The Polarity of Duration and Development

GA 184 — 13 September 1918, Dornach

Fourth Lecture

I shall continue, in a more aphoristic form, to bring you further thoughts on the subject we have been dealing with for weeks now, and which I have always characterized by saying that the great difficulty in matters of world-view now lies — I always emphasize the word “now”—that out of the views of the present time it becomes difficult for people to build a bridge between what is called idealism and what can be described as a view of the natural order of things. When modern man attempts to build such a bridge, when he tries to realize how, for example, moral ideas — if we take one group out of the sum total of ideas — now not externally but internally real to the views, to the concepts that one develops about the course of the causal natural order, he falls into a kind of world-view dualism, as one could express it spiritually. We have emphasized this again and again. Man tries to build such a bridge, but he does not succeed.

It will be easier for us to see exactly what is at stake here if we compare this modern dualism with what existed in ancient times – I mean in pre-Christian times, as we speak of pre-Christian times – as something similar. In ancient times, something similar to our present-day dualism existed for humanity in what can be called fatalism. People were almost forced into fatalism until the 2nd or 3rd century BC, and even more so later on – but it became more and more anachronistic. And basically, fatalism also lies at the root of the Greek world view. In modern times, all fatalism is actually anachronistic; that is, it no longer belongs in the present. Seduced, one might say, were the people of ancient times to fatalism, seduced are the people of the newer times, and most particularly of the present, to dualism.

Now let us try to understand why ancient people were so easily seduced into fatalism. We know, of course, that the state of mind of human beings has changed radically in the course of evolution, and it is a superstition to assume, as popular Darwinism does, that there has been only a gradual evolution. A radical change has taken place in the state of mind, and in this respect history is most of all a fable convenante. The state of mind of ancient people was such that the natural never really confronted them as it confronts today's people, and in contrast to this, the spiritual did not confront them conceptually, as in terms of ideas, as it confronts today's people. Everything that the ancient man imagined about nature, he imagined in such a way that he imagined the natural combined with the spiritual, and again he imagined the spiritual in such a way that he took images from the course of nature for the imagination. If you had old teachings about the gods, they are actually completely imbued, as myths completely imbued, with ideas taken from the nature that can be perceived by the senses. When people spoke of nature, they did not speak as we speak today, so dryly, so abstractly, but they spoke of elementary spirituality, of essences that carry and bring about natural phenomena.

This was not due to a great childishness of expression, but it was based on the real view, on the real state of mind. The ancient man did not see nature as we see it under the influence of today's science, even if we are not scientists; he did not see his spiritual being so abstractly, so merely in terms of ideas, as we have to today. Through this confusion of nature and spirit, man brought himself into fatalism; for in the way just described, when natural phenomena became imbued with spiritual acts for man, it was natural that all life should be intended in the external way in which human acts are intended. It was a picture, but the old man had no other picture; but that necessarily leads to the deception of fatalism.

Over time, however, a different state of mind arose. We have already characterized this change in the state of mind from the most diverse points of view; today we want to look at it from a very special point of view. Today we want to pose the question, which we can only answer on the basis of everything we have presented in the last lectures: What is it, objectively speaking, that a person sees when he observes the natural order, and what is it, objectively speaking, that a person inwardly conceives when he speaks of the spirit today? I am not talking about how we speak of the spirit in spiritual science, but rather how the general consciousness of humanity today speaks of the spirit, more or less nuanced in this or that way.

We know that even if a person is not a theorist (we are disregarding theorists here), if he wants to understand the natural order, he instinctively comes to the rule of matter and forces. I am not talking now about the scientific theories of substances and forces, but rather about how the average person today, in his simple way, imagines nature, and how he instinctively bases his ideas about natural phenomena on material processes permeated by forces. Man is led - when one really properly examines things, we know that - to an illusion. Because actually everything that can be said in such contexts about what matter and forces are, everything is illusion. The basis of today's view of nature is illusion. This is not based on a defect in thinking alone, it is simply based on the present constitution of the soul. We no longer speak of maya or illusion, as in the Indian worldview, because we do not see the facts in ordinary life. We do not see these facts, so that when we present nature, we actually always live in illusion. That is one thing.

The other point is: What about today's view of the spirit? This view of the spirit today is something that floats very, very much in abstractions. You can best follow this if you take one or the other philosophy. It does not matter which philosophy you take. You can take a philosophy that is half confused and rambling in words, like Eucken's; you can take one that rests on somewhat firmer foundations, like Liebmann's; you can get involved in one that speaks more to the popular consciousness, like Schopen and so on: in the philosophies and world views of the present day, there is talk of spirit; if the philosophies are not purely positivist, like the Comtean one we recently got to know, if they are not materialist, then there is still talk of spirit among philosophers. But what is it that is talked about in the philosophies, and what is called spirit from today's soul constitution? Just as that which man draws through natural phenomena like a net by assuming a certain material and energetic order makes the view of nature an illusion, so everything that is said about the spirit in current popular belief is basically a hallucination, and the usual philosophies are actually only a sum of unrecognized hallucinations. Basically, the human being today is constituted in such a way that when he looks towards nature, he hovers between illusion with his soul, and when he looks towards the spirit, he hovers between hallucination. What philosophers dream of spirit, in that they want to construct a certain view of spirit purely out of concepts, is actually only a sum of fine hallucinations, albeit fine ones, but still hallucinations. They are images that arise from the depths of the human being for reasons that we do not want to discuss today, and as such they have nothing much to do with reality.

I have often drawn your attention to such phenomena in the world of facts, which clearly show that everything that people can imagine need not have much to do with reality. To substantiate this, I have pointed out that, for example, in their naivety, a good number of philosophers today talk about man having to be thought of as consisting of body and soul. Even the world-famous Wundtian philosophy talks of body and soul and professes to be free of prejudice. But in reality – and I have already pointed this out – what is all of Wundt's philosophy or similar philosophies? It is only the execution of what the Eighth General Council of Constantinople decided in 869: that one should not speak - roughly one could define the council decision, which was of course couched in terms of conditions at the time - when speaking of man, of body, soul and spirit, but that the spiritual is only a property of the soul, that one should only speak of body and soul. And the trichotomy of body, soul and spirit was, after all, a heretical view throughout the Middle Ages. The theological philosophers trembled when they were pushed by reality to hint at body, soul and spirit, because it was a heretical view. Philosophers still hold this view today. They only expound what was dogmatized by that Council of Constantinople in the past, and they believe that they are unprejudiced, they believe that they are expounding something that follows from their pure views and investigations, whereas in reality they are only expounding a council decision. One must look at things without illusion; one must look at reality. Our young students learn in philosophy what was decided at the Council of Constantinople in 869.

Now I am not saying that what is taught today is a direct consequence or effect of that council decision; but what was dogmatized at the eighth council in Constantinople was, as a dogma, only the intellectual outflow of deeper events that are hidden beneath the surface of things and continue to this day. And all that wants to dogmatize - no matter whether it was done by the good philosophers of the Council of Constantinople or by the good professors of today's universities - all these conceptual webs are basically only conceptual hallucinations that arise in man and are too thin, I would say, in reality content, to really grasp the reality that prevails beneath them. Because today's human being, in accordance with the constitution of his soul, oscillates to a certain extent between the hallucinatory nature of his conceptual world and the illusory nature of his view of nature, he is therefore in danger of dualism. And he will always be in danger of being able to carry everything he devises as ideas, as ideals, only into the hallucinatory sphere of concepts, which does not reach into reality; or, he will be able to carry what he devises about nature into the illusionary sphere of the view of nature, which in turn has nothing to do with true reality, which is precisely an illusion. Man is simply never predisposed to find directly, or, I might say, comfortably, that which he calls truth – a word. He must start from something that can bring him discord, doubt, skepticism in life, and penetrate to the truth. In today's developmental cycle, man is forced to ascend from oscillating between the hallucination of philosophy and the illusion of the view of nature to the truly real, to that which really is.

Now one could raise the question – I am speaking more or less aphoristically, of course, only the whole should then provide a context: What can be given as the next reason why the old man could or can fall more into fatalism, the newer man more into dualism in matters of world view? One falls into such dangers when one abandons oneself to mere conceptual play; today one could also say: to mere dialectics.

Now, of course, you will object: today's people, with their sense of reality, are not at all predisposed to fall prey to mere conceptual play. —You are very much mistaken! Future ages, which will assess our age more objectively, will see that never before have people been so inclined to theorize and play with mere concepts as they are in the present. Today, people are very keen to abandon reality and turn to mere conceptual play. But when one leaves reality and begins to twist and turn, to connect and disconnect his concepts, at the very moment when one has turned away from reality, then there is already the danger of either fatalism or dualism. What is needed, and what today's man has to train himself to do, is precisely the sense of reality, which has often been emphasized here from the most diverse points of view.

Now it is not easy to cultivate a sense of reality, especially when it comes to spiritual matters, because more often than not we are dealing with mere playing with concepts, with playful dialectics. And what appears as an external illusion is, as soon as it enters into the moral and spiritual life of human beings, very apt to foster the illusionary. Man always tries to theorize about certain things. He tries to theorize about good and evil, about freedom or necessity; one could say that man is actually terribly inclined to theorize about the most important questions of life, that is, to indulge in mere conceptual play. And what one encounters today here and there in discussions of world views actually only runs within the dialectic of concepts. People are even deceived about this, believing that they have concepts, when in reality they cannot have concepts at all; rather, in addition to the concept, they still have sympathies and antipathies for certain concepts and against certain concepts, and according to one's sympathies and antipathies, a person then forms this or that conceptual context and the like. But I do not want to dwell on that. In the vast majority of discussions of world-views, which are a game of concepts in questions, a disregard of reality is inevitable.

To make it clear what I actually mean here, let us start from a fact that often occurs in life: from hatred, from the existence of hatred. Something like the existence of hatred in human nature needs to be explained. With a mere play on words, one very often tries to explain such and similar things. Hatred is a phenomenon of the soul, a psychological reality. But anyone who engages with these things soon finds that certain concepts cannot truly capture the full color of the phenomenon of hatred. Such things as hatred can only be understood by trying to move from the world of illusion to the true world of reality. Hatred is something that plays into the human soul from a deeper world of reality. We must now ask ourselves: is this hatred the same in the world of reality as it appears in the human soul? If it is different in the world of reality than it appears in the human soul, then we will soon see how important it is not to arrive at any spiritual insight by merely getting to know hatred in the human soul. If one seeks out hatred in the cosmos using spiritual scientific methods – not in the individual human being, but hatred plays a role in the individual human soul – if one seeks it out in the cosmos, it is something quite different. You find the same thing that manifests itself as hatred in the human soul outside in the cosmos. You just must not fall for the trap of merely seeking such natural forces as today's scientific illusion seeks. But in the cosmos, this hatred is something essentially different from what it is in the human soul. In the cosmos, hatred is a force without which individualization could never occur. Special beings could never come into being, nor could the special human being, if the force of hatred did not exist in the cosmos. I am not speaking of the illusory repulsion of atoms, but of something real. Hatred arises in the cosmos, but in the cosmos hatred must not be judged so morally as when it plays into the human soul. In the cosmos, hatred is a force that underlies all individualization. The whole world would merge into a great unity, as nebulous pantheists would like it to be; no being would separate itself, no being would divide itself, if it were not for the cosmic principle that humans do not see in the cosmos at first, but which plays into the human soul and takes on the special form in the human soul that we know as hatred.

Now, however, the question arises: what is the relationship between the human and the cosmic? I have already hinted at something about this from a certain point of view; today we want to add a few aphorisms. When reasonable philologists – today philology, too, has firstly become abstracted and secondly rather philistine – but when reasonable philologists studied the languages that could be found among the so-called wild people in America when the "civilized", I say that in quotation marks, had penetrated into America, when these civilized people had discovered the wild Americans, the more insightful philologists found it remarkable that these wild people had such logically transparent languages! A great number of such languages were found there in which, as philologists can assure us, and as is also true, the refinements of Spanish and Italian can be found in the formation and structure of the language. Such things were found among the wild natives of Greenland. Now there is no doubt about it: these savages did not have the intellect of which modern man is so proud. Nor would this modern intellect get very far if it were to engage in language formation and creation; for what the modern intellect achieves when it wants to be creative in language can be sufficiently demonstrated in many places. In fact, objective reason was at work in the human soul, which was still a wild one, which did not yet have the present intellect. This objective reason I also showed you at work in humanity's creativity in language the other day. Reason held sway there. This reason that held sway there did not yet affect man as strongly individualized as today's world reason affects man; it affected man even less individualized, less separated, and worked in him even more as cosmic reason. And so it has come about in the development of mankind. In those ancient times, man was not the wild creature that today's anthropology awakens illusionary ideas about, but he was a member of a whole organism - although this is of course figuratively speaking - and he gradually individualized himself. So he was a member and expressed more and more cosmic reason, or one could also say that cosmic reason was expressed more and more in him.

This gives you a real indication of how the cosmic that is at work here plays into the human soul. And now you can also transfer this to a special phenomenon such as cosmic hatred finding its way into the human soul. And we know, of course, that in the spiritual realm, as in the natural realm, we have to speak of certain polarities. How did that which is cosmic reason enter into language? Today humanity is no longer creative in language; it was creative in language; what appears in languages today are only residues. How did that cosmic reason enter into the human soul, how did it become individual? If we seek to answer this question, we come to all that we call the Ahrimanic. And how does something like the appearance of hatred enter the human soul from the cosmic? Here we come to the Luciferic, which is the opposite pole to the Ahrimanic. Today's man is ashamed to speak of Ahriman and Lucifer, while he is not ashamed to speak of positive or negative electricity or positive or negative magnetism. But the fact that he is ashamed is based only on a modern superstition.

Even if we are clear about the fact that spiritual entities really did enter on the one hand as the Luciferic in such things as hatred, or as the Ahr in such things as speech or even thinking, on the other hand we must also realize how things are significant in the whole context of the world, how this enters into the whole context of the world. When I look at hatred in such a way that I say that the great initial facts rest on it, precisely that it can individualize itself, separate itself, that not everything floats together in a general primeval slime, then I am pointing to the phenomenon, to the fact of hatred in the distant past, in that past in which man did not yet exist in his present form; I am pointing to a very, very distant past. So, in a sense, I am giving you an insight into hatred that corresponds to a distant, distant past, the past in which man had not yet separated himself from the rest of the world. We can speak of the different kingdoms of nature, of which we know — you only have to read my 'Occult Science' — how they have developed as mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms. We can speak of these nature kingdoms. If we speak of them completely, not in their illusory but in their reality, the power of hatred lives in all of this, but hatred as I have illustrated it to you as cosmic hatred.

Now there comes a point in evolution when that which is otherwise a general cosmic fact plays into the human soul; it plays into the human soul through luciferic, ahrimanic forces: now it is within the human soul, now it is raised out of the cosmic, as this cosmic has formed itself from the past until now.

Now we know – if we draw schematically the cosmic of the past up to the present (violet) – after we have spoken so much about the so-called law of the conservation of energy or matter, which does not exist! – that, to a certain extent, what is purely naturally real in the present, except for the material, ceases. We know that what is merely spiritually present today is also the germ of the material substance of the future (red). If we look at things spiritually, we have to say that everything that is now in the order of the past has flowed out of the spiritual. That which has flowed out will find its end. What is the future order is only now flowing out of the spiritual. It could never assert itself as the natural order if there were conservation of energy and matter. But the idea that there is conservation of matter and energy is the strongest of all superstitions that have ever existed. The spiritual, which today announces itself in mere thoughts, is just as much the germ for the natural order of the future as the small plant germ, which announces itself in the plant of this year, is the germ for the plant of the next year.

Thus man himself stands in an ambivalent way within the world order. And one is pointed to man in his ambivalence if one wants to understand the whole context, if one wants to find a transition from cosmic hatred to the individual-soul hatred that occurs in human nature. You know that when we look at the human being as he stands before us today, we can say that his nature is made up of perception, feeling and will. He divides himself into a perceiving, a feeling and a willing being, which form a unity. But all the beautiful things that philosophy says about it come to nothing if we cannot also clearly and precisely distinguish the other side. Now even the somewhat conceptually-minded psychologists of the present day are realizing that we actually know nothing right about will. I have already explained the nature of will to you; today it is enough to point out that even contemporary psychology has to admit that we know nothing right about will. In fact, will is also overslept in the waking life of a person, in its entity, in its essence. One could also say that the human being does not reach down with his soul to the will. He believes – I have discussed this in the context of Augustine on the basis of a concrete fact – he believes that he stands inside the essence itself by imagining; but he cannot say this with regard to the will. For, however any intended purpose is connected with the complicated mechanism of the hand or the movement of the legs, man knows as little about it in waking life as he knows about his body when he sleeps or about his surroundings when he sleeps. The present man actually oversleeps the will. If one now advances through the method of spiritual science from mere imagining to willing, one learns from the facts, albeit from spiritual facts, to understand how it comes that man today oversleeps his will.

With our thinking, with our intellect as human beings, we would actually be in a very bad way if it were not for the other circumstance that I have mentioned and which I will explain in more detail in a moment. With our thinking we would actually be in a very bad way, because our thinking basically always remains childlike in relation to our human nature. In the course of our life between birth and death, our thinking acquires some knowledge about the immediate present of the world; about the past and the future, nothing, or at most something in hypotheses, but these disintegrate immediately if one only really takes them seriously. This thinking is precisely the germ of the future. And just as the germ in the plant is as yet of no significance in the reality of the plant world, but will only have significance next year at the earliest, so today's thinking has no reality value as yet. It stands in the same relation to its reality value as a small child stands to a human being. Thought is really directed entirely towards the future; but only that which comes into being out of it, just as the plant germ becomes a plant, will have a real significance in the future. The actual content, the substance of thinking, has only a germinal value today. But if we descend spiritually into the realm of will and try to recognize the subject of will — for will is only an activity — then will is something that carries within it the consciousness of the most distant past, the cosmic past. You can never understand anything about the evolution of the world with the intellect, without placing yourself in the volition through imagination, inspiration and intuition; for only in the human volition, which at the same time builds up the whole human organism, lies a subject that has the memory of the cosmic past just as you have the memory of your ordinary life.

The difference between the human intellect and the human will is that the human intellect develops at most a memory for personal, individual life, but the will, which the human being cannot reach with his intellect, has the memory of the cosmic past. Man carries within himself the memory of the cosmic past, but he cannot reach it with his intellect without spiritual scientific research. So we can say that on the one hand, the human being stands there as a volitional being, bearing within himself, if I may call it memory - it is only a figure of speech - the memory of the cosmic past. He stands there as an intelligent being, bearing within himself, as an intelligent being, only the present, because the intellect is only a germ for the future, not yet something present. Just as the germ of a plant is not yet present, but something of the future, so the intellect in relation to the will is the same as the small plant germ is to the whole plant. In that we are volitional beings, we stand as cosmic human beings through the individual on the soil of the whole past; in that we are intelligent human beings, we stand in the present and prepare to grow into the future.

In the same way, our volition can be compared to our intellect, one could say, with an old man and a child. Just as the old man relates to the child, so, of course with a corresponding extension of time, our volitional human being relates to our thinking human being.

How is the balance achieved? Now, what I have often called the Ahrimanic before, cosmic reason, is at work in our thinking human being. If we were dependent on our human nature without the working of Ahriman, our intellect would be quite differently ordered in the present day. The Roman Catholic Church could be terribly satisfied with humanity if it had only the measure of intellect that grows out of human nature today. For this intellect is childlike in relation to what man is capable of in the whole Cosmos, just as our will is senile.

In our thinking - and this thinking is inconceivable in evolution without the participation, for example, of the linguistic element - the Ahrimanic element comes into play. The Luciferic element comes into our will. The Ahrimanic element permeates us by raising our intellect, which in the overall evolution is still weaker today, which is childlike, to a certain height. But there is also the other side of the coin: we have an intellect that does not actually grow out of us; we have an intellect that could be compared not to a plant that grows out of the ground and then has the germ, but to a plant on which another plant is placed that does not carry a germ but carries another plant, and a far more perfect plant.

Our intellect is organized in an Ahrimanic way, with Ahrimanic structure. Therefore our intellect has something deluding about it for the human being. Of course, we do not take the view that, if we are humanities scholars, we should not use this intellect because it is Ahrimanic; but one must only look at things without illusion, one must only be clear about the fact that the human intellect is a light that shines strongly, shines more strongly than what could shine as intellect already flows out of human nature today. The intellectual principle has something blinding about it for human nature, something that draws things back into a certain sphere for him, in which he is blinded. Just as a strong, blinding light would fall on things, so it is when man himself illuminates things with his intellect. In doing so, he actually makes them essentially an illusion.

Just as the Ahrimanic enters into our intellect, so the Luciferic enters into our will, so that it falls asleep, so that it falls asleep properly. Just as the Ahrimanic principle brightens our germinal intellect, so the Luciferic lulls and puts to sleep our volitional subject, which actually carries the memory of the whole past within itself, so that the human being is unaware of this past.

This is, in a somewhat deeper sense, the basis of the dualism in man, this dualism that must be bridged, but that cannot be bridged by merely turning to theories, but that can only be bridged by turning to the facts themselves, to the facts of spiritual life, by knowing that our intellect originates in the world differently than our will. Our intellect and our will are like placing a child and an old man side by side, and artificially deceiving oneself by positing the abstractum man, which is just a mere abstractum, and saying: The child is a man, and the old man is a man. Such concepts are, of course, to the liking of people today, who mix everything up. Thus, for example, the assertion of the unified soul is made today, and it is believed that the soul as such arises in the same way with intellectual thinking as with loving volition, whereas, in the way I have just indicated, if one really, actually wants to understand the human being, one must distinguish. What we think through mere intellect as a world view can therefore never approach reality, but remains hallucination, because it comes from our intellect being permeated with a spiritual essence that does not belong to this world: with Ahrimanic spiritual essence that does not belong to the world order into which we look with our eyes. Likewise, on the other hand, it is in relation to the will, which is permeated with Luciferic essence.

These things have always been felt, and in one way or another people have expressed them. For example, it is little noticed that the Old Testament already has at least an inkling of this polar opposition of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. I say it is little noticed because people read so nicely when they read the Bible, chapter after chapter in succession, and do not distinguish there either; do not distinguish such a contrast as exists between the Book of Job and the Books of Moses. But in this contrast between the Books of Moses and the Book of Job there is already an inkling of that polar contrast between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, which one must grasp. Moses raises the question of evil in human nature, that is, of something like the cosmic hatred, the human hatred, as it were, that enters into man. Moses raises the question of evil. And then he presents the Fall of Man in a magnificent picture. We know that behind this Fall of Man is hidden what we call the entry of the Luciferic into human nature. Then a certain conclusion is drawn from this view of Moses, that all misfortune and also death actually stems from this human sin - let us say pre-human sin, if you prefer. So that one can say that Moses' view is: misfortune and death are the consequence of sin.

The radically opposite view is that of the Book of Job. First of all, you do not have a snake, but a purely spiritual being, an ahrimanic being, which comes close to the divine being itself. And in the case of Job, it is not about a human being like Adam, who can fall prey to sin, but rather about someone who is supposed to be “righteous”. And how does this being, who approaches God, want to make Job fall into sin? By bringing misfortune upon him! It is exactly the opposite: this being wants to bring misfortune upon Job so that he will sin. Misfortune is already there, and from misfortune comes sin. In the Book of Moses, evil is said to come from sin, while in the Book of Job, sin comes from evil. This contrast is felt. Even at this early stage, a certain intuitively sensed dualism plays a part. There is a radical contrast in outlook between the more pagan Book of Job and the fully Jewish Book of Moses. But as I said, these things are read one after the other without always paying attention to them.

Today it is absolutely necessary for humanity that not that foolish “self-knowledge”, which is often defined as something desirable, seduces people, but that people really learn to know themselves, that they learn to distinguish between intellect and will just as objectively as they learn to distinguish between hydrogen and oxygen; otherwise they can only seemingly overcome a certain dualism.

But what happens in any given age is always preceded by a long period of preparation. And in fact we can only study that which emerges as particularly significant in a particular age. In our endeavor to build a bridge between the dualisms of the present, we want to take a particularly close look at the hallucinatory aspect of the intellect, which is connected with everything I have described, and at the illusory aspect of natural phenomena, which in turn is connected with what I have described. This leads man into a kind of inner conflict in life. I would say that there are two currents at work in him, whereas he must strive for one current. And today, one of these currents is particularly seductive: the one that arises from the relationship between man and his soul and the natural order. Today's man, who sees in it a reality that is the same for all things – the anatomist, if I choose a nearby example, or the physiologist – today takes the human body and differentiates only externally, not internally, the individual limbs of this body. I would say he puts the heart next to the liver and examines both only in a purely external way, not taking into account the time perspective of which I spoke recently; whereas in fact one only gets a proper understanding of the nature of the heart as well as the liver if one takes this time perspective into account , for example, if one really proceeds spiritually scientifically in embryology in such a way that one learns to distinguish in time the disposition of the heart in the development of the embryo, and furthermore, that one does not simply let them exist next to each other and consist of cells, which on the one hand is right and on the other hand is nonsense. Because something can be right and nonsense at the same time, as we know.

So, in explaining the natural order, today's scientific trend, as it were, takes no account of that which is temporally apart, placing it side by side and thereby arriving at its abstraction. There the temptation is particularly great to simply place one thing next to the other: cause, effect; cause, effect; cause, effect – an abstract, illusory causal order! We know from the presentations that I gave you here last year and also already this year that you cannot look at nature in this way, that nature can only be explained if you look at it primarily as a reflection of a spiritual being. That is when you come to the true metamorphosis, that is when you come to real Goetheanism. In this way, the human head appears as an education that depicts the distant past; the organism of the extremities appears as that which points to a distant future. But what stands in the individual is not just next to each other according to causes, but it is imagination, an image of what stands behind it. We do not understand the human head if we understand it only as if it grew out of the rest of the human organism, whereas in truth it is formed out of the whole cosmos, and out of the cosmos in a different way than, for example, the organism of the extremities. In physics, everyone would find it ridiculous if someone were to explain that a magnetic needle always points north because it has the inner power to point north; instead, the explanation is that the cosmos, i.e., the earth's magnetism, is the guiding force for the magnetic needle in one pole and the other. Only in the case of humans or other organisms should everything grow out of itself in a straight line! Just as the magnetic needle points to the north for cosmic reasons on one side and to the south on the other, so man, for reasons of cosmic time, points with his head backwards into primeval, distant pasts, even into pasts in which the earth itself was metamorphosing, and he points with his limb organism into primeval, distant futures. He is temporally and cosmically oriented. And that will be the formation of the doctrine of metamorphoses, that is real Goetheanism: rising from the mere illusory causal order to the conception of nature through imagination. By recognizing that which one has before one as an image of another, one rises above mere illusion.

'But one must not stop at nature. One needs a correlative, one needs something supplementary. He who speaks of nature in this way would again become a fantasist if he were to understand nature only in this way and were not to explain on the other side: What more recent philosophy opposes to nature as spirit is also hallucination, and this too must not be left at that. Because that which lives today has developed slowly, humanity has gone through the most diverse stages, in order to gradually, I might say, advance to the state of the human soul in the spirit. And there we can distinguish three stages. Just as the concept of nature today can still be somewhat confused, and tends towards the levels of knowledge described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds?' as imagination, inspiration and intuition, so one can say that the human soul has gradually developed intellectually through three stages to a real standing in the spirit, to a real grasping in the spirit.

These are the three stages: the intuitive experience of the spirit, which is of course something hallucinatory because one takes the spirit in the present and does not recognize that it is a germ for the future; the intuitive experience, the dreamy-intuitive experience of the spirit. The second stage is the prophetic vision, where, in the sense of the old Hebrew prophets, for example, the future is really experienced in visions, where something of the spirit being germinal for the future is already living in it. And the third stage, which is still little understood, but which has something profound about it, is the apocalyptic view of the world. But all these are preliminary stages for the spiritual-scientific view, which, on the other hand, must be connected — because otherwise it would be in the air, figuratively speaking — with the pictorial view of nature. A pictorial view of nature lifts one above the illusory nature of science. Real behavior towards that which goes beyond the intuitive perception of the future, the visionary view of the future - prophetic visionary vision, apocalyptic vision - lifts us above the hallucinatory nature of intellectual life.

We must not – and this is the task of the human being in the present – take the spirit as the newer philosophies take it. We must not take nature as the naive view of nature takes it, nor as the theoretical natural science of the present takes it. Rather, we must, as it were, discard the delusion we have about nature and recognize how nature is merely an image of another, and we must recognize how the spirit, as it presents itself to philosophy today, is merely a shadow image. Then the bridge will be built between the ordinary view of spirit and the ordinary view of nature.

And a third will exist. You can never overcome something like dualism through mere discussion, but only by facing the facts, but then the complete facts, and finding a third to the duality. Therefore, the symbol that expresses this must express a trinity. Of course, today we realize that concepts are only a way of expressing something that is more profound. But we must have concepts; if we do not overestimate them, they do no harm. We speak here of the normal human, of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, and we also depict it: it is to be the central point of our structure. Auguste Comte also sensed that a view that runs in a threefold structure must be there, by setting up that Trinity of which I spoke to you recently. This true Trinity, which will include spiritual and natural views and thereby truly overcome dualism, must contain anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Therefore, one cannot arrive at genuine anthroposophical spiritual science without seriously addressing all the light and shadow sides of today's natural science and today's spiritual science. One must take things seriously. The seriousness of today's world cannot be addressed by merely throwing things together and forming theories about them.

Life does not take place in a primeval soup, but rather proceeds in a differentiated and individualized way. That which must strive for a future must be striven for in a differentiated way from the outset. Today, there is still a widespread bad habit of, if I may put it in trivial terms, lumping everything together. Today, if someone has a political theory, he also forms everything else according to this political theory, world views and so on. If someone today has philosophical views, he also uses them as politics and so on, slapping everything over the same stick, and indeed over the one that the person in question uses as his favorite stick. That is the way it is in our time. Life is differentiated. Only the person who knows how life is differentiated is free of illusions. The future does not strive for a primeval soup of life, but for a strong structure: for the spiritual life as science, a certain inner life, of which one still has little conception today, and which, according to the customs of ancient times, one can call a religious life, and for the political life. If you mix things up, if you try to regulate one thing after another, then you fall into the same mistakes as those I characterized here last year, or even two years ago. For things proceed in separate currents: on the one hand, social life according to socialism, on the other hand, religious life according to freedom of thought, and scientific life according to pneumatology, according to knowledge of the spirit. Only in the living interaction of the three will the future have a certain healing power for human development, not a paradise on earth, that does not exist, but a certain healing power. But it would be a bad idea to present the outer life pneumatologically, for example, to found religious sects, to imbue them with pneumatological life, and thus to pursue politics from the point of view of pneumatology. That would achieve nothing. Likewise, it would achieve nothing if politics were pursued in the old sense in religious communities. Just as little as the hands can do what the head of man can do, so little the legs can do that, so little can pneumatology achieve what socialism should achieve, or religion achieve what socialism should achieve, or what pneumatology should achieve. What matters is the differentiation of certain things, but not just theoretically, but the differentiation of certain things in life. And that is what I want to conclude with today and continue with tomorrow. As I said, they are only intended to be aphorisms, to teach us something new about the fundamental questions that concern us now.

{For words following the lecture, see the end of the volume under “Notes” on p. 326]