Results of Spiritual Research

GA 62 — 10 April 1913, Berlin

14. The Legacy of the Nineteenth Century

This winter's lecture series sought to characterize the spiritual movement from various perspectives, which is supposed to be the attempt to lead the human soul through immersion in its own essence to those insights that it must long for with regard to the most important riddles of existence and life. An attempt has been made to show how, in a completely natural way, by considering present or emerging intellectual currents, spiritual science will show itself to be the right instrument for guiding the human soul into the realm of spiritual knowledge in a way that is appropriate to the present and the near future, in accordance with the laws given by the development of the human spirit. At the same time, as an undertone of these winter reflections, we have always tried to let it be heard what achievements and results spiritual life and spiritual striving have brought to humanity in the nineteenth century. For one can truly say that, given the way in which spiritual striving and spiritual life in the nineteenth century has seized humanity, and how this humanity has brought about the great triumph of material existence, it would seem a hopeless undertaking if this spiritual science, as it is meant here, had to rebel against or reject the justified demands of natural science or, in general, the intellectual results of the nineteenth century.

So it may perhaps be appropriate to end this lecture cycle by taking a look at what we can call the spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century, in order to perhaps be able to point out, by considering this spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century, how natural the spiritual science meant here is for the current development cycle of humanity.

What does this spiritual science of the soul attempt to be? It attempts to be a realization of the soul's origin in the spiritual; it attempts to be a realization of those worlds, those supersensible worlds, to which the soul belongs as a spiritual being, quite apart from the fact that this soul lives within the physical-sensory world through the tools and instruments of its body. It thus attempts to prove this soul to be a citizen of the supersensible worlds. It attempts to show that the soul, when it applies those methods often spoken of here during the course of this winter, can achieve such a development that powers of recognition are awakened in the soul, which otherwise hardly resonate in a person's life like an undertone of this life, but which, when unfolded and developed, really place this soul in the worlds to which it actually belongs with its higher being. When the soul discovers these powers in itself, it comes to recognize itself as an entity for which birth and death, or, let us say, conception and death, represent boundaries in the same sense that the blue firmament of heaven represents boundaries for the soul that recognizes in the spirit of natural science since the dawn of modern natural science, roughly since the work of Giordano Bruno and those who were like-minded to him. As the soul becomes aware of the forces slumbering within her, something similar happens in her for the temporal-spiritual as it did for the outer knowledge of the spatial-material in the time of the dawn of modern science, when, for example, For example, Giordano Bruno pointed out that this blue vault of heaven, which for centuries and centuries was thought to be a reality, is nothing more than a boundary that human knowledge sets for itself through a kind of inability and which it can transcend if it understands itself.

Just as Giordano Bruno showed that behind this blue vault of heaven lies the infinite sea of space with the infinite worlds embedded in it, so spiritual science has to show that the boundary set by birth and death or by conception and death only exists because the human soul's capacity is limited in time just as it once limited itself through the blue vault of heaven in space, but that when infinity can be extended beyond birth and death to the conception of the spiritual facts in which the soul is interwoven, the soul recognizes itself as permeating through repeated earthly lives. So that the soul's life on the one hand flows in the existence between birth and death, on the other hand in the time from death to a new birth.

If we go out with our view into the temporal-spiritual expanses, as science has gone out into spatial expanses, then the human soul recognizes itself by stepping out of the life it has gone through between death and the last birth, into the life between birth and death, both as co-creator of the finer organization of its own body and as creator of its own destiny. Furthermore, it has been said – this has perhaps been less touched upon this winter, but it has been in previous years and can be read about in spiritual-scientific literature – that the soul, when it grasps itself in its deeper powers, also traces itself back to the times when life in physical forms of existence began; that it can trace itself back to those times when it was already there before our earth planet took on its material form, before the earth as a material form itself emerged from a purely spiritual primal being, in which the human soul was already present in its first form, even before the emergence of the natural kingdoms surrounding us, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. And again the prospect opens up of a future into which the human soul has to enter when the earthly embodiments have been fulfilled, into which it will then pass into a purely spiritual world that will replace the earth; so that one can look can look forward to a future in which the human soul will enter, will enter purely spiritually, so that it will have to bring the fruits of earthly life forms to what it will achieve again as a spiritual kingdom, as in a primeval state. But it will not achieve it in the same form as it started out, but with the result of everything that can be acquired in earthly embodiments.

When the soul takes hold of itself in such a way that it condenses with the forces slumbering within it, then it also recognizes itself in connection with worlds that are the source worlds themselves opposite our earth planet; it recognizes itself as a citizen of the entire universe. From the successive earth-lives of the individual soul, spiritual science can take the upward surge to the successive lives of the planets, and even of the suns in the universe. The method is therefore one that consists in the soul's self-education to its deepest powers. The result is the realization of the origin and direction of the soul's life, the realization that the first is spirit, to which the soul belongs, that it is spirit that lets matter emerge from itself and brings it into its forms, and the most important form, which interests us most in our earthly existence, is the form of the human body. This realization will therefore have to become part of the consciousness of humanity in the near future: that spirit is the first and the highest, that spirit releases matter out of itself, just as water gives rise to ice out of itself, that spirit is what gives its outer form to the human body, that spirit with the spiritual activities, facts and entities of the world, and that the human soul is a citizen of this world of spiritual facts and entities, which release all external material existence from themselves, pouring it into the corresponding forms that then make up the visible universe around us, which can be perceived by the senses. This is how I would briefly characterize what can be the method and what the result of what is called spiritual science here.

This spiritual science is only just beginning in our present time. It has often been emphasized that it must seem quite understandable that enemies and opponents of this spiritual science are still rising from all sides today. This must seem understandable, especially to those who stand on the ground of this spiritual science themselves and, so to speak, know its whole character in relation to the rest of the cultural life of the present day. It is not surprising that this spiritual science finds enemies and opponents, that it is seen as fantasy, as reverie, perhaps sometimes as something even worse. It would be more surprising if, given the nature of this spiritual science, there were already more voices of recognition and encouragement in the present than is the case. For it seems very much as if not only the results of this spiritual science, but also the whole way of thinking and imagining, as it had to be practiced here, contradicts all habits of thought and all modes of imagination that have arisen for humanity precisely through the legacy of the nineteenth century. But it only seems so. And it may be said that this appears most to those who believe that they must stand on the firm ground of this heritage of the nineteenth century, that they consider only a materialistic way or a materialistically colored way of looking at the world to be compatible with this heritage of the nineteenth century.

What the spiritual scientist himself must recognize as this spiritual science does not seem to contradict the legacy of the nineteenth century at all.

For it may be said from the standpoint of spiritual science that what the nineteenth century has given to humanity in the most diverse fields of evolution so promisingly and so fruitfully will stand out brightly for all future epochs of development. It is, of course, impossible to cover the whole world in relation to this question of the legacy of the nineteenth century. But even if one were to stop, for example, at what the structure of the intellectual life of Central Europe or the West shows, one would have to say: Much, much light emanates from a true grasp of the significance of what is presented there. But there was also an extraordinary, often dizzying variety and diversity in the intellectual development of the nineteenth century, so that the observer could sometimes be fascinated by this or that, and easily be led to become one-sided and to overestimate this or that. Perhaps the only way to avoid such an overestimation is to have the successes of the nineteenth century and the changing images of the course of civilization unfold in such a way that one image follows another and a great diversity presents itself. Of course, we can only select a few images, and we would like to draw attention to the following.

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great philosopher of the West, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was writing his famous work “The Destiny of Man,” which is a testament to the hope for what the human soul can achieve inwardly and what it can become when it becomes aware of its powers and uses them. If you follow how he expressed himself to his most intimate friends and close associates while working on this writing, it is that he was able to glimpse into the deepest secrets of human cognitive and religious feeling. When one then goes through this writing, one can be fascinated by a kind of self-testimony, which in this writing the human soul seeks for the sake of its security, for the sake of its hope. In the first chapter, Fichte assumes that the knowledge gained through the external observation of nature and the physical world is basically only an external appearance, hardly that which one could seriously call a dream. how the soul takes hold of itself, takes hold of itself in its will, how it becomes certain of its own existence, then one gets an impression, which can be characterized something like this, even more through the individual explanations of this writing than through the whole context in which it is placed. This human soul has tried to pose the question: Can I stand before myself if I have no trust in all the knowledge that presents itself to me through my senses, and even through the contemplation of the external intellect? — In the style of his time, Fichte answered this question affirmatively in a grandiose way. What is impressive about this writing is precisely what it can become for the soul through the nature of the language, through the inwardly secure tone, which is so secure despite the renunciation of outwardly apparent knowledge.

Now, this writing is right in the middle of a striving of Western intellectual life for the sources of human confidence and human knowledge. The period in which Fichte aspired to such a powerful way of grasping the human soul was followed, so to speak, by the heyday of philosophical endeavor. What Fichte himself tried, what Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer tried, what was attempted in the field of philosophy in the first third of the nineteenth century to penetrate the secrets of the world with the power of human thinking , all this worked – however one may feel today about the results of this intellectual upsurge – through the way one felt in this striving, how one willed, grandiosely on every feeling and sensing human soul.

If you let yourself be influenced by Schelling, you might say, you would gain from an understanding of the world that is made secure by intellect but then becomes more imaginative. It is a world view that could really carry him beyond all material things into the spiritual evolution of the world. If you then move on to Hegel's striving of thought, which to penetrate into the innermost being of things through the power of thought alone, so that Hegel wanted to make clear to the human soul that in the power of thought it has the sources into which all the powers of the world flow and in which one has everything to grasp oneself, so to speak, in the eternal — then one sees a powerful struggle of humanity. One need only consider the hope and confidence that were attached to this powerful struggle.

And again, if one turns back, one might notice something that can somewhat enlighten the deeper observer of this entire epoch, of which we have now briefly spoken, about its origin. Thus, if we look back to the year 1784, we find a small, characteristic essay by Kant entitled “What is Enlightenment?” Its almost pedantic style does not always allow us to see how deeply the sometimes quite intellectual thoughts of this essay are rooted in the whole struggle of the human soul in modern times. “What is Enlightenment?” This question was posed by Kant, the same Kant who was so moved by the often chaotic but nevertheless powerful striving of the human spirit, as it came to light for example in Rousseau, that when he – which is more than an anecdote – could not keep still, but disrupted his entire daily routine and went for a walk at a completely irregular time (Kant, after whose walk one could otherwise set the clock) in Königsberg! But we know how Kant's soul was stirred by the freedom movement of the eighteenth century. This then, when we take this little writing in our hands, comes across to us, one might say, quite monumentally, in the sentences that we read there. Enlightenment, Kant says, is the emergence of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity. — Dare to use your reason! This sentence is taken from Kant's writing of 1784. One really appreciates this sentence: Dare to use your reason!as well as the others, especially when one realizes that they express something like the human soul coming to itself for the first time in a certain sense. Let us try to see these two Kantian sentences from his essay of 1784 in their true light, using a simple thought.

Cartesius, who as a philosopher did not precede Kant's work by very long — if we consider this “not very long” in terms of world development — went back to a striking and significant sentence. He pointed the human soul to its own thinking and thus did the same again that Augustine had already done in the first Christian centuries. It sounded like a keynote of Descartes's soul life when he said: “I think, therefore I am,” and in saying this he was saying something that Augustine had already said in a similar way: You can doubt the whole world, but by doubting you think, and by thinking you are, and by grasping yourself in thinking you grasp existence in yourself.

A person of sound mind cannot, according to Cartesius, possibly recognize himself as a thinking soul and doubt his existence. I think, therefore I am – this was, despite the fact that Augustine had already formulated a similar sentence, nevertheless something extraordinarily significant for the century of Cartesius and for what followed in the eighteenth century. But if we follow Cartesius as he goes on to build a worldview, looking further from this sentence as a basis, then we see that he takes up everything that has been handed down from centuries of tradition. One sees how his thinking, with what wants to arise from the human soul itself, stops at the traditions brought together from the centuries, at the spiritual truths, at the questions about the fate of the human soul after death and so on. Cartesius stops at the actual spiritual truths.

When you consider that, it becomes clear what it means that the Kantian sentences resounded in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century: Enlightenment is the stepping out of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity, and: Dare to use your reason! That is to say, people have now dared to trust the human soul with the power to reach the sources of its existence, to reach the sources of its strength through its own power, through its own greatness. This is precisely the characterization of Kant's statement, and it is proof of it.

From there everything that is contained in the bold sentences of Fichte's writing started, from there started that bold thought work that stands so grandiosely in the philosophy of the Occident from the first third of the nineteenth century. If we consider this upsurge of the human spirit, which we do not want to consider today in terms of the truth or falsity of its content, but in terms of what the human soul hoped to gain from it in terms of inner confidence and certainty of hope, and if we turn our turns one's gaze further into the mid-nineteenth century, one is perhaps touched by a word of a man like the writer of the history of philosophy, also the independent philosopher, but especially the biographer of Hegel, Karl Rosenkranz. In his preface to his “Life of Hegel” (1844), he writes: “It is not without melancholy that I part from this work, since one would hope that one day there would be a coming to be, not just a coming to be of the becoming! For does it not seem as if we of today are only the gravediggers and monument-makers for the philosophers who gave birth to the second half of the last (eighteenth) century only to die in the first of the present?” From such a statement, one feels perhaps more than from other descriptions how around the middle of the nineteenth century the whole splendor of philosophical endeavor had quickly faded from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and from the first third of the nineteenth century.

But another splendor arose immediately. While in the 1830s and 1840s the splendor of philosophical intellectual life quickly faded, a new confidence arose, one might say a new bliss of hope. This had already been prepared by the great scientific overviews of a physiologist like Johannes Müller and by everything that people like Alexander Humboldt and others have done. But then came such significant achievements as the discovery of the cell and its effect in the living organism by Schleiden and Schwann. This marked the beginning of a new era of the splendor of scientific knowledge. And now we see, in what has been done, all that will indeed shine immortal in the evolution of the nineteenth century. We see how the great achievements of physics follow on: in the forties, the discovery of the law of the conservation of energy and of the transformation of heat by Julius Robert Mayer and by Helmholtz. Those who are familiar with contemporary physics know that it was only through this discovery that physics became possible in the modern sense. We see how physics is led from triumph to triumph, how the discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen draws attention away from the material conditions on Earth and towards the material conditions in the heavens, by recognizing how the same substances are revealed in all the conditions in the heavens. We see how physics arrives at combining its theoretical foundations with the practical application of its principles, how it succeeds in penetrating into technology, and how it changes the culture of the Earth planet. We see natural fields such as electricity and magnetism, by connecting them with technology, stand as something great. We see the most highly developed future prospects joining the contemplation of the living, the organic, which was given by Darwin and in its further developments by Haeckel.

We see all this incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity. We see how Lyell's research from the beginning of the nineteenth century is followed by today's geology, which attempts to give a picture of the course of events on earth in a material sense. We see how grandiose attempts are also being made here to integrate the origin of man into the processes of the earth by means of purely material laws, to connect the biological with the geological. But all that has taken the place of the power of thought in the first third of the nineteenth century has not only deeply influenced theoretical worldviews. For if that had been the case, one could say that all this initially took place as if on a kind of upper horizon of intellectual development; but below that is the horizon of the rest of the population, who do not concern themselves with it. No, there is nothing in the development of mankind into which his instincts have not driven, which has now been sketched with a few cursory lines. We see it stretching everywhere into the mysterious formations of this spiritual path of humanity.

The human soul itself, in its innermost being and existence, has by no means remained untouched by what has taken place there. What took place there could be summarized, so to speak, characterizing the legacy that the nineteenth century left us, for example in a soul that was still allowed to listen to what came out of Fichte's mouth, which is contained, for example, in his writing “The Destiny of Man”. Such a soul would have had certain feelings and emotions about its own nature, about the way it can experience itself. This inner structure in relation to the experience of oneself at the beginning of the nineteenth century would present itself quite differently if we consider a soul that, I do not want to say, adheres to a materialistic creed, but which, with open senses and with interest, devotes itself to everything that legitimately flows from the heritage of the nineteenth century. This human soul has not remained untouched in its innermost being by what is unfolding around it in the expansion of the big city centers, has not remained untouched by the cultural achievements that stand as an embodiment of the new spiritual life, that spiritual life that has been gained from the contemplation of the new laws of the mechanical world order. From these views, which, so to speak, prove that the universe and its laws are to be regarded in a similar way to the laws that also govern machines and locomotives, a soul was still free to devote itself wholeheartedly to a work such as Fichte's “The Destiny of Man”. It has been rightly emphasized that this human soul had to undergo its transformation under the influence of all that has necessarily emerged as a material cultural result of the way of thinking, feeling and sensing that was characterized by the way it was transformed in the nineteenth century.

Consider the individual symptoms that have emerged as a result of what nineteenth-century scientific thought has delivered. Think of how the painter in earlier times stood in front of the canvas, how he mixed his colors, how he knew that they would hold; because he knew what he had mixed into them. The nineteenth century, with its great achievements and advances in technology, instructs the painter to buy his colors. He no longer knows what is presented to his senses, he does not know how long the splendor that he creates on the canvas will last, how long the impression will last. Yes, it is only under the influence of technology, which has emerged from the achievements of natural science, that we have today what we have today as public journalism, as our modern newspaper system and everything that makes an impression on the human soul, which, above all, has changed the whole pace of the human soul, and with it the thought forms, the whole influence on the feelings and thus also the structure of the feelings. Not only must we remember how quickly things come to man today through the achievements of modern technology, but we must also point out how quickly what the human mind achieves reaches other human minds through journalism, and what abundance reaches the human mind.

Now compare what a person can learn today through this journalism about what is happening in the world, and also about what the human mind is exploring, with the way he could learn about all the events at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Take a mind like Goethe's! We can look at him precisely because of the careful way in which his correspondence has been preserved, we can almost know what he did from hour to hour, we can know what he talked about and did with this or that scholar. Through this, the achievements of human intellectual life slowly flow together in his lonely Weimar room. But the central figure of Goethe was necessary for this to happen, which anyone can do today through journalism. But that changes the whole human soul, the whole position of the human soul in relation to the environment.

Let's approach something else. Today we write books or read books. Anyone who writes a book today knows that it will no longer be readable after about sixty years if it is printed on the paper that is the result of great technological advances, because it will have disintegrated. So, if you are not under any illusions, you know how much what was done in the past differs from what is available today.

In one lecture of this series, I tried to characterize a mind that, although it is connected to the whole spirit of the first half of the nineteenth century, is nevertheless a mind of the second half of that century: Herman Grimm. We have seen that he presents himself as a custodian of the heritage of the first half of the nineteenth century into the second half. But anyone who reads Herman Grimm's art essays with inner understanding will notice two things, among other things. In his work, even in the most valuable essays, a certain school resonates that he went through, a school that can be heard resonating in every essay. He was only able to undergo this schooling because, relatively early on, by what is called chance, he came into contact with a great mind, that of Emerson, a great preacher and writer who was a preacher and writer of world views not in the sense of older times, but in the most modern sense. Try to visualize Emerson, to immerse yourself in him, and you will find that a nineteenth-century spirit stands before us. Try to feel the pulse of the thoughts that arise with the coloration and nuance of the nineteenth century, even when they refer to Plato the philosopher or Swedenborg the mystic. No matter how unprejudiced they are, they are nineteenth-century thoughts that could only be thought in a century that was destined to make the telegraph the world's means of communication. Emerson, in particular, has a mind that, while rooted in Western culture, elevates this culture of the West to what it has become in the eminent sense. One tries to compare a page by Emerson with a page by Goethe, wherever one might open Goethe. Then try – which, however, you must find natural in the case of Goethe – to compare the image of the leisurely Goethe, still walking in the steps of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rapidly hurrying being of the man of the nineteenth century, which continues to have an effect in the train of thought of Herman Grimm. That is one thing.

But then we saw how Herman Grimm, in his wonderful novel of the times, 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Forces), even pointed to the existence of the human etheric body or life body, as he pointed to much that has only been fully developed in spiritual science. But one can also see how Herman Grimm deals with everything artistic in a thoroughly personally interesting, outstanding way, how he is able to juxtapose more distant periods of time artistically, how he is able to give an interesting, subtle consideration of art. It is impossible for anyone who is able to see such things to think that the thoughts that form the most beautiful essays of Herman Grimm could have been written in any other age than the one in which it was impossible for Herman Grimm to travel from Berlin to Florence or South Tyrol without being in a hurry. For this is the precondition for the formation of much of his work. Imagine that someone like Herman Grimm could have said in earlier centuries: “I have always written the most important parts of my Homer book in Gries near Bolzano during the weeks of spring, because that is when I feel the effect of spring!” That something like this could be integrated into a person's life is only possible in the overall atmosphere of the nineteenth century. There we feel a confluence of what springs forth as a wonderful contemplation of art in Herman Grimm, what proves to be an immersion into the soul of the entire cultural impact of the nineteenth century, with what emanates from technology, and flowing back into it, from the triumphs of the nineteenth century.

It is impossible to understand some of the deepest things of the nineteenth century if one is unable to summarize them with what is the most important legacy of the nineteenth century: with the scientific ideas with which the nineteenth century tried to understand the world. Today we cannot but admit that something lives in our soul as one of its most important instruments, which would not be there at all without the structure of scientific thinking, as we have it as a legacy of the nineteenth century. That is one side of it, the side that presents itself to us in what this human soul has made of itself after it has undertaken what Kant so monumentally characterized when he said: Enlightenment is the human soul's emergence from its self-imposed immaturity, and: Dare to use your reason! — This tendency of the Enlightenment, that is, the use of the means of research of the human soul, went through the philosophical upsurge and into the age of natural science, just as this human soul happens to be. But how did that happen overall? From the point of view of spiritual science, we have to consider a larger context if we want to understand what has actually been expressed, if we want to understand the configuration, the structure of our soul, in which we see the will to enlightenment on the one hand, and on the other hand everything that scientific culture has given us. To do this, we have to juxtapose at least three successive cultural epochs of human development. These cultural cycles have already been referred to in the context of these lectures, in the sense of the observation that arises from an understanding of human spiritual life, which attempts to fathom how the human soul returns through the ages in successive earthly and from earlier ages to later ones not only carries over its own guilt in order to atone for it in the sense of a great law of fate, but also carries over what it has inwardly experienced in the way of cultural achievements. In the sense of this spiritual knowledge, we initially distinguish three ages. Other ages precede these three. However, there is not enough time today to go into them.

The first age of importance for us is the Egyptian-Chaldean age, which came to an end around the eighth century BC. If we want to characterize it, we can say that during this age the human soul lived in such a way that it still sensed something of its connection with the whole universe, with the whole cosmos. In its destiny on earth, it still felt dependent on the course of the stars and the events of the great universe. This age of earlier millennia is filled with reflections on the dependence of human life on the starry worlds and the great universe, right up to about the eighth century BC. The soul felt wonderfully touched when it delved into ancient Egyptian or ancient Chaldean wisdom, when it saw how everything was geared towards feeling the connection of the soul with the cosmos beyond the narrow human existence. Something that was important for feeling this connection of the soul with the cosmos in this cultural epoch was the appearance, for example, of Sirius. And important with regard to what man did for the culture of the soul, what he utilized for the soul or accomplished for it, was the observation of the laws of the heavens. Man felt that he was born out of the whole universe, felt his connection with the extra-terrestrial as well as with the earthly; he felt, as it were, transferred down out of spiritual worlds into the earthly world. This feeling was a final echo of the ancient clairvoyance from which the human soul originated, and which has been mentioned here several times. This ancient clairvoyance was present in primeval times, and man has lost it in the course of development so that he can observe the world in its present form. At that time, in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, there was still an echo of ancient clairvoyance. Man could still grasp the spiritual connection of soul-spiritual laws in all natural existence and wanted to grasp it. In a certain respect, the human soul was not alone with itself. By feeling itself on earth, it was connected and interwoven with the forces that played into the earth from the universe.

Then came the Greco-Latin period, which we can roughly estimate, in terms of its essential nature and its after-effects, as lasting from the eighth century BC to the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth century AD, because the after-effects of this cultural epoch continue for so long. When we look at this age, especially at its first awakening, we find that the human soul has freed itself in a higher sense from the universe, in its knowledge, in its faith, in its recognition of the forces at work within it. In particular, if we look at the Greeks, we can see that the healthy human being, as he developed in the soul, also felt, as he stood on the earth, connected with his natural bodily being. This is what the Greek soul felt and experienced in the second of the periods under consideration. Today it is actually difficult to characterize what is meant by this. We have tried to bring it closer to our understanding in our reflections on Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. The Greeks lived quite differently in relation to the spiritual and soul life. This was particularly the case, for example, with the Greek artist. Today, one does not even want to admit what was special about the feelings and perceptions of the Greek soul. That the sculptor, who represented the human form in the true sense, could have before him what we call the model today, that he could shape the human form according to the model, is impossible for the Greeks to imagine. It was not so. The relationship of today's artist to his model would have been unthinkable in Greece. For the Greek knew: My entire body is alive with my soul and spirit. He sensed how the forces of this spiritual-soul life flowed into the formation of the arm, into the formation of the muscles, into the formation of the whole human form. And he knew that just as they flowed into the human form, so he had to express them in his sculptures. In accordance with his inner knowledge of the nature of the body, he knew how to recreate what he himself could feel in the external material. Thus he could say to himself: I am weak, but if I developed my will, I could let it work in the formation of the muscles, in the formation of the arm, and thereby become stronger. — What he experienced in this way he poured into his figures. The contemplation of external forms was not the essential thing for him, but the feeling of being placed in the earth's culture in one's own body and soul and the reproduction of what was experienced in the external world.

But the experience of the whole personality was also in Greek culture. It is quite impossible to think of a Pericles or any other statesman as a modern statesman would be thought of. We see a modern statesman acting on general principles, representing what he thinks and wants. When Pericles in ancient Athens steps before the people and carries out something, it is not because he says to himself: Because I see it, it must be carried out. — That is not the case. But when Pericles steps before the people and asserts what he wants, then it is his personal will. And if it is adhered to, it is because the Greek has the knowledge that Pericles can want the right thing because he feels it as a personality. The Greek is a self-contained nature, he lives himself, thinking in a closed way. He can do this because, unlike the members of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, he no longer feels a connection with the gods and so on. That is only present as an echo. But what he experiences directly is that he feels his physical body connected with the spiritual soul. So that in this way he is already more alone with his soul than the man of the Egyptian-Chaldean time, but he is still connected with all the rest of nature, because his body, his flesh, has given him this connection. One must feel that: The soul in the Greco-Latin period, already more free from the general universe than in the previous period, must still feel connected with all that is in the natural kingdoms around it. For the soul felt connected with what is an extract from these natural kingdoms, the physical-corporeal. This feeling is what must be seen as the characteristic of this Graeco-Latin period, which then included the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now we see the emergence - and we are in the midst of it with our thinking and feeling - of the third period, which we have to consider. How does it differ from the Graeco-Latin period? The human soul is much more alone, because the Greek felt connected to what he was in his body, to nature. Let us place before the Greeks the possibility that they should have looked at the smallest living creatures through a modern microscope, they should have thought of the cell theory. Impossible for the Greek soul! For it would have felt, when it came to these microscopic observations, that it was unnatural and unnatural to devise instruments through which one sees things differently than they present themselves to the natural eye of the body! — The Greeks felt so connected with nature that it would have seemed unnatural to them to see things differently than they present themselves to the eye. And to make the world's things visible through the telescope would have seemed just as unnatural to him. In many respects, the ancient Greek way of thinking resembles the way a personality felt who was inspired by this way of thinking and who made the beautiful statement: What are all the instruments of physics compared to the human eye, which is nevertheless the most wonderful apparatus! That is to say, the Greek view of the world was the most natural one, the one that one gains when one arms the senses with instruments as little as possible and thus sees things differently than when man perceives nature directly, as he is placed in the environment.

Our time is quite different! In our time it was quite natural, and it came more and more to be so through the development of the spirit since the period just characterized, that what one strove for as an objective scientific picture of the world was completely separated from what lives in the human soul. Only in this way could the view arise that the truth about the human organization can only be learned by directing the armed eye at things, by examining living beings with the microscope and applying the telescope to conditions in the sky, by using an instrument that comes to the aid of the inaccuracy of the eye. But if we consider the spirit that is expressed in this, we must say that now man separates what lives in his inner being, what is connected with his ego, from his world picture. The human ego, the human self, is even more lonely and alone than it was in Greek times. If we try to compare the Greek world view with our world view, as given to us by science, we have to say: in practice, too, efforts have been made to make this world view independent of what goes on in the deepest inner soul of man, what lives and weaves and is in the human I. In the ancient Egyptian-Chaldean period, for example, the soul and the world were one for the human being's perception. In Greek times, the human soul and the human body were one, but through the human body, the human being was still connected to his world view. Now, the spiritual-soul has become more and more detached, completely detached from what it considers to be the justified content of the world view. Lonely and closed in on itself is the human soul.

Now let us consider the remarkable polarity that becomes evident to us when we move from the Egyptian-Chaldean period through the Greek-Latin period to our own. What man strives for in our epoch above all else, in contrast to the earlier Greek epoch, is to gain a scientific world picture that is independent of his soul. What also necessarily resulted is to separate the human soul from what it was connected to in earlier times, to place the soul on its own, to push it entirely back into its consciousness. In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, the human soul still directed its spiritual and soulful gaze out into the world and allowed itself to be inspired by what was in the world. Even in Greek times, people still took what suited their conception of the world and incorporated it into art. In more recent times, the conception of the world stands alone, separate from the soul experience of the human being. And yet we must say: in modern times, when the human soul has thrown itself out of the objective world view, where it no longer finds itself in the soul in that which flows mechanically and objectively outside, when it has broken the connection with the external world existence, it still wants to gain within itself the strength for knowledge, as a world view, for its entire being. It would still have been inconceivable to the Greeks if someone had told them: Dare to use your reason! or: Enlightenment is the human soul stepping out of its self-imposed immaturity. - One could speak Socratic words in Greece, but not these words, because the Greek would not have understood them. He would have felt: What do I want through my reason? At most, to gain a picture of the world. But this image of the world lives continually in me, as the world flows into my powers and my soul and spirit. It would be unnatural in the face of what flows into me to use my reason. — And the follower of the Egyptian-Chaldean period would have found the call to use his reason even stranger and even more unnatural. To the sentence: Dare to use your reason! he would have replied: Then I would lose the best intuitions and inspirations that flow to me from the universe. Why should I use only my reason, which would impoverish me in my experience, when I make use of it, compared to what flows into me from the universe?

Thus we see how the human souls that come from earlier epochs always encounter a different age. Thus they are educated, in Lessing's expression: in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, in which the soul feels at one with the world; then in the Greek-Latin period, in which the soul feels at one with its own body, and now the souls are going through the period in which they have to find themselves within themselves because they have taken themselves out of their objective world view.

We find it quite in keeping with this that this age must produce a Fichte with his book “The Destiny of Man”, and that he raises the question: What if this world view were perhaps only an illusion, a deception, only a dream? How then can the I, which now feels impoverished — that is a feeling that comes from the times — come to inner confidence? How can it find itself?

Thus we see Fichte's teaching on the I as a necessary result of the whole evolution. We see how, precisely in the nineteenth century, because of the scientific world view – as in Fichte's time, when the power of thought was still in full bloom – the I wants to create clarity through itself. And the attempts of Schelling and Hegel, following Fichte, can only be characterized by seeing in them the endeavour to gain a connection with the world through thought from the I that has emancipated itself from the world picture. But we see how, in the third of these characterized periods, the natural-scientific world picture gradually takes away, so to speak, from the I as well, by impoverishing it, all echoes with the old world pictures. Such things are usually not sufficiently observed in our time.

If we look back to one of the people who contributed in an eminent way to our scientific world view, to Kepler, who achieved so much that still has an effect on our scientific view, we find a remarkable idea in his “Harmony of the World”. He raises his gaze from the harmony of the world to the whole Earth. But for Kepler this Earth is a giant organism, alive, somewhat like a whale. At least, when he looks for an organism among the living creatures that resembles the earth organism, he finds the whale, and he says: This giant animal, on which we walk, which breathes, does not breathe like man, but in the times determined by the course of the sun, and the rising and falling of the ocean is the sign of the inhaling and exhaling of the earth organism. Kepler finds the human view too limited to comprehend how this process takes place.

When emphasizing Kepler's connection with Giordano Bruno for a one-sided view of the world, one should not forget that Giordano Bruno also repeatedly pointed out that the Earth is a giant organism that breathes in and out with the tides of the ocean. And we do not have to go back very far to find the same idea in more recent times. There is a beautiful saying of Goethe's to Eckermann, where he says, “I imagine the earth as a giant animal that has its inhalation and exhalation process in the rising and descending air and in the ebb and flow of the sea.” That is to say, the view of the earth as presented by today's geology only emerged very gradually, and another view was lost, which we can still feel resonating in Goethe and which still comes across to us very vividly in Kepler and Giordano Bruno. What Kepler, Giordano Bruno, what Goethe thought and felt, men felt quite vividly in those ancient times when the soul felt at one with the world. That this feeling of at-one-ment with the world should have grown dim in the course of time was the natural course of evolution.

If we wish to characterize what is presented here in terms of spiritual science, we arrive at the following description. A more detailed explanation can be found in “Occult Science: An Outline”.

If we look at the human soul, not in the chaotic way that modern science often does, but with the eye of spiritual science, we see that it is divided into three parts. First, there is the lowest part of the human soul, which, as one might say, still characterizes in many respects only the whole chaotic depth of the human soul, where the upper parts of human nature do not fully reach: the sentient soul. This is where the drives, affects, passions and all the undefined feelings in the soul arise. Then we have a higher link of the human soul: the intellectual or mind soul. This is the soul that already lives more consciously within itself, that grasps itself within itself, that not only experiences itself in the surges that it feels surging up from the depths in instinct, desire and passion, but that, above all, feels compassion and shared joy, and develops within itself what we call concepts of understanding and so on. And then we have that part of the soul that we can call the consciousness soul, through which the human soul truly experiences itself in itself.

In the course of human development, these different parts have successively undergone their formation. If we go back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, it was mainly the education for the sentient soul that people went through at that time. For the connections of the great cosmos could speak to the sentient soul, and these entered into the human soul without man being aware of it. The wisdom of the Chaldean-Egyptian culture was therefore attained unconsciously. When we move on to the Greek-Latin period, we have the special development of the intellectual or emotional soul, where through intellect and emotion — we can see from this that this soul element has two parts — the inwardness is expressed, which is already more imbued with consciousness. And in our time we now have — and this follows directly from what has been described — the culture of the human soul, whereby this human soul is to come fully to consciousness in itself, that is to say, to develop the consciousness soul. This is what reached the highest pinnacle in the nineteenth century: the objective world view, which leaves the soul alone with itself so that it can grasp its self, its I, with its consciousness soul. In order to grasp the innermost essence of the human being in its inner illumination, it was necessary that the soul did not present itself to the world in the semi-unconscious way of the Egyptian world view or in the way we have described it for the Greek-Latin , but that it broke away from the world view in order to develop within itself that which had to become strongest in it, the I, the consciousness soul. Thus, in the successive earthly lives, favorable opportunities gradually presented themselves for man to develop the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul in the successive earthly cultures.

But now let us take a look at this legacy of the nineteenth century, this consciousness soul: it struggled – we can basically trace this in particular in the nineteenth century – struggled in the philosophy of a Fichte, in the subsequent philosophical representations, struggled even in the more materialistic philosophies, for example in the philosophy of a Feuerbach, who said: The idea of God is only the self-representation of man projected out of space.

Man set the idea of God outside of himself because he needed support in the lonely consciousness soul. And if one follows the most radical philosophers, Feuerbach and others up to Nietzsche, one sees everywhere the human soul coming to power and inner security after it has been torn away from the world view that has become objective. Through this process, we see the human soul developing in a very regular way, we see the development of that which reached its peak in the nineteenth century: the emancipation of the consciousness soul and the consciousness soul's taking hold of itself through its own power.

What is to set the tone in the next age is always prepared in an earlier age. It can be clearly demonstrated how the development of the intellectual or mind soul already plays a role in certain cultural phenomena of the Egyptian-Chaldean period; and in the Greco-Latin period, especially where it is post-Christian, for example in the work of Augustine, one can see how humanity struggles to prepare the consciousness soul. Therefore, we have to say: our human soul can only be fully understood when it prepares, in the midst of the age of the consciousness soul, that which is to be developed after the consciousness soul. What needs to be developed?

The inner development of the human soul strives towards what must be developed, but so too does the so-called objective world view itself. Let us consider several symptoms in conclusion. What has the nineteenth century, with its brilliant culture, achieved? We see one of the most brilliant natural scientists of the nineteenth century, Ds Bois-Reymond, with his objective world view. He wants to save – just read his speech “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” – for the human soul what he needs for its inner security, and he seeks to find his way with the idea of the “world soul” because this soul of consciousness, which has become lonely and detached from the objective world view, is inexplicable to him. But the objective world view stands in his way. Wherever the human soul makes its appearance, it manifests itself in the brain, in the nerve cords and in the other instruments of action. Now Du Bois-Reymond is at the frontier of natural science. What does he demand if he is to recognize a world soul? He demands that someone show him an instrument in the universe that is similar to the one present in man when the human soul thinks, feels and wills. He says, for instance: Show me a tangle of ganglion balls and nerve fibres embedded in the neuroglia and supplied with warm arterial blood under the right pressure, corresponding to the increased capacity of such a world soul. He does not find it. The same Du Bois-Reymond demands this, who in the same speech also stated: If you observe the sleeping human being, from falling asleep to waking up, he may be explainable in scientific terms; but if you observe the human being from waking up to falling asleep, with all the drives, desires and passions, all the images, feelings and volitional impulses that arise and subside within him, he will never be explainable in scientific terms.

He is right! But let us see where the legacy of the nineteenth century has led us. Du Bois-Reymond says: “If I look at the sleeping human body scientifically, I cannot find anything that explains the interplay of the forces that are at work in our perceptions, feelings, impulses of will, and so on. For it is simply illogical to seek an explanation for the inner nature of the phenomena of the soul in the processes of the body, just as it would be nonsensical to seek an explanation for the organ of the lungs in the inner nature of air.

This will be the legacy of the nineteenth century: science will show that, even when it remains strictly on its own terrain, it cannot explain the workings of the soul and spirit in human beings from the processes that are available to it. Rather, it can be said without reservation: When this human body awakens from sleep, the soul and spirit are inhaled, as the lungs inhale oxygen or air; and when it falls asleep, the soul and spirit are exhaled, as it were. In the state of sleep, the soul-spiritual is alone outside the human body as an independent entity.

The legacy of the nineteenth century will be that natural science will fully unite with spiritual science, which says: Man has an ego and an astral body, with which he leaves his physical body and etheric body during sleep, is in a purely spiritual world during sleep with his ego and astral body, and leaves his physical body and etheric body to the laws that are peculiar to them. In this way natural science itself will demarcate its own field, and through what it has to admit it will show how spiritual science must be added to it as a complement. And when natural science itself will correctly recognize, for example, one of its greatest achievements: the natural development of organisms from the most imperfect to the more perfect, it will see that precisely in this development of the natural natural in the sense of Darwin's theory, in which the evolution of the human soul is not included, but which must first be grasped by the spiritual-soul if the merely earthly is to be organized into the human. A fine legacy of the nineteenth century will be a correctly understood natural science, showing how spiritual science is necessary to supplement natural science. Then, as a necessary consequence, the two will be in complete harmony. And the human soul will grasp itself by awakening the slumbering powers within it and recognizing itself.

In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, people were still in contact with the cosmos. This showed man his spiritual background. In the Greco-Latin period, man was still indirectly connected to the cosmos through the body. He still felt the cosmos because he felt the unity between the spiritual-soul and the physical. Now, the objective world view has become only a sum of external processes. Through spiritual science, however, the soul, by finding itself in its own spiritual-deep powers, will recognize itself in a new way in connection with the universe. The soul will be able to say: When I look down, I feel connected with all living things, with all the kingdoms of nature that are around me. But now, after going through the culture of the sentient soul of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, through the culture of the mind or emotional soul of the Greek-Latin period, and now having absorbed the culture of the consciousness soul, in which the gaze of the I was directed towards material culture , I feel connected to a series of spiritual realms: downwards to the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms when I look out materially, and upwards to spiritual realms, to the realms of the spiritual hierarchies, to which the soul belongs just as it belongs upwards, as it is otherwise accustomed to looking downwards towards the natural kingdoms. A future perspective is opening up before her that is fully in line with the perspectives of the past. Man has worked his way out of the spiritual contexts of the past; in the future he will work his way into the spiritual realms. The soul will feel a connection with the nature kingdoms through its spiritual-soul forces, and it will feel a connection with the spiritual realms through the spirit self. For just as our time is characterized as the time of the development of the consciousness soul, so in our time the development of the spirit self is preparing for the future of human spiritual culture, which will gradually mature.

When we look at the development from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that it is quite organically necessary for this legacy of the nineteenth century to express most characteristically a task that was present: the task of rejecting the soul back to itself, throwing it out of the natural in order to force it to develop its own soul and spiritual powers. And this will be the best legacy of the nineteenth century, when the soul will see itself as having been torn away from everything, but feeling all the more encouraged to unfold its own powers. While the Age of Reason sought to make use of reason itself, the coming age must awaken still deeper forces slumbering in the depths of the soul, and thus a spiritual world will come into view, as the soul of the future must have it.

Thus the future will be grateful to the nineteenth century for having enabled the soul to develop the higher powers of objective science out of itself. That is also a legacy of the nineteenth century. If we consider the inner development of the human soul, we see that it must pass from the development of the sentient soul, through that of the mind or emotional soul and the consciousness soul, into the development of the spirit self. But man finds the spirit-self only when he is first torn away from all the external world by the scientific observation that is the legacy of the nineteenth century. If one looks at the legacy of the nineteenth century in this way and then goes into the details, one will see that the best thing about the positive results of the scientific heritage of the nineteenth century is the strengthening of the soul, because it then finds itself in that which science cannot give it. The soul will one day stand and feel with Du Bois-Reymond: Yes, the sleeping human body can be explained by the laws of physiology, but not what is inhaled by it as spiritual-soul. The soul will feel that it must raise to consciousness that which is unconscious in sleep through spiritual-scientific methods, in order to have a view into the spiritual worlds. And then a later Du Bois-Reymond will no longer stand so perplexed before the human body when he wants to explain it scientifically, because he will say to himself: the human soul is not in there at all, in the neuroglia and in the ganglion balls; so why should I then prove neuroglia and ganglion balls in the giant world soul?

We find the idea expressed in an outstanding nineteenth-century mind, that of Otto Liebmann, who only wanted to use what the nineteenth century could give him for an understanding of the sources of existence. Liebmann lectured on philosophy in Jena for many years: Why should we not be able to assume that our planets, moons and fixed stars are the atoms or even the molecules of a giant brain spreading out in the universe in a macrocosmic way? But he thinks that it will always be denied to human intelligence to penetrate to this giant brain, and that it will therefore also be denied to penetrate to the knowledge of a spiritual world soul at all. But spiritual science shows that Otto Liebmann was quite right. For it is impossible for the intelligence he speaks of to arrive at any kind of satisfaction of human longings in this field. Because this intelligence has first become great by emancipating itself from the objective world view, it is not surprising but self-evident that a philosophy built on this objective world view can find nothing in a world soul. If, in Du Bois-Reymond's sense, the natural scientist cannot find the human soul in the ganglia balls and neuroglia of the sleeping human body, why should one be able to find anything about the nature of the world soul in the giant ganglia balls of a giant brain? No wonder the physiologist must despair of it!

But these fundamentals are the best legacy of the nineteenth century. They show that the human soul is now thrown back upon itself and must seek and find the connection with the spiritual worlds, not through contemplation, but through the development of its inner powers. The human spirit will find, when it contemplates that conception of the world which it knows as the Darwinian theory of evolution, that its greatness is based on its having excluded itself. Man would not have come to the stage of development he has now reached if he had not excluded himself from the conception of the world. But when he understands this, he will realize that he cannot find in this theory of evolution what he himself had to extract. If one understands the Darwinian theory of evolution correctly, one will find, as it is not contradictory to it, to believe the spiritual researcher when he looks, in retrospect behind the phenomena of sense, at a spirit in which the human soul is rooted as a spirit.

This final lecture should show that in truth there is not the slightest contradiction between what is meant here by spiritual science and the true, genuine achievements of natural science, and that if one delves correctly into what the scientific world view, after the course of human development has been properly understood in spiritual scientific terms, human development, one knows precisely how it cannot be otherwise, and how the scientific world view, because it has become so, is the most beautiful means of educating the human soul to become what it should become: a being striving from the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

In this way, spiritual science is also shown to be part of the culture of our time. What was prepared in the Egyptian-Chaldean period with the culture of the sentient soul, and what was further developed in the Greek-Latin period with the culture of the mind or mind soul, has found its further development in our time in the culture of the consciousness soul. But everything that comes later is already prepared in the earlier stages. Just as there was a culture of the consciousness soul even in Socrates and Aristotle, which will continue for a long time in our time, so it is true that here, within our age, there must be the source for a true teaching for the spirit self. Thus the human soul grasps itself in connection with those worlds in which it is rooted, spirit in spirit.

In addition to all else, the natural science of the nineteenth century is a means of education, and the best means of education precisely for spiritual science. Perhaps it will be seen from the winter lectures that the spiritual-scientific views presented here regarding the heritage of the nineteenth century will provide a secure foundation for spiritual science, which should not become a conglomeration and chaos of something arbitrary, but something that stands on a foundation as secure as the admirable science of nature itself. If one believes that there must necessarily be a break between what natural science is and has achieved and what spiritual science is, then one could become disillusioned with this spiritual science. But when one sees how natural science had to become what it has become so that the human soul can find its way to the spirit in the new way, as it must find it, then one will recognize it as that which must necessarily be included in evolution as that which contains the seeds for the period of time that will follow our own just as our own follows those that have gone before. Then the apparent contradictions between the natural scientific and the spiritual scientific world picture will be reconciled.

Of course, I do not for a moment believe that in the short time of the lecture - which lasted so long - I have been able to exhaust even the slightest of what shows the continuing significance of the nineteenth-century scientific path with all its forms from the perspective of spiritual science. But perhaps by expanding on what has been said, by pursuing what was intended to be inspired today, especially by comparing the results of spiritual science with the correctly understood results of natural science, the honored audience will be able to see in their souls how a spiritual consideration of human evolution shows the necessity of spiritual science entering into the progress of human development. These lectures were organized and their keynote was always taken from this consciousness of an inner necessity for development. This lecture in particular was intended to evoke the feeling of how justified it may seem that the mere confidence that philosophers like Fichte and others sought to derive from the consciousness soul cannot be gained from the consciousness soul standing alone and shut up in its own thoughts, but only when the soul realizes and recognizes that there is something quite different within it than its mere intelligence and reason: when it finds the powers within itself that lead it to imagination, inspiration and intuition, that is, to life in the spiritual world itself, and when it realizes that out of a truly inner certainty about this, it may be spoken of again in the first third of the twentieth century – with the correctly understood legacy of the nineteenth century.

When Hegel, boldly building on what he believed he had grasped in the mere consciousness soul, once spoke significant words in his lectures on the history of philosophy, we may, in translation, his words, we may perhaps use them here at the end to characterize – not conceptually summarizing, but expressing like a feeling that arises like an elixir of life from the spiritual-scientific considerations. With some modification, we want to express in Hegel's words what the soul can feel for the security of life, for the necessary sources and foundations of existence and for all life's work, what it can feel in relation to the great riddles of existence, about fate and immortality. All this is such that the soul is met with the right worldly light, when it — but now not from an indefinite and abstract consciousness soul, but from a realization that in the soul there are dormant powers of knowledge slumbering in the soul that make her a citizen of spiritual worlds - when she is completely imbued with a feeling, so that this feeling becomes the direct expression of the spiritual science in question, making the soul secure and hopeful:

The human spirit may and should believe in its greatness and power; for it is spirit from the spirit. And with this belief, nothing in the cosmos, in the universe, can prove so hard and brittle that it does not reveal itself to it in the course of time, insofar as it needs it. What is hidden at first in the universe must become more and more evident to the seeking soul in its increasing realization and surrender to it, so that it can develop it into inner strength, inner security, inner value of existence and life!