The Eternal in the Human Soul

GA 67 — 7 February 1918, Berlin

2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

To speak in terms of spiritual science about the eternal in the human soul, or, as one might also say, about the problem of immortality and the related mystery of the freedom of the human soul, is indeed the task of the entire series of lectures that I would like to give here this winter. These are the two questions which, admittedly, the scientific worldview cannot even approach, and on which the purely philosophical view of the world will always founder, as I believe is evident from my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” and from an unbiased consideration of the historical development of philosophy in general.

Today I would like to examine one sub-question as comprehensively as possible: the question of human beings as soul beings and spirit beings. Just by uttering these words, one actually touches on the question of the human soul in a way that is quite foreign to the current view of the world. The current view of the world, if it even allows itself to look at anything other than what biology, physiology, and experimental psychology have to offer, speaks of a duality of man in terms of body and soul. Today we will show that this division of the human being into body and soul alone must lead to the most difficult misunderstandings, which actually distract a truly scientific view from the highest human mysteries. Today, it is believed that the so-called mysteries of the soul already include the mystery of the spirit, and by indulging in this misunderstanding, one will encounter the approval of many natural scientists and also many contemplators of the soul. I would like to begin by saying that the spiritual science referred to in these lectures stands in a peculiar relationship to the scientific and philosophical world views. Those of you who have been attending these lectures for years now know how I have emphasized again and again that the spiritual science I represent is not in the least at odds with modern scientific research, but on the contrary, is fully grounded in this research, and precisely because it stands more firmly on scientific ground than the scientific worldview itself, it feels compelled to rise from the mere observation of nature and its life to the observation of real spiritual life. The scientific view of the world alone, which, we may already say, has become second nature to a large part of our contemporaries, we may well say, has become second nature to a large part of our contemporaries, which — quite rightly, in fact — carries the thoughts, ideas, even the habits of feeling and the cognitive drives of the present, this view of the world, even in its most refined representatives, behaves in such a way that spiritual science finds it extremely difficult to meet with any understanding among its contemporaries. I would like to say a few introductory words about this, because it will be necessary for our further consideration.

Today, one can find that in certain fields, the scientific worldview has, if the word is taken in its limited sense, reached a kind of ideal-beautiful limitation of its domain. Today, we have works in the field of natural science that can be considered exemplary precisely because of the way they limit their task to the implementation of individual problems. After what might be called the one-sided Darwinian-Haeckelian romanticism of the last third of the nineteenth century, biology, for example, has brought us to the point where we now have such an exemplary work that satisfies the highest demands as that of the Berlin researcher Oscar Hertwig on “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance.” We also have methodologically outstanding achievements in areas that touch on the boundaries of what is to be considered here, such as Theodor Ziehen's “Physiological Psychology.” It can be said that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represented here takes the side of such methodical research wherever the consideration of the actual scientific field is important. I myself, with everything I wish to contribute to spiritual science, am always opposed to worldviews that are sometimes well-intentioned but nevertheless amateurish, arising from inadequate efforts at knowledge. It is precisely this methodical scientific worldview that makes it difficult for spiritual science to find understanding among our contemporaries. Even in such an exemplary book as Oscar Hertwig's Das Werden der Organismen (The Development of Organisms), published in 1916, we find, among other things, the scientific conviction that natural science can only deal with the finite and must leave the infinite out of consideration. However, natural science can explore the finite in all its aspects. Hertwig rightly repeats the view of Nägelis, the great botanist, from his scientific point of view with these words, and Theodor Ziehen also says that he wants to consider everything in human soul life that has parallel phenomena in human physical life, so that physiology can provide information about these parallel phenomena. Everything else must be left to epistemology, metaphysics, or the like. But then we also find in Ziehens' “Physiological Psychology,” which is exemplary from my point of view, that what is put forward by current physiological-psychological research is, in its details, which actually say nothing special about the great mysteries of the soul and spirit, more important than everything that centuries have attempted to achieve with regard to questions about the supernatural in the life of the soul and the like. If we add to this the authoritative statement made decades ago by the great physiologist Da Bois-Reymond that real science should only concern itself with the sensory world because, as he said, where the supersensible begins, science ends, we find that — and we could multiply what has been said a hundred or a thousand times over — whereby the scientific view of the world would like to pull the rug out from under the feet of all spiritual science. We find it in the fact that, while on the one hand it is always said quite benevolently: All questions that go beyond sensory observation must be left to metaphysics or something similar, on the other hand, however, it is asserted — and in such a way that this view is instilled in the widest circles of our contemporaries — that real science can only be achieved in the realm of sensory observation.

Thus we see that everything spiritual and intellectual is excluded from this science, and that only what remains is claimed to be scientific in character. In response to such efforts, I would like to emphasize that spiritual science, even in the question of the so-called old life force, stands firmly on the ground of researchers such as Du Bois-Reymond, Hertwig, and others. For this life force, which haunted science until the middle, even until the end of the second third of the nineteenth century, is a product of speculation. Because it was believed that the phenomena of living organisms could not be explained by physical and chemical laws and forces, people speculated about an undefined life force, to which they then attributed everything that could not be explained from a physical and chemical point of view. In his excellent preface to his “Investigations on Animal Electricity” in the mid-nineteenth century, Du Bois-Reymond said, I believe with some justification, that advances in physiology actually made it necessary for someone to come along who—as Gottsched once banished Hanswurst from the stage—would banish this life force from physiology. Even spiritual science can agree with such a harsh condemnation of the life force as it was understood in the old scientific sense. For it can see through everything that is rightly put forward from a physiological-biological point of view against such a hypothetical, speculative postulation of a life force, and it can regard what today appears as so-called neovitalism only as a reaction caused by the isolated realization that that which lives cannot simply be recognized by us in the same way as the purely physical and chemical. But this reaction more or less returns to the old speculation about an undefined life force.

The spiritual science represented here cannot go along with this reaction against purely mechanistic natural science either. Instead, it must — as I pointed out here two weeks ago — make use of something completely different. With the powers of knowledge and possibilities of knowledge that lead to the great, significant scientific results, it is impossible to go beyond the purely physical and chemical. Of course, living beings, up to and including human beings, have physical and chemical laws because they have physical bodies. These must naturally be considered in terms of physics and chemistry, and one must not speculate about any kind of life force. But the mere powers of cognition and possibilities of cognition, as they must rightly be applied in natural science, are not sufficient to truly penetrate and understand the living or the soul, and one has only the choice of either remaining purely in the realm of physical and chemical laws and then renouncing any understanding of life, of the soul and the spirit, or appealing to powers of cognition quite different from those by which the purely natural, namely the physical and chemical, can be considered.

But this in turn leads to an enormously widespread prejudice. The idea that the human soul, if it methodically sets out to do so, is capable of arriving at completely different possibilities and powers of cognition than those used in pure natural science is still rejected in the widest circles today. Therefore, we are faced with only two possibilities: either to leave the soul and spirit uncomprehended, or to cross this Rubicon in order to familiarize ourselves with what it actually means: the human soul can develop beyond the standpoint which, I would say, it already occupies of its own accord in relation to the world order. In this way, it can attain such powers of knowledge that tell it more than what pure natural science can tell it, even when it is as perfect as possible. Here we encounter a sharp prejudice. From the point of view of spiritual science, one must say: Natural science actually relates to spiritual science in the same way as someone who can only describe letters printed on a page relates to someone who can read. If I may express myself comparatively, I would like to say: What natural science can only describe, spiritual science seeks to read. What it has to say about the phenomena of the world, about their content and about the meaning of events, is like reading to the description of the mere letters that make up the words. So, to continue with the comparison, which must be superficial at first but will be elaborated on later, there is the possibility of truly penetrating the living soul and spirit by acquiring from the soul itself the ability to read nature. This ability relates to the mere observation of nature in the same way as the free ability to read, flowing from the soul, relates to the mere description of letters.

Now, when something like this is said, a large proportion of our contemporaries will naturally think that it is a reference to all kinds of fantastical, visionary activities of the human soul. But that is not the case at all. Spiritual science is, rather, something that must be worked out just as methodically and proceed in just as strict a manner as pure natural science. The reason why spiritual science finds it so difficult to gain acceptance today is that for centuries now — I will discuss this in one of my next lectures — all human worldviews have basically been based on more or less eliminating the spiritual from the soul, viewing the soul as the entirety of human inner life, and to think of it as more or less dependent on or independent of the body, but not to seek such a relationship between the soul and the spirit as is sought on the other hand between the soul and the body. Those who, through pure soul experiences alone, even if they are, as is often thought, mystically heightened soul experiences — experiences that are thus purely inwardly experienced with the soul that one has in everyday consciousness — wants to learn something about the actual essence of the human being as a spiritual being, that is like a person who, out of hunger and thirst, wants to learn about those processes that take place in the human body and which are the basis for what the soul experiences in hunger and thirst. Everyone can easily see that hunger and thirst are the inner experience of something that is happening in the body. The scientific view of the world says: when a person feels hunger and thirst, there is a chemical change in the blood or something similar, indicating that something has happened in the body that is expressed in the soul through the experience of hunger and thirst. However, if one wants to investigate what is happening in the body, one must look at the soul experiences. Of course, one cannot investigate in a living being who is not hungry how hunger is expressed physically, but one can never, by merely considering the inner experience of hunger or satiety, discover the physical processes associated with this inner experience of hunger or thirst or satiety. Nor can one, no matter how deeply one delves into mysticism, no matter how much one allows one's inner soul experiences to play out according to the pattern of some mystics, learn anything from this mere play about what underlies the soul as spirit. Just as natural science, through its methods, must go beyond the mere experience of hunger and thirst or satiety to something that is not observed in ordinary soul life — for in ordinary soul life, human beings know nothing of the chemical processes that take place in their bodies while they suffer from hunger and thirst — so too, in a true contemplation of the spirit, one must move beyond all that can be experienced in the soul through imagination, feeling, and willing, to something spiritual.

But how can this spiritual being be found? The sensory presents itself to the senses when man encounters nature; the spiritual does not do so in the same way. The spiritual only confronts the human being when he awakens the possibilities of knowledge and perception from within himself, which I have called “seeing” in my book “The Riddle of Man,” which is hidden in ordinary life, slumbering, as it were. Now, I do not want to talk in abstractions, but would like to show with a concrete example that just as it is possible for the natural scientist, through his method, to move from subjective hunger and thirst to bodily processes that are not conscious in ordinary experience, it is equally possible to move from mere soul phenomena to spiritual phenomena, which are related to the soul on the one hand in the same way as the physical is related to the soul on the other. Even with such concrete questions, one immediately encounters resistance, which is imposed by the common view of the life of the soul. This view, which is based on scientific methods, actually only wants to consider the passive life of the soul, and indeed must do so. The active life of the soul, which in its essence is active from within, cannot be considered scientifically and is often lost sight of altogether. When natural science considers spiritual experience today, it often only looks at the way in which ideas are grouped together, how one idea, perhaps evoked by an external perception, evokes another that is stored in my memory, or even many others. It looks at how ideas associate, how they connect with emotional nuances, with impulses of the will, or the like. On this basis, it does not adopt methods that could be compared, in terms of the spiritual, with the rigorous methods of the scientific view of the world. If you pick up Theodor Ziehen's Physiological Psychology, you will see how everything boils down to the fact that our entire soul life is actually built on such associations when it goes beyond mere sensory life. But this kind of observation does not lead to a truly unbiased view of soul life.

This results, for example, in the following: if one arrives at a true observation of the soul or self in the manner I will describe later, one can see how, in ordinary life as human beings, we are indeed dependent in our soul experience on the ideas that life gives us. When a person leaves their soul life to its own devices in the present moment, the ideas that have entered their soul through impressions from the outside world play out within it. In a certain sense, they are truly a kind of slave to their ideas. Theodor Ziehen says, in a limited sense, but quite rightly: “We cannot think as we want, but must think as the associations that are currently present determine,” because this or that impression has been made on us, which evokes another impression. Thus, according to Ziehen, we are at the mercy of impressions. This is absolutely correct in a limited sense. In ordinary life, we are not as free in our thinking as we think we are. But we are also not as dependent as Theodor Ziehen believes. Those who are able to observe their souls know that although we are strongly dependent on the impressions we receive, this only lasts for a certain period of time. This is something that today's official psychology does not give much thought to. An idea that is evoked by an impression does, however, tyrannize us. When I have seen a friend, this idea haunts me, it evokes other ideas about other friends, about shared experiences with these friends, and so on. We are dependent on these ideas, but only for a certain period of time. And this period of time can even be determined, I would say, experimentally within ourselves. This period lasts only two to three days. For two to three days, however, we are devoted to a received impression like slaves. After this time, however, the power with which such an impression affects our soul changes. We then come into the inner mental position of behaving toward an impression as the impression previously behaved toward us. We were previously its slave; after two to three days, we become its master. One can do this in the following way, for example. If one has a feeling for inner soul life — and we will see how this feeling is attained — one can ask oneself: What is the difference between surrendering to inner soul life, which takes place as if by itself over a certain period of time, and reading a book? When I read a book, I cannot allow myself to be carried from one idea to another. I would not make any progress in reading if I allowed myself to be carried away by ideas that an impression has evoked in me; rather, I must devote myself to the ideas that flow from the book. Then I come under the power of the author. It is the author who then controls the flow of my ideas. Similar to what happens when my ideas are dominated by the ideas that flow from the book, I become my true self when I have lived through an impression for two or three days in relation to that impression. I then do not surrender to the association that this impression wants to evoke, but I have the inner strength to combine this impression with others. A complete transformation of an impression takes place in the human soul when this impression has remained in the soul for two or three days.

Even without being a spiritual researcher, one can convince oneself of the truth of what has just been said through ordinary, more intimate observation of the soul life, albeit in a field that is only superficially considered today, and is particularly misrepresented by the fact that a certain branch of science, which is very much oriented toward the material, has taken hold of this field, namely, so-called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis. But I do not want to go into that. I would like to point out, however, that anyone who can truly observe the dream life knows that the involuntary emergence of dreams is always somehow connected with the impressions of the last few days, actually only the last two or three days. But don't misunderstand me! Of course, long-past events come up in dreams as reminiscences. But it is something else that evokes these long-past events. If you can observe the dream closely, you will always see that there must be some evoking idea from the last two or three days. This is what evokes long-past events. For two or three days, impressions from the outside world have the power to produce dreams. Everything else then structures itself around them. If no such idea from the last two or three days can generate the dream, then it cannot arise. Now, of course, one must be able to really observe what I have just indicated, because ordinary consciousness cannot observe it. It is precisely because it takes place in the unconscious that it is so unknown in the widest circles today. As a rule, people today do not acquire any knowledge of how they relate differently to an idea that has not been present in their soul for two or three days and to one that has been present for so long. All these things can only be observed accurately and correctly by a spiritual researcher. However, in order to observe them properly, the spiritual researcher needs a certain strengthening, an invigoration of the ordinary soul life. For ordinary soul life, imagination actually only extends to repeating and elaborating in a certain way what the senses perceive and grasp from the outside. This soul life can now be strengthened, even though ordinary science knows little about it, so that this pale, indefinite life of imagination in everyday life today can appear in the soul in a completely different way, so that it can appear as powerful as imagination, so that its power is equal to external, sensory perception. But this must happen if one really wants to do research in the spiritual realm. This research cannot be done with the ordinary powers of the soul of knowledge. Now, in my book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in my Secret Science, I have described in detail the method by which one can elevate imagination — to use a technical term that can easily be misunderstood — and by which one can turn it into imaginative cognition, into seeing perception.

Today, from the great wealth of what the soul must do to strengthen its life so that imagination can become spiritual vision, I would like to highlight just a few things. I would like to refer to what I have recently emphasized in my latest book, “Von Seelenrätseln” (The Riddle of the Soul), the sequel to my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man): that when human beings engage in their ordinary soul life in science, they come to certain so-called limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge can confront us precisely when we become acquainted with the worldview of profound minds. If I may mention something personal here, I must say that thirty to thirty-five years ago, what led me to the particular direction of spiritual science that I pursue here was, in particular, the experiences I had with the worldviews of people for whom knowledge is not an external profession, not something learned, but something that constitutes the innermost part of their soul life, their entire longing and feeling. For example, when one encounters the words of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, a thinker who is no longer sufficiently appreciated today—but I could also cite many others—words that he draws from deep mysteries of knowledge that came to him as he pondered the connection between the body and soul of human beings, words such as: The soul of man cannot be in the body, but neither can it be outside the body — then, in lively connection with an original, elementary thinker, one encounters such limits as the human soul must reach if it wants to engage in cognitive activity.

Ordinary thinking establishes limits of knowledge at such points of the soul's life. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the “seven world riddles” that cannot be solved; but one could cite hundreds and hundreds of such so-called limits of human soul life. If one does not easily resign oneself to such limits, but instead attempts to go through everything that the soul must go through, saying to oneself: You must raise questions here, the natural external world cannot give you any answers, nor can that which springs from your own soul give you any answers, — if one connects oneself so deeply with these questions in one's innermost soul life, if one has the patience to live with them not only logically but also inwardly, if one raises them again and again in one's soul in order to know not only what they say logically but also what they trigger inwardly in the soul, then something gradually sprouts from such questions in the soul. One experiences something in one's soul that I will try to clarify in the following way by means of a comparison: In many cases, the scientific worldview thinks that the lowest living beings initially have only an inner life activity, which they develop by interacting with the outside world, thereby transforming their still undifferentiated organism so that it not only interacts with the outside world in an indeterminate way, but that this interaction itself becomes differentiated into the sense of touch, and according to the scientific view, the other senses are said to have developed gradually from the sense of touch. What is experienced by the being in living matter can really be compared to what the soul experiences when it encounters such boundaries. If one really learns to know the soul experience in relation to such boundaries, one feels that this does not mean something that has to do with the development of external sensory organs. If one has the patience to live inwardly into such boundary mysteries, then something like a soulful touching develops from the encounter, and something emerges from it like a differentiation of the soul life. This is something that, of course, is not believed in the widest circles today. But people will believe in it more and more when they realize that only in this way can real knowledge about the phenomena of the world and, in particular, about the mystery of the human being be gained. Gradually, it will become apparent from within that human beings not only encounter boundary questions, but that they develop their soul life in the same way that mere living beings develop living substance, and thus those higher organs of vision arise through which the soul gradually learns to penetrate into the spirit. This is only one of those exercises — or whatever you want to call them — that the soul has to go through in order to transform the undifferentiated soul life so that it can truly penetrate the spiritual world.

I would have to quote much of what is written in the books mentioned if I wanted to explain how, in this way, imagination really becomes something quite different from what it is in ordinary life. In ordinary life, imagination is passive, based on sensory perceptions. By strengthening the soul life in the way that is done in principle through the exercises I have described, but which must be done through many, many exercises, imagination becomes something completely different. This makes the act of imagining so lively that, in a sense, a much more inner and concrete self than the ordinary human self asserts itself in the person, and the person learns to recognize how, with this heightened soul life, they can now truly observe the phenomena of the soul.

Now that I have developed the essence of true self-knowledge in this way, I must return to what I have asserted so far and say: What actually happens when the ideas of the state they have for two or three days transition to the other state they have later can only be truly understood with such an intensified soul life. For then one learns to recognize that, in fact, after two or three days, the human being becomes as free inwardly as he is otherwise free from his ordinary body in relation to the ideas that subjectively bubble up from within and tyrannically determine him. Human beings learn to recognize what they are inside, what directs their ideas in the same way that we direct our hands and legs when we grasp or walk, through our ordinary ego. Human beings learn to know the higher self, which otherwise remains unconscious, which moves within the world of ideas as the ordinary self moves in physical life, that is, after two or three days we emerge from what is subjective into the objective of soul life. We enter into that which is not dominated by external impressions, and which we then learn to recognize as that which carries the external impressions through the whole life between birth and death. We learn to recognize something second in the human being, towards which we then feel as we do towards our body in ordinary life. We learn to recognize what I called in one of the last issues of the magazine Das Reich the image-forming body of the human being, a supersensible body that is there just as the ordinary physical body is there. Only it remains unconscious to ordinary soul life. Just as the hand of the physical body is moved by the ordinary ego, so human beings learn to recognize how they act within that which now carries imagination, which lives in imagination, and that is the spirit. It is not imagination that is the spirit, but that which lives in imagination as the ordinary soul lives in the body. But since ordinary psychology basically considers the whole life of the soul only as it actually functions for two or three days, counting from the impressions, it does not come at all from the soul to the spirit; it excludes the spirit. In a certain sense, it is excluded from ordinary soul life.

This is demonstrated once again by self-observation, which we can now discuss, now that I have already indicated what its essence consists of. You are all aware that the so-called ego reigns at the center of your soul life. But psychologists today are less clear about this. It is interesting to consider what, for example, such an excellent psychologist as Theodor Ziehen says about the I in his book Physiological Psychology. This book is a transcript of lectures, so everything is said in a lecture style. He says to his listeners: When you think about what the I actually is, what do you come up with? If you really think about it, the first thing that will come to mind is your body, then everything you have in relation to the outside world; then you will think of all your family and property relationships, you will think of your name and title—Theodor Ziehen left out medals—your dominant ideas and your main inclinations, you will think of your past. However, says Theodor Ziehen, reflective consciousness distinguishes, apart from everything that comes to mind, the ego as that which reigns within, as opposed to that which is outside, as that which moves and acts imaginatively from within. But that is a fiction of epistemology or speculative psychology. Physiological psychology has nothing to do with this. — Again, this is a passage that is intended to undermine the very foundations of spiritual science. But can anyone really afford, in ordinary consciousness, to think of their ego only in terms of what Theodor Ziehen thinks? Will they not feel the inner activity of a central being in their soul life? Will they really think only of their family and property relationships, their title and name, and so on? No, that cannot be the case! Human beings are aware that something is at work within them. But nevertheless, they actually get nowhere when they try to characterize the ego. In a limited sense, external scientific psychology is right today when it does not have much to say about this ego. How does this ego actually behave in ordinary consciousness? This is revealed by the self-observation that I characterized in principle earlier.

When this ego gains strength, when it becomes something else through the exercises I have described, then one also notices what the ego actually is in relation to ordinary consciousness. Today, based on outward appearances, we distinguish between two states in human life: sleeping and waking, and we think that they alternate between day and night. People do not know that something completely different emerges when the soul is truly observed. For we do not only sleep at night, when our consciousness is completely clouded, but part of our being also sleeps during the day, sleeps continuously. The strengthening of the ego is actually, in a certain sense, an awakening, a bringing of oneself to wakefulness in relation to that part of the ego that sleeps continuously. We know nothing about the content of our sleep; we only know that it interrupts our ordinary life. When we look back on our life from birth to death, we actually only look back on our daytime experiences; our nighttime experiences are nothing. They are always something black when we draw in color or white what we experience during the day. When we look at our life in this way, what we are when we are asleep is actually as if it were not there. We see it as excluded from our field of observation. But this is also the case with the ego in ordinary soul life. Basically, it is not there for imaginative and other contemplation; the real ego eludes ordinary soul life because, at its present stage of development, the human being also sleeps during the day with regard to the ego. Basically, we only know our ego negatively in ordinary consciousness; we know it in the same way that the eye sees the dark spot it has inside. We know that there is nothing there. We know about the self in the same way as we know about a black spot on a colored surface. Even though no colors emanate from it, we still see a black spot. In this way, we see that nothingness is surrounded by our ordinary experiences, and thus we have the consciousness of the sleeping self. It is awakened by the soul forces being heightened, as I have described. In this way, what is actually the core of a person's being gradually comes to light, and one learns to recognize the connections of the soul life with the spirit, just as one first learns from natural science, when we are hungry and thirsty, that there is a body in which chemical changes in the blood take place, which are expressed in the soul life as hunger and thirst. Just as the body is connected to the life of the soul through certain processes of which the human being is initially unaware in ordinary life, so, on the other hand, one learns to recognize that the soul is connected to the spirit. While the body is recognized from the outside, the spirit is recognized by becoming aware of the sleeping ego.

As if compressed into a single point of the I, the human being is recognized as spirit by ordinary consciousness. If one strengthens the inner soul force, as I have described in detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “The Secret Science,” and “The Riddle of Man,” then one finds that this I really takes on content, just as one arrives at the content of the physical body for mere inner sensations through methodical scientific research. One arrives at a real exploration of the spirit, just as one learns about the chemical changes that take place in the blood or elsewhere in the body when a person is hungry or thirsty or feels satiated. In this way, one learns to recognize how an idea that lives within us and is initially a mere idea is now filled with pictorial content that is not as abstract as the idea that prevails in ordinary consciousness, content that the spiritual researcher brings into consciousness so that the idea becomes like a perception of this pictorial, imaginative content. Imaginative processes appear before the spiritual researcher's mind's eye, and they change. For example, when an idea becomes warmer, which is what happens in the subconscious in ordinary consciousness, the idea becomes something completely different. It then becomes something that is no longer merely an idea of knowledge, insight, or perception, but an idea that motivates the will. This is a very significant step forward for the spiritual researcher when he is able to ascend to such a realization, through which he understands how the concept of knowledge — under whose influence we do nothing, but only know something about the world — is transformed into a concept of will by the change in its imaginative content, which then passes over into what becomes or can become active within us. Here we see how the spiritual stands behind the soul and is in constant real change. Just as we can describe physical chemical and physical processes in the body, so we can describe spiritually how behind the life of imagination, feeling, and will there are changes that go from the imaginative to the inspired and the intuitive. And just as hunger and thirst subjectively arise from chemical changes in the body, so too does the spiritual subjectively arise, either as a perception or as a feeling, which then transforms into a volition. In this way, one arrives quite concretely at the possibility of a real description of what lives and weaves behind the soul as a spiritual being, just as the physical lives and weaves behind the soul on the other side. One then comes to the point where what can appear before the energized soul life becomes truly concrete in the human being, so that what I have previously called the “formative forces body” is felt by us in the same way as the physical body is usually felt. Then one also learns to recognize what lives outside in the world beyond the sensory as supersensible in a very concrete way.

It is in the nature of lectures such as I am giving here that I anticipate in an earlier lecture some things that will be explained in more detail in later lectures. This will also be the case with what I am about to say now. But I would like to draw your attention to it today. The plant, which is a living being, is not only composed of what physics and chemistry, or biology or physiology, which are in turn composed of them, can investigate, but it also contains something else entirely. If we have progressed so far within ourselves that we feel ourselves in a formative body, as we otherwise do with our ordinary ego in a physical body, then we can, just as we use our eyes and ears for sensory perceptions in the physical body, perceive through this formative body, which we have differentiated from the soul's sense of touch, then we can also perceive what is supersensible in the rest of the world, what permeates and interweaves nature as supersensible. Then we see in everything plant, animal, and also physically human outside ourselves the spiritual, which is then not visionary in a trivial sense, but stands before the empowered soul just as the content of sensory perceptions stands before the unempowered soul. Only we must be able to replace the concepts of space with concepts of time everywhere. How do we actually perceive what is supersensible in plants? By perceiving our own supersensible nature in the formative body as it moves and weaves, we now also perceive the supersensible in the plant world, similar to how one tone in a musical context would perceive another. The perception of the supersensible in the plant world is based entirely on the fact that our own formative body, in its life and weaving, proceeds at a much slower “tempo” than the life and weaving of the plant formative body. I have explained this in more detail in a small book entitled “Human Life from the Point of View of Spiritual Science.” There you will find how everything depends on this different tempo in the time measurement of the human and plant formative forces bodies. Because our formative forces body can interact like a higher, malleable organ with the much faster life of the plant, we truly perceive the other kind of life in the plant world. This brings something completely different before our soul than the old, speculated life force. In other words, we truly perceive the supersensible in the sensible.

It is difficult to speak about these things so impartially today. Only if one feels committed to the knowledge of truth in a certain sense does one do so. For it is, of course, widely believed that such things as have now been expressed are not based on a truly scientific spirit, but on some kind of fantasy or reverie. Only slowly and gradually will humanity learn that this is not fantasy or reverie, but rather a methodical investigation of the spiritual, albeit one that proceeds in a different way than that of natural science. Humanity will learn this in the same way that it once recognized the Copernican worldview, which was also considered fantasy and reverie, as truth. Certain confessions did indeed take until 1822 to accept this Copernican worldview as truth. Hopefully, it will not take so long to recognize these spiritual truths, also for social reasons that cannot be mentioned here today, but which will be mentioned in the lecture I will give in this cycle on the historical life of humanity.

Today, however, there are the most paradoxical prejudices regarding the whole and the details of this spiritual knowledge, which, of course, seem natural and must also be numerous. I will mention only one of them. Two weeks ago, I mentioned that Pastor Rittelmeyer recently wrote a beautiful treatise in Die christliche Welt (The Christian World) from a religious perspective on what spiritual science aims to achieve and how it can become a truly deeper foundation of religious life. From a side that is widely recognized in many circles, objections have now been raised against Pastor Rittelmeyer's remarks, among other things that I do not want to mention here: If the human soul is to rise to a spiritual world, this should in no way happen in such a way that the human being arbitrarily carries his soul into the spiritual world through exercises, but rather it must come about of its own accord. From the point of view of spiritual science, nothing could be more incomprehensible than this. For precisely when this living into the spiritual world comes of its own accord, when it occurs without the human being doing anything to bring it about, the human being does not enter the real spiritual world, but only into the delusion of some ideas that are not spiritual, because the human being is not active but passive in this process. He enters a life that is again dependent on the body, on some organic processes in the body, and then it is pathological, or dependent on mere mental processes, and then it is a delusion, autosuggestion, or the like. Real penetration into the spirit is based precisely on becoming aware that this can only be achieved through activity, through the exercise of one's own innermost human will. It is this alone that carries us into the real spiritual world. So anyone who says it is questionable to require exercises through which human beings are supposed to achieve arbitrarily what can only be given to them as a gift of grace understands nothing of the real essence, of the real meaning of this spiritual science, but also knows nothing of the real spirit, only of that dreamt-up spirit that lives as autosuggestion in the human soul. But today, quite a lot of people know nothing about the real spirit. Therefore, they cannot come to a real contemplation of the eternal, the immortal, and the free in the human soul.

There are two ways out of what is either only inner life in the human soul or dependent on the body. One cannot escape by following the path attempted, for example, by Theodor Ziehen's “Physiological Psychology.” When Ziehen says that we cannot think what we want, but must think as determined by associations, as ideas relate to one another, he shows that he is essentially distracting from the spirit with his entire view. It can be said that Ziehen's view of human soul life is what it is solely because Ziehen overlooks the real spiritual impulses of the human soul. That is why Ziehen can say that the main law of human soul life is that one idea connects with another either according to their inner similarity or according to their temporal sequence. If I have seen a friend in a certain place and then see the friend again, the place that was connected with him in time can again be associated with him. If the life of the soul proceeds in this way, only according to these laws of association, then it proceeds in the way that the body allows this soul life to proceed. It is precisely the spirit that sleeps. The spirit submerges into the soul life that is dependent solely on the body. Contemporary psychology pushes the whole life of the soul down into the physical, it considers only that soul life into which the spirit submerges so deeply that it is no longer really there. For the truly spiritual begins wherever we free ourselves from associations through inner activity. The truly spiritual begins wherever the urge to speak ceases, and where all psychology that today seeks to base itself on natural science ceases to speak.

Today, there are two ways out of mere soul life. On the one hand, we can escape and ascend to the spirit by becoming conscious of our true self, by feeling the formative forces body as we otherwise feel the physical body, thereby seeing the supersensible in the outer world. But then we come to an even higher conception of our I, then we come to the realization of why this I is hidden from ordinary consciousness: basically, this I springs from the ordinary soul life as little as the air we breathe comes from the lungs. Anyone who believes that the true I is somehow produced inside the body believes the same thing in this area as someone who believes that breath is somehow produced in the lungs. No, our true I is inside the world that we take in imaginatively. There we find the I on the one hand by awakening it, by bringing it beyond mere sensory perception to the supersensible. In this self we find one side of the eternal, the side that shows us the seed of all that we will become when we pass through the gate of death and live our way into the spiritual world, in order to return to subsequent earthly lives.

On the other side, we find the I again. It is the same. In ordinary life, human beings sleep through the true nature of their I, but they also sleep through the true nature of their will. When they become conscious of the formative body, what lives in the will awakens in a certain way. What do human beings in ordinary life know about what lives in the will? When they raise their hand, they know it comes from their imagination. But how this works, how it passes into the physical body, is something human beings completely sleep through in their ordinary waking consciousness. This also awakens, little by little, though not in the formative body. We then experience the real, deeper impulses from which our actions arise in the world; we experience behind our will a supersensible reality of which ordinary consciousness knows nothing. On the other hand, by going beyond our ordinary soul life into the spirit, we experience the spirit in our will, the spirit that carried and wove us even before we entered physical existence through birth or conception, through which we came into physical existence from the spiritual world. By methodically going beyond ordinary soul life in both directions, the spiritual researcher experiences his eternal self.

This will be further elaborated in the next lectures. How this eternal is contained in the content of contemplative consciousness, how this eternal is truly found by our ability to contemplate together that which we come to on the one hand by pursuing our imagination beyond mere sensory perception into the supersensible, and that which we come to on the other side by pursuing our will beyond the merely soul-physical into the spiritual.

With this, at the end of today's lecture, I have indicated something of the program for the next lectures. I hope that spiritual science will overcome Du Bois-Reymond's dictum, with which he sought to pull the rug out from under all spiritual research by asserting the principle that only that which comes from the senses can actually be science, and that where supernaturalism begins, science ends. No, our view of the world, as presented in these lectures, is intended to show that in the future it will be possible to have a conviction of humanity based on the fact that wherever real supernaturalism, real penetration into the spiritual world ceases, science must also die out in the face of mere observation of nature. Thus we also see how natural science itself has more and more dead, dying concepts, for the living can only come from the spirit. The spirit is the creator of the living, and when it is recognized, it can only be the creator of real, life-filled, scientific concepts.