Knowledge of Soul and Spirit

GA 56 — 24 October 1907, Berlin

Knowledge of the Soul and the Spirit

The entire cycle of these lectures is devoted to the knowledge of the spirit, and if today we are to speak in particular about the knowledge of the spirit and the soul, it is because this will enable us to understand the concept of the spirit itself in a certain way, by relating it to the concept of the soul. For those who are engaged in Spiritual Science, it is particularly disturbing in our time that the two concepts of spirit and soul are constantly confused when considering the human being.

You all know that we have a so-called psychology or science of the soul, which is taught in schools on a relatively large scale today. In the course catalogs of universities, you will also find lectures on psychology, which literally means the teaching, the knowledge of the soul. It should be noted that none of those who speak of this kind of psychology or science of the soul are clearly aware that when speaking of human beings, one must speak of soul and spirit. Everything that is connected with the inner life of human beings, that is, if we may use the terms, with human thinking, feeling, and willing, is considered under the concept of the soul. The soul is regarded as the very opposite of the physical and corporeal in human beings, and it is said — if one is willing to go so far, that is, if one has not fallen into a completely materialistic way of thinking — that human beings consist of body and soul.

Let us first consider only those opinions that take the view that the soul is a real being. When it is said that human beings consist of body and soul, people are usually unaware that they are falling prey to a dogma that developed relatively late in the course of Christian development. Even early Christianity, which was still based on the wisdom teachings, distinguished, like all wisdom teachings of different times and peoples, between body, soul, and spirit in the human being. It was only later council decisions that abolished the spirit, so to speak, and only since the Council of Constantinople has one spoken only of body and soul. Modern scholarship, which deals with such matters at all, which does not think materialistically, believes that it stands on the ground of completely free research and does not even suspect that it has only taken up this later Christian concept of the soul, which disregards the spirit, as a prejudice, as a preconceived opinion. This is the case with many concepts that appear in our scholarship and are accepted as if they were really the result of research, when in fact they are only centuries-old prejudices.

Now we will take a look at popular psychology itself in its various forms. However, the aim here is not to criticize, but only to characterize. We can safely say that psychology has suffered most and most thoroughly from the materialistic attitude and way of thinking. Gradually, not only has the concept of the mind been lost from the external science of sensory phenomena, but psychology has even lost the concept of the soul, that is, its own subject matter. It is an interesting development that spiritual life has undergone. A bold researcher and thinker, who has achieved extraordinary things in many fields, had the courage to express what is, so to speak, merely a basic attitude and feeling within modern psychology. This bold thinker was Friedrich Albert Lange. You can all obtain his “History of Materialism” today in Reclam's Universal Library. It is an excellent book because anyone who studies it thoroughly, if they think at all, must come to the conclusion—as I explained in my last lecture—that materialism as a worldview is comparable to a man pulling himself up by his own hair. This Friedrich Albert Lange said something about psychology that can be summed up in three words: “Psychology without soul.” That is from Friedrich Albert Lange. Other researchers have not dared to express this conclusion, but they act and research in psychology as if the concept of the soul did not concern them. Even today, you will find all kinds of concepts about the soul in the most famous works of academic psychology. But if you really want to learn and understand something about the soul, you will seek advice there in vain, because this psychology has—and this is not meant as a criticism, but only as a characteristic—completely lost the concept of the soul, even if this is not always explicitly stated. Whether you seek advice from Wundt or others, you will find no information anywhere about the questions that interest people in relation to the life of the soul. You will find all kinds of questions answered about the way people perceive objects in their environment. You will also find all kinds of speculation about how perception relates to consciousness. For example, one asks: How long does it take for a person to raise a stimulus to consciousness after receiving it? You will find questions dealt with about attention, questions about how people judge, how they compare things with each other, how they remember, and so on. But who could deny that the impartial soul — now meant in the ordinary sense — when it asks about its own nature, has one thing above all else in mind: What is the nature of my soul? Does it share the fate of the physical, to decay and cease when death occurs? Does it participate only in the life of the sensory environment, or does it participate in a far higher, supersensory life that is not exhausted in the physical world? These questions, which are questions of life for human beings, you will search for in vain in today's psychology, even as questions. Everything in human life points to them, but when the real essence of the soul is considered, it is said that this goes beyond the limits of human knowledge.

If you have a little patience and take a look at such psychology, you will notice that the very same methods and research techniques that are applied today to physical nature, to the life around us, and which we have become accustomed to calling scientific methods, are also applied to soul research. Yes, if these methods are applied, the result can be nothing other than what we encounter in this psychological literature. More than in any other field, research into the soul is a matter of who is conducting the research. Where people think materialistically, they have increasingly come to the conclusion that the results of research can only be of a kind that confronts everyone from outside. Who today still fully and thoroughly understands the meaning of Goethe's beautiful words:

Were not the eye sunlike,
How could we behold the light?
Were not God's own power within us,
How could the divine delight us?

Nothing in the outside world confronts us unless we are related to the thing or being or force in question in the outside world, unless we carry something related to it within ourselves. Thus, only those who seek outside themselves something that they have experienced within themselves can explore the soul. Not everyone — this must be emphasized especially in relation to soul research — can be a psychologist, for human beings only perceive as much of the mysteries of other souls as has become reality within themselves.

Spiritual Science, as we said at the very beginning, deals with the spirit as such. And all these lectures are devoted to the contemplation of the spirit. Whatever the individual titles may be, the spirit is to be sought everywhere. As already apparent from the lecture given here two weeks ago, spiritual science will have to show that behind everything we encounter, spirit lives and spirit works.

What is matter in spiritual science? Just another form of spirit! When spiritual science speaks of matter, substance, and body, it speaks of them in the same way that it speaks of ice in relation to water. Ice is water in another form. Now someone might come along and say: So Spiritual Science denies matter and physicality when it claims that everything is spirit — and then there is no matter for Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science does not take this strange point of view at all. Let us stick with our comparison of ice and water. What matters for life are not empty words, not empty definitions, but effects that you encounter in life. Even if one says that ice is water in another form — and one is completely right in doing so — the effects of water are different from those of ice, as anyone can see when they place a piece of ice on their hand instead of pouring water on it. Anyone who wanted to deny that ice is water in another form would make a complete fool of themselves. So it does not occur to spiritual science to deny matter. It is there, only it is spirit in another form. And in what form? In the form that it can be observed and viewed from the outside through the senses. That is the essence of matter. Today's lecture ties in with the one eight days ago, where we were able to show how every materialistic view crumbles into nothing in the face of scientific progress, how the fantastic concept of matter dissolves into mist and fog as a result of new research. What was still a secure concept thirty years ago, such as ether and matter, is now being shattered by further research. And what remains for us of what approaches us in the outside world? What we see and hear, sound, color, warmth, and so on: what we perceive. As best we can, we should rise to the realization that behind warmth, behind sound, behind light, there is nothing of this terribly brutal whirl of atoms that was the only reality during the long period of materialism. In this sense, what is real is what we see, what we hear, what we feel as warmth. And when we look behind the color, behind the sound, behind the warmth as we perceive it, what do we find behind it? If we take sound, as long as it remains in the sensory world, we find moving air behind it. But we must not go beyond the sensory world with our speculations. We must remain in the sensory world. A powerful statement was once made by someone who is not taken seriously by scholars, someone who was not only a poet but also a thinker: “Do not seek anything behind phenomena; they themselves are the teaching.”

If we go behind sound, behind light, we do not find material atoms that immerse themselves in our retinas, impregnate them, and through this impregnation produce the mental image of color and light. If we really look behind, what do we find there? — Spirit! Color is to spirit as ice is to water. Sound relates to spirit as ice relates to water. Instead of that fantastical world of swirling atoms, the true thinker and spiritual researcher finds spirit, spiritual reality, behind what he sees and hears, so that the question of the nature of matter loses all meaning. For how does the spiritual researcher answer the question of the nature of matter? What is the essence of what surrounds us in the world and appears to us as matter? It is spirit! And we know spirit! We must seek its essence within ourselves. What we ourselves are in our innermost being is what all things in the world are, only in a different form. They are in such a form that they can be seen from the outside when spirit gives itself a surface. Let me say something that every natural scientist will consider madness: when spirit goes outward, it appears as color and sound. Color and sound are nothing other than pure spirit, exactly the same as what we find within ourselves when we understand ourselves correctly. Thus, in Spiritual Science, every mineral is spirit to us. The lowest link in the human being, what we call the physical body, is for us in its true essence nothing other than spirit in the form in which it is also present in seemingly lifeless nature.

How does what we call the human spirit differ from the spirit that we encounter outside as minerals and plants, as mountains, as thunder and lightning, as trees and waters, and so on? How does the spirit that we refer to in the narrower sense as spirit differ from all of these? It is because this spirit in the narrower sense reveals itself as spirit in its very own form, in the form that befits it as spirit. What we usually call nature is indeed spirit, but spirit that turns its outer side toward the senses, and what we call spirit in the narrower sense is, in essence, exactly the same thing. Nature is, in form, that which, in its very own form, turns toward the innermost part of our being. If we seek spirit outside in nature, we find it lifeless in minerals, animated in plants, and sentient in animals. Human beings unite within themselves these three forms of spirit in the three members of their being, as we know them from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. Only by considering this complex nature of human beings, and not being satisfied with the abstract distinction between body and soul, but asking ourselves: How are human beings constructed?

In spiritual science, we first distinguish the physical body of the human being, that which he has in common with all so-called lifeless nature in terms of substances and forces. The physical body of the human being contains the same substances and forces that we find outside in the mineral world. But beyond that, human beings have another member, which we call their etheric or life body. When we speak of ether, this has nothing to do with the fantastical ether that has played such a role in science for so long and is likely to be completely discarded in the near future. With regard to the etheric body, we will not yet be able to engage in the methods of higher vision. However, we understand the etheric body best when we approach the matter in this way: let us take a plant, an animal, or the human being itself: the physical body has the same substances and the same forces, but in an infinitely complex mixture and diversity, so that these substances cannot form the physical body by themselves. No plant body can be what it is through physical forces alone, no animal body, no human body. There is the complication, the diversity of the mixture and combination, which would cause the body to disintegrate if it were left to its own physical and chemical forces. At every moment of life, their so-called etheric or life body works against the disintegration of the physical bodies. A perpetual struggle takes place within them. And at the moment of death, when the etheric or life body separates from the physical body, the substances and forces of the physical body follow their own laws. That is why we say in Spiritual Science: the physical body is physically and chemically an impossible mixture; it cannot sustain itself. What fights against the decay of the physical body at every moment is the etheric body. The third member of the human being is what we have often called the bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, of instincts and passions. When life begins to become inner, then we begin to speak in Spiritual Science of a so-called astral body. This is the third member of the human being and the third member of the animal being.

Today, people have such an unclear concept of what constitutes the individual being that certain researchers can no longer distinguish between an animal and a plant. Of course, there are transitions, but they are not of interest to us here. In popular works, which are otherwise very commendable, you can read that plants express themselves in the same way as animals or humans, and so people talk about a “plant soul” in the usual sense. They confuse the animal soul and the human soul with what are simply expressions of life in plants. When do we speak of an animal or human soul or an astral body? When inner life and inner experience are added to the outer appearance. It is the inner life that matters. When you see a plant, touch it, and this plant draws its leaves together, a stimulus is exerted on the plant, and it shows you a certain response to this stimulus. To call this response an expression of the soul is the most incredible dilettantism. One cannot speak of a soul or astral body when some kind of counteraction takes place; otherwise, you would also have to attribute a soul to litmus paper when it turns red in acid. It is not any external reaction that matters, but whether something happens inside such a being. If you bump into a being and it shows you a change in form or some other external reaction, you may call that a sign of life; but to speak of sensation or soul is to turn all concepts upside down. One can only speak of a soul or astral body when, in addition to what is happening externally, a new event, a new fact, occurs internally, when a push or pressure is accompanied by pain or another stimulus, something that is experienced as joy. What makes a being a soul being is not the expressions it manifests outwardly, but the processes it experiences inwardly. Only where sensation begins, where life is transformed internally into pleasure and pain, where some external object not only exerts an attraction on some being, but where an experience arises within the being in relation to the external object, only then can we speak of a soul or astral body. When a plant winds itself spirally around a stick or pole, these are effects that are the response to stimuli: signs of life. Even if it happens with some plants that when you bring a finger close to them, they follow the finger and not the stick, you are not dealing with an inner process. We can only speak of an inner process when an impulse stirs within the being and it then follows the stimulus by means of this influence. Those who do not make a strict distinction between these things are incapable of rising to the concept of the soul, the astral body. Humans share this with animals, but no longer with plants.

Then, as already mentioned several times, we have a fourth member, through which human beings experience something within themselves that makes them the crown of earthly creation, that which we call the I. Recognizing this I in its essence is an extraordinarily important thing for all knowledge.

In earlier lectures, I pointed out that in the entire scope of our language there is only one word, one name, that differs from all other names. You can designate every other object by its name: the clock, the table, the notebook. But you cannot designate what the I is by its name. Try saying “I” to another being! You can only say “I” to yourself. Every being is a ‘you’ to another, and for every being, the other is a “you.” If the name of the I is to be spoken, this name must sound from the innermost part of the being. The religions based on Spiritual Science also sensed this and therefore said correctly: Here the deity utters a first sound, a first word in the human soul in its most original form, and so the expression for this I appeared to them as something sacred. They therefore called it the “inexpressible name of God” because no one else can utter it, because only the soul can utter it. What later Hebrew religious teaching referred to as Yahweh is nothing other than the expression for the I that designates itself within itself. This is the fourth member of the human being.

And now, when we consider this fourfold being — physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I — we must say: With these four members, which no other being on earth has but man, everyone stands before us, from the uneducated savage to the most highly developed intellectual. But how do individual human beings on earth differ if they all have these four members? By the fact that one has worked more from his I on his three members than another. Let us compare the still completely wild human being, who follows every instinct, every desire, every passion, with a highly spiritual moralist, who has pure, sacred moral concepts and follows them, who allows only those of his instincts and passions to be valid which the spirit can say “yes” to. How do the two differ? In that the highly spiritual person has worked on his astral body from his ego. The uneducated savage has worked little on his astral body, which is still almost as he received it from nature, from the divine powers. The highly moralistic and idealistic person has reworked, purified, and cleansed it.

An astral body consists of two parts: one part that the person has without any effort on their part, and another part that they have worked on, which is the work of their ego. People who stand at such a height as, for example, Francis of Assisi — whatever else you may think of him — have placed almost their entire astral body under the control of the ego, so that nothing happens in their astral body that is not controlled by the ego. How does such a person differ from a savage? In the savage, everything happens through what has nothing to do with the ego; in the highly spiritual person, everything happens through what he has made of his astral body. The more of the astral body has been transformed by the ego, the more of the spirit self or manas is present in the person.

So we have five members of the human being: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, the ego, and the spirit self. And then we have the opportunity as human beings not only to transform, purify, and ennoble our astral body, not only the sum of our desires, drives, and instincts, but we also have the greater ability to transform our etheric body. In ordinary life, people work on their spiritual development by gradually ennobling their astral body through the ordinary impulses of life, moral concepts, and intellectual mental images. Everything we learn transforms the astral body. If we want to understand the contrast between the transformation of the astral body and the transformation of the etheric body by the ego, we must remember what we were like as eight-year-old children. At that age, we did not know many things that we know today. We learned many things. Under the influence of the impressions we absorbed, the astral body was transformed and integrated with the spirit self or manas. But everything that made up our temperament, our inclinations, and so on when we were eight-year-old children has not been transformed in the same way. If you were a quick-tempered, stubborn child at the age of eight, then you are probably still sometimes quick-tempered or stubborn today. The transformation of temperament and inclinations proceeds much more slowly. One can compare the progress of the astral body with the movement of the minute hand and the progress of the etheric body with the advance of the hour hand. However, inclinations only change when the etheric body changes, and this requires stronger impulses than those needed to transform the astral body. People who are involved in Spiritual Science have such strong impulses, and they can already have them when they are exposed to the impression of a work of art behind which they see the infinite meaning, for example, of Wagner's Parsifal or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. These impulses are not only effective on the astral body, but they are so strong that the etheric body of the human being is purified, cleansed, and transformed. It is the same when a person stands before a painting by Raphael or Michelangelo and is penetrated by an impulse of the eternal through the color. But the strongest impulses are still the religious impulses of humanity. What has passed through the ages as religious impulses has transformed human beings so strongly that it has taken hold of their etheric body, so that human beings also carry two parts within themselves in relation to their etheric body: the untransformed part, as received from nature, and the transformed part. The transformed part is called the life spirit or buddhi.

When what we learn about initiation or initiation is presented to human beings, what transforms the etheric body becomes even more apparent. Initiation consists in giving the human being the means to transform the etheric body more and more. Therefore, it is also true for those who are called student of occultism that all intellectual learning, everything they can absorb in school, is only preparation. For those who undergo spiritual scientific training, more important than all intellectual absorption is to consciously transform a single inclination into another, even if it is only a hand movement. Transforming such an inclination may be more valuable than acquiring a great deal of theoretical knowledge. Basically, initiation consists of impulses that cleanse and purify the human etheric body. These impulses then continue in those who ascend to the purification and refinement of the physical body, and that is the highest thing a person can achieve in their current career.

Now one might say that the physical body is the lowest; so is it something special when a person works on the physical body? — Oh yes! Precisely because the physical body is the lowest link, the strongest forces must be applied to transform it into its original form, the form of pure spirit. The purification of this physical body begins with certain methods of regulating the breathing process. That is why the part that is transformed in this way is called Atma, or the actual spiritual human being; Atma simply means breathing. Then, when the body has been transformed — but remains outwardly as before — human spiritual training proceeds at the highest level. Through this, the human being not only gains the ability to live consciously in his physical body, to know, so to speak, every blood cell, every nerve current, but also to work out into the great nature, to become, if one may say so, a human being who is no longer enclosed in his skin, but who is able to work on the forces of the universe and the cosmos. In this way, the human being enters into a state in which he or she becomes one with the cosmos. All other talk of becoming one with the cosmos that does not take place through true training and development is mere chatter and empty words.

Human beings become one with the cosmos by first transforming their astral body, then their etheric body, and finally their physical body. They become one with the entire cosmos, just as the little finger is one with the physical body to which it belongs. This is a completely normal and regular course of human development, which many people have gone through, which we are all going through to a certain extent even now, and which everyone will go through in the future.

What is actually happening here? Let us try to visualize it: What is the astral body? It is nothing other than the sum of desires, drives, and passions, of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. Everything that works together in the human being is an expression of the spirit, spirit in some form, because everything is spirit. How is it possible for the I to work on the astral body? It is possible because the spirit reveals itself to the I in its very own form. The spirit is hidden in the passions, drives, and desires; there it appears in its expressions. It flows into the ego in its original form, and the ego allows it to flow back into the astral body, so that the ego mediates between the original form of the spiritual and its expression. This is how it is with the etheric body and finally also with the physical body, and thus a continuous spiritualization takes place during the transformation of the three human bodies or members of the human being. Just as it is true that everything we encounter in minerals is spirit — but spirit in its outer effect — so it is true that what we encounter in human beings is on the path to spiritualization through what the I itself pours into the lower being. But only by the Ego standing between this manifestation, the material aspect of the human being, his physical body, etheric body, and astral body, and the members of the spirit that shine into the three bodies — spirit self or manas, life spirit or buddhi, spirit man or atma — is this transition of the spirit into the three bodies possible. The I must stand between them. Then the higher can work on the lower.

And where have we come to know the nature of this I? We have already come to know it in its name. The name, this I, can never sound to our ears from outside if it means anything to us. This says more than all the phrases found in ordinary psychology. If we could properly understand what the I is by the fact that this name can never approach us from outside, we would have achieved more than all academic psychology. The philosopher Fichte already said this: The most beautiful thing is a human being as an I. However, most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than an I, for which they need their own power to look at it, to see it.

In the lecture on the animal soul, we will see that animals also have an I, but not in the physical world. Humans differ from animals in that they have the I in the physical world. The I is that which allows the spirit to flow from within into what is another form of spirit, into the various materials, even into the soul itself, which we call the astral body. We can therefore describe the essence of the I as internalization. This internalization is only being prepared in animals. Since we will be talking about the animal soul later, let us only hint at this today. We must not forget that animals also have an I, but not individual animals, rather an entire animal species. All lions together, all tigers together have an I, and this I is in the supersensible world. It is as if invisible strands or threads were going up from an animal belonging to a species to the higher world, to the communal group or species soul. And such a species soul has become the human individual soul. What an entire animal group has, every individual human being has. Therefore, in animals, the internalization of the soul is only being prepared. We see this when we study the so-called soul of the animal, the astral body. The actual internalization of this soul, the first infusion of spirit, is possible in our world, where the I is present in this world itself as an individual soul. The soul that has the I within itself is thereby able to allow spirit to flow into matter. Thus we see how spirit and body, or spirit and matter, are two entities, if we may say so, but one entity is basically the same as the other, only in a different form. Matter and body are spirit in a different form. They are only different from each other in the world as ice and water are different. They are different, even though they are the same. And in the middle stands the soul. It is the connecting link between spirit and body.

We can only understand human beings if we comprehend them in this threefold composition, consisting of the body, or rather the threefold body, consisting of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body; consisting of the developing spirit: Manas, Buddhi, Atma, or spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man — and the soul as the entity that transforms one into the other, participating in the body and the spirit. Only then can we understand the soul in the right light, when we see it working on the body in this way from the spirit. When we study it from this point of view, Spiritual Science answers precisely those questions that human beings must ask about the real nature of the soul. We see how, in every moment of human life, the soul is placed between the body and the spirit. In the case of the savage, for example, the soul can only draw a drop of spirit into the body. He is still completely under the influence of external influences, under hunger and thirst, under what the etheric or life body imprints on him as the phenomenon of life, under the influence of instincts and desires that tend toward the animalistic. The soul of the highly developed idealist, such as Schiller or St. Francis of Assisi, tends toward the spirit, acquires a higher consciousness, and frees itself from material existence. Spiritual Science shows us that transformation exists in forms. That is what we call matter. We will often encounter this in the lectures this winter, we will often be able to build it up before you, and no one should hope to grasp the conceptual nature of spiritual science in a single lecture.

When we look at the world around us from this spiritual scientific point of view, it appears to be in a state of constant transformation, just as nature appears to us to be in a state of constant transformation. We see the flower emerge from the seed in spring. In autumn we see it decay again, but its essence is preserved in the seed, ready to emerge anew. Spiritual Science will also show us how the body is actually built up by the spirit, and how the essence of this spirit, when the body decays, is preserved as a spiritual seed that appears again and again.

We can transform ice into water and water into ice. In the same way, spirit transforms into body. The body decays, but the spirit within it remains and appears in ever new forms. This leads us to the law that we call the law of change in human life. Human beings live here in the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But they have another life that existed before this life and will exist after this life. There they live, just as they live here in these three bodies, in the spiritual world. And from there they bring the forces that build their bodies, that give them the form they have, even though life is different in the spirit. This is what we see when we understand Spiritual Science in the right way. It shows how human beings lead an alternating life between birth and death: life in the body, and life between death and a new birth, until they proceed to a new incarnation — life in the spiritual world. And what lives here in the body and there in the spirit, alternating between life in the body and life in the spirit, is the soul. But each time they have gone through an incarnation, human beings have worked on their bodies and return to the spiritual realm as souls enriched by the fruits of earthly life. The soul continues to develop, ever higher. Thus, it is also the mediator between spirit and body. And so we are led to the boundary that, when we correctly consider spirit, soul, and body, shows us the relationship between the three. We learn to recognize everything that decays, that dissipates, as a transformation of what constitutes the innermost essence of the soul, just as we recognize everything temporal as a form of the eternal. Such spiritual science leads to a science that truly answers the questions about the temporal and the eternal and about the fate of human beings after death, the questions that the human heart has when it wants to know something about such a science. A science that sets limits for itself fails to see what is most important. That is why our school psychology is so limited. In a certain sense, it is important to learn what it has to offer. Spiritual Science does not spurn it, but it finds it insufficient as long as it does not address the nature of the spirit and the soul. This is the right path to knowledge of the spirit and the soul: because it goes through a temporal life, the soul is connected with its bodies, if we may say so; it is entangled in these bodies, and what draws it to these bodies is the part that is an obstacle to pure, purified life in the spirit between death and a new birth. Here we gradually learn to understand where the obstacles to the soul's new birth lie. We also learn to understand that after death, the soul must first free itself not only from the body — for death already does that — but also from its attachment to the body. Through the correct concepts of spirit, soul, and body, we also come to understand the destiny of the soul on its physical and spiritual pilgrimage through life.

Today I have tried to show you, without regard to what is gained through the methods of clairvoyance and initiation, which we will discuss in the next lectures, but merely by applying ordinary human intellectual wisdom, how to arrive at pure, correct concepts of the soul and spirit in this way. We must remember that what we will encounter in the course of this winter will be the results of spiritual research. They can only be discovered through the methods indicated in the lectures on initiation and so on. But they can be grasped and understood through ordinary logic and thorough thinking. Those who use the excuse, “What does Spiritual Science have to do with me, since I am not a clairvoyant?” turn away from Spiritual Science not because of a lack of clairvoyance, but because they do not apply their thinking thoroughly and comprehensively enough to it. In our age of materialism — which some consider to be outdated, which is also outdated in philosophy, but which flourishes in the thinking of psychology — the science of the soul in particular has suffered greatly. Today, the concepts of soul and spirit have suffered most from this materialism. Spiritual Science will have to make it its mission to bring pure and purified concepts of soul and spirit back to humanity. In doing so, it will be the best servant of the high religious traditions that make the distinction between the human spirit and the comprehensive world spirit, which religious traditions call the Holy Spirit. Only then can we understand these writings if we grasp them deeply enough and view everything in large and powerful comprehensive images that are the expression of true facts, as a means to understanding. From Spiritual Science, we also understand much of what humanity will know in the future and what it has only guessed at in earlier times through its most significant spirits. Many strange feelings pass through the human soul when it empathizes with spiritual activity. Those who say to Spiritual Science: You give us something for the spirit, but nothing for the soul; I seek the soul and you give me intellectual achievements — they do not know that what they reject is precisely what gives the soul what they desire. They thirst for the impulses of the soul's will. But the soul can only be happy and blessed if it allows the spirit to flow into it and shapes the bodies from it.

What we encounter from outside is shaped spirit, and what calls matter into form flows down from the spiritual world. What the eye sees in form as color is, so to speak, condensed spirit, and the force that shoots into matter and brings about form comes from the eternal. Thus, a spirit that does not bring this to clarity in a spiritual-scientific way, but senses and intuits it, can easily perceive what lives around it in such a way that it says to itself: Everything that is here appears to me as if it were formed out of the spiritual world. The form appears to me as something sacred that has entered the mere substance like a flash of lightning, and when I see the form itself, it seems to sink into the substance and then withdraw from it again. The poet of Spiritual Science sensed this when he established the contrast between the body, the human soul, and the spirit, both of which are formative in the body. Schiller had a premonition, a feeling, of how the soul actually allows the spirit to flow into matter, causing matter to disappear from view. As he contemplated this, he let the feeling flow into these beautiful words:

Only the body possesses those powers
That weave dark fate.
But far from any temporal power,
The playmate of blissful natures
Walks above in the corridors of light,
Divine among gods, the form.