Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 28 March 1912, Berlin

Darwin and Supersensible Research

It was October 13, 1882. A man carrying the seeds of death within him traveled from a hotel in Turin to the train station. And on the way to the station, it became apparent that he would not be able to make the journey he had planned to Pisa. He died in Turin, alone, not surrounded by friends, some of whom, according to the arrangements made, were not to meet him again until Pisa. A strange man, whose death, one might say, is symbolically indicative of the way he lived. He died alone in Turin on the way from the hotel to the station, cared for only by the hotel manager, who had foreseen the difficulty of his physical condition. The man died alone, just as he had lived alone for a long time with the best he had possessed, alone in his soul in what was actually a very eventful life full of rich social variety. A strange man. He researched his family tree. We may now recognize his research as more or less historical truth, but its result had an effect, as we shall soon see, on this man's consciousness, and in a certain way we can recognize his world impact as being permeated by the impulses that came to him from this research into his family tree. He traced his family tree back to the ninth century and regarded the Viking Otar Jarl as his ancestor in the ninth century, tracing his family tree further back through the descendants of the Germanic god Odin to Odin himself. One might say that a proud consciousness may have emerged from the results of such a family tree investigation. In the case of the person I am referring to here, Arthur Count Gobineau, this consciousness was transformed into far-reaching, significant ideas that, like few others, set the tone and direction for the entire intellectual development of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one might say for the entire intellectual development of modern times. And when Gobineau's most important work, containing the results of his research into ideas, appeared in 1853, the few — for there were only a few who understood anything of what this work contained — were able to gain the awareness that it was not an individual who had spoken in this man, not a particular personality, but the consciousness of Western humanity at a very specific time in its development. This work contains many ideas that may seem strange to many. But for those who try to view it in the spirit of spiritual science, as we have been able to do in the lectures this winter, the work is filled with ideas that point us more than anything else to the way in which an advanced, particularly distinguished person in the middle of the nineteenth century must have thought.

“On the Inequality of Human Races” would be the English translation of the title of the French work, which, as mentioned, was published in 1853: “Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines”. This work was inspired by the views that Count Gobineau had gained during his numerous diplomatic posts, which he held not only at European courts, but above all in the Orient. He had seen much of what interacts in terms of intellectual, psychological, and moral forces in the fabric we call human life. And from an extraordinarily rich wealth of observations, which had been made with the most astute insight, he had arrived at the idea that humanity had originated from a number of original human types, which he saw at the starting point of human development, as far as he could see in retrospect, asserting themselves in different places on earth, human types of different shapes and different values. He attributed to each of these human types a certain inner richness of developmental content, which he had to bring out from within himself as he developed further in the history of the earth, or had to carry out from his predispositions into the comprehensive life of the earth. And Count Gobineau saw the ascending development in the fact that these original types of humanity, especially as long as they remained unmixed, brought out their original predispositions from within and developed them more and more across the globe, so that the results of this development of the different types of humanity in their interaction constituted what we call the history of the earth. But to the same extent, Count Gobineau said to himself, as the members of these original human types mixed — and that they mixed is a necessity for the later, further development of humanity — what we might call a certain equality of individuals across the earth begins to spread; but he saw everything great, powerful, elemental, and enduring in human culture as emerging from the different, unequal human types, which he understood as different human races. He saw this, according to his view, in the way that, over time, what could be called the flooding of humanity with the idea of equality and the overcoming of racial inequality developed. But Count Gobineau also saw in this the impetus for declining cultures. He therefore imagined human progress in such a way that what was to happen would certainly happen, that people would mix more and more with each other, but that with this mixing, with this assimilation of human being to human being, something would occur that would make people equal, but also, as Count Gobineau—radical as he is—believes, worthless.

In particular, Count Gobineau sees in what can be called Christian culture, with its ideas of equality and universal humanity, something that has infinite value for the further development of humanity, but which also contains precisely that which must gradually lead to the assimilation of human beings. He thus characterizes Christianity as a religion which, in his view, can never be transformed into a Christian civilization. He expresses himself sharply in this regard, saying that Christianity would leave the Chinese and the Eskimos with their external garb, that it would leave the Chinese, even if they were to accept Christianity, with what is the basic structure of their religious nature, and likewise the Eskimos. For in Christianity, Count Gobineau sees a religion that is “not of this world,” that is, one that gives people something that can be effective within the soul, but which cannot be transformed in such a way that it emerges outwardly, becoming impulses that transform humanity and further develop it in relation to what is apparent in people outwardly, in external culture, in external manners. He sees everything that can manifest itself in such external culture and manners as originating in the typical racial characteristics that were unequal at the beginning of human development on earth. And in relation to our earthly existence, a remarkable pessimism springs from Count Gobineau's view of humanity. By looking at what can be achieved through the balancing of the opposites of the original human types, by following the course of humanity as it increasingly embraces Christianity into the future, he finds that it is precisely in human beings that, little by little, in relation to what is most sacred and most important to them, the most important, something will develop among Christian views that cannot become an impulse for an external civilization. Instead, by making people equal, the Christian view will lead to degeneration, so that there will be fewer and fewer viable impulses for the advancement of humanity, and people will decline more and more in relation to civilization, so that civilization will be replaced by degeneration. And one day, as he puts it, the earth will outlive the human race, which will die out on it because it has essentially exhausted all the seeds it contained within itself and has no further impulses of life to carry into the future. Thus Count Gobineau's gaze is directed toward the earth, which will one day remain as a surviving planet. Humanity on it will have died out, and the signs of this extinction are all those impulses in the course of human development that point to the assimilation of human beings with one another, to the balancing of opposites.

When we survey this train of thought — which we may well call a powerful one — we must, in light of everything that has emerged from the lectures this winter, describe it as one that thoroughly corresponds to all the prerequisites of nineteenth-century intellectual life, which can only be given as these prerequisites of nineteenth-century intellectual life had to be reflected in a great, brilliant man who felt the need not only to think through the ideas of his time to a quarter or a half, but to pursue them to their ultimate consequences. However significant Count Gobineau's ideas were in the sense just described, they were able to take root only to a limited extent in the consciousness of the time. It can be said that Count Gobineau's name was known to few, even after the publication of his monumental work “On the Inequality of Human Races.”

A few years later, the consciousness of the time emerged in a completely different way, again through a personality in whom not only individuality but the whole era found expression in a unique way. In 1853, the first two volumes of Count Gobineau's aforementioned work were published, followed by the last two in 1855. In 1859, Charles Darwin's work “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” was published.

First of all, we can see from the way the work was received that Darwin's work contributed something significant to the intellectual development of humanity. How did it affect our country, Germany, for example? As is usually the case with significant works, the leading scholars, who believed that their logic encompassed all knowledge, initially reacted to Darwin's work by laughing at it and mocked those who, based on their observations of the animal world, believed they could speak of a transformation of animal forms, which until then had been placed side by side without considering how they related to each other and without introducing the idea of becoming into the concept of being, of constant being. But it took only a few years for Darwin's work to show its effect, especially within German research, where the courageous and bold Ernst Haeckel immediately drew the ultimate conclusion from Darwin's premises at the 1863 naturalists' conference in Stettin, namely that it was now necessary to consider that humans, in terms of their becoming, could also be linked to the becoming of animal forms, which not only coexist in the world, but have developed apart from each other from imperfect to increasingly perfect forms. But not only did this take place, something else entirely did as well. The guiding thoughts of the work, the guiding ideas of the Darwinian view in general, penetrated all natural science research and became so ingrained that within a few decades, all natural science literature was permeated by what Darwin had first proposed as an idea. And today we see that those who have not yet understood that Darwinism has gone beyond itself, especially in serious research, are even basing a complete worldview, indeed one might say a “religion,” on Darwinian ideas. What a strange difference in the fates of these two men: Count Gobineau is little known, while Darwin's name has become widely known and his ideas have taken root in people's minds. So that anyone who truly surveys cultural development in terms of intellectual development can say: the thinking of a large number of people has been completely transformed by Darwin in just a few decades. Only those who are unfamiliar with today's prevailing ideas, who are unfamiliar with everything that permeates public thinking, and at the same time with the ideas that dominated public thinking before the spread of the Darwinian view of nature, can doubt this last statement. The answer to the question of why the fates of these two people are so different also reveals something of what the task and significance of spiritual science can show us in the present day.

If we first take a look at what Darwinism has brought into part of human consciousness, we must say: Darwinism is based entirely on the idea that scientific observation of becoming can only flow from external sensory facts and the processing of these external sensory facts by thinking, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. Anything that goes beyond such a scientific approach belongs, in the Darwinian way of thinking as it has become, as Darwin himself did not yet cherish, to the realm of the unscientific, to the realm of what mere belief may perhaps accept, but which should never play a part in science. Those who view the course of events and what has become from the outside will readily say: Well, what earlier times thought about the development of man and the development of other organisms corresponds to imperfect human research; it was not until the nineteenth century that science was able to build a worldview strictly on the basis of real, sound, well-founded research. — Therefore, such glib thinkers will say: Science itself compels man to disregard everything supersensible in his knowledge and to limit himself to the course of events that results when science is restricted solely to sensory facts and to what the intellect can make of them. — And so many people today believe that science and its thinking compel us to simply reject all supersensible research.

Is that so? Much depends today on the answer to this question! If it were really the case that science forced us to exclude everything supernatural from our observations, then anyone who takes science seriously would inevitably have to accept this consequence. But let us ask ourselves: on what is this so-called scientific necessity, which only became apparent to mature humanity in the nineteenth century, based? For Darwin and the next generation of Darwinists, the reason why they placed humans directly in the animal kingdom, so that they were to represent not only with their physical but also with their mental and spiritual nature a more perfect being that had gradually developed from the animal kingdom, was that they said to themselves: When one considers humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, a striking similarity can be seen everywhere, first and foremost in the structure of the bones, but also in the other organ forms and in the activities of the individual beings. Darwinists such as Huxley emphasized in particular how similar the bone structure of humans is to that of higher animals. This, they said, forces us to assume that what humans carry within themselves actually has the same origin as the animal world, and indeed has gradually developed from the animal world through a mere perfection of animal characteristics and organs. We ask ourselves: Is it really the case for the human mind that it is compelled by such findings to draw the conclusion just characterized?

Nothing is more instructive in answering this question than the fact that, before Darwin, Goethe became a precursor of Darwin in a peculiar way. You will find Goethe's entire worldview not only in my book, which is directly titled “Goethe's Worldview,” but also in the preface I wrote in the 1880s for the Goethe editions of “Deutsche Nationalliteratur” (German National Literature). When we see how intensively Goethe studied animal and human forms in order to arrive at a very specific conclusion, and when we consider the significant fact that he was inspired by Herder to develop the basic ideas of his views, then we must say: A person with a completely different way of thinking, with a completely different scientific attitude and state of mind than Darwin, could have arrived at the same results, indeed, could have felt the necessity of these results. — In his relative youth, Goethe, contrary to the opinion of all the leading natural scientists of his time, endeavored to show that there is no external difference in the structure of humans compared to that of higher animals. Strangely enough, during Goethe's youth, such a difference had been assumed with regard to details. For example, it had been claimed that higher animals differ from humans in that they have the so-called intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw, in which the upper incisors are located, but that humans do not have this bone, instead their upper jaw consists of a single piece. This was the opinion that the most eminent naturalists of Goethe's youth believed they had to hold, because they said to themselves: there must be a difference between higher animals and thinking humans standing on the earth, which is also evident in their external structure. Goethe truly set to work with all scientific conscientiousness when, contrary to the scientific world of his time, he proved that humans, in their embryonic stage before birth, have the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw just like other animals, only that this bone then fuses in humans so that it is no longer visible in the adult state. Goethe considered this discovery to be significant. We can see in particular from the way he wrote about it to Herder at the time that he also regarded its significance as important, for on March 27, 1784, he wrote to Herder: "You should also be very pleased, for it is like the keystone of the human being; if it is not missing, it is also there! But how! I have also thought about it in connection with your whole work, how beautiful it will be there." And the fact that this must truly be attributed not to a materialistic attitude, but to the opposite, proves to us that Goethe, in full agreement with Herder, saw in his discovery, in his conclusion, the consolidation of a worldview based on spiritual facts, that the spirit reigns everywhere, from the lowest creatures to the highest, and follows the same basic plan everywhere.

It was Goethe's intention to prove this, and for him the result he had arrived at was proof of the effectiveness of the spirit. Therefore, it was also proof of the effectiveness of the spirit for him when he made the discovery, which was actually only rediscovered by natural science in the second half of the nineteenth century, that the vertebrae can be seen transformed into skull bones. For Goethe, this meant the reign of the spiritual in such a way that this spiritual has a basic form in the vertebrae, which it transforms, changing its shape so that this form becomes useful for enclosing the organ of the brain, in that the creative, ruling spirit reveals itself precisely in the transformation of forms from simple forms. And it was, if I may speak of something personal, in a certain respect a quite wonderful fact for me when, during my six and a half years of study and research in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar, I one day came across a notebook of Goethe's in which there was an entry in pencil to the effect that Goethe said to himself: The entire human brain is actually only a transformed nerve node, and every nerve node contains, as it were, the germ of what the spirit transforms and reshapes, so that it becomes the complex organ of the brain. — Here we see how what later Darwinists considered proof that one should only look at sensory facts when explaining human development became, for Goethe, proof of the all-acting and all-weaving spirit, which conjures up the most complex forms from the simplest, so to speak, and in this way gradually brings about the work of nature.

May we—we do not want to engage in logical deductions or dialectical games, but rather in the existing facts—maintain the assertion in the face of such a fact that scientific observations have forced people to base a kind of materialistic-monistic worldview on Darwinism? We must never do so, for we see how, in Goethe, the same course of research leads to an idealistic-spiritual result. What, then, can be the reason why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a Darwinian-monistic worldview or even religion developed on the basis of Darwinism, which we can boldly call an elaborated Goetheanism only in relation to the facts of the senses? It does not come from the facts that compel researchers to do so, but solely from habits of thought, from what people want to believe about the facts, for a mind that is different in nature from those who today develop a Darwinian-monistic worldview from the results of Darwinism, such a mind of a different nature uses precisely the same scientific way of thinking to establish a completely different worldview. This is the important and essential point that we must consider. Then we will also understand how, in essence, materialistic-monistic thinking is something that captivated people in the second half of the nineteenth century, something that deeply influenced all human thinking among those who call themselves advanced thinkers, and we will understand how this way of thinking also influences those who do not want to be Darwinists.

A significant example—for a humanities-based approach, it is good to work thoroughly and therefore go to the sources everywhere—is provided by a researcher who is certainly underappreciated in the present day, who, although he may have been may have been somewhat unsympathetic, but who is of great importance for the present in terms of his scientific results. I am referring to Moriz Benedikt, who has already been mentioned here over the years. Moriz Benedikt is not a Darwinian, but a developmental theorist. He acknowledges development, albeit not in the Darwinian sense. One single result from the wealth of Benedikt's findings should be highlighted here. Benedikt focused his attention on studying morally defective people, so-called criminal natures. Long before Lombroso pointed out such facts in a more amateurish manner, in a way that was more palatable to the public, Benedikt had already conducted such studies, even if this “long before” only extends to a few years. Here we see how Moriz Benedikt examines the brains of criminals, the brains of murderers. He finds that these criminal brains all have one characteristic. He found it very strange that certain furrows, which are otherwise located on the surface of the brain, were more internal in the criminal brain, i.e., they were covered by the brain mass and did not extend outward. However, he also examined the brains of murderers who otherwise gave the impression of being good-natured people. He noticed that there were irregularities in the occipital region, that the occipital lobe of the brain did not properly cover what was underneath it, and that the shape of the brains of people who had been driven to commit such crimes resembled that of a monkey's brain. Benedict therefore came to the conclusion that the reason for their abnormal behavior lay in the physical organization of humans, in their underdevelopment, so that the lower animal nature from which humans originated was expressed in their internal forms, right up to the brain. And because humans still carry within themselves that which they should transcend, they become criminals. Moriz Benedikt thus bases his entire view of law, morality, and punishment on the idea that criminals, criminal individuality, actually have something in common with the times when humans were still close to their origins among the higher animals. As mentioned, Moriz Benedikt is not a Darwinist, but his thinking does not go beyond believing that one must attribute to the criminal in his individuality an organization that compels him to his deeds from a physical standpoint. In anthropology, this nineteenth-century researcher seeks what he believes he must have in order to understand abnormal human deeds.

Thus we see—and we could cite hundreds and hundreds of similar examples to prove what is to be said—how everywhere, whether the people who engage in intellectual activity are Darwinists or not, the mere belief in the authority of external sensory facts and the science based on these external sensory facts prevails. Nor should we be surprised that Darwin's findings were interpreted in a materialistic-monistic way. It is not Darwin's findings themselves that compel this interpretation, but rather the habits of thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. And it is fair to say that if Darwin's research had been conducted in a different era, it is conceivable that the same results would have been interpreted in an ideal-spiritual sense, as we find in Goethe, who believed that the creative, ruling spirit makes use of the transformation of forms in order to bring about the diversity of phenomena. —spiritual sense, as we find in Goethe, that the creative, ruling spirit makes use of the transformation of forms to bring forth the manifold diversity of phenomena from a few basic forms. — This is the peculiar fact that must arise from all these considerations with an inner necessity, that the age that has just passed had to bring humanity into a deepening of the external sensory facts, into the external science of the senses, that for a while humanity had to refrain from had to divert its attention, so to speak, from everything that turns the gaze upward to the spiritual, supersensible worlds, so that the whole fabric of sensory facts, the fabric of what happens in the outer physical world, could once have an effect on the human soul. Thus, in the overall course of human development, we see, as it were, the necessity of the materialistic-monistic way of thinking; we see how the nineteenth century was called upon to divert its gaze from the supersensible for a while and to look only at what is happening in the sensory world. And if we want to grasp the deeper meaning of this fact, we must ask ourselves: Has humanity really gained anything significant for its spiritual life from such an immersion in the sensory world?

If we want to answer this question, we must bear in mind a number of things that have already been mentioned in these lectures, but which can also be found in the relevant literature, namely that a vast amount of significant facts could only really be researched by looking at this world of facts itself with an unbiased eye, by not allowing one's view to be clouded by all kinds of assumptions from the supersensible world, but focusing only on what one saw externally. And that is much more essential than what is usually regarded as the fundamental nerve of Darwinism in the second half of the nineteenth century, namely that meaningful, magnificent connections between the organs of individual animal and plant forms, connections between individual entities, have been elucidated. In these lectures, we have seen how Darwinism has overcome itself, how the facts today actually compel us to no longer speak of a connection between the animal world and humans in such a simple way as Ernst Haeckel once did. But despite all this, when one surveys the enormous sea of research results that came about under the influence of Darwinism in the second half of the nineteenth century, one finds in it insights into what could be called a great, powerful basic plan of the animal and plant world, the world of all organisms. Thanks to this research, we now see connections that would not have emerged if we had approached them with the preconceived ideas of old supernatural research. Thanks to materialistic one-sidedness, we now have results that will one day be interpreted in the right way, but which, given the weakness of human nature, could only be found through one-sidedness. So we must not underestimate the great merit of Darwinism, we must not overlook the significance of Haeckel, starting with his “General Morphology of Organisms” (1866) to his extensive “Systematic Phylogeny” (1896), compiled the similarities between animal and plant forms in order to construct, so to speak, a family tree for life. It may well be that all the family trees Haeckel constructed are wrong—they are not—they may be thrown overboard, the idea of descent in Haeckel may be completely wrong, we can disregard what emerges as his theories and look at what shows us similarities and connections between forms in a way that was unimagined in earlier times. That is what is significant. Once we allow this significance to sink into our souls, we can say: it is in him that spiritual science, as we understand it today, has found solid ground, for now, alongside everything that the intellectual culture of the nineteenth century has brought forth, there is spiritual, supersensible research.

How does this spiritual, supersensible research fit in alongside it? It shows how human beings can indeed, through a certain development that they can undergo within themselves, direct their gaze into supersensible worlds, and that when they direct their gaze into the supersensible worlds through the methods that have been sufficiently described here, they find a supersensible world of facts, and that in this world the true reasons, the true causes for the sensory facts can be found. Thus we have seen how human beings already find within themselves — this was a recurring theme throughout all the lectures — finds a comprehensive soul-spiritual element in supersensible self-knowledge, which not only lives within him as he perceives it with his normal consciousness, but which exists as a reality behind normal consciousness, which we must seek in a spiritual form long before human beings enter earthly existence. We must seek it in such a way that what comes from the father and mother connects with what comes from a spiritual world, as it now lives through the events in the time between birth and death. And when the human being enters the spiritual world through his imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive knowledge, then he gets to know the master craftsman, the creative, building being who works on us even before consciousness appears, who builds up the human body precisely where the human being cannot yet work on himself with his consciousness, because this work goes into the finer organization and finer formation of the body. It is precisely there that the I, which comes from the spiritual world, works on the finer development not only of the brain, but of the entire body.

Thus, when a person uses the methods of spiritual research to rise to the knowledge of his own spiritual-soul core, which only creates its outer expression in the body, he can recognize, without passing through the gate of death, how a spiritual world shines through the sensory world, which is just as real for supersensible knowledge as the sensory world is for sensory knowledge. If they thus know their spiritual-soul core to be effective, and if they know that it draws its powers and impulses from the spiritual world in order to build a new life and a new earthly embodiment, then he can also easily rise to the realization that connects the views on human nature, on the true human essence, so to speak, with moral ideas, which bring together the views on the spiritual-soul essence of the human being with what the human being needs as strength for life, as strength for work, as comfort in life, as security in life, and so on. And all the questions as to whether human beings will be reunited with those who have become dear to them on earth can be answered in a very appropriate way with a “yes.” — this is explained further in my “Outline of Esoteric Science” — by showing that human beings, with their true essence, not only live in the physical body, recognizing and acting, but can also live disembodied, where everything they have established in physical life continues to live in the spiritual world and forms the basis for a new incarnation. Those relationships between human beings that we experience here continue to play out in the spiritual world and form the starting point for our next incarnation, so that we come together with the same people with whom we have a connection when we are free of the body, in that we feel drawn to them and acquire the powers to be able to come together with them again in a new incarnation.

Thus, through spiritual research, human beings are led out into the sphere of a spiritual world, and they are led further out in such a way that they no longer find their origin in an animal form of the pre-world, but find the origin of themselves and of animals in the spiritual world. This is what the lecture on the “origin of man” has shown us. By going further and further back, we can come to understand that human beings have their origin in the spiritual world and that the creative spirit that lives and works in human beings can also be understood and recognized as such by human beings. Spiritual science will show this more and more clearly to contemporary culture. In doing so, it stands alongside what the more materialistic-monistic culture has achieved in the course of the nineteenth century. When we see how this Darwinian culture has shown us that there is a common plan underlying the development of all living beings, that we can really see fundamental ideas and fundamental forces running through all stages of life, from the most imperfect to the most perfect, then such a result gains its true meaning, especially in the light of spiritual science. In this summary lecture today, we can only draw attention to how what has been shown gains meaning through a parable.

When we see a person in later life and compare them with what they were in childhood, for example, we say to ourselves: our spiritual-soul core has worked on our outer organization. The same thing that I become aware of when I gain consciousness, which produces thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will from dark soul reasons, worked on my body when it was not yet able to produce these things, when I dreamed myself into life. My body was still an imperfect tool for the spirit and only later became a more perfect one. That which is purely supersensible, which lives only in my thoughts, feelings, and imaginations, worked first on my outer physical sensuality as the actual basis of my being, but I was only able to become aware of this later. If one understands this in its fundamental meaning, then one also understands how the spirit has worked for millions and millions of years to first bring forth the whole series of living beings in their ascending forms, in order to later bring forth, on the basis of these, what man is in his present culture. Just as what we are as thirty-year-olds must result in our inner spirituality from our first working on our imperfect childhood organism — with the same thing that we later become spiritually — so human historical life, cultural life as we know it, could only result from the same thing that now works supersensibly in all history and in all human culture — this spiritual-soul core of being, which is after all the starting point of all spiritual becoming — slowly and gradually prepared its own human organism throughout the entire series of organisms, just as the individual human being in childhood prepares his own organism, which is later to be the tool of the developed spirit. Just as it is the same ego that thinks, feels, and wills at the age of thirty, and who in the first years of life works on the external physical organization, overcomes it, and transforms it into an instrument for the spirit, so one can also form the idea — and after the Winter Lectures it will appear to be a fully valid one that one can arrive at — that the human being himself, with all his spiritual life, had to pre-form and overcome what now confronts us in the animal world. The deeds of the human spirit, which first prepared itself for what it was to become in the external animal or organic form, come to meet us when we survey the connection between the external forms.

What did the Darwinian culture of the nineteenth century do without knowing it? By developing such eminent, such admirably great external forms, it showed the deeds of the human spirit as it worked on the external world before it could penetrate into its inner being and unfold its own essence and becoming as history. The progress in human development in relation to spiritual culture will be that we will recognize how the total achievement of the human spirit lies in what Darwinian culture has given us without realizing it. In this, it has reigned as our ego reigns in the child's organism. In the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, Darwinism has studied, without knowing it, the divine deeds of the human spirit. And we will truly appreciate what has been created on the basis of Darwinism when we see the creative human spirit in all these details that have come to light, when we admire what the human spirit set out to do before it came to its conscious, historical creation. Thus, something great and powerful has been prepared, which is only misunderstood, which is taken as if it were effective in itself, whereas it is the plan that the creative divine spirit has followed on its way to humanity. This will enable human beings to advance a certain step in their self-understanding, and it is only by advancing to this step that they will truly recognize what was actually accomplished in the second half of the nineteenth century.

And now let us turn our gaze back once more to Count Gobineau. There we find how the genius of this man works thoroughly — but from the consciousness of the nineteenth century — how he sees, so to speak, what presents itself in the outer world, but sees it with the proud consciousness of a person who still knows something about it, knows personally that human beings originate from the spiritual. As fantastic as this may seem today, it is particularly important in this context that there was such a person in the nineteenth century for whom a personal, individual fact was what for other people is only theory, perhaps religious conviction, namely that when we go back to our origins, we do not come to something physical, but to something spiritual. One can only appreciate the unique personality of Count Gobineau if one is able to put his consciousness in the right light, which says: When I trace back what I am, what lives in my abilities and characteristics, as inherited from my ancestors, I find that the line of inheritance goes back to the Viking Otar Jarl, that it goes further back to the descendants of the god Odin, and that it does not end with a physical being, but with a superphysical being like Odin himself. But whatever else lay in Count Gobineau's train of thought, one thing did not lie in it. It did not contain any reference to that spiritual-soul core that works in human beings, not through the line of inheritance, not merely within the race, but which works in human beings from incarnation to incarnation, which is independent of the outer physical form, indeed, which itself contributes to the outer configuration that appears within the physical form. Thus, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Count Gobineau looks only at the external, only at what does not include the spiritual-soul core of the human being. How does he stand with his observation? He stands there like a courageous person who does not stop at half measures, but draws the ultimate consequences of his assumptions by saying to himself: When I look at the world, I see something that I can only describe by saying: becoming represents a decline to me, it withers, it dries up in its outward appearance; humanity is dying out on earth, and the earth will outlive humanity. — So this thought stands there, as if it were expressed by a plant, a plant that has developed from leaf to leaf to flower and fruit germ and cannot become aware that it can absorb an exterior that flies toward it and that it can absorb the fertilizing germ from another plant and develop it into a new form. What the plant cannot imagine for itself, Count Gobineau cannot imagine either. He cannot imagine that a spiritual core lives in the human being in racial existence, which at the appropriate moment can take in a new spiritual element that does not lie in the emerging original and mixing races, but lies in the spiritual-soul core of the being, in the individuality, which the individualities take in just as plants take in the seed that comes to them from other plants, and which has a fertilizing effect from the spiritual world on the spiritual-soul core of the human being and continues the human being when the outer falls away, as leaves and flowers fall from the plant when the mission of the outer is fulfilled.

Count Gobineau was thus able to think correctly about the external, to think correctly that it is heading toward degeneration. But he still lacked the perspective on the spiritual-soul core of the human being that is revealed through supersensible research. He was able to compensate for this with his awareness of his personal connection to the divine world. He was able to do this personally, but he remained alone with it. Humanity, however, had reached a stage where, looking back, it found only sensory facts as the starting point of its own origin; it found its ancestors in the animal kingdom, whereas in fact the animal kingdom should be understood as it has just been characterized. But if man is able to understand what is at work within him, independent of all external forms, which the natural sciences of the nineteenth century have explained to us in such a grandiose way, if he keeps his gaze fixed on the spiritual world and explores what springs from it in its similarity to his spiritual-soul core, then he will also be able to admit that ever new and new fertilizations occur for the spiritual-soul core, so that the thought, which is otherwise pessimistic, is transformed into the wonderful thought of human development into the future. So when we look with Count Gobineau at what was originally given to the races, what can be seen externally dies away, but inwardly there lives that which can take up new impulses, which becomes ever more meaningful, and which, leaving the earth — like the spirit leaves the corpse when we pass through the gate of death — strides toward new forms of existence in order to create a new existence out of the spirit in the course of that eternity which we discussed in the last lecture. Now we see how, in Count Gobineau, so to speak, a bold, energetic, ingenious thinker from a bygone era emerges, who thinks through to the end what must become of humanity if the gaze is directed only toward the external. Thus we see how humanity, having come to these conclusions, needs in another thought that which empowers the becoming so that the eternal is recognized in it, which carries the essential into other forms of existence, even if the outer shell falls away from the essential and actually takes the path that Count Gobineau has mapped out. All power develops through the overcoming of opposing forces. Count Gobineau, so to speak, still had the fulfillment of his thinking with a divine-spiritual element from his personal belief in his own origin. Darwinism has finally driven out of all views on the origin of man and the spiritual origin of organisms those facts that are not perceptible to the senses; it has directed man's gaze only to the facts of the senses and to what can be gained from the facts of the senses with the instrument of the brain. The counterforce that develops from the mere observation of the conventional Darwinism of the external world of facts will ignite the longing of human hearts for the supersensible world, and because our time already sees the dawn of this longing, which arises as a counterforce to conventional Darwinism, it meets it halfway and works in the minds of human beings. The number of people who feel this longing, who feel that old thinking, even in the most brilliant thinkers, must lead to such consequences as those of Count Gobineau or conventional Darwinism, will grow ever larger and larger. But when people realize that they cannot possibly remain with what is so seemingly firmly established in external science, they will demand supersensible research, and then it will become more and more apparent how the logic and all the thinking of this supersensible research can proceed in exactly the same conscientious manner as external science, which has come so far in the course of the nineteenth century and which could truly be admired by no one more than by the spiritual sciences.

When we survey the connections in this way, we recognize the necessity of supersensible research in our time, and then we will easily know what this supersensible research actually wants. An idea of what it wants should also be awakened in these winter lectures, as it has been in the numerous cycles of past years. The entire lecture cycle was, in essence, a reference to what has been summarized today, and it attempted to show in detail how this spiritual science consciously enters into the cultural life of our present time in order to serve it in an appropriate manner. It is therefore not surprising that this spiritual science is so often misunderstood today. The whole tone of the lectures has undoubtedly shown, for those who wanted to see it, that those who stand on the ground of spiritual science are well aware of the objections that can be made against it. And many of the objections have been made from this very place, in order to show how objections to what is presented here can arise. One must repeatedly experience that this or that objection raised here is later presented as their own objection by those who have listened, so that no attention is paid to how what might be objected to has already been dealt with by spiritual science itself. But anyone who understands the course of human culture and takes into account everything that has happened in relation to the progress of humanity will not be discouraged by the judgments that spiritual science is receiving in the outside world today, but will be able to point to numerous examples of how what was later taken for granted, such as Darwinism itself, initially provoked the strongest opposition. There are numerous examples of this kind. The true spiritual scientist will always keep in mind that even if individual aspects crumble, it is no different than in any other science, but the fundamental spirit and truths must remain and will take root, because every true look at our lives shows us the necessity of this spiritual science. — Especially when we turn to the greatest minds, as we have seen today with Count Gobineau and the proponents of Darwinism, we realize how necessary it is to integrate supersensible research into the spiritual life of our time, and we realize how supersensible research corresponds precisely to the longing of those people who want true progress in the spiritual life of our time.

However, in the near future, if people outside the world are interested in spiritual science or anthroposophy at all, they will place much more emphasis on various sensational things that have occurred here and there, or are still occurring, as excesses of spiritual science. It will be easy to portray this spiritual science as something fantastical, grotesque, perhaps even foolish, if one limits oneself to considering its excesses, but it will be more convenient for a certain public to mock the excesses than to deal seriously and respectfully with what can be considered scientific research within this spiritual science. And anyone who considers the spirit of the lectures given here must at least concede that these lectures have attempted to introduce the same logic, the same striving, the same scientific thinking into this human science as prevail in external science. And even if some people do not want to admit it, I may perhaps quote here the German biographer of Count Gobineau, who said: Many people have objected to Count Gobineau's ideas and said: What Count Gobineau thinks can easily be refuted, because any high school student can know this, and any high school student can grasp these ideas. But the assumption must be made that secondary school thoughts are not sufficient to understand Count Gobineau, and that one must go beyond what one believes to be his fixed logic and not remain at the level of secondary school logic if one wants to grasp the essence of spiritual science. Even if one continues to take the approach just outlined in assessing spiritual science and its results, there will always be individuals who will nevertheless recognize how attempts are being made to proceed in spiritual research with the same conscientiousness and the same rigorous logic that are customary in the training of thought that humanity has undergone in the course of recent centuries. Spiritual science should be recognized by this desire — not by the many mistakes made within it, nor by the many excesses that may appear within it. And the few who understand this will initially form the core of that human thinking and human will whose necessity is recognized precisely when one follows up on the most consistent thinkers who are emerging in our present time. That is why today's concluding lecture followed up not only on Darwin, but also on Count Gobineau.

May those who form the core of such human thinking and human will still stand alone today. All those who became the bearers of such ideas, which were taken for granted in a later time, were alone. In an age in which science has driven a materialistic-monistic religion out of its foundations, it is not surprising that a spiritual science, spiritual science, also drives people into loneliness in a certain way. For spiritual science, with its actual object, with what it seeks to grasp, stands at first in such a way that its object is denied in the widest circles today, or at least that the possibility of knowing this object is denied. But human beings cannot remain without knowledge of the spirit. And because they do not have to remain without this knowledge of the spirit, spiritual science comes into the picture. That this is how things are should be shown in these lectures. That in the outer sensory world, especially when it appears before our eyes in its most wonderful forms and connections, as can happen through modern science, we have something to see like a shell that a shellfish secretes after it has experienced the forces of this shell, this is how the outer world appears. And just as that which has overcome the shell, so does the spiritual, which creates itself through itself, appear through spiritual science. What had to be overcome, and what, having been overcome, still serves as a tool that we must use, is taught by external science. But spiritual science will impress upon people that knowledge need not be limited to the outer shell, to the outer crust of being. It will show that in the outer form, in the outer shell, we must see the deeds of the spirit, how it lives in its activities, in its results, and how it is the same when it withdraws into its actual source, into its inner being, but how it has something in this source that gives it perspective for eternity.

Spiritual science will renew—that was, as it were, the program of these winter lectures—but in an elevated way a certain Goethean view, which with deep conviction has given the whole program of these lectures, with which Goethe confronted the natural science of his time when one of its representatives, Haller, uttered the words:

No creative spirit penetrates
The innermost depths of nature.
Blessed are those to whom
The outer shell!

Goethe replied what spiritual science will always reply to external knowledge and external conviction, which believes that all human knowledge must be limited to the external world. Spiritual science will respond: You will only recognize this outer world in its true form when you see the real spirit. You will recognize what Darwinism has created in its true form when you see it as the deeds of the active spirit, as shells and deeds that the active spirit has separated so that it can make use of them. — And pointing to the human soul, spiritual science will bring to full consciousness in human beings that one also recognizes the shell only when one recognizes it as the expression of the spirit, and since one recognizes the spirit only when one grasps it in its creative activity, as it in its present existence already promises to bring forth new creations from the womb of the future, as it must become creative within itself. This is what the outer shell shows; it shows what the spirit has created. That is why spiritual science, of the kind that comes from it, exclaims when the saying is put before it:

No creative spirit penetrates
the innermost nature.
Blessed are those to whom
The outer shell!

to someone who speaks in this way, the words already anticipated and spoken by Goethe:

Examine yourself above all else,
Whether you are spirit or shell!

This concludes these winter lectures, and it may be said that the lecturer's attitude is this: May spiritual science truly find its goal and fulfill its task in such a way that it does not remain a mere theory, a mere sum of thoughts, but, as has often been characterized, an elixir of life that remains creative and effective in human beings, working not only in the recognition of the outer shell, but above all in the inner being, so that human beings may recognize whether they are core or shell, and so that a strong will may arise, not to remain shell, but to always be core and to become core.