The Eternal in the Human Soul

GA 67 — 7 March 1918, Berlin

5. Nature and Its Mysteries in the Light of Spiritual Research

The American science writer Charles Snyder, who has written a book about the current scientific worldview, which has also been translated into German, speaks in an almost mocking tone about a lecture once given by Darwin's fellow explorer, Russell Wallace. As a naturalist—or perhaps better said, despite being a naturalist—Wallace made the statement that, in his view, human life, the immortal soul of man, has not only the significance that can be observed here in life between birth and death, but that it extends in its unmanifested supernatural effect throughout the entire universe. A person like Charles Snyder, with his more materialistic thinking, can of course only express himself almost mockingly about such a statement in our present day. Now, if one wants to consider the cultural-historical interest of this fact, it must be pointed out that Wallace, even somewhat before Darwin, arrived at the epoch-making developmental ideas of the nineteenth century with regard to the animal and human world, which then became popular through Darwin. Nevertheless, Wallace belongs to those who, although they stand in the fullest sense of the word on the scientific ground of evolutionary theory, ultimately worked their way up to a view that is revealed in a statement such as this: that the human soul, the whole of human life, has meaning for the entire world.

However, Wallace attempted to find confirmation for what had entered his world of ideas as a conviction through the experimental method commonly called spiritualism. One might say that Wallace's endeavor to find confirmation in such external experimentation for a truth that relates to the spiritual world, which must be gained from the spiritual world, is a mistake, because in this case the question arises: Could the external experimental method, spiritualistic searching, really offer Wallace anything for his conviction of the eternal, universal significance of the human soul? Today I would like to say only this much about this question: For those who, according to their worldview and spiritual understanding, have insight into what actually occurs in a natural process and what results an experiment can yield, it is clear that such an external experiment—even if it reveals all kinds of things reminiscent of spiritual manifestations—cannot provide any more information about the eternal significance of a being than any other magnetic, electrical, or other experiment. What comes to light in the sensory world can only provide information about the sensory world. Wallace was certainly mistaken in his endeavor to find confirmation of his conviction through such experimental methods. But his conviction could not be produced and confirmed by such external observation. Anyone who knows the human soul knows that such a conviction must arise from the depths of the human soul itself, that the process that leads to such a conviction must be entirely spiritual and cannot have anything to do with external experiments. And so it must be assumed that Wallace, although he was thoroughly grounded in natural science, expressed a realization that emerged from the unconscious, from the depths of the soul, which related to this eternal significance of the human soul.

This is related to what I have already said about spiritual research in the lectures given here, and what I would now like to briefly repeat from a certain other point of view. It is related to the fact that in the depths of the human soul there is indeed something that could be called, not only in an ideal sense but in a spiritually real sense, a second human being, who is a spiritual entity. This spiritual being does not enter into the ordinary consciousness that we have between birth and death, but sends messages, revelations, up into this consciousness, the origin of which may even be unknown to this ordinary consciousness. These revelations can be called inspirations, which then manifest themselves in such a conviction that a scientific thinker seeks external confirmation similar to that found in scientific research. Wallace is thus actually a representative of those scientific minds of the present who, precisely because they have a deeper insight into the nature of natural processes and the becoming of nature, are compelled in their souls to convictions about spiritual life, but who cannot arrive at a spiritual scientific method themselves and therefore seek an imitation, one might even say mimicry of the scientific method to confirm their spiritual convictions.

Now, of course, the main thing will be to ensure that such a claim, that there is something in the depths of the human soul that may remain completely unconscious to ordinary consciousness, a kind of second human being, does not remain up in the air. The spiritual scientific method strives to find confirmation for this assertion. In the earlier lectures of this cycle, I pointed out in principle how certain powers of knowledge slumbering in the human soul, which do not come to light in ordinary consciousness, can be brought to the fore through strengthening, strengthening of this soul life, through certain exercises, so that the human being truly realizes how another being rests within his nature, one that can see a spiritual world around itself just as the human being in the physical human body sees the sensory-physical world through his senses. I have often explained here how one can bring forth these powers slumbering in the soul and turn them into real, conscious powers of knowledge. You will find this described in more detail in my books “The Secret Science,” “The Riddle of Man,” and especially in my treatise “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds.”

Here, only the following should be noted: Those who strive — but the effort requires long, energetic, patient inner work of the soul — to introduce the will into their life of imagination, so that this life of imagination really takes place under the influence of their own will, initially in accordance with practice, will succeed in discovering the spiritual in their life of imagination. It must be said that the correct method of meditation leads to finding the spirit as such in the ordinary life of imagination, which is otherwise only a mental activity, just as the natural scientist finds expressed in the feeling of hunger what underlies this hunger in the body in terms of chemical or physical processes. Meditating means — as I said, I can only mention the principles here, otherwise the discussion would take me too far — allowing an idea that is as clear as possible, so that nothing subconscious, nothing from reminiscences can play into it, to rest in the soul, so that one develops the power of imagination, the power of thought, as the content of the idea. If one persists in such an activity, and in a sense, as one otherwise feels one's physical body, feels one's soul in this activity of meditation, then little by little, when one's own will has been introduced into this arbitrary, meditative imagination until the power of this will has been strengthened, something objective is revealed that does not depend on one's own will. One's own will can, as it were, withdraw from the activity of imagination, and one has raised the activity of imagination into consciousness to an extent that it is not otherwise raised. In this way, one has embarked on the path to the spirit. By increasingly detaching imagination from the physical, one comes to truly discover the interplay of the spirit in imagination.

This is initially only one of the paths that the spiritual researcher must follow; others are similar. What matters is that human soul activity is strengthened to such an extent that it truly detaches itself from the physical. This must be experienced, and it can be experienced precisely by detaching oneself from the physical and becoming imbued with the spiritual. If one goes through the exercises that consist of such a strengthening of the soul life, then one gradually comes to be able to say — of course, this can only be achieved on the basis of the spiritual scientific method — what the spiritual actually is that works in the soul element of the human being. One makes the meaningful inner discovery that gives one's whole life a new direction, the shocking discovery — as simple as it may be to describe, it is shocking when experienced — that by training one's thinking more and more as pure thinking — not through the exertion of any physical functions — one comes to a point where one realizes: you can no longer get by with your habitual way of thinking. Thinking is just like when you have a weight lying there and at first mistakenly believe that you can lift it, and then realize that your hands and arms are too weak to lift it. Outwardly, it becomes apparent that the physical organ is too weak for the task at hand. Something very similar, transferred to the spiritual-soul realm, can happen to the spiritual researcher when he has brought his thinking so far through meditation that it is imbued with spirit. He then feels that he cannot go any further, he feels that the tool of the brain is not ready to really grasp a thought that he now wants to grasp, which is imbued with spirit. One must have experienced the resistance that the brain or the physical body can offer in order to appreciate, on the one hand, the dependence of ordinary consciousness on this physicality and, on the other hand, to experience that the physicality can also be too weak to sustain a thought that is grasped in the spirit. When one has such an experience — that physicality can be too weak and thought too strong — one knows that there is an immediately experiential, visible spirituality that is independent of the body, into which one can enter through appropriate methods. In fact, one gradually comes to a direct perception of a spiritual world by — it must be said again and again, although it is a paradox for today's world — placing one's soul activity outside the physical body. There one learns to recognize what it means to be filled with spirit in the same way that one is otherwise filled with the ordinary conception of physical activity. One learns to distinguish between the soul life based on the body and the soul life based on the spirit.

One then comes to understand how human beings can actually fall into materialism through scientific views. For it must be said that on the path to the spirit, if the spiritual researcher does not have enough intellectual courage to reach the spirit through these very endeavors, there is a real possibility that he will remain stuck in materialism, because he experiences how dependent he is on the body with his ordinary consciousness. If they are then unable to come to a real perception of a supersensible conscious being, if they reject it, then it is precisely the path to the spiritual that will put them in danger of falling into materialism. Those who have never really felt how great, how enormously great the temptation and lure to fall into materialism is, do not stand with their full energy in the spiritual world. For on the one hand, one must know that this consciousness, which accompanies us between birth and death, is indeed a spiritual activity in its primal power, but that it requires the external, physical-bodily organ in every smallest part of its activity, and that one can only detach oneself from this bondage to the physical-bodily for the purpose of spiritual research. Then one discovers — one must not misunderstand the expression, it is not meant to express a value judgment, but only to be an indication — how in this human being who lives between birth and death there really lives a higher, spiritual-soul human being who goes through births and deaths. One gets to know this spiritual-soul human being as he lives in an objective web of thoughts when he himself develops consciousness.

The experience that results from this can be expressed by way of comparison: one learns to recognize that this ordinary world, which we see with our physical eyes and hear with our physical ears, is something like the world we become aware of when we stand, say, on the shore of the sea. And just as when we plunge into the sea to swim submerged in the sea itself, we come out of the sensory-physical world into a world of objective thought life. This must be an experience and can become an experience. One learns to recognize what objective thought life is. However, there is then no uncertainty about the manifold world that occurs when one plunges into the sea and swims submerged in it, but one learns to recognize a second, spiritual world within which the human being lives as a spiritual-soul being, just as he lives in the physical-sensory manifold as a physical-soul being. Certain ideas, which natural science can otherwise only approach hypothetically, take on a thoroughly real meaning. Certain mysteries in nature approach the human soul in a new form.

I will first refer here to only one mystery in nature that has caused natural scientists so much headache because they approach it only from the outside, because they want to consider it only on the basis of what the external facts of nature provide. I am referring to what is called ether in natural science, that which natural scientists seek as the basis of the outer, coarse material world, as a finer element of natural existence. It is remarkable how, precisely in such fields, serious natural scientists approach spiritual science from the other side. In recent times, a very important physicist has said: If one wants to attribute properties to the ether, they must not be material ones. A physicist is already saying this today, which means he is already placing the ether in that world where non-material existence can be found. But for the physicist, as for the natural scientist in general, this ether must remain a hypothesis. He can deduce it from other natural processes and manifestations of being. When the human being, as a spiritual researcher, treats his soul in the way I have indicated, he will indeed come to perceive and become aware of the essence of ether within himself, and realize how this physical body — since I do not wish to speak in vague, purely theoretical terms, I must address this paradox, which is still paradoxical for today's world — is based on an etheric body, a supersensible body. What arises through true self-observation, through knowing oneself in the web of thoughts, has a direct relationship to this supersensible body. The soul experience is essentially a cooperation between the human being, who withdraws from the body and can live in the weaving sea of thoughts, and the etheric. And only indirectly, through the etheric, by the etheric acting back on the physical body, does the soul also act on the physical body. Thus, on the one hand, we discover that this etheric body — I have also called it the formative forces body in the magazine Das Reich — underlies the physical body of the human being and is an essential element of what I previously called the higher human being. On the other hand, by strengthening one's soul capacity to such an extent that one can clearly perceive this etheric body, one learns to recognize the refined form of the human being in the etheric realm and also experiences that the human being is spiritually richer than what is contained in what he experiences in his ordinary, everyday self-consciousness. This everyday consciousness is bound to the body and therefore shows only a fragment of the general spirituality. One immerses oneself in this general spirituality as in a sea of thoughts, and thus experiences what spiritually underlies the human body. But by stepping out of this human body, one also learns to recognize what spiritually underlies what one otherwise finds in the physical-sensory environment.

Now, when one has advanced to this realization, it becomes apparent, as something that occurs through experience, that one cannot find any real meaning in the search for the hidden entities of nature, as it initially appears in natural science itself, and that one must seek another meaning for this research. If one considers the research of the ordinary natural scientist into the mysteries of nature, one always finds that he researches as if he had spread out before him what nature observation yields, and then, penetrating this web that nature observation presents to him, wants to find something behind this web that essentially underlies what is observed externally, whether it is thought of in a more philosophical sense as the “thing in itself” or called the active world of atoms. When one goes beyond mere sensory facts, it is always assumed that one can, as it were, penetrate this fabric of sensory facts, that behind this fabric there must lie something that is some kind of “thing in itself,” which one cannot penetrate because the world of sensory observation is spread out before one. To the spiritual researcher who has learned through direct observation what spirit is, such an endeavor to find a “thing in itself,” a world of atoms or the like behind sensory observation, as if someone were looking into a mirror, seeing their image and the image of the surrounding objects in this mirror, and then, in order to find out where this image comes from, piercing the mirror. They will convince themselves that there is nothing behind the mirror that could in any way give rise to what they see in the mirror. If one really gets to know the spirit, one makes the discovery that in this way, by penetrating behind the sensory world, one comes to nothing, neither to an atomic world nor to a “thing in itself.” If one wants to seek the cause of what appears in the mirror, one must seek it in front of the mirror; one must seek it in coexistence with the world. You must actively penetrate the world with which you live together in front of the mirror. This is how it is with the mysteries of nature, this is how it is with what could be called the unrevealed in natural existence. If you learn in the manner described how to stand in the spiritual world, you will know that what you recognize as the spirit that carries and develops your own spirit soul, what you learn to recognize as the spirit in which you live and weave, is also the cause of natural phenomena, and it is only the outer human organization that is to blame for the fact that we see these natural phenomena spread out around us like a mirror image, that these natural phenomena are captured in this sensually and physically spread-out tapestry of observation. Thus, when spiritual research wants to speak of an essential being behind natural phenomena, it comes to speak of the spirit, which it recognizes as that into which the soul enters when it frees itself from the body and gets to know its own eternal being in the spiritual world.

It is very important not to be deterred by scientific prejudices, but to look at the relationship that arises for the spiritual observer in the manner described. For this is what arises when the soul sinks into the spiritual world, brought up from within the soul itself. What can be brought up from within the soul itself can also be obscured or rejected if the soul carries prejudices within itself. What is to become the soul's property can be taken away from the soul when prejudices cloud the free view of the spiritual environment. Whether someone comes to admit this at all depends on whether they allow opposing scientific prejudices to grow in their soul. Those who think that our physical-sensory world, from which we originate as physical-sensory beings and in which we develop, is the source of ordinary consciousness — which is true and is also confirmed by spiritual research — and who then traces this physical-sensory world back, in the Kant-Laplace manner, to a mere primordial nebula, which through its inorganic, purely physical activity and further development also produced living beings, and in the development of living beings ultimately produced human beings, and who then goes on to put forward all kinds of hypotheses about a final state that will occur in the development of the earth when it has cooled down to minus 200 degrees Celsius, — who, through scientific speculation, places the non-living at the beginning and at the end, and is then rightly convinced that ordinary consciousness arises from this scientific given, for such a person this speculative scientific worldview can become such a suggestion, such a prejudice, that it completely deprives him of the possibility of progressing toward the spirit, if he still wants to remain an honest human being. Perhaps precisely because the scientific worldview has had such a suggestive effect on humanity over the last few centuries, especially the very last century, because it has entered human education in such a suggestive way, there is so little inclination in humanity to want to move toward any spiritual view. From what I have described, you can indeed see that one can only penetrate to the essence of nature if one penetrates to the spirit; for then one also finds it as the essential element in nature itself. But, and this is the significant point — for spiritual science is not abstract like mere philosophy, but a very concrete research that proceeds in the vivid spirit — one finds not only in general that spirit underlies natural phenomena, but one finds this in detail. As a result, spiritual research cannot be presented in an easily comprehensible world picture, but must be presented step by step, slowly and gradually, like any other science.

If one really learns to see this etheric part of the human being, which is integrated into the physical-sensory body, then this etheric human being is of a completely different nature. It is supersensible, it is similar to the soul, it stands between the material and the soul, but it is not as differentiated, not as developed in detail as the physical body. The physical body has eyes through which we can only see, ears through which we can only hear, a sense of warmth through which we can only experience warmth, and so on. The etheric body of the human being is not structured in this way, but rather, when it encounters the etheric world, it forms and shapes itself, stimulated by what it encounters, so that the spiritual eyes and ears are only created at the moment when something is to be perceived in some way in the spiritual world. In this way, one discovers a completely different inner mobility, an inner formative capacity of this formative body. Above all, one discovers that while the physical-sensory world is dependent on the physical environment of the earth, and while it can be explained in terms of physical science through this dependence on the physical environment of the earth, the formative body is not dependent on this immediate physical environment. One gradually comes to realize that this human etheric body is actually dependent on the entire universe, so dependent that the vertical or horizontal direction means something to it, that it matters to it whether it is within the light mass emanating from the sun or under the influence of the gravitational mass of the earth when it is in darkness, and so on. One notices that this etheric body is at a stage where it is even more dependent on the entire cosmos, while the physical human body has already passed this stage of development and has now become directly dependent on the earth. This etheric body has a much more ideal dependence on a larger whole than the physical-sensory body. So, we discover the remarkable truth that, in their inner being, humans are supersensible, spiritual beings who create their image here in the physical-sensory body, but that this supersensible aspect, although it is supersensible, is in a certain sense higher than the physical-sensory aspect and is still at an earlier stage of development. here in the physical human body, but that this supersensible, although it is supersensible, in a certain respect stands higher than the physical-sensible, is still at an earlier stage of development.

This is something that immediately follows when the human being says to himself as a spiritual researcher: Something lives within you that is higher than all of external nature because it is spiritual and soulful, but as something spiritual and soulful, it is more imperfect than the external physical; as something spiritual and soulful, it will only become as differentiated and developed as the sensory and physical aspects of human beings are now at a later stage of development.

If one therefore wants to find the spiritual-soul in an image in physical life, one must seek it in the world of lower organisms. The lower forms of organisms appear to us in such a way that we say to ourselves that they form materially what human beings develop spiritually and soulfully at a higher stage. You see, things are not as simple as they are presented by the Darwinian-influenced scientific view. This inner mobility and determination of the formative forces of the etheric body, through which it soon follows the vertical direction, directing its organs there, soon follows the horizontal direction, directing its organs there, sometimes following the light, sometimes following gravity, and directing its organs there, and so on, this inner characteristic of the etheric body, which one truly does not discover through speculation, but through spiritual intuition, which one must have before one can find a counterpart in outer nature, has nothing to do with speculation about outer natural existence. Now, having convinced ourselves that this supersensible body of the human being has the characteristics I have just described, we would have to assert that something similar and undifferentiated must be found in lower living beings, it should turn out that, although they are spiritually and soul-wise lower than the spiritual and soul-wise nature of the human being, their physical configuration is not similar to the physical body of the human being, but to his etheric body. It is remarkable that the further natural science progresses with its very different methods, the better evidence it can provide for what spiritual science must present as a challenge. The process is therefore that spiritual science first says that one must find in nature the material image of what is discovered in the supersensible world.

Now, in a research context such as that corresponding to Snyder's more materialistic approach, you can find references to very interesting scientific investigations, such as those carried out by Jacques Loeb, who also played an important role in various monist associations in Europe in the past. There you will find a very strange experiment cited — I am not talking now about whether it is humane or inhumane, whether it is permissible or impermissible, whether it is moral or immoral to carry out such experiments; that is of little concern to “science” —: This researcher Loeb took the substance of simple, lower organisms, of hydroids, and ruthlessly cut cubes out of the substance with a knife. What was the result? Antennas grew upward in the head, and feet grew downward, just as they normally do in hydroids. So no matter what shape was cut out, the head and antennae grew upward and the feet grew downward. But then Loeb turned the substance upside down so that the feet were on top. Sure enough, a new head emerged at the top, growing out between the feet. There you have the completely undifferentiated, there you have, in the lower animal kingdom, in this case in the hydroids, that which the spiritual researcher discovers at a higher level of existence for the human soul in the image-forming body, developed on a material basis. It is similar with another species. If you cut into the substance of the lower animal with a razor at a certain point, a mouth even forms there with surrounding feelers, so-called tentacles. Here you still have the undifferentiated substance as a reflection of what lives spiritually and soulfully in humans at a higher level. Here you find the concrete connection between what has been discovered in the spirit, in which humans participate at a higher, supersensible level, and what is expressed at a lower level in the material world.

You see that the lower organic world is based on holding fast to the material what human beings can develop spiritually and soulfully at a higher level, because their more highly developed organism can serve as a foundation for this. You can see here how spiritual science, when taken seriously as research rather than as the frippery that often passes for mysticism or theosophy today, counteracts what comes from natural science on the other side, how the spiritual and the natural, spiritual mysteries and natural mysteries, truly meet in the middle.

By delving into such things, one learns thoroughly how the true fact that the ordinary consciousness one has in everyday life is bound to the physical-sensory does not interfere with the recognition of what one calls the spiritual-soul, the eternal, the immortal human soul; for one learns about the possibility that human beings live not only in this form of consciousness, but also in other forms of consciousness. If one has no other possibility than to know only the form of consciousness that is peculiar to human beings here between birth and death — which spiritual science shows to be bound to the physical body — then one also has no possibility of gaining an idea of what human beings will be like when they have passed through the gate of death. But if we learn through spiritual research that this consciousness is only one of various forms of consciousness, we also learn to recognize that even sleep is only another form of human consciousness. Then, precisely by taking into account the justified demands of material research, we clear the way for penetrating into the spiritual-soul realm. Then one says to oneself that the further and further natural science penetrates, the more mysterious facts it reveals, the more it urges us to recognize the spirit and its science, and it will recognize more and more that ordinary consciousness needs a lower level of materiality as its foundation, and that the spiritual-soul aspect in human beings penetrates this lower level supersensibly. Those who do not understand this relationship between the spirit and nature will be horrified by the crude materialism when a natural scientist today says, with a certain degree of justification, something like the following — although one can of course have other views on this, but here it is more a question of the direction, of the whole research method: What actually is the human brain nerve mass? It is organic substance, and the excitement that occurs in ordinary consciousness with the help of this organic nerve substance is actually nothing more than an striving of this organic substance to coagulate; and this coagulation of a phosphorous-containing, fatty substance that occurs in our brain nerve system when we think, imagine, perceive, can, as Snyder notes in his scientific worldview, be compared to what happens when, for example, jelly or cream prepared by a housewife coagulates through cooling. The natural scientist gradually comes to think in a truly vivid, material way, to say to himself quite vividly — and the scientific view is quite rightly moving in this direction —: While the most diverse processes are taking place in the soul, the natural basis for this is that the nerve mass, the jelly-like, cream-like mass, has the tendency to coagulate, and that it actually coagulates.

Here we have the approach that leads to the other side, to the natural side. The spiritual researcher does not need to resist this. If he were to resist, it would be dilettantism, for the simple reason that the legitimate scientific method will and must lead to the formation of such insights, even if they are still very imperfect today. But by recognizing the simple material processes that take place while the spiritual-soul is active, one explains precisely the independence, the self-founded nature of this spiritual-soul. It is precisely through this that one comes to know the spiritual-soul aspect, and thus the correct relationship between spiritual-scientific research and scientific research will turn out to be that spiritual science must, in a sense, point the way in terms of how scientific facts are to be viewed if one wants to use them to unravel the mysteries of nature, what one is to make of them. Gradually, one comes to realize that one should not think about the revelations of nature in the way that unfortunately most people still do today, namely that these revelations of nature will reveal the essence of nature on the basis of some material foundation, but rather that the essence of nature is to be sought in the spiritual realm. By seeing through this relationship between the spiritual and the natural, one comes to realize that the spiritual is active everywhere in the natural, and that one must, in a sense, view the facts of nature as the letters of a script. To describe them as letters is quite correct, but it is not complete. One must be able to read what is expressed by the letters in their combination to form words; one must learn to read in nature, one must come to understand, I would say, the facts of nature gradually in such a way that one says to oneself: What natural scientists recognize, what they find in nature, leads more to questions than to answers. The answers can only be given when one understands the spiritual foundations. However, this is something that the present and the future will first have to work through. Today, when a natural philosopher writes about natural things and natural processes, one expects him to provide answers. The correct point of view will be taken once one has come to say to oneself: What we observe in nature leads the human soul to ask questions; the answers must come from what can only be understood spiritually. Thus, in the most everyday processes, when we address their natural mystery, we could point out how the spiritual must give humans the instinct to treat the facts of nature in the right way as questions.

A very everyday fact is the succession of sleep and wakefulness in human life. There are very interesting theories about the nature of sleep from the scientific worldview, which I do not want to go into here, by J. Cräger, L. Strümpell, Preyer, and many others. These sleep studies are all very interesting, but they suffer above all from the fact that they fail to take into account the fundamental facts that can only be found through spiritual research, namely that the alternating states of sleep and wakefulness really belong to human life just as much as the left and right swings of a pendulum. When one recognizes how human beings, while living here on earth, are both natural and spiritual beings, one also recognizes how they swing back and forth with their true selves between being embedded in natural existence and spiritual existence. In their waking life, they use their physical body, which, because it has undergone a longer period of development, is more perfect than their spiritual-soul being, which, although it is on a higher level, is more imperfect, to perform the tasks that are carried out with ordinary full consciousness. Then he sleeps over with his spiritual-soul being into another state of consciousness, which he cannot yet perceive today between birth and death, which he will only perceive when he has passed through the gate of death, because there, precisely through the destruction of his connection with his physical body, he enters into another connection with the spiritual world and can take on a spiritual body. This oscillation is a fact that must be regarded as an inner necessity of life. Interesting scientific approaches have already been made in this regard. If, for example, one is able to consider some of the interesting things that the Magyar researcher Palagyi said about the life of feelings and memory in his “Lectures on Natural Philosophy” published in 1908, one sees that here too, natural science is already approaching what is understood in spiritual science. However, it must be said that the facts presented with regard to sleep research, which exist purely in external nature, are not treated in the right way as questions. How should they be treated?

A highly respected contemporary natural scientist from the Haeckel school has also written about sleep in a popular publication. Like other natural scientists, he claims that sleep occurs because humans are tired, that sleep follows fatigue. That is quite correct, and we will discuss this further in a moment. But to indicate that humans are now overtired, that they can no longer activate their senses, this respected natural scientist points out, for example, how humans fall asleep: what actually has to happen for humans to fall asleep. I could cite Strümpell's very interesting experiment here, but I will not do so. Instead, I will only point out what this respected natural scientist cites as evidence that the fatigue of the senses, the exhaustion of sensory life, actually leads to the fact that human beings, because they can no longer be in sensory life, actually cease to exist until sensory life has regenerated itself through self-control. Here, the human being is regarded as a purely natural being. Therefore, to reinforce how sensory life ceases when we want to fall asleep properly, this natural scientist cites the following: What do we do when we fall asleep? We try to block out sensory stimuli as much as possible. We darken our bedrooms so that it is as dark as possible, we block out auditory stimuli so that it is as quiet as possible around us. — He even points out that even the wrong temperature, if it is too warm or too cold, prevents people from falling asleep, that a certain temperature must be achieved, and so on. In short, he wants to show how, in fact, the causes of falling asleep are to be found not in the oscillation of life between body and mind, but in the external environment, in external circumstances.

Can this question be posed correctly? Can the external scientific facts really be viewed in this way? Then there should be no other, for example: I have observed numerous cases in my life where people do not create a completely silent environment, nor the darkest possible conditions by curtaining the windows and so on, but where they fall asleep in very bright rooms, even if the speaker is shouting, five minutes after he has shouted. The whole setup that the natural scientist demands is not there, and yet, with absolute certainty, sleep sets in, but only in individual people, of course! It is not a matter of having only the right conditions, conditions that correspond to the facts, but of being able to place these facts in the whole context to which they belong, with all the circumstances that are related to them and under which they occur. If we know that the state of change, the oscillation between sleeping and waking, is based on the fact that by oscillating back and forth between the body and the spiritual environment, the human being is embedded in the spirit, and that as long as he is not connected to the physical body, he enjoys this body from the outside, then one can also understand that it is possible to revel in this enjoyment, to exaggerate this enjoyment. Then, just as one can understand that a person gets drunk, one can understand that they sleep too much or that they sleep at the wrong time. One learns to recognize sleep as an independent, self-founded requirement of life, as a different state of consciousness than that which one has in the physical body. Now, this state of consciousness has a certain significance for the physical body. What one experiences with enjoyment, from falling asleep to waking up, is carried into the physical body upon waking up, and is also carried into the physical body during sleep. This removes fatigue. That is quite correct, but it is something different from saying that fatigue is the cause of sleep. If someone has written all over a blackboard with chalk and then takes a sponge and erases what is written on the blackboard, they have indeed erased the writing; in the same way, human beings remove fatigue with what they experience in sleep. But just as one cannot say that the chalk produces the sponge, one cannot say that fatigue produces sleep. It is one thing to say that sleep removes fatigue, and quite another to say that fatigue has produced sleep. However, when sleep is viewed from a spiritual-soul perspective, it may seem understandable that human beings long for sleep when they are tired. There is a need to move into the spiritual realm. However, it is not fatigue that produces sleep, but rather the soul's longing to get rid of fatigue that produces sleep. In other words, the soul's longing for sleep must be understood as a spiritual-soul phenomenon, not as something that arises from mere fatigue.

You see, what can be found in the spiritual realm is what guides the paths that must be taken to solve the mysteries of nature. I would like to briefly cite an example of this, which I was already able to explain in the appendix to my most recently published book, Von Seelenrätseln (On the Mysteries of the Soul). It is about the fact that, when speaking of the connection between the soul life and the physical life of human beings, it is almost universally stated today — even by those who accept this soul life as a special reality — that this soul life is merely connected with the nervous life. Those of my listeners who have heard me speak often know how little I am inclined to make personal remarks. Here, however, the personal is inextricably linked to the factual. Therefore, I may well say that this very problem, of defining the relationship between spiritual science and natural science in external terms, has occupied me for thirty to thirty-five years, and only now am I able to find the right words to formulate it at least to some extent; for spiritual research is truly no easier than natural scientific research. What has emerged for me over the course of thirty to thirty-five years of continuous observation and comparison of the relevant scientific facts as they stand today has confirmed to me everywhere that the relationship between the spiritual-soul and the physical must be characterized in a completely different way than is very often the case today. Certainly, there are approaches to this everywhere, so I would not say that what I have to say here is entirely my own original truth. But in this context, it is not yet understood in the field of external natural science today. The point is that the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being cannot be thought of as relating only to one part of the physical aspect, the nervous system, but that the whole spiritual-soul aspect, which enters the human physical body from the spiritual world through birth or conception, must be thought of in relation to the whole body, and in the following way:

We can divide the spiritual-soul aspect — my listeners will know that I do not attach great importance to such a system, but it does make it easier to get an overview — firstly into perception and imagination, secondly, into emotional experience, and thirdly, into the experience of volitional impulses, which are then realized in action, so that the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being, as it appears in ordinary consciousness, consists of this threefold structure. If we take the facts of spiritual science, they lead us to relate the imaginative, perceptive life to nothing else in the body than what takes place in the nervous system, but also only this imaginative, perceptive life. It is interesting that Theodor Ziehen, for example, because he relates the soul only to the nervous system, has only the expression “emotional tone” for the life of feeling, as if the life of feeling were not something independent in the soul, as if it were only a tone of the life of imagination. And as a result, he denies an independent life of will all the more. All these researchers are right when they relate only this part of the spiritual-soul life, the life of imagination and perception, directly to the nervous system, the brain. However, physical science has no concept at all of these nerve processes because it does not consider them properly. I will speak about this in more detail in my upcoming lecture on the revelations of the unconscious. But then the second link in spiritual-soul life appears: the life of feeling. This life of feeling is not directly related to the nervous system, but only indirectly. It is as directly related to what is lived out in the blood and in breathing as the life of perception and imagination is directly related to the processes in the nervous system. When we follow the nervous processes within ourselves, we have the physical counterpart of perceptions and imaginations. If we want to have an equally physical counterpart for the life of feeling, we must not first consider the nervous system directly, but must consider the rhythmic life as it plays out in the interrelationship between breathing and blood circulation. It is only when this rhythm of breathing and blood circulation affects the nervous system, enters into a relationship with the nervous system, that it becomes possible for us to imagine our feelings. When we imagine our feelings, they enter into our life of imagination, and this creates a direct relationship between the life of feeling and the life of imagination. But there is also a direct relationship between what underlies the life of feeling in the body as rhythm and the nervous system.

I am well aware that now that experimental psychology exists—and indeed for the benefit of science—this relationship between the rhythm of human life and the life of feeling is already being hinted at. But it is not indicated in the right way, because that direct relationship between emotional life and the rhythm of life is not sought, as one would otherwise seek the direct relationship between the life of imagination and the nervous system. I also know how much can be objected to what I have said. It would take me many hours to refute these objections. They can all be refuted. I will point out just one thing. Someone might come along and say: Yes, but look at musical and aesthetic sensibility, life in musical art, which comes about precisely through perception, through the life of imagination; that already refutes what has been said. — Hundreds and hundreds of refutations could be put forward in this way. These things are very subtle, and if you look at them in a crude way, as is often the case today, they can of course very easily be refuted. The true process of musical-aesthetic perception is that what takes place in the life of rhythm strikes what — as the psychologist knows — takes place in the brain when sounds are heard, and that only when the rhythmic life absorbs what passes into the human organism through sound, only when the sound becomes part of the rhythm of the whole body, is musical perception, aesthetic enjoyment in the musical realm, produced.

A third thing — as I said, I can only illustrate these things briefly — is life in impulses of the will that are realized in actions. Just as the life of imagination is directly connected with the life of the nerves, and the life of feeling with the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation, so the life of the will, indeed the entire life of the will, is actually connected with the metabolic life of the human organism, strange as that may seem. Every volitional process is based on a metabolic process. Things only become confused because, in a certain sense, everything in the human being interacts; for example, the will interacts with the life of imagination, and thus the metabolism interacts with the life of the nerves. But one must not relate what is happening there as metabolism to the life of imagination, which is based on completely different nervous processes; rather, one must always relate what is happening as metabolism to the life of the will.

In this way, the entire spiritual-soul life, thinking, feeling, and willing, has been related to the threefold life processes in the human organism. For when one enters into the human organism, its entire life is exhausted in nerve processes, rhythmic processes, and metabolic processes. The entire physical aspect of the human being is directly related to the entire spiritual and mental aspect. This connection can be substantiated by thousands of facts that are already recognized by science today, but which are not raised in the right way as questions and are therefore not taken in such a way that they lead to spiritual insight, which alone can bring order to the mysteries of science. Today, one can make the following discovery: one need only pick up a physiological book that is up to date, one need only familiarize oneself with what has really been discovered in the field of natural science, one need only disregard the prejudices that are brought in theoretically, one need only see through it correctly and ask the right questions, then what is already available in natural science today provides, to an enormously complete degree, confirmation of what spiritual science has to say. But natural science does not really apply its methods comprehensively. It specializes. As a result, what is correctly applied in one field is not transferred to another field. For example, would it occur to science to understand the position of the magnetic needle from north to south physically in such a way that only the forces that determine direction act in the magnetic needle itself? Science rightly says instead: The earth itself is a large magnet, the magnetic north pole of the earth attracts one end of the magnetic needle, the magnetic south pole the other end. In short, the magnetic needle with its directional force is placed in the entire cosmos. Just imagine if this were applied to organic science! In organic science, the approach is like that of someone who would seek the directional forces of the magnetic needle only in the magnetic needle itself. Embryology is practiced and the development of the chicken egg is studied, seeking its origin only in the chicken, or at most in its ancestors in the line of inheritance. If the physical method were applied to embryology, one would readily see the formative forces for egg formation and germ formation throughout the cosmos. Spiritual science must point this out. It will increasingly show that what is already known today as scientific fact confirms to a high degree what spiritual science has to say. How can one, like Loeb, for example, cut up the hydrozoan substance, see how the head and antennae form on one side and the feet on the other, reverse the process, and see a head form between the feet, and yet completely disregard the fact that there is a similar internal relationship between the formative forces and the cosmos as there is between the magnetic needle and the earth's magnetism? And how can one then overlook what a wonderful confirmation this is in the external realm for the fact, now found purely spiritually in the realm of spiritual research, that what lives in the human being in a supersensible way as the formative forces body is integrated in a similar way into the whole cosmos, that cosmic forces are thereby introduced into human nature, so that human beings, while living on earth in their ordinary consciousness, are at the same time living in the imperishable, eternal cosmos through their incorporation of the supersensible. But this will be discussed in the next lectures, in which I will speak more about the actual, eternal nature of human beings and about the fate of the soul after death.

Today, my task was to show how spiritual science, by leading to the spirit, also leads to the essence of nature, how it is able to grasp and fathom the mysteries of nature in reality. Then one comes to the point where one no longer looks back on a Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, but through real inner spiritual knowledge says to oneself: You now know what is connected with the whole cosmos in human beings, what the higher being is in their purely external natural existence, what lies supersensibly behind what is expressed sensually in their bodies. You must now trace this body back to how it stood in primeval times at the stage where the spiritual-soul stands today, in order to then advance to other stages of development. I can only hint at this as well. But it is clear from the whole meaning of what has been discussed today: One comes to think of the initial state of the earth not in the lifeless Kant-Laplace nebula, but in a spiritual-soul state, so that one sees in the earth the transition from the spiritual to the material, as in the individual human being, who descends from the spiritual world in order to incarnate here through connection with the material. Thus, one does not arrive at the lifeless Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, but at what is spiritual and soul-like at the beginning of the Earth's existence, at the spiritual and soul-like origin and at the spiritual and soul-like final state of the Earth's existence. In reality, one connects with external existence, not merely through hypotheses. In this way, one learns to grasp thoughts only as they are in reality.

I would like to refer here to a very interesting lecture given by Professor Dewar at the beginning of this century. He proceeds in a completely scientific manner in his explanations; logically, there is not the slightest objection to them. He calculates what the state of the Earth will be like after millions of years, and his calculations are entirely correct scientifically: the temperature must be at least minus 200 degrees Celsius; but at this temperature, conditions must be completely different. What surrounds the Earth as the air cycle will then be liquefied into water and form a sea. The current lighter gases will then form an air cycle, and certain substances—as I said, this is a completely correct scientific combination—will be solid, whereas today they are liquid. For example, milk, which is liquid today, will be solid at minus 200 degrees. But not only will it be solid, it will also glow when exposed to light for a period of time. The professor describes very vividly that one will only need to coat the walls with this milk protein, and then one will be able to read newspapers by this milky light! He goes on to describe very vividly how it will no longer be possible to take photographs — which is already a problem today — because at this temperature the chemical forces of the light rays will have been lost. In short, the picture could be continued quite well using scientific methods. Those who have learned to think realistically through spiritual research are so close to reality that they know where to stop with their thinking. Such research — as paradoxical as it may sound, what I am about to say is perfectly natural to spiritual researchers — is just like taking any human organ, for example the heart: you observe its changes over six to seven years and then combine them scientifically to determine how the heart must continue to change, calculating how it will have changed after three hundred years. This is the same method used by Professor Dewar! By extending the slow changes of our Earth over a foreseeable period of time to millions of years, he arrives at the final state of the Earth, just as one would arrive at the state of a human being after three hundred years if one based the calculation on the change in an organ or the entire organism over a period of several years, without taking into account that the human being, as a physical being, would of course have been dead long ago. Similarly, the Earth will no longer exist in the time for which Professor Dewar has calculated this beautiful state, for which, viewed from the outside, one might ask who will still be reading newspapers at minus 200 degrees Celsius, with these luminous walls coated with milk protein, which cows will then give liquid milk, and so on! Even a very superficial observation could show you, if you have connected your thinking with reality, that as soon as you stop thinking with the thoughts that physical reality provides, you must move on to the spiritual. But the Kant-Laplace theory is conceived according to the same method, just as if you start from how the human heart has changed in a certain foreseeable epoch and then calculate what the heart will be like after three hundred years. Thinking that has saturated itself with reality by absorbing the spirit does not allow you to develop concepts to the point of emptiness, which then makes it impossible to have a completely unprejudiced view of a spiritual world.

Thus it comes about that spiritual science will truly provide the ground on which a realistic approach emerges that will also truly accommodate healthy human thinking. It is remarkable — and I would like to cite an example here that I have already cited in previous lectures, but which is always interesting to bring to the soul's attention — how healthy thinking is, which, although not based on spiritual research, nevertheless faces reality in a healthy way, and how it relates to thinking that is entirely correct scientifically, but which does not notice that this scientific approach ceases to be realistic at a certain point. As to why healthy feeling cannot respond to such scientific thinking, I would like to refer to remarks made by Herman Grimm in his beautiful book on Goethe, which contains so much of spiritual insight, about the Kant-Laplace theory, about the primordial nebula from which everything is said to have been formed, and the relationship of this primordial nebula theory to Goethe's healthy view. He says about this:

"Long ago, in his (Goethe's) youth, the great Laplace-Kant fantasy about the origin and eventual demise of the globe had already taken hold. From the rotating nebula—children already learn this in school—the central gas drop forms, which then becomes the Earth, and as a solidifying sphere, it goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, in inconceivable periods of time, only to finally fall back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long process, but one that is completely comprehensible to today's audience, and one that requires no external intervention other than the effort of some outside force to maintain the sun at the same heating temperature. — No more fruitless perspective for the future can be imagined than the one that is being imposed on us today as scientifically necessary. A carcass around which a hungry dog made a detour would be a refreshing, appetizing morsel compared to this last excrement of creation, as which our Earth would finally fall back to the sun, and it is the thirst for knowledge with which our generation accepts such things and believes them to be true, a sign of a sick imagination, which scholars of future epochs will once again apply much acumen to explain as a historical phenomenon of the times."

If someone says something like this to us today, it goes without saying that if it is an ordinary person, they are a fool, and if it is Herman Grimm, they are a witty person who has been misled by their imagination and, because of their imaginative idealism, has been unable to penetrate the strict, exact methods of natural science. Well, yes! But ultimately, those who apply entirely correct scientific methods still need the ability to recognize where their thinking, which is derived from purely physical processes, departs from reality, and where they must enter the realm of the spirit in order to remain in reality. Then they become convinced that the greatest mysteries of nature—the beginning and end of earthly existence—lead to the spiritual, that the two polar ends of earthly development are to be seen not in Kant-Laplace's primordial nebula, not in Dewar's state of solidification, but in the spiritual-soul origin and goals of the earth. But in this one sees at the same time the spiritual-soul-physical environment of the earth that corresponds to the spiritual-soul-physical life of human beings themselves.

Cautious, serious natural scientists already sense what spiritual science wants. But today there is still little inclination to tackle things really seriously and thoroughly. On the occasion of Darwin's hundredth birthday, Julius Wiesner, a prominent contemporary natural scientist, wrote about the light and dark sides of Darwin's theories — and so much is connected with this that concerns the world today in relation to the mysteries of nature. Among other things, there is a passage referring to the aberrations and dark sides of Darwin's theory, which has given rise to so many materialistic nuances of opinion in questions of worldview. Wiesner says something like the following: The true natural scientist is well aware of the limits of his scientific approach and knows that science can provide the building blocks for a worldview, but can never provide more than the building blocks. The image is roughly accurate because, like few other images, it can be elaborated upon further. Natural science really only provides building blocks. If you take building blocks, you cannot build a house with what they themselves are. You have to take the laws of house building from outside, from the relationship of gravity, from the relationship of pressure, from everything that is not in the stones; the stones must obey other laws. However, one will then find that by building the house according to laws that do not lie in the stones themselves, one has expressed something in the pressure and weight ratios, the harmony ratios, and so on, of the house that can lead one back to similar conditions in nature itself, from which the building blocks were quarried. But the house can only be built if the stones are subjected to laws other than those inherent in them. Wiesner is quite right: natural science can provide building blocks, but they must be subjected to laws other than those found in the sphere of natural existence itself. Where are the laws found with which spiritual science builds, using the results of natural science as building blocks in the exploration of spiritual life? Just as the architect, after designing the plan of the house and constructing the house itself according to laws that are completely different from those inherent in the building blocks, the spiritual scientist, using what relates to the spiritual in nature, constructs the worldview for natural science itself according to the laws he has observed in the spirit itself. Just as one can find something in the structure of the house that leads back to the natural structure from which the stones were quarried, so too are we led back to nature by spiritual science. Spiritual science can in turn illuminate natural life, but spiritual science must not believe, and natural science must not believe either, if it understands itself, that with the building blocks and their laws themselves, with the immediate scientific results, a worldview can also be constructed for natural science.

Today's reflections may justify my summarizing them at the end in the short statement: It becomes apparent, precisely when one enters into a correct observation and consideration of the mysteries of nature, that natural science itself leads to the spirit, and that in the consideration of the spirit, the elements are also given to solve the mysteries of nature itself. Thus, as a motto for a worldview aspiration in the field of natural science and for the mysteries of nature, one can find:

Nature itself cannot shed light on itself; only the light gained in the spiritual world can illuminate the processes and essences of nature. If one wants to understand nature, one must take the path through the spirit. The spirit is the light that illuminates its own essence and can also illuminate the mysteries of nature.