial bones and cerebral ones without considering the inner transformation.

Somebody who can turn his view from the outside inwards with Goethean sense can behold the soul life; however, he has to do it even more vividly than to the outer life of nature because one can rest in the outer life as it were with the spiritual view. The outer life gives you the material; you can go from creation to creation. The inner life seems to disappear perpetually if you want to look at it. However, if you turn the ramble thinking inwards, which just becomes a beholding one, then that becomes what appears as thinking, feeling, willing, and as perceiving, nothing but something intrinsic that changes into each other. The will becomes a metamorphosis of the feeling, the feeling a metamorphosis of imagining, the imagining a metamorphosis of the perceiving and vice versa.

The development of the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, of the meditative thinking, which leads into the spiritual world, is based on nothing but on the living pursuit of the inner metamorphoses of the soul forces. On one side that tries who wants to become a spiritual researcher to develop his imagination, his percipience in such a way that he leads the will which only slumbers, otherwise, in percipience and imagination, into this percipience and imagination repeatedly in such a way that he brings that consciously to mind what, otherwise, appears as an involuntary mental picture. Thereby the usually pale thinking or forced percipience changes into the pictorial beholding. Since one can behold the spiritual only in pictures. The will and the feeling that one can imagine only, otherwise, but not in their real nature are recognised, are transformed by the meditative life, so that they become an imagining life, a perceiving life.

Leading the imagination into the will, leading the will into the imagining, changing the will into imagination and vice versa, the transformation of the imagining into the will in inner liveliness, the transformation of the single soul forces into each other, this is meditative life. If this is pursued, that announces itself for the inner observation what cannot announce itself if one looks only at thinking, at feeling and willing side by side. If one looks at them side by side, only the temporal of the human being appears. If one learns to recognise how imagining changes into feeling and the will changes into imagining and perceiving, one gets to know the metamorphosis of the inner soul life, as vividly as Goethe pursued the metamorphoses in the outer nature. Then the everlasting of the human soul announces itself that goes through births and deaths. The human being thereby enters the everlasting.

What did Goethe want while he removed such a prejudice that the human being differs by a detail like the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw from the animal? He did not want that the human being faces as an isolated being the remaining world, he wanted, completely in harmony with Herder, to survey nature as a big whole and to look at the human being arising from the whole nature. When Schiller had got rid of some prejudices towards Goethe and had reached a pure free recognition of his greatness, he wrote to Goethe, how he had to think about Goethe's way of looking at nature. Among the rest, he wrote the nice words: “You take together the whole nature to get light for the single; in the entirety of her phenomena you look for the explanation of the individual ... A great and really heroic idea which shows only too well, how much your mind holds together the rich whole of its mental pictures in a nice unity.”

It attracts Schiller's attention that Goethe wanted to understand the human being while he assembled him from that which is separated, otherwise, in the different beings of nature but which can change by inner formative forces so that the human being appears like a summary of the outer natural phenomena in his outer figure, the crown of the outer nature.

One has to form a correct mental picture of that which there Goethe wanted, actually, if one envisages the other side now that arises for the soul life. If one envisages the metamorphosis of the inner soul forces as Goethe envisaged the metamorphosis of the outer forms of the human being, that arises what appears in the human being as a summary of the metamorphosing soul forces from the underlying world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, as on the other side if one looks at the human being as a physical being in the Goethean way, this human physical being arises as a summary of the physical world. As Goethe's natural sciences connect the outer human figure to the whole remaining physical world, a Goethean psychology connects the human soul to the everlasting, concrete, enclosing spiritual world and allows it to concentrate in the human being. Not while you take this or that sentence of Goethe to confirm your own view you can build a bridge between spiritual science and the Goethean world consideration, but while you try to solve the problem internally—vividly, not in the abstract—logically how does one come close to such a kind to delve into nature?

Goethe himself possessed this ability to delve into nature naively. If you search it by deepening in his way to look at the world, to bring it back to life in yourself, then you get to the necessity to extend that which Goethe had as disposition for the view of nature also to the world of the mental. Then you get by the human soul life to the everlasting spiritual world as Goethe got by the human natural life to his consideration of the outer physical world. You have to approach Goethe internally; you have to try to want that in love what he wanted concerning nature. Then you get around to wanting the same concerning the spiritual world whose image is the human soul world. You get around to looking from the human soul into the spirit as Goethe looked from the human nature into the remaining nature. In this sense, one can already say that one understands Goethe little if one takes him only in such a way as he behaved at first. Goethe himself did not want to be taken in such a way. Since Goethe was very close to the whole way that must appear again with spiritual research, he was close to it also in the non-scientific areas, in the area of art.

If you yourself try to settle in the beholding consciousness, you realise that it is necessary above all that this settling does not perpetually disturb itself by all kinds of prejudices which are transferred from the sensory world or from the abstract, only logical thinking to the spiritual world. An important viewpoint of the investigation of the spiritual world is that you are able to wait. The soul can exert itself ever so much to investigate something in the spiritual world, it wants to investigate it absolutely, but it will fail, it will fool itself. It can exert itself ever so much unless in it those abilities have still matured which are necessary to the view of certain beings or certain facts, it will not yet be able to recognise them. Maturing, waiting is necessary until in the soul that has grown up which faces you in a certain area of the spiritual world. This is something that is necessary in a particular way for penetrating into the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must have patience and energy to a high degree. I characterise other rules in later talks. Goethe was minded by his whole nature to be also as an artist in such a way that he waited everywhere.

Nothing is more interesting than to pursue those poetries of Goethe that he could not finish if one pursues how he got stuck with the Pandora, how he got stuck with the Natural Daughter which should have become a trilogy and became only one part. If you compare it to that which he finished brilliantly, like the second part of Faust or the Elective Affinities, one recognises his innermost nature. Goethe could not “do” anything, he had always to form that only to which he had advanced by the maturity of his being, and if he did not attain this maturity, he left it, and then he was not able to work on. Someone who creates artistically only combining can work on. Someone who lets the spirit create in himself like Goethe cannot advance sometimes just if he is great as Goethe was. Where Goethe had to stop, he was of particular interest for that who wants to penetrate into his inner being. If one pursues something like the Elective Affinities, one realises that that which lives in it existed already in relatively early time, but not the possibility to develop figures really that could embody this riddle of nature and human being. Goethe left them, and thus he handed over the Elective Affinities to a time when the persons did no longer live who could still have understood it because they had experienced the first youth impulses together with him.

Thus, Goethe was close to spiritual science by this real experience of the mental as it were, he was close to it by the desire not to stop at the abstract thinking but to advance from the thinking to reality, indeed, as a naturalist, but as a naturalist who searched the spirit. Therefore, he was so glad when during the twenties the psychologist Heinroth (Johann Christian H., 1773-1843, German anthropologist) said that Goethe had a concrete thinking. Goethe understood this straight away that he did not have a thinking that keeps on spinning a thread but that submerges in the things.

However, the thinking submerges in the things, it does not find abstract material atoms in them, but the spirit, as well as by the beholding consideration of the soul life the everlasting spirit of the human being is recognised. Therefore, Goethe's view envisaged what reveals itself within the world of the sensory as something spiritual. You can understand from those indications that Goethe did not want to think about the thinking because he only knew too well that one could only look at the thinking. One can also understand well that Goethe did not at all mean anything irreligious when he said that it is antipathetic to him to speak of the things of another world. Since he knew that these things of another world are in this world, penetrate it perpetually, and that someone who does not search these spiritual things and beings in nature who denies them in nature does not want to recognise the spirit in the phenomena of nature. Hence, Goethe did not want to look behind the natural phenomena, but he wanted to search everywhere in the natural phenomena. Hence, it was unpleasant to him to speak of an “inside of nature.”

So about many philosophical minded people look for the “thing in itself.” They face the world of the outer sensory perceptions; they recognise that they are only sensory perceptions, reflections of reality. There they look for the “things in themselves,” but not, while they withdraw from the mirror and search in that which the spirit can grasp as spirit, but while they smash the mirror to reach for the world of the dead atoms from which one can never grasp anything living.

This inside of nature was for Goethe completely beyond his imagination. Hence, with his review on all efforts which he had to do to penetrate into the spirituality of the natural phenomena, that severe quotation which he did about the great naturalist Haller who had become unpleasant to him because he had said once: “No created mind penetrates into the being of nature. Blissful is that to whom she shows her appearance only!” Goethe did not at all want to speak about nature this way. He answered to it:

“No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.”
O you Philistine!
Do not remind me
And my brothers and sisters
Of such a word.
We think: everywhere we are inside.
“Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!”
I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

Goethe believes that someone who looks at nature as something that is an outside of the spirit cannot penetrate into the spirit of nature. While she shows her shell in her different metamorphoses to the human being, it reveals the spirit to him at the same time with her kernel. Spiritual science wants nothing to be in this respect but a child of Goethe, I would like to say. It wants to extend that which Goethe applied in such fertile way to the world of the outer natural phenomena also to the soul phenomena by which they immediately receive active life and reveal the internal spiritual, that spiritual which lives in the human being as his everlasting immortal essence. We look closer at this in the following talks.

I wanted to show this today. Not because one grasps Goethe in his single statements, one can call him a father of spiritual science—since in this way one could make him the father of all possible worldviews—, but while one tries to settle affectionately in that what appeared to him so fertile. Then one does not repeat what he already said, but then spiritual science appears rightly as a continuation of the Goethean worldview. It seems to me that it is in its sense if one ascends from the physical life to the spiritual life.

Goethe himself showed when he wanted to summarise his worldview in his essay about Winckelmann (Johann Joachim W., 1717-1768, German art historian and archaeologist) the living together of the human being with the whole universe as an interaction of spirits, while he said: “If the healthy nature of the human being works as a whole if he feels in the world as in a big nice and worthy whole if the harmonious ease grants a pure, free delight to him, then the universe would shout out and admire the summit of its own being and becoming if it could feel itself because it has attained its goal.” Thus, Goethe lively imagined the essence of the human being together with the essence of nature in interaction: nature, the world perceiving itself in the human being, the human being recognising himself as everlasting, but expressing his eternity in the temporality of the outer world. Between world and human being, the world spirit lives, grasping itself, knowing itself, even confirming itself in the sense of Goethe.

Hence, those who have thought in the sense of Goethe were never tempted to deny the spirit and to apply the Goethean worldview to confirm a more or less materialistic worldview. No, those who have understood Goethe have always thought that the human being, while he faces the things of nature and lives among them, lives at the same time in the spirituality into which he enters if he dies. These human beings have thought in such a way as for example Novalis (1772-1801) did.

Novalis, the miraculous genius, who wanted to submerge in nature in certain phases of his life in quite Goethean way, knew himself immersed in the spiritual world. His many remarks about the immediate present of the spirit in the sensory world go back to the Goethean worldview. Hence, I am allowed, while Goethe is put as it were as a father of a spiritual worldview, to close with a remark, which Novalis did completely in the Goethean sense that summarises that which I briefly outlined today as Goethean worldview in a way:

“The spiritual world is also not closed to us here. It is always manifest to us. If we can make our souls as elastic as it is necessary, we are like spirits among spirits!”