The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence

GA 150 — 8 June 1913, Stockholm

VI. Nature and Spirit in the Light of Spiritual Science

The first of the topics chosen for this short lecture cycle is “Nature and Spirit in the Light of Spiritual Science”. Nature and Spirit! — It seems to express a contradiction, and the human soul immediately has many opposing views and opinions that have confronted each other in the world. We know, of course, that in recent centuries a kind of science has emerged that only wants to accept nature and that, from its point of view, can hardly do anything other than also consider the spirit to be nature. On the other hand, we see how defenders of the spirit and of intellectual life assert themselves in all fields, even in our time. And we need only look on one side to the extreme, where it was said in the 19th century: the brain secretes thoughts, like the liver secretes bile. That is, what we perceive as spiritual in the human being is a purely natural process, and we do not believe in another spirit. We need only place this alongside the many current efforts to establish a spiritual science, and we have extremes.

But one can also think differently about the words “nature and spirit”, namely, point to Goethe's words: “Nature is sin, spirit is devil, they harbor doubt between them, their deformed hybrid child.” And so we can point out many things that set nature and spirit in opposition to each other, and we can find many things in them that have brought disharmony into human hearts, that have caused storms of struggle and conflict in the world.

On the other hand, we are still confronted with a word from more recent times, also from Goethe, which says that the spirit could never be and be effective without matter and that matter could never be and be effective without spirit. This word can be refuted very easily. One need only point out that when I cut a piece of granite out of a rock, I then have matter without spirit! It is very easy to find refutations of profound words in the world, and it must be clearly understood, especially in a spiritual-scientific movement, that nothing is easier for the foolish in the world than to refute the words of the wise with a great semblance of right. An anthroposophical view must go deeper into these things.

What is spirit, what is nature? — There is no doubt in our ordinary perception that we encounter nature when we see plants sprouting from the earth in spring and watching them unfold. There we see the weaving and living of nature. Nor is there any doubt that we speak of nature with a certain right when the snowflakes cover the earth in winter. These are both effects of nature. But does this mean that we are fully entitled to participate in what is unfolding around us? Imagine that: Entities could think that are much smaller than we are, so small that for them our nails or our hair would be as big as for us the trees, so these entities would describe the hair of our head in the same way that we describe the plants that come out of the earth. We humans, however, do not describe the individual hairs or the head of the human being as a ground on which the individual hairs rise, because we know that we cannot find a hair as an individual being in nature; they are only possible on another being. Only someone who, due to their smallness, cannot see the hairs in their entirety could describe a hair on its own. Such an entity could perhaps very well distinguish between the different hairs. Depending on the place on the head where they grow, they could be organized into classes and orders: one class of left temporal hair, one class of right temporal hair; one class of left frontal hair, one class of right frontal hair; later, names could be given to further distinguish them. Thus, there could be a hair science for such small entities. For other beings there is, with some justification, such a science: it is botany. While in fact the earth as a whole produces individual plants just as our head produces hair, while the individual plants belong to the earth and do not exist as a special genus, in botany the plants are classified and described without taking into account that this plant world forms a unity belonging to the earth, just as our hair forms a unity with our organism. To nature or the world, it is of no consequence that man has created a botany for himself, just as a hair science would be of no consequence to a thinking little being for man.

Spiritual science, however, leads us even further. It shows us that just as little as one can think of a being like man, with hair on his head, without a soul, just as little can the earth be considered other than as a whole, which has all material, purely natural things as organs of the earth spirit or the earth soul. When we study this earth spirit or this earth soul further, it differs from the human soul at first. What is peculiar about the human soul is that it presents itself to us as a kind of unity. With the earth spirit, this is not the case at first. In the end, however, as you know, there is a directing earth spirit, but the next thing we find in the spiritual observation of the earth is a large number, an abundance of elemental beings, which form the next stage of the earth spirit as a multitude, a diversity.

We can deal with this earth spirit for the time being. Then it turns out that, for example, on the half of the earth where it is summer at a certain time, these entities of the earth spirit go through a kind of sleep, and where it is winter, they wake. For spiritual realization, in fact, to the same extent that the plants sprout out of the earth, the elemental beings and spirits begin to fall asleep. In winter, they begin to stir. Then these elemental beings and spirits form their ideas, sensations and feelings in their own way. What night is for humans is summer for the half of the earth that is currently in summer, and what day is for humans is winter for the earth. The Earth as a whole sleeps and wakes like man, but in such a way that one half is always more awake and the other more asleep, whereas man is organized in such a way that when he sleeps, he sleeps all at the same time. That is actually not correct either, but it is quite the same with man as with the Earth. When man sleeps, only his head is asleep, while the other organs are all the more alert. But man is just not equipped to perceive that. It is actually the same with the earth, although not quite. One hemisphere of the earth has more water than the other, so the earth's sleeping and waking is not unlike man's sleeping and waking.

Just as we regard human beings as animate and ensouled beings, so must we also regard the Earth. Just because we walk the Earth as such small creatures, we do not see that it has both body and soul at the same time. But that also stems from the materialistic age. Kepler, for example, who also knew how to think, still says that he regards the Earth as a great organism. He just had no occult conception of the earth, so he did not know that winter means waking and summer sleeping for the earth, and he imagined the earth to be a great whale instead of thinking of it as a souled being higher than man. He somewhat belittled the conditions, saw the He saw the earth as a whale and in the movement of the air he saw the inhaling and exhaling of the animal. This was also the view of Giordano Bruno. For him, the earth was a great, ensouled organism that breathes with the tides. Goethe was of the same opinion: “The Earth is a great, living individual that manifests its process of inhaling and exhaling in the tides, in the currents of air and in the seas.” Yes, the spirits of the older, more spiritual times still knew that one cannot look at the earth in such abstract, theoretical terms as one does today, as if one could describe a hair or a nail in itself, whereas one should know that these cannot exist without the whole organism, that they are grounded in the whole organism. The naturalistic view does not know what is important. When observing the world, it is important that one can ask oneself about everything in the world: Is it a part of a whole or is it a whole in itself? — If someone finds a human tooth, they should not look at it as an individual thing, but the tooth is only understood when it is seen as a part of the human being. It is also absurd to describe a single plant, because it is only conceivable as a part of the whole earth being. So it is only conceivable that the outer body of the earth has a soul and a spirit. And if one knows nothing of the spirit of the earth, if one does not know that this earth is the body of a spirit, as our own body is, then one regards the earth as mineralogy, geology, botany regard it. These have no consciousness of the fact that behind everything they describe is the directing earth spirit. If I cut a piece out of a rock, it is easy to say: There is no spirit in it! — There is no spirit in a piece of tooth either, but the piece of tooth is inconceivable without the whole human being and the soul-spiritual to which it belongs.

We must keep this in mind when we speak of nature and spirit. When we speak of the earth as a natural planet, without speaking of its soul and spirit, this description stems only from the fact that we disregard the spirit, we do not want to know anything about it. Where does the earth exist as a mere natural planet? Botany, geology, astronomy would say: It moves in space! —- If that were true, it would soon stop moving, then it would collapse, like the human body after death, when the spirit has left it.

This way of looking at the world has rubbed off. Even the limbs of the human being and the human being as a whole are described today as if they were only nature, that is, one looks at the corpse. For if man were as the physiologist, anatomist and so on describe him, he would have to die immediately. Physiology describes only its own fantasy, as do astronomy and geology with their description of the earth. This is a pure fantasy product. There is no such thing as the mere natural earth. The fact that the earth is as it is is based, down to the smallest piece of rock, on the earth being permeated by the spirit of the earth.

There we see what is important. When observing human beings, it is important to find the starting point from which the part can be seen as part of the whole, and not to crumble the part away from the whole. Man as such is a whole. But when it comes to the earth, the whole earth is to be regarded as a whole. If we separate nature and its effects from the earth, what then is this nature? Then it is our product of the imagination, which does not really exist, which only appears to us because we cut a part out of a whole. Therefore, it can be seen that it is not at all important that someone describes something accurately, but that he knows how a part is integrated into the whole, or rather grows out of the whole. The earth must be seen as a whole, not as a physical whole, but as a living being that belongs to its spirit.

But we could also talk about nature and spirit in another way. We only need to look at the human being itself. In the human being, something comes to us that seems to justify the concepts of “nature and spirit” as opposites. A child is born, and all the expressions of life in the child in the early days appear to be something that has emerged from the physical, from the whole of physical nature. That is why it is often said that a child still acts entirely according to its nature. Only later is the spiritual, the soul, born out of the body. In the beginning of his life, man is more nature, later he develops more of the spirit. But that, in turn, is nothing more than a careless way of looking at things. For in the early days of our life there is much spirit in us, it is just more hidden in us than later. Everything that gives our body its forms is active spirit, it is just that we do not work inwardly in spirit and illuminate it with the faculty of memory. We truly have no less spirit in us in the early years of childhood than in later years. One could even be more radical in one's speech. Someone recently asked: What does it mean when a child only lives for a few days and then dies? Occult science shows us that such a short life still has a purpose. Often, the being in the womb has been able to develop many things, but sometimes it has not been able to develop one thing, for example, healthy vision. Let us assume that someone was an excellent person in one incarnation, but had poor eyesight. Then it will happen that such a person later lives only a few days in an incarnation, just to make up for what was lacking in the previous life because of his poor eyesight. In this case, this incarnation must be counted as part of the previous one. In general, the importance of the child's ability to learn in the first few days is greatly underestimated. When the child learns to see into the light, more capacity is needed than for anything learned in the first academic semester.

One can object to such things, but just think about the content of such a thing, and you will see that it is correct. We only consider childhood in the right way when we know that the spirit is not less in the body when we build our brain, work out our physiognomy and so on, than later, when we can do something more astute. At a later age, the spirit has withdrawn itself a little more from the body and works as the more abstract spirit, but it can no longer organize the brain. This has already become fixed again. The spirit, which one so readily calls “spirit” later in life, was already present in the first part of life, but had something else to do then, was more linked to the natural processes. We just don't see that, that's why we call what happens there just nature, and what happens later consciously, just mind. Therefore, man assumes an opposition between the “natural” processes of early childhood and the spirituality of thinking, feeling and willing in later life. But the contrast is quite different.

In early childhood, there is an intimate connection between nature and spirit; they permeate each other and are still on friendly terms. Later, they separate, and the spirit and natural processes take place more separately. In return, the natural processes become more spiritless, in that the spirit has differentiated itself from them and become the special soul of which the human being is so proud. Man pays for this with his body becoming more spiritless. Man has first drawn spirit out of his body so that he can use it more separately for himself. There is something similar in the whole evolution of the earth. In very early times of the earth, spirit was intimately connected with the nature of the earth everywhere, and so there was then an intimate interaction between earth spirit and earth nature. Today, in a certain way, the nature of the earth is as separate from its spirit as the nature of the human being is from the soul. And just as it is the spirit in the human being that directs thinking, feeling and willing, so too, in the evolution of the earth, the earth spirit runs alongside the natural process as the course of history. In the Lemurian period these were still more interwoven with each other, just as the spiritual and natural processes are more closely related in the child than in later man. What is the point here? Does it matter whether we say: the spirit develops in the later age of life or the earth age? — No, it was already there, but in those days it directed its activity to that which was then separated. And that hardens, lignifies, dies.

For this reason, we must also consider the whole, which is to be considered as a whole, not in time, only according to its parts. Man as a child is not a physical whole on earth. A human being in youth, middle age, old age and so on is only a whole, and we cannot say: 'The human being undergoes a development from the natural to the spiritual', but we must say: 'In his first childhood, nature and spirit were intimately connected. Later they separate more and more. Thus, the natural becomes somewhat dead, somewhat less inwardly alive, and the spirit becomes more independent. So a differentiation has occurred in the whole human being. That is the right impression. But the spiritual does not develop out of the natural without further ado. There is differentiation. If we speak of nature without spirit, then we speak of a mere fantasy product. Under the present physical conditions of the earth, a human being could never later become a thinking, feeling and willing creature that is so proud of its spirituality if it had not first detached its spirit from its natural existence. One must learn to completely rethink about nature and spirit.

This goes even further. Let us consider the external nature of man and woman. If you look at it very superficially, you will come to the conclusion that woman is closer to nature, judges more directly from the standpoint of nature. Man has distanced himself more from nature; independent thinking, the independent spirit, lives more in him. — The materialistic age, which thinks of the spirit in materialistic terms, has taught other reasons for this difference, such as the weight of the brain. But when the brain was weighed by the man who thought up this theory, it turned out that he had a particularly small man's brain! So if we look at nature and spirit in this way, even a superficial glance shows how little this is true. Anyone who goes into the depths here will in turn come to a completely different way of looking at things. In a certain respect, however, the woman's outer being is more natural, but in turn more spiritual than the man's outer being. Womanhood on today's earth is more natural because the spiritual activity in her has not yet separated from her physicality as it has in man. Therefore, man cannot be conceived of as having a greater spirituality than woman, but in man only that which is distilled spirit, leaving matter beside it, is more prominent. On the other hand, for certain parts, the male body is more abandoned to spirit. The feminine body is more permeated by spirit, as for example is the case with the child; the masculine body is more abandoned to matter at a later age than it is in youth. But we must not speak of more naturalness or spirituality in being a man or a woman.

The approach must therefore be completely different. It is true that, in a sense, what has to do with the essence of man and woman affects us throughout our lives. It is not always pleasant to point this out. Why, for example, are there more women than men in the Anthroposophical Society? Does this not actually speak against the presence of intellect in anthroposophy? — one might ask. The answer to that question is entirely objective, but it is easy to be misunderstood when one gives it. The fact that women are more attracted to the Anthroposophical Society, that is, more readily embrace spiritual truths, is because they preserve the spirituality of the nervous system and the brain longer in later life. In the case of man, these separate from the physical earlier, so he does not have the opportunity to so easily take in what speaks to what is neither man nor woman, but what stands above: the being itself.

In an incarnation, a person is either man or woman. In the case of man, the lignified parts are more developed, and somewhat more distilled out of his overall nature is the spirit, the temporal, transient spirit. In women, nature and spirit remain more connected throughout life, which is why their nature remains more flexible. But spiritual truths speak to something in people that has nothing to do with the difference between men and women. Because the being that goes from incarnation to incarnation can alternately be man and woman, even if that is a truth that often makes men angry.

Thus, our deepest nature has nothing to do with man or woman. Just as it has nothing to do with man and woman, so the deepest nature of world phenomena and facts has nothing to do with nature and spirit, but one time it is more spiritual, the other time more natural. These are both phases of an existence, as life continues. Just as in human life, there is a daily alternation between more spiritual activity during the day and more natural activity for the physical human being at night, so in the universe there is an alternation between times when beings become more spiritualized and times when they become more “naturalized”. That is a rhythm in the universe. For example, if you look at the nature of man, when he is a man in an incarnation, when he is thus karmically condemned to distill the spirit out of the natural, then he can say to himself: 'Now I am indeed karmically destined to distill the spirit out of nature, but that must alternate rhythmically, cyclically with a woman's existence, where I am allowed to be more in the natural with my spirit, so that I may have a pendulum swing in the direction of natural existence.

This is the case with all planets, with all wholes, totalities, with all worlds. Where we find a natural, there is a spiritual belonging to it, and where we find a spirit, it tends to separate something out of itself, which is a natural. Nature and spirit are not opposites, but alternating states of the higher being that stands behind them.

Thus we must see that through our spiritual world view, many old concepts with which much mischief has been done must be corrected. When we stop describing only parts of a being that is actually a whole, we will also come to clarity about the concepts of spirit and nature and will no longer limit ourselves to one-sidedness. Then one will realize that the spirit would be very weak if nature were hostile to it, then one will realize that nature is something that the spirit occasionally releases from itself, like the snail releases its shell. But the spirit can also absorb nature again and dissolve it within itself. Then it makes it invisible, but then it has it within itself, then it has become one with it. If a complete unity of spirit and nature were to exist somewhere, it would mean that for the realm of facts, the spirit has dissolved all nature that belongs to it.

Let us assume that a person is forty years old. He has his nature and he has his soul, his spirit, of which he is so proud. If we go back to his childhood, it is more of a unity, but it appears more in its natural basis. If we go back even further, before his birth, then he is entirely spiritual, he still had all spirituality without a natural basis, without matter in him.

It is a pendulum swing in the world: the being creates its image in the natural aspect and reveals itself through it. The spirit bears nature in its bosom in order to make an image of itself with what it itself gives birth to in its bosom as nature. But the spiritual essence also has the power to absorb everything that is out there in nature into the spirit. And so the spirit can triumph over all images of itself in order to appear ever anew in new transformations and new forms. This testifies to the fact that an infinite number of formations rest in the bosom of the being, and that the meaning of the world is actually fulfilled in ever new and ever new becoming. If one can see the belonging together, the inseparability of spirit and nature, one comes to the being in the world.