Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

GA 63 — 12 February 1914, Berlin

8. The Moral Foundation of Human Life

Although, naturally, this series of lectures has often had to deal with the moral life of human beings and the moral world order, allow me today to summarize once again what can be said from the standpoint of spiritual science about the foundations of the moral world order in human life.

Schiller expressed the fundamental character of moral human life in a magnificently simple way, one might say, out of a general feeling for the world. He expresses it in these simple words:

Are you seeking the highest, the greatest?

The plant can teach you. What it is without will, you should be with will — that is all.

Today's debates may show that the fundamental character of moral life is truly captured in this statement. But the second half of this statement conceals a riddle, a significant riddle: “Be willing what the plant is unwilling — that is all!” What matters is how, by what means, and from where human beings could be willing what the plant is unwilling. And in the riddle that lies in this second half of Schiller's statement, one must also seek the fundamental nerve of all philosophical and moral scientific research as it runs through the spiritual history of humanity.

In our time, it is hardly possible for a large number of thinkers, of personalities who deal with the moral questions of humanity, to really penetrate to the source from which the undeniable fact of man's ethical obligation can be drawn. We will see how ethical obligations, moral impulses, shine into the lives of a large number of thinkers without it being easy to indicate, based on the premises of the worldviews characteristic of the present, the place from which this light of moral impulses actually flows into the human soul.

Precisely when we take up Schiller's statement – let us take up only his – we can notice a peculiar fact that initially illuminates moral life, which becomes particularly clear when we descend into the lowest of the natural kingdoms, the mineral kingdom. Let us suppose we were to look at some object from the mineral kingdom, for example a rock crystal. The essential, but not always sufficiently noticeable, point is that, according to the whole situation of the cosmos, we must make the following assumption: if this rock crystal, if this natural formation, brings into being what we must recognize as its — let us use the word — innate laws, then it represents what its essence is. If one were able — and certainly ongoing scientific research will achieve such results; they have already been attempted hypothetically by individuals — to indicate from the particular substance of rock crystal how its particular crystal form, the familiar six-sided prism, closed on both sides by six-sided pyramids, must emerge, then one can also know, when it reaches such a crystal form, how this law, which can be recognized, so to speak, according to its substance, expresses itself in the outside world. Then it represents its essence for what it is in outer space. — In a certain sense, we can say the same about the beings of the plant kingdom, perhaps less so about the beings of the animal kingdom; but essentially, even if somewhat modified, since everything in nature exists only in certain gradations, the same law also applies in the animal kingdom. Much would have to be said if one wanted to explain the peculiarity of what is implied by this law. This will only be hinted at here. The deeper one delves into this fact, the more one realizes that there is a point here for our world order through which human beings—especially when one looks at the world order without prejudice—are radically different from other natural beings.

Let us assume for a moment that we could truly recognize all the laws of formation and other laws that are inherent in the human form, just as the crystal form is inherent in a rock crystal, and that human beings would express this inherent sum of formative forces. Then they would not be expressing their essence externally in space in the same sense as other natural beings. For deep within human beings lies what we call moral impulses, whose primary characteristic is that they spark an inner tendency toward development, so that when human beings express their natural formative forces, they do not present their essence in a closed form, as other natural beings do. It must be admitted that this initially expresses little more than what one might call a rather trivial fact, but a fact that must nevertheless be taken as a starting point. It is not even recognized by more naturalistic or materialistic worldviews, but it must be recognized by an unprejudiced view of existence. It must be acknowledged that human beings initially perceive something from somewhere that wants to become part of their being and that gives them the impulse not to consider their being complete when it enters existence in the same sense as other creatures of nature enter existence. Indeed, one could say: No matter how perfectly, how completely human beings might bring their formative forces into existence in the same sense as the formative forces of other creatures of nature, they would never be able to declare their being complete in relation to moral impulses. This led, not to mention older times, to Kant, the great philosopher, feeling compelled to divide his worldview into two completely separate parts: one part representing everything that can be recognized from the outside world, to be recognized in such a way that human beings, with all their organic formative powers, also fit into this worldview; and the other part, which initially only intrudes into human existence as the basic tone maintained by the “categorical imperative”: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action could become a commandment for all people. This is how the categorical imperative could be expressed. This other part of Kant's world view places itself in human life in such a way that it sets the basic tone for human beings. But how does Kant understand it? In such a way that, by its very nature, it speaks from a world quite different from that encompassed by the worldview of knowledge and cognition. And it speaks from such a different world that Kant bases everything he tries to incorporate into this part of his worldview—his teachings about a divine being, about human freedom, about the immortality of the soul—on this part from which the categorical imperative speaks. And Kant expressly believes that one must listen to a world quite different from that of ordinary human knowledge if one wants to hear what obliges human beings. The categorical imperative, this unconditionally binding commandment, is, as it were, the gateway to a world transcending the sensory world.

Thus, one can see that it is well understood that the essence of man is not limited to his formative powers, corresponding to the formative powers of the other creatures with which he together constitutes the physical cosmos. Something remarkable is happening in our time. One might say that our era of more materialistic, mechanistic, naturalistic thinking, if it consistently follows its innermost impulses, cannot really speak of the kind of world that even Kant spoke of in the sense just indicated. Certainly, very few people in our present day are consistent in their worldview. They do not extend all the basic feelings that follow from the premises of their worldview to their entire worldview. Those who today espouse a naturalistic-materialistic worldview—and who today prefer to call themselves monists—would have to completely reject even the possibility of looking up into a world into which Kant looks as if through a gateway via his categorical imperative. And that is what they do. And not only those who are more or less grounded in the natural sciences, which is understandable, but also many who call themselves “psychologists” do so. Numerous psychological thinkers of the recent past are no longer able to cope when they ask: Where do the moral foundations of human life actually come from? Where does that which speaks into human life as moral impulses come from, and what distinguishes humans from all other natural beings? People then come to say: morality and ethics must be based on the fact that the individual does not merely follow those impulses that are directly directed at his own being, at his own existence, but that he follows those impulses that are directed at the whole. And “social ethics” has become a term that is very popular in our present day. Because the powers that we believe to be at the disposal of our cognitive faculties do not allow us to look up to a higher world, we seek, in certain borderline areas, but, as we shall see, without any real basis, to find support in what can still be considered “real”: the whole of humanity or some group of humanity. And we call that which is in the interest of this totality moral, in contrast to that which the individual does only for himself.

One can find extremely speculative ideas in the present day that seek to uphold ethics and morality from the perspective of mere social ethics. But anyone who looks more deeply into these matters — regardless of whether they are searching for the moral impulses for individual human life or for what the individual has to do as a member of the whole — they must ask about the real content of what is to be done, or, better said, about where such content can come from, about the “place,” figuratively speaking, from which moral impulses can emanate. In this sense, Schopenhauer really said something brilliant, which I have already quoted here several times: “Preaching morality is easy, justifying morality is difficult.” By this he means that it is difficult to find the forces and impulses in the human soul that truly make human beings moral beings, whereas it is easy to glean certain principles from the historical course of humanity or from religious or other systems, with which one can then preach morality. For Schopenhauer, it is not important whether one can articulate this or that moral principle, but rather what lies at the root of moral impulses as forces, analogous to the forces of external nature that underlie natural phenomena.

Now, however, in his one-sided way, Schopenhauer seeks these impulses of human nature in pity and compassion. It has been rightly said: Why should someone who feels morally connected to a matter that concerns only himself and no one else seek to avoid perjury, which is caused only by compassion? Or what should morally prevent someone from, say, mutilating himself out of a certain compassion? In short, and many such things could be cited: with the impulse that Schopenhauer finds, one encounters something tremendously comprehensive, one encounters something that must underlie the vast majority of moral actions, but as such it cannot be exhaustive.

It is instructive in all circumstances that the theories, views, and opinions about the origin of morality are all the more futile the more any worldview inclines toward what can be gained with the external senses and the intellect, which is directed toward this external sensory world. It would, of course, take too much time to show this in detail, but it could be shown that such a worldview, even if it is able to establish, for example, the worldview of some image of nature, is in fact incapable of indicating the origin of morality. Basically, moral and ethical life remains up in the air in any such worldview that focuses only on the external sensory world and on the intellect, which combines the facts of the sensory world or forms them into laws.

What has just been said, by way of introduction, should lead us to consider what, after the previous lectures, must seem quite natural: If one assumes, as is the intention of all the lectures I have given here, that our sensory world and the world of the intellect are based on a world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts, then it is only natural, since one cannot find the impulses of the ethical and the moral within the sphere of the sensory world, to seek these impulses in the spiritual world.

world. For perhaps the assumptions, views, and opinions of those who believe that something in human nature speaks to us in the moral realm, something that comes directly from a supersensible world, are correct after all. So let us approach the consideration of moral life with the assumptions that have been made here in these lectures. For those listeners who have heard only a few of these lectures, I will briefly summarize how the spiritual researcher ascends into the spiritual world, where we now seek the origin of the moral foundation of human life.

It has often been said here that if human beings want to go beyond the realm of sensory experience and beyond the realm that ordinary science can discover, it is important not to remain with the powers of cognition that human beings possess when they are placed in the world. All science, all observation is correct when it speaks in the sense often discussed here of the limits of knowledge and proceeds from the assumption that human beings cannot develop any powers of cognition other than those that are already within them, which are within them because they are placed in the world without their own doing and find themselves in it with their qualities. But in spiritual research, it is important that everything that is already within human beings is further developed, that the assumption is practically recognized: there are dormant powers within human beings that can be awakened. And here, the methods that can develop these dormant powers have often been discussed. There has been talk of that “spiritual chemistry” which proceeds with exactly the same logic and way of thinking as natural science, but which extends to the spiritual realm and is therefore compelled to develop natural methods and natural modes of thinking in a completely different way than natural science itself. In this sense, we have often discussed where spiritual science in the true sense must be a continuation of natural science in our time. I would like to point out once again, for clarification, what should only be mentioned in passing.

I once said that when you have water in front of you, you cannot tell by looking at it that it contains hydrogen, which chemists extract through external chemistry. Water extinguishes fire and is itself non-flammable; hydrogen, a gas, is flammable and can also be liquefied. Just as one cannot tell from looking at water what the nature of hydrogen is, which is combined with oxygen to form water, so one cannot tell from looking at the outer human being what is bound to the outer physical body as spiritual and soul-related; and just as little as one need fear being called a backward dualist when one recognizes that water, a monon, consists of hydrogen and oxygen, one need not fear not being a true “monist” when one says that in what we encounter in human beings there is a spiritual-soul element, like hydrogen in water, and that this spiritual-soul element is as distinct from what can be observed in everyday human beings as hydrogen is distinct from water. And spiritual chemistry does not consist of tumultuous activities, of something that can be performed externally, like external chemistry, but in the following, which will only be described very briefly. More details can be found in my “Outline of Esoteric Science” or in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds.”

Human beings are the only tools through which the spiritual world can be penetrated. But through special exercises that he must perform with his soul, he must bring himself to the point where he can connect a meaning with the words: I experience myself in my spiritual-soul outside of the physical-bodily — as hydrogen would have to say if it could experience itself: I experience myself outside of oxygen. In order for this spiritual-soul aspect to practically separate itself from the physical-bodily aspect, and for the human being to come to associate a meaning with the words: I experience myself in the spiritual-soul aspect, but my physical-bodily aspect is outside of me, just as the table is outside of me, persistent soul exercises are necessary, which may be shorter or longer in duration and essentially consist of an increase in attention, which is already important in ordinary life — but not attention to a soul content brought about by external factors, but rather to a soul content arbitrarily placed at the center of soul life. When the human being then reaches the point where to strain all his soul forces and then concentrate them on a manageable soul content, of which he knows exactly what soul content he himself has put into it, then gradually, through this stronger concentration of the soul forces, everything that gives man the ability to lift his spiritual-soul out of the physical-bodily is compressed. However, in addition to practicing so-called concentration, the practice of meditation must also be added. This is something that human beings already know in ordinary life, but which must be increased to an unlimited degree in spiritual science: devotion, devotion to the general world process. To be as devoted to the general world being as the individual human being is in sleep through the rest of his limbs, but consciously and not unconsciously, that is the second requirement in spiritual science. The reason why many people do not experience the right success with these exercises is that they tire in the systematic and persistent performance of them. By giving the soul forces a different direction through such exercises than they have in everyday life and tensing them in a different way than they are tensed in everyday existence, one really reaches the remarkable moment that is possible to reach, where one knows: Now you are experiencing spiritually and soulfully; but whereas before you used your brain and your senses, you now know that you have stepped out of your body and are outside it, just as external objects were otherwise outside you.

The recognition that such a thing is possible is still in its infancy in today's culture. It will prevail, just as truths — the truths of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo — have always prevailed. They were confronted by exactly the same, only slightly more nuanced, backward powers of cognition that confront the recognition of the spiritual worlds today. If the opponents at that time were people who stood on old religious tradition, today it is so-called “free thinkers” who oppose the recognition of spiritual scientific insights. But the step toward this recognition will be taken, will have to be taken in the same sense as the step toward external natural science was taken in the time of Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno. I have never been in the habit of speaking to you in abstractions and speculations, but have always tried to cite the concrete spiritual facts that human beings arrive at when they reach the stages of spiritual knowledge indicated. In fact, it can be experienced that man lifts himself out of the physical-bodily in his spiritual-soul and experiences himself in such a way that he has a clear consciousness which, through the experience itself, is distinguished from every illusion and hallucination: You experience yourself outside your head, and when you submerge again, it is as if you begin to use your brain as an external instrument again. This experience, when it first occurs in its initial stages, is shocking. But it can be achieved, and it is described in the book: “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds.” And then you enter a world of concrete spiritual experiences, where you find yourself within spiritual realities, just as you stand with your senses and your mind in a world of concrete sensory beings and sensory realities.

One approaches this world in three stages. The first stage one has to work through is what I have taken the liberty of calling the stage of the imaginative world. This imaginative world is not an imaginary world, but one in which one experiences the facts of the spiritual world in a sum of images which, just as the senses express the facts of space, express the processes of the spiritual world as images. One must work one's way through this imaginative world, and above all one must work one's way through it in such a way that one gradually becomes familiar with all the sources of error, which are very numerous, so that one gradually learns to distinguish between what deceives and misleads one and what corresponds to the real spiritual existence of beings or processes. One then ascends to a second stage of knowledge, which I take the liberty of calling inspiration. Inspiration differs from imagination in spiritual perception only in that the latter presents only the outer surface of spiritual processes and beings in images, while the former requires one to develop what radically distinguishes spiritual perception from outer perception: that one immerses oneself in spiritual perception. In fact, one does not stand opposite spiritual existence in the same way as one does in sensory existence: that it is there — and I am here; but in spiritual cognition, something actually takes place like an expansion beyond what is perceived, an immersion into what is perceived. It sounds strange, but it is literally true: one expands spatially with one's own being into all the things one perceives in the spiritual world. Whereas one otherwise stands at a point in space, enclosed in one's skin, with everything else outside, in the spiritual world everything that one is accustomed to calling the outer world becomes the inner world. You live and weave in it and merge with it as far as you are able to penetrate. And then there is a higher level of cognition, which need not be discussed here today; that is intuition, understood in the right sense, not what is often called that in the ordinary sense. Through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, you work your way into the spiritual world.

The question we should now consider is this: when one steps out of the body and out of the ordinary experiences of existence, what difference does this make in relation to everything that is called knowledge, which comes from outside, which one is accustomed to receiving from outside — and in relation to what one addresses as one's moral impulses, as moral ideas and concepts? Are we then able to point to a source of moral life, if we can perhaps reveal this source in the world that can only be reached when we leave the ordinary sensory world and enter a spiritual world with our own spiritual knowledge?

Let us first consider the world that a spiritual world of images creates around us. I am simply stating the facts as they arise from spiritual observation. In relation to everything that is acquired through sensory perception, which is based on sensory perception, everything that is acquired in relation to what one is involved in in outer life, one finds that the moment one leaves this world, a kind of darkness spreads over this world itself, and a new world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts emerges, in which one is otherwise also present during sleep; but as a spiritual researcher, one submerges into this world of spiritual processes and beings in a conscious state. As you immerse yourself in it, you notice that what you see as colors and hear as sounds in the sensory world disappears; what you can take with you into the spiritual world is only a memory of it, something that you can at most imagine. When that disappears, one submerges in such a way that one's thinking, imagining, feeling, and sensing activities are, as it were, seized by other beings into whom one submerges: for that is the essential thing, that in the spiritual world one submerges into a world of beings. And then one arrives at what has often been discussed: as soon as one plunges into the spiritual world, one finds concrete facts and beings; and what one observes in the sensory world really looks as if one is actually living in the supersensible, invisible, spiritual world, but when we are enclosed in the body, the activity of the body causes this supersensible world to reflect itself back to us. In fact, it becomes a concrete fact that the entire outer world that one sees around oneself is a mirror image of the spiritual world, that spiritual world of which I have argued that it first causes the brain processes that produce the mirror apparatus through which the outer processes are perceived, and which itself cannot be perceived. Just as a person does not perceive themselves when they approach a mirror, but perceives the mirror image, so when they immerse themselves in the physical world, they see the mirror image of the spiritual world, in that the spiritual world is reflected in the mirror apparatus through the processes of the body. And now we realize that the physical world of perception is to the spiritual world as the mirror image is to the viewer. It is indeed the case that, just as the mirror image only has meaning for the viewer when he looks into the mirror and takes the image into his soul, so the mirror image of the spiritual world, the entire physical world of perception that we have around us, has meaning as an “image” — apart from the physical process behind it. One becomes aware of this when one enters the spiritual world.

This is not intended to be a teleological view of nature. I do not mean that the world is arranged by an infinite intellect in such a way that human beings can find the opportunity to develop their selves, but I simply want to point out the fact that is given as a fact: that human beings can now carry on what they take into their selves when they have seen it in the outside world, once they have received it in their souls. — For what we call judgments of knowledge, it is a given that this entire world of knowledge is constructed through a process of reflection, and what basically disappears as a process of reflection when one submerges into the spiritual world, where one immediately submerges into a world of spiritual processes and spiritual beings, of which one knows: it belongs to one, and from it is taken what is only a reflection in the physical world.

The essential thing is that at the moment when one takes leave, as it were, of the sensory world and ascends into a spiritual world, one learns to recognize: To what you yourself are, what would not exist without you, and to what you yourself belong, only the reflection has been added, which has come about solely because you are a human organism; and this reflection has a meaning for your self, for your I, for what you carry as spiritual-soul through the turning point of time. Therefore, as soon as one finds oneself in the spiritual world, one is in a world that exists without one, of which one learns to recognize: it must be reflected so that we can perceive it. But the essence itself does not come to the reflection.

Now let us look at the moment when we enter the imaginative world. What happens to moral ideas when one ascends into the spiritual world?

What one perceives as moral impulses presents itself at the moment one enters the imaginative world in such a way that one cannot describe it other than by saying: You have created something, you have placed something in the spiritual world! What one recognizes has not been placed into a world; it has only been placed within oneself and carried forward through the turning of the ages. What corresponds to a moral impulse, a moral action, or even just a moral will, is creative; so that when we look at it in the spiritual world, we must say: through what we experience within ourselves with the concept of ethics, we create beings in the spiritual world. We are the originators first of processes, and further even of beings in the spiritual world.

Those of you who have heard these lectures frequently know that spiritual science speaks of repeated earthly lives. This earthly life we are now experiencing is built on a series of previous earthly lives, and each earthly life is always followed by a life in the spiritual world. From our present earthly life, we look ahead to the earthly lives that are to come. What we represent in ourselves through our moral experiences is literally objectified, initially as spiritual processes. How I think and act morally is perceived in the spiritual world as processes. These are processes that now emanate from the mere self of the human being. While the experiences of knowledge are carried forward only with the mere self and transferred with the self into subsequent earthly lives, what belongs to the moral or immoral life is placed into the world as processes and continues to have an effect as such, so that we have to deal with them again in the next earthly life through karma. And those who ascend into the spiritual worlds notice how moral impulses establish a certain relationship to what they produce as the self.

Let us take, for example, one of the most important impulses — it would take us too far afield if I were to explain why I call it one of the most important moral impulses — the impulse which the eminent psychologist Franz Brentano called the only impulse of the moral world order, the impulse of love. Who would deny that countless things in moral life proceed from the various stages of love — from the lowest stages of love to the highest stages, to Spinozistic love, to amor Dei intellectualis? Everything that happens under the impulse of love, everything that we consider to belong to the realm of morality, how do we find it in the imaginative world? We find that everything that arises under this impulse is familiar to us, so that we can say: we can live with what arises under the impulse of love in the spiritual world. One feels at home in the spiritual world with something that springs from the capacity for love. This is the essential thing that appears to one as soon as one enters the imaginative world.

But let us take what springs from hatred, what presents itself as an action or merely as an intention inspired by hatred. Here we see the very striking fact that everything that flows from the realm of hatred appears in the imaginative world in such a way that it instills fear, that it repels. Yes, it is one of the tragic aspects of the spiritual researcher's experience that he must see how he places himself in the spiritual world with the forces of sympathy and antipathy. Truly, whatever the circumstances may be, as soon as one enters the spiritual world, one may find oneself feeling sympathetic or antipathetic. In the physical world, people do not feel antipathetic toward one another; they may feel sympathetic, but not antipathetic. But in the spiritual world, just as here we are subject to the laws of nature, there we are subject to the spiritual laws. Everything that has arisen from the capacity for love, from the capacity for sacrifice, everything that one accomplishes out of a moral impulse or feels as a moral attitude, all this gives rise to processes in the spiritual world that one perceives in imaginative cognition, so that one may feel sympathy for oneself because of one's loving thoughts, actions, or feelings. Everything that is done out of hatred or similar impulses, out of malice or vanity, for example, appears in the imaginative world in such a way that one knows: you are the creator of these processes, which are simply the objectification of your hateful impulses or your malicious impulses; you appear within them in such a way that the events force you to be antipathetic to yourself. You cannot help but be antipathetic to yourself.

In certain cases, it is necessary for a spiritual researcher to learn to endure such situations through thorough self-knowledge and to learn to endure them patiently as they appear in further karma. This does not necessarily mean that a spiritual researcher should not have such antipathy, but rather that he should not have the will to present himself as a saint or a higher human being. Rather, what should be striven for is that he will try to refine his moral life, as it relates to living together with other people, to such an extent that the tragedy of feeling antipathy occurs to a lesser degree. For it is a state of terrible tension that makes one want to flee, and this desire to flee only becomes apparent when one ascends into the spiritual world. There one sees where the impulses come from that enable us to do what is lovable and to learn to avoid what we hate. For what one does in the ordinary world out of such impulses acts as a force in the spiritual world. Yes, one can say: when a person sinks into sleep, the forces that have just been characterized here as familiarity with the spiritual world or as fear of it, as sympathetic connection with what emerges from one's own actions, or as antipathy and the desire to escape, continue to work. This has a strong effect on sleep and determines the health of sleep, at least in part. What emerges as a result of daily life, and what, when it acts in concert, prevents people from falling asleep, is at the same time what the spiritual researcher must observe.

Now we ask ourselves: Where do those moral impulses that speak in the human soul come from?

In ordinary life, we do not know where they come from. But they are there and speak in such a way that those who use only their intellect, who combine the facts of the sensory world and form them into laws, cannot find them. So where does that which speaks to human beings as if from another world come from?

Well, it is only there as knowledge when it is seen in the imaginative world. But it acts as dark forces whose origin remains obscure to knowledge, but which speak into the soul as impulses. The effects of what the spiritual researcher sees are experienced in the sensory world as moral impulses; the causes lie in the spiritual world. Therefore, human beings appear as beings who must always say to themselves: Even if your power of love were perfectly developed, you belong to a spiritual world and find the other part of your being there, where you acquire what is expressed here as moral life — what is expressed, for example, in what we call conscience, which is a very great mystery if one wants to be consistent.

We have now found where the forces that manifest themselves as conscience and the like have their roots. Let us suppose we are standing opposite a person, and the particular configuration of our imaginative life might cause us to hate him. What might cause us to hate him, and what we would fear as processes in the spiritual world, this voice speaks into our soul as: Thou shalt not hate! What works in our capacity for love, and through which we may be sympathetic in the spiritual world, speaks into our earthly life as: Thou shalt love! And so it is with the other manifestations of moral life, which ultimately crystallize spiritually as conscience.

And this conscience itself, how does it present itself as a fact in the spiritual world?

It is not yet found as a fact in the imaginative world. To find it as a fact, one must immerse oneself in the inspirational world—immerse oneself in such a way that one feels poured out over the entire field of perception in the spiritual realm and experiences these inner perceptions as one's field of perception as if within oneself. Now the origin of conscience speaks down from there. It only makes use of, expresses itself, as it were, in what can be experienced in the imaginative world, but its center lies in the inspirational world. And if one were to rise up into it and try, as an experiment, to ask oneself: What happens when you abstract yourself from all that the voice of your conscience tells you? Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you could do something out of love just as you do something out of hatred, and suppose your conscience did not speak — then you would notice that something happens, which I will first try to clarify by means of a comparison. I would say that you experience something like a drop of water that has been placed somewhere where it is so hot that it would evaporate immediately. Something like this happens when, as an experiment, you switch off your conscience in the imaginative world. You experience it: your consciousness wants to extinguish itself, as it were, it loses its center of gravity; you cease to be oriented in the spiritual world. It is one of the most terrible experiences one can have: to be in the spiritual world and feel one's consciousness fading away, after first having trained oneself to bring consciousness up there. It is a terrible state when people who are in fact unscrupulous have experiences up there when they ascend into the spiritual world. For let us suppose that a person who is not otherwise very conscientious enters the spiritual world. The exercises found in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” can be performed by anyone who carries them out with the necessary energy, so that they then perceive in the spiritual world. One should not ascend until it is beneficial. That is why exercises are recommended in which one does not lose consciousness; the book mentioned above lists exercises that make a person moral, so that consciousness is not switched off in the spiritual world. But let us assume that an unscrupulous person ascends into the spiritual world. Then what would happen is that he would immediately fall prey to the dissolution, the evaporation of his consciousness. Such unscrupulous spiritual researchers do exist. Those who ascend to the spiritual world with a certain amount of unscrupulousness immediately feel the need, since we enter a sphere of beings there, to surrender themselves to other spiritual beings. People who unscrupulously ascend to where conscience gives them a firm foothold in reality, such people, who feel their consciousness “evaporate” there, as it were, surrender themselves to another being, allow themselves to be possessed by another being in order to have a foothold. This is an experience that can really be had. This is why, when such a person returns to daily consciousness, they no longer proclaim what they have experienced in the spiritual world, but rather what a being that has possessed them speaks through them. The integrity of our being is maintained by truly carrying the voice that is present here as conscience into the inspiring world as a force within us. We then feel ourselves within ourselves, but in such a way that what we produce, what is already evident in the imaginative world, is so present that we do not lose our center of gravity and that it is something that holds and carries us. And this, which can carry and hold the human being in his true spiritual being in the spiritual world, speaks down through two worlds, through the imaginative world, down into the sensory world, and that is the voice of conscience.

Thus, conscience, whose origin many thinkers cannot actually discover, and which they speak of as if it were formed solely by the social order of human coexistence, so conscience is something that is carried down from the spiritual world, something that is present in its effect in the sensually experiencing human being and is found in its origin when one ascends into the spiritual world. If, in essence, the secrets of the entire world can only be found by truly developing those powers of cognition that have often been spoken of here, then it must be said in particular of the world of morality that it sends its impulses down from the spiritual realms, and that when human beings become aware of moral impulses, they experience the effect of what has its origin in the spiritual world. And a true understanding of the moral world order shows us, on the one hand, that spiritual worlds speak through the soul, but on the other hand also that with moral impulses we create realities that continue to have an effect, that we encounter again, realities that we send out into the spiritual world and that are causes in this world, which underlies the sensory world.

I could only hint at what the spiritual researcher has to traverse when he ascends from the sensory world to the spiritual worlds, leaving a wide field of intermediate stages completely unmentioned. But I would like to add briefly: What we see coming into being through our moral or immoral actions, what is expressed in its effects in our moral impulses, what we perceive in the imaginative world as constructive forces with which we can live in harmony, or as destructive forces with which we make ourselves antipathetic, appears to us as the first causes of world existence in general. For we look out into the vast world of the stars, where security, order, and harmony reign, and we look back to primeval times, when beings acted morally in a similar way to how we can today, when beings sent out their moral impulses, which seem so insignificant that they appear like nothing compared to the whole of world existence. But these moral impulses continue to grow over time! These moral impulses, which emanated from those beings in primeval times, continued to grow and grow — and in their growth they themselves became forces of nature. One learns to recognize — intermediate stages must now be skipped — when one considers what one finds in the laws of heaven, which filled Kepler, the founder of modern natural science, with such piety: that ancient and mature original moral impulses are at work in the cosmos. Those who in ancient times became spiritual leaders in the sense of those epochs — we know from earlier lectures that one can no longer ascend to the spiritual worlds in the same way as one used to in the mysteries; today it has to be done in a different way — they had to pass through certain stages, degrees. Among these degrees, one of the highest was that which gave the soul the opportunity to look into the higher realms of spiritual existence. It was a degree that was called the degree of the sun hero or the sun man. Why the sun man? It was called that because a soul that sees the connections in the world in the way just described must indeed have brought its inner life to such a point that, when it rises to the highest realms of knowledge, it is not subject to the inner arbitrariness to which ordinary soul life is subject, but to impulses that act with an innerly recognized and experienced necessity, so that one said to oneself: If you deviate from them, you will cause such disorder as the sun would cause in the universe if it deviated from its orbit even for a moment. Because one had to have attained such firmness of inner life at such a level of knowledge, in the ancient mysteries such knowers were called sun people. This reflected the connection that exists between what we send out into the world and what grows out of it — just as what we experience as the “laws of the cosmos” has grown out of the moral impulses of beings from distant, distant times.

When we take this into account, we begin to experience a saying of Kant's in a different way. When the moral duty, the moral consciousness itself, came before his mind's eye, he uttered the significant words: “Two things fill me with awe: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me!” Such connections, which have been experienced, which one can see, where one sees the moral law, as it were, at work in time, filled him when he spoke of “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” Those who recognize the primordial impulses of moral life through spiritual science also recognize how this moral life is connected to the true root source of human existence. Therefore, spiritual science can only lead, in the highest sense, to giving this moral life a firm foundation, so that one can say: Yes, all knowledge is there so that we may find ourselves within ourselves and carry what we find through the world and through time; but everything we experience in ourselves in terms of moral impulses makes us ourselves creators, co-creators of the world. We can understand how we must despise ourselves as immoral human beings who bring ruin and destruction into the world when we recognize: Through the moral world order, we are connected to the world in a much more real sense than through the other insights that we now take into our minds. And then one feels what such strong, profound spirits as Johann Gottlieb Fichte felt, whose hundredth anniversary of death we recently celebrated, who says: What the sensory world is has no independent, self-founded existence; it is only the sensualized material for duty, for the moral world order. What spiritual science has to bring to light today was anticipated in relation to the moral worldview by such a strong and profound spirit as Fichte, who basically looked at the world in such a way that he said to himself: The moral world order is the most real thing of all, and everything else is only there to provide us with material in which we can express what moral impulses are. — Of course, spiritual science will not be able to stand on the ground of Fichte's worldview, for it represents a one-sidedness. It comes from a time when spiritual science did not yet exist. But we can look with admiration at how a person like Fichte experienced the moral world order within himself. For this is precisely what spiritual science shows us: all other insights present themselves to us as a world tableau; but what we must be if we want to develop our whole being is moral. This is what not only anchors us within ourselves, but also places us with genuine balance within the entire world order.

When one sees how spiritual science in particular is able to find the living support of the moral world order, then one really understands what has already been said many times in these lectures. However, modern spiritual science today stands in the same position as Giordano Bruno once stood before his contemporaries when he wanted to expand the world view beyond the blue vault of heaven into infinite space. He had to show the people of his time: What you perceive as the blue vault of heaven is only the limits of your narrow view. Such a spiritual phantasmagoria is what human beings have placed in their existence through birth or conception and death. But just as the blue vault of heaven is only the narrow limit of one's own perception in space, so birth and death are only the limits in time for human perception. And just as what human beings themselves have placed as a maya, as the boundary of space, has been recognized as such, so the boundaries beyond birth and death open up for the human soul, and the infinite worlds that lie beyond birth and death are recognized. Today, we stand in relation to the spiritual-scientific information of our time as modern science stood in relation to the scientific views at the dawn of the modern era. But in a certain sense, we still stand alone. One stands in such a way that, if one knows it, one has an invincible faith in the truth that finds its way through the narrowest cracks and crevices, even if opposing forces may fight against it — that one still feels isolated with spiritual science: One feels how the present age must press forward toward spiritual science, how souls must demand it — and one feels in harmony with what the most significant minds of all times have sensed and meant, what they have often expressed in a simpler way than one must express it today, but what they have nevertheless expressed correctly from the soul that feels the truth. So, when pointing out the true sources of moral life and a moral world order from the divine-spiritual worlds through spiritual science, one feels in harmony with many other minds — and also with Goethe, from whom a saying is to be quoted here that sums up what has been said to you in the course of this lecture. Goethe said something significant about the source of moral life, something simple, one might say, for those who can truly feel moral life: A god speaks very softly in our hearts, very softly, but also clearly; he leads us to recognize what we should embrace and what we should flee from. When Goethe says: very quietly, but also clearly, a God speaks in our hearts, he is pointing — and he shows this with all great personalities and especially with sensitive personalities who were able to sense the truth in this area — as if sensing what can be found through spiritual science as the impulses of moral life in the spiritual world. We look up into the spiritual world and say to ourselves: Moral life in particular testifies to the fact that human beings have their origin in the spiritual worlds; for it is from there that God speaks, quietly yet clearly announcing what is to be embraced and what is to be avoided; he veils what the spiritual researcher sees as the reasons for embracing and avoiding, but what human beings express in moral impulses has its true origins in the spiritual world, which descends from there into our minds, which speaks into the human soul as a real God, as the voice of God from the spiritual world, announcing the essence of human beings, through which they reach beyond what the creatures of their fellow world in the cosmos are.