The Rudolf Steiner Archive

"Honor your German masters, then you will banish good spirits", Richard Wagner aptly calls out to us. Unfortunately, we still follow this call in a rather one-sided way. However, while we strive to create ever clearer and more complete images of the deceased greats of German intellectual development, we are often unfair to the living.

Without wishing to object in the slightest to the just appreciation of past cultural periods and to the ever-increasing immersion in the study of Schiller, Goethe, Herder and so on - on the contrary, we fully recognize the necessity of this - we cannot deny ourselves the insight that we usually lack the good will to come to a judgment about the greats of the present. Admittedly, it takes less courage to express one's admiration for Goethe and Schiller over and over again, whereby one can meet with no contradiction anywhere in the educated world, than to stand up for a living person and to speak a ruthless word here for once.

Since we believe that a newspaper is preferably called to serve the present, we would like to record our judgment on one of the most sympathetic German thinkers, Johannes Volkelt.

We want to start from a fact that will still be vividly remembered by many who studied in Vienna in the seventies. On March 10, 1875, Johannes Volkelt, a 27-year-old scholar at the time, gave a lecture at the "Reading Association of German Students in Vienna" which must be regarded as the most significant contribution to the cultural history of the present day.

In every sentence, Volkelt shows how deeply he has delved into the history of his time. There is an astonishing wealth of spirit in this lecture, and indeed of genuine German spirit.

Of course, this is not the light, French-style wit of Ludwig Speidel, Eduard Hanslick, Hugo Wittmann or even Oppenheim and Spitzer, who supposedly speak about some important subject, but in reality entertain their audience with stale quips and thoughtless phrases. No, Volkelt's speech was witty in the sense that it found the right word at the right moment, the genuine, pithy German word that always entertains us because it lifts us spiritually.

In this lecture, Volkelt measures our time against Kant's high concept of morality, which is deeply rooted in the essence of the German people. Kant makes the morality of an action solely dependent on the attitude from which it emerged. An action that complies with all existing laws, that is of incalculable benefit to others and posterity, is not moral if it does not flow from the good mindset of its author. If two do the same thing, one out of selfishness, the other out of duty, the first acts immorally, the second morally. Volkelt now asks: What is the attitude of our time to these views of the Königsberg sage? He comes to a sad answer. The view seems to have become almost universal: you don't get anywhere with a moral attitude, you don't build railroads with it, you don't found industrial enterprises with it. People believe they have done enough for morality if they do not come into conflict with the criminal law. Being good at heart is seen as a prejudice that children have to be taught at school, but which is of no use in life. There are circles today that have adopted ways of life that are immoral at their root. "It seems to me," says Volkelt, "that hardly any expression characterizes the moral life of our time as aptly as the word 'beguem'. Cool laxity, genteel comfort is part of the good tone."

There was a time when man had to wring the least he needed for his sustenance from nature. Hard work, a struggle in the truest sense of the word, was required to eke out an existence. Today things have changed. Conquering nature is easy for us. We have machines and tools that do what our ancestors had to do with their own hands. Like any sensible person, we naturally recognize this as progress. But we also do not fail to recognize that this very progress goes hand in hand with a decline in character and morals. The toil and labor that man once had to perform in order to wring a living from nature were for him a high school of morality. Today, all we have to do is lift a hand and the whole social apparatus works to satisfy our needs. As a result, the latter increase to the point of exaggeration, people lose the desire to walk the straight and hard path of duty, preferring instead the easy path of comfort. This results in a paralysis of personal strength of character, of the ability to work.

A large part of our society suffers from marrowlessness and softening of the bones in spiritual terms.

"We live in a time of general upholstery," says Volkelt aptly, and adds: "You will find out how right I am when you look around your comfortably furnished room, when you take a walk through the streets, when you go on a journey. Even the most remote mountain valleys are no longer safe from railroads and modern hotels. You experience it as often as you allow yourself to be served in a pub by the slickly combed waiters, those poetry-less machines; as often as you have to move about on a mirror-like saloon floor in tails and gloves. You experience it with every legal transaction you get into, with the simplest business you are supposed to handle. Even war today has an impersonal, prompt machine character." This is the age in which there are few who have an ideal goal in mind and, without a sideways glance to the right or left, head ruthlessly towards it; no, where everyone just abandons themselves to the blind hustle and bustle of the world and, playing a frivolous game with happiness and life, tries to get as much out of the social machine as they can. Everywhere the comfortable is preferred to that which requires the use of the whole personality. Who reads a systematic book today that has been produced by years of hard work? No, people prefer to take note of the issues of the day from "elegantly" written feuilletons or "popular", i.e. shallow lectures. The former is tedious and requires rigorous thinking, the latter is comfortable. In the theater, the audience is offered the lightest, meanest, even the most stupid stuff. They sip it with pleasure, because the enjoyment of something higher also requires mental effort. Political party life everywhere reveals only half-measures and opportunism. Almost no one can be found who utters a sincere, ruthless "That's what I want!"

The firmness of character has perished in the staggering life of pleasure. Volkelt recommends reading Kant's writings to all those who are corroded by the evil spirit of our time. For they are a school for the weak in character. In particular, Volkelt addresses his admonition to journalists. It is precisely this profession that most degrades the dignity of man in his own person, when he surrenders himself to the will-less tool of his financial backers. The journalist turns his person into a thing by selling himself.

It is curious that Volkelt, in view of the outcome of the Ofenheim trial in 1875, had already bluntly exposed the damage done to the Viennese press. He chose an example from the series of papers that do not want to know anything about morals and sentiment when it comes to large-scale undertakings, for which the only decisive factor is whether more or less can be gained from something. Irrespective of the fact that you risk a lot when you make enemies of the powerful, our thinker chose the "most respected" newspaper in Vienna, the "Neue Freie Presse", as the object of his attack. He was right, because although this newspaper lives only from the phrase, it still impresses many. One must first remove its mask. The other leaves of this character are not even worth this effort. Volkelt says: "After the acquitting verdict of the jury - in the Ofenheim trial - one should have confessed with moral sorrow: Our penal law is unfortunately so imperfect that it cannot catch the immorality of those people in its snares. But what happened instead? The next morning, an editorial appeared in the "Neue Freie Presse" that must make every simple and healthy-minded person nauseous. If the Ofenheim spirit was not adhered to in industrial undertakings, we would fall into an "era of dull, despondent resignation". This paper goes so far in its forced, artificially incited enthusiasm that it regards acquittal as the highest achievement for the 'conscience', for 'ethics'. The same conflation of legal right and morality can be found in the next editorial. In order to present its lapchild Ofenheim as completely morally rehabilitated, the 'Neue Freie Presse' seeks to scandalize morality in general. It has the temerity to declare that there is 'no earthly tribunal' for morality at all.

I ask: does not a voice of judgment live in the people, does not a voice of judgment live in every man's breast, urgently proclaiming his moral guilt and innocence? The 'Neue Freie Presse', which describes morality, which is different from law and justice, as an 'insubstantial abstract' and wants us to believe that every person's breast is as arid and paragraph-like as that of its followers, should take a lesson from the old Kant that acting in accordance with the law is legal, but not yet 'moral'. But the "Neue Freie Presse" probably knows this itself. Only the oppressive feeling of having once stood up for something morally hollow could give it the sentence: "If justice and the law have spoken, then morality has also been satisfied." While she usually loved to dress herself with a certain idealistic verve, she now displays a moral dullness and moral nakedness. In her eyes, all those who are morally indignant are hypocrites, sycophants, people with a crude attitude."

These were strong words. Volkelt had said what moved hundreds of people. Anyone who heard his words had to recognize the German man in Volkelt and agree with him wholeheartedly. And he has so far proved himself to be an energetic, fully German man. He leads a life of thought in the German sense and strives to solve the highest world problems. His works definitely bear the trait that is imprinted on them by his harmonious, indomitable personality.

Mind and thought are equally present in this man. If you want to see this for yourself, read his book: "Dream Fantasy."

Just as astronomy developed from astrology and chemistry from alchemy, a science of the dream world will develop from dream interpretation. Man always wants to exploit the realms of reality for his personal desires first and will only penetrate them later with the selfless research of science. In his book, Volkelt has eloquently compiled all the elements we have today for a future 'dream science'. Anyone who goes through the book will soon realize that this intimate field, this world of fairy tales, could only have been treated so favorably by a German.

Volkelt's writings: "The Unconscious and Pessimism", "Individualism and Pantheism", "The Concept of Symbol in the Latest Aesthetics", show us everywhere the highly gifted, thorough thinker who finally appears at his full height in his last writings: "Kant's Epistemology" and "Experience and Thought".

Volkelt is an original researcher who builds on Kant in his own way. Kant argued against the scientific "groping around in the dark" that we must first test our own cognitive faculty to see whether this instrument is also suitable for understanding extraordinary things such as God, the soul and the like. And he believed he had proved that we can understand nothing but the experience that is spread out before our senses. Everything supernatural remains uncertain. Volkelt is also of the opinion that we only have certain knowledge of that which is given to our eyes and ears and so on. However, he believed that by logical reasoning we could also gain knowledge of the active causes lying behind this sensory world, but that this knowledge had no character other than that of probability. He wanted to unite the "cautious criticism", which he had adopted from Kant, with a "highly aspiring idealism". It is true that the latest phase of his thought is not entirely free of the lack of courage and energy that generally prevails in thought today, but his healthy nature and his German sense will hopefully not allow him to fall into the error of thinking that our research is a futile struggle. We hope to see the disappearance from his philosophy of that which he regards as necessary today: "A going forward, which again partially recedes, a yielding, which again to a certain extent takes hold." We demand that the philosopher also be inspired by Hutten's spirit and speak a strong and resolute "Through!"

We would have liked this German thinker, who was born in Austria, to have found an appropriate place for his work here too. His bold, free spirit made him impossible in his homeland. Truly, he would have become a role model for the academic citizenry here in the upholding of our ideal goods and in the hatred of all that is bad and half-baked. Not everywhere, however, people love a free, unrestrained demeanor, and so Volkelt had to wander. He first found a place to work at the University of Jena, then in Basel, where he lives today.

Neither the future historian of philosophy nor the cultural historian will be able to deny Volkelt's name a place of honor.

Formerly published in association with several scholars by Dr. I. H. Fichte and Dr. H. Ulrici, edited by Dr. Richard Fal ckenberg, Professor of Philosophy in Erlangen. New series. 100th volume 1st and 2nd issue, 101st volume 1st issue. Leipzig 1892

The "Zeitschrift für Philosophie" occupies an outstanding position among the philosophical journals in Germany. The three issues before us prove this anew. From the rich content of the first, I would like to highlight the essay by Dr. Nicolaus von Seeland: "On the one-sidedness of the prevailing theory of force" and a brief comment by Eugen Dreher on the "law of the conservation of force" and on inertia. The criticism which Dreher, in my opinion one of our most gifted and unfortunately most unrecognized physicists, makes of Jul. Rob. Mayer's ingenious conception seems to me to be highly noteworthy. I would like to take this opportunity to refer to Eugen Dreher's writings and essays in general. Regrettably, this scholar does not succeed in getting beyond dualism and forcing his way through to monism. However, where this fundamental flaw in his thinking does not come into consideration, his explanations are of the greatest importance due to the originality of his approach.* The second issue contains a contribution by

* In the second issue we also find a remarkable essay by Dreher: Critical Remarks and Additions to Kant's Antinomies. Robert Schellwien "Zur Erkenntnislehre Kants", which, like the essay by the same author recently published by us in the "Literarischer Merkur", we consider to be one of the most significant that recent philosophical literature has brought to our attention. Like so many of our contemporaries, Schellwien is not blind to Kant's errors. He strives for a solution to philosophical problems that goes beyond Kant and is independent of his teachings. Schellwien says "that human consciousness, which of course is not original, but constantly emerges only from the suspension of ignorance, can be a post-creative identity of the knower and the known, indeed, according to its own principles, it must be of the a priori nature of cognition". Kant never reached this degree of insight. Because he did not, he constructed human consciousness from two contradictory components: the passive reception and the active processing of the material of knowledge, which resulted in the "Critique of Pure Reason" becoming the most confused book among the intellectual works of the first rank.

In this issue we also encounter the essay: "Philosophische Randbemerkungen zu den Verhandlungen über den preußischen Volksschulgesetzentwurf" (Philosophical comments on the negotiations on the Prussian elementary school bill) from the pen of the astute Max Schasler, whose boldness of thought has always endeared him to us.

The next issue is an anniversary issue. It marks the second hundredth issue in the magazine's series. For this reason, it is adorned with the portrait of I. H. Fichte, the founder of the journal, and contains an account by Rud. Seydel of its origins, which is well worth reading. It describes in a stimulating way the needs to which the philosophical enterprise owes its origin and the activities of the men involved in its founding. The essays in this issue begin with "Psychological Aphorisms" by Otto Liebmann. Like everything that the critical mind of this researcher treats with his truly caustic acuity, the psychological field is also richly stimulated here by a sharp definition of the concepts, a precise statement of the problems and a clear indication of the tendencies that the endeavors have to take towards a solution. An essay by Eduard von Hartmann is of great interest: "Below and above good and evil". With regard to these two concepts, Hartmann distinguishes three exclusive points of view: 1. the naturalistic one, which makes the individual-egoistic needs and instincts the sole starting point for action, stamps the tendencies of the same as the only moral principle and rejects any regulation of the same by the laws of practical reason. 2. the moralistic, which establishes the abstract imperatives of reason as the highest practical maxims and declares every kind of action, including divine action, to be bound by them. 3. the supranaturalistic view, which places the will of God-inspired man above the laws of reason and claims that if a person is so imbued with the eternal counsel of God that he has made it his own ethical driving force, then he is no longer bound by any laws of reason. These counsels would be higher than all reason. Only the middle point of view can establish an actual morality. The first and the last, because they establish principles of action that are different from the rules of practical reason, are "beyond good and evil", the former "below", the latter "above". Hartmann now characterizes the one-sidedness of the three standpoints and finds that the two most important questions of ethics, that of responsibility and the origin of evil, can only be solved by an interpenetration of the three spheres. The limited space makes it impossible for us to enter into a critical discussion of this subject, which deals with the most important problems of practical philosophy.

Friedrich Jodl's "Jahresbericht über Erscheinungen der anglo-amerikanischen Literatur aus der Zeit von 1890 bis 1891" is also valuable in this booklet. We must also draw attention to the fact that a number of philosophical publications of the present day have received remarkable reviews and that a bibliography of philosophical writings and a table of contents from philosophical journals at home and abroad conclude the individual issues of this work, which no one interested in the philosophy of the present day can do without.

[ 1 ] The human being is not content with what nature willingly offers to his observing spirit. He feels that nature, in order to bring forth the manifoldness of its creations, needs driving forces that it at first conceals from the observer. Nature does not itself utter its final word. Our experience shows us what nature can create, but does not tell us how this creating occurs. Within the human spirit itself there lies the means for bringing the driving forces of nature to light. Up out of the human spirit the ideas arise that bring clarification as to how nature brings about its creations. What the phenomena of the outer world conceal becomes revealed within the inner being of man. What the human spirit thinks up in the way of natural laws is not invented and added to nature; it is nature's own essential being, and the human spirit is only the stage upon which nature allows the secrets of its workings to become visible. What we observe about the things is only one part of the things. What wells up within our spirit when it confronts the things is the other part. It is the same things that speak to us from outside and that speak within us. Only when we hold the language of the outer world together with that of our inner being, do we have full reality. What have the true philosophers in every age wanted to do? Nothing other than to make known the essential being of things that the things themselves express when the human spirit offers itself to them as their organ of speech.

[ 2 ] When man allows his inner being to speak about nature, he recognizes that nature falls short of what, by virtue of its driving forces, it could accomplish. The human spirit sees what experience contains, in its more perfect form. It finds that nature with its creations does not achieve its aims. The human spirit feels itself called upon to present these aims in their perfected form. It creates shapes in which it shows: This is what nature wanted to do but could only accomplish to a certain degree. These shapes are the works of art. In them, the human being creates in a perfected way what nature manifests in an imperfect form.

[ 3 ] The philosopher and the artist have the same goal. They seek to give shape to the perfected element that their spirit beholds when it allows nature to work upon it. But they have different media at their command for achieving this goal. For the philosopher, a thought, an idea, lights up within him when he confronts a process in nature. This he expresses. For the artist, a picture of this process arises within him that manifests this process more perfectly than can be observed in the outer world. The philosopher and the artist develop the observation further in different ways. The artist does not need to know the driving forces of nature in the form in which they reveal themselves to the philosopher. When the artist perceives a thing or an occurrence, there arises directly in his spirit a picture in which the laws of nature are expressed in a more perfect form than in the corresponding thing or occurrence in the outer world. These laws do not need to enter his spirit in the form of thoughts. Knowledge and art, however, are inwardly related. They show the potentialities of nature that do not come to full development in merely outer nature.

[ 4 ] When now within the spirit of a genuine artist, not only the perfected pictures of things express themselves, but also the driving forces of nature in the form of thoughts, then the common source of philosophy and art appears with particular clarity before our eyes. Goethe is such an artist. He reveals the same secrets to us in the form of his works of art and in the form of thoughts. What he gave shape to in his poetic works, this he expresses in his essays on natural science and art and in his Aphorisms in Prose⁸³ in the form of thoughts. The deep satisfaction that emanates from these essays and aphorisms stems from the fact that one sees the harmony of art and knowledge realized in one personality. There is something elevating in the feeling, which arises with every Goethean thought, that here someone is speaking who at the same time can behold in a picture the perfected element that he expresses in ideas. The power of such a thought is strengthened by this feeling. That which stems from the highest needs of one personality must inwardly belong together. Goethe's teachings of wisdom answers the question: What kind of philosophy is in accordance with genuine art? I will try to sketch in context this philosophy that is born out of the spirit of a genuine artist.

[ 5 ] The content of thought that springs from the human spirit when it confronts the outer world is truth. The human being cannot demand any other kind of knowledge than one he brings forth himself. Whoever seeks something in addition behind the things that is supposed to signify their actual being has not brought to consciousness the fact that all questions about the essential being of things spring only from a human need: the need, namely, also to penetrate with thought what one perceives. The things speak to us, and our inner being speaks when we observe the things. These two languages stem from the same primal being, and man is called upon to effect their reciprocal understanding. It is in this that what one calls knowledge consists. And it is this and nothing else that a person seeks who understands the needs of human nature. For someone who has not arrived at this understanding, the things of the outer world remain foreign. He does not hear the essential being of things speaking within his inner life. Therefore he supposes that this essential being is hidden behind the things. He believes in yet another outer world in addition, behind the perceptual world. But things are outer things only so long as one merely observes them. When one thinks about them, they cease to be outside of us. One fuses with their inner being. For man, opposition between objective outer perception and subjective inner thought-world exists only as long as he does not recognize that these worlds belong together. Man's inner world is the inner being of nature.

[ 6 ] These thoughts are not refuted by the fact that different people make different mental pictures of things for themselves. Nor by the fact that people's organizations are different so that one does not know whether one and the same colour is seen by different people in exactly the same way. For, the point is not whether people form exactly the same judgment about one and the same thing, but whether the language that the inner being of a person speaks is in fact the language that expresses the essential being of things. Individual judgments differ according to the organization of the person and according to the standpoint from which one observes things; but all judgments spring from the same element and lead into the essential being of things. This can come to expression in different nuances of thought; but it is, nevertheless, still the essential being of things.

[ 7 ] The human being is the organ by which nature reveals its secrets. Within the subjective personality the deepest content of the world appears. “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as though in a great, beautiful, worthy, and precious whole, when his harmonious sense of well-being imparts to him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could experience itself, would, as having achieved its goal, exult with joy and marvel at the pinnacle of its own becoming and being.” (Goethe, Winckelmann) The goal of the universe and of the essential being of existence does not lie in what the outer world provides, but rather in what lives within the human spirit and goes forth from it. Goethe therefore considers it to be a mistake for the natural scientist to want to penetrate into the inner being of nature through instruments and objective experiments, for “man in himself, insofar as he uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most accurate physical apparatus that there can be, and that is precisely what is of the greatest harm to modern physics, that one has, as it were, separated experiments from man; one wants to know nature merely through what manmade instruments show, yes, wants to limit and prove thereby what nature can do.” “But man stands at such a high level precisely through the fact that what otherwise could not manifest itself does manifest itself in him. For what is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the ear of the musician? Yes, one can say, what are the elemental phenomena of nature themselves compared to man who must first tame and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to some extent?”

[ 8 ] Man must allow the things to speak out of his spirit if he wants to know their essential being. Everything he has to say about this essential being is derived from the spiritual experiences of his inner life. The human being can judge the world only from out of himself. He must think anthropomorphically. One brings anthropomorphism into the simplest phenomenon, into the impact of two bodies, for example, when one says something about it. The judgment that “one body strikes another” is already anthropomorphic. For if one wants to go beyond the mere observation of the process, one must bring to it the experience our own body has when it sets a body in the outer world into motion. All physical explanations are hidden anthropomorphisms. One humanizes nature when one explains it; one puts into it the inner experiences of the human being. But these subjective experiences are the inner being of things. And one cannot therefore say that, because man can make only subjective mental pictures for himself about nature, he does not know the objective truth, the “in-itself” of things.⁸⁴ There can absolutely be no question of anything other than a subjective human truth. For, truth consists in putting our subjective experiences into the objective interrelationships of phenomena. These subjective experiences can even assume a completely individual character. They are, nevertheless, the expression of the inner being of things. One can put into the things only what one has experienced within oneself. Thus, each person, in accordance with his individual experiences, will also put something different, in a certain sense, into things. The way I interpret certain processes of nature for myself is not entirely comprehensible for someone else who has not inwardly experienced the same thing. It is not at all a matter, however, of all men having the same thoughts about things, but rather only of their living within the element of truth when they think about things. One cannot therefore observe the thoughts of another person as such and accept or reject them, but rather one should regard them as the proclaimers of his individuality. “Those who contradict and dispute should reflect now and then that not every language is comprehensible to everyone.” A philosophy can never provide a universally valid truth, but rather describes the inner experiences of the philosopher by which he interprets the outer phenomena.

[ 9 ] When a thing expresses its essential being through the organ of the human spirit, then full reality comes about only through the flowing together of the outer objective and the inner subjective. It is neither through one-sided observation nor through one-sided thinking that the human being knows reality. Reality is not present in the objective world as something finished, but rather is only first brought forth by the human spirit in connection with the things. The objective things are only a part of reality. To someone who extols sense experience exclusively, one must reply like Goethe “that experience is only half of experience.” “Everything factual is already theory”; that means, an ideal element reveals itself in the human spirit when he observes something factual. This way of apprehending the world, which knows the essential being of things in ideas and which apprehends knowledge to be a living into the essential being of things, is not mysticism. But it does have in common with mysticism the characteristic that it does not regard objective truth as something that is present in the outer world, but rather as something that can really be grasped within the inner being of man. The opposite world view transfers the ground of things to behind the phenomena, into a region lying beyond human experience. This view can then either give itself over to a blind faith in this ground that receives its content from a positive religion of revelation, or it can set up intellectual hypotheses and theories as to how this realm of reality in the beyond is constituted. The mystic, as well as the adherent of the Goethean world view, rejects both this faith in some “beyond” and all hypotheses about any such region, and holds fast to the really spiritual element that expresses itself within man himself. Goethe writes to Jacobi: “God has punished you with metaphysics and set a thorn in your flesh, but has blessed me, on the other hand, with physics. ... I hold more and more firmly to the reverence for God of the atheist (Spinoza) ... and leave to you everything you call, and would have to call, religion ... When you say that one can only believe in God ... then I say to you that I set a lot of store in seeing.” What Goethe wants to see is the essential being of things that expresses itself within his world of ideas. The mystic also wants to know the essential being of things by immersing himself in his own inner being; but he rejects precisely that innately clear and transparent world of ideas as unsuitable for attaining higher knowledge. He believes he must develop, not his capacity for ideas, but rather other powers of his inner being, in order to see the primal ground of things. Usually it is unclear feelings and emotions in which the mystic wants to grasp the essential being of things. But feelings and emotions belong only to the subjective being of man. In them nothing is expressed about the things. Only in ideas do the things themselves speak. Mysticism is a superficial world view, in spite of the fact that the mystics are very proud of their “profundity” compared to men of reason. The mystics know nothing about the nature of feelings, otherwise they would not consider them to be expressions of the essential being of the world; and they know nothing about the nature of ideas, otherwise they would not consider them shallow and rationalistic. They have no inkling of what people who really have ideas experience in them. But for many people, ideas are in fact mere words. They cannot acquire for themselves the unending fullness of their content. No wonder they feel their own word husks, which are devoid of ideas, to be empty.

[ 10 ] Whoever seeks the essential content of the objective world within his own inner being can also regard the essential being of the moral world order as lying only within human nature itself. Whoever believes in the existence of a reality in the beyond, behind human reality, must also seek the source of morality there. For, what is moral in a higher sense can come only from the essential being of things. The believer in the beyond therefore assumes moral commandments to which man must submit himself. These commandments reach him either via revelation, or they enter as such into his consciousness, as is the case with Kant's categorical imperative. As to how this imperative comes into our consciousness from out of the “in-itselfness” of things in the beyond, about this nothing is said. It is simply there, and one must submit oneself to it. The philosopher of experience, who looks for his salvation in pure sense observation, sees in what is moral, only the working of human drives and instincts. Out of the study of these, norms are supposed to result that are decisive for moral action.

[ 11 ] Goethe sees what is moral as arising out of man's world of ideas. It is not objective norms and also not the mere world of drives that directs moral action, but rather it is ideas, clear within themselves, by which man gives himself his own direction. He does not follow them out of duty as he would have to follow objective moral norms. And also not out of compulsion, as one follows one's drives and instincts. But rather he serves them out of love. He loves them the way one loves a child. He wants to realize them, and steps in on their behalf, because they are a part of his own essential being. The idea is the guideline and love is the driving power in Goethean ethics. For him duty is “where one loves what one commands oneself to do.”

[ 12 ] Action, in the sense of Goethean ethics, is a free action. For, the human being is dependent upon nothing other than his own ideas. And he is responsible to no one other than himself. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have already refuted the feeble objection that a moral world order in which each person obeys only himself would have to lead to a general disorder and disharmony in human action. Whoever makes this objection overlooks the fact that human beings are essentially alike in nature and that they will therefore never produce moral ideas which, through their essential differentness would cause discord.⁸⁵

[ 13 ] If the human being did not have the ability to bring forth creations that are fashioned in exactly the same sense as the works of nature and only bring this sense to view in a more perfect way than nature can, there would be no art in Goethe's sense. What the artist creates are nature objects on a higher level of perfection. Art is the extension of nature, “for inasmuch as man is placed at the pinnacle of nature, he then regards himself again as an entire nature, which yet again has to bring forth within itself a pinnacle. To this end he enhances himself, by imbuing himself with every perfection and virtue, summons choice, order, harmony, and meaning, and finally lifts himself to the production of works of art.” After seeing Greek works of art in Italy, Goethe writes: “These great works of art have at the same time been brought forth by human beings according to true and natural laws, as the greatest works of nature” (Italian Journey, September 6, 1787). For the merely sense-perceptible reality of experience, works of art are a beautiful semblance; for someone who is able to see more deeply, they are “a manifestation of hidden laws of nature which without them would never be revealed.”

[ 14 ] It is not the substance the artist takes from nature that constitutes the work of art; but only what the artist puts into the work of art from out of his inner being. The highest work of art is one that makes you forget that a natural substance underlies it, and that awakens our interest solely through what the artist has made out of this substance. The artist forms things naturally; but he does not form things the way nature itself does. These statements to me express the main thoughts that Goethe set down in his aphorisms on art.

• 83. Sprüche in Prosa
• 84. Goethe's views stand in the sharpest possible opposition to Kantian philosophy. The latter takes it start from the belief that the world of mental pictures is governed by the laws of the human spirit and that therefore everything brought from outside to meet this world can be present in this world only as a subjective reflection. Man does not perceive the “in-itself” of things, but rather the phenomenon that arises through the fact that the things affect him and that he connects these effects according to the laws of his intellect and reason. Kant and the Kantians have no inkling of the fact that the essential being of the things speaks through this reason. Therefore the Kantian philosophy could never hold any significance for Goethe. When he acquired for himself some of Kant's principles, he gave them a completely different meaning than they have in the teachings of their originator. It is clear, from a note that only became known after the opening of the Goethe archives in Weimar, that Goethe was very well aware of the antithesis between his world view and the Kantian one. For him, Kant's basic error lies in the fact that he “regards the subjective ability to know as an object itself and, sharply indeed but not entirely correctly, he distinguishes the point where subjective and objective meet.” Subjective and objective meet when man joins together into the unified being of things what the outer world expresses and what can be heard by his inner being. Then, however, the antithesis between subjective and objective entirely ceases to exist; it disappears in this unified reality. I have already indicated this on page 167 ff. of this book. Now K. Vorländer, in the first number of “Kant Studies,” directs a polemic against what I wrote there. He finds that my view about the antithesis between the Goethean and the Kantian world conception is “strongly one-sided at best and stands in contradiction to Goethe's own statements,” and is due to a “complete misunderstanding on my part of Kant's transcendental methods.” Vorländer has no inkling of the world view in which Goethe lived. It would be utterly pointless for me to enter into polemics with him, because we speak a different language. The fact that he never knows what my statements mean shows how clear his thinking is. For example, I make a comment on the following statement of Goethe: “As soon as the human being becomes aware of the objects around him, he regards them with respect to himself, and justifiably so. For, his whole destiny depends upon whether he likes or dislikes them, whether they attract or repel him, whether they help or harm him. This entirely natural way of looking at things and of judging them seems to be as easy as it is necessary ... Those people take on a far more difficult task whose active drive for knowledge strives to observe the objects of nature in themselves and in their relationships to each other; they seek out and investigate what is and not what pleases.” My comment on this is as follows: “This shows how Goethe's world view is the exact polar opposite of the Kantian one. For Kant, there is absolutely no view of things as they are in themselves, but only of how they appear with respect to us. Goethe considers this view to be a quite inferior way of entering into a relationship with things.” Vorländer's response to this is: “These words of Goethe are not intended to express anything more than, in an introductory way, the trivial difference between what is pleasant and what is true. The researcher should seek out ‘what is and not what pleases.’ It is advisable for someone like Steiner—who dares to say that this latter, in fact very inferior, way of entering into a relationship with things is Kant's way—to first make clear to himself the basic concepts of Kant's teachings: the difference between a subjective and an objective sensation, for example, which is described in such passages as section three of the Critique of the Power of Judgment.” Now, as is clear from my statements, I did not at all say that that way of entering into a relationship with things is Kant's way, but rather that Goethe does not find Kant's understanding of the relationship between subject and object to correspond to the relationship in which man stands toward things when he wants to know how they are in themselves. Goethe is of the view that the Kantian definition does not correspond to human knowing, but only to the relationship into which man enters with things when he regards them with respect to his pleasure or displeasure. Someone who can misunderstand a statement the way Vorländer does would do better to spare himself the trouble of giving advice to other people about their philosophical education, and first acquire for himself the ability to learn to read a sentence correctly. Anyone can look for Goethe quotes and bring them together historically; but Vorländer, in any case, cannot interpret them in the spirit of the Goethean world view.
• 85. The following story shows how little understanding is present in professional philosophers today both for ethical views and for an ethic of inner freedom and of individualism in general. In 1892, in an essay for “Zukunft” (No. 5), I spoke out for a strictly individualistic view of ethics. Ferdinand Tönnies in Kiel responded to this essay in a brochure: “‘Ethical Culture’ and its Retinue. Nietzsche Fools in the ‘Future’ and in the ‘Present’“ (Berlin 1893). He presented nothing except the main principles of philistine morality in the form of philosophical formulas. Of me, however, he says that I could have found “no worse Hermes on the path to Hades than Friedrich Nietzsche.” It struck me as truly humorous that Tönnies, in order to condemn me, presents several of Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose. He has no inkling of the fact that if I did have a Hermes, it was not Nietzsche, but rather Goethe. I have already shown on page 149 ff. of this book the connections between the ethics of inner freedom and Goethe's ethics. I would not have mentioned this worthless brochure if it were not symptomatic of the misunderstanding of Goethe's world view that holds sway in professional philosophical circles.

[ 1 ] With the foregoing we have determined the direction the following investigations will take. They are meant to develop what manifested in Goethe as a scientific sense and to interpret his way of looking at the world.

[ 2 ] The objection could be made that this is not the way to present a view scientifically. Under no circumstances should a scientific view be based on an authority; it must always rest upon principles. Let us forestall this objection at once. We regard a view founded in the Goethean world conception as true, not because it can be traced back to this world conception, but because we believe that we can support the Goethean world view upon sound, basic principles and present it as one well founded in itself. The fact that we take Goethe as our starting point should not prevent us from being just as serious about establishing the views we present as are the proponents of any science supposedly free of all presuppositions. We are presenting the Goethean world view, but we will establish it in accordance with the demands of science.

[ 3 ] Schiller has already indicated the direction of the path such investigations must take. No one perceived the greatness of Goethe's genius more clearly than he did. In his letters to Goethe, Schiller held up to him a mirror image of Goethe's being; in his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, he traces his ideal of the artist back to the way he recognized it in Goethe; and in his essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, he portrays the being of true art in the form in which he found it in Goethe's poetry. At the same time, this justifies the statement that our considerations are built on the foundation of Goethe's and Schiller's world view. We wish to look at Goethe's scientific thinking by that method for which Schiller provided the model. Goethe's gaze is directed upon nature and upon life, and his way of looking at things in doing so will be the object (the content) of our discussion; Schiller's gaze is directed upon Goethe's spirit, and his way of looking at things in doing so will be the ideal for our method.

[ 4 ] In this way we believe Goethe's and Schiller's scientific strivings are made fruitful for the present day.

[ 5 ] In accordance with current scientific terminology, our work must be considered to be epistemology. To be sure, the questions with which it deals will in many ways be of a different nature from those usually raised by this science. We have seen why this is the case. Wherever similar investigations arise today, they take their start almost entirely from Kant. In scientific circles the fact has been completely overlooked that in addition to the science of knowledge founded by the great thinker of Königsberg, there is yet another direction, at least potentially, that is no less capable than the Kantian one of being deepened in an objective manner. In the early 1880's Otto Liebmann made the statement that we must go back to Kant if we wish to arrive at a world view free of contradiction. This is why today we have a literature on Kant almost too vast to encompass.

[ 6 ] But this Kantian path will not help the science of philosophy. Philosophy will play a part in cultural life again only when, instead of going back to Kant, it immerses itself in the scientific conception of Goethe and Schiller.

[ 7 ] And now let us approach the basic questions of a science of knowledge corresponding to these introductory remarks.

This year I shall again be giving a series of lectures on subjects related to Spiritual Science, as I have done now for several years past. Those of my audience who attended those previous lectures will know what is meant here by the term, Spiritual Science (Geisteswissenschaft). For others, let me say that it will not be my task to discuss some abstract branch of science, but a discipline which treats the spirit as something actual and real. It starts from the premise that human experience is not unavoidably restricted to sense-perceptible reality or to the findings of human reason and other cognitive faculties in so far as they are bound up with the sense-perceptible. Spiritual Science says that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind the realm of the sense-perceptible and to make observations which are beyond the range of the ordinary intellect.

This introductory lecture will describe the role of Spiritual Science in present-day life, and will show how in the past this Spiritual Science—which is as old as humanity—appeared in a form very different from the form it must take today. In speaking of the present, I naturally do not mean the immediate here and now, but the relatively long period during which spiritual life has had the particular character which has come to full development in our own time.

Anyone who looks back over the spiritual life of mankind will see that “a time of transition” is a phrase to be used with care, for every period can be so described. Yet there are times when spiritual life takes a leap forward, so to speak. From the 16th century onwards, the relationship between the soul and spiritual life of human beings and the outer world has been different from what it was in earlier times. And the further back we go in human evolution, the more we find that men had different needs, different longings, and gave different answers from within themselves to questions concerning the great riddles of existence.

We can gain a clear impression of these transition periods through individuals who lived in those days and had retained certain qualities of feeling, knowing and willing from earlier periods, but were impelled to meet the demands of a new age.

Let us take an interesting personality and see what he makes of questions concerning the being of man and other such questions that must closely engage human minds—a personality who lived at the dawn of modern spiritual life and was endowed with the inner characteristics I have just described. I will not choose anyone familiar, but a sixteenth century thinker who was unknown outside a small circle. In his time there were many persons who retained, as he did, mediaeval habits of thinking and feeling and wished to gain knowledge in the way that had been followed for centuries, and yet were moving on towards the outlook of the coming age. I shall be naming an individual of whose external life almost nothing is historically known. From the point of view of Spiritual Science, this is thoroughly congenial. Anyone who has sojourned in the realm of Spiritual Science will know how distracting it is to find attached to a personality all the petty details of everyday life that are collected by modern biographers. On this account, we ought to be thankful that history has preserved so little about Shakespeare, for instance; the true picture is not spoilt—as it is with Goethe—by all the trivia the biographers are so fond of dragging in. I will therefore designate an individual of whom even less is known than is known about Shakespeare, a seventeenth century thinker who is of great significance for anyone who can see into the history of human thinking.

In Francis Joseph Philipp, Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz, who led the life of a solitary thinker during the second half of the seventeenth century in Bohemia, we have a personality of outstanding importance from this historical point of view. In a little work entitled Libellus de nominis convenientia¹—I have not inquired if it has since been published in full—he set down the questions which occupied his soul. If we immerse ourselves in his soul, these questions can lead us into the issues that a reflecting man would concern himself with in those days. This lonely thinker discusses the great central problem of the being of man. With a forcefulness that springs from a deep need for knowledge, he says that nothing so disfigures a man as not to know what his being really is.

Count von Hoditz turns to important figures in the history of thought, for instance to Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., and asks what Aristotle says in answer to this question—what the essential being of man really is.² He says: Aristotle's answer is that man is a rational animal. Then he turns to a later thinker, Descartes, and puts the same question, and here the answer is that man is a thinking being.³ But on reflection he comes to feel that these two representative thinkers can give no answer to his question; for—as he says—in the answers of Aristotle and Descartes he wanted to learn what man is and what he ought to do. When Aristotle says that man is a rational animal, that is no answer to the question of what man is, for it throws no light on the nature of rationality. Nor does Descartes in the seventeenth century tell us what man ought to do in accordance with his nature as a thinking being. For although we may know that man is a thinking being, we do not know what he must think in order to take hold of life in the right way, in order to relate his thought to life.

Thus our philosopher sought in vain for an answer to this vital question, a question that must be answered if a man is not to lose his bearings. At last he came upon something which will seem strange to a modern reader, especially if he is given to scientific ways of thought, but for our solitary thinker it was the only answer appropriate to the particular constitution of his soul. It was no help for him to know that man is a rational animal or a thinking being. At last he found his question answered by another thinker who had it from an old tradition. And he framed the answer he had thus discovered in the following words: Man in his essence is an image of the Divine.⁴ Today we should say that man in his essence is what his whole origin in the spiritual world makes him to be.

The remaining remarks by Count von Hoditz need not occupy us today. All that concerns us is that the needs of his soul drove him to an answer which went beyond anything man can see in his environment or comprehend by means of his reason. If we examine the book more closely, we find that its author had no knowledge gained direct from the spiritual world. Now if he had been troubled by the question of the relation between sun and earth, he could, even if he were not an observer himself, have found the answer somewhere among the observations collected by the new forms of scientific thought. With regard to external questions of the sense-world he could have used answers given by people who had themselves investigated the questions through their own observations and experiences. But the experiences available to him at that time gave no answer to the questions concerning man's spiritual life, his real being in so far as it is spiritual. Clearly, he had no means of finding persons who themselves had had experiences in the spiritual world and so could communicate to him the properties of the spiritual world in the same way as the scientists could impart to him their knowledge about the external world. So he turned to religious tradition and its records. He certainly assimilated his findings—this is characteristic of his quality of soul—but one can see from the way he worked that he was only able to use his intellect to give a new form to what he had found emerging from the course of history or from recorded tradition.

Many people will now be inclined to ask: Are there—can there be—any persons who from their own observation and experience are able to answer questions related to the riddles of spiritual life?

This is precisely what Spiritual Science will make people aware of once more: the fact that—just as research can be carried out in the sense-perceptible world—it is possible to carry out research in the spiritual world, where no physical eyes, no telescopes or microscopes are available, and that answers can thus be given from direct experience as to conditions in such a world beyond the range of the senses. We shall then recognise that there was an epoch, conditioned by the whole evolutionary progress of humanity, when other means were used to make known the findings of spiritual research, and that we now have an epoch when these findings can once more be spoken of and understanding for them can again be found.

In between lay the twilight time of our solitary thinker, when human evolution took a rest, so to speak, from ascending towards the spiritual world, and preferred to rely on traditions passed down through ancient records or by word of mouth. In certain circles it began to be doubted whether it was possible for human beings to enter a spiritual world through their own powers by developing the cognitive faculties that lie hidden or slumbering within them. Are there, then, any rational grounds for saying that it is nonsensical to speak of a spiritual world that lies beyond the sense-perceptible? A glance at the progress of ordinary science should be enough to justify this question. Precisely a consideration of the wonderful advances that have been made in unraveling the secrets of external nature should indicate to anyone that a higher, super-sensible knowledge must exist. How so?

If we study human evolution impartially, we cannot fail to be impressed by the exceptional progress made in recent times by the sciences concerned with the outer world. With what pride—and in a certain sense the pride is justified—do people remark that the vast, ever-increasing advance of modern science has brought to light many facts that were unknown a few centuries ago. For example, thousands of years ago the sun rose in the morning and passed across the heavens, just as it does today. That which could be seen in the surroundings of the earth and in connection with the course of the sun was the same then, for external observation, as it was in the days of Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and so on. But what could men say in those earlier ages about the external world? Can we suppose that the modern knowledge of which we are so justly proud has been gained by merely contemplating the external world? If the external world could itself, just as it is, give us this knowledge, there would be no need to look further: all the knowledge we have about the sense-perceptible world would have been acquired centuries ago. How is it that we know so much more and have a different view of the position of the sun and so on? It is because human understanding, human cognition concerning the external world, has developed and changed in the course of hundreds or thousands of years. Yes, these faculties were by no means the same in ancient Greece as they have come to be with us since the 16th century.

Anyone who studies these changes without prejudice must say to himself: Men have acquired something new. They have learnt to see the outer world differently because of something added to those faculties which apply to the external sense-world. Hence it became clear that the sun does not revolve round the earth; these new faculties compelled men to think of the earth as going round the sun.

No-one who is proud of the achievements of physical science can have any doubt that in his inner being man is capable of development, and that his powers have been remodeled from stage to stage until he has become what he is today. But he is called upon to develop more than outer powers; he has in his inner life something which enables him to recreate the world in the light of his inward capacity for knowledge. Among the finest words of Goethe are the following (in his book about Winckelmann)⁵ “if the healthy nature of man works as a unity, if he feels himself within the world as in a great, beautiful, noble and worthy whole, if harmonious ease offers him a pure and free delight: then the universe, if it could become conscious of itself, would rise in exultation at having reached its goal and would stand in wonder at the climax of its own being and becoming.” And again: “Man, placed at the summit of Nature, is again a whole new nature, which must in turn achieve a summit of its own. He ascends towards that height when he permeates himself with all perfections and virtues, summons forth order, selection, harmony and meaning, and attains in the end to the creation of a work of art.”

So man can feel that he has been born out of the forces he can see with his eyes and grasp with his reason. But if he applies the unbiased observation we have mentioned, he will see that not only external Nature has forces which develop until they are observed by the human eye, heard by the human ear, grasped by the human reason. In the same way a study of human evolution will show that something evolves within man; the faculties for gaining exact knowledge of nature were at first asleep within him, and have awakened by stages in the course of time. Now they are fully awake, and it is these faculties which have made possible the great progress of physical science.

Is it then inevitable that these inner faculties should remain as they are now, equipped only to reflect the outer world? Is it not perfectly reasonable to ask whether the human soul may not possess other hidden powers that can be awakened? May it not be that if he develops further the powers that lie hidden and slumbering within him, they will be spiritually illuminated, so that his spiritual eye and spiritual ear—as Goethe calls them⁶—will be opened and will enable him to perceive a spiritual world behind the sense-world?

To anyone who follows this thought through without prejudice, it will not seem nonsensical that hidden forces should be developed to open the way into the super-sensible world and to answer the questions: What is man in his real being? If he is an image of the spiritual world, what, then, is this spiritual world?

If we describe man in external terms and call to mind his gestures, instincts and so forth, we shall find all these characteristics represented imperfectly in lower beings. We shall see his external semblance as an integration of instincts, gestures and forces which are divided up among a number of lower creatures. We can comprehend this because we see around us the elements from which man has evolved into man. Might it not be possible then, to use these developed forces to penetrate similarly into a spiritual external world and to see there beings, forces and objects, just as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world? Might it not be possible to observe spiritual processes which would throw light on man's inner life, just as it is possible to clarify his relationship to the outer world?

There has been, however, an interval between the old and the modern way of communicating Spiritual Science. This was a time of rest for the greater part of mankind. Nothing new was discovered; the old sources and traditions were worked over again and again. For the period in question this was quite right; every period has a characteristic way of meeting its fundamental needs. So this interlude occurred, and we must realise that while it lasted men were in a special situation, different both from what had been in the past and from what would be in the future. In a certain sense they became unaccustomed to looking for the soul's hidden faculties, which could have given insight into the spiritual world. So a time drew on when men could no longer believe or understand that the inner development of hidden faculties leads to super-sensible knowledge. Even then, one fact could hardly be denied: that in human beings there is something invisible. For how could it be thought that human reason, for example, is a visible entity? What sort of impartial thinking could fail to admit that human cognition is by its nature a super-sensible faculty?

Knowledge of this fact was never quite lost, even in the time when men had ceased to believe that super-sensible faculties within the soul could be developed so as to give access to the super-sensible. One particular thinker reduced this faculty to its smallest limit: it was impossible, he said, for men to penetrate by super-sensible vision into a world that comes objectively before us as a spiritual world, just as animals, plants and minerals and other people are encountered in the physical world. Yet even he had to recognise impartially that something super-sensible does exist and cannot be denied.

This thinker was Kant,⁷ who thus brought an earlier phase of human evolution to a certain conclusion. For what does he think about man's relationship to a super-sensible, spiritual world? He does not deny that a man observes something super-sensible when he looks into himself, and that for this purpose he employs faculties of knowledge which cannot be perceived by physical eyes, however far the refinement of our physical instruments may be carried. Kant, then, does point to something super-sensible; the faculties used by the soul to make for itself a picture of the outer world. But he goes on to say that this is all that can be known concerning a super-sensible world. His opinion is that wherever a man may turn his gaze, he sees only this one thing he can call super-sensible: the super-sensible element contained in his senses in order that he may perceive and grasp and understand the existence of the sense-world.

In the Kantian philosophy, accordingly, there is no path that can lead to observation or experience of the spiritual world. The one thing Kant admits is the possibility of recognising that knowledge of the external world cannot be attained by the senses, but only by super-sensible means. This is the sole experience of the super-sensible that man can have.

That is the historically important feature of Kant's philosophy. But in Kant's argument it cannot be denied that when man uses his thinking in connection with his actions and deeds, he has the means to affect the sense-perceptible world. Thus, Kant had to recognise that a human being does not follow only instinctive impulses, as lower animals do; he also follows impulses from within his soul, and these can raise him far above subservience to mere instinct. There are countless examples of people who are tempted by a seductive impulse to do something, but they resist the temptation and take as their guide to action something that cannot come from an external stimulus. We need only think of the great martyrs, who gave up everything the sense-world could offer for something that was to lead them beyond the sense-world. Or we need only point to the experience of conscience in the human soul, even in the Kantian sense. When a man encounters something ever so charming and tempting, conscience can tell him not to be lured away by it, but to follow the voice that speaks to him from spiritual depths, an indomitable voice within his soul. And so for Kant it was certain that in man's inner being there is such a voice, and that what it says cannot be compared with any message from the outer world. Kant called it the categorical imperatives significant phrase. But he goes on to say that man can get no further than this voice from the soul as a means of acting on the world from out of the super-sensible, for he cannot rise beyond the world of the senses. He feels that duty, the categorical imperative, conscience, speak from within him, but he cannot penetrate into the realm from which they come.

Kant's philosophy allows man to go no further than the boundary of the super-sensible world. Everything else that resides in the realm from which duty, conscience and the categorical imperative emanate is shut off from observation, although it is of the same super-sensible nature as the soul. Man cannot enter that realm; at most he can draw conclusions about it. He can say to himself: Duty speaks to me, but I am weak; in the ordinary world I cannot carry out fully the injunctions of duty and conscience. Therefore I must accept the fact that my being is not confined to the world of the senses, but has a significance beyond that world. I can hold this before me as a belief, but it is not possible for me to penetrate into the world beyond the senses; the world from which come the voices of moral consciousness, duty and conscience, the categorical imperative.

We will now turn to someone who in this context was the exact antithesis of Kant: I mean Goethe. Anyone who truly compares the souls of these two men will see that they are diametrically opposed in their attitudes towards the most important problems of knowledge. Goethe, after absorbing all that Kant had to say about these problems, maintained on the ground of his own inner experience that Kant was wrong. Kant, says Goethe, claims that man has the power to form intellectual, conceptual judgments, but is not endowed with any contemplative faculty which could give direct experience of the spiritual world. But—Goethe continues—anyone who has exercised himself with the whole force of his personality to wrest his way from the sense-world to the super-sensible, as I have done, will know that we are not limited to drawing conclusions, but through a contemplative power of judgement we are able actually to raise ourselves into the spiritual world. Such was Goethe's personal reply to Kant. He emphasises that anyone who asserts the existence of this contemplative judgement is embarking on an adventure of reason, but he adds that from his own experience he has courageously gone through this adventure!⁸

Yet in the recognition of what Goethe calls “contemplative judgement” lies the essence of Spiritual Science, for it leads, as Goethe knew, into a spiritual world; and it can be developed, raised to ever higher levels, so as to bring about direct vision, immediate experience, of that world, The fruits of this enhanced intuition are the content of true Spiritual Science. In coming lectures we shall be concerned with these fruits: with the results of a science which has its source in the development of hidden faculties in the human soul, for they enable man to gaze into a spiritual world, just as through the external instruments of the senses he is able to gaze into the realms of chemistry and physics.

It could now be asked: Does this possibility of developing hidden faculties that slumber in the soul belong only to our time, or has it always existed?

A study of the course of human history from a spiritual-scientific point of view teaches us that there existed ancient stores of wisdom, parts of which were condensed into those writings and traditions which survived during the intermediate period I described earlier. This same Spiritual Science also shows us that today it is again possible not merely to proclaim the old, but to speak of what the human soul can itself achieve by development of the forces and faculties slumbering within it; so that a healthy judgment, even where human beings cannot themselves see into the spiritual world, can understand the findings of the spiritual researcher. The contemplative judgment that Goethe had in mind when he spoke out against Kant, is in a certain sense the beginning of the upward path of knowledge which today is by no means unexplored. Spiritual Science is therefore able to show, as we shall see, that there are hidden faculties of knowledge which by ascending order penetrate ever further into the spiritual world.

When we speak of knowledge, we generally mean knowledge of the ordinary world, “material knowledge”; but we can also speak of “imaginative knowledge”, “inspired knowledge” and finally “intuitive knowledge”.⁹ These are stages of the soul's progress into the super-sensible world which are also experienced by the individual spiritual researcher in accord with the constitution of the soul today. Similar paths were followed by the spiritual researcher in times gone by. But spiritual research has no meaning if it is to remain the possession of a few; it cannot limit itself to a small circle. Certainly, anything an ordinary scientist has to say about the nature of plants or about processes in the animal world can be of service to all mankind, even though this knowledge is actually possessed by a small circle of botanists, zoologists and so on. But spiritual research is not like that. It has to do with the needs of every human soul; with questions related to the inmost joys and sorrows of the soul; with knowledge that enables the human being to endure his destiny, and in such a way that he experiences inner contentment and bliss even if destiny brings him sorrow and suffering. If certain questions remain unanswered, men are left desolate and empty, and precisely they are the concern of Spiritual Science. They are not questions that can be dealt with only in restricted circles; they concern us all, at whatever stage of development and culture we may be, for the answering of them is spiritual food for each and every Soul.

This has always been so, at all times. And if Spiritual Science is to speak to mankind in this way, it must find means of making itself understood by all who wish to understand it. This entails that it must direct itself to those powers which are most fully developed during a given period, so that they can respond to what the spiritual researcher has to impart. Since human nature changes from epoch to epoch and the soul is always acquiring new aptitudes, it is natural that in the past Spiritual Science should have spoken differently about the most burning questions that concern the soul. In remote antiquity it spoke to a humanity which would never have understood the way it speaks today, for the soul-forces which have now developed were non-existent then. If Spiritual Science had been presented in the way appropriate for the present day, it would have been as though one were talking to plants.

In ancient times, accordingly, the spiritual researcher had to use other means. And if we look back into remote antiquity, Spiritual Science itself tells us that in order to give answers in a form adapted to the soul-powers of mankind in those times, a different preparation was necessary for those who were training themselves to gaze into the spiritual world; they had to cultivate powers other than those needed for speaking to present-day mankind.

Men who develop the forces that slumber in the soul in order to gaze into the spiritual world and to see spiritual beings there, as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world—these men are and always have been called by Spiritual Science, Initiates, and the experiences that the soul has to undergo in order to achieve this faculty is called Initiation. But in the past the way to it was different from what it is today, for the mission of Spiritual Science is always changing. The old Initiation, which had to be gone through by those who had to speak to the people in ancient times, led them to an immediate experience of the spiritual world. They could see into surrounding realms which are higher than those perceived through the senses. But they had to transform what they saw into symbolic pictures, so that people could understand it. Indeed, it was only in pictures that the old Initiates could express what they had seen, but these pictures embraced everything that could interest people in those days.

These pictures, drawn from real experience, are preserved for us in myths and legends which have come down from the most diverse periods and peoples. In academic circles these myths and legends are attributed to the popular imagination. Those who are cognisant of the facts know that myths and legends derive from super-sensible vision, and that in every genuine myth and legend we must see an externalised picture of something a spiritual researcher has experienced, or, in Goethe's words, what he has seen with the spiritual eye or heard with the spiritual ear. We come to understand legends and myths only when we take them as images expressing a real knowledge of the spiritual world. They are pictures through which the widest circles of people could be reached.

It is a mistake to assume—as it so often is nowadays—that the human soul has always been just as it is in our century. The soul has changed; its receptivity was quite different in the past. A person was satisfied then if he received the picture given in the myth, for he was inspired by the picture to bring an intuitive vision of the outer world much more directly before his soul. Today myths are regarded as fantasy; but when in former times the myth sank into a person's soul, secrets of human nature were shown to him. When he looked at the clouds or the sun and so forth, he understood as a matter of course what the myth had set before him. In this way something we could call higher knowledge was given to a minority in symbolic form. While today we talk and must talk in straightforward language, it would be impossible to express in our terms what the souls of the old sages or initiates received, for neither the initiates nor their hearers had the soul-forces we have now developed.

In those early times the only valid forms of expression were pictorial. These pictures are preserved in a literature which strikes a modern reader as very strange. Now and then, especially if one is prompted by curiosity as well as by a desire for knowledge, one comes across an old book containing remarkable pictures which show, for example, the interconnections between the planets, together with all sorts of geometrical figures, triangles, polygons and so on. Anyone who applies a modern intellect to these pictures, without having acquired a special taste for them, will say: What can one do with all this stuff, the so-called Key of Solomon¹⁰ as a traditional symbol, these triangles and polygons and such-like?

Certainly, the spiritual researcher will agree that from the standpoint of modern culture nothing can be made of all this. But when the pictures were first given to students, something in their souls really was aroused. Today the human soul is different. It has had to develop in such a way as to give modern answers to questions about nature and life, and so it cannot respond in the old way to such things as two interlocked triangles, one pointing upwards, the other downwards. In former times, this picture could kindle an active response; the soul gazed into it and something emerging from within it was perceived. Just as nowadays the eye can look through a microscope and see, for example, plant-cells that cannot be seen without it, so did these symbolic figures serve as instruments for the soul. A man who held the Key of Solomon as a picture before his soul could gain a glimpse of the spiritual world. With our modern souls this is not possible, and so the secrets of the spiritual world which are handed down in these old writings can no longer be knowledge in the original sense, and those who give them out as knowledge, or who did so in the 19th century, are doing something out of line with the facts. That is why one cannot do anything with writings such as those of Eliphas Levi,¹¹ for instance, for in our time it is antiquated to present these symbols as purporting to throw light on the spiritual world. In earlier times, however, it was proper for Spiritual Science to speak to the human soul through the powerful pictures of myth and legend, or alternatively through symbols of the kind I have just described.

Then came the intermediate period, when knowledge of the spiritual world was handed down from one generation to the next in writing or by oral tradition. Even if we study only external history, we can readily see how it was handed down. In the very early days of Christianity there was a sect in North Africa called the Therapeutae¹² a man who had been initiated into their knowledge said that they possessed the ancient writings of their founders, who could still see into the spiritual world. Their successors could receive only what these writings had to say, or at most what could be discerned in them by those who had achieved some degree of spiritual development.

If we pass on to the Middle Ages, we find certain outstanding persons saying: we have certain cognitive faculties, we have reason; then, beyond ordinary reason we have faculties which can rise to a comprehension of certain secrets of existence; but there are other secrets and mysteries of existence which are only accessible by revelation. They are beyond the range of faculties which can be developed, they can be searched for only in ancient writings.

Hence arose the great mediaeval split between those things that can be known by reason and those that must be believed because they are passed down by tradition, are revelation.¹³ And it was quite in keeping with the outlook of those times that the frontier between reason and faith should be clearly marked. This was justified for that period, for the time had passed when certain mathematical signs could be used to call forth faculties of cognition in the human soul. Right up to modern times, a person had only one means of grasping the super-sensible: looking into his own soul, as Augustine,¹⁴ for example, did to some extent.

It was no longer possible to see in the outer world anything that revealed deep inner secrets. Symbols had come to be regarded as mere fantasies. One thing only survived: a recognition that the super-sensible world corresponded to the super-sensible in man, so that a man could say to himself: You are able to think, but your thought is limited by space and time, while in the spiritual world there is a Being who is pure thought. You have a limited capacity for love, whereas in the spiritual world there is a Being who is perfect love. When the spiritual world was represented for a human being in terms of his own inner experience, his inner life could extend to a vision of nature permeated by the Divine; then he had consciousness of God. But for particular facts he could turn only to information given in ancient writings, for in himself he had nothing that could lead him into the spiritual world.

Then came the later times which brought the proud achievements of natural science. These are the times when faculties which could go beyond the sense-perceptible emerged not only in those who achieved scientific knowledge, but in all men. Something in the soul came to understand that the picture given to the senses is not the real thing, and to realise that truth and appearance are contraries. This new faculty, which is able to discern outward nature in a form not given to the senses, will be increasingly understood by those who today penetrate as researchers into the spiritual world and are then able to report that one can see a spiritual world and spiritual beings, just as down here in the sense-perceptible world one sees animals, plants and minerals.

Hence the spiritual researcher has to speak of realms which are not far removed from present-day understanding. And we shall see how the symbols which were once a means for gaining knowledge of the spiritual world have become an aid to spiritual development. The Key of Solomon, for instance, which once called forth in the soul a real spiritual perception, does so no longer. But if today the soul allows itself to be acted on by what the spiritual researcher can explain concerning this symbol, something in the soul is aroused, and this can lead a person on by stages into the spiritual world. Then, when he has gained vision of the spiritual world, he can express what he has seen in the same logical terms that apply to external science.

Spiritual Science or occultism must therefore speak in a way that can be grasped by anyone who has a broad enough understanding. Whatever the spiritual researcher has to impart must be clothed in the conceptual terms which are customary in other sciences, or due regard would not be paid to the needs of the times. Not everyone can see immediately into the spiritual world, but since the appropriate forces of reason and feeling are now existent in every soul, Spiritual Science, if rightly presented, can be grasped by every normal person with his ordinary reason. The spiritual researcher is now again in a position to present what our solitary thinker said to himself: Man in his essence is an image of the Godhead.

If we want to understand the physical nature of man, we look to the relevant findings of physical research. If we want to understand his inner spiritual being, we look to the realm which the spiritual researcher is able to investigate. Then we see that man does not come into existence at birth or at conception, only to pass out of existence at death, but that besides the physical part of his organism he has super-sensible members. If we understand the nature of these members, we penetrate into the realm where faith passes over into knowledge. And when Kant, in the evening of an older period, said that we can recognise the categorical imperative, but that no-one can penetrate with conscious vision into the realm of freedom, of divine being and immortality, he was expressing only the experience natural to his time. Spiritual Science will show that we can penetrate into a spiritual world; that just as the eye equipped with a microscope can penetrate into realms beyond the range of the naked eye, so can the soul equipped with the means of Spiritual Science penetrate into an otherwise inaccessible spiritual world, where love, conscience, freedom and immortality can be known, even as we know animals, plants and minerals in the physical world. In subsequent lectures we will go further into this.

If once more we look now at the relationship between the spiritual researcher and his public, and at the difference between the past and present of Spiritual Science, we can say: The symbolic pictures used by spiritual researchers in the past acted directly on the human soul, because what today we call the faculties of reason and understanding were not yet present. The pictures gave direct vision of the spiritual world, and the ordinary man could not test with his reason what the spiritual researcher communicated to him through them. The pictures acted with the force of suggestion, of inspiration; a man subjected to them was carried away and could not resist them. Anyone who was given a false picture was thus delivered over to those who gave it to him. Therefore, in those early times it was of the utmost importance that those who rose into the spiritual world should be able to inspire absolute confidence and firm belief in their trustworthiness; for if they misused their power they had in their hands an instrument which they could exploit in the worst possible way.

Hence in the history of Spiritual Science there are periods of degeneration as well as times of brilliance; times in which the power of untrustworthy initiates was misused. How the initiate in those early times behaved towards his public depended to the utmost degree on himself alone. At the present time—and one might say, thank God for it!—all this is somewhat different. Since the change does not come about all at once, it is still necessary that the initiate should be a trustworthy person, and it will then be justified to feel every confidence in him. But people are already in a different relationship to the spiritual researcher; if he is to speak in accordance with the demands of his time he must speak in such a way that every unbiased mind can understand him, if the willingness to understand him is there. This is, of course, far removed from saying that everyone who could understand must now understand. But reason can now be the judge of what an individual can understand, and therefore everyone who devotes himself to Spiritual Science should bring his unbiased judgment to bear on it.

From now onwards this will be the mission of Spiritual Science: to rise into a spiritual world, through the development of hidden powers, just as the physiologist penetrates through the microscope into a realm of the smallest entities, invisible to the naked eye. And ordinary intelligence will be able to test the findings of spiritual research, as it can test the findings of the physiologist, the botanist, and so on. A healthy intelligence will be able to say of the spiritual researcher's findings: they are all consistent with one another. Modern man will come to the point of saying to himself: My reason tells me that it can be so, and by using my reason I can grasp clearly what the spiritual researcher has to tell. And that is how the spiritual researcher, for his part, should speak if he feels himself to be truly at one with the mission of Spiritual Science at the present time. But there will be a time of transition also today. For since the means to achieve spiritual development are available and can be used wrongly, many people whose purpose is not pure, whose sense of duty is not sacred and whose conscience is not infallible, will find their way into a spiritual world. But then, instead of behaving like a spiritual researcher who can know from his own experience whether the things he sees are in accord with the facts, these pretended researchers will impart information that goes against the facts. Moreover, since people can come only by slow degrees to apply their reasoning powers to understanding what the spiritual researcher says, we must expect that charlatanry, humbug and superstition will flourish preeminently in this realm. But the situation is changing. Man now has himself to blame if, without wishing to use his intellect, he is led by a certain curiosity to believe blindly in those who pass themselves off as spiritual investigators, so-called. Because men are too comfort-loving to apply their reason, and prefer a blind faith to thinking for themselves, it is possible that nowadays we may have, instead of the old initiate who misused his power, the modern charlatan who imposes on people not the truth, but something he perhaps takes for truth. This is possible because today we are at the beginning of an evolutionary phase.

There is nothing to which a man should apply his reason more rigorously than the communications that can come to him from Spiritual Science. People can lay part of the blame on themselves if they fall victim to charlatanry and humbug; for these falsities will bear abundant fruit, as indeed they have done already in our time. This is something that must not go unnoticed when we are speaking of the mission of Spiritual science today.

Anyone who listens now to a spiritual researcher—not in a willful, negative way that casts immediate doubt on everything, but with a readiness to test everything in the light of healthy reason—will soon feel how Spiritual Science can bring hope and consolation in difficult hours, and can throw light on the great riddles of existence. He will come to feel that these riddles and the great questions of destiny can be resolved through Spiritual Science; he will come to know what part of him is subject to birth and death, and what is the eternal core of his being. In brief, it will be possible—as we shall show in later lectures—that, given good will and the wish to strengthen himself by taking in and working over inwardly the communications of Spiritual Science, he will be able to say with deepest feeling: What Goethe divined and said in his youth is true, and so are the lines he wrote in his maturity and gave to Faust to speak:

The spirit world is ever open,
Dead is thy heart, thy sense-veil closely drawn!
Up, scholar, let thy breast unwearied
Bathe in the roseate hues of dawn!¹⁵

In the dawn-lines of the Spirit!

• 1. The “Libellus de hominis convenienta” by Francis Joseph Philipp Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz is a manuscript which was discovered in the Fürstenberg Library in Prague and which was written approximately between 1696 and 1700.
• 2. Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. Cf. the Parva Naturalia.
• 3. René Descartes, 1596–1650. Cf. for example the work “Meditationes de prima Philosophia”, 1641/42.
• 4. With this answer Hoditz goes back to the Neo-Platonist Philo of Alexandria (see Rudolf Steiner's comments on him in Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972) who in turn revives the Old Testament tradition; I Moses 1, 26/27
• 5. Goethe: Winkelmann, “Antikes” and “Schönheit”; in: Goethe, Werke, Weimar Edition, vol.46 (Weimar, 1891).
• 6. Cf. for example Goethe's essay “Wenige Bemerkungen” in Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.107 or in “Entwurf einer Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie”, op. cit., p.262: “We learn to see with the eyes of the spirit, without which we grope around blindly as everywhere so also in natural science”. Also Faust II, sc. 1, 1 1.4667.
• 7. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804. Cf. the chapter “The time of Kant and Goethe” in Rudolf Steiner's The Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 8. Goethe, “Anschauende Urteilskraft” in: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.1 15/116.
• 9. Cf. fundamental account of the stages of knowledge in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979, in the chapter “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”.
• 10. The symbol of two intertwined triangles, the one pointing upwards, the other downwards.
• 11. Eliphas Levi, 1810–1875, occultist. Pseudonym for the originally catholic deacon Alphonse Louis Constant from Paris. Dogme et Rituel de la haute Magie, 2 vols, 1854 and 1856.
• 12. Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C.–50 A.D.) describes the life and thought of the Therapeutae in his work “De vital contemplative”. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972, p.137.
• 13. Decisive in this respect are the writings of Thomas Aquinas, especially the four books of the Summa philosophica. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy and The Redemption of Thinking.
• 14. St. Augustine, 354–430 A.D.. Had the greatest influence of the Church Fathers on theology and philosophy.
• 15. Faust I, sc.1,11.443–446.

Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps you have thought of something during the slightly longer time - a special question?

Question about the nature of the various hierarchies and their influence on humanity.

Dr. Steiner: I think this is a subject that will be somewhat difficult and incomprehensible for those gentlemen who are here for the first time today, because one should know something of what has already been presented in the lectures that have been given. But I will still address the matter and try to make it as understandable as possible.

You see, when you look at a person standing and walking on the earth, that person actually has all the kingdoms of nature within them. Man has, first of all, the animal kingdom within him; in a certain sense, he is also organized like an animal. You can see this from the fact that man has, let us say, for example, thighbones and humerus, which are also found in a similar way in higher animals; but if you can see the matter clearly, you will also find that it is related to the lower animals, or at least shaped similarly. And if you look at fish, you can see roughly what corresponds to a human bone in fish. The same thing that can be said for the bone system can also be said for the muscle system and for the internal organs. We find a stomach in humans – and in a corresponding way, we also find a stomach in animals. In short, we find what is in the animal kingdom in the human body as well.

This has led to the materialistic view that humans are nothing more than highly developed animals. But that is not the case; rather, humans develop three things that animals cannot develop from their own organism. One is that humans learn to walk upright. Just look at the animals that learn to walk more or less upright, and you will see the considerable difference between them and humans. In the case of animals that walk upright, for example the kangaroo, you will see how the front limbs, which it does not use for walking, remain atrophied. The front limbs of the kangaroo are not designed for free use. And as for the ape, we certainly cannot say that it is human-like in this respect; because when it climbs a tree, it is not walking, but climbing. It actually has four hands, not two feet and two hands. Its feet are hand-like; it climbs. So the upright walk is the first thing that distinguishes humans from animals.

The second thing that distinguishes humans from animals is the ability to speak. And the ability to speak is connected with the upright posture. Therefore you will find that where an animal has something similar to the ability to speak – the dog, which is relatively a very intelligent animal, does not have it, but the parrot, which is somewhat upright, has it – you will find that the animal is then upright. Speech is entirely connected with this upright posture.

And the third is free will, which the animal also cannot acquire, but the animal is dependent on its inner processes. These are things that make up the whole inner organization of the human being and shape it humanely.

But the human being still carries animality within him. He has this animal realm within him.

The second thing that man carries within him is the plant kingdom. What can man do because he carries the animal kingdom within him? You see, the animal feels - so does man; the plant does not feel. On the other hand, a strange science of the present day - I have mentioned this here before - has the view that a plant can also feel because there is a plant, the so-called Venus flytrap, for example: When an insect comes near, as soon as the insect has flown up, this Venus flytrap closes its leaves and devours the insect. This is a very interesting phenomenon. But if someone says: This plant, the Venus flytrap, must sense the insect, that is, perceive it when it comes near – that is just as much nonsense as if someone were to say: A little thing that I make so that it snaps shut when a mouse comes near – a mousetrap would also have a sensation that the mouse is coming in! So such scientific opinions are not very far-reaching; they are just plain nonsense. Plants do not feel. Nor do plants move freely.

So what is common to humans and animals is the sensation and movement; in this, he bears animality within him. Only when he can think rationally - which the animal cannot - is he human as a result. Furthermore, the human being bears the plant kingdom, the whole plant kingdom, within him. The plants do not move, but they grow. The plants do not feel, but they feed themselves. The human being also grows and feeds himself. The plant kingdom does this in him. Man also bears this plant power within him. He also bears it within him when he sleeps. He sheds his animality when he sleeps, because he does not feel or move unless he is a night walker, and that is based on abnormal development; then he does not completely lose his movement, then he is ill. But in a normal state, a person does not walk around in his sleep and is not aware of anything. If he is supposed to be aware, he wakes up. He cannot be aware while sleeping. During sleep, the human being also carries the plant essence within himself.

And the mineral essence, gentlemen, we also carry that within us; it is contained, for example, in our bones. They are somewhat alive, but they contain the inanimate carbonic lime. We carry the mineral kingdom within us. We even have brain sand in our brains. That is mineral. We also carry the mineral kingdom within us. So we carry the animal kingdom, we carry the plant kingdom, we carry the mineral kingdom within us.

But that is not all for the human being. If the human being were merely a mineral, plant and animal, he would be like an animal, he would walk like an animal, because the animal also carries mineral, plant and animal within itself. Of course, the human being is not only related to these three kingdoms of nature that are visible, but he is also related to other kingdoms.

Now I will sketch this out for you schematically. Imagine that this is the human being (see drawing); now he is related to the mineral kingdom, to the plant kingdom, to the animal kingdom. But he is a human being. You can say: Well, animals can be tamed. That's all right; but have you ever seen an ox being tamed by an ox? Or a horse by a horse? Animals, even if they can be tamed, thus acquiring certain abilities that can be remotely compared to human abilities, must be tamed by humans! Right, a dog school, where the dogs teach themselves and make tame dogs out of wild dogs, does not exist; humans have to intervene. And even if one thought one could admit to the materialists everything they wanted, one would just have to follow their own train of thought – one can admit everything to them, for my part one can say: man, as he is now, was originally an animal and was tamed – but the animal he originally was could not have tamed itself! That is not possible, because otherwise a dog could also tame a dog. So there must have been original beings - they may be elsewhere now - but nevertheless there must have been original beings who brought man to his present height. And these beings cannot belong to the three realms of nature. Because if you now imagine that you would ever be tamed by a giraffe, made into a human being, when you are still like a small animal in childhood, just as little as this would be possible, you could just as little be tamed by an oak tree. At most, the German-nationalists believe this, who assume that the oak, the sacred oak, has tamed people. And, you see, the minerals even less so; rock crystal is beautiful, but it certainly cannot tame people. There must have been other beings, other realms.

Now, everything in man is really called up into the higher. The animal has the possibility of having ideas, but it does not think. The ideas form in the animals. But the animal does not have this activity of thinking. Man has this activity of thinking. And so man can indeed have his blood circulation from the animal kingdom, but he cannot have his organ of thinking from the animal kingdom. So that one can say: Man thinks, feels and wills. All these things are done freely. And all this is changed by the fact that man is an upright and articulate creature.

Imagine how you would have to want differently, how all wanting would be different, if you were always crawling around on all fours like you were in your first year; after all, all human wanting would really be different. And you would not even have time to think. And just as the things we carry in our physical body connect us with the three realms of nature, so do our thinking, feeling and willing connect us with three other realms, with supersensible, invisible realms. We have to have names for everything. Just as we call the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms the kingdoms of nature, so we call the kingdoms that effect thinking, feeling and willing in the human being, so that they are free, precisely hierarchies. So here we have: natural kingdoms, through which man reaches into nature; and here we have: hierarchies. You see, just as the human being reaches into three natural kingdoms, he also reaches into three spiritual kingdoms. With his thinking, he reaches into the hierarchy - well, you see, there is no name for it yet. Because materialism takes no account of this, there is no name for it; so we have to call it by the old name: Angeloi, angels. But you are immediately branded as superstitious. Of course, we no longer have the ability to find names in language because people have lost the ability to feel with sounds; but languages could only be formed as long as people still felt something with sounds. Today everyone speaks of ball, of fall, of strength; there is an A in everything, an A in each of these words. But what is an A? An “A” is the expression of feeling! Imagine if you suddenly saw someone opening the window from the outside and looking in. You would be amazed because that is not supposed to happen; a large part of you would probably express your amazement with an “Ah!” if you were not embarrassed to do so. A is always the expression of astonishment. So with each letter there is some expression of something. And when I say “ball,” I need the A because I am amazed when I throw the ball, how it behaves strangely; or if it means a dance ball, I am also amazed at how it swirls around! It just so happened that people gradually got used to it, so that they are no longer amazed; you could also call it a bull or a bill, but certainly no longer a ball. - Let's take “fall.” When someone plops down somewhere, you can also say: Ah! - And the other thing that is significant is precisely in the F inside. “Force": when someone applies a force that pushes him; Ah: wherever astonishment occurs, the A is there.

And consider: you are of the opinion that thinking sits in your head. But if you were to suddenly realize that spiritual beings are just as much a part of your thinking as animals must be on earth for your sensing and feeling, so that you can have animality within you, then you would also be amazed, and so, if you express this amazement, you would have to have a word that contains the A. So you would be able to name these thinking beings, who were once called angels, with an A, and you would name the fact that you have the power of thought with the letter that expresses power in a certain way: L; and the power that works you might perhaps call B. The word 'alb', which has already been used for something spiritual, could just as well be used for these beings that have to do with thinking, if it were not used only for nightmare, which is pathological. So the hierarchies are realms that man reaches into, that he carries within himself, just as he carries the realms of nature within himself; and these beings, which have been called demons or angels, are the ones that have to do with thinking.

On the other hand, animal beings are involved in the feeling in man. What, animal beings? Now, you see, if you are a little attentive, if you don't go wild from the outset when it comes to the spiritual, but if you just allow yourself to be open to the fact that it can be about the spiritual, then you will come across many things – even if you cannot yet proceed with spiritual research, as is the case with anthroposophy. Just imagine that if you want to feel, you have to have a certain warmth within you! The frog feels much less vividly than man because it does not have such warm blood; you really have to have warmth within you if you feel. But the warmth that you have within you comes from the sun! And so you can say: Feeling is also connected with the sun - only spiritually. Physical warmth is connected with the physical sun, and feeling, which is connected with physical warmth, is connected with the spiritual sun. This second hierarchy, which has to do with feeling, thus dwells in the sun. Anyone who is not completely brain-dead, as so many are today - especially scientists - can come up with it: the second hierarchy is the solar beings. And because the sun reveals itself only outwardly in light and warmth (no one knows the interior of the sun, for if physicists really came up with the sun, they would be extremely astonished to find that the sun does not look at all as they usually think it does! They think to themselves, the sun is a glowing ball of gas. That is not what it is at all; it actually consists of nothing but sucking forces; it is hollow, not even empty, but sucking. We can say that outwardly it reveals itself as light, as warmth; the beings that are within were called in Greek “beings of revelation”. Where there was still some knowledge of these things – for the old instinctive science was much more intelligent than today's – these beings, which reveal themselves from the sun, were called exusiai; we can also say: sun beings. We only need to know that when we speak of feeling, we enter the realm of the sun beings. Just as when I say: Man has in himself forces of growth and nutrition, thus the plant kingdom in himself, so I must say: Man has in himself the forces of feeling, thus forces of the spiritual sun kingdom, the second hierarchy. And the third is the first hierarchy, which has to do with the human will, where man becomes most powerful, where he does not merely move, where he expresses his deeds. This is connected with those beings who are spiritually out in the whole world and who are actually the highest spiritual beings we can get to know. We call them again by Greek or Hebrew names, because we do not yet have German ones, or we do not yet have the expressions in language at all: Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. That is the highest realm.

So there are three spiritual realms, just as there are three natural realms. Just as humans deal with the three natural realms, they also deal with the three spiritual realms.

Now you will say: Yes, but I can believe that or not, because these three realms are not visible, not perceptible. Yes, but, gentlemen, I have met people who were supposed to be made to understand that there is air! He didn't believe that there was air. When I say to him: There is a board - he believes that, because when he goes there, he bumps into the board, or when he looks with his eyes, he sees the board, but he does not bump into the air. He looks and says: There is nothing there. Nevertheless, today everyone admits the air. It is just there. And so it will also come about that people will admit the spiritual. Today people still say: Well, the spiritual is just not there – as the farmers used to say: The air is not there. – In my homeland, the farmers still said: The air is not there at all – only the bigwigs in the city say that, who want to be so clever; you can walk through it, there is nothing there to walk through! But that was a long time ago. Today, even the farmers know that there is air. Today, however, the cleverest people do not yet know that spiritual beings are everywhere! But in time they will admit this, because there are certain things they cannot explain otherwise, and these things also need to be explained.

If someone were to say today: In all that exists as nature, there is no spirit in it; for everything that science knows about nature is in it, nothing else is in nature – yes, anyone who says that says that, gentlemen, he is just as if a dead person were lying there, a corpse, and I come and say: You rotten guy, why don't you get up and go! I try to make him understand that he shouldn't be so lazy and get up. Yes, I am foolish because I believe that the living person is inside. And so it is: everything that the natural scientist can find in there, he does not find in the living, he finds in the dead. He also finds the dead everywhere outside in nature, but he does not find that which is alive. He does not find that which is spiritual in this way, but that is why it is there.

That is what I wanted to say in response to this question, which was asked in connection with the hierarchies.

Mr. Burle: In earlier lectures, Dr. Steiner spoke about the knowledge of spiritual science of ancient peoples. Today, this has been lost to humanity. Could Dr. Steiner explain to us why this has happened? Was materialism solely to blame?

Dr. Steiner: Why the old knowledge has been lost? Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is a very strange fact. Not in the way we have knowledge today, but in an artistic, poetic form, in a poetic form, the ancients, our ancestors, had great knowledge in primeval times, and this knowledge, as Mr. Burle quite rightly says, has been lost to humanity. Now we can ask ourselves how this knowledge was lost. Of course we cannot say that materialism alone is to blame for this, because if all people still had the old knowledge, materialism would not have come into being. It is precisely because the old knowledge was lost and people became spiritually crippled that they invented materialism. So materialism comes from the loss of ancient knowledge – not that one can say that the loss of ancient knowledge comes because materialism has spread. So what does the loss of ancient knowledge really come from?

Yes, gentlemen, it comes from the fact that humanity is undergoing a development. Of course, you can dissect the human being who is here now; when he dies, you can dissect him. In this way you can gain knowledge about the way in which man is put together in the present. From ancient times, the only things that are available are, well, the mummies in Egypt, which we talked about the other day; but they are embalmed through and through, so you can't really dissect them anymore. So how man looked in earlier times, especially in the time when he was built finer, of that people now can't get any scientific idea through mere external research; one must also penetrate with spiritual research. And then one comes to the conclusion that man in ancient times was not at all as he is today.

There was a time on earth when people did not have such firm bones as we have today; then people had bones like those of today's rachitic children, who have weak bones that cause bowlegs or knock-knees and are weak in general. You can see that such weak bones can exist because they are still present in cartilaginous fish today. Their bones are as soft as cartilage. Human beings once had such bones, because the human skeleton was once soft. Now you will say: But then people must all have walked around with knock-knees or bowlegs, and everything would have been crooked if the bones were soft!

Of course, that would have been the case if the air on our earth had always been the same as it is today. But it wasn't; the air was much thicker in the old days. It has become much thinner. And the air contained much more water in the old days than it does today. The air also contained much more carbon dioxide. All the air was thicker. Now you must realize that people in those days were also able to live with their soft bones; because we have our present-day bones only because the air no longer supports us. A thicker air supports people. Walking in those ancient times was much more like swimming than it is today. Today's walking is something terribly mechanical: we put one leg on - that has to stand properly like a pillar - we put the second leg on. People in prehistoric times did not walk like that, but they felt, just as one lets oneself be carried in the water, the watery air; that's where they could have their soft bones. But when the air became thinner there – and this can be known with external science, that the air became thinner there – only then did the hard bones make sense; only then did the hard bones arise. Of course, in the past the carbonic acid was outside, the air contained it; today we carry the carbonate of lime within us; that is how the bones became hard. That is how things are connected.

But when the bones become hard, the other things in the human being also become hard, so that the human being, who had softer bones, also had a significantly softer brain matter. In general, the skull, the human head, was also shaped quite differently in ancient times. You see, it was shaped more like the shape of hydrocephalic skulls today; that was beautiful back then, but is no longer beautiful today. And so, like the very small child still has in the womb, he retained his head because he had a soft brain mass, and the soft brain discharges into the front skull. Everything was softer in humans.

Now, gentlemen, if man was softer, then his mental abilities were also different. With a soft brain, one can think much more spiritually than with a hard brain. The ancients still felt this; they called a person who can only ever think the same thing and accepts little and therefore stubbornly always remains with the one idea, a mule. This feeling already implies that one can actually think better and have better ideas if one has a hard brain. Prehistoric men had such a hard brain.

But these primitive people had something else. We can really say: when a child is born, its skull with its soft brain and even the soft bones are still similar - the bones are no longer so strong, but the brain is very similar to that of primitive people. But put a small child down: it cannot move from the spot, cannot feed itself and the like, it cannot do anything! For this, higher beings had to take care of them when humans still had this soft brain. And the consequence of this was that people in those days had no freedom, had no free will. These people had great wisdom, but no free will at all. But in human evolution, free will gradually emerges. For this, the bones and the brain must harden. But with this hardening, the old knowledge takes its downfall. We would not have become free human beings if we had not become stubborn, hard-skulled, and had skulls with hard brains. But we owe our freedom to that. And so the downfall of the old knowledge comes with freedom. That's it. Is it understandable? (Answer: Yes) It comes with freedom!

But now, while humans have gained freedom on the one hand, they have lost the old knowledge and fallen prey to materialism. But materialism is not the truth. Therefore, we must come to spiritual knowledge again, even though we have a denser brain today than primitive people did. We can only do this through anthroposophical spiritual science, which comes to knowledge that is independent of the body, that is recognized by the soul alone. The ancient people had their knowledge because their brain was softer, that is, more similar to the soul; and we have our materialism because our brain has become hard and no longer absorbs the soul. Now we have to gain spiritual knowledge with the soul alone, which is not absorbed by the brain. This is what spiritual science does. One comes back to spiritual knowledge. But we are now living in the age in which humanity has bought its freedom through materialism. Therefore, one cannot say that materialism, even if it is untrue, is something bad. Materialism, if it is not exaggerated, is not bad, but through materialism, humanity has come to know a great deal that it did not know before. That is it.

Now, one question has already been asked in writing:

I read the sentence in your “Philosophy of Freedom”: “Only when we have made the content of the world our own thought content, only then do we rediscover the context from which we have detached ourselves.”

So that is what the gentleman read in the Philosophy of Freedom. He now poses the question: What belongs to this world content, since everything we see is only there to the extent that it is thought? And then he says: Kan explains that the mind is incapable of grasping that which the appearing world of causes is prior to the world of experience.

Well, you see, gentlemen, it is like this: when we are born and are still small children, we have eyes and ears, we see and hear, that is, we perceive the things that are outside of us. The chair that is standing there is not yet thought by the child, but it is perceived. It looks the same to the child as it does to an adult, only the child does not yet think the chair. Let us assume that, through some artificial means, the very young child, who has no thoughts yet, could already talk; then the child would be inclined to criticize everything, which is something we are accustomed to today, where even the thoughtless people criticize the most. I am even convinced that if very young children, who cannot yet think, could already talk a lot, they would become the strongest critics. Not true, even in ancient India, only those who were already sixty years old were allowed to criticize and judge; the others were not allowed to judge because it was said that they had no experience of the world. Well, I don't want to defend that, nor criticize it myself, but I just want to tell you that it was like that. Today, of course, anyone who has turned twenty would be laughed at if you wanted to tell him that he should wait to be judged until he was sixty! Today's young people don't do that; they don't wait at all, but as soon as they can hold a pen, they start writing for newspapers and judging everything. In this respect, we have come a long way today. But I am convinced that if very young children could speak, they would be strict critics! A two-year-old, my goodness, would criticize so many of our actions if he could be made to speak!

Kant – I mentioned him the other day – made the biggest mistake by believing that what the child does not yet perceive and what one only perceives later, namely the content of thought, is something that the human being first puts into things. So Kant actually says: When the chair is there – the chair has colors, the chair rattles. But when I say the chair is heavy, that is not a property of the chair, but I give it to it by thinking it heavy. The chair has firmness, but it does not have that in itself, I give it to it by thinking it firm. Yes, gentlemen, this is considered a great science, this Kantian doctrine, as I told you some time ago; but in reality it is a great nonsense. It is just that, due to the peculiar development of humanity, a great nonsense is regarded as a great science, as the highest philosophy, and Kant is always called the all-devourer, the all-destroyer. I have always seen in him only a destroyer; even as a very small boy I studied Kant over and over again. But otherwise I have not noticed that the one who destroys the soup plates establishes the greatest and that he is greater than the one who makes them. It always seemed to me that the one who makes them is greater! Kant always destroyed everything in reality. So these objections of Kant's should not trouble us at all. But the thing is that when we are born, we are detached from things because we have no connection with them at all. We only grow into things again by forming concepts. Therefore, the question that is asked here must be answered as follows: What belongs to the content of the world? I say in my Philosophy of Freedom: Only when we have made the content of the world our own content of thought do we rediscover the connection from which we detached ourselves as a child. As a child, we do not have the content of the world; we only have the sensual part of the content of the world. But the content of thought is really contained in the content of the world. So that as a child we only have half the content of the world, and only later, when we grow up to our thoughts, do we not only have the content of thought within us, but we know that it is within things, we also treat our thoughts in such a way that we know that they are within things, and there we restore the connection with things.

You see, it was very difficult in the 1980s, when everything had been Kantianized, when everyone spoke in such a way that Kantian philosophy was regarded as the highest and no one yet dared to say anything against it – it was very difficult when I appeared on the scene back then and declared that Kantian philosophy is actually nonsense. But I had to explain that from the very beginning. Because of course, when someone like Kant thinks that we actually have to add the content of thought to things, then he can no longer come to the simple content, then in the soul there are just thoughts about external things, and it is quite definitely materialism. Kant is largely to blame for the fact that people have not come out of materialism. Kant is to blame for a great deal in general. I told you about this at the time, when I was asked about Kant from a different angle. The others, because they could not think otherwise, made materialism. But Kant said: We cannot know anything about the spiritual world, we can only believe. - With this he actually said: We can only know something about the sensual world, because we can only drag thoughts into the sensual world.

And now people who wanted to become materialistic felt more and more justified in referring to Kant. But humanity must also get rid of this prejudice - that is, part of humanity, very few people know about Kant - they must get rid of always referring to Kant, and then referring to Kant when they want to say: you can't really know anything about the spiritual world. So: the content of the world is the content of the senses and the content of the spirit. But one only comes to the spiritual content in the course of life, when one develops thoughts. Then one re-establishes the connection between nature and spirit, whereas at the beginning, as a child, one only has nature before one, and the spirit only gradually develops out of one's own nature.

Does anyone have a very small question?

Mr. Burle asks about human hair and says: Today, so many girls have their hair cut. Can the doctor say whether this is beneficial to health? My little daughter also wanted to cut her hair, but I didn't allow it. I want to know if it would be harmful or not.

Dr. Steiner: No, the thing is this: hair growth is so little connected to the whole organism that it does not matter so much whether you let your hair grow long or cut it. The damage is not so great as to be noticeable. But there is a difference between men and women in this respect. It used to be the case for a while – but it's no longer true – that you would often see anthroposophists together, men and women: the man would not cut his hair, he would just have long curls, and the women would cut their hair short! Of course, people also said: This anthroposophy brings the world upside down; among anthroposophists, the ladies cut their hair off and the men let it grow. - Now that is no longer the case, at least not so noticeable. But one can also ask how it is with the difference between the sexes when cutting hair.

In general, however, it is the case that for men, abundant hair growth is somewhat superfluous; for women, it is somewhat necessary. The hair always contains sulfur, iron, silica and a few other substances. These substances are also needed by the organism. For example, silicic acid is very much needed by men because, by becoming male in the womb, they lose the ability to produce silicic acid themselves. Through the cut hair – whenever the hair is freshly cut, it absorbs the silicic acid that is in the air – the man absorbs silicic acid from the air. So cutting your hair is not a problem. It is only bad when they run out, because then they cannot absorb anything. Therefore, going bald early, which is somewhat connected to a person's lifestyle, is not exactly a good thing for a man.

Now, for women, cutting their hair is not entirely good, because women have the ability to produce more silicic acid in their organism, and so they should not cut their hair too short too often; because then the hair absorbs the silicic acid that the woman already has in her from the air and drives it back into the organism. The woman becomes hairy and prickly on the inside; she then gets “hair on her teeth”. This is not so noticeable; one must be a little sensitive to notice it, but it is there. The whole manner also becomes prickly, she becomes hairy and prickly inside; and cutting it off, especially if it happens in adolescence, also has an influence.

But it could also be the other way around, gentlemen. It could be that today's young people are coming into an environment – after all, children today are all different from how we were in our youth – where their inner silica is no longer enough for them, because they want to be prickly. They want to be a little prickly, scratchy. So they get the instinct to cut their hair. This then becomes fashionable: one person imitates another, and here the story is reversed, with children wanting to become prickly and getting their hair cut. If you can manage to get this fashion to be combated a little, then it can't be all that bad if you have exaggerated this fashion a little. After all, it comes down to this, doesn't it: one likes a soft one, the other a spiky one; that's where it can change a bit in the judgment of taste. But it can't have that much of an influence. Only if someone has a daughter who, precisely because of the circumstances, wants to or should choose a man who loves a spiky one, should she have her hair cut. Of course, she won't get a man who is sensitive to mildness; that might happen. - So the story reaches more into the fringes of life.

First, the purely physical theory that is usually taught in our schools. According to Kant-Laplace's theory, it is assumed that at the point where our solar system is today, there was once a thin, gaseous nebula, similar to the mass of the Orion Nebula, so that the entire planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, Earth - in analogy - were like simple fat globules, like fat globules floating on water.

[Dr. Steiner takes a card sheet that is as large in diameter as a fat globule, pushes it through the fat globule, which is then divided into two parts. Then he pushes a needle through it as an axis, puts it in water and sets it in rotation. It becomes a lens, and then fat globules split off and move around the original drop.]

Kepler replaced the circular motion with the ellipse. All physical theories are built on analogies. There is no other evidence. As long as we remain within the physical mass, we can transfer the process we have described to the large scale and accept it. If someone had sat outside the process of creation to observe its development, they would not have seen anything different.

But suppose that something that would not be visible to the physical eye would become visible in the preceding and subsequent for someone who begins to see brightly, who could say: Now something is present in the moment when the ethereal condenses into the physical. He completely disregards what precedes it. And that is the secret, that everything else is eliminated and only the physical remains. Such a physical representation cannot be challenged. It is a partial truth. The Kant nebula could never have been there if it had not condensed out of something else. Can you imagine organic germs separating out of a mass of gas? From this you can see that within what Kant describes, something must have been present that Kant does not describe. If we trace back the states of our earth: today it is solid, before that it was liquid, even before that it had a gaseous form. But before it took on the gaseous form, it was an astral sphere.

And this cannot be described by physical theory. You have to imagine the space where the earth is now as being filled with astral matter. At a certain point in time, Kama is divided into two poles. One of these is the physical-material, the other the kamic-manasic. Now the material emerges, as it were, out of nothing.

He cannot recognize the Kama-Manas. This forms the human being, and the human being forms the animals as side branches. Something else must precede the astral earth. This is preceded by a mental earth, the rupic-mental earth. But when the rupic-mental earth was formed, the rupic-mental sun, Venus, and so on, the whole planetary system, was formed at the same time. All planets became rupic-mental at the same time. The original was the Sun. The first division that arises is developed out of the Arupic. The segregation of the planets takes place in such a way that this is a purely mental process. The Dhyan-Chohans are the mental spirits of the planets.

Let us consider Jupiter. The Arupic mental Sun has become the Rupic mental Mercury and so on. We have designated as rupic-mental all the processes that relate to the planetary system. Everything that enters into the individual planets is astral. The astral-earthly has nothing to do with any other planet. On the other hand, we have the rupic-mental sphere in common with all the other planets. The kamic entities are those that belong only to our physical existence. The observer sitting on the chair could only see the bodies shine when they have entered the physical-material. A Christian who imagines God as a man with a long beard is spiritually superstitious. Those who believe in the Kant-Laplace theory we call materially superstitious.

If we follow the lunar cycle, we are dealing with a physical moon. It becomes astral. Take the earth. It was first arupic, then rupic, then mental, astral, physical, then astral again, rupic, arupic. We have already been through this.

The Pitri nature is astral and so on. In the astral state, we would never be able to make the transition from one planet to another. Only when we rise to the mental and there again reach the roupical-mental, which still belongs to the same planet, and come to the formless, only then can we pass into the pralaya and ascend to another planet. We have to reach the arupical stage to be able to go from one planet to another.

I will now describe the process by which the Earth was formed from the Moon. In today's physics books, the process is described very crudely. The conditions are described as being similar to those on our Earth. Our Earth makes one revolution in 24 hours. The Moon completes the same in 29 days. That is one lunar month. It revolves around its axis once. Its day lasts half of 29 days = 14¾ days day and 14¾ days night. When the sun shines for so long, such heat is generated that the lead, if it exists on the moon, would melt completely at noon and would flow on the moon. Lead could never stay put for a day. The other metals would all be water. And if we look at the night, it would have become so cold before sunset that the thermometer would be 150 degrees below freezing. Everything that looks like earthly life would have to perish every moonlit night. You see, the conditions are radically different when we look at them purely physically.

Now I will show you what conditions were like before our Earth was formed. The body that is the Moon today is not the Moon we speak of in occult science. That was a world body that no longer exists today, on which the soul ancestors lived, who had a highly developed Kama nature, were long-haired, gigantic in size, and in certain races even looked similar to a Nikelmann [...], moist, the ancestors were enclosed in the germ. Their physical form had become astral; from there rupisch, arupisch, then germ [...] and from there over to earth. The seeds were fertilized by Kama-Manas. Then the astral formed, and then we had the astral earth.

In this line were the Pitris, who were essentially already merged with Kama-Manas, and most of the Pitris were merged with such Kama-Manas seeds. But there were also a number of Pitris natures who had not reached their level of development in the earlier lunar epoch. Not those that had gone mad, that disturbed the development, but those that had remained behind, that had not achieved the development. They were there with the full amount of kamic power that belonged to them, that was not usable by others. This was excreted, and the sphere that was present lengthened, becoming an ellipsoid, an egg-shaped form.

In this form, two solid cores formed, one large and one small. And now the small sphere and the large sphere were separated. The moon lost its astral shell, a mass of slag that contains only those kamic forces that are more firmly embedded in its mass than the magnetic forces are in a magnet. Lunar magnetism is a very condensed kamic force. The outside then also condenses and becomes solid earth. This process of casting out takes place in the astral state. The Rupa earth differs from the earlier moon in that the seed of Kama-Manas is added. The fact that we do not make moral demands on cosmic bodies in the mineral kingdom is because the astral body of the same has come to rest. You will not blame Vesuvius for overflowing and spewing fire.

The more one has burnt [kama], the more one's human body will resemble a star. The astral body will not appear as a surging battlefield between the astral and the physical, but will come to a uniform rest within itself. The burning of [kama] consists precisely in the thorough astralization of the astral body.

By the Translator

Date of publication of book: 1886

A. Preliminary Questions

1. The Point of Departure. Philosophy alone, the central and unifying branch of knowledge, is uninfluenced by the great “classic age” of German thought—especially by Goethe. Hence, it fails to provide the inner certitude at present so deeply needed. Goethe possessed a profound philosophical sense. Completely centered and many-sided, he employed the appropriate form of cognition for each object of research.

2. Goethe's Science Considered According to the Method of Schiller. The present inquiry will interpret and justify Goethe's mode of cognition as applied to the living world. It will follow Schiller's method in doing this. It will not deal with mere formulae.—The return to Kant will not benefit philosophy, but the understanding of Goethe will.

3. The Function of This Branch of Science. Each of the sciences seeks to discover the relationships among objects in its special field—these being wholly unrelated in the form of pure experience. But there must be one branch of knowledge which seeks to determine the relationship between experience as a whole and the totality of thoughts, between human thoughts and the objects of reality.

B.Experience

4. Definition of the Concept of Experience. Without our participation, except in passive sense-receptivity, the world appears as if from an unknown source. This, in its first form of appearance, we term experience. It includes our feelings, our impulses of will. It includes also our thoughts. This becomes clear upon adequate observation of our thinking. For thinking is contemplation, an activity directed outward, and it would be directed into a void if an inner object of contemplation did not meet it. This object is a thought.

5. Examination of the Content of Experience. Experience is merely a juxtaposition in space and succession in time of single things, wholly unrelated—different in their impressions on the senses but undifferentiated in significance. Our own personality is, at this stage, one item of experience, also unrelated. Thinking alone establishes relationships and significance.

6. Correction of an Erroneous Conception of Experience As a Totality. The opinion that the world of experience is wholly within us, mere subjective “representations” Vorstellungswelt generated through our senses by an unknown source, is very widespread. This opinion certainly does not come from experience itself, for the untutored person never holds it. It could result only from much reflection. Therefore, it is utterly illogical to postulate such a characterization of the nature of experience, and then proceed from this point to inquire into the nature of human knowledge.

7. Reference to the Experience of the Individual Reader. The characterization of experience in 5, above, is not intended dogmatically. It is only a definition of the use of the term, merely directing attention to the nature of the first appearance of reality in consciousness before any concept arises. The best name for this is “appearance for the senses”—meaning both inner and outer senses. If this is the real nature of things, no knowledge whatever is possible beyond the registering of single unrelated sense impressions. But, if it is only the outer shell of reality, and is capable of being penetrated, knowledge is possible.

C. Thought

8. Thinking As a Higher Experience within Experience. Thought—one item of experience—is the key to all others. It differs from all others in that it appears at once in its completeness and its relationships. (For example, the thought of cause brings with it the thought of effect.) The demand of science that we must limit ourselves to experience, but must discover the inner laws within experience, becomes possible only through this one item. The requirement is fulfilled immediately in the case of this item itself, and is fulfilled in all other cases through the application of this item. Goethe practiced this principle to the full. He declared that it is impossible to get outside of Nature; that all higher views of Nature give also only Nature.—We must bear in mind two aspects of the thought world:—1. the content of ideas, law-conforming, complete in itself; 2. my inner activity, prerequisite to their appearance in consciousness. Since we ourselves permeate thought completely, we can rightly use this one item of experience to interpret all experience.

9. Thought and Consciousness. But thought is not subjective. Evidence is this.—1. We combine thoughts wholly according to their content; not at all according to our subjective nature. 2. We do not create the content subjectively; for, if we did, how could anything else than ourselves determine the combinations. What is essential is not the subjective activity prerequisite to the appearance of thoughts, but their objective content. Each personality, working with the one thought content of the world, brings to manifestation in his own consciousness thoughts which are objectively real. As a mechanic brings natural forces into interaction and produces mechanical effects, so a thinker brings thoughts into connection and creates thought combinations—ideas and whole systems.—Thoughts do not merely reflect their essential nature in their manifestations in consciousness while the essential nature is not actually present. Observation of our thinking will show that the real content is present in the manifestation.

10. The Inner Nature of Thought. Our thought realm consists of a multitude of single thoughts all interrelated. A new thought is disturbing until it is interrelated. The fixing of a harmonious relation among all thoughts creates the assurance of truth.—Thoughts are not mere photographs of experience, for the following reasons:—1. If thoughts completely copy the sense world, this world gives us all we need, and thought is superfluous. We have shown that this is not the case. 2. Thoughts do not copy essential characteristics from the sense world; for experience, as we have seen, gives no clue to what qualities are essential. 3. Nor do thoughts select even identical characteristics—without regard to what is essential—since identical characteristics practically never appear in experience.

    If, for the sake of argument, we should assume that thoughts give only a reflection of real content, while this lies beyond our reach, we should have at least indirect access in this way to real content. As to this detail of the question, we need go no further at this stage.

D. Knowledge

11. Thought and Perception. The perceptual aspect of reality, passively received, is permeated by the conceptual aspect, actively apprehended and elaborated. This union constitutes reality. Thinking is the organ for perceiving something above the level of sense-perception.—The self-sufficing harmony of thoughts seems to separate them completely from the world of percepts. But this is not true, since general thought characterizations can be made particular and concrete only by means of percepts.—Experience comes psychologically before thought, but it is really derivative. The process is as follows:—A percept stimulates me to seek for its inner nature. This seeking is really a concept working its way upward from below into consciousness. Then percept and concept unite to form one item in my thought realm. To discover the inner nature of a percept, we must have the corresponding concept already within us, or be able to evolve it from the world of concepts. In the concept we bring to manifestation the content of the empty form of the percept.

12. Intellect and Reason. Thinking is twofold:—I. It forms clearly differentiated concepts; and, 2. it establishes relationships among these. The former capacity is called the intellect; the latter, the reason. In modern science, the intellect is much more common and more highly valued. Intellectual activity is essential, for the creation of sharply differentiated parts, but only as preliminary to the development by the reason of a harmonious whole.—Kant declared all ideas—combinations of related concepts—to be merely subjective, without content, only regulative norms of our own subjective nature. This is false. Reason does strive for unity, but it can establish this only where unity is inherent in the content of the concepts. Where experience cannot function without the use of certain ideas, Kant admitted the validity of these ideas for merely practical purposes. But Kant's explanation of the creation of such ideas is incorrect; they are intuitive.

13. The Act of Cognition. All reality is in two realms; experience and thought. Experience may be considered from two points of view:—1. to what extent it is inherent in the nature of reality that it can manifest itself only as experience; 2. to what extent it is inherent in the nature of our mind, whose form of action is contemplation, that it requires this form of manifestation. From this point of view, we may consider two possibilities:—1. That the experiential form is only transitional, and is to be overcome in reaching the essential nature of the “appearance for the senses.” 2. That the experiential form is identical with the essential nature of what we experience, but that our minds require an effort in order to discover this fact. The second is true of thought; the first is true of all other items of experience.—The two realms of experience and thought must be united through thought activity. Thinking is an organ of perception. As the eye perceives light and the ear perceives sound, so does thinking perceive concepts, ideas. There is one world of ideas, but many minds.—The external is merely the form; the inner is the real nature.

14. Cognition and the Ultimate Foundation of Things. Kant achieved an important step in philosophy in pointing out that man must seek the reasons for certitude in his affirmations in his own spiritual faculties, and not in any truth imposed upon him from without. But Kant did not adequately differentiate the two scientific trends thus indicated.

    Two kinds of judgment are formed by: 1. the union of a percept with a concept; and: 2. the union of two concepts. Example of 2: “No effect without a cause.” If the content of the two concepts, as this is given to me, does not include the reason for their being united, then I can never reach that objective reason, and the real meaning of the assertion is in a world inaccessible to me. Such judgments would then be dogmas—dogmas of revelation. Moreover, those who insist that we must limit ourselves to pure experience, would condemn us to remain likewise ignorant of reality. But the author's view has shown that there is no Fundament of Being lying beyond the reach of thought: that this Fundament of Being has poured itself out in thought. According to this view, every judgment is a union of two elements in our thought, which means two elements of reality. It has shown also that thought must give a knowledge of experience, not as product but as productive—in its productive aspect.

    The real being of things exists only in connection with man. Truth is anthropomorphic. Not only is the world known to us as it appears, but it appears—to thinking contemplation—as it is.

E. The Science of Nature

15. Inorganic Nature. The simplest action in Nature occurs when two factors are external to each other. Example: a rolling stone setting another stone in motion. The whole system of such occurrences constitutes inorganic Nature. This appears first as one form of our experience. Cognition arises here only when we discover causes through our thinking. The process is the elimination of one factor after another until it becomes evident that one or more specific factors are prerequisite to the occurrence. Or it may be simplification: reducing a complex problem to a simpler form till it becomes transparent.

    An occurrence which must result inevitably and directly from observed factors is called a primal phenomenon. Identical with a law of Nature. All natural laws may be stated thus: “If this is present, that must occur.” This mode of thinking is superior to induction, which requires the observation of innumerable instances, and can never be absolutely certain. Scientific progress demands the discovery of primal phenomena. A primal phenomenon is higher experience within experience.—An experiment creates the conditions needed for discovering prerequisite factors. It is a mediator between subject and object in inorganic science.—The mind raises objects in Nature from “appearance for the senses” to appearance for the mind itself.

    A scientific insight gives satisfaction only when it leads to a self-sufficing totality. In inorganic Nature, only the cosmos is such a totality; therefore, the cosmos must be the ultimate goal in this part of science.

16. Organic Nature. Until the nineteenth century, the determinative forces in living entities were supposed to be in the mind of the Creator. Human minds were considered incapable of understanding living things. This was Kant's view. It was opposed by Goethe, who sought to discover the evolution of organs and organisms. Later came a gradual change of view but the fundamental error occurred of applying the methods of the physical sciences to living things. Scientific methods as a whole were falsely identified with methods in one branch of science.

    Environment does not create living entities. The inner forces create; environment can only modify the result of the action of the inner forces.—The essence present in each specialized form is the general which is manifest in the special. This general thus manifest is the type: the primal organism, either plant or animal. It evolves into all the specialized forms. The type corresponds in the living world to the natural law in the inorganic world.

    The activity of thought in this realm must be entirely different. In the inorganic realm, natural law determines the single phenomenon. In the organic realm, the type actually manifests itself in the single entity. Here we must first apprehend the type; then apprehend all potential modifications of the type; and finally trace the actual living form back to one of the potential modifications of the type. This demands intuitive thinking. The mind must acquire the power of perception in the supersensible realm: it must be able to perceive in thinking and think in perceiving. Goethe called this capacity the “perceptive power of thought.”

    Intuition is generally distrusted, but it is the sole mode of cognition applicable to the living world. According to the author's theory of knowledge—which he considers to be the theory implicit in Goethe's mode of scientific work—it is entirely logical to seek to develop this form of knowledge. For, according to this theory of knowledge, all thinking is a direct apprehension of reality. Limits of proof—required in the inorganic realm—do not constitute limits of knowledge.—Intuition means being within truth.

F. The Spiritual, or Cultural Sciences

17. Introduction: Spirit and Nature.Above the level of “organics” are the cultural, or spiritual, sciences. Here, again, the mind must alter its form of activity. In the natural sciences, the human mind completes the world process by bringing to manifestation (in human consciousness) the reality within phenomena, which otherwise would never reach manifestation. The mind interprets Nature to herself. Human knowledge is the conclusion of the work of creation, the final link in the process which constitutes Nature. In the spiritual sciences, the mind deals with spiritual realities already in manifestation,—human actions, thoughts, creations. Here, the human spirit comes to an understanding of itself.

    These sciences, likewise, arise out of a sense of inner need. Their function is to know the spiritual world in order that the human spirit may freely choose and play its own role. Here the idea of freedom is central. In place of the determining law (in inorganic Nature) and the evolving type (in organic Nature), we have the single personality, who determines instead of being determined.

18. Psychological Cognition. The method in psychological cognition is immersion of the mind in the contemplation of its own activity—that is, self-apprehension; but apprehension of the essential self, not of its casual manifestations. We must seek the fundamental human being in each personality. The individual here is not a specialized form of the general, but is the general. In thought applied to objects observed in external reality, man discovers the highest form of content. In contemplating himself, he finds that he is this highest content.

    Modern psychology fails because it applies in its own field the methods of inorganic science, seeking through observed phenomena to infer the activating being within. This central being is given to us in direct experience just as truly as are the phenomenal manifestations.

    But the single personality acts also partly out of the forces of his people. Hence we must add to psychology the science of folk-psychology, the psychology of a whole people.—The scientific study of any people must be based upon the inner nature of this people—the folk-personality.

19. Human Freedom. Human action is determined by human thinking. Hence a personality will act freely or under compulsion according as he knows the reality in his own intuitions or accepts dogmas dictated from without. The World Fundament has poured itself out into the world. Its highest form is manifested in human thought. Thus the Guiding Power of the world lives in human thoughts. Hence man is in harmony with this Guiding Power when he acts according to his own true intuitions. History also is determined by the thoughts of individuals.

20. Optimism and Pessimism. Since man is the central point of the world process, and his thought its highest manifestation, he is self-sufficing. Only he can determine his own happiness or unhappiness. Happiness or unhappiness bestowed upon him from without would negate his nature.

G. Conclusion

21. Scientific Knowledge and Artistic Creation. The Idea is the content of knowledge. It is the product of the activity of the mind. In cognition, man arises from the phenomenal, the product, to the Idea, the creative reality. He strips all unessentials from the manifested form, and apprehends the essential in the Idea. In art, the human spirit imprints the same eternal Idea upon an object of Nature. In doing this, it is necessary to subdue to the eternal Idea all that is casual and unessential in the object used to receive this imprint. Art is a product of the eternal laws of Nature, as Goethe discovered in contemplating the great masterpieces in Italy. In both science and art, the human spirit masters the sensible characteristics and brings to manifestation the innermost reality.

[ 1 ] I have described the evolution of thought from the age of Plato to that of Kant in order to be able to show the impressions which Goethe was bound to receive when he turned to the outcome of the philosophical thoughts to which he might have adhered in order to satisfy his intense desire for knowledge. He found in the philosophies no answer to the innumerable problems which his nature impelled him to face. Indeed, whenever he delved into the world-conception of some particular philosopher, he found an opposition between the drift of his questions and the world of thought from which he would have liked to get counsel. The reason for this lies in the fact that the one-sided Platonic separation of idea and experience was repugnant to his being. When he observed Nature the ideas lay there before him. He could therefore only think of Nature as permeated by ideas. A world of ideas that neither permeates the objects of Nature nor brings about their appearance and disappearance, their becoming and growth, is to him nothing but a feeble web of thought. The logical fabrication of trains of thoughts without penetration into the life and creative activity of Nature appeared to him unfruitful, for he felt himself intimately one with Nature. He looked upon himself as a living member of Nature. In his view, all that arose in his spirit had been permitted by Nature so to arise. Man should not sit away in a corner and imagine that from there he can spin out of himself a web of thoughts which elucidates the true being of things. He should rather allow the stream of world-events to flow through him perpetually. Then he will feel that the world of ideas is nothing else than the active, creative power of Nature. He will not then want to stand above the objects in order to reflect upon them, but he will sink himself into their depths and extract from them all that lives and works in them.

[ 2 ] Goethe's artistic nature led him to this mode of thinking. He felt his poetic creations grow out of his personality with the same necessity as that which makes a flower blossom. The way in which the spirit within him produced the work of Art seemed to him no different from the way in which Nature produces her creatures. And just as in the work of Art the spiritual element cannot be separated from the spiritless material, so it was impossible for him, in face of a natural object, to think the perception without the idea. A point of view to which the perception is only an indefinite, confused element and which wishes to see the world of ideas separated off, purged of all experience, is therefore foreign to him. In all those world-conceptions in which the elements of a partially understood Platonism lived, he sensed something contrary to Nature. For this reason he could not find in the philosophers what he sought. He was seeking for the ideas which live in the objects and which allow all the particulars of experience to appear as if growing out of a living whole, and the philosophers offered him husks of thought that they had combined into systems according to the principles of Logic. He always found that he was thrown back on himself when he turned to others for explanation of the problems which Nature set him.

[ 3 ] One of the things from which Goethe suffered before his Italian journey was that his yearning for knowledge could find no satisfaction. In Italy he was able to form a view of the motive forces which give rise to works of Art. He recognised that perfect works of Art contain what men reverence as the Divine, the Eternal. After beholding the artistic creations which interested him most deeply, he wrote these words: “The great works of Art, like the highest creations of Nature, have been brought forth in conformity with true and natural law. All that is arbitrary, that is invented, collapses: there is Necessity, there is God.” The art of the Greeks drew forth this utterance from him: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.” What Plato believed to have found in the world of ideas and what the philosophers could never bring home to Goethe, streamed forth to him from the works of Art in Italy. What he is able to regard as the basis of knowledge is revealed to him for the first time, in a perfect form, in Art. He sees in artistic production a mode and higher stage of Nature's working; artistic creation is to him an enhanced Nature-creation. He expressed this later in his characterisation of Winckelmann: “In that man is placed on Nature's pinnacle, he regards himself as another whole Nature, whose task is to bring forth inwardly yet another pinnacle. For this purpose he heightens his powers, imbues himself with all perfections and virtues, summons discrimination, order and harmony, and rises finally to the production of a work of Art.” Goethe does not attain to his world-conception along the path of logical deduction but as a result of the contemplation of the essence of Art. And what he found in Art he seeks also in Nature.

[ 4 ] The kind of activity by means of which Goethe acquired his knowledge of Nature does not differ essentially from artistic activity. Both play into and mutually react on each other. In Goethe's view the artist must surely become mightier and more effective when, in addition to his talent, “he is a well-informed Botanist, when he knows, from the root upwards, the influence of the different parts on the health and growth of the plant, their significance and mutual interaction, when he penetrates into and reflects upon the successive development of the flowers, leaves, fertilisation, fruit and new seed. He will not then reveal his own ‘taste’ by a choice from among the phenomena, but by a true portrayal of the qualities he will instruct and at the same time fill us with admiration.” The work of Art is therefore the more perfect, the more fully it expresses the same law as that embodied in the work of Nature to which it corresponds. There is but one uniform realm of truth, and this includes both Art and Nature. Hence the faculty of artistic creation cannot differ essentially from the faculty of the cognition of Nature. Goethe says in reference to the artist's style that “it is based on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things in so far as it is granted us to cognise this essence in visible, tangible forms.” The view of the world that had proceeded from one-sided understanding of Platonic conceptions draws a sharp boundary line between Science and Art. It bases artistic activity upon phantasy, upon feeling, and would represent scientific results as the outcome of a development of concepts that is free of the element of phantasy. Goethe sees the matter differently. When he directs his gaze to Nature he finds there a sum-total of ideas; but to him the ideal constituent is not confined within the single object of experience; the idea points out beyond the particular object to related objects wherein it manifests in a similar way. The philosophical observer takes hold of this ideal element and brings it to direct expression in his thought-creations. This ideal element works also upon the artist. But it stimulates him to give form to a creation wherein the idea does not merely function as in a work of Nature, but becomes present in appearance. That which in a work of Nature is merely ideal, and is revealed to the spiritual vision of the observer, becomes concrete, perceptible reality in the work of Art. The artist realises the ideas of Nature. It is not, however, necessary that he should be conscious of these in the form of ideas. When he contemplates an object or an event something else assumes direct form in his spirit—something that contains as actual appearance what Nature contains only as idea. The artist gives us images of Nature's works and in these images the ideal content of Nature's works is transformed into perceptual content. The philosopher shows how Nature presents herself to contemplative thought; the artist shows how Nature would appear if she were to reveal openly her active forces not merely to thought but also to perception. It is one and the same truth that the philosopher presents in the form of thought and the artist in the form of an image. The two differ only in their means of expression.

[ 5 ] The insight into the true relationship of idea and experience which Goethe acquired in Italy is only the fruit of the seed that was lying concealed in his nature. The Italian journey afforded the sun-warmth which was able to ripen the seed. In the Essay “Nature” which appeared in 1782 in the Tiefurt Journal, and for which Goethe was responsible, [Compare my proof of Goethe's authorship in Vol. VII of the publications of the Goethe Society.] the germs of the later Goethean world-conception are already to be found. What is here dim feeling later develops into clear, definite thought. “Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by her, we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us, unasked and unwarned, into the gyrations of her dance and whirls us away until we fall exhausted from her arms. ... She (Nature) has thought and she broods unceasingly, not as a man but as Nature. ... She has neither language nor speech, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she speaks and feels. ... It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was she who spoke it all, true and false. Hers is the blame for all things, hers the credit.” At the time when Goethe wrote these sentences it was not yet clear to him how Nature expresses her ideal being through man; but what he did feel was that it is the voice of the Spirit of Nature that sounds in the Spirit of Man.

[ 6 ] In Italy Goethe found the spiritual atmosphere which was able to develop his organs of cognition in the only way that in accordance with their inherent nature they could develop, if he were ever to find complete satisfaction. In Rome he had “many discussions with Moriz about Art and its theoretical demands;” as he observed the metamorphosis of plants on the journey there developed in him a natural method that later proved fruitful for the cognition of the whole of organic Nature. “For as vegetation unfolded her procedure before me stage by stage, I could not fall into error, but allowing things as I did to take their own course, I could not fail to recognise the ways and means by which the most undeveloped state was brought to perfection.” A few years after his return from Italy Goethe was able to find a mode of procedure, born of his spiritual needs, for the observation of inorganic Nature also. “In connection with physical investigations the conviction was borne in upon me that in all observation of objects the highest duty is to search for every condition under which the phenomenon appears, with the greatest exactitude, and to strive for the greatest possible perfection of the phenomena; because ultimately they are bound to range themselves alongside each other or rather overlap each other, to form a kind of organisation before the gaze of the investigator, and to manifest their inner, common life.”

[ 7 ] Nowhere did Goethe find enlightenment. He had always to enlighten himself. He tried to find the reason for this and came to the conclusion that he had no facility for philosophy in the proper sense. The reason, however, lies in the fact that the one-sided comprehension of the Platonic mode of thought which dominated all philosophies accessible to Goethe was contrary to the healthy tendency of his nature. In his youth he had repeatedly turned to Spinoza. He admits that this philosopher always had a “pacifying effect” upon him. The reason for this is that Spinoza conceives of the universe as one great unity with the single parts proceeding necessarily from the whole. But when Goethe entered into the content of Spinoza's Philosophy he still felt it to be alien to him. “It must not be imagined that I was able to agree absolutely with his writings and admit their truth word for word; for I had already realised only too clearly that no one person understands another, nor thinks as another, even although their words may be the same; I had realised that a conversation or reading would awaken different trains of thought in different people. And one will credit the author of Werther and Faust with the fact that, deeply permeated by such misunderstandings, he is not conceited enough to imagine that he has perfect understanding of a man, who, as a disciple of Descartes has raised himself through mathematical and rabbinical culture to the summit of thought which up to the present time seems to be the goal of all speculative endeavours.” It was not the fact that Spinoza had been taught by Descartes, nor that Spinoza had attained to the summit of thought as the result of mathematical and rabbinical culture that made him an element to which Goethe could not wholly surrender himself, but it was Spinoza's purely logical method of handling knowledge—a method that is alien to reality. Goethe could not surrender himself to a mode of pure thinking free of all element of experience, because he could not separate this from the sum-total of the real. He did not want to connect one thought with another in a merely logical sense. Such an activity of thought seemed to him rather to depart from true reality. He felt that he must sink his spirit into the experience in order to reach the idea. The mutual interplay of idea and perception was to Goethe a spiritual breathing. “Time is regulated by the swings of the pendulum; the moral scientific world is regulated by the interplay of idea and experience.” To observe the world and its phenomena in the sense of these words seemed to Goethe to be in conformity with Nature. For he had no doubt but that Nature observes the same procedure; that she (Nature) is a development from a mysterious, living Whole into the diverse and specific phenomena that fill space and time. The mysterious Whole is the world of the idea. “The idea is eternal and unique; that we also use the plural is unfortunate. All things that we perceive and of which we can speak are but manifestations of the idea; we utter concepts and to this extent the idea is itself a concept.” Nature's creative activity proceeds from the ideal Whole into the particular that is given to perception as something real. The observer ought therefore “to recognise the ideal in the real and allay his temporary dissatisfaction with the finite by rising to the infinite.” Goethe is convinced that “Nature proceeds according to idea just in the same way as man follows an idea in all that he undertakes.” When man really succeeds in rising to the idea and in comprehending from out of the idea the details of perception, he accomplishes the same thing as Nature accomplishes by allowing her creations to issue forth from the mysterious Whole. So long as man has no sense of the working and creative activity of the idea, his thinking is divorced from living Nature. He must regard thinking as a purely subjective activity that is able to project an abstract picture of Nature. But directly he senses the way in which the idea lives and is active in his inner being he regards himself and Nature as one Whole, and what makes its appearance in his inner being as a subjective element is for him at the same time objective; he knows that he no longer confronts Nature as a stranger, but he feels that he has grown together with the whole of her. The subjective has become objective; the objective is wholly permeated with the spirit. Goethe thinks that Kant's fundamental error consists in the fact that he (Kant) “regards the subjective, cognitive faculty itself as object, and makes indeed a sharp but not wholly correct division at the point where subjective and objective meet “ (Weimar Edition, Part II. Volume II. Page 376.). The cognitive faculty appears to man as subjective only so long as he does not notice that it is Nature herself who speaks through this faculty. Subjective and objective meet when the objective world of ideas lives in the subject and when all that is active in Nature herself lives in the spirit of man. When this happens, all antithesis between subject and object ceases. This antithesis has meaning only so long as it is artificially sustained and man regards the ideas as being his own thoughts by which the being of Nature is reflected, but in which, however, this being is not itself active. Kant and his followers had no inkling of the fact that the essential being of objects is directly experienced in the ideas of reason. To them the ideal is merely subjective, and they therefore came to the conclusion that the ideal can necessarily only be valid if that to which it is related, the world of experience, is also merely subjective. The Kantian mode of thought is in sharp contrast to Goethe's views. There are, it is true, isolated utterances of Goethe where he speaks with some appreciation of Kant's views. He says that he has been present at many discussions of these views. “With a little attention I was able to observe the reappearance of the old cardinal question—the question as to how much the Self and how much the external world contributes to our spiritual existence. I had never separated these two, and when I philosophized in my own fashion about objects, I did so with unconscious naiveté and really believed that I saw my opinions clearly before me. As soon, however, as that dispute came into the discussion, I wanted to range myself on that side which does man most credit, and I gave entire approbation to all those friends who maintained with Kant that even if all knowledge commences with experience it is not necessarily all derived from experience.” Neither does the idea, in Goethe's view, originate from that portion of experience which may be perceived through the senses of man. Reason, Imagination (Phantasie) must be active and penetrate to the inner being of things in order to master the ideal element of existence. To this extent the spirit of man participates in the birth of knowledge. Goethe thinks that honour is due to man because the higher reality which is inaccessible to the senses, is made manifest in his spirit; Kant, on the other hand, denies the character of higher reality of the world of experience, because it contains elements that are derived from the spirit. Goethe was only able to find himself in some measure of agreement with the Kantian principles when he had interpreted them in the light of his own world-conception. The fundamental principles of the Kantian mode of thought are strongly antagonistic to Goethe's nature. If he does not emphasise this sharply enough, it is really only because he will not allow himself to enter into these fundamental principles because they are too alien to him. “It was the Introduction (to The Critique of Pure Reason) that pleased me; I could not venture into the labyrinth itself for here I was restrained by my poetic gift and there by the human intellect, and I felt no benefit anywhere.” In reference to his discussions with the followers of Kant, Goethe had to make this confession: “They listened to me, it is true, but could give me no reply nor be helpful in any way. More than once it happened that one or another of them admitted in smiling admiration, ‘it is certainly analogous to the Kantian mode of conception, but in a very peculiar sense.’” ... It was, as I have shown, not analogous at all, but the very reverse of Kant's mode of conception.

[ 8 ] It is interesting to see how Schiller tries to explain to himself the difference between the Goethean mode of thinking and his own. He senses the originality and freedom of Goethe's world-conception. He cannot, however, rid his mind of thought elements that are the result of a one-sided conception of Platonism. He cannot attain the insight that idea and perception are not separated from each other in reality, but are only thought of as separated by the intellect that has been led astray by a misguided trend of ideas. Therefore in contrast to the Goethean mode of thinking which he describes as intuitive, he places his own speculative mode of thinking and asserts that both must lead to one and the same goal if they only operate with sufficient power. Schiller assumes that the intuitive mind adheres to the empirical, the individual, and rises from there to the law, to the idea. If such a mind is endowed with the quality of genius it will cognise in the empirical, the necessary; in the individual, the species. The speculative mind, on the other hand, must proceed by the reverse path. The law, the idea, has first to be given to it and from thence it descends to the empirical and individual. If such a mind is endowed with the quality of genius it will of course always have the species only in view, but with the possibility of life and with an established relation to real objects. The assumption of a special type of mind—of the speculative in contradistinction to the intuitive—is based on the belief that the world of ideas has an existence separate and distinct from the world of perception. If this were the case a path could be found along which the content of the ideas about the objects of perception might enter the mind even when the mind does not seek it in experience. If, however, the world of ideas is inseparably bound up with the reality given in experience, if the two only exist as one Whole, there can only be an intuitive cognition that seeks for the idea in the experience and apprehends the species along with the individual. The truth is that there is no purely speculative mind in Schiller's sense. For the species exist only within the sphere to which the individuals also pertain. The mind cannot find them elsewhere. If a so-called speculative mind really has conceptions of species, these are derived from observation of the real world. When the living feeling for this origin, for the essential connection of the species with the individual, is lost, there arises the opinion that such ideas can arise in the reason also without experience. Those who hold this opinion describe a number of abstract conceptions of species as the content of the pure reason because they do not see the threads which bind these ideas to experience. Such an illusion can occur most easily in connection with ideas that are the most general and comprehensive in character. Because such ideas cover a wide region of reality, a great deal that appertains to the entities belonging to this region is effaced or obliterated. A man may absorb a number of such general ideas through tradition and then come to believe that they are inborn in human beings or that they have been spun by man from out of pure reason. A mind that lapses into such a belief may regard itself as speculative in character. It will, however, never be able to extract from its world of ideas any ideas other than have been placed there by tradition. Schiller is in error when he says that the speculative mind, if it is endowed with the quality of genius, produces “indeed only species but with the possibility of life and with an established relation to real objects” (Compare Schiller's letter to Goethe, 23rd August, 1794.). A truly speculative mind, living only in concepts of species, could find in its world of ideas no established relationship to reality other than that already existing within that world of ideas. A mind that has relation to the reality of Nature and in spite of this designates itself as speculative, is labouring under a delusion as to its own nature. This delusion can mislead it into negligence of its relation to reality and to actual life. It will imagine itself able to dispense with direct perception because it believes that other sources of truth are in its possession. The result of this always is that the ideal world of such a mind bears a dull, pale character. The fresh colours of life will be lacking from its thoughts. Those who wish to live with reality will be able to acquire little from such a world of thought. It cannot be admitted that the speculative type of mind is on the same level as the intuitive; it is stunted and impoverished. The intuitive mind is not concerned with individuals alone, it does not seek the character of necessity in the empirical. But when it applies itself to Nature, perception and idea coalesce into unity. Both are seen to exist within each other and are perceived as one Whole. The intuitive mind may rise to the most universal truths, to the highest abstractions, but direct, actual life will always be evident in its world of thought. Goethe's thinking was of this nature. In his Anthropology, Heinroth has spoken about this kind of thinking in striking words that pleased Goethe in the highest degree, because they explained to him his own nature. “Dr. Heinroth speaks favourably of my nature and activity, indeed he describes my modus operandi as original; he says that my thinking faculty is objectively active, by which he means to express that my thinking does not sever itself from the objects; that the elements inherent in the objects and the perceptions enter into my thinking and are permeated by it in a most intimate way; that my perceiving is itself thinking, my thinking, perceiving.” Fundamentally speaking, Heinroth is describing nothing else than the way in which all sound thinking is related to objects. Any other mode of procedure is a deviation from the natural path. If perception predominates in a man he adheres to the individual element; he cannot penetrate to the deeper foundations of reality. If abstract thought predominates in him, his concepts are manifestly inadequate to comprehend the whole living content of the real. The extreme of the first deviation from the natural path produces the crude empiricist who contents himself with the individual facts; the extreme of the other deviation is represented in the philosopher who worships pure Reason and who merely thinks, without realising that thoughts in their essential being, are bound up with perception. In beautiful imagery Goethe describes the feeling of the thinker who rises to the highest truths without losing the sense for living experience. At the beginning of the year 1784 he writes an Essay on Granite. He goes to a hill composed of this stone where he is able to soliloquise as follows: “Here you are resting on a substructure that extends to the very depths of the Earth; no newer stratum, no deposited, heaped-up fragments are laid between you and the firm foundation of the primordial world; you are not passing over a continuous grave as in yonder fruitful valleys; these peaks have brought forth no living thing, have devoured no living thing; they are antecedent to all life, they transcend all life. In this moment when the inner attractive and moving forces of the Earth are working directly upon me, when the influence of the heavens hovers more closely around me, it is given to me to attain to a more sublime perception of Nature, and as the human spirit gives life to everything, an image whose sublimity I cannot withstand, is stirred to activity within me. looking down this naked peak with scanty moss hardly perceptible at its base, I say to myself that this loneliness overtakes one who would fain open his soul only to the first, oldest, deepest feelings of truth. Such an one can say to himself: here on the most ancient, imperishable altar, built immediately above the depths of Creation, I bring a sacrifice to the Being of all Beings. I feel the first firm beginnings of our existence; I look over the world with its valleys now rugged, now undulating, its wide fertile meadows, and my soul, raised above itself and all else, yearns for the Heavens that draw nigh. But soon the burning sun calls back thirst and hunger—human needs—and one looks around for those valleys above which one's spirit had raised itself.” Such enthusiasm in knowledge, such a sense for the oldest, immutable truths can only develop in a man who continually finds his way back from the spheres of the world of ideas to direct perceptions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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