The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The word health means something very precious to every human being, and rightly so. Not only must we recognize health itself as a precious thing, which is only a product of selfish sentiment, but we also feel that health is connected to something that flows from the depths of our inner being. Health is a means to external vitality, to the fulfillment of our duties, to the performance of every activity, etc. And from this point of view, health must be placed at the center as something of the highest value. However, when we consider what health is, we arrive at a gloomy judgment when we look around the world and see how health and illness are judged by the competent and the incompetent in the most diverse ways, how all kinds of shades of parties are spoken of, and how the healing process of this or that is disputed. When we consider all this, it does indeed seem that one of our most precious possessions is at the mercy of all these different schools of thought.

Before I try to tell you what spiritual science has to say about health, we must first be clear that spiritual science or theosophy cannot have the task of interfering in this or that party line; the point of view must be gained that neither approves nor condemns this or that world view. What is said here will not fully satisfy the adherents of either party, for in the case of party doctrines it is not a matter of something being absolutely true or false, but of something being not quite true or not quite false. And those who want to look up to the unseen behind things see that, with all the shades of parties, we are not dealing with an either-or, but with a both-and.

And in particular, as far as our question today is concerned, we see how fanatically the one party of medicine fights the other. There is a broad movement that does not think favorably of what is official for today's general human thinking. In many cases, this official health teaching is attacked. Spiritual science is not there to take a layman's point of view and fight the official line. Spiritual science will always be inclined to recognize how official health science is able to provide the means to reach a judgment in a truly magnificent way. It is just that official science, in this particular field, is tied up in a certain dogma, so that the majority of those who are called upon to form an opinion cannot but consider what spiritual science has to say as foolish, fantastic, or even worse. But regardless of the judgments, the question must be discussed.

First, let us consider how partiality has delivered judgment. We can only agree on the principle, on the current, only on what the popular view is in this area. It is completely imbued with materialistic thinking. Much has changed in recent decades; we will see what is being neglected; we will see that reference will have to be made to the higher aspects of human nature; we will see that there is no awareness of these aspects at all in our time. And we may say that it has only become so in the course of the last few decades.

I would like to mention just one symptom. I would like to remind you of a personality, the once really very famous anatomist Hyrtl. Not only did he write excellent books on anatomy, but he was also one of the best teachers. He presented anatomy in a way that made it seem less dry; but he presented it in his own, unique way. He had a prerequisite for his students; he always said that he had written his books so that readers would read the parts they already knew before listening to his lectures, so that they could skip over what they already knew. But when he explained the entire structure of the human organism, it was as if one saw the creative hand at work; that which is composed came to life, and that was because this architect really exists, because the etheric body really exists, because Hyrtl spoke as if from these forces. The spirit of his description was permeated by these forces. This anatomist had, so to speak, expressed the invisible essence of human nature between the words.

A saying of Hyrtl's may be in the memory of his listeners in the 1970s. He said: Only a doctor can recognize an illness, but only someone who knows what helps can heal an illness. The spirit that hovered over the whole has given way in such a way that today's approach is only concerned with understanding the human body as it presents itself as a sum of processes that can be examined, perhaps more thought of as chemical or physical processes. The approach that views health from such a perspective has produced extraordinary results because the physical body is what is really there, and because it has provided the most wonderful means.

If we want to establish a principle, it is that there are certain antidotes for illnesses that make the causes of illness disappear. So we speak of illnesses and specific remedies; we speak of the fact that the human organism must be protected by various means, by water and air treatment, etc. From this point of view, we point out the progress that has been made recently. And one would be mistaken if one were to deny this point of view outright; one need only point to the mortality rates of cities, for example, and one will see what official science has achieved; one need only point to what has been added to the store of remedies in recent times. So it is not to deny the fertility of official medicine that these considerations are intended.

But there is a dark side to this progress. Imagine what would happen to humanity if it had to live according to the will of those who would exploit the fear of germs to create social institutions! Take, for example, tetanus. It is caused by a germ that does not need its carrier, the sick person himself, only the person who comes into contact with the sick person. Now imagine that everyone who has come into contact with someone suffering from lockjaw is checked. Imagine the tyranny that would result! Of course, all these things are right, but it is impossible to base anything on them in social life.

Now, spiritual science is not one of those currents of contemporary thought that seeks to deny that there are specific remedies for certain diseases that are “poisons”. The word “poison” has a kind of suggestion, and many feel within themselves when it is said that certain medicines are poisons, as if something tremendously striking against medicine were being said. But it must be realized that one should not allow oneself to be suggestively influenced by a word.

What exactly is a poison? Those who have been subjected to the suggestion of this word will not be able to answer this easily. We can form a rough idea if we bear in mind that belladonna, for example, is a poison for humans, but rabbits can eat it without harm; in the same way, hemlock does not harm goats. This gives you the whole relativity of the concept of “poison”. And in this respect, spiritual science will never go against official experience.

Let us now contrast this approach with another, namely naturopathy or homeopathy. These differ in many ways in the way they think about illness. One says: When a disease process is present, we have to look at it as something that should not be there and that we have to fight against. The other says: It is not a matter of fighting directly; what presents itself to us as an illness is an attempt by the person to fight against the cause lying within. One has to support a disease process so that nature, the symptom, can take effect. – That can be said in many respects. But the remedy that causes illness in a healthy person can have a healing effect on a sick person.

Now, however, we have to say that when this view is theoretically applied, when it is advocated, those people say something very specific that comes close to what spiritual science must advocate, namely that beyond the physical body lies something much more real, the actual builder, the etheric body. But in many respects it is actually impossible for those who want to be considered important in the conventional world view to admit that there is an invisible part of the human being. Spiritual science that wants to be valid must today point out that behind all physical processes there is something as a system of forces, the etheric body, permeating everything that is physically visible with forces. It may well be that the causes of illness lie in the etheric body.

We so often hear people compared to a machine or a mechanism. Of course, in a certain sense, this is true; but what is a machine without the person who builds it or the one who operates it? There is no visible builder or guide in the human body, but there are invisible guides. When we die and the etheric body separates, the physical body succumbs to physical and chemical processes.

Just as there is damage in the physical body, there is also such damage in the etheric body, in the astral body and in the I. One must not only theoretically admit the spirit, so to speak – it may be enough for the soul egoism – but if one is unable to apply the spirit in one's true behavior, then the spirit is an empty theory. What matters is that we are able to put what happens in the spiritual world at the service of life. We will show in a moment how this comes into play when we talk about health. When we speak in this context, we must not think of external injuries such as a broken leg; these are things that belong in the realm of external healing methods. But there are injuries where we have to say: the causes are to be sought in the spiritual realm; and there we must also seek the healing methods. For such things it is not enough to say that the invisible limbs are at work, that they bring about the damage.

I would like to follow up on the last lecture given here on “Nutritional Issues”, in which we saw how what a person takes in as food is significant for the strength or weakness of the human organism. Today, we want to realize that by taking in food, we enter into a relationship with the processes of the environment. In this way, he ceases to merely allow processes to take place within him. Depending on whether we take this or that food, we are dependent on the processes that they trigger in us. We must be able to process what we take in from the outside within us. This other aspect is no less important; depending on how we eat, we are connected with our organism to the spiritual world. On the one hand, we are devoted to the whole outside world, and on the other hand, we withdraw into ourselves to devote ourselves to the spirit. The organism enters into an exchange. There it takes up these spiritual products just as it takes up the physical products in the physical world. When a person devotes himself to the spiritual world in the right way, his spiritual organs become the right tools for digesting the spirit. If he does it in the wrong way, they become unsuitable for processing what is taken up materially; he must become ill.

There is a definite relationship between what a person does and what happens to his spirit. You can visualize this if you consider the astral body to be a good and accurate indicator of what a person experiences in relation to the outside world. There are parents who think this or that is good and now expect their child to share the same view. This is the most misguided method of education there is. When the child is young, its organism has a yardstick by which to measure what arouses its antipathy and sympathy, what gives it pleasure and pain. We should therefore carefully examine the sympathy and antipathy of childhood.

This is not to say that the child should not be disturbed by the naughtiness; you should only choose the right way. First of all, it is a matter of creating pleasure, that is, one should first act on the astral body. By the indirect route of pleasure and pain, we come to what can now be absorbed by us in the appropriate way. You see, anyone who looks at our social life today knows that countless pathological conditions are connected with it. When we look at the human organism, we see the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. Let us assume that a person has a task to perform that becomes habitual for him. What happens then? The physical body and the etheric body are involved in such work. When something becomes habitual for a person, when he does it, so to speak, because he has to do it, then the astral body is not involved. Observe the countless people sitting and working here or there, who hardly involve the astral body at all, except at most through annoyance and displeasure. Under the influence of such activities, a process takes place that we can call a process of solidification of the astral body. The astral body is in a healthy state when it can actively engage with the physical and etheric bodies. If you have made the astral body rigid and hardened, it is as if you have a machine in front of you that you cannot control. When the etheric body and the physical body switch off the astral body, it is not present during activities. The fact that it encounters resistance means that such a person feels the resistance not only as an illness, but as having this or that illness.

Thus, the simple fact is that the non-consideration and non-participation of the astral body in countless disease processes is the cause of the present situation. These are not counteracted in the right way. Of course, a great deal of emphasis is placed on all kinds of useful things, such as gymnastics, for example. But the way it is done in our time does not promote intensive health care. The focus is too much on the physical body, on the idea that a limb must move in a certain way and that a person must perform this gymnastic exercise in a certain way, because it promotes the physical body. It will be understood that if one envisages that a very specific feeling of pleasure must be associated with each exercise, then one is, as it were, doing gymnastics in the astral body. Then harmony is established with the astral body. I knew a gym teacher who was an example of how gymnastics should not be done. He was a person who was proud that he understood anatomy. The man himself could not do gymnastics, he could only show how things should be done. His instructions indicated that he only looked at people from the outside, only as a composition of bones and muscles.

Gymnastics should be spiritualized, so to speak. At some point, every gymnastics exercise will have a very specific name, and you will feel that you are imitating something very specific. You do an exercise, for example a little ship, and you feel that you are imitating something. This is spiritual gymnastics. If young people do this, it also has the side effect of ensuring that they never suffer from poor memory in old age. If you look at it this way, spiritual science can have an extremely fruitful effect.

All that we have mentioned now shows how spiritual science can be applied in health practice. If you consider that people today lead two lives, one in the outer world and one in the inner world, in feelings of pleasure and displeasure, you will see the whole disharmony of the inner and outer human being. Harmony can only come about when one knows how the astral and etheric bodies can work healthily. When the instincts and desires are directed in a certain way, let us say, according to the general laws of the world, then the astral body will find within itself the strong power to rule over the etheric body and the physical body. If a person is gloomy, if pain constantly touches the soul, then the astral body will be weak. A varied life of ideas and feelings has a healthy effect on the astral body under all circumstances.

It is remarkable how human culture has always worked towards shaping all means to achieve the goal of having a healthy effect on human nature. Aristotle said that drama should present a series of actions that arouse fear and compassion. So, emotional processes should be evoked in us, but they should be such that they allow a catharsis, a purification of the passions to occur. Thus, he shows that he sees a healing process in the emotional process that is stimulated in a person. Yes, the astral body becomes stronger as a result. From this we see that it is not irrelevant how the whole process plays out in the astral body. Depending on whether we alternate exciting or calming feelings, storm or calm, we will have an effect on the etheric body and the physical body if we do it in the right way. One of the most beautiful ways of stimulating the human astral body for a certain class of people is the very ordinary circus games with the clown. The lust with which people see the clown's antics is extraordinarily healthy. Feeling superior, seeing the absurd, makes one healthy. It is precisely these things, which make us able to counteract destruction, that have unconsciously been used in the natural process of human development. One can say that events in which nonsense is obviously presented are just as effective as saying, “You should drink this or that water, breathe this or that air.”

Furthermore, the I is involved to a very extraordinary degree in how a person tolerates the outside world. If we do not see the functions taking place properly because they cannot tolerate this or that, the interests of the person are misdirected, then we can find disturbances in digestion, etc., as an effect. If we understand this connection with interests and the direction of attention, what is already there could also be introduced.

Human beings express their feelings through two actions that you do not find in animals, namely laughing and crying. The ape may have a certain grin, but it is not human laughter because the animal has no I. You also know that just as slowly as the child comes to self, so too does laughter and crying come to him, only from about the 40th day onwards. Why is that? It is because when a person laughs, a relationship exists in which the astral body expands. We see how the ego takes on a superior relationship to what is happening in the environment. Just as one breathes, one must have this feeling of superiority. When crying, the whole ego contracts. Therefore, crying is a certain voluptuousness; it is basically an antidote to what one has experienced. Thus we see how the ego changes the organism, attacks it. In the discharge of the tear water, a secretion of the blood, we have a very material effect on a mental process. Thus, the spiritual works continuously in all possible details.

I will give an example to show how tremendously enlightening spiritual science will be. There is a certain rhythm, a rhythm that encompasses many things. Take the human ego; it goes through a very specific rhythm within 24 hours. When you wake up, you experience the same thing exactly 24 hours later. Thus the ego remains in a rhythmic activity. Just as the I has a rhythm in 24 hours, so does the astral body in 7 days. Just as the I returns to a starting point after 24 hours, so does the astral body after 7 days. And finally, the etheric body goes through a similar rhythm in 28 days. So you see again that the human being is a very complicated being. We can compare these rhythms with the hands of a clock; the rhythm of the I with the rotation of the second hand, the slower rotation of the minute hand with the rhythm of the astral body; with the even slower rotation of the hour hand, the rhythm of the ether body. Just as the minute hand is above the hour hand at a certain time, so it is with the movements, the rhythmic movements of the human etheric and astral bodies. The etheric body has only made a quarter of the astral body's full revolution.

The position of the etheric body in relation to the astral body is therefore different, so a lot depends on the state of the person when a particular event occurs. If, for example, fever occurs in a very specific position of the etheric and astral bodies, when the etheric and astral bodies collapse after seven days, the fever can be combated again by the etheric body. From this you can see that it is connected with this behavior of the etheric and astral bodies that the fever drops after seven days in the case of pneumonia.

This phenomenon that we are confronted with is a very specific effect of the whole human nature and its rhythms. And such behaviors exist for each individual system, whether it is the lung system, heart system or any other. If we recognize this as a truth, it will have an enormous influence and the groping in the dark will end. Of course, it is necessary to be vividly aware that one can also work on the spirit. When one speaks of the influence of this or that light, one has only the physical processes in mind and not the spiritual effects.

A start has just been made here in Munich by our dear member Dr. Peipers. This is important because it involves taking into account the higher bodies in man, that the blue or red has a certain effect on them. It must be made clear that this matter cannot be compared to any color theory, but that the perception of colors triggers healing processes and thus has a healing effect. And it is reckoned here that there is a spiritual world, and it is placed in human life.

Just as colors, tones and very specific thought complexes are used for the recovery of the person, because they evoke very specific processes in the person. For example, it has a very specific influence on a person whether he indulges in ideas that are linked to reality. Today, one is instructed to use, as far as possible, ideas that are only a photographic image of reality. These are the most unhealthy. Those ideas that are in the realm of natural science kill the human spirit all the more, the more central they are, and the consequence is that the human being cannot overcome the physical body, and the further consequence is that this or that illness must occur. In contrast, ideas that are produced by the spirit itself have an invigorating effect. When imaginative thinking takes place in a lawful way, it is healing. Directing attention in the right way is also health-giving. This is of tremendous importance, for no person can suffer from a digestive disorder, for example, who is filled with such interest. And such interest can only be evoked by the whole world appearing before us, guided and directed by the spiritual.

When humanity will one day realize that educating oneself about the riddles of existence pours all the vitality into our soul and gives such joy and pleasure that no storms can change it, then one will understand that spiritual science itself is the original remedy for all diseases. Those who do not want to come to it will rush from one impression to another and get bored. Nothing is more unhealthy than this rushing about. When the correctly guided interest of life goes to the center, then there is neither boredom in the world nor rushing from one sensory impression to another. The one who is guided by spiritual science finds something interesting in even the smallest thing. One does not always have to beg the outside world to interest me. - Because one finds a source within oneself that creates interest. And this makes the person healthy.

Spiritual science must not be accused of alienating life; no, it contains the only elixir of life. It has the right effect on everyone because it leads to the center of the world; it is a source of health. However, we may say that through a failed inner life, man creates the cause of the disease that takes him furthest away from the goal. Therefore only spiritual science will be able to answer the question, because it takes into account the whole human being. And so spiritual science will give us a health care that makes man the master of his organism. Even if one will establish a dogmatic medicine, where the dogma was always there, one will not be able to force people to keep themselves healthy. Therefore, the question to be answered in the near future will be important: How do we keep ourselves healthy? And this will be possible for the person who is able to repair what can be disturbed by the causes of illness. He knows that inner strength accomplishes more than what can be done from the outside. And so Theosophy is able to give people health in such a way that they acquire the ability to live and the security to fulfill their tasks and duties in life.

My dear attendees, as soon as a person looks at the world around them, they will find the greatest secrets and mysteries everywhere. Wherever they look, they see phenomena that they cannot understand the cause of, and the greatest mystery for humans is arguably humans themselves. And this can be very well understood in our very materialistically colored time, when we consider that today's science attempts to explain man on the basis of a hypothesis, which says that man developed from the animal kingdom, that the animals developed from the plant kingdom, and that the plants developed from the mineral kingdom. Spiritual science admits that, as long as one takes this point of view, it is completely impossible to explain the human being. Everything would be easier to explain as the human being, as long as one starts from this materialistic view that man has developed from the lower natural kingdoms, and it is precisely spiritual science that will be able to show, clearly show, that man is not a being as science imagines him to be.

Let us look at the world and try to be clear about what we see around us when we want to look at the human being. The first thing we see about such a person is his physical body. This physical body is composed of all the elements that we see in the nature around us. We can examine the human physical body chemically and then we will see that all the forces and laws that we also find in the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms prevail in it. We can therefore say: the human being has the physical body in common with the three lower kingdoms of nature.

But if we were to consider only the part of the human being that we call the physical body, no one would claim that this body could be a human being. We see that the human being has different characteristics from those of the minerals. We see that the human being has the power within him by which he grows, by which he reproduces, by which he can feed himself. We cannot go into this in too much detail today and just want to say that the power that manifests itself in the functions is the result of the etheric or life body. By ether, we do not mean the ether that science has assumed as a hypothesis. This etheric body or ether has very specific tasks to fulfill, such as nutrition, reproduction and so on. But this life body has yet another completely different task, which remains together with the physical body from birth to death. And the ether body ensures that the physical body does not follow the physical laws. If the physical body were to follow the physical laws, the physical body would immediately fall apart. Only because a physical body is enclosed and permeated by the etheric body, the physical body retains its shape and does not disintegrate. We can say that during life, from physical birth to death, the etheric body is a fighter against the decay of the physical body, and this etheric or life body is shared by humans with all plants and animals. Minerals do not have an etheric body as I have described it.

If man had only a physical body and an etheric body, he would have the ability to grow and nourish himself and so on, namely, all the things we see in plants. But man has something else that is much closer to him than all these qualities, namely his joy and pain, pleasure and suffering, his urges, desires and passions, and man would not have all this if he were composed only of an etheric body and a physical body. We cannot go into this in any more detail here, but for now we can merely state that the astral body is the body that makes it possible for a being to feel joy and pain, pleasure and suffering, instinct, desire and passion. The astral body also has many other characteristics, which can be precisely described by spiritual science, but for our consideration today we need only state what has just been said.

We see that where the astral body is the carrier of the above-mentioned qualities, a being that has such an astral body leads an inner life. And if we now look at nature, we see that only the human kingdom and the animal kingdom have such an inner life. Just as man has the physical body in common with the minerals, plants and animals, and the etheric or life body in common with the plants and animals, so he has the astral body in common with the animals. But if man had only a physical body, etheric body and astral body, he would not differ from animals. However, if we take a closer look at man and see how he differs from animals, we will find that man has an ability that no other being in the aforementioned realms has. Man has self-awareness. He can say “I” to himself. Take any other thing: at table it can say “table”, at the clock “clock”, at roses “roses”, at cloth “cloth”; but no human being can say the word “I” if it does not mean only itself. Every human being is a “you” to me, and I am a “you” to every other human being. The “I” or self-awareness is what distinguishes humans from all other beings in the natural kingdoms mentioned.

Thus we see that man is composed of four parts, namely, the physical body, which is composed of physical and chemical substances and laws; an etheric or life body, which protects the physical body from decay; an astral body, which enables man to lead an inner life; and finally, the ego, through which man attains self-awareness. All this was known to people in earlier times, and only when humanity has allowed itself to be fertilized again by spiritual science will people recognize again what great truths can be found in the sacred books of all nations. In these books we find messages about this compilation, only our present-day science cannot understand this because it is not willing to be taught, but because it thinks it can find out everything itself, which has been secretly written in the old books.

We have already had the opportunity to speak here in this city about other issues that touch on spiritual science, or as it is called in our time, theosophy, namely reincarnation and karma. We have spoken here before about the fact that the spiritual part, the I of the human being, goes from embodiment to embodiment in order to gain new experiences in each new incarnation, and that through the great law of karma, the human being has to bring balance into all his actions and all his experiences. When a person dies, what happens then? First, he lays down his physical body, which is returned to the physical earth. The physical body decays and the elements dissolve. The etheric body, the astral body and the self move out. After a short time, the etheric body separates. An extract of the etheric body is preserved and absorbed by the self. After the time on the astral plane, or as it is called in theosophical literature: Kamaloka, the astral body also disintegrates. An extract of this astral body is also taken by the ego, and now the ego goes through other states, which we do not need to describe here. After a certain time, the ego comes back, takes an astral body, an etheric body and reincarnates itself again on our earth.

If we take a closer look at this process, we will find that the ego takes a new physical body each time through the various reincarnations, which is given to it by its parents. This physical body therefore has the characteristics of the parents, and the physical body inherits the physical traits from its parents, grandparents and so on. But the ego is not inherited; that is something completely different, which was there long before the physical body was there. Only the physical body a person gets from his parents. Tonight we do not want to go into or at least not go too far into the etheric and astral body in relation to inheritance.

Material science claims that man is the product of heredity and imagines, for example, that genius is the result of heredity. As an example, it cites the fact that in the Bach family, about twenty more or less important musicians lived within two hundred years and now says that this gift is the result of heredity, or it proves that in the Bernoulli family there were six or eight important mathematicians within a short period of time and attributes this to heredity. But if science wanted to prove something, then it would have to start at the top with a genius and then prove that the genius was inherited in further generations. But this is not possible because, as is well known, it would be difficult to prove such cases. But how is it that there were so many great musicians and mathematicians in the Bach or Bernoulli families?

The first requirement for being a musician like Bach is a good ear, a good physical ear. Without such an ear, a person cannot be a musician. Now, a very good ear was formed in the Bach family through inheritance, and therefore people were born into this family who had to undergo a certain development in the field of music. This is not a matter of mere chance, but very definite laws are the basis of these incarnations. If the same people had lived in other families, had been born of other parents, who did not possess such an excellent ear, these people would simply not have been musicians, and exactly the same applies to the Bernoulli family. Certain physical predispositions are also necessary for a mathematician, and these physical necessities were present in this family.

We have now seen that the physical body is recreated each time, while the I remains. If nothing stood between the body and the I, then all people would be more or less the same. But something stands between the physical being of the human being and the I, and that is temperament. Every person has their own unique temperament. As you know, there are four temperaments: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic.

As we said before, man consists of four parts, which together form his being: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego. These four parts have not been created at the same time, but there has been a very long development before man reached the stage he is at today. You can find more detailed information about this in my article 'Akasha Chronicle' in 'Lucifer – Gnosis' (numbers 13 to 35).

Humanity has so far gone through four stages of development, and at each stage a part of its being has been developed. First, its physical body was developed, then its etheric body, then its astral body and finally the I. Now each of these four parts expresses itself in a physical part of the human being, and in such a way that the physical body expresses itself in the senses, the etheric body in the glands, the astral body in the nerves and the ego in the blood. The blood, as we can see it in humans today, is the expression of the ego, and there was no blood before the ego came into being.

Now every person has the four bodies, as stated above, and thus every person also has sense organs, glands, nerves and blood, but these four bodies are not equally developed in all people. There are all kinds of mixtures, and it is through this mixture that the difference in temperaments arises, as we shall see.

As I said, blood is the expression of the ego. We recognize a person as a choleric person if they have a strongly developed ego; we recognize someone as a sanguine person if they have a strongly developed astral body. We recognize a person as a phlegmatic person if they have a developed ether body, and we recognize a person as a melancholic person if they have a developed physical body. Spiritual science is able to explain this precisely because it knows how things relate to each other.

Take the choleric type, for example. As I said, the person has developed his ego strongly. The person in question has an excellent blood principle. When we look at such a type, we see something compressed in his build. A very good example is found in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the German philosopher. This is because the blood constricts the nerves, and thus the growth is, so to speak, restrained. We also see this in Napoleon. These are people with a strongly developed ego, which manifests itself in the choleric temperament. When we see such people walking, it is as if they want to stomp through the ground, not just put their feet on the ground, no, it is - / gap. The coal-black eyes look sharply into the world. The whole body gives the impression of willpower and energy, to which the bridled nature contributes. This is not to say, of course, that the choleric person must be small, only that if the same person were not a choleric person, he would be somewhat taller.

Now let us take the sanguine type. As we have seen, the sanguine type has a strongly developed astral body, and consequently a strongly developed nervous system. What is the result of this? Such a person walks very hoppily, everything springs out, because his astral body has the power and is not held back by the blood. Such a person always walks hopping, looks lively through his light blue eyes, has blond hair. But the sanguine person has very little lasting interest. As soon as he sees something, it gives him interest, but the same is not permanent. Tomorrow he sees something else, and that arouses his interest more, and so it goes on and on. But because he is interested in everything, he faces the world with a certain joy in life.

But let us now look at the phlegmatic person. As I said, this person has the most developed glandular system, which gives such a person an inner comfort. Such a person has no interest in the outside world, and we can see that from his dull eye and his calm gait. He is not interested in anything around him, and as I said, the reason for this is that the etheric body or the glandular system is in control.

Now let us take the melancholic. He has developed his physical body strongly, not the musculature, but the principle of the physical body. Such a person is weighed down, we would say, by the weight of his body. He cannot lift himself up, he cannot get ahead, and so everything is too much for him.

We have now seen how these four temperaments relate to the bodies, but it would not really have much practical value if we did not look at the matter further.

Not only can we apply what we are about to discuss to ourselves, but it is also of great importance in education. Take, for example, a choleric child. His disposition compels him to achieve the best in everything, it is not difficult for him to achieve the best because his temperament and disposition give him the ability to do so. How should we educate such a child? Many parents today are willing to say: The child does everything so easily, we don't need to worry about that – and yet that is not right. If we let such a child go, the time will come when the child will not go through all difficulties so easily. The child must be guided in a very specific way. If we want to give such a child a proper teacher, we must look for someone who is able to answer every question the child asks, so that the child gains respect for that person's knowledge. The child must realize that there is someone who is far more knowledgeable than he is, and precisely because of this the child acquires the ability to respect that which is above him. In general, we will see that such children do not have many opportunities to show their full strength, and although it may be unpleasant for [parents], it would be good if such a child were to have the opportunity to test his strength to the utmost. We can go even further ourselves, we have to let such a child do something that we know in advance he cannot do. In this way the child develops what we might call respect for the force of facts, and in this way we can keep such children on the right track. A choleric person – and a child like that too – will carry out everything he does to the letter; in other words, he will maintain an interest in his cause.

But now let us take a sanguine child. As I said, such a child has no lasting interest. Many parents now think they have found the right way to force the child to develop lasting interest by means of punishment and beating, but that does not work. We have to take into account what the child has, not what is not there, and what is not there is the disposition for lasting interest. We have to take that into account. All external things pass quickly. But there is one thing that all sanguine people recognize as lasting interest, and that is love for a particular personality. Where the choleric person must have someone beside them who forces respect through their knowledge, there is nothing to be done with such a personality with the sanguine person. The sanguine child needs to have someone by their side whom they can love, and if you have such a person, they will be able to guide the sanguine child in the right direction. As I said, the sanguine child jumps from one interest to the other, so to speak. To change this, there is no point in punishing the child. But you can try the following: You give the child something that he is a little more interested in and take it away before his interest has waned. You can also give the child something that is good for temporary interest. If you take these two tests in a tactful way, you will see that lasting interest will arise very soon. As I said, it is useful for such a child to have someone they can love, because a lot depends on that. Not through knowledge will anything be achieved with such a child, but only through love.

Now we come to the phlegmatic temperament. As we have seen, a phlegmatic person, and also a phlegmatic child, has a strongly developed etheric body and thus leads a comfortable inner life, as a result of which no interest arises for external things. A phlegmatic child has no interest in the outside world as far as it is concerned in relation to the outside world. But there is something else. Where the phlegmatic has no interest in what concerns himself, he does have interest in the things and affairs of others. If we bring a phlegmatic child into the environment of other children, we will see that such a child becomes interested in the affairs of others. Being with other children also has a strong suggestive effect, and a lot can be achieved in this way. If we try to force the child to take an interest, we will see that this is quite futile, but interest can still be taught in the way described above.

The melancholic child has developed the principle of the physical body excellently, and as a result, everything feels heavy to him. Even when there are no external causes, the child is in a bad mood. If you now think that this can be changed by getting the child a pleasure – which as a rule is not much pleasure – you will soon find out that this is not possible and that such contrived distractions are futile. This is also because the child does not have what is needed to respond to such joyful things. We have to work with what is available, not what is not. We do well to show such a child the suffering of other people, because this will help the child to see that its complaints are unjustified. However harsh it may sound, it is absolutely right for us to give such a child the opportunity to complain where there really is reason to complain. If the reason has disappeared, the child will feel relieved, and in this way we bring a certain change, whereby the child learns to appreciate the pleasant, and in this way we can contribute a great deal to distracting the melancholic temperament. Of course, a great deal of tact is required, and this is precisely what is important in education.

What we have said here for children applies equally well to adults. If, for example, a person is strongly melancholic, then he should deliberately seek out opportunities to feel uncomfortable. In this way he learns to appreciate the better. The same applies to sanguine people. If, for example, we see that we are too flighty, that we cannot keep our interest in one thing, then we can either be torn away from things that interest us very much – which can also happen – before the interest has expired. We can also force ourselves to do something for a week, for example read a book that does not interest us at all. We force ourselves to do it, and by doing so we learn to distinguish between what is worth our interest and what does not deserve our interest as much. If people would really take the trouble to hear what spiritual science has to say about such things, they would not take the position that today's materialistic science takes and claim that it is all fantasy or worse. Spiritual science is really able to provide answers to important questions about life and solve the riddle of man. One should not think that spiritual science will provide a recipe for every person, telling them what to do and what to avoid, but it does indicate the paths that a person who is really serious about life should follow. A person who just wants to get involved in everything that materialistic science has to say will certainly be able to learn a great deal about the laws of physics and the chemical composition of physical matter, but it is not possible for a person to find what is most relevant to him on the basis of this materialistic science. Spiritual science or theosophy fully recognizes the great achievements that materialistic science has given to the world, but it also knows that on the basis of this science, man can only recognize a part of his being. If man really wants to strive to know his inner being, then he has to listen to what spiritual science has to say, because this science is able to give people what today's humanity needs.

Dearly beloved! Ours is a time of doubt and mystery that are given to humanity. And one can say that it is good for anyone who, in their innermost being, can honestly and with strength say to themselves in the face of present-day events: Yes, for me this time is a time of doubt, of mystery and of questions that need to be answered. — For if he could not say this to himself and yet looked with an alert soul at the events of the time, there would actually only be the other pole for him: despair at the continuation of human civilization in the West. And if our time holds hidden doubts, questions and riddles that need to be resolved, then we need the strength of those people who can find their way in the present chaos of civilization and who can bring forth from the flood of questions and riddles that which can lead to a new progress, to a building up of our Western civilization. Everything that is undertaken from this Goetheanum wants to contribute to the forces that time needs so that the doubts and riddles can be resolved in human souls.

In such a time of questions and riddles, the necessity will also arise for much of the content of ancient tradition to appear in a new light. Now shines up to us — as it were, like an ancient sacred legacy of Greek culture — the oft-repeated Apollonian saying: Know thyself! And much of Western civilization since ancient Greek times has been influenced by this saying. But it seems to me that even such a seemingly rock-solid magic word in the development of mankind can only survive today, in our times of great transformation, if it undergoes a kind of transformation itself, absorbing the forces of our time. And so it seems to me that the ancient oracle of Delphi must now sound to people as follows: Know thyself, and become a free being! — We must be able to see world events, insofar as they relate to human beings, swinging back and forth between the two poles of self-knowledge and true human freedom.

Why did Greek wisdom write the significant words on the temple at Delphi: “Know Thyself”? To this Greek wisdom there shone forth, from ancient times, historically undefinable in its origins, an ancient, sacred wisdom and science. The origins of this science go back into the darkness of prehistoric times. In Egypt, people still had direct access to this ancient wisdom. In Greece, people only had a feeling for it, albeit one steeped in noble Greek humanity, and they felt that this wisdom had come to people from the world, from the world itself, which was full of wisdom. Within the world of wisdom, man had felt like a more or less instinctive, more or less unconscious link in the whole of the world. Then, in the Greek feeling, the sense of the independence of the human soul dawned. In addition to the old world knowledge, the self-knowledge of man should be striven for. The ancient wisdom was based on the motto: Know the world and, in the world, know man! This motto of ancient wisdom shone forth in Greek civilization. But the urge to strive for this knowledge of the world with man in it, to strive for independent human self-knowledge, now asserted itself. To the: Know the world! was added: Know thyself. The Greek stood as it were on the shore of the past, absorbing the full content of the past treasures of wisdom. We – and I believe that any impartial person can feel this – stand on a different shore. We stand on the shore of an indeterminate future, but a future that humanity must create in a spiritual sense. And we feel that we need a new motto to help us reflect with all our human strength on what can work from within us into the indefinite future as a creative force. On the shore of the past, the Greeks established the motto: Know Thyself! — On the shore of an indefinite future, we must establish the motto: Become a free being! This building and everything that is done in it is intended to speak about that which lies in the oscillation between the two poles of human contemporary tasks. The short series of presentations of knowledge and art that are to take place in the next few days also intend to speak about this. We stand at the starting point of the great scientific mystery. Humanity has not yet experienced the full courage within itself to face this great, mighty scientific riddle. Natural science has achieved great and mighty things. It has adopted a way of looking at things through which one of the events that our souls see in the chain of causes and effects is necessarily followed by the other. And it is natural science's most natural endeavor to include the human being in this chain of natural necessity. The great ideal of natural science is to study natural phenomena with this law of causation, to perceive them — in accordance with their essence — according to this law of causation, and thus also to understand from man what is to be understood from him according to this law of causation. One does not yet fully understand with living feeling what this striving, this ideal, actually means for human life.

If we completely absorb ourselves in what we, through correct knowledge of nature, take in as the world necessity, then we ourselves, with our consciousness, stand in this world necessity, then we must say to ourselves: everything that is experienced in ourselves is only one link in the chain of necessities. But when we have acquired such an awareness through a proper immersion in the scientific view of life, then our innermost being revolts against this feeling, then an experience that shines through our soul speaks against this feeling, then we say to ourselves: as a human being I am free and I must grasp my freedom, with my knowledge I must penetrate just as much into the fabric of natural phenomena as into the life of my freedom.

If we take up this inner riddle of freedom in the full sense of the word, then we come to say to ourselves: The significant knowledge, the development of which has been going on for the last three to four hundred years and which has so significantly illuminated nature, needs to be extended in order to also illuminate the experience of human freedom. For those would always appear justified who, out of the scientific consciousness of the present, have said and continue to say: We can only comprehend nature; we cannot help but stop short of comprehending human freedom. We must repeat the old Kantian saying: To make room for faith, we must destroy knowledge. Yes, as long as we are immersed in mere knowledge of nature, this saying is true. But then comes the rebellion of human consciousness. And it is precisely in the proper appreciation of the greatest scientific achievements of modern times that the urge must arise to know, to recognize the experience of human freedom. And this knowledge must at the same time be an experience. For, starting from it, we must carry the strength that we gain from it out into social life, which today presents us with no fewer riddles and questions than the life of knowledge and belief. Just as the riddles and questions of knowledge and faith are lived out in the lonely room in inner struggles of the soul, so the other riddles and questions, the social ones, work tumultuously through the world because they are not worked on by human forces that, out of a clear consciousness of freedom, out of a consciousness of freedom experienced in knowledge, know how to work against what surrounds us today as social chaos.

Only those who penetrate the riddle of freedom with living knowledge are capable of bringing the power of harmonious human coexistence into social life. Because in recent centuries we have lost this power precisely by penetrating into the depths of external events, we now live in social chaos. Light will only dawn in this chaos when we step into it with the inner strength that comes from knowing how to see through the riddle of freedom. Just as the ancient Greek once stood questioning before all that an ancient wisdom handed down to him, standing questioning before: Know the world! — and passed over to the: Know thyself! —then we must stand questioning today before the saying: Man, become a free being!

Between these two poles of human activity, between the pole where the Greek sage threw into the multitude of thinkers and unbiased minds the word: Know thyself! - and the other pole, which expresses itself in the words: Man, become a free being! - lies, at bottom, an episode of human development.

It is tangible how an episode of human development lies between these two poles. Take the most modern of people, from whom this School of Spiritual Science borrows its name, Goethe. He found himself in the then already dawning and pressing modern life, sensing it in a time when most still lived fully in the traditions of the old. How did it affect Goethe's soul on the one hand in terms of true knowledge, and on the other hand in terms of true art, and in art in his case also in terms of religious deepening, of religious inwardness? All these impulses surged through his soul – which at that time were actually noticed only by him, at most by some of his friends, but which have since emerged into general human life – all these impulses tend towards the social life grasped in freedom. And when he felt strongly enough what lived in him like the dawn of a new era, he turned his back on the Nordic world and went to the south to sense from what remained of ancient Greek culture what the deepest essence of that Greek culture was. This modern man, Goethe, had wanted to build the wide-spanned bridge in his own soul across the episode between the future tasks of modern humanity and the comprehensive résumé of the past, as it was drawn in Greek culture.

And does not that which Goethe so vividly portrayed in his own personality live today in every human being who wants to strive upwards to that sphere where the great questions of the world can come to meet him in their true forms? Do not those who devote themselves to our education still draw from Greek culture that which should give this education its formal foundation? Is not the heart and mind of those who are educated in our grammar schools still imbued with Greek? We must feel this episode as Goethe felt it, first tragically and then redemptively for humanity. But then we shall also understand how we must turn to the other pole, the pole of human self-knowledge, in a new way, how we must approach it in the moment of world-historical development when the word resounds from our deepest innermost being: Man, become a free being! — also the: Know thyself! — differently than the Greek approached it.

Let us look around us, especially at those who have immersed themselves with all their soul in the modern scientific world view, who have become so great on its soil. We see how man, in observation as well as in experiment, through which so many puzzles have been solved for modern man, immerses himself in material existence. And we should listen more attentively than we are accustomed to to such a saying as was uttered by a Du Bois-Reymond, for example, out of this modern consciousness: where matter haunts, human knowledge can do nothing! — Modern knowledge has become accustomed to penetrating material existence. It has achieved great things in this field. Everywhere it follows how the material world is structured in material phenomena. But in order to decipher the fabric of material phenomena, it must presuppose that which it can never penetrate if it remains on its own ground: the world of matter itself.

It is a long story of what has taken place between the pursuit of human knowledge and the mystery of matter. What has taken place in the theoretical field is of little interest to us at this moment. But attention must be drawn to what has remained as a residue in the human mind, in all human life. No matter how much one believed that one was walking on mere paths of knowledge when dealing with material phenomena, no matter how much one established, by presupposing matter as such, a basis of feeling in the depths of the soul that permeates all human life. And we have such a basis of feeling. We can see it in the best of our contemporaries. They struggle with the material riddle; they wrestle with this material riddle. And a good number of them could not help but rise above this struggle and admit that the human riddle cannot be found, cannot be solved in this way, not even in a relative sense. And yet this solution is necessary for the security of the human soul. One would now like to get to the true essence of man “in the inner being of man”, but one has become accustomed to thinking and feeling one's mind on the outside world, “which cannot be seen through”, on the “conditions of material existence”. What one has become accustomed to doing there renounces seeing through. And if one turns this mind, which renounces seeing through, inwards, then one becomes a mystic in the modern bad sense.

Unfortunately, all too few people realize today that the best ones, who turn away from our knowledge of nature and come to a striving for knowledge of the human interior, have acquired their habits of thinking and feeling by observing “which is inscrutable”, and now they carry into the human interior what they have acquired as habits of thinking and feeling by observing the outside world. But when we turn our gaze, which we have first trained on dark and gloomy “matter”, inwards, it becomes nebulous mysticism, and nebulous mysticism bars the door to the knowledge of ourselves!

This is what everything that is done within this School of Spiritual Science seeks to emphasize. We must avoid the path of nebulous mysticism, as well as the path that leads only to outer scientific necessity and thus to the destruction of the knowledge of freedom. We can avoid these paths only if we seek real spiritual science, not that spiritual science which dare not stop short before the human soul, and which then, having stopped, continues the path by casting mystical fog into this human soul. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, must not do this! With the training that has been gained in bright, clear, light-filled knowledge of external facts, it must be possible to shine a light into the human interior, free of mysticism but in a spiritual scientific way. The: Know Thyself! must not be grasped in a mystical, dark way of life, but in a bright, clear clarity. Then will be united that which springs from man's inner knowledge, from the fulfillment of the word: Know Thyself! — and that which springs from his behavior of recognizing himself in relation to outer nature, under the watchwords: Man, become a free being!

These two words of truth may be seen as two pillars that stand ideally in the spirit when one enters this building: the pillar of truthful, light-filled human self-knowledge and the pillar of human freedom. The first is suited to remind people of that which can provide them with security and support, artistic activity and religious satisfaction. The second is suited to equip them with the strength to contribute to the pressing social issues of the present and the near future. From all that is aimed at here in the fertilization of the individual specialized sciences, as should become particularly apparent in the next few days, the world-historical moment should be grasped, as well as it can be grasped in all modesty, which places us on the shore of an indeterminate future, just as the Greek was placed on the shore of a fulfilled, overwhelming past.

But to do this, we must come to feel the light-filled grasp of the human interior in the knowledge itself, that we no longer merely drag the knowledge from external observation and external experiment, but that we freely raise it and, by permeating it with the inner being of the human being, we place ourselves with this knowledge in the life of freedom, in which mere scientific observation can never place us. From a scientific point of view it is honest to deny freedom, but it is human to protest against this denial and to see in this protest the starting point of a free spiritual science born out of the human soul and its organs.

This spiritual science, because it penetrates not into the dead but into the living, need not be feared as having a deadening effect on art, as does the dead science of the intellect. It will be able to fertilize art with what it draws from the spirit. This knowledge itself will be able to have an artistic effect on the outside, because it descends into human depths in clarity full of light. It will lead from true knowledge to the worship of that which can reveal itself in the human interior. And such knowledge, which only retains the form of mysticism but strives for the light, will at the same time lead human knowledge to religious

worship of the Highest, which lives and moves through the world. New artistic powers and new religious depths will be able to arise out of such knowledge, which grasps the inner being of man. And the life into which such knowledge may enter will be a life in freedom. It will first of all assure man of the consciousness of freedom. Man will no longer need to lose himself in the outer necessities of nature, as he does when he is merely aware of nature scientifically, because this is only a matter of necessity and not of freedom.

And the artist will become free from the mere model in the imitation of external nature, which he can never achieve anyway. From spiritual heights he will draw what he wants to impress on matter. A weak beginning of such a drawing of forms that reveal themselves to the free spirit, that are not linked to imitation in the model, should be what speaks from the forms and the artistic and the other artistic aspects of this structure.

And religious experience should be free from everything that is merely traditional, which approaches the human being as an external, unfree thing: freely grasping what reveals itself as the divine within the human being himself, freely connecting within with that power which, according to its true nature, only truly wants to connect with this human inner being in freedom: the power of Christ.

Knowledge in the most diverse fields – in the outer natural world, in the inner life of man, and in the all-embracing unity of both – that is the new striving for the fulfillment of the word: “Know thyself!” – a threefold step towards freedom: freedom in the inner experience of the most human, freedom in creative work, including artistic work, and freedom in religious experience. That is the other.

The cross-fertilization of the individual sciences and human endeavors, and of all of social life, is intended to lead to this, and will be discussed here over the next few days. It will be shown that not only can certain propositions be derived from the individual sciences, as a modern philosophy that is dying to death would have it, and then pieced together into an abstract world-view, but that a world-view can be gained through spiritual observation that embraces all sense impressions, and that this general world-view, grasped in the light of spirit, can shine into the individual specialized sciences.

It has also been demanded that the world view should draw nourishment from the individual sciences and their results. The time has come when the results of a spiritually experienced world view radiate into the individual sciences. However little the world may realize it today, what happens here in this place should never come from a different tone than the one that is itself impulsed on the one hand by the true: know yourself! - on the other hand from the: man, become a free being! — But this does not only call out to us from the lonely contemplation of science within the human being. This calls out to us in all of our catastrophic time today. And if we summarize what lies deepest in the riddles and questions of the times, that is what I have tried to suggest today.

We may speak in this way to the age about what is given to us by the signs of the times and by the sentient human being who stands within that time. These older people have experienced what it means to live in a catastrophic time. They feel how the ideals of their youth have been lost. They feel how they have poured out into a civilizational chaos what they believed in their youth they were contributing to modern Western civilization. To them, who have experienced such things, we may speak as we have today. For such a word must find the side in the life of the human soul that says: We must still use the rest of our lives to point out to humanity something stronger than what we have done.

And such words may also be spoken to young people. For they still see with full strength what is collapsing, what is living in catastrophe. They can feel, with their full human strength and enthusiasm, that something new and powerful must happen. And the right old person of today will seek out the word that can ignite in youth, so that other times see the souls that look out into the world from the eyes of today's youth, as the souls that look out into the world through today's old eyes must see.

And so one can speak to people of any age. One can speak to those who are called the “old houses” of all kinds in a certain language, and one can speak to young fellow students. Because one can speak not only out of the tasks of the times, but out of the greatest tasks of the human being itself. And we live in a time when the greatest questions of human life have become tasks for our time. We live in a time when we can look into the deepest interior of human beings. And we will see the call to action written there, to act in a direction that we will also find indicated when we look at the outer signs of the time with their clear language.

What lies in this twofold direction of view, I would like to speak about in the next few days. I would like the spoken word to find attention. Because in today's world, to understand the human being means to sense and feel an important thing in human life itself. Only he can rightly and justly place himself in the human activity of our time who is able to say: the signs of the time contain the challenge to look into the depths of the human soul with insight and spiritual recognition. And what the human being can fathom in his or her inner life today is at the same time what the clearly speaking signs of the time challenge us to recognize, feel, will and accomplish.

Rudolf Steiner's opening speech was followed by a lecture by Albert Steffen on “The Becoming of the Work of Art”.

Then Marie Steiner spoke the words of Hilarius, which Rudolf Steiner had already transformed for the opening ceremony of the First School of Spiritual Science: “The Guardian of the Threshold”:

In the name of that spirit which
Announces itself to the souls in our striving,
I appear at this moment
Before people who from now on want to hear
The word that sounds earnestly to the souls here.
Not earlier times could those powers,
that guide the aims of our earthly becoming,
could not reveal themselves in a fully conscious way.
For just as in the child's body,
the powers that are destined to be the vehicles of knowledge
must first gradually mature and grow stronger,
so humanity in its earthly course also had to unfold as a whole.
At first the soul impulses lived in dullness,
which were later to prove worthy of
seeing spiritual light from high worlds.
But when men were wise leaders
In the beginning of the earth, souls devoted to the spirit
Were chosen by higher powers of existence.
They used to send, in the places of knowledge,
The powers of the spirit, the rays of knowledge
Into souls that were only dimly aware
Of their ability to penetrate each other through their vision.
It was only later that spiritual researchers
were able to recruit students from the ranks of humanity
who, through the trials of life, had shown strength of will
proved themselves mature, in the brightness of consciousness,
striving towards spiritual knowledge.
And when the first disciples of the leaders
were later able to cultivate the noble good with dignity,
the unconscious leadership disappeared,
so that free souls were allowed to strive knowingly.
And free souls then chose people
Who were allowed to follow them in the care
Of the treasure of the spirit; and so it went on
From one generation to the next.
All seats of knowledge so far,
Which in truth are, have just arisen
from the highest, which stands in the spiritual spheres.
In earnest seeking we strive here
for the true spiritual human heritage.
We will never speak of knowledge
that does not bear the spirit's own seal,
but only of the light from the spiritual worlds,
which, by beholding, can be opened up to people
Who, aspiring, want to entrust themselves to it
To fathom the depths of their soul.
To strive worthily towards this light
The seriousness of the turn of time
And its need shows us; the signs are truly
Full of meaning, which in the plan of the world
Now clearly reveal spiritual eyes.

The lectures this week are to be arranged in such a way that each day is devoted to a different subject, so that it can be seen what is to be achieved as a fertilization of the individual subject areas and branches of practical life by spiritual science. Today we shall begin with the subject that is most closely related to spiritual science as it is meant here: the subject of philosophy. What I myself will have to say here is intended as a kind of introduction to the questions that will be dealt with in the course of today.

I would like to start from one of the most interesting and even most significant phenomena of recent philosophical development. It is certainly not always the case that the most significant and interesting phenomena are those that are soon recorded in the usual historical works. And so I would like to start from a phenomenon that has yet to be expressed historically, from the whole meaning of a philosophical work published in 1888 by Ludwig Haller, a government councilor and public prosecutor, entitled “All in All: Metalogic, Metaphysics, Metapsychics». I may all the more base myself on this phenomenon in the life of philosophy, as anyone who has followed my own literary career can see that I myself have remained quite uninfluenced by this phenomenon, because that which constitutes my position on philosophy already contained in my writings that appeared before this “Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik,” and what I said later is only a proper and consistent elaboration of what was contained in my first writings.

Above all, in the prosecutor and government councilor Ludwig Haller, who wrote nothing but the aforementioned work, we encounter a person for whom what is called philosophy is not just a specialized science—although in a certain respect he is thoroughly qualified to engage with this specialized science—but for whom what he presents comes from direct personal philosophical experience. We are dealing with a personality for whom philosophical endeavor has become the most intimate personal experience. And if we go straight to the most significant thing about Ludwig Haller, then we have to note that he is actually at loggerheads with the whole way of philosophical thinking in modern times. He has obviously been around a lot in all kinds of philosophy and also in those works of literature in which “philosophy of life” bubbles. He has familiarized himself with the philosophical thinking of his time and he has found – this is, as I said, his opinion – that with this philosophical thinking one actually goes around in a kind of unreal circle, that with this philosophical thinking one never comes into a position to delve into reality itself.

Ludwig Haller wants to penetrate into spiritual reality with his philosophy, which he, having evidently outgrown more religious ideas due to his education, calls “the divine” or even “God”. In this “divine” or in “God” he seeks the source of all that which, as the actual essence, also lives in the human soul and of which the human soul must also become aware. But he comes to the conclusion that this soul, by processing the conceptual fabric that is customary in his time, cannot penetrate into this center of its being, where it is one with the divine-spiritual of the world.

Since the thought-weaving of philosophers at the end of the 1980s, when the aforementioned work was published, was still influenced by Kant in many ways and thus Kantian thought lived in this thought-weaving, Ludwig Haller felt compelled above all to deal with Kantianism and all that stems from Kantianism. But precisely in all the thoughts in which something Kantian somehow flows in, he saw the unreal, that which can never be immersed in the reality of the world. And he was actually unhappy about the fact that he, because he wanted to speak philosophically in his time, had to deal with this thinking, which was thoroughly infected by Kantianism, that he had to keep coming back to it, to deal with Kantianism. He found very sharp words, first to characterize Kantianism itself, and then also for the having to deal with Kantianism, which he found so unappealing. I would like to share with you two samples from this assessment of Kantianism, so that you can see what a person for whom philosophy is an innermost personal matter struggles with in our times.

On one occasion, Ludwig Haller speaks of Kantianism in such a way that he says of it: the “pseudo-dialectical, half-true, deeply dishonest character of this misosophy, which tries to steal the weapons from the arsenal of light in order to use them in the service of darkness”. On another occasion, he becomes, I might say, literarily enraged that he repeatedly finds himself compelled to deal with Kantian thought because he must engage with his contemporaries , and he says: “I, who could and would like to talk about God and his glory, see myself condemned again and again to talk about Kant and his wretchedness – I, a dandy's dandy.”

I wanted to point out this phenomenon because it is an imprint of the struggles that a truly philosophically inclined nature had to endure at the end of the 19th century. Today, what is meant by philosophical speech and writing is also taken to mean that it is a matter that, so to speak, hovers a bit above people's heads, and that one is not personally involved in it. That is why the inner tragic phenomena of philosophical life are far too little appreciated in our time. And I believe that this phenomenon, which is one of the most tragic inner philosophical experiences of our age, is actually quite unknown in wider circles.

Those who are truly familiar with the intellectual life of our time know how much of such moods has been lived in people of our age. And actually, if one wants to explain the essence of philosophical thought in our time, one must speak precisely of these phenomena, which are not considered by the philosophical experts, but which are all the more important for the actual human experience.

Now, building on this phenomenon, I would like to characterize another one that is basically also only a subjective, personal philosophical experience, so to speak. The philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who became better known as Ludwig Haller, dealt with Ludwig Haller. In this discussion, one point is of particular importance. Ludwig Haller, who makes a lot of work for himself, as you saw, he calls himself “a dandy dandy” because of this making-a-lot-of-work-for-himself, with the introduction into the Kantian-infected thought-weaving of his time, of our age - he he feels, namely, by going from concept to concept with his thinking, by abandoning himself to philosophical thinking, which can be clearly seen to permeate his book from cover to cover — he feels that the concepts he is now following with his thinking take on a remarkable inner life. It is as if the concepts in his mind began to lead an independent life. He emphasizes this in the most diverse places in his “Metalogic, Metaphysic, Metapsychic”.

If we want to explore this interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective, we cannot do other than say the following: Ludwig Haller puts all his energy into the particular nature of contemporary philosophical thinking. But his inner human experience actually wants something different; he cannot come to this other because in the 1880s there was not even a trace of a truly modern spiritual science. What could fill this human inner life with real spiritual science is lacking. But I would like to say that he lives in it in a strangely instinctive, unconscious way. He is unaware of this, but he notices from this strange phenomenon that the world of concepts comes to life for him and leads an independent life.

Anyone who is able to conduct research in the sense of the spiritual science represented here is very familiar with this independent life of concepts. But they can also master it. They can master it in the sense that one can master the transition from one mathematical concept to another mathematical concept in the ordinary process of mathematization. But this mastery must be achieved through inner practice. It is quite natural that one enters into a life that is very far removed from ordinary consciousness when one suddenly notices – something that otherwise only the food in our organism does, that they lead their own life in digestion without our intervention – that the absorbed concepts begin to lead their own inner life. It is not incomprehensible, but very, very understandable, that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann, who was indeed brilliant, who also achieved something quite penetrating in some areas, but who had completely outgrown the philosophical thinking of his time, could not do anything special with this experience of Ludwig Haller. And when Eduard von Hartmann writes his critique of Ludwig Haller, one notices that on the one hand he feels quite queasy. What is to become of it, the modern philosopher asks himself, when the concepts to which I devote myself suddenly begin to dance like goblins within me, to embrace each other or the like? That is something terrible, one cannot expose oneself to it! And so, as a true contemporary philosopher, he also offers this criticism in a very significant way by saying that he never noticed anything of this playful, goblin-like activity of concepts that have come to life independently.

We can readily believe Eduard von Hartmann when he says that he felt this inner sultriness when reading Ludwig Haller's “Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik”. However, as his critique shows, this did not stop him from reading the whole book, and in a sense he even found it very significant. I believe that many others who have been professionally involved with philosophy in the period since 1888 have hardly got beyond the first pages of this book, if they have even seen the title page!

What I am pointing out to you is a very significant phenomenon. And we can only understand it if we follow the philosophical development of the West as I have tried to do in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”. If we go into what I have explained in detail there with reference to the history of philosophy, and what I can only hint at here, we see that in the age of Greek philosophy the whole human soul was different from what it later became and especially from what it is in our time. We see how in Greek philosophizing, what we call thinking, what we call imagining, is linked in a similar way to the conditions of the external world, insofar as it presents itself to man, as for us only the qualities of sensory perception. When we perceive, we ascribe, at least in naive consciousness, the sensual qualities to what we perceive. Certainly, the epistemological discussions since Locke and others think differently, but they need interest us less at this moment; I want to refer only to naive consciousness for the fact that has been brought up. In this naive consciousness, one attributes the sensory qualities red, blue, white, warm, cold, lukewarm, sweet, bitter, etc., to things, and today it is clear that what one thinks and imagines about sensory objects is separated from the objective in the process of becoming conscious, that it is experienced subjectively. But the Greeks attributed their thinking, their ideas, to the object just as we attribute red, blue, sweet, bitter and so on to the object; they had what they experienced in knowing, to an even greater extent, so to speak, in perceiving than we have. They were fully aware that they perceived the conceptual content at the same time as the red, green and so on.

And what emerged in the most logical way in Greek thought, I would say, was basically a peculiarity of the general enquiring consciousness right up to the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, up to the Galilei-Copernicus period. Anyone who delves into what has come to light in scientific achievements, which, after all, were still one and the same with philosophical research for that time, anyone who delves into the corresponding literature, insofar as it exists, will say that these older researchers and thinkers, when they talk about things, still describe the objective aspects of things, whereas today's researchers think entirely separately from things and ascribe them to the subject.

One can follow, and this pursuit is extraordinarily interesting, how in the age of scholasticism, philosophical life takes the direction of becoming clear about how what we call thinking in concepts may still be thought of as connected to the objective. Before the scholastic age, the connection between what is experienced as an idea and concept in things was self-evident. This connection only became a question, a mystery, when the conceptual and the imaginative were separated from what is called objective perception in human experience. And it was out of this philosophical experience that scholasticism arose, the problem of which should be studied much more thoroughly today than it is studied, the problem of 'realism' and 'nominalism'. Today, these words conjure up completely different ideas than they did in the scholastic era. In the age of scholasticism, a realist was, for example, Ihomas of Agquino, who attributed an objective reality to concepts and ideas, so that he said: Concepts and ideas have something objective in their content, something that does not merely belong to the subject, that is not merely thought. A nominalist was someone who sought reality only in that which lies outside the conceptual, who saw in the concepts only something by which man summarizes what is given to him as perception, so that for the nominalist, the concepts were mere names.

Such a problem always arises in the development of humanity when something is experienced inwardly. In the Middle Ages, people had to undergo this inwardly, that they became more and more familiar with the conceptual life in their own inner being, that they saw what is called the external world only in the perceptible. Hence the question arose for him: How can one justify relating to external perceptions in some way that which one basically has only as a name within oneself, which one grasps only by associating it with external perceptions? A significant skepticism emerges from nominalism.

And basically, what then emerged in Kantian philosophy is nothing other than, I would say, the last consequence of this scholastic problem. It is just that Kant arrived at his formulation of the scholastic problem in a peculiar way: in the age in which Kant, as a young man, was pursuing his philosophical studies, a somewhat diluted Leibnizianism prevailed in the circles in which Kant was pursuing his studies. Leibnizianism, which is something great in its own way, albeit somewhat abstract, and which still has a connection to the spirit of reality, was philosophically sublimated and diluted in Wolffianism, which formed the stage of Kant's youth. During this time, people were already dealing with the demands of mathematizing science, with the demands of science, which is precisely composed of the results of external observation of the world. But out of the old habit that man has something to say when something is being determined about the world, one had established the broad doctrine of reason alongside this empirical science, alongside this science of experience. It was decreed that uncertain judgments can be gained through experience, through empiricism, about everything that is transitory; but these judgments are directed only at the transitory and are uncertain. One cannot know whether what one recognizes through observation and intellectual knowledge about any fact of the transitory world must necessarily be so for all time. We cannot even know that the sun must rise every morning, because we have only the one piece of empirical evidence that it has risen every morning so far. From this we can conclude that it will also rise in the future; but it is just an empirical conclusion. Beyond this empirical science, Wolffianism, and Kant in his youth, were looking for a rational science, in complete harmony with Wolffianism. It is characteristic that one of Wolff's books is called: “Rational Thoughts about God, the World, and the Soul of Man, and about All Things in General.”

So the aim was, on the one hand, to gain empirical knowledge about the world, insofar as it is accessible to experience, and, on the other hand, to gain rational knowledge that extends over everything, which, so to speak, is to be gained from reason alone. And so, alongside, say, revealed theology, a rational, a rational theology was established, alongside empirical psychology a rational psychology, alongside the knowledge of the world gained through experience, a rational geology, and so on. The underlying reason for this search for a particular science of reason was that people said: there is no certainty for scientific research in an external world. But if one wants to have such certainty, it can only be gained by deriving it from reason itself.

However, the whole research of Wolffianism is still based on the fact that a reality has first been placed in this reason, from which man then derives his “truths of reason”, in some transcendent way.

In Kant's work, two things occurred, and anyone who studies Kant with an open mind will be sharply reminded of what emerges in his work from two sides: on the one hand, he had become accustomed to searching for “certain judgments”. For example, he had said to himself: in mathematics we have such judgments that always apply quite necessarily, that cannot come from experience because experience does not give rise to such judgments. We also have such judgments in some areas of scientific thought, which are valid forever, and which can only be gained from the human being itself. There must be certainty in philosophy. That was one side of what Kant wanted. And anyone who does not grasp how firmly Kant stood on the ground: there must be certainty — also in the sense of Wolffian philosophy — does not understand Kant, because he cannot engage with Kant's insistence on the certainty of certain judgments.

But Kant had become disillusioned with Wolffianism, in terms of its content, through his study of Hume, the English philosopher who wanted to be a mere philosopher of experience. And he said to himself, precisely under the influence of Hume: there is no such thing as spinning a reality out of reason; there is actually only experience. — That was the second side.

On the one hand, there must be certainty; but everything that appears in experience, which is the only basis for real knowledge, does not provide certainty. How can we escape from this dilemma? And the very compulsive search to escape from this dilemma is basically the main impulse of Kantian thinking. I have presented this in detail in my writing “Truth and Science” and have further illuminated it in my “Philosophy of Freedom.” Kant's search did not actually lead to the recognition of anything essential, but to the question: How do you achieve absolute certainty?

Kant's problem is not a problem of truth, nor of knowledge, but of certainty. And if you don't grasp it as a problem of certainty, you can't really understand it. Kant seeks the solution by saying: the human soul is certainly not suited to distilling judgments of reality out of reason, but these judgments do come about; they are applied to external experience, as can be seen, for example, in mathematics. We do not merely look at such figures (it is drawn), but we look at them mathematically and say: there are two triangles or, drawn differently, it is a hexagon. We mix what we spin out of reason inwardly with what comes to us through external experience. We impose what we recognize inwardly a priori over what we experience a posteriori.

Thus Kant came to say: Knowledge of truth cannot be gained from reason. But human reason is applied to experience. It imposes its judgment on external experience. It itself makes its judgment on external experience. Because Kant said: There must be certainty in philosophy, one must be able to find certainty, but one does not find it by searching in a Wolffian way, by believing that one can gain a reality in reason and let experience run alongside – because Kant could not could not bring it together, so he said: Man spins out of his reason that which experience then takes up; man makes knowledge himself; the things of experience are therefore certain and certain to the extent that we make them certain out of our minds.

You see, actually the essence of knowledge is dethroned. Actually, knowledge is eliminated. And it is eliminated in such a subtle way that the Kantians still adhere to this subtlety today and do not realize what is actually involved. When someone like Ludwig Haller comes along and feels how Kantian thinking has actually lost touch with reality, how it snaps at certainty in the unreal, then he finds words like the ones I have shared with you. He finds that human ingenuity is being applied to an impossible problem, to a problem that does not shed light on knowledge but shrouds it in fog. That is why Ludwig Haller says, as he feels it: This misosophy tries to steal its weapons from the arsenal of light and use them in the service of darkness.

But on the other hand, one must also recognize how this whole development of modern times was basically necessary. The development of human thinking and human research since Greek times was not a line of development that can only be followed in the way I have just done, but can also be followed in another direction. I also pointed this out in my book 'Riddles of Philosophy'. Today, we have a knowledge of nature that attempts to understand natural phenomena purely in terms of their essence.

It may be said, however, that the very knowledge of nature which today always prides itself on understanding natural phenomena purely, hardly succeeds in understanding natural phenomena purely, that is, in no longer penetrating them with the web of thoughts of that which is only made in the concept, inwardly subjectively. — All kinds of hypotheses are still being put forward about the external course of phenomena, not only justified ones but also unjustified ones.

But one person did emphasize in modern times, and relatively early on, that in terms of observing external natural processes, this modern age must strive towards the pure phenomenon, towards pure phenomenology. And that person was Kant's opposite number, Goethe. He demanded that phenomena and appearances express themselves purely. He emphasized that what takes place in the development of understanding must remain completely separate from what is presented as a description of phenomena and of the phenomenal process itself. And in the most stringent and admirable way, Goethe repeatedly demands this pure phenomenalism.

But the more one strives towards this pure phenomenalism, the more one must strive for a special peculiarity of the conceptual world. And this peculiarity of the conceptual world is also highly achieved. This peculiarity is thoroughly justified for a certain age of human development. Anyone who, since the age of Cartesius, has not limited himself to studying philosophy, but who has an organ for also entering into the good sides of

of scholastic philosophy and medieval philosophy, and who does not see Aristotle and Plato through the spectacles of modern philosophers and historians of philosophy, but can place them before his soul in their original form, he knows that the way in which the world of concepts and ideas lives in the human soul is quite different today than it was in ancient Greece and even in the scholastic Middle Ages. In the scholastic Middle Ages, the soul still felt that, in experiencing the concept, there was something substantial in this concept, just as there is still something substantial in the red and blue that one perceives. Only in recent times has the concept become a complete image. Only in recent times has the concept been completely emptied of its content. Only in recent times has it become possible in the development of humanity and in philosophy to do what I have called pure thinking in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

If one tries to eavesdrop on the problem of freedom, as I attempted in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” one simultaneously becomes acquainted with this modern character of thinking. One becomes acquainted with a thinking that is basically emptied of all external experiential content. It is brought up on this external experiential content, but lives only as subjective fact.

It is just as true to say of this pure thinking, and I made this clear in the new edition of my Philosophy of Freedom, that it takes place in the realm of the will. But the will has been transformed into thinking, as it were. It is the result of the kind of thinking that has stripped away all external experience. This pure thinking is only an image, and is entirely an image. And if one is at all to arrive at a philosophical understanding in our age, one must reach the soil in which this pure thinking is found.

Goethe sensed what lies in this pure thinking. Others can only feel it with him. That is why they always quote a Goethe saying incorrectly, which says something like that the kind God has saved him from “thinking about thinking”. As Goethe meant it, it is already correct. Goethe never “thought about thinking” because, admittedly, one cannot achieve this pure thinking with the thinking that one has become accustomed to. One must look at it as an image. So that one can say: the thinking itself that one wants to recognize, pure thinking, becomes a looking at this pure thinking. Pure thinking can be achieved not dialectically but vividly. One arrives at this point in philosophical development at the problem of freedom, which is why freedom, real freedom, is not possible at all without attaining this pure thinking, which is a mere image.

As long as a reality within us motivates our actions, our actions cannot be free. Therefore no instinctive action, no traditional action, no action under a habit is really free, but only an action that can follow the images that weave in pure thinking. As soon as you follow a reality, you are pushed. If you want to be free, you must include the unreal in your will. When you bump into something, you feel that the object has an effect on you. When you perform an act under an instinct, under an urge, you must feel that there is something pushing, that there is no freedom. But when you stand in front of a mirror, see the image in the mirror, you will be clear about the fact that the mirror image can never give you a slap in the face, that the mirror image can never push you. The image cannot do anything on its own. It is he who must act, who must act when he confronts this image. But since the image does nothing, the act then becomes a free act. Only a thinking that is not rooted in reality, but is pure image, can motivate a free act. That is why the problem of freedom is the problem of modern thinking, of pure thinking. But in this thinking, one is standing in a world of images.

Modern philosophy, everything that lives in this modern philosophy through Kant and the Kantians, comes instinctively, although it usually does not understand this pure thinking, to this pure thinking. When one begins to think in modern times and trains one's thinking in natural science, which claims all authority for itself and would be real natural science, real science of reality, if it stuffed anything else into us than mere images, one must, when one moves one's thinking in this direction, first approach an unreal. In the thinking through whose peculiarities we are passing with our modern philosophical and scientific development, we have no reality; we have only an image of reality. And in looking at this thinking, we come on the one hand to the problem that concerns the newer epistemologists. They would like to build a bridge from what is inwardly experienced to what outwardly exists in being. They do not realize that they are not building a bridge from one reality to another, but from something that lives in images to something that is supposed to be reality.

And on the other hand, we come to the point where conscientious natural philosophers admit to themselves: with this unrealistic thinking, with this thinking that is absorbed in the pictorial character, we cannot immerse ourselves in reality. The point “where matter haunts” cannot be reached. Because one weaves in pictures. Modern philosophy weaves in images, is unaware of it, and seeks reality in these images. Hence the feeling of a “misosophy” in Ludwig Haller, hence the feeling that one cannot enter into reality if one moves in this thinking.

That is the problem of the more recent development of philosophy: that human history must necessarily drift towards a pure comprehension of unreal pictorial thinking. For the sake of the development of freedom, modern humanity had to rise to this unreal pictorial thinking. But one cannot remain in it if one is a fully human being, if one feels reality in all human beings. For one must feel the contradiction between what is pressing and living and weaving in the human being, and what stands before consciousness as a mere environment of unreal images. We are not dealing with a merely logical or formal problem, but with a real one, which has arisen because man has gradually withdrawn his thinking, his imagining, from external reality.

In the external world there remains for him the dark, obscure matter that he cannot grasp. But his thinking has not become a reality, it has become an image. And he must go further in this image. Thinking, which today is a mere image, was still the content of perception for the Greeks. This thinking has moved in the direction from outside in. It proceeds in such a way that man first submerges into the outer world by thinking. Now, with his philosophizing, he has reached the point where he is weaving in the thinking that has been peeled from the outer world. He must continue in this direction. He must seek reality again. Matter has given man in ancient times and up to our age the support for thinking by making thinking real for him. But thinking, because it had to become the basis for the development of human freedom, has passed into the pictorial character. Thus it hovers between external experience and inner experience. It must submerge into this inner experience. It must in turn become reality. Man must plunge with full consciousness into the regions where Eduard von Hartmann and with him all modern philosophers feel so sultry, because thoughts seem to begin to dance like goblins.

When the human being with his thinking goes out of the pictorial character – where, if he weaves and lives in it, because they are only images, he does not need to be so sultry – when he steps out and enters into his own reality, then, through the exercises of spiritual science, he must indeed include the possibility in his inner abilities to move around in this self-life of the conceptual world, as otherwise in mathematical thinking. He must acquire the ability to grasp reality independently in this self-life. Just as we do not feel stifled when things out there in space do not stand still — lest our knowledge be disturbed — but when they move, run, so man must, in the ascent to spiritual explanation, to spiritual revelation, become capable of giving his image-concept a content again.

If one grasps the actual, pressing philosophical life of the present at this point, then one comes away from all the talk that the philosopher cannot understand what the spiritual researcher is saying. He can understand it as soon as he has understood the pictorial character of his thinking, but also as soon as he has understood that thinking has come to this pictorial character because it moves in world history from the outside in, from the direction of the spirit in matter to the contemplation of the pure spiritual world.

In this way, philosophy must be continued by receiving it from spiritual science, from spiritual research, by immersing thinking in what spiritual science, spiritual research, has to say. This is what I wanted to show you, even if only in a sketchy way with a few lines: in what way philosophy is to be fertilized by spiritual science. In the next few days, we will talk about how other branches of human thought and action can be fertilized by this spiritual science.

Closing words on the occasion of the disputation on philosophy

In the course of the disputation, questions arose that naturally required a broad discussion from a technical point of view. Since we cannot discuss everything in one evening, I would just like to make a few methodological suggestions regarding the questions that arose and that, at least in my opinion, were not formulated very clearly. These suggestions point in the direction in which certain solutions to such questions must be sought.

In view of such questions as, for example, that of the “subjectivity of perception”, there is a lot of confusion of ideas in the most recent philosophical development, an accumulation of concepts that tend to obscure and tangle the problems rather than to illuminate them and lead to a certain solution.

For when one wishes to raise questions concerning the relation between object and subject in perceiving in terms of representation and knowledge, it is always a matter of arriving at the questions by means of the most careful analysis of the facts. For often the questions themselves are wrongly formulated from misconceived ideas. And so it is often the case with questions about the “subjectivity of perception”.

The difficulty was indicated by the example of the partially color-blind person, who is assumed to see a, say, green landscape differently than the so-called normal-sighted person. The difficulty lies in this idea of the partially color-blind person: to what extent must one ascribe subjectivity to what the so-called normal-sighted person, I say quite explicitly, the so-called normal-sighted person, sees?

Well, the first thing to do is to present the whole problem in such a way that it appears correct. “Correct” means that the way in which the elements that have to be brought together to form the problem, that this how of bringing together is done in the right way. Just suppose someone says: Yes, the external world, which appears to me, say, in a green landscape with a green tint, gives me cause to reflect on whether the quality “green” is objective, whether I can ascribe it to the world of objectivity, or whether it must be addressed as subjective. In order to even formulate the problem, one must consider such things as, for example, this: Yes, how does it actually behave when I look at something that is white or yellow, for my sake, through green glasses? There we see it tinged green. Is that now to be ascribed to the sphere of objectivity, or must one speak of subjectivity here? We will soon realize that we certainly cannot ascribe this green, which I see through green glasses, to what is out there. We cannot speak of objectivity in relation to the external environment. But it will certainly not be possible to say that this green tint, which I have seen through green glasses, is based on something subjective. It is objectively determined in a perfectly lawful way, without what I am designating here as green actually being green.

You see, by forming this idea, I am putting the problem in a special light, where I have to consider that which certainly does not belong to the external world, but objectively, as having arisen in an objective way; because the glasses do not belong to me, so they certainly cannot be included in the sphere of subjectivity. Such things might even appear to be sophistry. And yet such sophistries are very often what leads one to put the elements that are supposed to lead one to the questions in the appropriate way, to bring them together. For if one sees through such apparent sophistries in the right way, one will see through the whole threadbareness of the everyday concepts of “subject” and “object”, which have gradually been introduced into modern philosophical reflection. And if one gets into the right line of questioning, one will probably be led more and more to the path that I believe in, which I have taken in my writings “Truth and Science” and “Philosophy of Freedom,” where one does not take the starting point from the concepts of “subject” and “object”, but seeks something independently of these concepts that must lie beyond the sphere of subjectivity and objectivity: that is the function of thinking.

The function of thinking! If you look at the matter independently, thinking actually appears to go beyond the subjective and the objective. And with that, you have gained a starting point from which you can then be led in the appropriate way to where the problem of “subjectivity” and “objectivity”, which presents such difficulties, is at stake. For one is led—and you will find this path thoroughly followed in these two books of mine—not to ask: How does an external “objective” world affect some “subjective” world, for which, say, the mediator is the eye? —but one is led to something quite different. One is led to ask: What is the fact of the senses themselves? What essence does one sense show? For example, the constitution of the eye?

One will then find that in the problem one sets oneself in this way, something comes to light that I want to make clear through a comparison, because I have to be brief – it could, of course, be encompassed with the adequate concept in an explanation lasting hours: I can also look through a pair of glasses and still see the world around me as the naive consciousness perceives it, with its color tinglings, with all its sensory qualities. I must only look through colorless transparent glasses; I must not look through glasses that change the outer world itself for me. And I must now find my way into the difference between glasses that change the outer tinting and glasses that are colorless and transparent and avoid any outer tinting. From this comparison – as I said, long-winded considerations could be used instead of the comparison – I will find: if I take the structure of the so-called normal eye, I have given it a structure that proves to be transparent, that can be compared to the transparent-colorless glass. I find nothing in the normal eye that indicates that the external world is qualitatively changed in any way. But I must not conduct this investigation with the ordinary concepts that I have in everyday consciousness, but with the imaginative consciousness that can truly penetrate the structures of the eye.

For the imaginative consciousness, a so-called normal eye is a transparent organ. An eye that is partially colorblind proves to be comparable to colored glasses for the imaginative consciousness, as something that does, however, make a change in the “subject”.

Thus, by conceiving of subjectivity in a higher sense, one comes precisely to regard the sensory apparatus in the broadest sense as that which can be compared to the transparent, which is precisely designed in such a way that it suspends the production of sensory qualities within itself. One learns to recognize as pure fantasy the idea that in this ideationally transparent sensory apparatus – which is precisely arranged in such a way that it cancels out any production of the sense qualities within itself – something could arise that would first evoke sense qualities, that would be there for something other than the sense qualities.

As I said, I only want to point in this direction. And at the same time, I want to point out that ordinary philosophizing should be aimed at saying: the facts of the world, when examined without prejudice, show me results that are simply insoluble for ordinary mind-consciousness; the facts themselves show me that I must go beyond this ordinary mind-consciousness. It is not honest to conclude, let us say, from the fact of partial color blindness that color qualities are subjective. For every such conclusion contains some logical error that can always be somehow demonstrated. It would be honest to say: one simply does not come to any result with ordinary philosophizing if one wants to solve the difficulty that arises from the comparison of partial color blindness with the vision of the so-called normal eye. The usual consciousness has the task, at this point, of presenting the difficulties and saying, “There they are.” And if one were to become truly aware of the scope of logic, of real-logical thinking within consciousness, one would, I might say, find problems lying everywhere and say, There is one more, insoluble for ordinary consciousness, the second, the third --- and would be glad that in many respects ordinary philosophy is nothing more than a hint at problems and a creation of an atmosphere of waiting for these problems to be solved from a higher level of consciousness. It is only the urge to come to terms with ordinary consciousness that spreads a fog over the problems and does not want to admit that one can only raise the problems with it and that one must point out that the human soul must now undergo a development and exercises to solve these problems. The law of specific sensory energies is certainly not something that can be dealt with within ordinary consciousness.

As I said, I only wanted to point out the main point of the discussions on the subject of colors, and to point out that, above all, philosophy and also philosophical physiology, philology and so on, in the present day would need a very conscientious delineation of what they actually bring before ordinary consciousness through their thinking.

This is the one thing I would like to draw attention to, as I said, quite inadequately. It should only point in one particular direction; but more cannot be done in such a short discussion.

The second point I would like to make – again, purely from a methodological point of view – is the problem of categories that arises here. Of course, one could talk for hours about the categorial nature of human thought, but I would like to point out just one thing for now: within the actual table of categories, “subjectivity” and “objectivity” do not appear at all. And the fact that within the actual category table, the actual, the original category table, “subject” and “object” do not occur at all, this in itself constitutes a kind of proof of the essence of categorical thinking: if one takes the categories in the way not as they arise from some sort of proof, but simply, I might say, as they are derived from logic, then, by dint of being posited, they must be applicable to that which is above 'subjective' and 'objective'. That to which the categories are applicable must be supersubjective and superobjective. But the fact that the categories are applied by man himself is a clear proof that in categorical thinking there is not a subjective, but a subjective-objective.

This is the problem that Goethe also thought about so much. And the way he thought, which led him to always seek out the point where subjectivity and objectivity disappear for the human being in human experience, this endeavor actually made him the opposite of Kant.

Of course it is perfectly true that, as has been said, one could also work out of Kant in a positive sense; but one can work out of everything in the world in a positive way, even out of the greatest error! For there is nothing in the world from which one cannot also extract something positive. We have this positivity, this seeking out of the positive, listed among the basic exercises for those who want to attain higher knowledge. I need only remind you: you will find it discussed in the second part of my “Occult Science”. Of course, this should not blind us to the recognition of aberrations. And finally, if we consider the historical, we can say that a great deal has been worked out positively from Kant. There are not only the critical Kant philologists, not only the neo-Kantians of the likes of Liebmann, Volkelt and so on, but there is the very active Marburg School – Cohen, Cassirer, Dilthey and so on – which tried to work out the positive from Kant in a certain sense.

Now, I have shown how little this 'positive elaboration from Kantianism' can lead to a realistic view: in my 'Riddles of Philosophy', where I also briefly discussed these efforts of the Marburg School. So it is also the case with the category problem that it is necessary to present it correctly in its entire inner essence before the soul in order to see how, precisely through the category problem, the question of the “subjective” in contrast to the “objective” cannot be posed as it has been done by more recent philosophy under the influence of Kantianism. This almost epistemological harnessing to subjectivity is something that has introduced countless unjustified ideas into our modern philosophy and caused us to lose ideas that were already there and that, if developed in a correspondingly straight line, could have led to something quite fruitful.

I must repeatedly draw attention to the fact – which I have already done several times – that an extraordinarily talented 19th-century philosopher, Franz Brentano, published the first volume of his “Psychology” in 1874. It is basically an ingenious book. This volume of Brentano's “Psychology” was published in the spring of 1874. He promised the second volume for the fall of the same year. The three following volumes were then to appear shortly thereafter. Brentano had initially calculated this “psychology from an empirical point of view” to consist of five volumes. The first volume was only a preparation. In it, however, there is a highly remarkable passage in which Brentano indicates how he was in fact aiming at the most significant psychological problems. He says: If all modern thinking should lead only to the examination of how representations arise and fade away, how they associate with each other, how memory is formed, and the like, and if one could only come to uncertainty about about the actual psychological questions of Plato and Aristotle, for example, whether the soul remains when its external physical body decays, then one would not have gained much for the needs of man through modern science! Well, from everything else that Brentano suggests in the first volume of his “Psychology from an Empirical Point of View,” one can already see how he wanted to bring the problem through his five volumes to these fundamental questions of Plato and Aristotle.

The strange thing is that the second volume did not appear in the fall. It did not appear the next year either. And in the nineties, Brentano promised once again that he would now set about creating at least a kind of surrogate in a kind of descriptive psychology. So the second volume of “Psychology” was supposed to appear in 1874. Nothing appeared until the nineties; then a second promise appeared, but was not fulfilled! Franz Brentano died in Zurich a few years ago. The promise has not been fulfilled to this day. It has remained with the first volume of “Psychology from an Empirical Point of View.” Why? Because Brentano, in his Privatdozentenschrift, posited the sentence, “Philosophy has to follow the same methods that are applied in natural science,” because Brentano wanted to remain true to this methodological sentence that he had posited at the time, and with which one could not make any progress. Brentano was much too honest a nature to want to make headway by any other means than by the means of the external scientific method. Therefore, he simply remained silent about what came after the first volume.

I have expressed this in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Mysteries of the Soul). Brentano's pupil Kraus has indeed said that there were all sorts of other reasons why Brentano did not publish the later volumes; but it must be said that if the reasons were only those that Kraus pointed out, then Brentano must have been a real philistine. And he certainly was not that. He was a personality who followed the impulses of his inner being and only those impulses! But there was something in Brentano that at least gave him hope that one could penetrate into the things of the world. And basically every such philosopher – and there are few who have had this hope in a well-founded way in modern times – has turned against Kant, and of course Franz Brentano as well.

There was something in him that justified this hope. And I find that in a concept that, I might say, occasionally emerges from Brentano's philosophy, and which he borrowed in the sense of an older philosophy – of the kind that still drew from reality, as I suggested this morning: it is the concept of intentional inwardness, which he applies to the concepts of cognition and perception.

This concept must be formulated. Then, from there, one will get an approximation of what I just hinted at: to examine the extent to which the human sense organ is a self-extinguishing one, to which one must not ascribe that it could be the producer of sense qualities. And this concept – now not of the real interiority of some process, but of intentional interiority – contains within itself the life of pointing, which then becomes observable for the imaginative conceiving. And this life of pointing, which is given with the concept of intentional inwardness, then brings the possibility of grasping what, since Johannes Müller, the physiologist from the first half of the 19th century, has been so inadequately grasped in the doctrine of “specific sensory energies”. So that one would like to say that the comparison with the transparent, colorless glass is not quite appropriate for the reason that one has to imagine not an inanimate colorlessness, thus a self-abolition, but a living and precisely through its liveliness and thereby standing in a corresponding process within, which allows an objective experience by not taking in the objective, but by grasping out of itself the process of pointing through and in pointing to this objective.

I have found what lies in a renewal of this concept of intentional interiority, in the sense of a modern world view, only in some recent American philosophers who—probably even without knowing the concept I have just mentioned—try to grasp the continuity of human consciousness. Let us say, for example, that in the twenty-ninth year of life a person looks back, with the help of memory, on what he went through in the eighteenth year of life. Then, if we grasp it inwardly, what returns to the person in the twenty-ninth year of life is something similar to what could be described as an intentional innesein. And in relation to this process, this concept appears again in some recent American epistemologists.

It is precisely in such phenomena that one can see how conceptual work is alive in contemporary philosophical endeavor. But this work must become honest in the way I have described, by coming to show clearly that problems exist; but ordinary consciousness, ordinary intellectual activity, can only pose the problems; and now one must move on to the solution of the problems. If one were to develop scientific honesty in this way, it would be the basis for moving on to the imaginative and the other stages of knowledge.

These are only very inadequate, methodological suggestions.

If I attempt today to make the transition from the actual philosophical field to the field of the specialized sciences, then in our present epoch this transition is to be accomplished quite naturally through a consideration of the mathematical and physical, chemical, that is, the inorganic natural world , because by far the majority of present-day philosophical conceptions are constructed in such a way that philosophers base them on concepts and ideas gained from the field of science that is considered the most secure today, namely from mathematics and inorganic natural science.

If we wish to discuss the mathematical treatment of inorganic natural science, which is so popular today, we must always remember something that has already been mentioned in the opening speech: the connection that current thinking believes it can make with Kant, precisely with the introduction of mathematics into inorganic natural science, indeed into science in general.

What must be emphasized in this and also in a later context from the negative side, I say expressly from the negative side, has already been noticed by individual thinkers who are very far removed from the use of supersensible knowledge. Thus, the negative, that is, the rejection of the purely mathematical treatment of natural science, can be found, for example, in a thinker like Fritz Mauthner, who, out of a certain acumen in a negative sense, that is, in rejecting what appears as false claims of a false science, is not at all unhappy. And with regard to the question: What can current science not do? – we can learn a lot from a thinker like Fritz Mauthner, learning through the negative that he presents, and learning through the fact that he does not want to stop at this negative, but would like to advance to a positive realization.

Why shouldn't you also learn from such a negative thinker? If I was able to quote Ludwig Haller as saying yesterday that, in his opinion, Kant took the weapons from the arsenal of light to use them in the service of darkness, why should you not also borrow the weapons from the arsenal of darkness, even the deliberate darkness of knowledge as found in Fritz Mauthner, to use them in the service of light?

Attention is to be paid, as I said, to Kant's saying that there is only as much actual science in each individual discipline as there is mathematics in it.

If you study the history of the use of this Kantian saying up to the present day, you get an interesting example to answer the question of how to be a Kantian at all in modern times. For the people who refer to this saying believe that as much real science as there is mathematics in it is brought into every single science. But Kant means something quite different. Kant means: as much as he brings mathematics into science, that much is mathematics, that is, real science, and the rest is not science at all in the individual sciences.

You see, you become a Kantian if you thoroughly misunderstand a Kantian saying. For the Kantian approach in this area has something like the following logic: if I say, in a gathering in which there are a thousand people, there is as much genius in it as three ingenious people have contributed, I certainly do not mean that the thousand people have now been given the genius of the three people. Nor does Kant mean that the rest of science has acquired the scientific character of mathematics; rather, he means that only the small part that has remained mathematics even in the sciences is real science, but the rest is not science at all.

We must study such things seriously – and in an empirical age we must do so empirically, not a priori – so that such questions are not answered as they often are today, but so that we may come upon the truth.

Now, however, one can point out something else: the most outstanding mathematical thinkers of modern times define mathematics something like this: it would be the “science of sizes”. Well, today it is the science of sizes. But go back just a few centuries to the time when Cartesius and Spinoza found great satisfaction in presenting their philosophy “according to a mathematical method,” as they say, and you will find that what Cartesius and Spinoza wanted to bring into their philosophy as a mathematical method is quite different from what is to be brought into natural science as mathematics in more recent times.

If we go back to Descartes and Spinoza, we find that these two philosophers want to construct their philosophical system in such a way that there is just as much certainty in the transition from one proposition to another as there is in mathematics. That is to say, they want to build their philosophy according to the pattern of these mathematical methods; but not by introducing into their philosophy what is understood by mathematics today. So, by going back to Descartes and Spinoza, we have already associated a completely different meaning with the word mathematics. If we disregard the aspect that merely refers to quantities, we have associated the sense of the inner, secure transition from judgment to judgment, from conclusion to conclusion. We have considered the nature of mathematical thinking, not what we can call a science of quantities.

And let us go back even further. In ancient times, the word “mathematics” had a completely different meaning altogether. Then it was identical with the word science. This means that when one meant 'science', one spoke of 'mathesis' or 'mathematics', because in mathematization one found the certainty of an inner insight into a 'fact' present in consciousness. One associated the sense of 'knowledge' and 'science' with this word. And so a much more general concept has been transferred to the narrow field of the theory of quantities. Today we have every reason to remember such things, because we are faced with the necessity of looking again at what actually lies at the basis of mathematical thinking. What is the essential feature of mathematical thinking? The essential feature of mathematical thinking is precisely the transparency of the mathematical content of consciousness. If I draw a triangle and consider its three angles, alpha, beta, and gamma, and want to prove that the sum of these three angles is 180 degrees, then I do the following (see figure r): I draw a parallel to the base line through the uppermost point of the triangle, look at the ratio of the angles alpha and gamma to the alternate angles that arise at the parallel, and then, by observing how the three angles that arise at the parallel – gamma', alpha', and beta – are positioned in relation to one another and how they form an angle of 180 degrees, I have the proof that the three angles of the triangle are also 180 degrees. That is to say, what is present in the mathematical as a conscious fact right up to the lines of reasoning is manageable and accompanied by inner experience from beginning to end. And this is the basis of the certainty one feels in mathematical thinking: that everything that is present as a conscious fact is accompanied by inner experience right up to the judgment and the proof.

And when we then look at the external world, whose material foundations cannot be penetrated with such clarity, we still feel satisfied when observing external nature if we can at least follow its phenomena in the experience that first met us in clarity.

The certainty that one feels in this clarity of consciousness in mathematics becomes particularly apparent when one looks at what is universally recognized as a major advance in mathematics in the 19th century century: what emerged as “non-Euclidean geometry”, as “metageometry” in Lobatschewskij, Bolyai, Legendre and so on.

There we see how, based on the inner certainty of intuition, the Euclidean axioms are first modified and, by modifying the Euclidean axioms, possible other geometries than the Euclidean one are constructed, and how one then tries to cope with an inscrutable reality using what has been constructed as an extension of intuitiveness. All the ideas that have entered modern thought through this “meta-geometry” are basically factual proof of the certainty that one feels in the comprehensibility of mathematization.

And with regard to Euclidean space – for the spaces of the other geometries are simply other spaces – which is characterized by the fact that three coordinate axes perpendicular to one another have to be imagined , that what has been presented here as proof of the 180-degree nature of the three angles of a triangle applies to this Euclidean space. And everyone will realize that if the Euclidean axioms are modified, this may have a bearing on our space, in which we are – which is then precisely not Euclidean space, but perhaps an internally curved space – but that for Euclidean space, which can be comprehended, the Euclidean results must be assumed to be certain because of their comprehensibility. No one will doubt that.

And just when you see through these facts, then you will find: the application of mathematics to the field of natural science is based on the fact that one finds in the external world that which is first found internally, that, so to speak, the facts of the external world behave in such a way as corresponds to the mathematical results that we first found independently of this external world in inner contemplation.

But one thing is absolutely certain: I would say, the precondition for this inner vision of the mathematical is that this mathematical first appears to us as an image. The inner free activity of constructing, which we experience in mathematizing, is such an inner free activity only because nothing of what otherwise prevails within our human beingness, when, for example, we want or the like, following an instinct. From this, what arises as a stock of consciousness in the process of mathematization is, as it were, elevated to the point of becoming pictorial. In relation to what is “external natural reality”, the mathematical is unreality. And we feel the satisfaction in the application of the mathematical to the knowledge of nature precisely because we can recognize what we have freely grasped in pictorial form in the realm of being.

But precisely for this reason it must be admitted that on the one hand it is justified when such minds, which do not merely want to go to what natural reality as such shows in human observation as real, but want to go to the full, total reality, like Goethe, when such spirits — as Goethe particularly showed in his treatment of the “Theory of Colors” — do not want a total application of the mathematical to all of external reality. Goethe's rejection of mathematics arose precisely from the realization that, although what corresponds to the pictorial vividness of the mathematical can be found in external nature through mathematics, at the same time one thereby renounces everything qualitative. Goethe did not want to treat only the quantitative in external nature; he also wanted to include the qualitative.

On the other hand, however, it must be said that the whole inner greatness of mathematics is based on its pictorial nature, and that it is precisely in this pictorial nature that we must seek what gives it the character of an a priori science, a science that can be found purely through inner contemplation.

But at the same time, by mathematizing, one is actually outside of nature, in contrast to which mathematics is of particular interest. Nowhere does one grasp something that is effective in itself, but only the relationships of this effectiveness that can be expressed by mathematical formulas. When you calculate a future lunar eclipse in mathematical formulas, or, by inserting the corresponding variables in negative form, a lunar eclipse that has passed in the past, you must be aware that you never penetrate into the inner essence of what is happening, but only grasp the quantum of relationships with mathematical formulas from a certain point of view. That is to say, one must realize that one can never penetrate into the inner essential differentiation through mathematics if one understands mathematics in the narrow sense in which it is still often understood today.

But even within mathematics we can already see a kind of path that leads out of mathematics itself. From what I have just said, you can see that this path, which leads out of the mathematical, should be similar to the path we take when we submerge into nature, which has been thoroughly penetrated and is penetrating, with the purely pictorially mathematical, with the unpenetrated, ineffectively pictorially mathematical. There we submerge into something that, in a sense, intercepts us with our free mathematizing activity and constricts mathematical formulas into an event that is effective in itself, that is in itself something to which we have to say: we cannot fully grasp it with mathematics; in the face of the inner transparency of mathematics, this thing asserts its essential independence and its essential interiority.

This path, which is taken when one simply seeks the transition from the unreal mathematical way of thinking to the real scientific way of thinking, can in a certain way already be found today within the mathematical itself in a certain relation. And we see how it can be found if we look not outwardly but inwardly at the attempts that thinking has made in the transition from mere analytical geometry to projective or synthetic geometry, as presented by more recent science. I would like to explain what I mean by the sentence I have just uttered using a very elementary, an extremely elementary and well-known example of synthetic geometry.

When you do synthetic, newer projective geometry, you differ from the analytical geometer in that the analytical geometer works with mathematical formulas, that is, he calculates, counts, and so on. The synthetic geometer uses only the straightedge and the compass, and that which can arise in consciousness through the straightedge and the compass as a fact, which first emerges from intuition. But let us ask ourselves whether it also remains purely within intuition.

Let us imagine a line – what is called a line in ordinary geometry – and on this line three points. Then we have the following mathematical structure (see Figure 2): a line on which the three points I, II, III are located.

Now, there is – I can, of course, only hint at what I have to present here in the main lines, so to speak appealing to what you already know about the matter – there is another figure which, in a certain way, in its entire configuration, corresponds to the mathematical figure just drawn. And this other figure is created by treating three lines in a similar way to the way I have treated these three points here, and by treating a point in a similar way to the way I have treated the line here. So imagine that instead of the three points ], II, III, I draw three lines on the board, and instead of the line that goes through the three points, I draw a point (see Figure 3); and to create a correspondence, I take the point where the three lines intersect: I have drawn another figure here (Fig. 3). The point that I have drawn above with a small ringlet corresponds to the line on the left, the three, as they are called, rays that intersect at one point, and which I denote by I, II, III, correspond to the three points I, II, III, that lie on the line on the left (Fig. 2).

If you want to feel the full weight of this ruling, you have to take the exact wording as I have just pronounced it. You have to say: the point on the right (Figure 3), which I have marked with a small ring above, corresponds to the line on the left (Figure 2) on which the three points lie; and the rays I, II, III on the right correspond to the points I, II, III on the left. And in that the three rays I, II, III on the right intersect at the one point above, this intersection corresponds to the position of the three points I, II, III on the left on the straight line drawn on the left.

Thus stated, there is a very specific cognitive fact and a corresponding structure on the left opposite the structure on the right.

One can now – by remaining purely within the realm of the visual, that is, what can be constructed with compass and straightedge, without the need for calculation – proceed to the following state of consciousness: I draw a line again on the left, and again three points on this line (the lower line in Figure 4).

I have now – I ask you to please consider the way I express myself, which I will follow, as decisive for the facts – I have now drawn the line on the left, on which the three points i, 2, 3 are located. I will proceed and assume – please note the word I pronounce: “and assume” – I will proceed and then assume the following. I will connect the points to the left of one line with the points on the other line in a certain way and will thus obtain connecting lines that will intersect (see Figure 5). I will connect the point I with the point 3, the point III with the point i, the point I with the point 2, the point II with the point 1, the point III with the point 2, the point II with the point 3, and will get intersection points by these lines, which I can then again - I now assume - connect by a straight line. So my construction is carried out in such a clear and transparent way that I can actually do what I have just described. You can actually carry out this construction as follows (dotted line in Figure 5): You see, I have the three points of intersection, which I got in the way I described earlier, so that I can draw the dashed-dotted straight line through them.

I now assume that by adding another to the right-hand bundle of rays (Figure 3), as it is called, I have the same ratio in the ratio of the radiation as in the distance of the points lying on the left straight line. I shall therefore draw a second bundle of rays on the right (Figure 6), which, in relation to its radiating conditions, corresponds to the positional conditions of the points on the lines on the left. So I have drawn in another bundle of rays here (Figure 6) and call it I, 2, 3, assuming that i, 2, 3 corresponds to i, 2, 3 in relation to the points on the left.

And now I will perform the corresponding procedure on my two ray structures on the right, which I performed on my line and point structures on the left (Figure 5), only I have to take into account that a line on the left corresponds to a point on the right: while on the left I looked for a line connecting two points, on the right I have to look for a point that arises when two rays intersect. The intersection on the right should correspond to the connection on the left (the points of intersection in Figure 6 are marked by small circles, see Figure 7). You can see what I have done: if I connected III with i and 3 with I as points on the left, I brought I with 3 and i with III as lines to the intersection here on the right.

And if I have drawn two lines from the points on the left and brought them to the intersection at one point, I will now draw a line through the two points that I have obtained on the right (dotted line in Figure 7), and I will now carry out the same procedure with respect to the other rays. That is [the lecturer once again illustrates the correspondence between the circled intersections of Figure 7 and the connecting lines of Figure 5], I will bring II into intersection with i, I with 2, III with 2, II with 3; I will therefore look for the points of intersection on the right as I looked for the connecting lines on the left; and, as you see, I have sought these points of intersection on the right by bringing the rays to the intersection in order to draw lines through these points of intersection (dashed lines in Figure 7), just as I sought lines on the left by connecting the points in order to obtain the points of intersection of these intersecting lines (dotted lines in Figure 5).

The connecting lines – but the points of intersection that I obtained on the right – also intersect at a point indicated here by a small ring at the top (P in Figure 7), just as the three points that I obtained on the left lie on a straight line (dashed in Figure 5). That is to say, in the figure on the right, where lines are used instead of points and the connecting lines are intersections, I get a point where the three lines intersect, just as I got a line that passes through the three points on the left. I get a point for the line on the left.

Here I remain, proceeding purely from the realm of the intuitive, although within that which proceeds from intuition but which nevertheless leads to something else. And I ask you to consider the following. Suppose you look in the line, in the direction indicated by the (dashed) line on the left, which goes through the three points of intersection – Alpha, Beta, Gamma. Then you will look up at an intersection point that obscures the others, in relation to which the others are behind it (Figure 8). Here, in the line, you have not only “three points.” But as soon as you move on to a relationship of reality, something quite vivid occurs in relation to these three points: the point gamma is the one in front, and behind it are the points beta and alpha. You have clearly laid this out in the left-hand figure in the illustration.

If we now go through a completely legitimate procedure, which I have described, to the corresponding structure on the right, we have to consider a point instead of a line (P in Figure 9). When we consider this point, we must say that just as on the left an intersection point gamma arises from the connection of III with 2 and the connection of 3 with II, covering the other intersection points, so on the right the necessity arises to introduce what follows and thus, through the law of connection, to pass from the concrete to the non-concrete: On the right (Figure 9), the necessity arises to imagine the curled point (P) in such a way that the ray (Gamma), which is formed by connecting the points of intersection of the lines III and 2, II and 3, first intersects at the curled point with the ray (Beta) that is formed by the preceding ratio ( III with 1, I with 3); and we must imagine that within this curled point the intersections that arise through the three dashed lines also lie as three internally differentiated entities, just as on the left on the dash-dotted line the three points gamma, beta, alpha. That is, I must find the intersections arranged in the individual point on the right so that they coincide one above the other.

That means, in other words, nothing less than: Just as I have to think of the dashed-and-dotted line on the left in such a way that a front and back arises for the points gamma, beta, and alpha for an observing eye, so I have to think of a differentiation within the point, that is, a spatial expansion of zero, in all three dimensions. Seen from the way it has arisen out of this structure, I have to think of this point, not as something undifferentiated, but as having a front and a back. Here I am confronted with the necessity of not thinking of a point as neutral in all directions, but of thinking of the point as having a front and a back.

I am making a journey here, through which I am forced out of the free formation of the mathematical and into something where the objective passes over into an inner determination, into an inner being. You see, this journey is similar to the one through which I pass from the mathematically free formation to the acceptance of this formation from the inner determination within the natural order. And by passing from analytical to synthetic geometry, I get the beginning of the path that is shown to me from mathematics to inorganic natural science.

Then, basically, it is only a small step to something else. By continuing these considerations, to which I have now pointed, one can also come to an inner understanding of the following state of consciousness: if one pursues purely with the help of projective, synthetic geometry how a hyperbola relates to an asymptote, then one finds purely intuitively that on the one hand, say at the upper right, the asymptote ptote approaches the hyperbola but never reaches it, but you still get the idea that the hyperbola comes back from the lower left with the other branch, and the asymptote also comes back from the lower left with its other side. In other words, through this relationship between asymptote and hyperbola I get something that I could draw on the board for you in something like the following (Figure 10): at the top right, the asymptote, the straight line, approaches the hyperbola ever closer. I have added a shading there to express what kind of relationship the asymptote actually has to the hyperbola. It is getting closer and closer to him, it wants to get to him, it is getting closer and closer to the essence of its relationship to him. If you now follow this relationship upwards to the right, you will finally come to the conclusion, through purely projective thinking – I can only hint at this here – that the direction of the line that you have upwards to the right, be it the hyperbola or the asymptote, coming from the lower left, , coming from the lower left, the hyperbolast and the asymptote, and this in such a way that it leaves the hyperbolast more and more with its being in the hatched suggestion.

So that we can say: this asymptote has a remarkable property. As it ascends to the right, it turns towards the hyperbola with its relationship to the hyperbola; as it comes up again from the bottom left, it turns away from the hyperbola with its relationship to the hyperbola. This line, the asymptote, when I look at it in its entirety, in its totality, has a front and a back again. That is why I was able to draw the shading on one side one time and on the other side the next. I come again into an inner differentiation of the linear, as I come into an inner differentiation when I force the purely mathematical pictorial into the realm of natural occurrence. That is, I approach what occurs as differentiation in the natural occurrence when I want to grasp the mathematical structures themselves in the right way with the help of projective geometry.

What happens through projective geometry can never be done in the same way through mere analytic geometry. For mere analytic geometry, by constructing in coordinates and then searching for the end points of the abscissas and ordinates in its computational form, remains, in its form, completely outside the curve or outside the structure itself. Projective geometry does not stop at the curve and the figure, but penetrates into the inner differentiation of the figure: to the point where one must distinguish between front and back – to the straight line where one must also distinguish between front and back. I have only indicated these properties because of the limited time available. I could also mention other properties, for example, a certain curvature ratio that the point extended in the three spatial dimensions has within itself, and so on.

If you really follow the path from analytical geometry into synthetic geometry with an open mind, if you see how you are, I would say, caught up in something that already approaches reality is already approaching reality, how this reality is present in the external nature, then one has the same inner experience, exactly the same inner experience that one has when one ascends from the ordinary concept of the mind, from ordinary logic, to the imaginative. One must only continue in imaginative cognition. But one has given the beginning when one begins to move from analytical geometry to synthetic. One notices there the interception of what arises from the determination by external reality, after which one has grasped the result, and one notices the same in imaginative cognition.

And now, what is the opposite path within spiritual science to that which leads from ordinary objective knowledge to imaginative knowledge? It would be the one that led from intuition down to inspired knowledge. But there we already find that we are standing inside the real. For with intuition we stand inside the real. And we move away from the real. Descending from intuition to inspiration, we again move away from the real. And when we come down to imagination, we have only the image of the real within.

This path is at the same time the one that the real undergoes in order to become our object of knowledge. Of course, in intuition we are immersed in reality. We move away from reality to inspiration, to imagination, and arrive at our objective knowledge. We then have this in our present knowledge. We make the path from reality to our knowledge. In a sense, we first stand within reality and depart from this reality to arrive at unreal knowledge. On the path we take from analytical geometry into projective or synthetic geometry, we try to move in the opposite direction again, from purely intellectual analytical geometry to where we can begin to think in real terms if we want to achieve anything at all. We are approaching the re-realization of nature, which it undergoes by wanting to become knowledge, by realizing unreal knowledge.

You see, there is no need to assume that our modern spiritual science, as it appears here, wanted to do mathematics differently than mathematicians do when they do mathematics in their own way. There is no need to do much else in the fields that a quantitative natural science has already entered today, except to look for special experimental setups that lead from the quantitative into the qualitative. And when this external quantitative natural science today presents modern anthroposophy with its 'sound results', it is a bit like when someone reads a poem that touches on completely different regions, and someone says: Yes, I cannot decide through my state of mind whether one can live in a poem, but I know something for sure: that two times two is four! No one doubts that two times two is four; nor does anyone doubt what modern inorganic natural science provides who wants to advance to spiritual science. But there is no particular objection to the content of a poem, for example, if you hold up two times two is four to it.

What is at issue, however, is that the individual sciences should seriously and courageously take the path towards a true knowledge of reality that Anthroposophy offers, towards which they are already particularly tending, towards which they want to go. And while some people today, in fruitless scepticism, want to create darkness over what they, often rightly, perceive as the limits of knowledge of nature, anthroposophy wants to start to ignite the light of spiritual knowledge where natural science becomes dark.

And so it will perhaps not make much of a departure from the methods of the sciences mentioned today; but it will present the significance, the inner value of the sciences that have been spoken of today to humanity and will thereby ensure that people know why they penetrate into existence with mathematics, not just why they arrive at a certain certainty with mathematics. For in the end it is not a matter of developing mere products of certainty. We could close ourselves in the narrowest circle and go round and round in the narrowest circle if we only wanted to hold on to “the most certain”. Rather, it is a matter of expanding knowledge. But this cannot be found if one shies away from the path out of inner experience into the outer, into being differentiated in itself. This path is even hinted at in many ways in present-day mathematics and mathematical science. One must only recognize it and then act scientifically in the sense of this knowledge.

Closing Remarks on the Disputation

Dear attendees! Partly because of the late hour and partly for other reasons, I will not say much more than a few remarks related to what has been presented and discussed this evening.

I would like to return very briefly to the question regarding Professor Rein for the reason that one circumstance in this matter should be emphasized sharply.

I am well aware that not much of approval can be said about my “Philosophy of Freedom” by a Herbartian, especially one who has gone through the historical school. This was evident almost immediately after the publication of The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894. One of the first reviews that appeared was by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann. But I must say that, despite the fact that this review was extremely critical, I was pleased with it because some really great points of view were put forward in opposition at the time. As to how necessary the relationship must be between a Herbartian evaluation and what my Philosophy of Freedom contains, I have not the slightest doubt. But it is a pity that I do not have Professor Rein's review of The Philosophy of Freedom here and could quote the passage as I would like to. It has just been brought to me, and I can therefore say some things even more precisely than would otherwise be possible on the basis of the review. So let me quote from this review, which begins with the words: “In times of such a low level of morality as the German people have probably never experienced, it is doubly important to defend the great landmarks of morality, as established by Kant and Herbart, and not to allow them to be shifted in favor of relativistic tendencies. The words of Baron von Stein, that a nation can only remain strong through the virtues by which it has become great, must be considered one of the most important tasks in the midst of the dissolution of all moral concepts.

The fact that a writing by the leader of the anthroposophists in Germany, Dr. R. Steiner, is involved in this dissolution must be particularly regretted, since one cannot deny the idealistic basic feature of this movement, which aims at a strong internalization of the individual human being, and in its plan of the threefold structure of the social body can find healthy thoughts that promote the welfare of the people. But in his book “The Philosophy of Freedom” (Berlin 1918), he takes his individualistic approach to such an extreme that it leads to the dissolution of the social community and must therefore be fought.

You can clearly see here that the “Philosophy of Freedom” is said to have emerged from the dissolution of all moral concepts and so on – and one can believe that, that it can be the opinion of one man.

Now, a large part of those present here know my views on scientific accuracy, on scientific conscientiousness, and above all, that one should first properly educate oneself about what one writes. To associate the Philosophy of Freedom, which appeared in 1894, even stylistically, with what is implied in the first sentences, is a frivolity. And such frivolity cannot be excused by the fact that the author, who works as a professor of pedagogy at a university, has by no means — as I believe has been said — “gone beyond the bounds of truly objective judgment.” The point is that we can only bring about a recovery of precisely those conditions, which have been discussed here this evening in a rather hearty way, if we do not make ourselves guilty of the same carelessness, but if we strictly exercise scientific conscientiousness precisely towards those who, by virtue of their office, have the task of educating young people. We must not allow those who have this profession to overlook the circumstances and times in which a work was written that they want to judge. That is the first thing I have to say.

Then there is the way of quoting. In this article you will find an incredible way of tearing sentences out of context and then not taking up what is said in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, but rather what the author of the article thinks he is entitled to take up, based on his own opinion, and what can be inferred from his interpretation of the sentences he has quoted.

Anyone who takes the trouble to really read The Philosophy of Freedom will see that it deals in a completely clear way with how to avoid the misunderstandings that Professor Rein criticizes when sentences are taken out of context in any way.

His description of how the Philosophy of Freedom is taken out of its historical context is matched by his placing it in impossible contexts: “If we listen to Dr. Steiner speak, we might be tempted to see him as an apostle of ethical libertinism. He also felt this and countered the objection, which goes: If every person only strives to live out and do as he pleases, then there is no difference between good action and crime. Every crookedness that lies in me has the same claim to be realized as the intention to serve the general good. Dr. Steiner seeks to refute this objection by pointing out that man may only claim the freedom demanded if he has acquired the ability to rise to the intuitive idea content of the world. To acquire this ability is the task of the anthroposophist, who is to rise to the standpoint of ethical individualism.

Now, please ask yourself whether someone is allowed to write such sentences as an assessment of Philosophy of Freedom. Philosophy of Freedom was published in 1894, before the term anthroposophist was coined. Professor Rein also places the “Philosophy of Freedom” in a milieu that was an impossible one for the “Philosophy of Freedom” at the time of its publication, apart from the trivialities that come later, where he speaks of it as an ethics for anthroposophists and angels and the like, and so on.

It is not at all my intention to cast a slur on what I might call the opposing point of view, but to show that this way of judging spiritual matters is part and parcel of the whole world of the person who has to leave our culture behind if the conditions that should be discussed here today are to improve. I may well say that I have carefully considered whether or not I should finally speak these words here. But it seems to me that the matter is important enough, and I believe that I have not crossed the boundary of objectivity, that I have actually confined myself essentially to characterizing the way of judging and not the “point of view” before you here. I know that it is always somewhat precarious to discuss family matters. However, I cannot change my approach, although I am not bound by it anyway, as I have no father-in-law among my colleagues!

Now I would like to make a few other comments, taking up a sentence that has also been discussed here today. Just to speak symptomatically, I would like to relate a small experience, but only to illustrate.

It has been said that it is true that not all students who come to a university or college are ready for that college; but the professors at the colleges cannot be held responsible for that, and these students are simply sent to them by the secondary schools. Yes, but I really could not help but think of a conversation that had once been held in my presence with one of the most famous literary historians at German universities. This literary historian was also on the examination board for grammar school teaching. – I don't really like to do it, but today times are so serious that one must also bring up such things. – He said: Yes, with these grammar school teachers, we know them, we have to examine them, but we sometimes have very strange thoughts when we have to let these camels out as grammar school teachers!

Well, as I said, it is just an illustration that I would like to give through this experience. I don't know if it speaks very strongly for the university teachers when an examiner and famous university teacher deigns to call the teachers of youth who are sent to the grammar schools “camels”. I'm not saying it, but the man in question did say it. I am only quoting. Well, every thought must be thought through to the end. And I believe that when the thought is thought through to the end, university teachers should not complain when incompetent high school graduates enter the university gates; after all, it was the university teachers who sent out the high school teachers who prepared these graduates for them. So in the end it is necessary, as I said, to think the idea through to the end. And that shows us that, if with some indulgence, we may already apply the concept of guilt in a certain respect.

But today some very strange words have been said, you see. And I must say that one of the strangest words, almost one of the little piquant ones, was this: that it was said that a university teacher had said: We expect deliverance from the student body! I am just surprised that he did not also say: From the moment we sit down on the school benches and promote the students to the professorship. You see, it is necessary to follow up the worn-out judgments that are buzzing around the present and that are nevertheless the cause of our current conditions. Of course, in doing so, one does not fail to recognize that there are exceptions and exceptions everywhere, and one can, for example, subscribe to much, very much, of what has been said with regard to art instruction at the academies. But on the whole, one must say that there is not so much reason to have good hopes for the future if one is not prepared to join forces, not only externally, through some association or the like, to join forces to move towards some vague goal, but when one is prepared – only when one is prepared – to truly engage in a thorough renewal and revival of our spiritual life itself. The actual damage is already encroaching on our spiritual life itself. And anyone who is familiar with the whole structure of anthroposophical life, how it has led, for example, to this School of Spiritual Science, certainly does not need to be told that “everyone must be free to express their worldview and to speak out of their own free conviction!” The many malicious natures who are here today to say all kinds of inaccurate things about the anthroposophical movement and related matters will immediately take advantage of this and say: These anthroposophists want their world view to be represented everywhere.

Now, the Waldorf school was founded by our community, without in any way founding a school of world view. The opposite of a world view school should be founded. This has been emphasized time and again. And anyone who believes that the Waldorf school is “an anthroposophical school” does not know it at all. And nor can it be said here at the Goetheanum that anyone is restricted in their free expression of their most deeply held convictions.

But what I will always fight for, despite all freedom, individuality and intellectualism, is scientific conscientiousness, thoroughness, being informed about what one is writing about, not just putting forward one's own opinion because one believes that under certain circumstances damage could arise from something that one has not really taken the trouble to understand, and from which one has plucked a few sentences in order to write an article.

I say this quite dispassionately. You know that I usually use the things that are done as “reviews” of anthroposophy only as a proximate occasion to characterize general conditions. I am not really interested in the personal attacks, only to the extent that they point to what needs to be changed in our circumstances. And here I do believe that the fellow student from Bonn, in his hearty way, has struck the right note, a right note to the extent that the students he meant really cannot find what they are looking for at the universities or colleges today.

But not “because of the curriculum”, not “because the right choices are not being made”, but because today's youth quite instinctively – without being fully aware of it – craves something from the bottom of their hearts that is not yet present within the general scientific framework, but which must be created within the general scientific framework. This is what awaits young people. This youth will certainly not fail to grasp with both hands when it is offered what it really wants: a truly new spirit. For such a new spirit is needed in the present.

This is basically the reason for the aversion to what emanates from anthroposophical spiritual science, even if one uses the phrase “one wants to accommodate every new thing”. When it asserts itself, then one does not do it after all. Because basically one cannot do it at all. It would be of no use to conceal these things in any way, but rather they must be pointed out clearly and distinctly.

Then the question of the World School Association was raised here. I believe I expressed very clearly what I have to say about this World School Association in terms of its intentions at the end of our last School of Spiritual Science course here in the fall. I then again expressed in roughly the same way the necessity of founding such a general world school association in The Hague, in Amsterdam, in Utrecht, in Rotterdam and in Hilversum: that the possibility of working in a world school association depends on the conviction that a new spirit must enter into the general school system spreading in as many people as possible. I have pointed out that today it cannot depend on founding schools here or there that would stand alone and in which a method is applied that is widespread in this or that respect, but that the school system of modern civilization must be taken into hand on the basis of the idea of a self-supporting, liberated spiritual life, the school system for all categories, for all subjects.

As far as I am aware, the words and calls that I have spoken so far are the only things I have to report on. These words were intended to find an echo in the civilized population of the present day. I have no such response to report. And I think the fellow student from Bonn spoke a true word when he pointed out that ultimately the student body from whose hearts he spoke here is in the minority. I think it is very, very much in the minority, especially in Germany. But also otherwise – I don't want to be unkind to anyone – otherwise, from where we are not far away at all. This is shown by the attendance at this college course. He said: the majority of the student body is asleep! Yes, it also rages at times. But one can also sleep while raging with regard to the things at stake.

And with regard to the matters for which this demand for the World School Association has been raised, everyone is also sleeping peacefully in the broadest circles. And it must be said: people have not yet really become accustomed to how necessary it is to bring anthroposophical work into modern civilization. We must become accustomed to it, and I long for the day when I can report more fully on the question of the world school association. Today I still could not say much more than what I said at the end of the School of Spiritual Science courses here last fall, although what I said was intended to allow something completely different to be reported today.

But the same applies to other things, and it is very difficult to raise awareness of the issues that really matter in today's world.

In a lecture in Berlin, after Lloyd George had called a general election in England in the wake of a strike that had already broken out, I pointed out that you don't achieve anything with such things, that it's just a postponement. It seems that people took it as a mere catchphrase at the time. Now, please, see for yourself today, you could have done so for a few days already, whether what I said back then was just a catchphrase or whether it was perhaps born out of a deeper understanding of social interrelations and the necessity of social interrelations.

The difficulty is that today there are so few people with the enthusiasm that really makes them feel inwardly involved with what they are saying. And so I am always pleased when young people come forward who have something to say about how they find what they are looking for here or there. For I believe that from such impulses will emerge what we need for all insight, for all understanding: inner participation, inner participation that knows how strong the metamorphosis must be that leads us from the declining forces of an old civilization to the impulses of the new civilization. Yes, we need conscientious understanding, we need penetrating insight. But above all, we need what youth could bring out of its natural abilities. But we need not only insight, not only penetrating understanding of the truth, in the broadest circles of present-day civilized humanity, we need enthusiasm for the truth!

The field I shall be discussing today is so extensive – even if it is to be illuminated from only a single point of view – that what I will be able to give today can only be a few brief indications, and I would ask you to take this into consideration. The point is that in the progression from the inorganic natural sciences to the organic natural sciences — and then further to psychological and spiritual observation — on the one hand, the necessity of spiritual-scientific anthroposophical observation arises more and more, but on the other hand, as this progression continues, it becomes more and more apparent how what is called spiritual science here can have a fertilizing effect on the individual specialized sciences.

What has been said about the nature of mathematics and the nature of the inorganic natural sciences was not so much to suggest that spiritual scientific observation could somehow bring about a completely different way of treating them and, in particular, a different content from that already present in our current scientific understanding. From the lectures on mathematics and inorganic natural science that have been presented so far, you have been able to discern a certain underlying theme that has been hinting at how, in both mathematics and the inorganic, the beginnings of the approach to these sciences that is meant here, can be found everywhere, even if it goes unnoticed by most. You have seen how one must point to the transition from the analytical treatment of geometry to the synthetic treatment, and how one finds that if one does not stop at the formal, but moves on to a living grasp of what is actually present, then continuing along this path leads to imaginative observation. And then, when a purely mathematical consideration was presented, you saw how a certain more lively treatment of the problems should lead to what is to be thought in the mathematical and inorganic natural sciences as being correct in the anthroposophical sense. To a certain extent, we have immersed ourselves in these sciences and have sought in them the points of strength in the directions in which we should proceed. The only thing is that in these sciences one remains strictly within the objective approach, which is the peculiarity of present-day human consciousness, and that one does not need to arrive at anything other than a certain how in the treatment of this observation.

The same situation does not apply to the organic natural sciences, although something similar is also present here in another respect. When we speak today of mathematics, of inorganic natural sciences, of photometry, mechanics and so on, we have to point out the way of thinking that needs to be reformed, as was the case yesterday. In the organic natural sciences, however, one begins by pointing out not what is to be rejected, but what is to be included. This begins already within the world of facts itself. Nothing substantial can be achieved by a mere reform of the way of thinking.

I would first like to present a brief historical consideration to clarify how to proceed in this area in order to arrive at a fruitful view. We have already pointed out in our reflections that in the progressive development of humanity, only since the 15th century of the Christian era has there emerged what we call the special nature of our present consciousness. All earlier ways of looking at things were fundamentally quite different. It was only from the aforementioned point in time that humanity truly grasped that form of consciousness which, on the one hand, leads to the use of freedom, but on the other hand, by referring man back to himself, throws him into an abstraction through which he becomes, in a certain sense, alienated from reality in relation to the world of being. It is the approach that adheres only to external observations and their description, to the arrangement of tests, of experiments and observation of their results, that is, the answers that nature provides when questions are asked not only theoretically but practically, in the experiment.

What is applied by the powers of the soul, in that science comes into being in this way, is the combining power of the mind. This combining power of mind is, I might say, the great practical-scientific problem for the time being. It becomes so when one raises the question of its correct applicability. And this question of the correct applicability of the power of mind or of ordinary reason—in observation, in summarizing observations, in experimenting—this question arose particularly for Goethe. And anyone who delves into what actually became a problem for Goethe — you can read about this in my “Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, which is now almost forty years old — will find that Goethe did not want the power of understanding or reason to be applied that it gives science an actual content, that one says something about existence as such out of the power of understanding or reason, so to speak, but rather that this power of understanding or reason is used only to think of the phenomena in such an order that one phenomenon explains the other. Then, by using one's understanding or reason, one has contributed nothing to what the phenomena themselves express.

If one wants to apply pure reason, then one must proceed without reservation to a pure phenomenology, that is, use reason only to look at a phenomenon purely, to do nothing but just to bring it to pure looking, and then to place the other associated phenomenon next to it; so that through this arrangement of the phenomena - which is then also carried out in practice in the experiment - the phenomena themselves are caused to explain each other. The intellect, then, has only an ordering, a real methodological significance, so to speak, but no qualitative significance. In the Goethean sense, nothing may emerge from it that says anything about being itself.

I believe that this is a precise definition of what Goethe saw as the use of the power of understanding, and that is also what the general consciousness of humanity has been striving for since the first third of the 15th century. It may be said that not everyone has yet learned to resign themselves to a certain extent when it comes to understanding, as Goethe wanted to do in his own research, even if he did not fully implement it everywhere. But unconsciously this way of life of the intellect lives in the striving for knowledge, out of which spiritual science wants to go forth, but in a different way than through the intellect.

And what I am saying now is obvious when one sees the progress that has been made in natural scientific thinking, say, from the beginning of the 19th century. I am not referring to the natural philosophers, but with the empirical naturalists, for example, with the likes of Johannes Müller, up to Mach or even to Poincare and the others, or to Fritz Mauthner, who is certainly not a naturalist.

Anyone who really wants to get an idea of what is at stake here must familiarize themselves with something that still played a certain role in the first half of the 19th century, but which was then completely abandoned around the middle of the 19th century, and which is now emerging again in scientific observation in a strange form here and there. This is the idea of the life force, what is called vitalism in scientific life.

If we go back to the idea of vital force that was held in older times, we see that the supporters of the existence of this vital force said to themselves: When we look at a thing of inorganic nature, we find in this thing of organic nature, we find all kinds of forces, thermal energy, light energy, electrical energy, and so on; but when we look at a being in the organic world, we find, in addition to these forces that constitute inorganic nature, the vital force, the life force. This life force is present in every living being, just as magnetic force is present in a magnet. It takes possession, as it were, of the inorganic forces in order to combine them and to produce effects from them that they cannot achieve on their own.

This vital force was given the final push to resign through the presentation of an organic substance in a synthetic way by Wöhler and Liebig, and it was abandoned as such in the second half of the 19th century. But in the so-called neovitalism, it has recently emerged from obscurity because certain thinkers have come to realize: If we apply the methods we have developed to explain the inorganic with the help of inorganic forces to the organic, then we will not get anywhere; we have to look for something else in the organic. And, I would like to say, with a clear echo of the old life force, something like this emerges again in neovitalism for the explanation in the organic sciences.

But anyone who really engages critically with what still appears as life force in Johannes Müller's work will find that there is something in this life force that cannot be grasped as a concept in reality. And I would like to say that, due to the impossibility of grasping life force as a concept, it died in the course of the 19th century in scientific observation. It could not be grasped. And why could it not be grasped? If we look very carefully at the organic-scientific methodology of the 19th century, we will see that those who wrestle with the idea of this life force find that they cannot do anything with it. What they want to do with it disappears as soon as they approach the phenomenon with their idea. They do not get to the root of the matter. The reason they do not get to it is that they do not clearly define the actual function of intellectual activity.

In our age, intellectual activity tends to look at only the phenomenon and place it alongside another phenomenon, so that one phenomenon explains the other. But this cannot be done with the life force. With the life force, if you want to do anything at all, you always have to push something into the phenomenon from the intellectual activity. You have to, as it were, insinuate something into the phenomenon. And therein lies the cause of the gradual disquieting doubt that arose in the use of the idea of the life force. This doubt was the reason why the idea was finally abandoned and why a certain ideal arose in the widest circles, namely to regard living beings as a confluence, a combination of those forces that also prevail in inorganic nature.

In other words, the idea of the life force has actually become a kind of changeling. It was decided to look for the constitutive element in the sciences only in the phenomenon. The life force did not emerge as a phenomenon. One had to construct the vital force from the intellect, which was actually not permissible in this age of human development. That was the negative part of the development in which we find ourselves today. For in neovitalism nothing vivid occurs. What neovitalism puts in the place of an explanation of life phenomena that combines only the inorganic is nothing more than a kind of rehashing of old vitalism. And one could say that in the outer workings of scientific life there is clearly a kind of reflection of what is actually going on in the inner life of the spirit. Today I can only point to this reflection in a few isolated phenomena. But anyone who can look at the phenomena that are close together in such a way that they shed light on each other will also see the truth of what I am talking about. Until recently, until the middle of the 19th century, what was retained from an older way of looking at things, what the concepts and ideas held back from it, still figured quite unattractively as philosophy. And I tried to at least hint at what was going on with this philosophy in my first lecture in this series. But in the second half of the 19th century, there were already some strange phenomena in the field of philosophical life.

We can see how a very conscientious thinker, who was just not able to think the problems he raised through to their conclusion – I have mentioned him here in recent days – how Franz Brentano called for the scientific method in philosophy. He was given nothing but the scientific method as it was customary in the present. In a sense, this provided the guiding principle for all those who no longer wanted to reflect on a particular intellectual method, but who submitted to the general authority of popular scientific thinking. But then there were other phenomena. At some faculties, where, let us say, old Herbartians were working, it came about that they left their chairs, and there were then faculties which did not appoint philosophers in the old sense to these vacant chairs of philosophy, but people who thought scientifically. This was the case, for example, in Vienna, where Mach, the naturalist, had to take up the chair of philosophy that had become vacant. This was still somewhat uncomfortable, and so they called the subject he had to represent “inductive philosophy,” and so they gave him the chair of inductive philosophy, but placed next to it a man — I hold this man in very high regard, but I am now characterizing cultural phenomena objectively, and so personal opinion plays no role here — who had previously been a professor of Christian philosophy at the theological faculty of the new university. This was a way of documenting that what should be in philosophy was not taken from some new way of research, but from the old tradition. And what took place there, I would say, in a certain striking way, is taking place again and again. Apart from the fact that people who think entirely in terms of natural science are brought to the psychological chairs and introduce an entirely scientific way of thinking into an area previously regarded as philosophical, we also see otherwise how people who think scientifically today function quite officially as the bearers of philosophy. In such phenomena, what I have to suggest here is also expressed externally: with what has emerged in recent times as the combining mind, which in its purity can only be applied as Goethe wanted it to be applied, nothing can be made out about the phenomena of life.

Here again is the point where honesty and impartiality of scientific thinking must be strictly demanded. And the methods that research with the help of external observation, external experiment, with the help of this combining mind, they can, if they are really critical with themselves, if they, out of their considerations, if I may say so, gain a full awareness of their own scope, can do no other than say: we are applicable only to the field of inorganic natural science; there we belong, there we can magnify the method; but we must not, without changing the whole meaning of the method, also change the content of the method, ascend into the field of organic natural science. That must remain untouched by this method.

Spiritual science must now speak from the other side. Spiritual science must say: There is also the possibility of a development of consciousness corresponding to the path taken by those forms of consciousness that had still blossomed before the 14th century. Just as these forms of consciousness have been developed into a purely objective consciousness that should not get stuck in phenomenality, so today, in order to take a scientific approach to the organic, it is necessary to develop inwardly through the soul to the other forms of consciousness: imaginative consciousness, inspired consciousness, intuitive consciousness.

For if the intellect is to come to terms with life phenomena, then, for the intellect, what takes place within the realm of life phenomena must become observation, must become phenomenon. It cannot do so within sensory observation. The intellect cannot become constitutive for a content of the organic natural sciences. The intellect must also behave combinatively there. But the intuition must be supplied to it. This intuition is supplied to it in imaginative cognition. In the training of imaginative cognition, as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, apart from everything else that can be said about it, the possibility is gained of breaking with the old vitalism, which has provided a changeling of conceptuality, and of replacing it with the imaginative intuition of life.

Of course, the tremendously cheap objection that can now be made comes to mind. It can be said: Well, yes, but we normal people only have this combining mind. There may be some oddballs who progress to imagination, inspiration, and so on. We won't question that, but we don't have it. Therefore, a philosophy applies to us that rejects these contents of imagination and so on, that does not concern itself with taking these contents of imagination, inspiration and so on into itself as philosophy. This cheap objection can be refuted in the following way. I will clarify myself with an example that I have often mentioned. If spiritual research simply takes the facts that are already available to empirical organic science today, then, for example, in the study of the human heart, one comes to quite different views than those that are still held in popular science due to a false, traditional use of the mind that has been preserved from ancient times. There the heart is regarded as a kind of better pump that drives the blood through the organism. This view is only accepted as the “correct” one for the human being if reason is applied to the human organism as a living being, which is not applicable to it. As soon as one rises to imaginative contemplation, one comes to say to oneself: It is not the heart that drives the blood through the veins of the organism, but the movement of the heart is the result of the inner life of the blood. It is the blood itself, which, from its own intense life, centralized in the heart, causes this movement, so that the movement of the heart is the consequence of the movement of the blood, and not the other way around. This follows directly from the imaginative observation of the human and then also the animal organism. Now, anyone who sets out to teach about the heart and the movements of the heart without this imaginative observation must, if he is honest, come to find in this approach something inadequate to be relied upon. And if he then excludes what he himself has recognized as inadequate in his explanation, but retains the empirical knowledge of the facts, the entire world of facts of the human and animal organism, insofar as this world of facts relates to blood movement and heart movement, if he summarizes everything – spiritual science never shrinks from a truly thorough and conscientious examination by others — of what can be gained from the field of present-day anatomy, physiology, biology, etc., and especially, in explaining this problem, of what can be gained from embryology, he will say to himself: Now, the one who stands on the ground of imaginative knowledge gives this explanation. I know the facts; if I honestly presuppose the result of imaginative knowledge and test my well-known facts by it, then it is completely correct and there is every desirable reason to accept what is gained through imaginative knowledge.

As soon as progress is conscientiously and honestly made in this field in the direction of the development of scientific consciousness, the excuse can no longer be made that anyone who does not have imaginative knowledge himself does not need to recognize this imaginative knowledge. Instead, the other must take its place, that one says: I know well the facts that present themselves to sensory observation, but an explanation only comes to me from the side of imaginative insight. I can make sense of this explanation. The facts are understandable on this basis; so all the conditions for acceptance are met. — And basically, anyone who rejects supersensible knowledge in this area for the reason just given does not show that he does not have a command of supersensible knowledge. After all, it has not yet reached the point where it can be easily mastered. Rather, he proves that he cannot correctly evaluate the facts available to him. He proves the lack of his insight into the world of facts gained through sensory-empirical means. And this is most often the case in today's approach to organic natural science. The approach that is necessary for organic natural science is the one that rises from mere objective knowledge to imaginative knowledge. For it is only in imaginative knowledge that the secret of life is revealed.

Starting from pure phenomenology, which he wanted to see applied in the theory of colours and sounds, for example, Goethe strove towards what he called morphology, towards grasping the process of formation. He only came to a certain degree of knowledge. What he inaugurated must be continued. One can see how he only got to a certain point: after his approach had been sufficient to a high degree, if not completely, for the unconscious plant kingdom, he had to stop when he wanted to move from the plant kingdom to the consideration of the metamorphosis of the animal kingdom. Look at the treatises he wrote in relation to the metamorphosis of the animal kingdom. You will see everywhere how he, as a conscientious person, stops because it does not go any further, because from a certain moment of this Goethean morphology, if one wants to go further, one must arrive at something even more spiritual than mere form: at what the consciousness with the world of feeling and will can grasp inwardly – now in inspired knowledge.

If we look at it this way, then we will see that the essential thing is the way we look at it, the way we look at it, the way we develop the methodology. And, as I said, I can only hint at it today. If we look at the development of the theory of evolution from this point of view, we find the following: First, the series of living beings is followed empirically from the imperfect, so-called imperfect monad up to man, and it is proceeded in such a way that one always imagines the more perfect emerging from the more imperfect. If one proceeds in a somewhat different way, as Haeckel did to a certain extent, then one constructs, at least in the ancestral line of present-day beings, those which are in turn fairly accurate copies of present-day creatures. The constructed beings of the distant past in Haeckel's old family tree have the very character of what lives today.

But what presents itself to the imagination leads to a completely different way of looking at it. And I will – because the limited time available demands it – only sketch out this approach: If one starts from the standpoint of the imaginative way of looking at things, then, for example, the human head in relation to the spinal column can only be properly considered by saying: This human head formation, however dissimilar it may be in its outer form to the spinal column in its present metamorphosis, can only be imagined metamorphically as a transformation of the spinal column. One has to think that the nervous organization of the spinal cord is transformed, metamorphosed into what appears to us as the brain, and that the enclosing bones, the vertebrae of the spinal column, are also transformed into what becomes the skull.

11

But now it is important to bear the following in mind. One must imagine that in a certain respect what I have drawn here as a circle, in contrast to the line a-b, is, so to speak, a puffed-up dorsal spine and points to what it once was in an earlier metamorphosis: itself something like a dorsal spine, but under different external conditions. What I have drawn as a circle has, in a sense, developed out of a-b. But what is now the dorsal vertebra of the human organism only joined it later. In the case of humans, this is the later formation. After the skull had reformed from an arrangement of forces that now appears in a slightly different way in the dorsal vertebra, this dorsal vertebra joined it. What is less developed in the human being is therefore what is later, and what is more developed is what is earlier. And if we proceed in this way, we are led back to an age in which the forces that form the human head were already present in a different metamorphosis, but not the forces that form today's human spinal cord.

If, however, we consider these latter forces, then they are the same forces that we encounter, for example, in the animal kingdom, where skull formation is a process that exhibits only a lesser transformation compared to the spinal column than in humans. So we have to say: what is present in the human head points us back to older times as the earliest formation than what then already occurred as a human being with the dorsal spine, and also than what is present in the animal kingdom. In evolution, we do not have to derive man from the animal kingdom, but we have to say that an interpretation of the facts themselves shows us that man is an older being than animals, that animals originated later and that in only achieved in their evolution what is also found in humans today in their later form as a dorsal spine, but because they had a shorter time available, they did not manage to develop the skull metamorphosis in the human sense.

If you develop this idea, which I can only sketch out here, you will come to a truly analogous understanding of the theory of evolution. The magnificent facts that are available, which one only needs to be fully aware of, become explicable when based on this imaginative insight. And from these assumptions, one then arrives at very definite relationships and connections of what is presented in external science to our earthly conditions.

Do you think that by pursuing this thought further, one arrives at an understanding of the relationship between man and beast? But one can also proceed in this way and learn to recognize how man relates to the plant kingdom and ultimately to the mineral kingdom, which one can grasp in its phenomenal context through observation, experiment and the combining intellect.

With such a way of thinking, one comes to truly understand man's relationship to his environment, just as one comes to understand, in a certain way, the relationships of the fields that lead us to mathematical judgments in mathematical science. One comes to develop more and more what Goethe had in mind as an ideal when he said that his primeval plant had to become something in the idea, with which one can recognitively place every single plant in its corresponding character before the soul. Just as one, when one has the general concept of the triangle, also knows what occurs in any particular triangle. This metamorphosis of human knowledge into organic knowledge is what Goethe had in mind as an ideal.

But now I would like to illustrate myself again with an example. If we start from this point of view, we come to really take a closer look at what takes place in the human head as functions, for example. We learn to recognize how the functions of the human head, by undergoing evolution in the way I have described here, are already in the process of regressing today, how they have become the human head from other states, but how a mineralization process is taking place in the human head today through external influences. And this mineralization process is the parallel phenomenon to our intellectual knowledge, which also only knows how to grasp the mineral physical, because it is bound to a mineralization process in the human nerve-sense apparatus. One becomes familiar with how what one accomplishes in intellectual cognition is paralleled by a mineralization process that builds itself into the organic of the human being as its physical vehicle, a settling of the purely mineral within the organic. By settling this mineral within the organic, one comes to do for the soul what intellectual activity is for this human being. One comes to really understand the inner connection between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily, not just to talk about it in abstract terms, as the “psychophysical parallelists” and similar phraseurs in the field of psychology do.

This is the way in which the present state of organic natural science can be pointed out as the path it must take. One cannot stop at demanding a particular way of thinking; one can only look for what is propelled in the empirical facts themselves, and one must really let another way of thinking take the place of the existing one, namely that of imaginative cognition.

But then one also comes to a truly fruitful application of this knowledge. If one seeks something in the external world that, when transferred to the external world, corresponds to what goes on in the human head as a process of mineralization parallel to intellectual cognition, then one finds outside in nature what takes place between the forces in the earth and what goes on in the root of the plant, and one finds the inner relationship between what is constituent in the root formation of the plant and what is constituent for what goes on in the human head.

In a similar way, we can then find relationships between, for example, what is going on in the herbaceous, leafy part of the plant and what is going on in the human rhythmic system, in the human organic. And we can find relationships between the functions in the flowering and fruiting part of the plant and what is going on in the human metabolic system, in the human sexual system, and so on. From this point of view, one can gain an overview of plant life.

If one knows how what I have called the mineralization process works in the human organism, so that this mineralization process takes place internally, in contrast to the external mineralization process, which also takes place in the upper part of the plant, then one notices the connection between what is going on internally in the main organization and what is going on in the root formation process, namely in what occurs as a mineralizing process in the root formation process. One also notices that in a certain way there is an opposition – despite the similarity, an opposition – as it expresses itself, for instance, when I have three and three, the one positive, the other negative. Then I have three times three, but there is still an opposition in it. Thus there is something that is the same in a certain respect and yet is opposed: in the internal mineralization process of the human head and in the external one of the plant root formation, and also in the external mineralization process of the earth planet itself. From here, the therapeutic connection between what is external and what is internal in the human being can be found in a rational way. And the transition can be found via pathology to rational therapy.

I can only hint at this last point here. Further information on this chapter will be given to those concerned, as it already happened in a spring course for doctors and medical students last year. But the important thing will be that it will be possible to give birth to real science out of spiritual science – which is not just theory, but a pointer to fruitful action, to deed.

Today, humanity is faced with the necessity, especially in the scientific field, of making not a small but a great decision: the decision to enter into organic life by not merely modifying the content of the old way of thinking to some extent, but by introducing a new element into this old way of thinking itself, the element of supersensible knowledge. What still stands in the way of this decision today for the majority of those who should make it, is not some defect in human cognitive ability, but a lack, an understandable lack, of courage for this strong, radical change. People would much rather suffer than move forward into the new. They would rather stick to the old and just reform it in some critical or other way.

But light will not come into what is available here for our present civilization in the field of knowledge until one has the courage to move forward from the way of thinking that is usual to a different way of thinking. As long as people content themselves with the excuse that 'one cannot achieve imaginative thinking after all', nothing useful will come of it. Only when people realize that they must not remain inert inwardly if science is to progress fruitfully in its approach will there be a change. One must become inwardly active and diligent. A decision of the will, not merely a theoretical consideration, is necessary here. And since, as every psychologist knows, mankind is more difficult to bring to decisions of the will than to theoretical considerations, in which one can remain quietly within, modern mankind has the opportunity to show how it rise from adversity to greatness by deciding to take a bold new approach, not to mention small considerations, in the fields of knowledge and the spirit.

It seems obvious to me today that what has been discussed here, from this point of view, during these days, the harmony of the subjective and the objective, is now emerging as an introduction to my lecture, also based, so to speak, on a feeling. Yesterday morning, the reflections concluded with the speech of Professor Römer, which gave me great satisfaction – that is the subjective aspect – for the reason that it showed how a specialist, who is thoroughly and fully immersed in his field, can feel the need for the spiritual science to shed light on such a specific subject. It will also have become clear to you from what Professor Römer has already been able to cite from his field of expertise today, that above all, for this interweaving, strong, vigorous work must be developed on the part of the relevant spiritual science itself. For what has been given so far - and this should be fully recognized - are initially individual guidelines that require verification with reference to external science.

In all that has been brought to me through this lecture to a certain subjective satisfaction, there was a consideration of the teeth. So yesterday we concluded with the teeth – now I come to the objective. And allow me to start with the teeth again today, though not with something that I want to tell you about the teeth on my own initiative, but with a saying that emerged from the scholarship of the 11th century, as it was in Central Europe at the time. This saying goes:

When thy tongue catcheth the wind

and draweth it into thy mouth,

and with thy teeth thou choosest

the word that thou shalt speak.

This means: just as the tongue catches the wind from its surroundings and draws it into the mouth, so it draws the word it speaks out of the teeth.

Now, that is a product of 11th-century Central European scholarship. It means that the tongue draws the word out of the teeth just as it draws air into the mouth from the outside world.

Now a sample of 19th-century scholarship, from the last third of the century, a word pronounced by the philologist Wilhelm Scherer, who was revered by a large number of students as a modern idol, and which you will find in his “Deutsche Sprachgeschichte” (History of the German Language), where he also uses this word that I have just read to you. The word he uses in contrast to this is this: “We laugh at such a word in the present”.

That is the scientific confession from the 19th century about this word from the 11th century; it expresses the scientific attitude that still prevails today in the broadest sense and that the representatives of the corresponding field are still likely to express today in further references.

If we first consider this contrast from the point of view that has been adopted here more often, that a complete change has taken place in relation to the state of mind of people since the first third of the 15th century, then we have in the time that lies between the first quoted saying and the saying of Wilhelm Scherer, we have contained approximately just what has elapsed in time since the dawning of that state of mind that existed until the beginning of the 15th century, and the direction that has emerged since then and has so far undergone a certain development.

Wilhelm Scherer now continues the sentences that he began by saying that he had to laugh at such a word from the 19th He says that all efforts in the present must be directed, with regard to linguistics, to bringing together what physiologists have to say about speaking and word formation based on the physiological organization of the human body with what philologists have to say about the development of language from ancient times to the present. In other words, physiology and philology should join hands in this field of science. And Wilhelm Scherer adds that unfortunately he has to admit that the philologists are very, very far behind and that it cannot be hoped that they will meet the physiologists halfway in terms of what they have to say about the physical organization for the formation of speech. So that physiology and philology are two branches of science whose lack of mutual understanding a man regarded as a man of his time acknowledges in no uncertain terms.

This points to a phenomenon that is a dominant one in our time: that the individual sciences with their methods do not understand each other at all, that they talk alongside each other without the person who is placed in the midst of this scientific activity and hears what the physiologists on the one hand and the philologists on the other have to say, and who hears what they say, is able to do something with it – forgive the perhaps somewhat daring comparison – other than to be skewered from two sides in relation to his soul by the formations of concepts.

In a sense, although I do not want to say much more with this than something analogous, a certain contrast is already expressed in the word designation, which, I would like to say, is unconsciously taken seriously by the newer currents of science. The word 'physiology' expresses the fact that it wants to be a logos about the physical in man, so to speak, that which grasps the physical in a logical, intellectual way; the word 'philology' expresses: love of wisdom, love of the Logos, love of the word; so the word designation is taken from an emotional experience. In one case the word designation is taken from a rational experience, in the other from an emotional experience. And what the physiologist wants to produce as a kind of intellectual Logos about the human body, that - namely the Logos - the philologist actually wants to love. As I said, I am only trying to make an analogy here, but if we pursue it further, if we follow it historically, it will take on a certain significance. I would advise us to follow it more closely historically.

But we can point out something else that comes to us from prehistory, from the forerunner of that which has emerged in human consciousness since the beginning of the 15th century. We know that what is called logic and which, in a certain respect, has its image in language, at least essentially, is a creation of Aristotle. And if one were to claim that, just as a person today who has not studied logic nevertheless lives logic in his soul activity, logic also lived in people's soul activity before Aristotle, one overlooks the fact that the transformation of the unconscious into the conscious nevertheless has a deeper significance in the course of human events. The elevation of the logical into consciousness is also a real process, albeit an inwardly real process, in the development of the soul of humanity: in older times there was an intimate relationship between the concept and the word. Just as there was such an intimate relationship between the concept or idea and the perception, as you will find explained in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, there was also an intimate connection, an interlocking, I would say, of words and ideas.

The distinction that we have to make today, psychologically, between the word and the content of the idea – particularly when considering mathematization, this emerges with all clarity – was not made in older times. And it was precisely this distinction that Aristotle first arrived at. He singled out, within the life of the soul, that which is conception or concept from the fabric of language and made it into something that exists separately for knowledge. But in doing so, he pushed that which lives in language further down into the unconscious than it was before. In a sense, a gulf was created for knowledge between the concept or the conception and the word.

The further back we go in the consideration of human language, the more we find that the word and the concept or idea are experienced as one and the same thing, that man, so to speak, hears inwardly what he thinks, that he has a word-picture, not so much a thought-picture. The thought is linked externally to the sense perceptions and internally to the word. But in this way, even in these early times, a certain intuitive perception was present, which can be characterized as follows: as people expressed themselves in words, they felt as if what resounded in their words had entered their speech directly from a hidden, subconscious, instinctive aspect of things. They felt, as it were, that a real process takes place between what lives in things, and especially in facts, and what inwardly forms the impulse for the sounding of the word. They felt such a real connection as a person today still feels a real connection between the substances that are outside, say egg, veal, lettuce, and what then happens inside with the content of these substances when they are digested. He will see a real process in this process, which unfolds from the outside of the substances to what happens inside in the digestion. He experiences this real process subconsciously. What one experienced in language was subconscious — even if much more clearly, already permeated by a certain dim awareness. One had the feeling that something living in the things is related to the sounds, to the words. Just as the substances of the materials one eats are connected with what happens internally in the metabolism of the human being, one felt an inner connection between what takes place in the things and facts, which is similar to words, and what sounds internally as a word. And in that Aristotle raised to consciousness what was felt to be a real process, where concepts come into play, the same was achieved for language as a person achieves when he reflects on what the substances of the materials in his organism do. Thinking about digestion is, of course, somewhat further removed from the actual process of digestion than thinking about language. But we can gain an idea of the relationship by clarifying this idea by moving from the more immediate to the more distant, and by becoming clearer in the distance.

Now, for us, if we replace today's abstract view of history with a more concrete one, the fact that things that happened in Greece in the pre-Christian era, also in the pre-Aristotelian era, happened later for the Central European population - who still perceived the Greeks as barbaric, that is, at a lower level of culture - is clear. And we will be right, and spiritual science gives us the guidance to raise this feeling to certainty, if we imagine that the mental state from which we speak is spoken emotionally, “the tongue draws the outer air into the mouth just as it draws the word out of the teeth,” that this way of looking at things , this remarkably pictorially expressed view was roughly the same as that which prevailed in pre-Aristotelian times within Greece, and in the place of which there arose what was bound to arise through the separation of logic, of the logos, through the separation of the conceptual from that which is expressed in language.

You are aware that in that erudition which developed first in the 15th century and from which the various branches of the individual specialized sciences have emerged, that in this erudition as education much has contributed what has asserted itself as late Greek culture. The philologists, in other words, those who are supposed to love the logos, were thoroughly influenced by what emerged from late Greek culture. And just imagine such a late Greek as a Germanic scholar, like Wilhelm Scherer, confronted with early Greek, and it tells him: the tongue pulls the language out of the teeth – then he naturally rejects it, then he wants nothing to do with it from his point of view. One must consider such facts in a light that tries to shine a little deeper into the historical context than what is often available in the ordinary popular science of history today, both in the field of external political or cultural history and in the field of language history.

Now the question is what paths must be sought in order to scientifically penetrate into the structure of the language organism itself, if I may express it in this way.

Even in external appearances, it is expressed how the soul, which has gradually been elevated into the realm of abstract concepts, has moved away from what was felt about language in the pre-Aristotelian period. What, for example, has been produced, as an opinion about the origin of language, by this research, which is in the sign of Aristotelism? Well, it was elevated into the abstract, and thus alienated from its direct connection with the external world, through which one could experience what really corresponds to the formed word in things. It was alienated from this, but still sought to understand what such a connection might look like, and it then also translated this connection into all kinds of abstractions. What she felt inwardly, she placed in the realm where concepts are formed externally, based on sensory or other external observations. Because it was impossible to delve into things to search for the process of how the word works from things into the human organization, an abstract concept was used in place of such an understanding, for example in the so-called Wauwau theory or in the Bimbam theory. The wauwau theory says nothing more than that what appears externally in the organic as sound is imitated. It is a completely external consideration of an external fact with the help of abstract concepts. The Bim-Bim theory differs from the Bow-Wow theory only in that it takes into account the inorganic way in which sound is released from itself. This sound is then imitated in an external way by the human being who is confronted with and influenced by external nature. And the transformation of that which children call — though not everywhere, but only in a very limited area of the earth — when they hear the dog bark: woof-woof, or that which comes into their sense of language when they hear the bell ring: ding-dong-dong, this transformation is then followed by a curious method. Thus, what has then formed into the organism of language can be seen in the indicated 'theories', which, it is true, have not been replaced by much better ones to this day.

We are therefore dealing with an inwardness of the observation of language. Above all, the aim of spiritual science, as it is meant here, is to make the study of language an inward one again, so that through what can be achieved in the ascent from sensory to supersensible knowledge, what was once thought about language through feeling and instinct can be found independently again, but now in a form appropriate to advanced humanity. And here I must point out (owing to the limited time I have only to indicate the directions in which the empirical facts can be followed) how spiritual science takes a strictly concrete path when it wants to understand how the human being develops from childhood to a certain age. You will find what I am trying to suggest here outlined, for example, in my booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'.

First of all, it must be pointed out how the entire soul-physical configuration of the human being in the period before the change of teeth is essentially different from what it becomes after the change of teeth. Anyone who has observed this fact knows how much is metamorphosed in the soul-physical life during the period when the second teeth replace the first. And anyone who does not seek the relationships between body, soul and spirit through abstractions such as the followers of psychophysical parallelism, but seeks them in concrete phenomena, seeks them according to a truly further developed scientific method, and is able to grasp the inner structure of the soul life in the concrete, will find just how what later, in a more soul-like way, in the peculiar configuration of conceptual life, in the implementation of that which is experienced conceptually, with will impulses, which then lead to the formation of the judgment, as something that has been working in the physical organization until the change of teeth. And he will not speculate about what can “work spiritually” in the physical organization from birth to the change of teeth. Rather, he will say to himself, what is then released during the change of teeth, released from a body in which it was previously latent, that has previously been active in a latent and bound state in the physical organization of the human being. And this particular type of physical organization, in which what can later be observed in the soul is active, comes to an end with the eruption of the second teeth, which you were also made aware of yesterday.

Now, the facts at hand must be considered not only from a physiological point of view, but also from the perspective of the human soul. Just as the physiologist, with his senses and the mind bound to them, penetrates into the physical processes of the human organism, so too does the soul, with its faculties of imagination and inspiration. If one really penetrates into these processes, then one must see in the real, which is first latent from birth to the change of teeth, and then becomes free, also in terms of imagination and knowledge. That is why my writing on “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, in summarizing this process in a formulaic way, speaks of the fact that with the change of teeth, the etheric body of the human being, which previously worked in the physical body, is only born free to be active in the soul life. This “birth of the etheric body” is expressed in the change of teeth.

It is necessary to have such formulaic expressions at the starting point of anthroposophical spiritual scientific observation, such as “birth of the etheric body from the physical body”, which corresponds to an actual event. But when we seek to make the transition from spiritual science in the narrower sense — which is concerned with the observation of the human being's direct experience of the day — to the approach taken in the individual specialized sciences, then what is initially expressed in such a formulaic way becomes something similar to a mathematical formula: it becomes method, method for dealing with the facts. And that is why this spiritual science can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences, without always merely continuing into the individual sciences that which, admittedly, must be clearly borne in mind at the starting point: that the human being is structured into a physical body, etheric body, and so on. At the beginning one can and must know such things; but if spiritual science is to bring about a fruitful influence, they must become active, they must become a method, a way of treating even the empirically given 'facts'. And in this respect spiritual science, because it rises from the inorganic, where it can do little, through the organic into the spiritual realm, I would like to say, not only in the way the individual sciences can fertilize can, but it will, as a result of its findings, have confirmations of facts to hand over to them, which will shed light on what is gained from the other side through sensory-physical observation and then seen through with the mind. Spiritual and sensory-physical research must meet. And it is one of the most important tasks for the future to ensure that this spiritual research and this sensory-physical research meet.

In the process that manifests itself externally during the change of teeth, it becomes clear that what is designated as the etheric body – but by taking a concrete view, not a word concept, into the eye of the soul – becomes freely active for the entire human organism, after previously having had an organizing effect in the physical body. Now it rises into the soul, becomes free and then consciously works back to the whole human being to a certain degree.

Something similar occurs again with what manifests externally as sexual maturity. There we see how, once again, something arises in human experience that expresses itself, on the one hand, in a certain metamorphosis of the physical organism and, on the other hand, in a metamorphosis of the spiritual. And an essential part of the spiritual researcher's work is to acquire a concrete way of looking at what occurs in the soul and spirit, just as someone who only wants to educate themselves through external observation acquires a concrete way of looking at what they can see with their eyes and combine with their mind. Soul cannot be looked at in this way, but can only be looked at in its reality through imagination. There is no true psychology that does not begin with imaginative observation, and there is no way to find the interrelationship of body and soul or physical body and spiritual soul other than to build a bridge between what is given to external physical sensory perception as the physical body, and what falls away from this perception, what can only be given as reality in the ascent to supersensible knowledge, the spiritual-soul.

If we now turn to what occurs during puberty, we must say: here we see, in a certain sense, the reverse process of what took place when the teeth changed. We see how what plays as the capacity for desire in man, what is the instinctive character of his will, takes hold of the organism in a way it did not take hold of it before. Summarizing the whole broad complex of facts that this involves in a formulaic way, it comes about that one says: the one in which the nature of desire slumbers, the astral body of the human being, becomes free when sexual maturity occurs. It is this body that now, if I may express it in this way, sinks freely into the physical organism, takes hold of it, permeates it, and thus materializes desire, which finds expression in sexual maturation.

Now, what does an appropriate comparison of these two processes show? We see, so to speak, when the change of teeth occurs, a liberation of the etheric body of the human being. How does what is happening actually express itself? It expresses itself in such a way that the human being becomes capable of further developing the formation of concepts, in general the movement in the life of ideas, which used to be more bound to his whole organism, bound to the organization of the head. To a certain extent we see, and spiritual science sees it not only to a certain extent but in its reality, that the etheric, which we ascribe to the human being as an etheric body, withdraws with the change of teeth to that which only lives in the rhythm of the human organism and in the metabolic limb-organism, and that it develops a free activity in the formation of the head, in the plastic formation of the head, in which the consciousness life of the human being participates in the imagination. In a sense, the organization of the head is uncovered during this time. And if I may express myself figuratively about a reality that certainly exists, I must say that what drives itself to the surface from the entire human organization in the second teeth is the soul-spiritual activity that previously permeates the entire bodily organization and then becomes free. Before, it permeated the whole human being right into the head. It gradually withdraws from the head; and it shows how it withdraws by revealing its no-longer-to-the-head activity in that it stops and produces the second teeth. You can visualize this almost schematically. If I indicate schematically what the human physical organization is with the white chalk, and what the etheric organization is with the red chalk, then the following would result schematically (see figure):

In the figure on the left, you see the human being in his spiritual, soul and physical activity as he stands before you until his teeth change. In the second figure, which is to your right, you see how the etheric element has withdrawn from the immediate effect of the head organization, how it has become free in a certain respect, so that from there it can freely affect the human head organism. And the last thing that happens in the physical organism as a result of this activity of the soul-spiritual is the eruption of the second teeth. I would say that you can observe in its image what is being communicated to you here as a spiritual view if you take the skulls that Professor Römer showed you yesterday, because you can compare the insertion of the first teeth with the insertion of the second teeth. If you want to follow this logically, then you have to take as a basis what has been gained here from spiritual science. Then you have to say to yourself, the first teeth, with all that is expressed in them, are taken out of the whole human organization, including the head organization. What is expressed in the second teeth is taken out after the inner soul organization, insofar as it concerns the etheric body, has slowly withdrawn into the rhythmic and metabolic organism and become free for the main head organization. In a similar way, we can say — as I said, I can only give guidelines — that something is happening with sexual maturity. What we call the astral body is sunk into the physical body, so that it finally takes hold of it and brings about what constitutes sexual maturity.

But now what happens in the human being takes place in the most manifold metamorphoses. Once one has truly understood a process such as that which is expressed through sexual maturity, which brings about a certain new relationship in human development, in the development of the human being to the outer world, once one truly understands such a process inwardly, one then also recognizes it when it occurs in a certain metamorphosis. What occurs at puberty, in that it takes hold of the whole person, in that it, so to speak, forms a relationship between the whole person and their environment, is, I would say, anticipated in a different metamorphosis at the moment when language develops in the child. Only what takes place with sexual maturation in the child takes place in a different metamorphosis in the formation of speech. What takes hold of the whole human being at sexual maturation and pours into his relationship with the outside world takes place between the rhythmic and limb human being and the human being's head organization. To a certain extent, the same forces that take hold of the whole person during puberty and direct their relationship to the outside world assert themselves between the lower and upper human beings. And as the lower human being learns to feel the upper human being in the way that the human being later learns to feel the outside world, he learns to speak. A process that can be observed externally in a person at a later age must be followed in its metamorphosis until it appears as an internal process in the human organism, in the learning to speak: the process that otherwise occurs in the whole person at puberty.

And once we have grasped this, we are able to comprehend how the interaction of the lower human being — the rhythmic and the limb-based human being — in its reciprocity develops an inner experience of something that is also present externally in the nature around us. This inward experiencing of what is outwardly present leads to the fact that what remains outwardly mute in things as their own language begins to resound as the human language in the human inner being. Please proceed from this sentence as from a regulative principle. Proceed from this sentence that what is in things, as they become external, material, falls silent, that in dematerialization it becomes audible in the human being and comes to speak. Then you will find the way in which you do not develop a yap-yap or a bim-bim theory, but on which you see that which is external to things – and cannot be perceived by external observation because it is silent and only exists in a supersensible way – as language in the human interior.

What I am saying here is like drawing a line to indicate the direction in which one would most like to paint a wide-ranging picture. I can only present this rather abstract proposition regarding the relationship between the things and facts of the external world and the origin of human language in the inner life. And you will see everything you can sense about language in a new light when you follow the path from this abstractly assumed sentence, which initially sounds formulaic, to what the facts connect for you in terms of meaning. And if you then want to apply what has been philologically obtained in this way to physiology, you will be able to learn about the connection between external sexual metamorphosis and linguistic metamorphosis by studying facts that are still present as a linguistic remnant of the sexual maturation metamorphosis in the change of the voice, that is, of the larynx in boys, and in some other phenomena that occur in women. If you have the will to engage with the facts and to draw the threads from one series of facts to another, not to encapsulate yourself in barren specialized sciences, but to really illuminate what is present in one science as fact , through the facts that come to light through other sciences, then the individual special sciences will be able to become what man must seek in them if he is to make progress on the path of his knowledge as well as on the path of his will.

In a context that might seem unrelated, we will see tomorrow in a very natural way how we can go from the change of teeth to the appearance of speech and then further back to what is the third on this retrogressive path: we see, so to speak, in what is expressed in the change of teeth, an interaction between the physical body and the etheric body. We see, in turn, in what is expressed in language, an interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. And thirdly, we must seek an interrelationship between the I and that which lives in man as an astral body, and we will be led to that which is the third in this retrospective consideration: to the embodiment of the spiritual-soul, to that which is born in the spiritual-soul. If one seeks the path from the change of teeth through the emergence of speech, the third stage is the stage of uniting the pre-existing human soul with the physical.

By walling up the way out of his consideration of the change of teeth to the consideration of language through his abstraction, Aristotle was forced to resort to the dogma that a new spiritual soul is born with each new human being. Due to a lack of will to continue on a path of knowledge, knowledge of human preexistence has been lost, and with it knowledge of all that truly leads to the knowledge of the human soul.

We see a historical connection, which, however, comes to expression in the treatment of certain problems, and we can say in conclusion: Today, according to the dictum of a philologist who is quite significant in the contemporary sense, philology and physiology are so opposed that they cannot understand each other. Why is this so? Because physiology studies the human body and does not come back to the mind in this study. If one pursues true physiology, then one finds the spiritual and psychological in man through the bodily in physiological observation. What happens when one pursues true philology? If one pursues true philology, then one does not reduce the logos to an abstraction, for which one then seeks to see through after-images, after-images in a scientific method, but one seeks to penetrate into that which one supposedly loves as a “philo”-logist, through imaginative and other forms of observation. But then, when one penetrates into that which has become shadowy and nebulous for today's philology, namely the genius of language, the creative genius of language, when one penetrates into it, then one penetrates through the spirit to the external corporeality.

Physiology finds the spirit by way of the inner body. Philology, when viewed correctly, finds what speaks and has fallen silent in things on the way out through the genius of language. It does not find bark and bim-bam, but rather finds the reason why words and language arise in us in the things that physically surround us. Physiology has lost its way because it stops at the body and does not penetrate inwardly through the body to the spirit. Philology has lost its way because it stops at the genius of language, which it then only grasps in the abstract, and does not penetrate into the inner being of the outer things from which what lives in the word resounds. If philology does not speak as if the wauwau and bimbam are imitated in an externally abstract way by man, but speaks about the external physicality in such a way that it becomes clear to it in imaginations, how the word arises from this external physicality, which echoes internally, so that when physiology has found spirit and philology has found physicality, they will find each other.

In this way I have traced the path that spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense wants to lead in conscientious work. I have only given a few hints in this particular field of introductory linguistics.

Now, these things are discussed among us, these things are striven for by us. While we strive for these things, so that they may bear witness to what is being striven for on a path of knowledge that arises entirely out of the spirit of our time. And while you can see from what is being striven for that there is probably a certain seriousness that can be measured against the seriousness that exists in other areas of life, Stuttgart, a meeting raged that trampled on most of our speakers, that had no intention of listening to anything, that did not want to engage with what we had to say, but that, through trampling and similar things, sought to crush what is being seriously pursued. And, addressing my fellow students, I may say: yesterday evening in Stuttgart, your colleagues were absent – not from the other faculty, but from the other attitude – they were not absent, they were present in the trampling.

Dear attendees, my dear fellow students! It will become ever clearer and clearer that there are those who, because they cannot be refuted – because they do not want to be refuted – because they do not want to engage with the new at all by inertly continuing with the old that has outlived itself, they will want to trample down on that with external force. Well, I would just like to appeal to you here in the sense that I do have faith in you, that you may say to yourself: We still have a say in this trampling down procedure! – But may this word become action.

Third evening of disputations

The questions did not relate to the theme of the day, “Linguistics”, but drew on problems dealt with earlier.

Dr. Steiner. Here is the question: It has been said that the three dimensions of space are not equal in structure – what is the difference?

In any case, the sentence was never formulated in this way: the three dimensions of space are “not equal in structure”, but what is probably meant here is the following. First of all, we have mathematical space, the space that we imagine – if we have an exact idea of it at all – as three mutually perpendicular dimensional directions, which we can thus define by the three mutually perpendicular coordinate axes.

In the usual mathematical treatment of space, the three dimensions are treated absolutely equally. We make so little distinction between the dimensions up-down, right-left, front-back that we can even think of these three dimensions as interchangeable. In the case of mere mathematical space, it does not matter whether, when we have the X-axis and the Z-axis perpendicular to each other, and the Y-axis perpendicular to them, we call the plane on which the Y-axis stands “horizontal” or “vertical” or the like. Likewise, we do not concern ourselves with the limitations of this space, so to speak. Not that we imagine it to be limitless. One does not usually ascend to this notion, but one imagines it in such a way that one does not concern oneself with its limits, but rather tacitly assumes that one can start from any point – let us say, for example, the X-direction and adding another piece to what you have already measured in the X-direction, to that again a piece and so on, and you would never be led to come to an end anywhere. In the course of the 19th century, much has been said against this Euclidean-geometric conception of space from the standpoint of meta-geometry. I will only remind you of how, for example, Riemann distinguished between the “unboundedness” of space and the “infiniteness” of space. And initially, there is no necessity for the purely conceptual imagination to assume the concept of “unboundedness” and that of “infiniteness” as identical. Take, for example, a spherical surface. If you draw on a spherical surface, you will find that nowhere do you come up against a spatial boundary that could, as it were, prevent you from continuing your drawing. You will certainly enter into your last drawing if you continue drawing; but you will never be forced to stop drawing because of a boundary if you remain on the spherical surface. So you can say to yourself: the spherical surface is unlimited in terms of my ability to draw on it. But no one will claim that the spherical surface is infinite. So you can distinguish, purely conceptually, between unlimitedness and infinity.

Under certain mathematical conditions, this can also be extended to space, can be extended to space in such a way that one imagines: if I add a distance in the X or Y axis, and then another and so on, and am never prevented from adding further distances, then this property of space could indeed speak for its unlimitedness, but not for the infinity of space. Despite the fact that I can always add new pieces, space does not need to be infinite at all; it could be unlimited. So these two concepts must be kept separate. So one could assume that if space were unbounded but not infinite, it would have an inward curvature in the same way as space does now, that is, in some way it would likewise recede into itself, like the surface of a sphere recedes into itself.

Certain ideas of newer metageometry are based on such assumptions. Actually, no one can say that there is much to be said against such assumptions; because, as I said, there is no way to derive the infinity of space from what we experience in space. It could very well be curved in on itself and then be finite.

Of course, I cannot go into this line of thought in detail, because it is almost the only one followed by the whole of modern metageometry. However, you will find sufficient evidence in the works of Riemann, Gauss and so on, which are readily available, to explore if you value such mathematical ideas.

From the purely mathematical point of view, therefore, this is what has been introduced into the, I would say rigid, neutral space of Euclidean geometry, which was only derived from 'unboundedness'. But what is indicated in the question is rooted in something else. Namely, that space, with which we initially calculate and which is available to us in analytical geometry, for example, when we deal with the three coordinate axes that are perpendicular to one another, that space is initially an abstraction. And an abstraction – from what? That is the question that must first be raised.

The question is whether we have to stop at this abstraction of “space” or whether that is not the case. Do we have to stop at this abstraction of space? Is this the only space that can be spoken of? Or rather, if this abstract concept of space is the only one that can legitimately be spoken of, then there is really only one objection that can be raised, and this is sufficiently addressed in Riemannian or any other metageometry. The fact of the matter is that, for example, Kant's definitions of space are based on the very abstract concept of space, in which one does not initially concern oneself with infinity or boundlessness, and that in the course of the 19th century, this concept of space was also shaken internally, in terms of its conceptual content, by mathematics. There can be no question of Kant's definitions still applying to a space that is not infinite but unlimited. In fact, much of the further development of the “Critique of Pure Reason” would be called into question, for example the doctrine of paralogisms, if one were obliged to move on to the concept of unlimited space curved in on itself.

I know that for the ordinary conception this concept of curved space causes difficulties. But from the purely mathematical-geometric point of view, nothing can be objected to what is assumed there, except that one is moving in a realm of pure abstraction that is initially quite far from reality. And if you look more closely, you will find that there is a strange circularity in the derivations of modern meta-geometry. It is this, that one starts out from the idea of Euclidean geometry, which is not concerned with the limitations of space. From this, one then gets certain derived ideas, let us say ideas that relate to something like a spherical surface. And then, in turn, by undertaking certain reconciliations or reinterpretations with the forms that arise, one can make interpretations of space from there. Actually, everything is said under the assumption of Euclidean coordinate geometry. Under this assumption, one arrives at a certain measure of curvature. One arrives at the derivations. All of this is done with the concepts of Euclidean geometry. But then one turns around, so to speak: one now uses these ideas, which can only arise with the help of Euclidean geometry, for example the measure of curvature, in order to arrive at a different idea that leads to a reorganization and can provide an interpretation for what has been gained from the curved forms. Basically, we are moving in an unrealistic area by extracting abstractions from abstractions. The matter would only be justified if empirical facts made it necessary to conform to the ideas of these facts according to what is obtained through such a thing.

The question, then, is: what is the experiential basis for the abstraction “space”? After all, space as such, as presented in Euclid, is an abstraction. What is the basis for what can be experienced, what can be perceived?

We must start from the human experience of space. Placed in the world, human beings, through their own activity of experience, actually perceive only one spatial dimension, and that is the dimension of depth. This perception, this acquired perception of the dimension of depth by the human being is based on a process of consciousness that is very often ignored. But this acquired perception is something quite different from the perception of the plane-like, the perception of extension in two dimensions. When we see with our two eyes, that is, with our total vision, we are never aware that these two dimensions come about through an activity of their own, through an activity of the soul. They are, so to speak, there as two dimensions. Whereas the third dimension comes about through a certain activity, even if this activity is not usually brought to consciousness. We actually have to first acquire the knowledge and understanding of how deep in space something lies, how far away from us any object is. We do not acquire the extent of the surface, it is given by observation. But we do acquire the sense of depth through our two eyes. The way in which we experience the sense of depth is indeed on the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious; but anyone who has learned to focus his attention on such things knows that the semi-unconscious or unconscious, never conscious, activity of judging the depth dimension is much more similar to an intellectual, or even a soul activity, an active soul activity than to everything that is only viewed on the plane.

Thus, the one dimension of three-dimensional space is already actively conquered for our objective consciousness. And we cannot say otherwise than: By observing the position of the upright human being, something is given in relation to this depth dimension — front-back — which is not interchangeable with any other dimension. Simply because a person stands in the world and experiences this dimension in a certain way, what he experiences there is not interchangeable with any other direction. For the individual, this depth dimension is something that cannot be exchanged for any other dimension. It is also the case that the grasping of two-dimensionality – that is, up-down, right-left, of course also when it is in front of us – is also tied to other parts of the brain, since it lies within the process of seeing, that is, within the sensory process of perception; while, with regard to localization in the brain, the emergence of the third dimension is quite close to those centers that are to be considered for intellectual activity. So here we can already see that in the realization of this third dimension, even in terms of experience, there is an essential difference compared to the other two dimensions.

But if we then move up to imagination, we get out of what we experience in the third dimension altogether: in imagination, we actually move on to two-dimensional representation. And now we have yet to work out the other imagination, the imagination of right and left, although this has been hinted at just as quietly as the development of the third dimension in objective imagining; so that there is again a specific experience in right and left. And finally, when we ascend to inspiration, the same applies to up and down.

For ordinary imagining, which is tied to our nervous sense system, we develop the third dimension. But when we turn directly to the rhythmic system by excluding the ordinary activity of the nervous sense system – which in a certain respect occurs when we ascend to the level of inspiration; it is not entirely precise to say this, but it does not matter for now – then we have the experience of the second dimension. And we have the experience of the first dimension when we ascend to inspiration, that is, when we advance to the third member of the human organization.

Thus that which we have before us in abstract space proves to be exact because everything we conquer in mathematics we extract from within ourselves. What arises in mathematics as three-dimensional space is actually something that we have within ourselves. But if we descend into ourselves through supersensible representations, it is not abstract space with its three equally valid dimensions that arises, but three different valences for the three different dimensions: front-back, right-left, up-down; they cannot be interchanged. From this follows yet another: if these three are not interchangeable, there is no need to imagine them with the same intensity. That is the essence of Euclidean space: that we imagine the X-, Y-, Z-axis with the same intensity – this is assumed for any geometric calculation.

If we hold the X-, Y-, Z-axis in front of us, then we must – if we want to stick with what our equations tell us in analytical geometry, but assume an inner intensity of the three axes – imagine this intensity as being of equal value. If we were to elastically enlarge the X-axis with a certain intensity, for example, the Y- and Z-axes would have to enlarge with the same intensity. That is to say, if I now grasp intensively that which I am expanding, the force of expansion, if I may say so, is the same for the X-, Y-, Z-axis, that is, for the three dimensions of Euclidean space. Therefore, applying the concept of space in this way, I would like to call this space rigid space.

Now, this is no longer the case when we take real space, of which this rigid space is an abstraction, when we take space as it is experienced by a human being. Then we can no longer speak of these three intensities of expansion being the same. Rather, the intensity is essentially dependent on what is found in the human being: the human proportions are entirely the result of the intensities of spatial expansion. And we must, for example, if we call the up-down the Y-axis, imagine this with a greater intensity of expansion than, for example, the X-axis, which would correspond to the right-left. If we were to look for a formulaic expression for this real space, if we were to express in formulaic terms what is meant by 'real' here, then again we would end up with a three-axis ellipsoid.

Now we also have the reason to imagine this three-axis space, in which supersensible thinking must live, in its three quite different possibilities of expansion, so that we can also recognize this space, through the real experience of the X-, Y- and Z-axis given to us with our physical body, as that which simultaneously expresses the relationship of the world bodies situated in this space.

When we imagine this, we must bear in mind that everything we think of out there in this three-dimensional cosmic space cannot be thought of as simply extending in different directions with the same intensity of expansion along the X-, Y- and Z-axes Z-axis, as is the case with Euclidean space, but we must think of space as having a configuration that could also be imagined by a triaxial ellipsoid. And the arrangement of certain stars certainly supports this. Our Milky Way system is usually called a lens and so on. It is not possible to imagine it as a spherical surface; we have to imagine it in a different way if we stick to a purely physical fact.

You can see from the treatment of space how little newer thinking is in line with nature. In ancient times, in older cultures, no one had such a conception as that of rigid space. One cannot even say that in Euclidean geometry there was already a clear conception of this rigid space with the three equal intensities of expansion, and also the three lines perpendicular to one another. It was only when people began to treat space in the manner of Euclidean geometry, in their calculations, that this abstract conception of space actually arose. In earlier times, quite similar insights had been gained, as I have now developed them again from the nature of supersensible knowledge. From this you can see that things on which people today rely so heavily, which are taken for granted, only have such significance because they operate in a sphere that is divorced from reality. The space that people use in their calculations today is an abstraction; it operates entirely in a sphere that is divorced from reality. It is abstracted from experiences that we can know through real experience. But today, people are often content with what abstractions are. In our time, when so much emphasis is placed on empiricism, abstractions are most often invoked. And people don't even notice it. They believe that they are dealing with things in reality. But you can see how much our ideas need to be rectified in this regard.

In every concept, the spiritual researcher does not merely ask whether it is logical. Although, in a certain sense, it is only a branch of Euclidean space, it is not really possible to grasp it conceptually, because one arrives at it through a completely abstract train of thought, in which one comes to a conclusion and, as it were, turns one's whole thinking upside down. When imagining, the spiritual researcher does not merely ask whether it is logical, but whether it is also in line with reality. That is the deciding factor for him in accepting or not accepting an idea. He only accepts an idea if this idea is in line with reality.

And this criterion of correspondence to reality will be given when one begins to deal with such ideas in an appropriate way, which is the justification for something like the theory of relativity, for example. It is logical in itself, I would like to say, because it only comprehends itself within the realm of logical abstraction, as logically as anything can be logical. Nothing can be more logical than the theory of relativity! But the other question is whether its ideas are realizable. And there you need only look at the ideas that are listed there as analogous, and you will find that they are actually quite unrealistic ideas that are just thrown around. It is only there for sensualization, they say beforehand. But it is not just there for symbolization. Otherwise the whole procedure would be in the air.

That is what I would like to say about the question. You see, it is not possible to answer questions that touch on such areas very easily. Now there is a question regarding the sentence: “The organism of an ancient Egyptian or Greek was quite different from that of modern man.

Dear attendees, I certainly did not say that! And at this point I must definitely draw attention to something that I often draw attention to, and really not out of immodesty: I am in the habit of expressing myself as precisely as I possibly can. And it is actually an extremely painful fact, not just for me personally, since it is tolerable, but from the point of view of the anthroposophical spiritual movement, that in the face of many things, for the formulation of which I have used all possible precautions to formulate the facts as adequately as possible, then everything possible is done, everything possible is said, and then these assertions are sent out into the world as “genuine anthroposophical teachings”. One of these assertions is that I am supposed to have said, “The organism of an ancient Egyptian or Greek was quite different from that of a modern man”.

It can be reduced to the following. I said: the modern way of thinking imagines too strongly that man, as a whole being, has basically always been as he is today, right down to a certain historical time. I usually only speak of “completely different,” of metamorphoses of man as such, where there are great differences, where man becomes “completely different” in a certain respect: in prehistoric times. But anyone who is able to penetrate to the subtleties of the structure and the innermost fabric – as a human being can in spiritual science – will find that a metamorphosis of the human being is constantly taking place, that, for example, the modern human being differs from the Egyptian or the Greek. Of course not in terms of external, striking characteristics, which are as striking as external physiognomy and the like. That is probably what is meant in the question, but that is not my opinion, because in terms of striking characteristics, modern man is of course not “completely different” from the Egyptian. But in terms of finer internal structural relationships, spiritual science comes to the following conclusion, for example. It has to be said that since the first third of the 15th century, humanity has become particularly adept at abstract thought, at moving more and more towards abstract trains of thought. This is also essentially based on a different structure of the brain. And through the method of spiritual science, the spiritual researcher can recognize the matter. Then it turns out that it is really the case that the brain has indeed changed in its finest structures since Egyptian times. The brain of the Egyptian was such that, to take one example, he also belonged to those of whom Dr. Husemann spoke, that the ancient Egyptian also had no sense for the blue color nuance and so on. In any case, we can see that the sense of abstraction occurs to the same extent as the nuances of blue emerge from mere darkness. What occurs in the life of the soul corresponds entirely to a physical metamorphosis. It is extremely important that we do not stop at the coarser aspects of human nature, as they are presented when we go back, for my sake, to the long periods of time that lie before history. Rather, if we want to consider human beings as humanity, we must also consider the finer structural changes during their historical existence.

Question: It would be interesting to hear, in a more intimate way, how this fact behaves.

Well, quite a lot has actually been said in these days, let us say, also through the things that Dr. Husemann has presented, about how this fact behaves. And if we were to go into other fields of fact, there would certainly be much that could be said about these other, very fine, intimate structural relationships of the human being.

Question: How do you explain the phenomenon of the well-known horse that solved all arithmetic and mathematical problems without difficulty, to the amazement of all scholars, and only then failed completely when the problems were written on pieces of paper in front of the examiner? If it is the case with the horse that none of those present in the room could see the problem, is this based on a strong suggestiveness on the part of the animal? And how does that come about?

I never want to talk about anything other than what I have investigated myself. And so, in answering this question, I would only like to share what I have experienced myself. For example, I don't know the famous Elberfeld horses. I also don't know the dog Rolf, I never had the honor of meeting him. Now, with regard to such things, I could always state that the story is all the more wonderful the less one is embarrassed by not really being able to see through it, to really get to know it. But I once saw Mr. von Osten's horse in Berlin. I can't say that the calculations that Mr. von Osten presented to the horse were extraordinarily complicated. But I was able to get an instant idea of what it was all about from what was going on there – although you had to look very closely.

I could only marvel at the strange theories that had been advanced about these things. There was a lecturer, I think his name was Fox or something like that, who was supposed to examine this whole story with the horse; and he now put forward the theory that every time the gentleman from the east gave some task, terribly small movements would occur in the eye or something like that. Another small movement would occur when Mr. von Osten says “three” like that, or when he says it like that; another movement would occur when he says “two”. So that a certain fine series of movements would come about if Mr. von Osten said, “three times two”; then the same sign of this movement would come again, six! And Mr. von Osten's horse should now be particularly predisposed to guess these fine movements, which the lecturer in question said he did not perceive in any way, but only assumed hypothetically. After all, the whole “theory” was based on the fact that Mr. von Osten's horse was much more perceptive, to a much greater extent in reality, than the lecturer who put forward this theory.

If you stick to the flashy blue thinking in hypothesizing, you can set up hypotheses in the most diverse ways. For those who have some insight into such matters, certain circumstances were of extraordinary value. During the entire time that Mr. von Osten presented his experiments to the amazed public with his horse, he gave the horse nothing but sweets – he had huge pockets in the back of his coat. And the horse just kept licking, and that's how it solved these tasks.

Now imagine that this has created a completely different relationship between the horse and Mr. von Osten himself. When Mr. von Osten continually gives the horse sugar, a very special relationship of love and intimacy develops between them. Now the animal nature is so extraordinarily variable due to the intimacy of the relationship that develops, both from 'animal to human and from human to animal'. And then effects come about that are actually wrongly described when they are called “mind reading” in the sense in which the word is often understood, but they are mediators for that which is not “subtle twitchings” that a private lecturer hypothetically posits, but which he himself says he does not see! No subtle twitches are needed to convey the solutions. It can be traced back to the following: imagine what went through the mind of Herr von Osten, who of course was vain enough to realize that the tension in the audience, made up of sensation-hungry people, was going through the most incredible twists and turns as he noticed it, and when he was then standing in front of the solution to the task, he gave the horse a piece of sugar. And add to that the effect on the horse of the mental relationship. It was truly not a command given by words or twitching, but an intimately given command that always went from Mr. von Osten to the horse when he gave him sweets to eat. Suggestion is probably not the right word. Relationships that take place between people cannot be transferred to every living being.

I have tried to show these things in concrete terms by highlighting a circumstance that many will consider trivial: the constant giving of sugar as something extraordinarily essential.

Question: Is there a possibility for pointing out a point of view that is just as stimulating for systematics in the field of mineralogy and crystallography as the idea of the primal plant is for botany or a new understanding of the periodic system of elements is for chemistry?

When we speak of crystal forms, we are dealing with forms that are actually different in their overall relationship to the cosmos, in their entire position in the world, than the forms that one can imagine in the Primordial Plant and, again, in the plant forms derived from the Primordial Plant, that is to say, in the possibility of real existence. For example, the principle applied to the design of the primeval plant could not be applied to the field of mineralogy or crystallogy. For there one is dealing with something that must be approached from a completely different angle. And one must first approach it by actually approaching the field of polyhedral crystal forms. And this approach, I can only hint at now. I have explained it in more detail in its individual representations in a lecture course that I gave for a smaller group. This approach is taken when one starts from the consideration, an internal dynamic consideration of the state of aggregation, let us say first of all from the gaseous state downwards to the solid. I can only draw the lines now; it would take too long if I were to explain it in detail, but I will hint at it. If one descends – if I may express it this way – from the gaseous state to the liquid state, then one must say: the liquid state of aggregation shows itself in that, as the one in the whole coherence of nature, a level-limiting surface, which is a spherical surface, and the degree of curvature of which can be obtained from any point on the surface by means of the transition to the tangent at that point. What you get there includes the shape that has its outer circumference in the spherical surface, and a point in the interior that is the same distance from this spherical surface everywhere.

If we now imagine the drop in an unlimited way, I do not say in an infinite way, but enlarged in an unlimited way, we get a level surface approaching the horizontal, and we have certain relationships in mind that are perpendicular to this level surface.

But we arrive at the same idea by observing the connections that arise when we simply regard our earth as a force field that can attract surrounding objects that are not firmly attached to it. If we regard the earth not as a center of gravity but as a spherical surface of gravity, then we arrive at the same result for this, I would say, gravitational figure as we need in another respect for the material constitution of the drop. So for a pure force context, we get something that corresponds to a material context. And in this way we arrive at a possibility for studying the formal relationships in the inorganic.

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So that we can say that in this context of forces, which is present in the whole body of the earth, we are always dealing with the horizontal plane. If we now move from this state of forces to one in which, let us say, there is not a point in the center to which the level surface refers as in the 'drop to the one center point', but rather several points, we would find a strangely composed surface. These relationships of the line to these 'centers' I would have to draw in the diagram in something like the following way: But if we now proceed—and now I am taking a great leap, which is well-founded, but in the short time available I can only hint at the true content—if we now proceed to assume these points not inside, within the system we are dealing with, but outside, then perhaps we would get a diagram that can be made diagrammatically in the following way: If we transfer the points into immeasurable distances, not into infinite distances, but into very great distances, then these curved surfaces, which are indicated here by curved lines, by curves, pass over into planes, and we would get a polyhedral form, which approximates to what we have before us in the known crystal forms.

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And indeed, spiritual scientific observation leads us to look at the crystal in such a way that we do not merely derive it from certain inner figurative forces in some material substance, but we relate it to the exterior of the cosmos, and we seek in the cosmos the directions that then, through the distribution of their starting points, result in what the individual crystal form is. In the individual crystal form, we actually get, so to speak, impressions of large cosmic relationships. All of this needs to be studied in detail. I fear that what I have been able to hint at, albeit only in a few very sparse lines, may already seem to you to be something very daring. But it must be said that today people have encapsulated themselves in their world of ideas in a very narrow area, and that is why they feel so uncomfortable when one does not stick to the conceptual world that is usually taken as a basis today, I would say is taken as a basis in all sciences. Spiritual science demands an - as experience makes necessary - immeasurable expansion of concepts compared to the present situation. And that is precisely what makes some people uneasy. They cannot see the shore, so to speak, and believe they are losing their way. But they would realize that what is lost through the expanse is gained again as a certain inner firmness and security, so that there is no need to be so afraid of what appears to be an expansion into the boundless.

Of course, it is much easier to make up some model or other — as was also mentioned today in a certain question — than to advance to such ideas. It is easier to say: the truth must be simple! — The reason why one says that the truth must be simple is not, in fact, that the truth really must be simple, because the human organism, for example, is incredibly complicated. Rather, the reason why it is said that the true must be simple is that the simple is convenient in thinking. That is the whole point. And it is necessary, above all, to advance to the fuller content if one really wants to understand reality bit by bit.

The question that was raised here still required that one should present three hours of theory. One cannot speak about the sun through “a brief answer to the question,” because one would be completely misunderstood. And I do not want that. — So, first of all, the answerable questions are answered provisionally.

Question: Does spiritual science find a transformation of the material earth with the entry of the Christ-Spirit into the earth? Is the effect of the power of Christ perhaps particularly expressed in one of the elements found in modern times?

What is the question? — Not true, one must only consider from which point of view such a question can be asked. The question is posed: Is the effect of the power of Christ expressed in the material earth? — You must only bear in mind that spiritual science, based on its research, has a very definite idea about the earth that does not coincide with what one imagines about the earth when one speaks of the “material earth” in the sense of the word “material” in today's language. So the question is actually without real content. If one speaks of something like an “influence of the power of Christ on the earth”, then, since this idea is in turn borrowed from spiritual science, one must also have the idea of the earth that applies to anthroposophy, to spiritual science. And how the power of Christ stands in a certain relationship to the whole metamorphosis of the earth can only be presented in the overall context that I have given in Occult Science. And there one also finds what is necessary to answer the question, if it is formulated correctly.

In response to requests from many course participants, a gentleman from Stuttgart will give a brief report on the lecture given the previous evening by the Pan-German General v. Gleich at a mass meeting in Stuttgart on “Rudolf Steiner as the prophet of a questionable teaching” (see Rudolf Steiner's reference to this at the end of the morning lecture, $. 139/140).

I would just like to add that the aforementioned General v. Gleich, quite a long time before, for weeks before, he proceeded to his lecture and to the writing of his pamphlet, wrote a letter to our friend Mr. Molt, as a concerned father, concerned about the misfortune that he, as the owner of a forty-year-old nobility, not only “handed over” his son to anthroposophy, but also to a completely un-noble lady who is an anthroposophist! As a concerned father, he wrote to our friend Molt, asking him to visit him. Mr. Molt did so, but said that he did not know what to do with him. This was clear to him from the fact that Mr. v. Gleich demanded that we “of the threefold social order movement” should henceforth pay the son of General v. Gleich, who was employed by us, so little that the young man would not be able to marry, and that we should at least protect General v. Gleich from this marriage of his son by paying him so little. After these events, it was understandable that one could not expect the best from General von Gleich's lecture. We then actually saw even the worst expectations exceeded! It was the case with this lecture that Gleich essentially presented the content of a brochure – somewhat more fully developed, we might say – that appeared in Ludwigsburg at the same time. It had already been arranged that this brochure should appear at the same time as the lecture. In this brochure, he makes various accusations against anthroposophy in the most uninformed way, without providing any evidence for what he says – anyone who reads this brochure can see that for themselves – by actually only using the opponents of anthroposophy. This is clear from the brochure's table of contents: a few references to literature where one can find out about anthroposophy. One would think that these would be the anthroposophical books, but no, there are about twenty opponents, with the most shameless one right at the front: Max Seiling! Von Gleich essentially brings nothing new to the table that cannot be found in Seiling's brochure, only in the way General von Gleich used to give his lecture. And it was the case that this lecture was announced “without discussion”. There were numerous followers of the anthroposophical movement in the audience. After he had finished the lecture, which was full of the harshest expressions and included some of the most crude slander, he simply left the hall without entering into any discussion. And when someone tried to get a word in edgewise, and when Mr. Molt, who was there and was also personally attacked several times in the lecture, shouted: “He hereby publicly declares – he shouted this into the hall, in which there was a raging was a raging crowd of Mr. v. Gleich's supporters, he did not consider it worth replying to anything. He had already left the hall. On the other hand, the supporters, who were equipped with whistles and other noisy instruments, tried to shout down the anthroposophists who wanted to object. And it was quite close to a brawl. It was very difficult to protest against the most serious defamations, since the whole meeting immediately took on a threatening character, and it was clear that it would come to a brawl.

There followed some reports about the previous lecture by v. Gleich in Ludwigsburg. Finally, a letter from General v. Gleich to his son was read out.

I would just like to say a few words. Can I have this letter again? I would just like to make a formal comment, a comment that does not concern the matter itself. So, in the letter from Mr. v. Gleich to his son, it says: “[...] If only God had willed that you, a decent Christian nobleman, had fallen for your fatherland, then I could at least mourn you with pride [...] I pray to God to take the blindness from you again, so that you may awaken from it again [...].” (space in the postscript).

As you can see, a lot has been said about Mr. von Gleich's own Christianity; I would like to emphasize this: his own Christianity, in comparison with the unreasonable demand that we have been made to pay our son so badly that he cannot marry. That seems to me a very Christian act! And I do not want to be distracted by these “little piquant matters”, which are also on this program, and talk about the seriousness of the situation. Because I know very well that what happened yesterday in Stuttgart is not an end, but a beginning, that behind it stands a strong organization. And it is precisely out of this feeling that I may thank such a personality as the one who has just spoken - out of a real inner feeling for what Anthroposophy at least wants to be. But I would like to point out the seriousness of the situation and the necessity to act in the spirit of this serious situation.

What I want to say must, of course, be distinguished from a certain understanding that one can also have of such Christians as General von Gleich, for example, who is a Christian! I do not want to make a comparison, not even a formal one, but I just want to say something that I had to remember with this kind of Christianity. There are, in fact, very different kinds of Christianity, even of Orthodox Christianity. When the criminal anthropologist Moritz Benedikt started working and writing in criminal anthropology, he initially found little understanding in Vienna. He then found extraordinary understanding in a director of a home for dangerous criminals in Hungary. He was given the opportunity to examine the skulls of criminals, including the skulls of the most dangerous Hungarian criminals. Among them were the strangest people, including a very devout Orthodox Christian, who, of course, could not behave towards Professor Benedikt in accordance with his Christian intentions. He was very angry with him because he was allowed to examine his skull. And he was especially angry about it because he had heard that the prison director had agreed that Professor Benedikt would get to study particularly characteristic criminal skulls after death. And since he was not released to the professor Benedikt in this institution, he wanted to be at least presented to this Benedikt in chains. During this presentation, he said that he could not admit that, given his Christian beliefs, he should allow his skull to be sent to the professor Benedikt in Vienna after his death; he would then be buried here, and his skull would lie around in Vienna! And he wanted to know how his body and his skull would be brought together at the resurrection. He believed so much in his bodily resurrection – he was a real criminal, I think even a murderer.

Allow me today to take up some of the material that I could only hint at yesterday and which will then lead us to our reflection today. Yesterday I had to take up a sentence that emerged from the worldview of the 19th century, insofar as it prevailed in Central Europe, to the sentence that the tongue draws the word, that is, the power to speak, from the teeth just as it draws in air from the environment. And I drew your attention to how the 19th-century scholar has only to add to this sentence that he can laugh at it. But I have also characterized the distance that lies between the time in which such an instinctive view as the one quoted yesterday falls, and the age in which this philistine-ironic criticism then asserted itself, the age that begins with the first third of the 15th century. That saying falls into the previous age and is, for that age, in a certain way extraordinarily characteristic, for the reasons that I gave you yesterday.

But it must also be felt as characteristic in terms of its content. For I explained to you yesterday how, in order to understand the ability to speak and language in general, one must first familiarize oneself with what spiritual science has to say in the sense of what I have explained in my small writing “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”. There I have shown what significant process takes place at the change of teeth, how that which later still fulfils the human being as a rhythmic human being and a human being with limb metabolism, but which had previously fulfilled him completely, withdraws from the nerve-sense organization and therefore brings about precisely this process, which is formulated there in my writing “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science” as the birth of the etheric body. I then showed you how, in a similar way, we must grasp the process that occurs around the fourteenth or fifteenth year, namely sexual maturation, and I explained how what is involved here can be expressed in the formula: birth of the astral body. But I have said that the events that occur in this way in the life of a human being at any stage of life also take place in metamorphosis at other times — but then in metamorphosis — and that what takes place externally between the human being and the external world at the time of sexual maturity must be sought internally as a process that occurs between the soul and spirit and the physical body within the human being as the process that is essentially the physiological correlate of the child learning to speak, and that we must therefore also seek the clues to a truly rational linguistics by starting from a penetrating intuitive knowledge of this process.

I then said that through the establishment and development of abstract logic and abstract logical thinking, the sphere of experience in which what takes place between the spiritual-mental and the physical-corporeal , is, as it were, displaced, pushed down into the subconscious, and that precisely by leading consciousness into abstraction, Aristotle has cut off the possibility of looking towards the prenatal. For if one had had a vivid picture of the workings of the astral in sexual maturation and in speech, as one instinctively could in early antiquity, as we must now strive to achieve again, then one could also have gradually gained a visual understanding of what the connection is between the I itself and the whole physical-etheric-astral human being. That is to say, one could have advanced in this field through the knowledge of learning to speak to the knowledge of the integration of the human spiritual-soul I into its bodily-physical. And Aristotle established his dogma precisely for the reason that with every single human being born here, the soul-spiritual also comes into being. With that, he removed from the world of knowledge the concept of the pre-existing human soul.

Only the concept of this pre-existing human soul provides real knowledge of the eternity of the human soul. This knowledge is not provided by any kind of philosophical speculation, but solely and exclusively by an intuitive judgment in the direction that I have just indicated. This dogma of the non-existence of pre-existence was then adopted into the church doctrine of Christianity. And it must be emphasized that the denial of pre-existence, in that it was then confirmed by councils, is not Christian in the true sense of the word, but is Aristotelian, and with the penetration of Aristotelianism into Christian doctrine, it became a Christian dogma. The moment that Christianity is able to free itself from this element of Aristotelianism, the way will also be clear for an acknowledgment of pre-existence.

It must be said that this pre-existence, which was not doubted by Western Christian doctrine until Origen, disappeared from Western Christian doctrine as a result of the state decree of Justinian, who helped to have Origen condemned as a heretic. That is why the followers of this non-Christian Christian doctrine of the West are so uncomfortable when someone points out the historical facts in the first centuries of Christianity. They then conjure up all the untruths they can muster about the connections between anthroposophy and gnosis and so on.

Now, I cannot go into these things in more detail here. But what I want to say is this: if one bases the spiritual and soul life in man solely on what lives for the contemplation of consciousness since birth, then one gradually comes to what makes the teaching of immortality a mere article of faith.

It can be said that what was prenatal, what was pre-existent in man, comes through the process of birth into a completely unconscious state. This can only be looked at again when one rises up to imagination and inspiration. But at the other pole of the human being, it appears in his will and emotional nature. In the threefold human being, we have on the one hand the nerve-sense human being, who is connected with the imaginative human being, and on the other hand the limb-metabolic human being, who is connected with the will nature of the human being and with his emotional nature. Because the life of imagination is dampened, subdued to the point of objective observation, pre-existence is initially closed to this objective imagination in knowledge. But what is present with it lives in the sphere of the human being that emerges at the other pole. The nature of the will and the emotions comes to the fore. Initially, no knowledge can be gained from this, only mere belief. And if what is prenatal can become knowledge through the expansion of knowledge, then without this expansion of knowledge, what lives in will and emotion can become nothing more than an article of faith for the human being. Therefore, with the dawning of supersensible knowledge, there also comes the dawning of knowledge of the eternity of the human soul, even in language. It should be striking that we have a word for immortality in the more well-known languages of civilization, that is, for life in the afterlife, but that we do not have a word that would express the eternity of the human soul at the other pole of the human being, its being unborn. But modern humanity will have to reclaim this for itself in language: that the eternity of the human being can be expressed in a word like “unborn-ness” — which, of course, will become more sophisticated with increasing civilization — just as it is expressed on the one hand, on the side of death, in the word “immortality”. But then what can be said about the eternity of the human soul will no longer be a mere article of faith, but a content of knowledge. As long as one remains merely with the afterlife, the question of immortality must be a question of faith. As soon as one passes over to a real knowledge of the supersensible, the question of immortality becomes a question of real knowledge.

This is a connection that must be recognized, this is a Rubicon that must be crossed by modern civilization. For what follows from this crossing will not only have a theoretical effect, but will have an effect in a completely different way. We can say: if we learn to ascend appropriately from something like the understanding of the change of teeth, the understanding of language, to what we then come to, we thereby acquire a knowledge of the immortal nature of the human soul.

Those who in the 18th century thought and spoke of the tongue drawing language out of the teeth, they did not believe, as Wilhelm Scherer strangely enough assumes, that there are only dental sounds, but in their instinctive knowledge they were imbued with the fact that in order to understand language one must penetrate down into the human being, just as one must penetrate down in order to understand the change of teeth. Just as the forces arise there, so must one penetrate down to the origins of the path that, with the change of teeth, points to what appeared at a previous step in the development of man: the emergence of language. These insights were instinctive, subconscious. But anyone who brings the corresponding thing out of consciousness today will find what depth they breathe in a certain respect, and what philistinism such objections breathe, like those I discussed yesterday. But we also gain, by soaring to such insights as those about language, at the same time, I would say, access to the way to recognize immortality. Therefore, the recognition of this supersensible world is at the same time connected with the attainment of a sound judgment about that which surrounds us in life, such as language. And we cannot, without becoming inwardly dishonest, pretend to penetrate into something in our environment, such as language, if we do not at the same time admit: here there are limits that are not merely to be recognized as limits of ordinary knowledge, but which make it necessary to transcend them through a different kind of knowledge.

Thus, true knowledge of the external sense world is already connected with the ascent to supersensible knowledge. In truly healthy knowledge, supersensible and sensory perception must work together, with one supporting the other. Therefore, we may believe that with the attainment of sound judgments about the supersensible, sound judgments can also be obtained in relation to what surrounds us in another sphere as human beings, with which we are connected as human beings and with which we must enter into intimate relationships: social life.

In the style of my previous lectures, I have tried as much as possible to adhere to what could be called a completely scientific style. Today, as we move on to what follows from such an inner state of mind as a social science and social practice, as it must arise from spiritual science as it is meant here, we find ourselves in the midst of practice in the present day. For what is to be said in a social context cannot today be considered in the same way as what has gone before.

It is necessary to take the following into account. By rising to imagination, inspiration and so on, what would otherwise be conceptual and cannot directly motivate the will is pushed into the will. Therefore, supersensible knowledge motivates the will, and there is no moral or religious ideal that is not rooted at least unconsciously in the supersensible. What is gained through imagination only from the sense world can never be socially or morally motivating because it remains ineffective for the will. Therefore, one must say that it could perhaps be conspicuous that the people who got hold of my writing on the social life of the threefold order, when they read it, found nothing in it of what they were accustomed to finding as the basic tone, for example, in my anthroposophical writings. Perhaps some people expected that when someone who professes to be an anthroposophist writes on a subject such as the one contained in my Threefolding of Man, then all kinds of familiar “anthroposophical” judgments must flow into all the details that are discussed there; one must very much mystel to all sorts of admonitions and so on.

Even if such a judgment has been heard many times from the anthroposophical side, it is no different in quality from the judgments of those who wanted to find in my Theosophy, as I was writing it, a literal transcription of what was in my arguments with Haeckelianism, for example. People just cannot understand how real anthroposophy, when it passes over into the will, leads to the environment, that is, to the objective observation of every field that it undertakes, so that one does not simply need to carry the formulas that are found in one field into another. It is easy to believe that those who have been accustomed to hearing this or that word for word over long periods of time will then find it unusual and uncomfortable to hear the same thing in another language. However, the different areas of life require different languages. And the point is that when they are spoken about, they should be spoken about in the same spirit, but not that the same concepts and ideas should be expressed in the same words everywhere. And in anthroposophy it is important that it is not only taken in according to its wording, but that it is taken in according to its spirit. But then one will recognize, when it wants to be active in an eminently practical area, such as the social question: which activity is called for by the need of the time, by all the forces of decline that are coming to light in our time. Inwardly, this treatment of the social question is entirely connected with what flows from other aspects of knowledge, but not from other practical aspects, even through the more theoretical sides of anthroposophy. Therefore, I must ask you today to bear in mind that I will have to depart from the style of my previous lectures, which were kept within the bounds of objective science. For it is necessary that what must live in direct life as impulses of the will, and what must still fight for its position, be grasped in a different form, so that it approaches our souls in a different way from that which one can say: That is how it is! Please refer to what is given in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question' about threefolding. And today I want to speak more from the point of view of great social practice. Not theoretically, but from the point of view of social practice, I want to speak of what must be done first in the broadest sense. What must be done is connected with what has been done in recent years with regard to the threefold social order, despite the fact that it has aroused such tramping disapproval from fellow students, as it did, for example, in Stuttgart the day before yesterday in such a repulsive form. Therefore, I would like to give you a characterization that is very much of our time, which is based on the content that you can read about in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question', in my book 'In Practice: Threefolding', and which you will then find characterizing various aspects of the lectures that are still to be given here today. I just wanted to give a kind of introduction to the general tone that will be struck. But I would like to say that precisely because, in the course of more recent times, humanity, for the reasons that have already been developed, has increasingly — despite believing that it is so very practical, believing that it has to an abstraction that can never bear favorable fruit anywhere else than in the scientific consideration of the inorganic, that humanity thereby became utterly impractical. Humanity had settled into this abstraction and had gradually begun to speak out of this abstraction even about what directly surrounds us as socially concrete life. If you read through all the theoretical discussions that modern, learned economists usually precede their system, you will find how the question figures everywhere: To what extent can the scientific observer of the national economy see into what is happening around us in practical terms? And how should the political economist, in order to do justice to the scientific claim – but that means nothing other than the scientific claim that one has acquired out of habit from the scientific point of view – how should he, this political economist, act in order to meet these scientific demands?

The confusion surrounding this question, and the fact that this confusion expresses a lack of contact with real social life, was something I first had to show in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. I had to show how, in this more recent period, hurrying on to abstraction, the leading human personalities have indeed found the way to live in the technical and social workings of the capitalist system, but how, precisely because their sense for what is human has been lost, nothing has come from these leading personalities for that which is so closely connected with man and his knowledge as the social question. For the connection between theoretical knowledge and so-called practical knowledge had been lost philosophically, too; in spite of Schopenhauer's saying, or perhaps because of the meaning of it, which was so much alive in modern humanity. In spite of the saying, “It is easy to preach morals, but difficult to found them,” word, one could not see how necessary it is to search for those foundations of life that not only preach morality, as Schopenhauer says, and thus want to provide a theoretical proof for it, but that want to establish morality through facts, by pointing to what really lives in the world of facts.

In Kantian philosophy, the confusion in this area is expressed by the fact that a sharp distinction is drawn between what is theoretical reflection, what is criticized in the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and what is the content of a mere imperative and therefore of a mere belief, and what is criticized in the “Critique of Practical Reason.” No attempt should be made to bridge the gap, although, as you have heard from this platform in recent days, Goethe objected to this with his concept of “contemplative judgment,” of “intellectus archetypus,” and then tried to approach what is really practical in the justification of human action from a different angle. Schopenhauer could not find it because he regarded everything that lives in the world of ideas from the outset as something merely pictorial, as something that cannot be imbued with the content of being. He also only referred to the will, which, however, cannot be brought into consciousness for objective knowledge without higher supersensible knowledge. Thus he felt the inadequacy of the theoretical basis of practical action. Through mere theoretical reason he was incapable of pointing out the basis of practical action itself, because in the will he saw only a blind thing, never one to be penetrated by the light of knowledge. For this light can only be the supersensible. And to that Schopenhauer did not want to rise either.

Then came other attempts, such as that of Herbarts. In Herbart we find the attempt to find a kind of basis in practical life for what practical action is. But the characteristic feature of Herbart is that in his practical philosophy he seeks what is basically an aesthetic judgment, that he tries to found practical philosophy as a part of aesthetics. In this way — by implicitly going beyond what he has theoretically in his consciousness — the five well-known practical ideas of perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, right and equity emerge. But man's relationship to them is one of consent, which in turn also requires the motivating force. Here, too, I can only hint at how an attempt was made, I would like to say, to break through what was given with the merely abstracting intellect, but how this attempt, because it did not want to penetrate to real spiritual science, failed in all possible respects.

Therefore, I must point out that the reason why the leading personalities could not find what appeals to people lies in this development of modern historical life. And so they found the way to the machine, so they found the way into technology, so they found the way to capitalism. They did not find the way to the human being, whom they left standing beside the machine, just as the natural scientist leaves the real human being standing beside what he is investigating theoretically through his natural science.

What is being lived out in natural science is rooted in a deep habit of life and expresses itself in all areas. Therefore, the first chapter of my “Key Points” could only be such that it illuminates this effect of a life-alien spiritual life in modern times. It had to be pointed out sharply to me, not by a theoretical consideration, but by the life experience described in my book, that the personalities who were the leaders in all traditions in the artistic, religious and scientific fields, in addition to what mere conception in the imagination in modern times, they created a religious content of feeling that could not arise in the class that was removed from the life of tradition and placed at the machine, which, of what emerged in this modern time, only took on the theoretical abstraction, so that in addition to the life of toil and labor, this class was also confronted with what comes from the emptiness of the soul, which can theoretically be filled with what a theoretical scientific way of thinking can provide, but which cannot live with it.

Thus what was to live through my “Key Points of the Social Question”, and already in the “Call” that preceded it, was conceived in the most eminent sense in practical terms, conceived as something that must pass directly into life, that should not merely take hold of the intellects, but should take hold of the will. And it had emerged from what should take hold of the will.

When it became clear to a larger number of personalities in the outside world how the terrible catastrophic events of the second decade of the 20th century would unfold, something intervened in the events - I will only hint at the direction today, as I said, you can find more details in my books -– that was the most bloodless abstraction, something born entirely out of abstract spirituality. With this abstract type of spirituality, the man who had become President of the United States of America from a scholar had emerged, Woodrow Wilson. In his Fourteen Points, he presented to the world as an impulse for practical action something that emerged only from an abstraction that was alien to life. The practical proof of this was provided by the situation – you can read about it in Maynard Keynes – in which Woodrow Wilson found himself during the negotiations in Versailles, where what lived in his theory was increasingly eroded in the face of what had been worked out in Versailles from the most outdated traditional views. Historical development itself has provided the proof of the lack of life in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. When they were drawn up, however, they testified that with such abstraction one can also introduce something into reality: one introduces something into it, but one introduces only error! It is not that abstractions, when they pass through human beings, cannot conjure up realities; but it is the case that they will always cause confusion or inadequacies in these realities, because they have not been taken from life. Thus the Fourteen Points were able to transport ships and armies across the sea, but these Fourteen Points could not send a vital impulse into modern civilization.

I fear that what is at stake within modern civilization has still not been grasped by a sufficiently large number of people. For in the post-war period in America, Woodrow Wilson was followed by Harding – and we were recently able to read this Harding's inaugural address: the same abstract phrases, the same talk of “human brotherhood” that cannot be motivating because it lives in abstractions, the continuation of Wilson's policy under a different name. I cannot find that there is sufficient understanding in a sufficiently large number of people for the inadequacies that are perpetuated here. It is as if modern man has lost all connection with any enthusiasm for truth, for living truth, and would pass by asleep even such a lack of contact with life as was again heard in the inaugural address of the American president.

At the time when the Fourteen Points first entered modern life, what was contained in these Fourteen Points in the way of alienation from life should be countered by a real practice of life, something that emanated from life, emanated at the same time from the most important components of modern public life, from real social practice, from an understanding of what pulsates through contemporary humanity as a social question.

In a Stuttgart lecture a short time ago, I pointed out such things in a way that was true to life, after Lloyd George wanted to prevent the then impending outbreak of strikes and smoothed over the circumstances. After this gluing of social conditions, I said in Stuttgart: You can use such things, which, despite coming from Lloyd George, are only theoretical, to glue conditions, but you cannot direct realities, and people will see that only theory has been gluing, but that nothing has been achieved in practical life, and that this will soon become apparent. — Now you have it! Now you can see for yourself, from what has actually happened, whether in that Stuttgart lecture the knowledge of social forces was spoken of or whether it was only spoken of in theory, whereas today one not only speaks in theory but also acts in theory in public and especially in social life, where it is truly out of place.

And so at that time, when, I might say, in a classical way, the political fruit of modern abstractism appeared in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, an attempt was made to awaken understanding in those who listened to it at the time, discouraged and reluctant to act , but who were curious about it in a certain way, to try to awaken understanding for the fact that from Europe - at first only Central Europe was accessible - in the form of the threefold social order, something concrete and practical was being opposed to the impractical Fourteen Points. And one could have been convinced if one had had a sense of realities, not just of beloved theories that had then become “practical”. One could have been convinced that just as the impractical abstractions in reality have set armies and ships in motion, that which would have been spoken out of a reality, if only it had been conveyed from the right place, would also have conjured up realities.

But those who had a say at the time did not want to listen. Social practice was far from their minds. They were accustomed to what had emerged in the course of modern times: to go the way to the machine, to the machinery of the social order, but not to go the way to the human being who stands at the machine, who lives as a human being within the machinery of the social order, and who, as a human being, is an active being.

Since people at that time did not understand what the necessities of life demanded, it was a necessary consequence that, immediately after the bloody catastrophe of war had ended, at the instigation of friends in Stuttgart, what is contained in my “Appeal to the German People and the World of Culture” and what is contained in my “Key Points of the Social Question” came about. And in the period when the old powers had disappeared in certain areas of modern civilized life, an attempt was made to speak to the broad masses of the people, to those who had suffered most from all the conditions that I have now indicated and otherwise described again and again. The beginning was basically a good one. It was possible to reach the broad masses of the people. They gradually understood the significance of the impulse of the threefold social order. For it is nonsense to say that it is difficult to understand in itself. The difficulty in understanding it lies only in the fact that one cannot escape from old habits of thinking, that one cannot refrain from imposing one's own habitual, rigid way of thinking on something that presents itself as something quite different. That is the reason, not the difficulty of the matter itself. Therefore, there was also the possibility of finding understanding precisely within those who, out of their own needs, were striving for a relative solution to the social question, and who had already seen that they could not arrive at a satisfactory organization of social life in modern times from the old dogmatic Marxism.

A spanner was put in the works by the fact that on the one hand, not the workers, but the leaders of these workers, and on the other hand, leading figures of the old bourgeoisie, reacted negatively. From all sides, one was, so to speak, left in the lurch with regard to the impulse of threefolding.

At first, in the spring of 1919, those in leading positions were gripped by a terrible fear and grasped at anything that had anything to do with the social question. As a result, some found themselves in the first stirrings of threefolding, as it came to them, but they did not have the strength or the courage to persevere with it. One of the celebrated leaders of the bourgeoisie of a Central European region said to me at the time, when we were in the midst of what was to happen: Yes, in the way you understand and speak to the broad masses of the people, one could indeed have high hopes; but such a thing, you will admit to a party leader of the old parties, must not be left to two people; others are not yet not yet – I am just quoting – that would be effective in this direction; therefore, we do not rely on this whole broad movement, but we want to hold the old order, despite the fact that it may only last for another fifteen or twenty years at most, with the cannons and rifles.

That was the response from one side. But let me also speak of the response from the other side, because I have to characterize practically what it is about. The working population, insofar as I was able to speak to them, tried to get involved in the threefolding movement with relative ease and with inner understanding. Then the labor leaders came, and they became, I might say, green with envy, because now they could be addressed from a different side than from the side of their instilled Marxism. And they, like the others, invented all kinds of slander and dirty tricks to prevent the workers, who are so credulous in their faith in authority in their relations with their leaders, from finding the right way to understanding. But the workers have not yet reached the point where they can find their way in the right way in their faith in authority, which has been handed down from past decades. The moment the workers realize what the lower and higher-ranking labor leaders are really after, much of the well-intentioned belief that still exists in this area will evaporate. They will realize that those at the top, of the Lenin and Trotsky, Lunach arskij, are at the head of the movement, they do not have the happiness and well-being of the masses at heart. They say to themselves and to each other: The broad masses of the people are stupid and will always be racked by passions; there is nothing to be done with them but to tyrannize them; therefore it must not be conspicuous that we also tyrannize, whether we are called Czar Nicholas or Lenin; for us, it is only a matter of those who used to sit on the curule chairs falling down and us now sitting on them; for us, it is a matter of conquering the seats of government!

The moment this realization dawns on the broadest sections of society, many things will change. But then the time will also have come when social practice can really be introduced into social life. Then people will look with practical understanding at what I have said in the second and third chapters of my “Key Points of the Social Question”, which I would like to say exemplifies what can be achieved from such a spirit. Then it will be seen that nothing here has been invented out of thin air, but that everything has been gained out of a hard-won practical life experience, just as in the past, after Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points had become known, this idea of the threefold social organism first appeared.

I speak as someone who spent half of his life, thirty years, in Austria, in this experimental country for social impossibilities. I speak as someone who knows well how people spoke in this Austrian experimental country in a ministry, a liberal ministry. At the height of Austrian liberalism, when the social question was already looming behind liberalism, the liberal Giskra said: In Austria we have nothing to do with the social question, because the social question stops at Bodenbach! — This was proclaimed in the parliament of liberalism in Austria by the responsible Minister of the Interior, in the last third of the 19th century.

Anyone who wants to study how the impossible mixing of the three parts of the social organism worked in this Austrian parliament – I would like to say in its purest form, which I have already expressed in my “key points” by stating that the composition of parliament was based on four economic curiae – can see how things gradually developed.

But what must emerge from every such consideration is that it is a matter of finding impulses for practical social life that speak from this life itself. Then we may come to the time when there will be a sufficiently large number of people who, uninfluenced by the old designations of direction, “right” and “left”, turn their attention to the factual and practical, which, because it flows from reality, may believe it has a right to have a say in the most important matters of life. And these are the social matters.

Today, many people take the view that the world will be put in order if only they can continue the old impulses, and for a long time now they have been trying again to see how it can work by letting the old continue. They turn their eyes away from the fact that under this unobjective, unrealistic approach, more and more comes about that must have a demoralizing effect on the whole of modern civilization.

But a possibility to move forward will not arise until people realize that, without looking to the left or right, they must look objectively at direct life. For only in this way can we develop an understanding of such practical and social ideas that can not only preach an ethical and social life, but also found it. For it is the foundation of this life that should be emphasized in the threefold social organism. Theorists have long repeated from their theoretical point of view that today we must look at what also lives in ethics in a “social” way. Since the division of labor, man has been placed entirely in the social sphere, and one must understand “from the social” what motivates man when he is to act.

As long as this judgment remains bloodless, as long as it remains an abstraction, it will achieve nothing. For as an abstraction it is just as true as it is false. That it is false I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom. The other, truly alarming aspect is that man hands himself over more and more with his freedom to the objective economic process and the like, as is even theoretically expounded in Marxism. And in that man hands himself over to the economic process or the state process or the other social institutions that we have now, naturally more and more his motivation for action becomes a social one. This can and may be understood. For modern civilization aims at people learning to live with people in a division of labor. But if the social order is to motivate appropriate social action in the individual, then it must be a social organism that is capable of motivating the will through its own inner laws. In a living social organism, one must not only preach morals, but establish social morals. In this field, morals must be established not through words and ideas, but through the realities of the situation. These realities should be stimulated by the impulse of the threefold social organism.

The matter was so little understood that the abstract thinkers even mocked me because I kept using the word “impulse” instead of “idea” to suggest that there should be power in this tendency of the threefold social organism, not just talk. That should already be in the life of this work for threefolding: that there is reality in it, not just talk. Otherwise, one can also go around as an ethical traveling speaker, as there are so many of them now, trying to persuade people: Just become ethical again, just become good again, and social harmony will arise! I have always said to those who wanted to hear it, when speaking to the stove in the room: You stove, according to your nature, it is your categorical imperative to warm the room – it will not warm the room. But you don't need to preach if you put wood in and light it. You don't need to moralize in theory, mystify, aestheticize. What is needed is not just a “practical” mixture of ideas, but real impulses to stimulate social forces that are filled with ideas, if it is to be a social practice. And only when we have developed an understanding for this fact will we learn to think correctly about what threefolding actually wants.

But because this reaches down into the soul and will, an enthusiasm and commitment to the truth is required for this understanding of threefolding, not just a theoretical interest in the truth and in a theoretical discussion. As long as we are unable to take truth into our will, to extract it from theory and permeate our whole being with it, there can be no beginning to a fruitful treatment of the social question and social practice.

That is what it is about: that those who seek understanding for what threefolding wants to achieve may seek it with their whole being. Then enthusiasm will not come from blind instincts, but will be stimulated by light-filled knowledge. Then it will not remain blind itself, but will shine itself. When the impulses of the will do not come from instincts and drives, but from an overview of social life, then they do not remain blind and dark, but become themselves seeing and luminous. And the path of the impulse of the threefold social order depends on the will and enthusiasm for the truth becoming ever more luminous and radiant in this sense. And I would like to express the hope that what can be said here in this direction will contribute to inspiring not a blind and dark enthusiasm and will, but a light-filled, willed shaping of life.

Final Word on the Fourth Evening of the Disputation

In the course of the very lively disputation on the topic “Social Science and Social Practice”, a Dutch member of the Society came back to the “World School Association” (see p. 92 ff.). He called for “immediate action”, namely to proceed with the founding immediately (following a Dutch initiative that was supported by iso names). In doing so, it referred to the fact that in April 1912, members of the “German Section” of the “Theosophical Society”, at the suggestion of a member who had travelled from England, had founded a “bund” through such an “act”, from which “what is known today as the Anthroposophical Society originated”.

I do not wish to detain you much longer, but would just like to make a few comments, firstly in connection with what our friend v.L. has proposed here, which is certainly quite commendable, or will be if it leads to the promised goal. I would just like to note that it would be a questionable basis if the matter were built on the same foundation as the “bund”, to which reference has been made. At that time, work was indeed carried out with a certain zeal, in the way Mr. v.L. has roughly outlined it today: people sat down in small committees, discussed all sorts of things, what should be done and so on. But then Mr. v.L. made a statement which, of course, is a small mistake at first, but which, if it were to continue to have an effect, could lead to a big mistake. It was said that the Anthroposophical Society emerged from the work that was so tirelessly carried out that night. No, that is not the case at all: nothing emerged from that night and from that founding of the society! I would like to protect the intended “restless work of this night” from this fate. There was a lot of talk back then about what needed to be done, but nothing came of it. And the mistake that could arise is based on the fact that one might think that something should now be done in the direction indicated by that “covenant”. What actually happened was that those who had been involved in our anthroposophical work, who were already very much with us, founded the Anthroposophical Society quite separately from this federation, and this then developed further, while the “federation” gradually passed from a gentle slumber into social death, let us say.

So, it would be a small mistake! And this must be emphasized, so that the mistakes of that night committee are not repeated in its second edition. That is one thing.

The other point I would like to make is that the aim of a world school association should be based on something really broad and should be tackled from the outset with a certain courage and a comprehensive vision.

Our friend v.L. has quite rightly emphasized that what is to be advocated in relation to a free spiritual life in connection with the threefold social organism must be treated in different ways for the most diverse fields. But this must then also really

so that the way it is treated is appropriate for the territories concerned. I myself will always point out that, for example, in England it will be necessary to present things in a way that is appropriate to the English civilization. |

One must thoroughly understand what is imagination in the face of the great human questions of the present, and what is reality. So one must not present the matter in such a way as to create the belief that English intellectual life is freer than other intellectual lives. And you will see, if you really go through the “key points”, that less emphasis is placed on the negative aspect – the liberation of intellectual life from the state – and much less emphasis is placed on the establishment of a free intellectual life in general. And there it will always remain a good word: that it depends on the human being, that it really depends on the spiritual foundations from which the human being emerges, which spiritual foundations are created for his education. It is not so much a matter of emphasizing the negative aspect, but rather the positive. And I need only say this: if, let us say, spiritual life were formally freed from state control, and everything else remained the same, then liberation from the state would not be of much use.

The point is that positive spirit, as it has been represented here this week, as it has been tried to represent it, that this free spirit be brought into intellectual life internationally. And then things will happen as they should happen.

For example, the Waldorf School is not only a truly independent school, it does not even have a director, but the teaching staff is a truly representative community. It is not a matter of all measures being taken in such a way that 'nothing else' speaks except what comes from the teaching staff themselves, so that here we really have 'an independent spiritual community', but it is also a matter of the fact that in all countries there is a lack of the spiritual life that has been talked about here all week. And when one hears it emphasized somewhere that “intellectual life is free in this country” – I am not talking about Switzerland now, I am talking about England – that is another matter. And it is this positive aspect, above all, that matters. It must then be emphasized: Of course, this will only exist if one tries to actually respond to the specific circumstances in the individual countries and territories.

But one must have a heart and mind for what unfree intellectual life has ultimately done in our time. Not in order to respond to what was said here yesterday, but to show the blossoms of human thinking, both intellectually and morally, that our current intellectual life brings to light, I would like to read you a sentence. I do not wish to detain you for long, and I do not wish to speak from the standpoint from which there was such virulent opposition to anthroposophy and the threefold social order here yesterday; but I would like to read out a sentence from the brochure that had to be discussed here yesterday. General von Gleich writes about me: “At the turn of the century, which also marks a turning point in the supersensible world of Anthroposophy, Mr. Steiner, then almost forty years old, was gradually led to Theosophy through Winter's lectures on mysticism.”

Now you may ask who this Mr. Winter is, whom Mr. v. Gleich cites here as the person through whose lectures I was converted to Anthroposophy in Berlin. One can only put forward the following hypothesis: in the preface to those lectures that I gave in Berlin in the winter of 1901/1902, there is a sentence in which I say: the movement I want to talk about began with my lectures in the winter of 1901/1902. — From this winter, during which I gave my lectures, that Mr. 'Winter' was born, who converted me to theosophy in 1901/1902.

You see, I do not want to use the expression that applies to the intellectual disposition of a person who, because of it, is now called to lead the opponents of the anthroposophical movement; I do not want to use the expression; but you will certainly be able to use it sufficiently. This is the kind of intellectual product of the spiritual life that one could pass through in the present day to the extent of becoming a major general.

So one must look at the matter from a somewhat greater depth. Only then will one develop a heart and a mind for what is necessary. And just because the spiritual life must be tackled first and foremost through the school system, it is so desirable that this World School Association could be established, which would not be so difficult to establish if the will for it exists. But it must not be a smaller or larger committee, but must be established in such a way that its membership is unmanageable. Only then will it have value. It must not — I do not want to give any advice on this, because I have said enough about it — it must not, of course, impose any special sacrifices on an individual. It must be there to create the mood for what urgently needs a mood today! — That is something of what I still had to tie in with what has come to light today.

Finally, I must say something that I would rather not say, but which I must say, since otherwise it would not have been touched upon this evening and it might be too late for the next few days, when the pain of departure will probably set in. I must point this out myself. The point is that it is taken for granted that everything that has been said today will be worked for. But this work only makes sense if we can maintain the Goetheanum as it stands here, and above all, if we can complete it.

Now, however well things are going with “Futurum A.-G.” and however well things are going with “Kommenden Tag”, they will not be any economic support for this Goetheanum for a long time to come. Certainly not. And the greatest concern that weighs on me today, despite all my other concerns, is this: that in the not too distant future we may find ourselves with no economic support for this Goetheanum. Therefore, it is necessary above all to emphasize that each of us should work towards this, that each of us who can contribute something towards this, that this building can find its completion, may do so! That is what is needed above all: that we are put in a position by the friends of our cause to be able to maintain this Goetheanum, to be able to finish this Goetheanum above all. And that, as I said, is my great concern. I must say so here. Because ultimately, what would it help if we could do as much propaganda as we want and we might have to close the Goetheanum in three months from now? This is also one of the social concerns that, in my opinion, are connected with the general social life of the present day. And I had to emphasize this concern because the facts on which it is based should not really be forgotten: this makes it possible to strengthen the movement that emanates from this Goetheanum.

We can see the intellectual foundations on which those who are now taking up their posts against us are fighting. That will be a beginning. We must be vigilant, very vigilant, because these people are clever. They know how to organize themselves. What happened in Stuttgart is a beginning, it is intended as a beginning. And only then will we be able to stand up to them if we spark such idealism – I would like to say it again this time – that does not say: Oh, ideals are so terribly high, they are so exalted, and my pocket is something so small that I do not reach into it when it comes to exalted ideals. – It must be said: Only idealism is true that also digs into its pockets for the ideals!

Closing Remarks at a Student Assembly

At the suggestion of German students, a meeting was held on the afternoon of 9 April 1921 to discuss how anthroposophical work could be established at universities. Dr. Steiner spoke at the end.

Dr. S. has, however, pointed out the three most important issues at stake here: whether to organize or not, as desired. But above all, I would like to emphasize one thing: if you are involved in a movement like ours, it is necessary to learn from the past and to lead further stages of the movement in such a way that certain earlier mistakes are avoided.

What it will depend on in the first place is this: that anthroposophy, to the extent that it can already be accepted by the student body in terms of understanding and to the extent that it is at all possible through the available forces or opportunities, that anthroposophy in its various branches be spread among the student body as positive spiritual content. Our experience has basically shown that something real can only be achieved if one can really build on the basis of the positive.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to point out that years ago an attempt was made to establish a kind of world federation for spiritual science, and that nothing came of this world federation, which actually only wanted to proceed according to the rules of formal external organization. It ended, so to speak, in what the Germans call “das Hornberger Schießen” – a shooting match in Hornberg. But because a sense of cohesion and collaboration were needed at the time, the existing adherents of anthroposophy had to be brought together in the “Anthroposophical Society”. These were now more or less all people who had simply been involved with anthroposophy. It is only with such an organization, where there is already something in it, that one can then do something.

Of course it will be especially necessary for the student body not only to work in the sense of spreading the given anthroposophical problems in the narrower sense, but also to work out general problems and the like in the sense that Dr. S. just meant. Of course, at first it will not be so necessary to work towards dissertations with such things. It has often, really quite often, happened recently that I have been asked by younger students along the following lines: Yes, we actually want to combine anthroposophy with our particular science. How can one approach this in such a way that one works towards one's goal in the right way after the doctorate, after the state examination? What should one do? How should one set up one's work? — I have always given the following advice: Try to get through the official studies as quickly as possible, to get through them as quickly as possible – and I am always very happy to help with any advice – then choose any scientific topic that seems to emerge from the course of your studies, as a dissertation or state examination or the like. Whichever topic you choose, one of them is of course diametrically opposed to the other approaches in anthroposophical terms, there can be no doubt about that. Each is diametrically opposed. But now I advise you to write your dissertation in such a way that you first write down what the professor can censor, what he will understand; and take a second notebook, and write down everything that comes to you in the course of your studies and that you believe should actually be worked in from anthroposophy. You then keep that for yourself. Then you make your two sheets, that's how long a dissertation must be. You submit these. And try to finish them. Then you can really help anthroposophy with what you have acquired in addition to this one in the second issue, bit by bit. Because you actually only really notice what significant problems — special and specialist problems — arise when you are faced with the necessity of really working scientifically on a certain topic and the like. But there is a danger of, I would say, unclear cooperation with the professorship. And submitting dissertations to the professors that are written “in the anthroposophical sense” – these usually do not suit professors – I do not consider this to be a good idea because it actually slows us down at the pace that the anthroposophical movement should be taking.

We need as many academically trained co-workers as possible. If there is anything we lack in the anthroposophical movement today, it is a sufficient number of academically trained co-workers. I do not mean the externality of needing, say, people with degrees. That is not what I mean. But first of all, we need people who have learned to work scientifically from within. This inner scientific work is best learned in one's own work. Secondly, however, we need staff who come from the student body as soon as possible, and who are no longer held back by considerations for their later specialized studies. (You see, it is not at all wonderful that it is as difficult as it is in Switzerland, for example.) As a student, you naturally have the opportunity to join such a group in the first few semesters, if you are free-minded enough to do so. Then come the last semesters. You are busy with other things, and it becomes more difficult. And so the threads that you have pulled are constantly being torn away. This has just been emphasized.

So I would like to say, especially for scientific collaboration: the topics must be processed twice during such a transition period: one that the professor understands, and the other that is saved for later.

Of course, I am not saying that very special opportunities that arise are not seized, and that these opportunities, which arise, are not vigilantly observed by the student body in the most eminent sense and also really exploited in the sense and service of the movement: On the one hand, I hope, and on the other hand, I fear almost silently, that our dear friend, Professor Römer in Leipzig, will now be inundated with a huge number of anthroposophical dissertations! But I think that would also be one of the things he would probably prefer. And such a document of student trust would show that he is not one of the professors just mentioned. That would come from the foundation.

Now, however, we need an expansion of what has already been discussed here in Dornach, namely a kind of collaboration after all. You will work out among yourselves later how best to do this technically. It would be good if, with the help of the Waldorf teachers, who would be joined by other personalities from our ranks – Professor Römer, Dr. Unger and others – a certain exchange could take place, especially regarding the choice of topics for dissertations or scientific papers, without in any way compromising the free initiative of the individual. It can only be in the form of advice. It is precisely for this scientific work that a closer union should be sought – it doesn't have to be an organization, but an exchange of ideas – between you.

The economic aspect is, of course, a very, very important one. It is a fact that the university system in particular, but actually more or less the entire higher education system, will suffer greatly from our economic difficulties. Now it is a matter of really seeing clearly that it is only possible to help if it is possible to advance such institutions, as it is for example for Germany the “Kommende Tag”, as it is here the “Futurum”. So that a reorganization of the economic situation of the student body can also emanate from these organizations. I can assure you that all the things we are tackling in this direction are actually calculated on rapid growth. We do not have time to take our time; instead, we actually have to make rapid progress with such economic organizations. And here I must say that the members of the student body, perhaps with very few exceptions, can help us above all by spreading understanding for such things. It has indeed already happened in relation to other things that a student could achieve something for this or that with his father, or could achieve something with his relatives. Not everyone has only destitute friends. And then there really is something that works like an avalanche. Just think about how powerfully something like an avalanche works, based on experience: when you start somewhere, it continues. Something like this continues to have an effect when you act out of the positive: try to study these brochures that have been published by “Kommender Tag” and “Futurum”, and try to create understanding for something like this.

It is this understanding that the oldest people in particular find extremely difficult to work their way up to. I have seen how older people, I would say, have chewed on the desire to understand what “Tomorrow” or “Futurum” want, how they have repeatedly fallen back on their old economic prejudices, like a cat on its paws, with which they have rushed into economic decline, and how they cannot find their way out. I believe that there really is a bright understanding among our fellow students that could also have some effect on the older generations. We cannot make any progress in any other way. Because I can tell you: when we have come so far in relation to these economic institutions that we can effectively do something, that we first of all have enough funds to do something on a large scale – because only then does it help – and on the other hand can overcome the resistance of the proletariat, which is particularly hostile to an economic improvement in the situation of students, then it must indeed be the first concern of our economic organizations to work economically in relation to the student body.

The 'battle problems'! Yes, you see, that's the problem: the Anthroposophical Society, even if it wasn't called that before, has existed since the beginning of the century, and it has always actually only worked positively, at least as far as I myself am concerned. It let the opponents rant and do all sorts of things. But naturally then the opponents come with certain objections. They say, there it has been said, there that has been said, yes that, that has not even been refuted. It is already so that one finds understanding for it that actually the one who asserts something has the burden of proof, not the one to whom it is attributed. And we could really experience it again and again, that strange views emerged precisely among academics, I now mean lecturers, professors, pastors and those who had emerged from the ranks of academics. Just think, that from, I would like to say, for the outside world honorable - but I say it only between quotation marks: “honorable” - professors, things are put forward against Anthroposoph , and so on, that if one follows these proofs with reasons, it is a mockery, a bloody mockery of all possible methods of asserting something in science. Therefore, with someone like Professor Fuchs, I simply had to say: It is impossible that this person is anything other than a quite impossible anatomist! Am I supposed to believe that he examines things conscientiously when, after everything that has been presented, he examines my baptismal certificate in the way he has examined it? You have to draw conclusions about the way one area is treated from the way another is treated. Such things simply show – through the fact that people step forward and show their particular habits – the symptoms of how science is done today. Even the things that are presented at universities and technical colleges today are basically no better founded than the things that are asserted in this way; it is just that the generally loosened habits in scientific life are revealed in this way. And that is what is needed: to take the fight to a higher level, so to speak.

And there it is not necessary, as my fellow student wished, for example, which I understand very well, to play as a “fighting organization.” That is not necessary. Rather, only one thing: to avoid what has occurred so frequently in the Anthroposophical Society. In the Anthroposophical Society, this always came to the fore, as incredible as it is – not in everyone, of course, but very often: one was obliged to defend oneself against a wild accusation, and then to use harsh words, for example, we say in the case when a Mr. v. Gleich invents the term “Winter” for a lecturer by reading that I myself have given winter lectures, then invents a personality “Winter” and introduces it into the fight in a very nasty way. Yes, you see, I don't think that in this case one would say too harsh words if one spoke of Trottelisis! Because here, even if it occurs with a general, one is dealing with a genuine Trottelisis in its purest form. And in the Anthroposophical Society it was usually the case that it was not the person who was at fault who acted like Mr. von Gleich, but the person who defended himself. Until today! We have learned a few times that it was said: You must not become aggressive in this way. In the eyes of many people, becoming aggressive means defending oneself in this way. It is necessary that you, without emphasizing that you are a fighting organization or the like, still follow things with a watchful eye and reject them. You have to act positively in this regard; and then the others have to stand behind you, behind the one who is forced to defend himself. It is not a matter of our becoming fighting cocks ourselves; but it is a matter of the others standing behind him when it becomes necessary to defend himself. And it is a matter of really following the symptoms of the world-descriptive, scientific, religious, and so on, in this respect in our time, taking an interest in them.

Take this single phenomenon: I was obliged to characterize philosophical, or whatever you want to call it, scribblings by Count Keyserling in the appropriate way, because in his incredible superficiality he mixed in the madness that I started from Haeckel's views. This is not only an objective untruth, but in this case a subjective untruth, that is, a lie, because one must demand that anyone who makes such an assertion should search for the sources; and he could have seen that the chapter I wrote in the earliest years of my writing career is in my arguments with Haeckel, in the introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You can all read it very well. Now Count Keyserling has had a small pamphlet published by his publisher: “The Way to Perfection”. I will not characterize this writing further, but I recommend that one or two of you buy this writing and pass it around; because if everyone wanted to buy it, it would be a waste of money; but I still recommend that you read it so that you get an idea of what, so to speak, goes against all wisdom in this writing “The Way to Perfection” by Keyserling. There is the following sentence, which he put together, more or less as I remember it: Yes, if I said something incorrect, that Dr. Steiner started from Haeckel, then Dr. Steiner could simply have corrected that; he could have set me right, because I have - and now I ask you to pay close attention to this sentence - because I have no time for a special Steiner source research.

So now, you see, we have already brought scientific morality to such a pass that someone who founds a “school of wisdom” considers it justified to send things out into the world that he admittedly has no time to research, that he has therefore not researched! Here one catches a seemingly noble thinker - because Count Keyserling always cited omnipotence in his writing - that is what is so impressive about Count Keyserling, that he always cites omnipotence. All present-day writing has reached a point where it is most mired and ragged. And despite the omnipotence, there is a complete moral decline of views here. And so people have to be told: Of course, nobody expects you to do Steiner source research either; but then, if you don't do any Steiner source research, if you don't have time, then – with regard to all these things about which you should know something: Shut up!

You see, it is necessary that we have no illusions, that we simply discard every conventional principle of authority and the like, that we face ourselves freely, really and truly examining what is present in our time. Then we will be able to notice quite a lot of it today.

I would certainly advise you to take a look at some of the sentences that the great Germanist Roethe in Berlin occasionally and repeatedly coins, purely in terms of form – I will completely disregard the view, which can certainly be respected. Then you will find it instructive. We do not need to be a fighting organization. But we must be ready and alert to take action when the things that are leading us so horribly into decline actually materialize. Do we need to be an organization of anthroposophical students to do that? We simply need to be alert, decent, and scientifically conscientious people, then we can always take a stand against such harm from our most absolute private point of view. And if we are also organized for positive work, then the number of those who are organized for it can stand behind us and support us. We need the latter. But it would not be very clever of us to present ourselves as a fighting organization. On the other hand, it is important that we really work seriously on improving our current conditions. And to do that, we first have to take note of the terrible damage that is coming to light in one field or another – and which really cannot be overlooked, because it involves enormous sums of money – and have the courage to take a stand against it in whatever way we can.

You have already done something if you can do just that: simply set the record straight for a small number of your fellow students with regard to such things, even if it happens only in the smallest of circles. Yesterday, I said to one of our members here with regard to the World School Association: I think it is particularly valuable, especially with regard to such things, to start by talking to one or two or three others, that is, to very small groups, even if there are only two of them; and, to put it quite radically, if someone cannot find anyone else, then at least say it to yourself! So these things are quite tangible in terms of what the individual is able to do. Some will be able to do much more, as has actually already happened with a doctor who was a member and whose fellow students proved to be very enthusiastic. The point is not to make enemies by appearing as fighting cocks in a wild form, but also not to shy away from the fight when others start it. That's it: we must always let the other start; and then the necessary help must stand behind us, which does not allow the tactic to arise, because it has arisen: that we would have started. If they start from the other side, then one is forced to defend oneself; and then you can always read that the anthroposophical side has used this or that in the fight as an attack and so on. They always turn the tables. That is the method of the opponents. We must not let that happen.

As for the World School Association, I would just like to say this: in my opinion, it would be best if the World School Association could be established independently of each other in Entente and neutral countries, but also in the German-speaking area of Central Europe. If it could happen at the same time, so that things could develop independently of each other, so to speak, it would be best. Of course, a certain amount of vigilance is required to see what happens. I believe that Switzerland, in particular, should mediate here. It would be good if we could do it right now. I can assure you: things are on a knife edge – and if the same possibilities for war existed today as existed in 1914, then we would have had war again long ago. Things are on a knife edge in terms of sentiment and so on. And we won't get something like this Weltschulverein (World School Association) off the ground if, for example, it is founded in Germany now, and then the others, for example, if only for a week, had to follow suit. It would simply not come about, it would be impractical to do so.

On the other hand, we must not allow any possibility of our in the least denying our position on these matters. This School of Spiritual Science is called the Goetheanum. We gave it this name during the World War, here and now. The other nations, insofar as they have participated in anthroposophy, have adopted the name and accepted it. We have never denied that we have reasons to call the School of Spiritual Science 'Goetheanum', and it would therefore not be good if in Germany things were allowed to appear as some kind of imitation from the other side.

So it would be a matter of proceeding in this regard — forgive the harsh word — a little less clumsily, of doing it a little more skillfully in the larger world cultural sense! Switzerland would now have to work with full understanding here. So it would actually have to be taken up simultaneously by Central Europe, by the Entente and by the neutral countries.

For the time being, I don't know whether it will take off in just one or two places. This morning I received the news that the committee, which was convened yesterday and which wanted to work so hard, went to bed a few minutes after yesterday's meeting left the hall; it was postponed until tonight. Whether they will meet tonight, we will wait and see. We have already had very strange experiences; and based on this knowledge, that we have already had the most diverse experiences, I have taken the liberty of speaking to you here about the fact that in the further course of the movement, the experiences made should be taken into account.

On the other hand, I am convinced that if the necessary strong impulse and proper enthusiasm can be found among our fellow students, especially for what I myself and other friends of mine have mentioned in the course of this lecture: enthusiasm for the truth – then things will work out.

I would like to say one more thing: I recently read an article from a feature page and I can assure you that what recently took place in Stuttgart is not the slightest bit an end, but only a beginning, and I can assure you that things will get much, much worse. I have often said this to our friends here – a very, very long time ago – and I recently read a piece from a feature page in which it says: “There are enough intellectual sparks that flash like lightning after the wooden mousetrap, there are plenty of sparks of intellectual fire, and it will take no little cleverness on Steiner's part to reconcile people and prevent a real spark of fire one day bringing the Dornach glory to an inglorious end.

I really do think that whatever must occur as a reaction against such action, which will grow ever stronger and stronger, will have to be better shaped and, above all, more energetically carried out. And I believe that you, my dear fellow students, need to let all your youthful enthusiasm flow in this direction, in what we have often mentioned here during this course: enthusiasm for the truth. Youthful enthusiasm for the truth has always been a very good impulse in the further development of humanity. May it be so in the near future through you in a matter that you recognize as good.

Although I will be giving a lecture this evening at eight o'clock for all course participants this week, which is to some extent outside the program, we are now at the end of our spring lecture series. In the short time available to us, we were only able to give hints and guidelines about what we have in mind for a certain goal. And this goal – as you will have been able to sense from these lectures – is none other than this: to show how what is referred to here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can have a fruitful effect on the various individual specialized sciences and also on the various branches of practical human life in the present day. In order to show how we envision this goal, we have first covered, day by day, those sciences that lead into the life of the outer world, of outer nature. We have endeavored to show how barriers and limitations are everywhere being erected by the cognitive endeavors of the present, but which cannot be real barriers and limitations to human soul activity at all, because if they could apply, that which must be the essential goal of knowledge for man, the insight into the human being itself, would never be attainable. And above all, there would have to be a lack of knowledge that can become the driving force of human will and human action. Human will and human action would have to be condemned to continue to shape social life only out of instincts and drives, while a dignified existence can only be established if spiritual insight has the power to dive beyond the mere contemplation of nature into the purely spiritual life and to bring from there moral and social ideals that are powerful enough to impel the will.

Thus, on the one hand, we had to point out how spiritual science seeks to overcome the limitations that are supposed to be placed on external science, insofar as it relates to external nature and the external world, according to the will and the opinion and belief of our time. And on the other hand, we had to point out the other direction of human knowledge: the one that goes inwards, that aims to grasp the human being and himself, so that one can descend into what lives in man as his actual core of being. And we have shown that only when this impulse truly penetrates into the inner being of the human being, lives in knowledge, can a real linguistics, for example, or a real historical science come about, and that this impulse of inner knowledge is necessary to penetrate and fertilize the linguistic and historical sciences.

Thus we have pointed out two directions in which we must go beyond the boundaries that contemporary science wants to set: outwards and inwards. And we have pointed out in these days how the appeal to such a spiritual knowledge resounds to us from the most important signs of the times.

On the one hand, we have the numerous signs that people in the broadest circles are striving to delve ever deeper into the mysteries of the human soul in order to find a secure hold there and maintain a proper balance with regard to their external social life. And when we listen to the most important voices of the human heart and mind, we must say that it sounds everywhere from the demands of the present that scientific knowledge must lead to what must be found for the inner security of the human soul. No prospect of such a goal can be found in current popular science. Because it is not to be found in this, spiritual science believes it must take the step of showing these other sciences how they can be fertilized by true spiritual scientific research.

From the other side, the sounds of social confusion can be heard. Great, formidable social tasks face the people of our time. We will only be able to cope with them if we realize that only what we can acquire in insight into human life, in knowledge of the human being, can give us the strength to approach the great social tasks of the present. The insights that arise from genuine, true spiritual scientific research must again become leading, because only that can also provide direction for the socially necessary endeavors.

It is precisely our intentions that are resented, that we have to approach the question indicated here in a somewhat different way than many of our contemporaries. I have already had to point out this difference on a wide variety of occasions. But this is something that must always be said again. Therefore, I want to say it here today, at the end of our event. Certainly, there are already many people who say: Insight must go beyond the broadest sections of the population; knowledge must be popularized, because it must live in a sufficiently large number of people; only if it lives in them will social insights also develop. And the good will that undoubtedly underlies it is evident from everything that is undertaken in the direction of establishing adult education centres, public libraries, popularization of science, as it is cultivated at our present educational institutions. It is believed that if we only spread what is cultivated at our educational institutions to the widest circles, then it should be avoided in the future that we enter into such catastrophic epochs as ours.

But can we believe that what was there for the people who were directly involved with the causes of this present catastrophic time, that what was broadcast by our educational institutions to the leading circles and did nothing has borne fruit in leading them to better deeds than those to which they have come, can we hope that the same 'spiritual knowledge', as it is also called, will now have an effect when it is spread among the masses? One can only believe such a thing if one wants to throw sand into one's own eyes. Because we do not want that, we who feel connected here with the aspirations of Goetheanism, therefore we must say, despite all that is immediately invoked in all possible enmity and antagonism: No, something else is still necessary! — Not only should something be carried out of our educational institutions, something should be carried in. What must be brought into them is that which can only be brought in if one wants to recognize spiritual research alongside external sensual and intellectual research. What is then brought into our educational institutions will already take hold of the hearts and minds of people, because it is drawn from the nature of the hearts and minds of people, because that which unconsciously slumbers in the depths of people is thus brought to light as a guiding force for human activity. We have already been put in the unpleasant position of having to admit that not only should something be brought into our educational institutions, but above all, much, much should be brought into them. And the fact that we dare to point out such things is what has earned us so much hostility.

Now, believe me: personally, it would be my dearest wish if the urge for such a spiritual calling of the sciences were to arise above all from the seats of our education to date, if there were those who would point out what is needed. Nothing would please me more, nothing would satisfy me more than to see such striving. Yes, that is why I really had some joy — forgive me for this interjected episode — when I was recently in Basel and discovered a writing in a shop window that was entitled “University Reform”, written by a university professor himself, as it turned out. That, I thought to myself, perhaps makes the pursuit of a foundation for the World School Association quite unnecessary when such voices come from such a source. And the writing begins in an extraordinarily auspicious way. One has the feeling that something must be struck with such sentences, which understands the signs of the times in a certain direction: “The organization of our universities suffers from great deficiencies. A reform is urgently needed here. But only those who know the university system from the ground up should participate in this work.

One could also be pleased about this, if those who know the university system from the ground up would participate. But because I would like to characterize a symptom in what I have further learned in this writing, you must allow me to speak briefly about the experience of this writing. On page 4, you will find an expression of what the author now excludes from his consideration of this reform work with regard to the universities: “For example, I will not comment on the question of the semester schedule and university vacations. Because these things are not yet ripe for discussion.”

Another thing that is to be excluded from this consideration: “Furthermore, I will leave the legal status of the assistants in our clinics or our scientific institutes undiscussed. Because I do not trust myself to make an expert judgment on this.”

Now, one could be quite satisfied if these two points were excluded from a consideration of how necessary a reform of our universities is.

Then the actual reforms are discussed in individual chapters. The first chapter is entitled: “The Division of University Teachers into Different Classes.” From this we learn that there are full and associate professors, private lecturers, honorary professors, lectors and assistants. One learns from this that it is necessary to start here with a major reform, that it is necessary, for example, that certain people who, according to current practice, have remained associate professors all their lives, because, for example, they only had to represent a minor subject – otolaryngology or Egyptology – must now, well, now, have to be appointed full professors too; only that one should not go too far, one learns that for all those who are to be appointed from associate professor to full professor, one will have to allow the salary to be less than that received by the real full professors.

Then we move on to the next chapter on the appointment of university teachers. Among other things, attention is drawn to the extraordinary and significant fact that discrepancies have arisen between the governments and the faculties or the professorial colleges, and that it would be somewhat questionable if, for example, too much reliance were placed on the fact that the professorial colleges themselves could be solely responsible for the appointment. Governments have sometimes done better than the professorial colleges.

One must look for a way out. It is true that the writing is written for German conditions, but I believe that it is at least symptomatic of world conditions and can therefore be cited here. They are looking for a way out, for a way to get around the fact that the discrepancies between the colleges and the governments are disappearing, and they point out that the important institution of a “Reich University Council” must be brought into being!

We come – I will quickly go over the things – to the third chapter: the salary of university teachers. Well, there is a discussion of the wishes regarding the salary regulations. I have already told you a little about it.

We come to the fourth chapter: the transfer of lecture fees to university teachers. It is pointed out that some who are very capable only have a very small college, while others who happen to read something popular have a large college and thus receive a lot of college fees. It is pointed out that, for example, someone who only has to read three hours on his subject is given five or six hours so that the lecture money is higher. In short, the only way out is to subject this matter to a thorough reform.

Then, in the fifth chapter, the awarding of prizes to university teachers is discussed, which is also a matter that requires thorough reform.

In a sixth chapter, the way in which university teachers leave their teaching positions is discussed. It is pointed out that many injustices could occur in this regard. However, if a “University Service Court” is set up, which consists in part of the most worthy members of the “Reich University Council”, then these matters will be taken care of.

Then it is pointed out how such instances as the “Reich University Council” and the “University Service Court” can bring order to what is stated in the seventh chapter, the “Service Criminal Law of University Teachers”, which has to be done if one wants to dismiss them or if they are only to receive a reprimand or something similar.

Then we find a special chapter on “Special service assignments for university teachers”. We find a chapter on the “administration of university affairs”, but it only talks about things that require discussion, including whether associate professors and private lecturers should perhaps participate through a representative, and how this should happen, in terms of what is decided.

In an eleventh chapter, the “university assets” are discussed. In a twelfth chapter, how to deal with people who have not quite passed their preliminary examination. In a thirteenth chapter, attention is drawn to the fact that, due to various circumstances, being a doctor is nonsense, and that in the future, therefore, one should not do a doctorate through exams, but that those who have passed the state exam, the assessor exam, the philological school teaching exam and the like should be entitled to call themselves a doctor in the future. But that in turn leads to difficulties, namely, if those who are employed by the state can call themselves doctors – I don't know the inner logical connection, I don't understand it – then there would be no guarantee that they would also be scholars, and therefore a scholars' examination would have to be introduced. Of course, one cannot expect people to be particularly keen on taking this additional academic examination; but one could introduce an extra substitute for it, for example, that the year in which the examination is taken should be counted double towards the period of service for those who have passed it and are subsequently awarded a doctorate.

Yes, my dear audience, I am talking about a very serious matter, I am talking about a book on university reform that begins: The organization at our universities suffers from major deficiencies, a reform is urgently needed, and I saw when I had gone through thirteen chapters, I had already reached page 43, now there were only one and a half pages left; I hoped, now it will come! But lo and behold, now comes a fourteenth chapter: “Scientific Research Institutes.” It says that there is indeed something to be done for these too, that, for example, only those who have been university professors should be employed as real researchers, because only they are real researchers. And then, on page 44, this document concludes: “It is therefore recommended that the salary of members of research institutes should not be set quite as high as that of full university professors of the same seniority; they cannot complain about it, since they are quite exempt from the heavy teaching load. Some kind of provision must also be made to ensure that the members of the research institutes do not use their position as honorary professors to secure excessive lecture fees."

Yes, that really is the end of the writing. And I actually left some things out without noticing. However, when I had finished reading the writing, I had the feeling that the universities consist of professors, ordinary and extraordinary professors, private lecturers, lecturers and assistants. But then I realized: at the university, there are also students, and I wondered if perhaps these students are also somehow connected with the purpose of the universities? I was then able to state that seven and ten lines are devoted to the student in this writing, which covers almost forty-four pages. But the first seven lines on page 5—I couldn't make anything special out of them. Because they actually say so terribly little positive: “Therefore, I will not go into whether the relationship between university teachers and students could not be made more intimate and, above all, whether the office hours of university teachers could be made more fruitful than is now generally the case. Because here administrative regulations would achieve nothing. Here any compulsion that came only from outside would be hopeless.”

Then I wanted to refer to the page about the student body, which deals with students in ten lines. But I couldn't do anything about that either, because they only deal with the “student disciplinary code”.

Now, I didn't actually share what I shared in order to be ironic, to provoke laughter or the like, but rather as a sign of the times, and I would like to make it explicitly clear that I consider the man who wrote this, I consider him to be an extraordinarily good and extraordinarily clever man who just can't decide to reflect on his reform work in terms of anything other than what – as he himself says – can be implemented through administrative measures. Well, I think we have more pressing needs today than those that can be implemented through administrative measures. The signs of the times demand something completely different.

But not only is the author of this paper on “University Reform” a well-meaning, clever person, he is also a person who knows himself well, and he reveals why he does not actually go beyond such things. And there we find something very strange on page 4: “Thus I shall pass over in silence the reform of university teaching in the narrower sense. It is, of course, very close to my heart and is at least as important as all the other reforms, which I will discuss in more or less detail in the near future. Therefore, I find it difficult to remain silent. But what I know about it would essentially only apply to teaching in law and economics, and would have little significance for teaching in philology, medicine, and the natural sciences. However, an investigation limited to teaching in law and economics would not fit into the framework of a treatise that deals with the reform of the university as a whole.

Yes, we think to ourselves, if a lawyer hadn't written the thing, it could say here: “My silence is therefore difficult for me. But what I would have to say about it would essentially only apply to teaching medicine and would therefore be of little importance for teaching law and economics. But an investigation limited to medical instruction would not fit into the framework of a treatise dealing with the reform of the university as a whole.

And now, with a change of subject, I could read this sentence to you quite often and you would see from it – if you call the underlying fact to mind – what specialization, in particular, has led to, as it has become rampant. It has condemned the scientist to inaction. No one knows enough about the big picture to talk about it because they are a lawyer, an economist, a medical doctor, a philologist, and so on. Today, one becomes a scientist in order to have to admit that one knows nothing about the actual matters of human knowledge. Such a symptom is significant because it comes from a clever, well-meaning person who also has the necessary modesty. But I think it points all the more to the necessity that something must be brought into the places in question, not just that something can be taken out to the ends I mentioned earlier.

Therefore, I believe that we not only had to, but must always point out what, on the part of spiritual science, is to have a fruitful effect on the individual branches of specialized knowledge, but ultimately also on the individual branches of practical thinking. For the way in which we have gradually arrived at abstractions in the sciences has given science a position in a dry, impractical, and unrealistic zone of existence. And one can experience it even for the social area that a man like Schumpeter, who is again an extraordinary, clever, clever man and has written a clever essay on imperialisms, concludes with the words: “An ethical, aesthetic, political or cultural evaluation of this process is far from the goals of these studies. Whether this process heals ulcers or extinguishes suns is, from their point of view (namely from a scientific point of view), completely irrelevant. It is not for science to judge.

That is to say, it is the business of science to produce something that stops short of life, that does not lead to evaluations in ethical, aesthetic, or cultural life. In the course of this lecture series, we have seen what a remarkable fact has emerged as a result of this abstract shaping of the definition of science. We have seen how the philosophy of value, the Rickertian, Windelbandian, and so on, has been drawn up. I think it was clear to you from Dr. Stein's remarks what it was about. The point was that on the natural science side, being is now being claimed, but that on the natural science side, where being is being claimed in its totality, one does not want to engage in any further philosophical work. They want to sit down on the chair of science, which represents existence, and they want to make out everything that can be made out about existence from the scientific point of view. On the philosophical side, they make no effort – forgive me, the image is not as bad as I mean it when I say it – to turn the chair into a bench, to push the others aside a little and sit down on the chair of being themselves. No, because the evaluation is left to you, because scientists say: ethical, aesthetic, cultural evaluations are far removed from science, are not a matter for science, you sit on the chair of evaluations so that you have a clear demarcation. One specializes to the point of intellectualism and loses the possibility of really approaching the human being, who certainly cannot help but, by living in being, to experience something that must represent an ethical, aesthetic, and cultural evaluation for himself.

The issues at stake today are truly profound. And that is why the contemporary world should develop the inclination to answer the fundamental question: Is this spiritual science, which claims that it can fertilize the individual specialized sciences and also branches of practical life, is this spiritual science itself scientific? And in this respect, spiritual science will take the view that any engagement with it from the individual sciences of the present day, with full scientific thoroughness and with good scientific prior knowledge — but of course not with dilettantism — is welcome to spiritual science, any engagement with it from a good scientific standpoint is welcome. It does not shrink from the scrutiny of those who know something, and it will be all the more pleased the more those know who want to scrutinize it from the point of view of the individual sciences.

That is the first thing I would like to say to you today at the end of our spring courses.

But the second thing is what many people reproach us for: that we strive for the supersensible in an impermissible way, that we talk to people about an investigation of the supersensible, but that this is unscientific from the outset, because one cannot know anything about the supersensible.

Now, the tenor of this week's lectures was, I might say, automatically directed towards showing that we do not want to go in for supersensible research because we want to go beyond science to some nebulous stuff, not to strive for the supersensible because we want to be unscientific, but to place ourselves on the ground of science as it is now, but to place ourselves honestly on this ground. And by placing ourselves honestly on this ground, we find where in these sciences the gates are out of themselves and into the supersensible world. Not because we want to go beyond the sciences, not because of unscientificity, we speak of the supersensible, but because we are led out of science itself into the supersensible on scientific grounds.

We profess a knowledge of the supersensible that is based on science. Not only is our supersensible knowledge scientific and can be tested by any scientific method, but because we recognize what the other sciences should recognize in their fields, we strive — out of scientificness, because we must out of this scientificness — to the knowledge of the supersensible.

In this way, however, we are truly led to an understanding of the human being as a whole. For what I just mentioned as the way out leads to clarity about the so-called limits of knowledge of nature. But it also leads to an insight into what the human being as a whole becomes when he immerses himself in a knowledge that assumes such limits. It is not just that we do science, but by doing science we are human beings, even if we do not take it into account. We become human beings through the practice of science. We can strike out of our consciousness the concepts of the human essence, but we cannot, in truth, dehumanize ourselves within science. We have to penetrate to the human essence. We cannot do this if we set ourselves the limits and boundaries that are spoken of today in popular science and that are also demanded in practical scientific work. We are set back, so that we lose abilities. If you do not use the muscles of a hand, they become weak. If you do not use certain abilities because you imagine that there are limits and that the abilities must not be applied because otherwise they would exceed the limits, you lose those abilities.

Now, dear audience, from what you have seen here over the past eight days, you will have realized what a connection exists between the development of these abilities, which do not bind themselves to the commonly assumed limits of nature, and that which lives in nature itself. That which only wants to go as far as the limits of the sensory world in the external nature, cannot develop those forces that lead down below the surface of the sensory being and from which something must also be gained for human life.

Goethe points to this, to what must be gained, in his very meaningful, I would even say weighty, statement: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to anyone, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Here we have the path where that which is living knowledge does not kill the artistic, but leads directly into the artistic.

When the last university courses were held here in the fall, I pointed out how what is said here should lead to what was instinctively present in humanity in ancient times: a unification of science, art and religion. This is found. For if we do not cut ourselves off from our abilities, if we do not paralyze them by accepting the “limits of natural knowledge” scientifically, then we will notice how, little by little, what we understand of the laws of education in nature must give way to what, out of this understanding of the laws of education, shapes itself artistically. One cannot understand the human form, which is also formed out of nature, if one does not convert into artistic intuition what are otherwise only general rules in one's own knowledge. When people then come and say: Yes, but an analysis of the cognitive faculty shows that we must not go beyond logic in cognition, but that we must grasp everything with abstract logical rules, and with observation, with experiment — then one must reply to them: But insight, spiritual-scientific insight into the facts of the world, shows something else. It shows that we can talk at length about how knowledge must be, how we must shape knowledge; but nature does not yield to such knowledge. For she herself creates artistically, and from a certain point on she wants to be understood artistically.

There is a continuous path from science into art. And the bridge is not an unnatural one, the bridge is a self-evident one. And the other way should lead across the boundaries that are erected within man. It has been hinted at during this week that one does not come to some nebulous, spongy mystical depth, but that one comes to a clear understanding of the human organization. But one comes to it by going this other way – spiritual science shows this by also ascending to insights on this other way – to something that one would now like to express with a word similar to the Goethean word just quoted. Goethe says: “To whom nature begins to reveal her secret, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” With regard to what one can really recognize when developing scientific thought truth, one can say: When the human soul begins to reveal its mysterious essence, one feels a deep longing for the most dignified feeling of religious devotion to creative existence.

And so, by penetrating outward into nature, we find the path to art; by penetrating inward into the human being through knowledge, we find the path to religion. Whatever has specialized in these three fields must still interact uniformly in the human soul. The possibility of this unified interaction must be found. If, then, knowledge is once more able to immerse itself in the secrets of things, which, as you have seen, has been the aim here during these eight days, then it will be able to approach what wells up from the human being: the social question. Here, because the human being is the external embodiment of a spiritual soul, the impulses that we can gain from an understanding of the spiritual soul must help. The social question, which is so urgent and burning that it must touch our hearts today, especially if we belong to today's youth, can only be mastered, insofar as it must be mastered, if we find our way, so to speak, into the object of the social question, into the thinking, feeling, desiring human being, who is pushing for a dignified existence. That spiritual science strives in this direction is part of its essence.

And when one realizes what it has to say about man, then one will no longer be able to say: an ethical, aesthetic, political or cultural evaluation of the social process is far removed from the goal of such a study. Whether this process heals ulcers or extinguishes suns is completely irrelevant from the point of view of science. The only thing missing is for someone to say that the task of medicine is to understand the human organism, and that, from a scientific point of view, whether or not medicine succeeds in healing patients is completely irrelevant. The way of thinking that lives in sentences like the first one, and the way of thinking in such an absurd sentence as the one I have just quoted to you, is basically one and the same. We have come so far that we no longer recognize absurdities as such when they are clothed in popular scientific formulas, when they sound out into the crowd formed by authorities.

That is what moves us here at the Goetheanum to speak out. We cannot help it, even if there were so many enemies and opponents, but to work together with the student body in such a direction.

We know what it means to be a student. That means carrying in your hearts what must flow over as strength into the future. Yes, this future that now awaits humanity will need powerful souls in whose will and emotions a clear insight into the nature of the world and human life plays out. We know that you will need something like this, and so we speak to you, provided you are willing to meet us with understanding. We have truly called you here with us – although, as you can believe me, we all very much like to see you in person – we have called you here with us because we hope that you will become collaborators on a path that we see as necessary for the present and for the near future, and because we want to do the test – and we will do it more and more, I hope it will be possible despite all resistance – because we wanted to do the test to see how many people can be found in whose hearts there is an echo of what we believe to be a necessity of our time.

We now have to part again, my dear course participants. But I believe there is one thing we can all be united on, united in spite of the distance between us: the realization that we must move forward in the direction indicated here, that we must work, that we must develop the will in this direction, each to the best of our ability. He will develop this will if he gains the necessary insight.

We are not yet in a position – and this is addressed to you, my dear fellow students – to bring what we are able to offer you here to a conclusion by enabling you to pass final exams that will give you life-long positions. We are poor people in this respect, who can only appeal to the sense of truth and enthusiasm for knowledge that prevails in human souls and hearts. We can only hope that despite all the unhealthy influences at work in the examinations and job placements, there are still enough young people with hearts and souls who want to find the truth, for the sake of truth, in what can be believed to be necessary in the signs of the times, for the sake of this purely human necessity. We believe that there is still so much free feeling present that out of this pure desire for freedom, these two endeavors can arise.

Because we must believe this, we who have given these lectures and organized these events over the past week stand here to bid you farewell as you return to the rest of your lives. But we stand here, hoping that you will be our helpers, accompanying you with the thoughts that we have let pass through our souls together, accompanying you with the best wishes that your will to clarity, your will to appropriate action, be strong. In this hope and with these wishes, we part, hoping to see each other again, and from this place we say a heartfelt farewell and goodbye!

Dear fellow students, If I attempt to present to you today something from the field of what for a number of years I have been calling anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I do so in the knowledge that this evening, in what is effectively a first lecture, I will be able to give nothing more than a few suggestions and that I am under no illusion that such a presentation will instantly create any kind of conviction. But perhaps it will be possible, after the general description that I will give, to satisfy specific wishes and to address specific questions in the discussion that follows.

In order not to take up too much of our time, I would like to address the most important point first, and that is to give a characteristic of what spiritual science in an anthroposophically oriented sense actually wants to be. It differs from what is usually called science in the method of its research. And it is convinced that, in the latest period of time, a serious and honest striving in science, if consistently pursued, must ultimately lead to its method. I would like to speak to you in a thoroughly scientific sense, since I myself truly did not start from any theological point of view, nor from any world-view questions or philosophies in the sense in which they are usually cultivated, but rather I myself started from technical studies. And out of technical studies themselves, this spiritual science presented itself to me as a necessity of our historical period of development. Therefore, I am particularly pleased to be able to speak to you this evening.

When we do natural science, in the sense of today's thinking, we first have something in front of us that extends around us as the world of sensual facts. And we then use our thinking, we use in particular our methodically trained thinking, to find laws from a corresponding pursuit of these sensual facts. We look for what we are accustomed to calling natural laws, historical laws and so on. This way of relating to the world is not something that the humanities reject, but they want to stand on the firm ground of this research. But it does its research, standing on this firm ground, I might say, by starting from the point of view of human life itself. It comes, precisely because it wants to do serious scientific research, simply to the limit of scientific knowledge, which is fully admitted by level-headed natural scientists. And with regard to what natural science can be, it is entirely on the side of those who say: In the summary of external facts, we advance to a certain level with scientific methodology, but we cannot go beyond a certain limit if we remain on the ground of this natural scientific research itself.

But then, when what is sought in ordinary life and also in ordinary natural science is achieved, only then does the goal of spiritual science as it is meant here begin. We come to certain boundary concepts by thinking about and understanding the facts around us. I am mentioning here only such limiting concepts, whether they are conceived as mere functions or as realities, limiting concepts such as atom, matter and so on. We operate at least with them, even if we do not seek demonic entities behind them. These limiting concepts, limiting ideas, which confront us particularly when we follow the scientific branches that are fundamental to technology, stand there as it were like pillars. And if you want to stop at the limits of ordinary science, you will remain standing right in front of these boundary pillars.

But for the spiritual researcher, as I mean him here, the actual work begins only at these border pillars. There it is a matter of the spiritual researcher, in what I call meditation - please do not take offense at this, it is a technical term like others - entering into a certain inner struggle, an inner struggling of life with these concepts, more or less with all the border concepts of natural science. And this inner struggle does not remain unfruitful for him.

In this context, I must mention a man who taught here in this city, at this university, in the second half of the last century, and who repeatedly emphasized this struggle that man enters into when he comes to the limits of ordinary science. It is Friedrich Theodor Vischer who knew something of what the human being can experience when he arrives at the concepts of matter, atom, natural law, force, and so on. What I mean here does not consist in brooding, but in consulting everything in the depths of our soul that has led to these concepts, in trying to live with these concepts in meditation.

What does that actually mean? It means establishing the inner discipline within oneself to be able to look, just as one otherwise looks at external objects, at what one finally has in one's soul when one arrives at such a borderline concept; I could name many others to you besides those I have just mentioned. Then, when one tries to concentrate the whole range of the soul on such concepts, abstracting from all other experiences, one makes an inward discovery. And this inner discovery is something quite overwhelming. It shows us that from a certain point in life, in our inner life, our concepts become something that grows in our soul through itself, that is different after such inner meditative work than it is when we take it only as the result of external observation. Just as we observe in the growing child how certain organs, which first appear more undifferentiated, become more differentiated, how we perceive how organs grow, so in such meditative devotion to the results of scientific experience we feel how an inner growth of the soul takes place. And then comes the shocking realization that it is not through speculation, not through speculative philosophy that one goes beyond what is called the limit of natural knowledge, but through direct experience, that is, by transforming what one has gained through thinking into inner experience of beholding.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the first step that is taken. It can be clearly felt how the method becomes quite different and how, therefore, something completely new occurs in comparison to the usual scientific method, which can be objectively recognized more than by anyone else, but also by me, in that mere thinking, mere comprehension, passes over into inner experience. And then, through consistent, patient, persistent experience in this direction, what occurs cannot ultimately be called anything other than an experience of spiritual existence. One cannot speak about the experience of the spiritual world in any other way from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For this experience of the spiritual world is not something that is innate in man. It is something that must be achieved by man. When one has reached a certain level of this experience, one realizes that our thinking, which we otherwise use to grasp our environment, is in a different relationship to our entire physical being than one is forced to assume from mere knowledge of nature.

From the mere knowledge of nature, one notices how the physical changes and transformations, with youth, with old age and so on, also change the states of the soul. With scientific thinking, one can go further physiologically. It can be shown how the nervous system and the brain actually express the structure and configuration of our thinking. And if you follow this matter consistently from one side, you can say: Yes, something emerges from something else, which of course today could only be established hypothetically, that which is thinking, that which is life in thought.

The one who has experienced this inwardly, which I have characterized as being able to be experienced, speaks differently, saying: When one walks, for my part over a soggy road or when a car drives over a soggy road, then one has the impression of furrows, of footsteps. It would obviously be quite wrong to put forward the theory, just because you don't know, that it must have been an extraterrestrial being that created these footsteps, these furrows, or to put forward the hypothesis that there are certain forces below the earth's surface that work in such a way that they have caused these footsteps, these furrows.

Thus one says – and I say expressly, with a certain right – from a scientific point of view: That which is the physiological formation of the brain is what, in the end, is expressed in the function of thinking. The person who has experienced what I have characterized does not say it that way; they say: Just as these grooves and furrows are not raised from within by the inner forces of the earth, but rather as if something has passed over them, so the physical brain has been placed in its furrows by the body-free thinking. And that which, in a certain way, when we entered physical existence through birth, changes these furrows, that is also what, descending from spiritual worlds, does the work of shaping these furrows in the first place.

In this way, it is established that the soul is absolutely the active principle, that it is what first gives form to the body. I know, my dear audience, that hundreds of objections can be raised against what I am saying, if one starts only from the intellectual-theoretical point of view. But spiritual science must point to the experience. It must point out that until this experience takes place, one is justified in believing that thought life arises as a function from the physical brain, whereas when one experiences this thought life oneself, one knows how it is active in itself, how it is substantial and moving in itself, and how it is actually active in relation to the passivity of the physical body.

So what is presented as a first initial experience is not something that is gained through a straightforward continuation of ordinary scientific methods, but only through a metamorphosis, only through a transformation of the ordinary scientific method into a method that can only be experienced, which consists not in speculation but in an inner experience.

That is one side of it. The other side of this inner experience relates more to the inner development of the human will. By looking at our lives, we can see the transformations we have undergone in life. We think back to how we were in our inner soul and outer bodily state one, five, ten years ago, and we say to ourselves: we have undergone changes, transformations. These changes, these transformations that we undergo, how do we undergo them? We passively surrender to the outside world in a certain way. We just need to say: hand on heart, how active are we in what we have initially become through the outside world? The outside world, heredity, education and so on, shapes us; and what shapes us in it continues to have an effect. As a rule, we are actually the passive ones. If we now transform this into activity, if we form out of it what one could call in the most eminent sense self-discipline, and in the way I will characterize it in a moment, then the second element is added to what we have characterized as the first element in the path of spiritual research. If one brings it to that - and this can only be achieved through methodical schooling in the sense presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other books - if one brings it to that through methodical schooling, to say to oneself, “I will plan, even if only a small part of what that is to arise in me, I will resolve that this or that quality shall become mine. And if I succeed in actually producing such a quality in me, perhaps only after years, by a strong arousal of the will, if I make of myself that which I would otherwise only passively experience in life , if I take my will, if I may express it somewhat paradoxically, into my own hands and take full control of my development – in a certain part one can of course only do so – then what otherwise is merely memory, in a certain way, also comes together to form a real area. You get a kind of overview of your life, as if you were looking at a series of things, and you then come to know the will in its true character.

While one gets to know thinking as something that actually detaches itself from the physical the more one enters into life, one comes to recognize one's will in such a way that it actually encompasses the physical more and more, permeates us more and more, flows through us, and that basically death is nothing more than a struggle of the will with the physical functions have reached a certain limit when we pass through an earlier or later death, and that then that which can no longer work our body in this way, the will, is completely absorbed in what the body does, that this will detaches itself and that an element of the soul now actually enters a real, a spiritual world when we pass away.

So it is a matter of the fact that what is usually called the idea of immortality is not pursued by any speculation of the spiritual science meant here, that basically this spiritual science completely breaks with the way in which the world usually approaches this idea. The point is that spiritual science, as a continuation of scientific research through the training of thought and will, actually manages to grasp what we carry within us, thinking and willing, in such a way that we can also grasp it when this soul, which lives in thinking and willing, lives in a disembodied way that can no longer be reached by the senses.

Of course, what I have briefly explained here will be regarded by the widest circles of our present time as something fantastic and visionary. But how could it be otherwise? Everything that comes into the world as something new and seemingly contradicts what was already there is initially regarded as something fantastic and visionary. But I do not believe that it will remain so for all time, that people will not recognize that what has been described here as the method of spiritual science, at least in two of its characteristic elements, is only a continuation, but a lively continuation, of what natural science actually achieves, but with which natural science comes up against a certain limit.

Today, when one speaks of the spirit in general, it is no longer entirely taken amiss. This was still the case in the last third of the 19th century, when a certain materialistic way of forming a world view out of scientific knowledge was used to draw the only logical conclusion of scientific thinking itself. Today it is again permitted to speak of the spirit, at least in a speculative way. But one is still very much taken aback when one speaks of the spirit in the way I have just done, because that has a certain consequence.

When one has acquired what I have called in my book “The Riddle of Man” the “seeing consciousness,” when one has acquired what arises out of such developed thinking and willing, then one knows oneself in a spiritual world through this seeing consciousness - just as one knows oneself through one's eyes and ears in a world of color and sound. In a sense, the world around us is filled with spirit. Just as the world around a person who was born blind is filled with something new when, after undergoing an operation, he begins to see colors at a certain point in his life, so it is when this seeing consciousness occurs. The world, to which one was accustomed to look upon as the world of the senses and of the combining intellect, is filled with spirituality. And the spirit becomes something concrete. The spirit becomes something that one can follow in its concrete formation. One no longer speaks of the spirit in general. When someone speaks of the spirit in general, it is as if a person were walking across a meadow where flowers are growing. If you ask him: what kind of flower is that and what kind is that, he will answer: they are all plants, plants, plants. So today we also allow people to say: behind the sensory world there is a spiritual world. But spiritual science cannot stop there. It must examine the spiritual facts in the concrete – because the spiritual world is around us just as the colored or the sounding world is – in the same way that one otherwise examines the colored and sounding world with the senses and the combining intellect. And in doing so, one acquires, above all, a very specific way of relating to the world. It is also the case that if you are born blind and suddenly gain your sight, you acquire a different relationship to the world. You first have to find your bearings; you know nothing about spatial perspective, you have to learn it first. So, of course, you also have to acquire a certain relationship, a certain position to the world when you pass over into the seeing consciousness. Then many things appear to you in a peculiar way. That is why the spiritual researcher is still misunderstood by his contemporaries.

You see, the spiritual researcher never says that what has been gained through the method of strict natural science, or what has been drawn from the consequences of these results of strict natural science, is in any way logically incorrectly followed or anything of the sort, but he is compelled to add something from his spiritual insight, which is then not merely added on, but which in many respects completely changes the results of natural science.

Take geology, for example. I will pick out one example. It is better to talk about specific questions than to use general phrases. I understand completely and was able to follow this method myself: if you examine the geological layers that lie on top of each other from what is happening around us today in the formations of rocks, in the deposits of rivers and water and so on, and then calculate - even if the subject is not always a real calculation, but only something approximate – when you calculate how long these rock layers have existed, then you get the known figures. And then, as you all know, we arrive at the beginning of the earth's development, where the earth - as is hypothetically assumed - formed out of something, out of a kind of primeval nebula or something similar. I do not need to go into this in more detail. You are familiar with all this.

But for the spiritual researcher it is so, simply because he has experienced such things as I have described to you - though only in outline, to stimulate interest, not to convince - for the spiritual researcher it is so that he must say to himself: I assume that someone is examining the changes in a human organism, say the changes in the heart every five years. I follow how the human heart or another organ changes over the course of five or ten years, what happens there. And now I calculate what I have seen, if I simply consistently deduce from what I have calculated what it was like three hundred years ago. I get a certain result, albeit purely arithmetical, of what this human heart was like three hundred years ago. The only objection to this is that this heart did not even exist at that time. Just as correct as the geological approach would be to conclude from the small changes in the human heart what that heart was like three hundred years ago, only it was not even there at that time. Equally correct – for I fully recognize that what geology reveals has at least a relative correctness – is also everything that is deduced from the geological facts for the development of the earth. But we then transpose what arises for us as a consequence of our calculation into times when the earth did not yet exist in its present form. Or we transpose what arises from our observations, which were made over a limited period of time, into an epoch that lies millions of years ahead, by calculating an end state and speaking of entropy or the like. For the spiritual researcher, this is the same as if he were to calculate what the nature of the human heart will be after three hundred years.

That is what you arrive at when you convert the ordinary scientific method into something that can be experienced. Because, you see, man is actually like an extract of the whole cosmos. In man you find - somehow changed, somehow extracted, compensated or the like - what is present in the cosmos as a law. You will ask me: Yes, how can you, a dreamer, claim that the earth has not yet existed in its present form? You must show us a way to arrive at such a claim.

I will attempt to characterize, albeit only sketchily, how one arrives at such assertions as I have put forward. One discovers, by experiencing the volition, the thinking, as I have described to you, that man really is a kind of microcosm. I do not say this as a phrase, as the nebulous mystics say, but in the awareness that it has become as clear to me as any solution to a differential equation, out of complete logical clarity. Man is inwardly a compendium of the whole world. And just as in our ordinary life we do not know only what is sensually surrounding us at the moment, just as we, by looking beyond what is sensually surrounding us at this moment, look at the image of something we have experienced about ten or fifteen years ago , how it emerges before us as something that no longer exists – but something of it is present in us, which enables us to reconstruct what was present back then – it is the same with the expanded consciousness that arises from the transformation of ordinary thinking and willing. In that man was actually connected with all that is past, only in a more comprehensive sense, in a completely different sense, in a more spiritual sense, was connected with what is past than he was connected with experiences ten or fifteen years ago, which he can bring up again from his inner being, so it is possible, when consciousness is broadened, we simply find out what was there from a cosmic memory, where we were present, and what does not live on in us for ordinary consciousness, but what lives on for the consciousness that has arisen through the metamorphosis that I have described.

It is therefore nothing more than an expansion, an increase of that power which is otherwise our power of remembrance, whereby man inwardly, simply from his own nature, which is a summary of the macrocosm, constructively resurrects that which actually was on our earth in a certain period of time. Man then looks at a state of the earth when it was not yet material. And whereas he would otherwise have to construct something from the present-day experiences of geology that was supposed to have existed at that time, he now looks at a point in time when the earth was not yet there, when it was in a much more spiritual form. He sees, by constructively recreating what lives in him, that which actually underlies the formation of our earth.

And it is the same with what can emerge in us in a certain constructive way from a future state of the earth. I know how unsatisfactory such a sketchy description must be, but you can see from it that what I characterize as spiritual science is not drawn from thin air or from fantasy.

It is, of course, something unusual. But then, once you have completed the metamorphosis of consciousness, what you constructively represent inwardly is just as clear to your consciousness as what you conjure up in mathematics or geometry, which is also constructed from within the human being.

And when someone comes and says, “Yes, but you have to assert something that all people can understand,” I say, “Yes, that is also the case, but the first thing to be considered is that the person who wants to understand something must first go through everything that is necessary to do so – just as someone who wants to solve a differential equation must first go through what will enable him to solve it.

And if someone objects on the other hand: Yes, mathematical geometry only presents something to our consciousness that we apply when we follow the reality of the external world – then I say: Yes, that is so, but if we constructively present this to ourselves, then we arrive at the conviction that it is a mere formality. If you are aware of what is being characterized, you know that it is a reality. And if someone says that this might be self-suggestion, then I say: everything that gives us the possibility of saying that something is real is only a result of experience. And when some people object that someone could be mistaken, that someone could, for example, have the vivid thought of citric acid when drinking something and if they are sensitive, they could even have the taste of lemon – I say: that is possible. But just as in ordinary life one can distinguish the mere thought of heat from the heat that comes from actually touching a hot iron, so too, through inner experience, if one has the seeing consciousness, one can distinguish between what is mere imagination, what is mere suggestion, and what is reality, because the grasping of all reality is an inner experience. And it is necessary to follow things through to the end, not to stop somewhere. Anyone who stops short of where the path should actually lead may succumb to suggestion. I therefore say: It is indeed possible, if someone is sensitive and gives themselves over to autosuggestion, to say: I have the thought of lemonade, I even feel the taste – but the thought of lemonade will not quench one's thirst. What matters is that one passes from the sensation of taste to quenching one's thirst, that one follows the path consistently. The experience must be pursued consistently, then the fact that one designates something as reality in the spiritual sense is also entirely the result of the experience. The designation of a sensual reality or reality cannot be theoretically established, but is a result of experience.

Now, dear attendees, I have characterized the spiritual science that comes to a modern, natural scientific person when they go through what life offers today. This life has truly changed extraordinarily in the last thirty to fifty years, especially through the advances in technology. When I think back to the time when the first chair of technology was established in Vienna in the early 1880s, and consider all that has happened since then, I get some idea of how much this modern man has changed as a result of everything that has been drawn into our cognitive, our moral, but especially our social life. Those who have honestly gone through this, who do not say out of some prejudice: Oh well, science can't give us anything! but who takes the view that natural science can give us a great deal, who is completely absorbed in the triumphs of modern natural science, can come to realize that what underlies the world spiritually must be grasped in the way I have tried to present to you today.

Then one looks back to earlier times in the development of humanity and says to oneself: In these earlier times of human development, people hardly spoke of the spirit at all. And the way in which they spoke of the spirit has been preserved traditionally in various religious beliefs, which, if one is completely honest and does not want to keep double accounts of life, one truly cannot reconcile with the results of ordinary natural science today. These spiritual experiences, it must be said, arise from a completely different state of consciousness in people. What we have learned through the three to four centuries in which scientific methods have been developed, what we have become as a state of mind through the Copernican and Galilean way of thinking, through Kepler, we have gone through everything that has subtracted the technical laws from the laws of nature in more recent times, through Kepler, by The entire configuration of the soul has changed, not by becoming more theoretical, but by becoming more conscious. Through the development of humanity, we have necessarily left certain instinctive states of earlier ages. And we look back at what earlier ages sensed as spirituality, which has been preserved in religious traditions, and we say to ourselves: What was there then as spirituality was grasped by human instinct. One could not say that this was dependent on such a heightening of consciousness through the methods of natural science, through the methods of social experience in modern times. People spoke in such a way that, when they saw natural phenomena, these natural phenomena, as it were, endowed them with the spirit of what they were speaking about. How did an ancient civilized Egyptian relate to the world? He looked up, followed the course of the stars, the configuration of the starry sky. He saw not only what Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler saw in this starry sky, but he saw something that at the same time revealed a spiritual reality for him. Just as, when I move my arm, a soul-active underlies this hand movement, so the human being of earlier epochs felt in what happened externally that which underlies this external event as a spiritual, but instinctively.

Then came the more recent period, the time of natural science. I would like to say that we look back on a long period of human development that did not actually reach its conclusion until around the middle of the 15th century, when people could not help but see what was around them with their senses as something spiritual at the same time. When we speak of physical states today, of solid, liquid, gaseous forms, we speak in such a way that we consider the material. Ancient man, when he spoke of what are for us today the physical states, saw them as elements, but these elements were not merely material; they were the spiritual that manifested itself in them. What surrounded man as the material world was for him just as much the external physical-spiritual expression of the spiritual-soul as the physical organism is for us an expression of the spiritual-soul - but all instinctively. This path has necessarily been abandoned in the last three to four centuries, when humanity passed over to something quite different, which then became guiding in civilization. Mankind moved on to what distinguished the observation of nature from mere observation, which is always connected with the instinctive, with the spiritual observation of nature, which is still hidden in the name 'contemplation'. Man moved on from mere observation of nature to what could be called experimental comprehension of nature.

Since Bacon and others have been working, the mere observation of nature has been replaced by the experimental comprehension of nature. We do the experiment in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet, which we then extend to the technical work. In that which we ourselves bring about as a condition for some natural event, we survey these very conditions. Through the experiment, we are in a different position than in mere observation of nature. In nature, I cannot know whether what is revealed to me, be it for my mind or for my imagination, whether that is also some totality or whether I have to delve into it, much, much deeper than the thing initially presents itself to me. In short, despite all exact observation, what I observe in nature remains before me as an unknown. When I have an experiment before me, I establish the conditions myself; I follow how one thing is evoked out of another, and what is then still unknown is basically what is actually of interest. When you design an experiment and then observe what can be observed, you are actually looking at the result of what follows from the conditions that are manageable for you. In the experiment, everything is transparent in a completely different way than what I observe in nature.

And so, little by little, people have become accustomed to regarding themselves as interpreters of nature in the manageable context of the experiment, to some extent to tracing the law of nature where they themselves can trace the conditions of its manifestation. However, this experimental method is still linked to a certain inner yearning that used to underpin knowledge through and through. In those ancient times, when there was as yet no technology, no natural science in our sense, what was regarded as science had emerged primarily from the desire to know, from the desire to recognize, to explore, “what holds the world together in its inmost being,” if I may express it in this way. Now that the experimental method has emerged, it is not only the desire for knowledge that drives us, but also the desire to recreate what nature forms. But the old desire for knowledge still lives on. We recreate what we want to see in the experiment in order to unravel nature itself through what we can see. In recent times, technology has emerged from this experimental method with a certain matter-of-factness, and with technology we have entered a new phase.

We can therefore say that in the history of human development, we first have research determined by the desire for knowledge, then the experimental method, which, however, still combines the longing of the old quest for knowledge with the recreation of nature. But if we trace the path from what can be experienced through experimentation to what happens as a result of the laws of nature that are recognized through experimentation, to what then happens through technical design, which so deeply intervene in human and social life, we have to say to ourselves: there is a third element present that passes from what we still have in recreating nature to what is now creative in man himself. This creative power – I do not believe that I am speaking to completely insensitive souls when I say the following about this creative power: the person who, with that peculiar characteristic style, with that peculiar state of soul constitution is undergoing a technical training, feels differently in this training than someone who is undergoing, for example, a theological training, which is a reproduction of the oldest methods of knowledge, or an already experimental scientific training. Those who undergo an experimental scientific training apply the mathematical, the geometrical, the theoretical-mechanical, the photometric, and so on, to what they observe there. He, as it were, recalculates nature.

One stands on a completely different level of consciousness when one first has before one that which is, as it were, completely inwardly transparent: the mathematical, the geometrical. And when one applies this not only in experiment, that is, in reproducing nature, but when one applies it in completely free creation to the design of machines. When you see that what you have experienced as mathematics, as theoretical-mechanistic chemistry, penetrates into the design of a technical structure, you experience the world in a completely different way than the mere naturalist or the theorizing technician.

What is the actual difference? One often fails to consider this. Imagine that in our ordinary, trivial lives we describe everything as “real”, even that which is not real in a higher sense. We call a rose “real”. But is a rose real in a higher sense? If I have it here in front of me, torn from the rose stem, it cannot live. It can only be shaped as it is when it grows on the rose stem, when it grows out of the rose root. By cutting it off, I actually have a real abstraction in front of me, something that cannot exist as I have it in front of me. But this is the case with every natural structure to a certain extent. When I look at a natural formation, even at a crystal, which is the least likely to exist, I cannot understand it just by looking at it, because it basically cannot exist by itself any more than the rose can. So I would have to say: this crystal is only possible in the whole environment, perhaps having grown out of a geode in the mountain formation.

But when I have before me something that I myself have formed as a technical structure, I feel differently about it. You can feel that, even feel it as something radically significant in the experience of the modern human being, who looks at what technology has become in modern life from the perspective of his or her technical education. When I have a technical structure that I have constructed from mathematics, from theoretical mechanics, I have something in front of me that is self-contained. And if I live in what is basically the scope of all technical creation, then I have before me not just a reflection of the laws of nature, but in what has become technical entities out of the laws of nature, I actually have something new in front of me. It is something different that underlies the laws of the technical structures than what also underlies inorganic nature.

It is not just that the laws of inorganic nature are simply transferred, but that the whole meaning of the structure in relation to the cosmos becomes different, in that I, as a freely creating human being, transfer what I otherwise experience from the design of physical or chemical investigations into the technical structure.

But with that, one can say: in that modern humanity has come to extract the technical from the whole scope of the natural, in that we had to learn in modern times to live in the realm of the technical in such a way that we we stand with human consciousness in a completely different relationship to the technical than to that which is produced in nature, we say to ourselves: Now it is for the first time that we stand before a world that is now, so to speak, spiritually transparent. The world of nature research is in a certain way spiritually opaque; one does not see to the bottom of it. The world of technology is like a transparent crystal - spiritually understood, of course. With this, a new stage in the spiritual development of humanity has truly been reached, precisely with modern technology. Something else has entered into the developmental history of humanity. That is why modern philosophers have not known how to deal with what has emerged in this modern consciousness precisely through the triumphs of technology. Perhaps I may point out how little the purely philosophical, speculative way of thinking could do with what has seized modern human consciousness, precisely from the point of view of technology. Today we are much more seized by what emanates from the leading currents of human development than we realize. What is now general consciousness was not yet there when there were no newspapers, when the only spiritual communication was that people heard the pastor speak from the pulpit on Sundays. What is now general education flows through certain channels from the leading currents into the broad masses, without people being aware of it. And so, basically, what came through technical consciousness has, in the course of a very short time, shaped the forms of thought of the broadest masses; it lives in the broadest masses without them being aware of it.

And so we can say that something completely new has moved in. And where a consciousness has become one-sided - which, fortunately, we have not yet achieved in Europe - where a consciousness has become one-sided, almost obsessed with this abstraction, a strange philosophical trend emerged, the so-called pragmatism of William James and others, which says: truth, ideas that merely want to be truth, that is something unreal at all. In truth, only that which we see can be realized is truth. As human beings, we set certain goals for ourselves; we then shape reality accordingly. And when we say to ourselves: This or that is real according to a natural law, we form a corresponding structure out of it. If we can realize in the machine, in mechanics, what we imagine, then it is proved to us by the application in life that this is true. But there is no other proof than that of application in life. And so only that which we can realize in life is true. The so-called pragmatism, which denies all logical internal pursuit of truth and actually only accepts the truth of truth through what is accomplished externally, figures today in the broadest circles as American philosophy. And that is something that some people in Europe have also grasped for decades, even before the war.

All those philosophers who still want to think in the old ways know of no other way to proceed with what has emerged as a newer technique, as the awareness of newer techniques, than to set the concept of truth aside altogether. By stepping out of the instinctive grasping of nature, out of the experimental recreation of nature, towards the free shaping of nature, nothing remains for them but free external shaping. The inner experience of truth, that spiritual experience of the soul that can permeate the soul, is actually denied, and only that which can be realized in the external, purposeful structures is considered truth. That is to say, the concept of truth that is inherent in the human soul is actually set aside.

Now, another development is also possible; it is possible that we will experience how something is emerging from the actual substance of technical structures, something that is no longer natural, in which there is now nothing that we can intuit, but only what we can survey. For if we cannot grasp it, we cannot shape it. By experiencing this, by thoroughly permeating ourselves with what can be experienced in it, a certain need must awaken in us all the more. This new external world presents itself to us without the inner realization of the ideas, without the inner experience of the ideas. Therefore, through this new experience, we are prepared for the pure experience of what spirituality is, of what man, abstracted from all external observation, must experience within, as I tried to outline at the beginning of my reflections today.

And so I believe that, because we have advanced in the developmental history of humanity to a view of that reality that we can survey externally, where we can no longer see any demoniacal, ghostly aspect in externality, because we have finally arrived at the point where we can no longer interpret the external sensual in such a way that we say it is opaque to us and we can assume that behind it there is something spiritual. So we must seek to find the forces for the spirit within us through the development of the soul.

It has always seemed to me that a truly honest experience of the consciousness that comes to us precisely from technology calls upon us – because otherwise what is intimately connected with our human nature would almost would otherwise be lost to us - to experience in our inner being what spirituality is, and thus to add to the one pole of transparent mechanics and transparent chemistry that which can now be attained through spiritual insight, that which can be presented to people in the spirit. It seems to me that it is necessary in our time for the spiritual insight of Anthroposophy to reveal itself for the reason that we have indeed reached a certain stage of development in human history.

And there is another factor, honored attendees: with this newer technology, a new social life has emerged at the same time. I do not need to describe how modern technology has created modern industrialism, how this modern technology has produced the modern proletariat in the form it is in today. But it seems to me that if we only want to take the standpoint of the earlier scientific method, the standpoint of that which emerges from observation, then our thoughts fall short. We cannot grasp what is truly revealed in social life. To grasp what emerges in social life from the human, it is necessary that we come to truths that reveal themselves only through human nature itself. And so I believe that Marxism and other similar quackery, which today put people in such turmoil, can only be overcome if one finds special methods that are applied as a necessary counterbalance to technology applied to the social life of human beings, and if, through this, it becomes possible to bring spirituality into the outer life, into the broad masses, because one has found this spirituality through inner experience, hard,

Therefore it is no mere accident that out of the same soil out of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose for me, there also grew, truly unsought, what I tried to present in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. I simply tried to draw the consequences for social life from what spiritual-scientific knowledge is. And what I have presented in this book emerged quite naturally.

I do not believe that without spiritual science one can find the methods to grasp how man stands to man in social life. And I believe that, because we have not yet been able to recognize social life, this life will not allow itself to be conquered by us and that we will therefore initially be plunged into chaos at the moment when, after the terrible catastrophe of war, people are faced with the necessity of rebuilding it. It is necessary to carry out what is to be carried out on the basis of spiritual laws, not on the basis of the law that a misconceived understanding believes can be based on natural laws, as is the case in Marxism and other radical formulations of social science.

So, dear attendees, I was able to give a reason for something that is actually quite personal to me, right here in front of you. And I may say: Speaking to you now, I feel transported back to an earlier time, to the 1880s, when we in Central Europe were living in a time that was felt by all to be a time of ascent. We – those people who, like me, have grown old – have now arrived at a point in time where the hopes of the springtime that emerged back then take on a rather tragic form in our minds. Those who look back on what then seemed like an invincible ascent now look back on something in which, for many people, something reveals itself that was in fact an error in many respects.

In speaking to you, I am speaking to fellow students who are in a different situation. Many of you are probably the same age as I was when I experienced that springtime hope; now you are experiencing something that is very different from the fantasies that arose from the springtime hopes of that time in the human soul. But someone who is as filled with the possibility and necessity of spiritual knowledge as the one speaking to you can never be pessimistic about the power of human nature; he can only be optimistic. And that is why it does not appear to me as something that I do not present as a possibility before my soul, that once you have reached the age at which I am speaking to you today, you have gone through the opposite path – that opposite path that now leads upwards again from the power of the human soul, above all from the spiritual power of the human soul. And because I believe in man out of spiritual knowledge, I believe that one cannot speak, as Spengler does, of a downfall, of a death of Western civilization. But because I believe in the power of the soul that lives in you, I believe that we must come to an ascent again. Because this ascent is not caused by an empty phantom, but by human will. And I believe so strongly in the truth of the spiritual science described to you that I am convinced: This will of men can be carried, can cause a new ascent, can cause a new dawn. And so, my honored audience, I would like to close with the words that first fell on my ears as a young student when the new rector for mechanics and mechanical engineering in Vienna delivered his inaugural address. At that time, for people who also believed in a new ascent, and rightly believed in it, even if only a technical ascent came later, not a social, not a political ascent. But now we are in a period in which, if we do not want to despair, we can and must think only of an ascent. That is why I say what that man said to us young people back then: “Fellow students, I conclude by saying that the one who feels honestly about the development of humanity in the face of what is to arise from all science and all technology can only say: Always forward!”

Discussion

Question: What entitles us to go beyond the limits of thinking, to leave the unity of thinking and to move from thinking to meditation?

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It seems to me that this question is about something very significant, which, however, can only be fully understood through thorough epistemological and epistemological reflection. But I will try to point out a few things that come into consideration when answering this question.

Perhaps I may draw attention to the last chapter that I added to the second edition of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in which I described the development of philosophy itself and in which I then tried to show how, at the present moment in human development has arrived at the point where philosophy, so to speak, demands of itself this going beyond of thinking about the point of view of thinking that arises precisely when one has reached the limits of the knowledge of nature. I tried to show the following at the time:

People can, if they study the methods of knowledge acquisition in detail, as the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond did, arrive at the point of view that Du Bois-Reymond expressed in his lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” at the famous natural science conference in Leipzig in the 1870s and also repeated in his lecture on “The Seven World Riddles”. I will only briefly point out that at that time Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the fact that with the application of what has been called “unified thinking” here, one comes to develop the so-called Laplacian mind, that is, to develop such thinking about matter as is possible when one seeks to grasp the course of the planets of a solar system using astronomical-mathematical methods.

If we now turn our attention, through a certain inner contemplation, to what takes place within ourselves, if we try to make the subject into the object, then it turns out that this thinking, which we develop, cannot be defined as being there to depict some external world or to combine the facts of an external world. In what is thought about thinking, I must still see a last remnant of that old teleology, that old doctrine of purpose, which everywhere asks not why but for what purpose, which does not ask how it comes that the whole organization of man or any other organism or an organ like the hand is formed in a certain way, but which asks how this hand would have to be formed for a certain purpose. This is also extended to the consideration of thinking, although today people are no longer aware of this or have not yet become aware of it. One asks: What is thinking actually for? One does not always realize this, but unconsciously one asks it. Thinking, one thinks, cognition in general, is there to draw an outer world into oneself, so that what is first outside, is then within, even if only as an image. But now, through realism, but of course spiritual realism, one can follow what thinking actually is. Then one realizes that this thinking is a completely real force that shapes us ourselves.

You see, this spiritual science of which I speak here is not an abstract theory, not something that merely wants to be a world view in ideas. Among other things, I have recently given a pedagogical course here in which I tried to apply spiritual science to pedagogy. It was a course for teachers before the Waldorf School was founded. In addition to this pedagogical course, I also gave a course that tried to take the therapeutic aspect of medicine from spiritual science and show how spiritual research can shed light on something that can never be fully understood by using only today's methods of physiology and biology. Now, I do not want to tell you something specifically therapeutic, but there is one thing I would like to mention to characterize the method. That is, in current philosophy today, there is actually only speculation about the connection between the spiritual-mental and the physical-corporeal. There are all kinds of theories about interactions, about parallelism and so on, all kinds of materialistic interpretations of the soul processes. But actually, in a certain abstraction, we always have on the one hand the observation of the spiritual-mental, on the other hand that of the bodily-physical, and then we speculate how these two can come into a relationship with each other. Spiritual science really studies methodically - but precisely with the thinking that is awakened there - how the soul-spiritual works in the bodily-physical. And even if I expose myself to some misunderstanding, that what I say is taken as paradoxical, I want to emphasize one thing:

When we observe a child growing up until the change of teeth around the seventh year, we notice that not only does the change of teeth take place, but that the configuration of the soul and spirit also undergoes a significant change. If you now think back over your own life, you will find – even if you are not yet conducting methodical research – that the sharply contoured thoughts, which then solidify into memory and reproduce themselves for the course of life, that these sharply can only be formed out of the power of thought at the time when the organism is driving out what are called second teeth – it is something that comes from the whole organism, not just from the jaw. If one pursues this methodically, one comes to say to oneself: Just as, for example, in physical processes, some kind of force, such as mechanical force, can be converted into heat and one then says: heat is released, heat appears - so in the course of human life one has to what remains in the organism – we have completely lost the expression for this – in the change of teeth, and what is then released when the change of teeth gradually takes place, what then passes from the latent state to the free state, what initially only worked internally. The second teeth have appeared; there is a certain connection of forces at work, a system of forces within, until these second teeth emerge. Then this interrelatedness of forces is released, and in its release it appears as that spiritual-soul element which then gives the sharply contoured thoughts of memory.

With this example I only want to show how this spiritual science is actually applied to areas that one does not think of today. It is a continuation of the natural sciences. It is exactly the same form of thinking that is applied when one speaks of the release of warmth. The same form, which has only just emerged, is then applied to human development, and one says to oneself: that which appears as memory, as thinking power, that pushes the second teeth out - if I may express myself trivially.

In this case, one is not speculating about the connection between body and soul, but rather one is pursuing, in a completely empirical way, as one is accustomed to doing as a natural scientist, only with more highly developed methods of thought, that which can be observed. Only the whole of what one has around one is also observed spiritually. And so one comes to speak no longer in an abstract, nebulous way about the interaction of body and soul and spirit, but one states how at a certain age a force works physically, which then emancipates itself as a spiritual-soul force at a different age. And one comes to enter with the spirit into the material, to understand the material spiritually. That is the peculiar thing, that materialism has not understood the material, that it actually stands opposite matter in such a way that it remains incomprehensible to it. Materialism has not understood matter. Spiritual science, which is meant here, advances to the understanding of the material through its spiritual method. And it was indeed extremely interesting for the doctors and medical students who attended the course for physicians to be shown how one can really get to effectively represent the spiritual and soul in the physical, how, for example, one can show how the heart, in its function, can be understood from spiritual science in a completely different way than with the methods of today's physiology or biology.

So it is a matter of developing thinking not just through some kind of fanciful elaboration, but through a real continuation, which must simply pass through a borderline or critical state. In this passage through the borderline state, thinking becomes something else. You must not say that the unity of thinking is somehow destroyed by this. For example, the power that works in ice does not become something that should no longer be when the ice melts and turns into water. And the power that works in water does not become something else when the water passes through the boiling point and through vaporization. So it is a matter of the fact that at the point that I have characterized as a point of development for thinking, this thinking power passes through such a borderline state and then indeed appears in a different form, so that the experience differs from the earlier experience like steam from water. But this leads one to understand the thinking power itself, thinking – I could also prove the same for willing – as something that works realistically in man. In the thinking power that one has later in life, one then sees what has been working in the body during childhood. So everything becomes a unity in a remarkable way.

I readily admit that spiritual science can err in some individual questions. It is in its early stages. But that is not the point. The point is the direction of the striving. And so one can say: an attempt is made to observe what reveals itself in thinking in its shaping of the human being, to observe it as a real force that shapes and forms the human organism. Thought is observed in its reality. Therefore, one can say in conclusion: Those who still look at thought in a cognitive way, asking only one question: Why is thought such that it combines outer sense perceptions? – they are succumbing to a certain error, an error that I would like to characterize for you now.

Let us assume that the grain of wheat or the ear of wheat grows out of the root tip through the stalk; the plant-forming power manifests itself and can shape a new plant out of the seed, which in turn grows into a seed and so on. We see that the formative power at work in the plant is continuously effective in the plant itself, from formation to formation, as Goethe says: from metamorphosis to metamorphosis. In spiritual science, we try to follow thinking, which expresses itself in human beings, as a formative force, and we come to the conclusion that, in so far as thinking is a formative force in the human being, a side effect also comes about, and this side effect is actually ordinary cognition. But if I want to characterize thinking in its essence according to this secondary effect, then I am doing exactly the same as if I were to say: What do I care what shoots up through the root, the stalks into the ear of corn as a formative force in the plant; I do not care about that; I start from the chemistry of nutrition and examine what appears in the wheat grain as a nutritional substance. This is, of course, also a legitimate way of looking at the wheat grain. You can also look at it that way. But if I do, then I disregard what actually flows continuously in plant formation. And so it is with cognition. In what is usually thought by epistemologists, by philosophers and by those who want to ground natural science with some kind of observation, there are the same effects that occur when thinking, which actually wants to shape us, expresses itself outwardly in a side effect. It is as if what grows in the wheat plant is only thought of as the basis for the nutrition of another being. But it is wrong to examine the wheat only in terms of this. This has nothing to do with the nature of the wheat grain. I am introducing a different point of view.

Thus, philosophy today is on the wrong track when it examines cognition only in terms of the apprehension of the external world. For the essential thing is that cognition is a formative force in man, and the other thing appears as a mere side effect. And the way of looking at it that wants to leave thinking only in the state in which it abstracts natural laws, collects perceptions, is in the same position as someone who would claim that one should not do plant biology to get to know the nature of the plant, but nutritional chemistry.

These are things that are not thought about today, but they play a major role in the further development of the scientific future, that scientific future that is at the same time also the future for such a social organization through which man, in grasping social life through the spirit, can truly intervene in this social organization. For it seems to me that this is precisely what has led to the catastrophe: that we no longer master life because we do not think that we have entered a state of human development in which life must be mastered from the spirit, from that spirit that is recognized from within and thereby also recognizes what confronts us in the external world.

Yes, my dear audience, with such things one is considered an eccentric in the broadest circles today, a dreamer, and in any case one does not expect such a person to really see through the outside world realistically. But I believe that I am not mistaken when I say: the application of spiritual science to the entire external world can be compared to the following. If someone lays down a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron, a farmer comes and says: I will shoe my horse with that. Another, who knows what kind of object it is, says to him: That is not a horseshoe, it is a magnet, it serves a completely different purpose. But the farmer says: What do I care, I will shoe my horse with it. This is how science appears today, refusing to admit that the spiritual lives everywhere in the material. Those who deny the spiritual in the material are like the man who says, “What do I care about the magnet, I shoe my horse with the iron.” I believe, however, that we must come to the realization that in all material things we have to recognize not only an abstract spiritual essence, but also a concrete spiritual essence, and that we must then be willing to study this concrete spiritual essence in the same way as we do in the material world, and that this will mean progress in cognitive and social terms for the future.

But it is easier to express speculative results and all kinds of philosophies about what the spirit is, it is easier to be a pantheist or the like out of speculation, than to follow the example of strict natural science, only with the experiential method, as I have described it, to continue the scientific research and then to find the spiritual in the material - just as one brings warmth to light, even if it does not express itself, by showing under which circumstances that which is latent reveals itself. If we apply this method, which is usually applied externally, to the internal, but especially to the whole human being, then we will understand the spiritual in the material from the inside out. And above all, that which has actually been resonating to us from ancient times and yet, for human beings, is a profound necessity, that which still resonates from the Apollonian temple at Delphi to the ears of the spirit: “Man, know thyself!” And just as philosophers and theologians have spoken of this “know thyself”, so too has the naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who was more or less inclined towards materialism. This “know thyself” is deeply rooted in human nature. And modern times have now reached a point where this “know thyself” must be approached in a concrete way.

With these suggestions, I believe I have shown that it is not a matter of violating the unity of thought, but of continuing the thought beyond a boundary point. Just as it is not impossible to bring the forces in water to a completely different manifestation after passing through the boiling point, so too, there is no sin against what is experienced in the combining thinking with the perception when this thinking is taken beyond the boundary point. It is quite natural that a metamorphosis of thinking is then achieved. But by no means has a uniformity of thinking been violated. You will not find at all that spiritual science leads to the rejection of natural science, but rather to a deeper penetration of it. One arrives precisely at what I consider to be particularly important for the development of humanity: the introduction of scientific knowledge into the whole conception of the world, which fertilizes life, but which can only be achieved by our ascending from the spiritual observation of nature to the pure experience of the spiritual, which can then also pour into our will and become a living force in us. Because it can do this, because living knowledge makes us not only wise but also skillful, I believe in a future for humanity, in human progress, if in the future more attention is paid to the spiritual in the material than has been the case so far, if the spiritual is sought in the material, which can then also be transferred to the social, so that in the future the solution of the social question will appear to us as the spiritualization of social life, as spiritualization with that spirit which we can achieve precisely as a continuation of scientific research.

Professor Dr. Th. Meyer: I am in complete agreement with Dr. Steiner that the limiting concepts of scientific knowledge are not the limiting concepts of existence and reality. I have also heard him speak with warm and moved heart of the hopes that the German people may cherish for the future despite their collapse. But I do have some doubts on the point of whether spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy will possess precisely the ability to lead to a new height to which Germany should aspire. And I think the concern lies in the following: Dr. Steiner has repeatedly emphasized that the path to the higher worlds, of which he has spoken, is achieved through vision, through a seeing consciousness, through an experience, and that this path is absolutely scientific, not imaginative. This inner vision naturally has the same status as something that is evident in logic. That is to say, what I have seen with my outer or inner eyes cannot be disputed. I see a tree and do not need to prove that the tree must be there. There is no metaphysical proof for it, it is evident that the tree is there. Dr. Steiner now claims this evidence for his inner vision. That means he sees the higher world and sees the connections of the higher world, and because he sees them, precisely for that reason this higher world is there; it is indisputable. I do not want to dispute that the higher world is evident to him who beholds it. The only question is whether it is evident to everyone, and here I have a reservation. Ever since I have known anthroposophy, it has been based on the fact that this inner vision, this seeing consciousness, is ancient, that there have long been people who rise to the height of this seeing consciousness, have long since risen to it in India. That is why anthroposophy also adopts a whole series of expressions from the Indian language. It needs Indian expressions for the various spiritual insights it imparts. But the fact of the matter is that Dr. Steiner claims that he is bringing something new. However, there were a number of Theosophical Societies in Germany and England before Dr. Steiner came on the scene. Dr. Steiner originally belonged to these Theosophical Societies, then he came into conflict with them and resigned from these associations. He just, because he came into inner conflict with them, no longer referred to his view of things as theosophy, but because his inner vision is different from the inner vision of the other theosophists, he called it anthroposophy.

Now I would like to say: If the earlier intuitive consciousness was mistaken, if Dr. Steiner was the first to bring the right thing, who guarantees me that another will not come and say: This higher intuitive consciousness that Dr. Steiner brought has not reached the ultimate goal. Another person may arrive at a quite different goal. In that case Steiner's vision becomes subjective. It is the vision of an individual. It is doubtful whether one can rely on it.

This is my concern, which arises in relation to the supersensible of the whole movement, that there is a different inner vision. There should be no discord between the different visionaries. But I do not want to conclude without expressing my sincere and warm thanks to Dr. Steiner for the many fine suggestions he has given in his speech tonight.

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not need to keep you any longer, for I will only have to point out that the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me has made a few errors in the most important point that he has raised.

First of all, I would like to start from the end and correct a few errors. The fact is not that what I have presented to you here was preceded by the teachings of other theosophical societies to which I belonged. It is not like that. Rather, I began writing my interpretations of Goethe's world view in the 1880s. At the time, they were published as an introduction to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's “Deutsche National-Literatur” in Stuttgart. Anyone who follows them will find that the germ of everything I have presented to you today lies in those introductions. You will then find that in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, in the first edition of 1894, I tried to show how man gradually develops his thinking to a certain level and how, after that, what then leads discursive thinking into intuitive thinking follows.

Then it happened, in Berlin around 1902, that I was once asked to present what I had to say about the spirit in a circle that called itself theosophical. At that time I had become acquainted with various Theosophists, but what they had to say did not really prompt me to follow with any attention the Theosophical literature that was common in this Theosophical Society. And so I simply presented what had emerged from my own intuitive research. The result was that people in England who had read my book Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life very soon translated these lectures into English and published them in an English newspaper. I was then invited to give lectures to a number of people in the society that called itself the Theosophical Society. I have never hesitated to speak to those who called upon me, whether they called themselves by this or that name, about what I had to say. But I have never advocated anything in any of these groups other than what I had to say on the basis of my own research. Thus, during the time that I belonged to the Theosophical Society, I advocated nothing other than what I have to advocate on the basis of my own research.

That I called what I presented “Anthroposophy” even then may be gathered from the fact that at the same time - not only later, when I had come to a different view from that of this society - I also presented to a different circle of people in Berlin, and I did not present a single iota of what I had to present from my research. And there I announced my lectures – so that people could not possibly be in error – as anthroposophical observations on human development. So for as long as any human being can associate me with Theosophy, for as long have I called my worldview “Anthroposophy”. There has never been a break. That is what I would like to say about it now, so as not to keep you waiting too long.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, some people say that if you study the history of philosophy, you find that philosophers - starting with Thales and going up to Eucken or others - have put forward all sorts of views and that they have often contradicted each other; how can you arrive at a certainty of knowledge? This is precisely what I set out to do in my book “Riddles of Philosophy”: to show that the matter is not so, but that what appear to be deviations in the various philosophies worthy of the name only ever come from the fact that one person looks at the world from one point of view, while another looks at it from a different point of view. If you photograph a tree from one side, what you see in the picture is only from a certain side. If you photograph the tree from a different side, you get a completely different picture – and yet it is the same tree. If you now come to the conclusion that many truly truthful philosophies do not differ from one another in that one deviates from the other, but that they simply look at one and the same thing from different points of view, because you cannot come to a single truth at all, then you realize that it is a prejudice to say that the philosophies contradict each other.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, I have shown that it is a prejudice to say that philosophers contradict each other. There are, of course, those who are in a certain contradiction, but these are only those who have made a mistake. If two children in a class solve a problem differently, one cannot say that it is therefore not certain who has found the right solution. If one understands the correct solution, one already knows what the right thing is. So it cannot be deduced from the fact that things are different that they are wrong. That could only be deduced from the inner course of the matter itself. One would have to look at the inner course of the matter itself. And it is an external consideration when one says: Steiner resigned from the Theosophical Society. First of all, I did not resign, but after I was first dragged in with all my might to present my own world view, nothing else at all, I was - perhaps I may use the sometimes frowned-upon expression in front of you - thrown out, and for the reason, my dear dear attendees, because the “other kind of truth”, namely the madness of those theosophists, prevailed. These theosophists had finally managed to present an Indian boy who was claimed to be the newly appeared Christ; he was brought to Europe and in him the re-embodied Christ had appeared. Because I, of course, characterized this folly as folly and because at that time this folly found thousands of followers throughout the world, this following took the opportunity to expel me. I did not care. At any rate, I did not believe that what one had gained through inner research seemed uncertain simply because a society that calls itself theosophical expelled me, a society that claims that the Christ is embodied in the Indian boy.

Such things should not be considered superficially, simply overlooking the specifics and saying, “Well, there are different views.” One must take a closer look at what is occurring. And so I would like to leave it to you, when you have time - but you would have a lot to do with it - to compare all the quackery that has appeared in the so-called theosophical societies with what I have always tried to bring out of good science. I say this not out of immodesty, but out of a recognition of the reality of the matter and out of spiritual struggle. And bear in mind that I myself said today: “Some details may be wrong, but the important thing is to show a new direction.” It does not have to be the case that the absolutely correct thing is stated in every detail. So someone could well say that they are looking at a right-angled triangle and getting all sorts of things out of it. Then someone comes along and says: The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You can't be sure whether it could be universally true just because he is the only one saying it. No, if it has become clear to you through an intuitive insight into the nature of mathematics that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, then a million people may say it is otherwise, but I know it is so and I will contradict a million people. For the truth has not only an external basis for agreement, but above all a basis in its inner substantiality.

Of course, anyone can check this. And I have never claimed anything other than that anyone who wants to can learn about the spiritual scientific method just as easily as they can learn about the methods of chemistry. But once the things have been researched, they can be verified by any thinking person. And so what I say or write and have written from the spiritual science can be verified by every thinking person. There will certainly be many errors in it, of course, but that is the same as with other research. It is not about these errors in detail, but about the basic character of the whole.

Have I used a single Indian expression to you today? And if something is sometimes referred to by using some old expression, then that is just a technical term used because there is no such expression in current usage. Even if I can prove the Pythagorean theorem on the blackboard or something else, can one be reproached for the fact that it was already there centuries ago? For me, it is not a matter of putting forward ancient Indian or similar ideas, but of putting forward what arises from the matter itself. Just as today, anyone who grasps and understands the Pythagorean theorem grasps it from the matter itself, even though it can be found at a certain point in time as the first to emerge, so of course some things must, but only seemingly, agree with what was already there. But it is precisely this that I have always most vigorously opposed: that what is being attempted here from the present point in the development of human consciousness has anything to do with some ancient Indian mysticism or the like. There are, of course, echoes, because instinctive knowledge found much in ancient times that must resurface today. But what I mean is not drawn from old traditions. It is really the case that what is true, what is true for me, is what I wrote down at the time when I wrote the first edition of my book Theosophy in 1904: I want to communicate nothing but what I have recognized through spiritual scientific research, just as any other scientific truth is recognized through external observation and deductive reasoning, and which I myself can personally vouch for. Some may certainly hold a different opinion, but I put forward nothing but what I can personally vouch for. I do not say this out of immodesty, but because I want to appear as a person who does not want to present a new spiritual science out of a different spirit than out of the spirit of modern science and also of newer technology, and because I think that one can only understand this new consciousness in terms of its scientific and technical nature, when one is driven by both to the contemplation of the spirit.

I ask that my words not be taken as if I had wanted to avoid what the honorable previous speaker said. No, I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to correct some factual errors that have become very widespread. But much, very much even, of what is being spread today about what I have been presenting in Stuttgart for decades is based on errors. And it seemed necessary to me, as the previous speaker commendably did, to address what was presented, because it is not just a matter of correcting what affects me personally, but also something that the previous speaker brought together with the substance of the question, to correct it through the historical.

Question: If Dr. Steiner proves just one point of spiritual science to me in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem can be proved, then I will gladly follow him, then it is science.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, who can really prove the Pythagorean theorem? The Pythagorean theorem cannot be proved by drawing a right-angled triangle on the blackboard and then using one of the usual methods of proof. That is only one illustration of the proof. The point is that anyone who wants to prove the Pythagorean theorem is put in the position of having to have what can be constructed mathematically in their mind's eye - even if only in the inner vision of the geometric space vision. So imagine a consciousness that did not have this spatial vision. He would not have the essential part of the Pythagorean theorem before him, and it would make no sense to prove the Pythagorean theorem. We can only prove the Pythagorean theorem by having the essential part of the spatial perception and spatial organization before us. The moment we ascend to another form of consciousness, something else is added to the ordinary spatial view (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) ( Only, as long as one has no conception of the configuration of space, one cannot at all arrive at the observation that leads to the proof of the Pythagorean theorem. And only as long as one has not yet made the transition from ordinary consciousness to experiencing consciousness, as I have described it, does one believe that the results of spiritual scientific research cannot be proved in the same way.

I started from the assumption that the experiencing consciousness is there first. And just as he who does not have a spatial view cannot speak of the Pythagorean theorem, so one cannot speak of the proof of any proposition of spiritual science if one does not admit the whole view. But this view is something that must first be attained. It is not there by itself. But our time demands that we decide on something completely new if we want to move towards this progress in science. And I do believe that there is still a great deal to be overcome before spiritual science is advocated in broader circles in the way that Copernicus's world view was advocated over all earlier ideas of the infinity of space. In the past, people imagined space as a blue sphere. Now we imagine that there are limits to our knowledge of nature that cannot be overcome, or that we cannot go beyond ordinary thinking. Such things are well known to anyone who follows the history of human development. And I can only say: either what I have tried to present is a path to the truth – not the finished truth – in which case it will be trodden, or else it is a path to error, in which case it will be overcome. But that does no harm. What must not be extinguished in us, not be swept away by hasty criticism, is the everlasting striving upwards and onwards. And it is only this striving that really animates what I have tried to characterize today as the path that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take.

Question: We must have the firm belief that the effort we expend will also be worthwhile. Is it at all possible to recognize spiritual life in and of itself? Dr. Steiner says that it is possible to recognize the spirit of the world, the spirit of all life and of all nature, and to come into contact with it. Is that possible with our spirit, with our thinking? I doubt it. Thought consists of images. I think in pictures.

Rudolf Steiner: If I were to go into the question, I would have to keep you very busy for a long time. I do not want that and I will not do it. I only regret that this question was not asked earlier, then I could answer it more thoroughly.

You can find in my writings everywhere those things that I hypothetically object to and that are also discussed there, so that you can find a remedy for your doubts in the literature. Here, however, I would just like to say the following: It is the case with certain people that they make it virtually impossible for themselves to get ahead of the phenomenon through preconceived notions. They point to the phenomena and then say: What lies behind them, we do not recognize. The whole of Kantianism is basically based on this error. And my whole striving began with the attempt to combat this error. I would like to make clear to you, by means of a comparison, how one can gradually come to a resolution of these doubts.

When someone looks at a single letter, they can say: This single letter indicates nothing other than its form, and I cannot relate this form to anything else; it tells me nothing else. And when I look at, say, an electrical phenomenon, it is exactly the same as when I look at a letter that tells me nothing. But it is different when I look at many letters in succession and have a word, so that I am led from looking at them to reading them. I also have nothing in front of me other than what is being looked at, but I advance to the meaning. There I am led to something completely different. And so it is also correct that as long as one only grasps individual natural phenomena and individual natural elements – elements in the sense of mathematical elements – one can rightly say that one does not penetrate to the inner core. But if one tries to bring everything to life in context, to set it in motion with a new activity, then, as in the transition from the mere individual letter to the reading of the word, something quite different comes about. That is why that which wants to be spiritual science is nothing other than phenomenology, but phenomenology that does not stop at putting the individual phenomena together, but rather at reading them in the context of the phenomena. It is phenomenology, and there is no sin in speculating beyond the phenomena; rather, one asks them whether they have something to say about a certain inner activity, not only in terms of details but also in context.

It is understandable that if one only looks at the individual phenomena, one can take the same standpoint as Haller when he said: No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature; blessed is he to whom nature only reveals the outer shell. But one also understands when someone grasps phenomenology as Goethe did – and spiritual science is only advanced Goetheanism – that Goethe, in view of Haller's words, says: “Into the innermost nature – oh, you philistine! — “No created spirit penetrates the innermost nature, blessed he to whom she shows only the outer shell.” I have heard this repeated for sixty years; I curse it, but furtively; I say to myself a thousand, a thousand times: She gives everything abundantly and willingly; nature has neither core nor shell, she is all at once. You, most of all, test yourself, whether you are core or shell."