Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul

GA 52 — 6 October 1904, Berlin

XVII. Is Theosophy Unscientific?

Eight days ago, I attempted to show you what modern man can find in Theosophy today. Before I continue with this series of lectures, I would like to discuss the specific question of theosophy and its relationship to the great cultural tasks of the present, to the significant intellectual currents of our time. And so today I would like to address the very important question of whether theosophy is unscientific.

This is the accusation that hits the theosophical movement hardest at a time when science holds the greatest conceivable authority, perhaps even the only real authority. In such a time, this misunderstanding weighs very heavily. And so it must be particularly painful for theosophists when science, especially those who want to create a world and way of life based on science, repeatedly accuse theosophy of being unscientific. The fact that the majority of people today are seeking precisely this authority of science can be gauged from a phenomenon of recent years that must be symptomatic of the interests of our time. However, the question I am now only going to touch upon will only be discussed in detail in the lecture on science. Nevertheless, I would like to point out the great sensation caused by Haeckel's “The Riddle of the Universe” to show that the teachings of this book reveal where the interest lies to those who, like myself, recognize their value. This book aims to construct an entire worldview on the basis of natural science. Over ten thousand copies have been sold; then a cheap popular edition was published for one mark, and over a hundred thousand copies of this edition have been sold in the few years since its publication. The book has been translated into almost all major languages. However, this seems less significant to me than what I am about to say. Haeckel has received more than five thousand letters relating to scientific questions. The letters all contain almost the same questions, and so we see that an important central need has been met. A supplement to the book “Die Welträtsel” (The Riddle of the Universe) is the book “Die Lebenswunder” (The Wonders of Life). In the introduction to this book, Haeckel tells us what I have just said. In this book, you can also read the accusation made against theosophy, the accusation of unscientificity. The question is therefore a burning one.

We must therefore be clear about the overall position of our theosophical spiritual movement in relation to science in general. If we only look at the last few centuries, we cannot become clear about this at all. We must go much further back, we must go back to the origin of human knowledge, to a time far ahead of our calendar, to the dawn of human knowledge, or at least to what we today call human knowledge.

In order to fully understand how enormous the contrast is between the view of scientific problems today and in that dawn of human knowledge, we must realize that today's science itself declares itself completely incapable of answering the great questions of existence. In the preface to “The Wonders of Life,” you will find repeated what Haeckel has often said: he represents the standpoint of science as opposed to medieval superstition and revelation. There is no middle ground between truth and superstition; only one or the other is possible. In doing so, he asserts that what he has achieved on the basis of his scientific studies is the only truth and that everything that other millennia have produced is error, superstition, and unscientific, simply because the researchers of earlier centuries knew nothing of the great discoveries of the 19th century.

However, the natural sciences of our time admit that they are unable to answer certain questions. Certainly, as I already indicated in my previous lecture, these natural sciences attempt to take us back to times long past, searching for prehistoric animals and plants and leading us back to the point in time when life probably first sprouted on Earth. But the questions, these important central questions posed by Dw Bois-Reymond and answered by Haeckel in his book “Die Welträtsel” (The Riddle of the World), the questions about the origin of life, find no answer in natural science. Of course, natural scientists today are trying to answer these questions, Haeckel in particular. He shows how the Earth emerged from a molten state, gradually cooled down, became more solid, how water was then able to form and collect, and how the conditions were finally right for living beings to emerge. He attempts to show how one could form a mental image of life sprouting from the inanimate. This is what he wanted to counter all older beliefs with: that life once sprouted from the inanimate and that everything that depends on life—including humans—is nothing more than a product of inorganic matter, that it is based on nothing other than what we have in physics and chemistry. But Haeckel tries in vain to show that human beings are nothing more than the result of the wonderful dynamics and mechanics of the human organism. For now comes the big question. Now the natural scientist comes to the point where the conditions on our earth are supposed to have existed for the first living being to emerge from inanimate matter. And here we find a concession among researchers, even among Haeckel: we cannot possibly form a mental image of the state of our Earth at the time when the first life appeared on it. We do not know what the external natural conditions were like at that time, and therefore we cannot possibly say how the inanimate transformed into the animate.

This is one group of researchers. They had many followers in the first third of the 19th century, as they still do today. If, for example, the great English researcher Darwin had been asked for his opinion in the early days, when it was said that life must be understood from matter, he himself would have admitted that it was impossible to understand living things from non-living things. Huxley, through his study of comparative anatomy, himself stated in the last period of his life that we are in the midst of world development, and why should we not be able to think that what we see around us could not develop further, that we cannot declare the realm of beings to be complete, that we must look up from the lower beings to the higher beings, which are inaccessible to us because we do not have the sensory organs for them. Such thoughts and objections have been raised by the most insightful among natural scientists themselves.

It is interesting that the German biologist Preyer, on the basis of his studies, which were themselves based on Darwinism, came to completely different views on life. He did not believe that life developed from the dead, but came to the conclusion that when the earth developed the first living being of our kind, the earth was not dead, but a single living being, and that at that time there was nothing lifeless on our earth at all. The inanimate developed from the animate. So you see, the Darwinist Preyer turned the view held by other naturalist philosophers on its head by seeing the Earth as one big living being. That was, according to Preyer, millions of years ago. Our Earth was a large living being, comparable to a human or animal organism of today. Even humans today have living and seemingly lifeless parts within them. Our skeletal system is seemingly lifeless. It has separated itself from the living as a non-living part. Preyer has, roughly, the mental image that the Earth was once a large living being, and that the living Earth then expelled the lifeless, the dead, the rock and the masses of stone, just as humans expel the skeleton. This is a step, an important step, that natural scientists and philosophers have taken in recent times. And this step must necessarily lead to another; it must lead to the step that not only the lifeless developed from the living, but that everything physical, the living and the lifeless, developed from the higher, from the spiritual. Thus, if researchers follow the path they have taken today and at the very beginning, they must come to the conclusion that not only has the inanimate developed from the animate, but the animate itself has developed from the spiritual. The spiritual came first, it first separated the animate, and the animate in turn separated the inanimate, the dead. This, however, is nothing other than the basis of the theosophical worldview.

The theosophical worldview differs from the current materialistic-scientific view in that it makes the spirit primary and everything else dependent on the spirit. The materialist makes matter primary and derives everything from matter. I already indicated last time that the doctrine of the senses in the last century itself points to the reason why today's natural scientists insist on their assertion that the living can be derived from the non-living, the spiritless. I referred to the great statement first made by the physiologist Johannes Müller and other eminent physiologists. Helmholtz and then Lotze formulated it as follows: The world around us would be dark and silent if we did not have eyes and ears that convert the vibrations of the air into what we perceive as colors and sounds. — Thus, natural science itself tells us that everything we see in the physical world around us depends on us. If we did not have eyes and ears arranged in a very specific way, we would not be able to see and hear the world in this particular way. Physiologists can tell us the reasons why the eye and the ear are formed in a very specific way. This stems from the fact that we participate in the physical world through our sensory organs. Theosophy now shows us the basic concepts, which I will discuss in eight days. We see a thing by placing our eyes in the right position in relation to the thing we want to see. We understand a thing by having a mind and using it to form the images of objects into a world picture. This enables us to form a world picture. Theosophy expresses this as follows: Man is conscious of the physical world.

But now we must ask the question: Does man live only within the physical world? We can explain this question to ourselves by forming a mental image of someone who has no ears; he would not hear the sounds of his fellow human beings. They could produce sounds and words, but without the faculty of hearing, they would not perceive the sounding revelations of the outer physical world. You must have ears in order to become aware of the physical world. But does man consist solely of such physical manifestations? No, you all know that within the body that encloses man and also the animal, there are not only physical activities, but that feelings, instincts, passions, desires, and wishes are also present in the human being. These desires, wishes, instincts, and passions are just as real as physical functions and physical activities. Just as you digest and speak, you also feel, wish, and desire. Digestion and speech are physical expressions, and we can perceive them with our physical senses for our physical consciousness. Why can't we perceive the other reality that is also within us, the desires, cravings, emotions, and passions? In the spirit of the natural sciences, we can say that we cannot perceive them because we have no sensory organs for them.

However, the worldview underlying the theosophical movement shows us that human beings can become aware not only of the physical world, but also of a higher world. And when we look at the manifestations of this higher world, then desires, cravings, passions, and instincts are just as perceptible realities as physical perception, just as language is the physical expression of physical activity. We then say that consciousness of the so-called astral world has awakened. Then human beings stand before us as beings of instinct, desire, and passion, just as they awaken as physical beings and can reflect light impressions back to our physical eyes. How these higher senses awaken, how human beings can acquire higher consciousness, we will hear in the lecture series on “The Basic Concepts of Theosophy.” Human beings live in this higher world, but their consciousness, insofar as they are average human beings of the present, is not awakened to this higher world.

Then there is a third world, a world of thought, a world of higher spiritual life, which lies above the passions, desires, wishes, and instincts. This world of thoughts, the world of spirituality, is even less accessible to physical consciousness. Those who hold the views of modern philosophy should not deny the existence of this world of pure spirit, but should consider that perhaps modern humans simply lack the organs to perceive it. Humans also live in this third world. They think in this world, but they cannot perceive it.

So we must say: human beings today live in three worlds. In German, we call these three worlds: the physical world, the soul world, and the spiritual world. In common theosophical terminology, they are called: the physical world, the astral world, and the mental world. However, human beings are only conscious of the first, the physical world, and can therefore only scientifically discern anything about the physical world. They can only discern anything about the other worlds when they become as perceptive, as aware, and as conscious in them as they are today in the physical world.

Thus, we have before us a three-part living being in the human being, which forms a whole consisting of body, soul, and spirit, but which is only conscious in the body. For this reason, however, the researcher investigating within the body today can only look back as far as the physical world opens itself to this researcher's gaze. Even the researcher's gaze, equipped with all the tools of science, sees no other world than that which presents itself to ordinary sensory life. Even if he looks back millions of years on the history of the earth, he sees back to the point where, out of the astral dawn — which is more luminous than any physical light — the physical gradually condensed. Only the eye that has become seeing can penetrate to the point where the physical emerged from the astral, and even earlier, where the astral emerged from the spiritual; to the point where the spirit gradually condensed into the living and later into the inanimate. Therefore, the physical researcher's method of research leaves him at the point where the physical flashes forth, as it were, where it has emerged from the soul-spiritual. Thus it comes about that the physiologist rises to the periphery, to the point where the living becomes spiritual. The spiritual researcher rises even further into the past, thereby creating a more comprehensive worldview, a worldview that extends far beyond what the physical researcher knows.

We have thus shown that the theosophical worldview does not need to be unscientific because it presents a slightly different worldview than physical research. It is based on different experiences — awakening on the spiritual plane. Just as you have to feel your way around in a dark room and perceive things by touch, and just as a completely different impression arises when the dark room is illuminated, so everything appears new to the spiritual researcher, to the one whose eyes are open, in new activity, in a different light. This researcher has not become unscientific because his experience has been enriched. The logic of the theosophist is just as reliable as the logic of the best natural scientist. Only this logic moves in a different field. It is a strange ignorance to reject the science of our research before examining it. We think in the same way on the higher planes as the physical researcher thinks on the physical plane; this harmonizes the theosophical method of research with the physical one.

Now we must have an explanation as to why the modern researcher expresses this harsh either/or and rejects everything that is not physical in nature. It becomes clear to the theosophical researcher why this must be so: it is connected with the development of humanity. Because the theosophist views the development of humanity in a higher light and because he can, so to speak, follow the preparation in the spiritual realm, the theosophist is able to recognize from this development why physical intellectual science is accorded sole authority. What we call science today has not always existed. Just as every plant and every animal has developed, just as the sexes and human races have developed, so too has spiritual life developed. And even today's science has not always been at the same stage. It, too, is a product of development. But even in the most ancient times there was a way of human perception, even if it was not scientific in the modern sense. That is why we must go back to the time when human life began.

Everything is in development. Millions of years ago, the human race was more different from today's than one's mental image. This difference will also be discussed in the lectures on the “Basic Concepts of Theosophy.” The human race of today was preceded by another, the Atlantean human race. Plato still tells of it. This race is an undeniable fact for natural science. It thought differently, lived differently, and developed different powers than today's humanity. Anyone who wants to learn more about this can read further about this human race in my magazine “Lucifer.” After the demise of this human race, this “root race,” the kind of mental image and thinking and viewing that we have today began to develop. And even within our present root race, according to theosophical understanding, we distinguish seven sub-races, of which our own is the fifth.

Today's humanity has developed slowly, and spiritual life has developed slowly. If we go back to the spiritual life of the first sub-race of our root race, we find that this spiritual life was very different from our spiritual life today. The thinking of these people was different. It was of a kind that cannot be compared at all with our present-day combinatory intellectual knowledge. This thinking was spiritual, arising through intuition, through a kind of spiritual instinct — but even that is not the right word; it was more a spiritualized way of thinking. This spiritualized way of thinking contained within itself, as in a seed, all the other human spiritual activities that exist side by side today. What today manifests itself separately as imagination, religious piety, moral sentiment, and at the same time as scientific thinking, was then one. Just as the whole plant is contained in the seed, in a unity, so what is now expressed in many spiritual activities was contained in a unity. Imagination was not the kind of imagination that we refer to as unreal. Imagination was fertilized by the spiritual content of the world, so that it produced truth. It was not what we today call artistic imagination; it was the kind that contained truth in its mental images. Feeling and ethical will were intimately connected with this imagination. The whole human being was a unity, a spiritual cell. We can get an external mental image of this by examining what has remained to us. If you study the ancient spiritual products, such as the Vedas of the ancient Indians, you will find art, poetry, and spirit flowing as if from a single source. Truth, poetry, and a sense of duty flowed at that time as if from a single center of the human being, from a common intuition. We can also study the mental images that have remained historically from the oldest Druidic times and which form the basis of our own — and we will find that the temple buildings, the stone settings of the Druids, are modeled on the cosmic dimensions of the world. All this shows us an earlier development.

Then we come up to the next sub-races. There we see how spiritual activities separate, how they spread out in the beginning like the branches of a tree. We see how later, in the Chaldean-Egyptian period, the science of astronomy separates from purely practical science; how, piece by piece, it separates from what was a unified view and becomes specialized endeavors. And we can then follow a very specific law in our fifth root race: namely, that the human beings of this fifth root race gradually conquer the physical world in all its areas. If we consider the spiritual human beings of the very beginning of our age, as just described, we see how everything is still spirit for them. The ancient Vedic priest does not yet know the attachment to the physical. The physical was still something unworthy to him; his gaze was directed only toward the eternal course of events; his gaze was directed toward heaven, and the earthly hardly touched him. In our time, this Vedic view seems like an anachronism; we see how these views are no longer equal to the physical, and how the Indian people in particular suffer from the fact that their inner gaze is darkened, pushed back by a world that can no longer understand this gaze. Man had to conquer the physical world with his spiritual gaze; man has immersed himself in the physical world and must work on the physical world more and more. First, the gaze was directed inward toward the inner self, then, among the Chaldeans and Egyptians, it was directed toward the stars. And if we move on to the Greeks, we see how what was previously united—philosophy, religion, and art—gradually emerges as three completely separate spiritual activities. In ancient Vedism, the priest is at once a poet, a researcher, and a religious prophet; if we move on to Greek culture, we see the philosopher, the artist, and the priest appearing separately. And what happened, according to the law of development in ancient Greece? The physical world was first conquered by one of the activities of the spirit, by the imagination. The conquest of the physical world by means of imagination is the powerful Greek art.

Let us move on to the early Christian era. This had already been prepared in the Old Testament, in antiquity, but the new territory was only conquered by the spirituality of the Christian era. It is the realm of ethical, moral life. If you go back to ancient Greece, you will see that morality does not appear separately from the general worldview. It was only with Socrates and Plato that the moral being began to separate itself. Christianity conquered the moral world. Just as ancient Greece conquered the physical spiritually through imagination in art, so Christianity conquered physical morality, moral life on earth, spiritually. This is a second phase of development.

And again, if we skip forward some time, we see at the turn of the 15th to the 16th century how what was previously united splits once more. We see how the worldviewer, the philosopher, and the researcher separate. Previously, there was no separation between philosophers and natural science and physical researchers. If you look back to the early Middle Ages, consider Scotus Erigena, Albertus Magnus, all those who were concerned with intellectual life in the world, you will see that everything went hand in hand. There was no separation between spiritual-philosophical researchers and purely physical researchers. Even in Cartesius and Spinoza, you can find echoes of the connection between philosophy and science. Philosophical thinking used to go hand in hand with natural science. Then, in the 15th and 16th centuries, this divergence occurred: science separated itself from philosophy; science became independent. A new area of physical life was conquered: the area that could be conquered by physics, astronomy, and so on, in short, by purely physical intellectual science. So now we see what used to be united: science, art, philosophy, religion, ethics, going their separate ways.

Repeated attempts were later made to reunite what used to be a unity. We see this endeavor in Goethe as well. We see how he strives to create a spiritual natural science and to find a bridge between science and art. One of his statements illustrates this: “Beauty is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would have remained hidden from us forever without its appearance.” Richard Wagner also attempted to unite the myths of religions in a new art form that was to be more than art based purely on imagination. These endeavors are reminiscent of something that has always existed. Alongside the separate paths taken by religion, art, science, and ethics, there has always been what is called the great unity. Alongside science, art, and philosophy, there was the mystery tradition. The entire worldview was presented to the initiate of the mysteries. He was not told in a scientific way what once was and what the laws of the world are: an image of life was created there. In the drama of Dionysus, it was revealed to him how man, the spiritual man, is immersed in physical matter, how the spiritual has condensed into matter in order to 'rise again to the spiritual in the future. This work of art, this Dionysus drama, was performed in grand images in the ancient Greek mysteries. It showed how Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Semele, how he is saved by Pallas Athena, and how his heart is saved by Zeus. This is the performance of a great human drama; it was meant to represent nothing other than life within our earth. It was intended to show how human beings have sunk into their physical form, how they have saved their souls through the deepest spiritual within, and how they should develop themselves upward again to a new divine existence. — Outwardly, in Greek culture, what constitutes a unity in the depths of the mystery temples appears to be separate. What Socrates recounts and what Plato depicts in philosophy is nothing other than an external reflection, a separation of what was found in the mysteries. If you read Plato, you will see the philosophical elaboration of the mystery drama; if you read the tragic fates of the heroes, you will find in these heroic dramas a faint reflection of the mystery drama. Philosophy developed out of ancient art. In our new age, as I said, the final separation has taken place: intellectual science, limited to the physical world, has conquered the world; the microscope and the telescope have conquered the world. Just as Christian art conquered the inner world of feelings, so physical science has conquered the outer world of nature. That was the task, the great world mission: to conquer in separate parts what used to be a unity.

To initiate the unity of all four, of science, philosophy, ethics, and art, is the mission of a new dawning age; the mission of a new humanity that Theosophy wants to prepare. That is why the first significant work, The Secret Doctrine by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, with the subtitle: The Unification of Science, Religion, and Philosophy. — This is how the theosophical worldview relates to the individual branches that today spill over into spiritual life. You can see why it cannot be comforted when the worldview of the scientific world calls out to us with an either/or. You can see why the theosophist, who looks at the whole, can look at science with reconciliation and can hope for further advancement in the scientific sphere precisely because of the further development of science. This is the ideal of Theosophy. Because humanity is a whole in every single human being, this ideal is the great ideal of humanity in our time. People within our root race had to reach their goal on separate paths. But only for a while, according to the great law of the world, do the paths go separate ways; then they must unite again. Now is the time of union.

A unifying worldview can only be a tolerant worldview. That is why the great principle of tolerance is at the forefront of the movement. It would be a misunderstanding to judge the theosophical movement on the basis of any particular truth. We do not unite on the basis of a specific individual truth, a dogma, or what this or that person has recognized or believes they have recognized. Those in the theosophical movement who express a truth, however firmly and energetically, do not express it in the sense that others demand that one must profess it. Look at the various creeds, including the scientific schools of thought, materialism, monism, dualism, and so on. Everywhere you can observe one thing: the adherents of such a school of thought believe that they alone possess the truth and reject everything else. It is either one or the other. The result is strife between sects and strife in views. Theosophy differs fundamentally from this. The truth must develop in each individual human being. Those who express their insights do so for no other purpose than to inspire others. Nothing more. The theosophical teacher is aware that the truth must be brought out in every human being. In doing so, completely tolerant people unite in brotherhood toward a common great goal; they unite in the Theosophical Society, in the spiritual science movement. The most tolerant attitude, tolerance down to the level of feelings and thoughts, can be found in this movement. The theosophist, especially when he has advanced on his path of knowledge, is clear that the kernel of truth rests in every human being's own breast, that it only needs to be surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere in order to develop. It is the whole, the cooperation, that matters. Where theosophists unite, they create around themselves that atmosphere in which the individual human seed can flourish. They see their real task in this cooperation. This is what fundamentally distinguishes the theosophical movement from all others. Others fight each other — but we unite. Others are monists and consider dualism to be false, but we know that dualism and monism will find unity in an even higher harmony if one searches further within oneself spiritually.

The great minds have expressed this, including Goethe—echoing the words of the old masters—how divine truth must develop within human beings themselves, how it must spring forth from the individual human heart. He wrote this at the beginning of one of his scientific works, as a motto for our theosophical movement. This motto is:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could we see the light?
If God's own power did not live within us,
How could the divine delight us?