Ways to a Knowledge of the Eternal Forces of the Human Soul

GA 70b — 26 November 1915, Stuttgart

2. The World View Of German Idealism. A Consideration Regarding Our Fateful Times

Dear attendees!

In our immediate present, the object of today's consideration of the human soul should be very close indeed. At a time when the essential processes raise such great questions, at the same time as everything painful and at the same time as everything uplifting, in such a time the riddle of the human soul and the question of the eternal powers that may be present in it present themselves to this soul with particular force. Even though this riddle, which is the subject of today's meditation, is of course always one that must occupy human thinking and human feeling in the deepest sense. Over many years I have spoken about the question that underlies today's reflections from many different points of view, all of which are within spiritual science, the nature and character of which I have often had the honor of speaking about. And today, this theme will be treated from a particular point of view. Much of what the honored listeners, who have often attended these lectures, have already heard, will appear again today within a certain context, but I will try to treat much of what has been touched upon over the years from a different point of view.

When the question arises as to what lies in the human soul, for example through birth and death, as something beyond the temporal, as eternal forces, then man usually thinks that this eternal in the human soul must be explored on the basis of what man finds when he looks at his soul or the soul process of human events in the world in general. As is well known, the more or less grossly materialistic or positivistic approach, or the approach that fancies itself as being strict in natural science, is opposed to such a consideration, if it comes to the conclusion that something eternal is expressed within the human soul life — human thinking, feeling and willing as they express themselves in time. It has been emphasized here often enough that spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not want to develop any kind of opposition to the great achievements of today's scientific world view. On the contrary, it wants to fully recognize the deeply justified nature of the scientific world view, that it wants to be a continuation of the scientific attitude, of the scientific way of looking at things, beyond the sensory into the spiritual. If we turn to that which unfolds in the human soul in everyday life, as the content of thinking, as the content of feeling, as the impulses of its will, then, relatively speaking, the scientific way of thinking will have an easy time of it, in the face of all that is put forward by a more or less spiritually oriented soul science. It will have an easy time of objecting. Conversely, this or that world view, which also considers itself spiritual, takes the scientific objections far too lightly. We must always bear in mind that the scientific objections that speak against a soul being that exists separately in man – against a soul being that existed before man entered into a sensual existence through birth or, let us say, conception and remains present when man has passed through the portals of death. These objections to the acceptance of such a soul-being, raised from the standpoint of natural science, which seeks to develop into a world-view, are certainly not to be lightly dismissed. For if one simply concludes by judgment, with the ordinary means of today's thinking and research, to recognize an eternal being from these or those peculiarities of the soul life, then for the one who has become familiar with, has become accustomed to, natural scientific thinking - and I say expressly, in a justified way, the objections that one might make in such a way that one says: Yes, certain spiritually oriented thinkers claim that a special soul being exists that is to be thought of separately from the physical body in man. And yet, the whole consideration, the course of human life, shows how closely connected the soul phenomena are with the physical life. One can observe how, under the development of bodily processes from early childhood, the spiritual-soul processes also develop to the same extent, as the physical changes, transforms, and - as one often also says - , although this is a relative concept; so one sees how with all of this, the powers of imagination, the powers of memory, the purposeful and the meaningful also fully develop. And when one sees that another thing develops in parallel to a certain series of phenomena, so that it also appears ever more clearly and distinctly how the first series of phenomena - in this context the physical sense world - must be there as a basis for the other, for the second series of phenomena , for the soul and spiritual, then one is justified - I would say - in thinking of the soul and spiritual phenomena as dependent on the physical body, just as the light of the flame is necessarily bound to the candle. And when we then see how the violation of the physical body in this or that form simply switches off certain soul and spiritual powers, when we can follow clinically how illnesses of this or that bodily organ, of the nervous nervous system, the brain, certain soul processes are simply switched off, then one is justified in speaking of how dependent the soul-spiritual is on the physical-bodily as a function, as a result, as one says. I can only hint at the general direction of thought that this implies, the direction of the objections that can be raised against a slightly exaggerated psychology. And we must listen very carefully to such objections in the face of the great, powerful, incisive, humanly progressive results of natural science. Yes, one can say even more. These objections, which could of course be multiplied, these objections, if one goes into them, that is, if one really learns to think scientifically, they eliminate much from the field that is traditionally put forward for the independence of mental and spiritual phenomena and for the assumption of a special soul being, for the reasons that one so often has.

Now, spiritual science, as it is meant here, is not at all based on such a point of view, from which science must be contradicted in some way. And, as we shall see in a moment, it proceeds in a completely different way from much of what is also advocated in the traditional way by the viable doctrine of the soul. Spiritual science, in a certain sense, fully agrees with natural science when natural science presents everything that it has to present through careful observation about how thinking, feeling and willing, as they reveal themselves within the human being, depend between birth and death on the physical organization, on everything that develops within this physical organization.

Spiritual science will not directly confront any of the objections or conclusions that are brought from this side against some of the things that are put forward from the point of view of a viable doctrine of the soul. For spiritual science can say “yes” to what is put forward in a positive sense by natural science. Spiritual science takes the view that everything that can be intuitively grasped about the human soul within the ordinary course of life is indeed connected — just as natural science thinks it is, and as it will think ever more clearly as as it will increasingly realize as it develops further. Everything that takes place in the soul life over the course of time between birth and death is connected to the body in the way that natural science initially thinks when it develops into a worldview. And with the means of thinking, feeling and willing, with the means of soul development, which are also those of ordinary psychology or soul science, one does not come close to that which underlies the temporal of the human soul life as eternal. The temporal of the human soul life is bound to the physical organization, even for spiritual science. Just as sound, if it is to be physically audible, is bound to the instrument and otherwise cannot be brought into the physically audible world, so the soul life that one knows first is the soul life that is present in our physical life; this soul life is bound to the bodily instrument and also depends on this bodily instrument for its properties, for its healthy and sick course.

But spiritual science shows - and here it becomes something similar in a higher, a spiritual field, to the way natural science has become under the influence of newer research directions in the sensual field; it becomes a spiritual art of experimentation, only that the object of the experiment is one's own soul-life, and that one does not perform external acts or accomplish external tasks, but that the object of the experiment is the soul-life itself. And the processes that come to light in the experiment are intimate, inner, soul processes, soul processes that all have a common character; the common character that they lead, in research, beyond that which represents the course of everyday soul life. If we keep thinking, feeling and willing within the limits in which we need them for our external physical life, then we can gradually penetrate with these thinking, feeling and willing into those regions in which the eternal of the human soul comes to revelation. The forces that we have in ordinary life must, I would use the expression, be inwardly strengthened, inwardly changed, developed into something other than what they are in everyday life, in order, when they have become something different , when they appear in the soul in a different metamorphosis than they are in everyday life, in order to then enter into those areas of existence in which that which underlies the human soul as eternal can reveal itself.

First of all, we can consider one of the basic forces of our soul life, thinking itself. This thinking, which serves us in our everyday, physical life, is capable of development. It can be developed. Just as one can bring the forces of nature under certain conditions so that, in the course of an experiment, they reveal the secrets of nature or the laws of nature, so one can bring thinking into certain conditions where it reveals and discloses something other than it can reveal in its, I might say, self-given form. For this to happen, it is necessary that, above all, this thinking is made present in our soul life in a stronger, more intense way than is good and necessary and useful for everyday life.

I have often said here that in spiritual science, this intimate inner activity is called “meditation” – it is a technical term, like another term. The spiritual researcher must strive for that intimate inner activity that thinking must undertake with itself, so that it leads beyond itself, so that a thought becomes present in the soul in a way that it is not otherwise present. And it does not matter that the thought as such is present with its content, but that the thought - I will say a certain thought, for example - is held longer than we are otherwise accustomed to. To hold thoughts in our soul, so that the person becomes aware of holding this thought, which inner activity is necessary to, if I may say so, be thinking. That is what it comes down to: to persist in thinking differently, to be thinking differently than one is otherwise in everyday life and [also] in ordinary scientific life. When you place a thought at the center of your mental life – and it does not matter whether this thought reflects something externally real or not – when you place a thought at the center of your mental life, when you are able to concentrate all the power of your mental life on this thought, to gather it in this thought, and now hold and maintain this thought, thereby developing the possibility – and this ability can be acquired through gradual practice – to see, as it were, how to hold a thought, to persevere in the power of thought. Then one experiences – however strange this may at first seem for the outer physical life, for the usual daily life, and for the usual scientific life – one experiences something special with this thinking.

The important thing is to be careful when engaging in such an inner process, and not to draw a thought that has been chosen at random from the rest of one's thoughts. For if one simply draws such a thought, there is a possibility that all kinds of things connected with this thought in the soul will come up with it. And then one can succumb to all kinds of illusions and deceptions and experience something special, while only unclear, subconscious impulses of feeling or sensation attach themselves to such thinking. It is better to take a thought that one gets from somewhere, I mean through some advice or in some other way from what spiritual science brings to light, a thought that one has not otherwise connected with one's soul life, that one can see in its simplicity , to which nothing can attach itself that deceives us – if you place such a thought at the center of your soul life and repeat it again and again: it certainly takes more than a short time, it takes months, often years, before you make even the simplest observations in this area. But it can also happen very quickly, it depends entirely on the capacity for devotion that one can develop in such an inner process. If one can now really feel this special behavior of the soul inwardly, inwardly experience it, then this experience is what gets one started on the path of taking the thinking further, of taking the power that otherwise experiences itself in thinking further than it does in everyday life or in ordinary scientific life. The special aids available for carrying out such inner exercises in the right way are described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in other books that follow on from it. The principle, the essential thing, is that the soul's inner activity is directed in a direction that is otherwise unfamiliar to it, but which is precisely the direction of concentrating on the power of inner awareness, of experiencing, which underlies thinking.

If you carry out such an exercise, which I can only ever hint at in principle, again and again, then you will indeed experience that hidden forces are present in [our soul life], forces that are indeed constantly active but that are not brought to consciousness in everyday life and in ordinary science. One does not create something new when one behaves as indicated, but one brings to consciousness what is always present. Everything depends on finding the inner composure, the inner calm, the devotion to a calm, collected mental life, in order to unfold that inner self-observation, that the indicated process, the experience of the effective powers of thought, is really something. But when one has managed to grasp that something is revealed there that was previously unknown, and when one continues to deepen this knowledge of the previously unknown, then the most significant inner processes of the human soul life will follow. Then one experiences processes that inwardly illuminate one, of which one had just as little idea as the one who has never experienced that through special processes in the physics laboratory, water can be decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen – just as little as one has an idea what is in water. In the case of the physical laboratory, these are external processes; in the case of the soul life, they are internal efforts, internal developments of strength, which bring up from the dark depths of existence what is unknown. What is brought up to consciousness brings something that those who have tried to find their way to the spiritual have always actually known. The path to the spiritual worlds has always been sought, depending on the human powers at work in the course of human development. It was found differently in different ages than it must be found today. Just as nature was viewed differently in ancient times and must be viewed differently today under the influence of the newer scientific way of thinking, so too is the path to the spiritual worlds different today; and the path that can be taken today, after the point of development that humanity has reached, is what we will discuss here in particular. But on all paths that have been taken, we repeatedly encounter the fact that That there appears, as it were, an abstract word that can be glimpsed here and there when talking about mystery beings, about revelations about the unknown worlds, about the hidden worlds. It is the word that the one who really wants to explore the powers that underlie the human being as a spiritual being must approach “the gate of death” on his path of research; that he must come close to the experience of death on the path if he is to continue on the path that I have indicated.

However simple it may appear, the essential thing does not lie in what can be described as simple, but in the effort that one makes to address the soul again and again, as has been mentioned. What one arrives at in this way is indeed something that brings one to an understanding of the ancient saying: 'By exploring the spiritual foundations of the soul, one comes to the gate, to the threshold of death'.

I will now simply describe where the indicated path leads. First of all, there is a summarizing of all soul forces, and that which is summarized there is the very particularly concentrated power of thinking. One gradually experiences this summarizing of the soul life. By summarizing the soul life, one comes deeper and deeper into an understanding of one's own human nature. This knowledge is not conveyed so much through concepts as through the experience of how this strenuous, invigorating thinking brings one into a state of mind, into a soul mood, whereby one brings something into the soul experience that, I would say, brings one particularly close to what it is to be human in the world. If one gets to know thinking on its path, then one first enters into the soul life by feeling connected, I would say, from the outside, with what the human body organization is. One learns in this way, by being led through the indicated inner soul work, being led in a new way to the human being, one gets to know something in the human being that one did not know before. One gets to know, in a living way, as wonderful as it may sound, that which is connected with the human being here in earthly life between birth and death, and which always represents the sum of those power formations that we carry within us and which, by always living in the human being, wear away at the human organism and ultimately bring about death.

What one comes to is a vivid experience of the fact that, as he has to live here on earth, man always carries within himself a sum of forces, an organization of forces, a shaping of forces, which modifies itself during life but which always amounts to actually consuming the outer physical organism. And basically, it is a harrowing experience, one filled with inner tragedy, that one comes to. One gets to know something like a second person within oneself, a spiritual person within the physical person. But this spiritual person is the one who continually consumes the physical person. And now one gets to know – just as one gets to know in a physical experiment the occurrence of some substance, some element, which can only come to light through the experiment – so one now gets to know what is actually the power within one, the activity within one, which unfolds as thinking, and everything that is connected with thinking in physical life here.

When this thinking has been taken to its furthest point in the manner described, then one learns to recognize what thinking depends on as thinking. It depends on the fact that within the complex of forces that consumes us as physical human beings, that consumes us as physical human beings, there are such forces that underlie thinking. And one learns to grasp the great truth that thinking depends on those forces that gradually consume the human being and even bring about his death. We become familiar with the close connection between thinking — we start from ordinary, everyday thinking, we only take it to an extreme point, so to speak — and the destructive, consuming forces of the human being. We make the discovery of the relationship between death and the highest thing that we are presently unfolding in the physical world, namely, thinking. That is why this experience is so harrowing. We cannot help but fully acknowledge the point of view of spiritual science in the living inner experience of natural science.

In this living inner experience we learn that we are actually only able to think because we have brought the dying forces to a special point of development, beyond the rest of the living world. But this creates a special inner mood in the spiritual researcher. It produces in him everything that arises from inner experience: with your thinking, as you can develop it here in the physical-sensual world, with this thinking you are bound to the physical body. As long as this physical body can endure being used up, being used up by certain formative forces, so long can you develop your thinking!

But then, once one has had this experience, it becomes clear that there is indeed a second person within the human being, a person who, in this physical existence, uses up the outer human nature, but who is a complete being; a second person within the human being who, just as he lives in our physical existence, lives by devoting himself to consuming, using up the physical organization. We do not produce what we experience here through thinking; we learn to observe it. We come upon something, so to speak, and at the moment we come upon it, we notice that it is always there in the human being. We come upon something; we discover this inner human being in the human being. But we also discover that this human being has nothing to do with the particular external bodily organization, but that it is active within it. That which underlies the bodily organization, and indeed that which consumes its forces, can only be discovered by pushing the ordinary life of the soul beyond itself. In this way, one discovers a second person within the person, who initially has the peculiarity of consuming the ordinary physical life. But it is precisely in this consuming that it performs the activity that forms in our ordinary life as a thinking activity from within.

But one also notices, and this can only be the result of observation, of the observation that one acquires in this way, as it has been described, but one also notices that what is gradually consumed in the physical life of the physical human organization, that it has also built it. That part of the human soul life that has gone through birth or conception in order to clothe itself with the physical body organization can only be experienced. And when one has taken experience this far, as has now been outlined, one does indeed gain insight into human nature to the extent that one can say: You have discovered within yourself that which, consuming, allows your thinking to shine forth during the life between birth and death, but which has also brought you into this bodily life; that which, before you came into existence as a thinking being, built up your physical organism for thinking.

During physical life, one always uses up thinking power, and one discovers that this power was present before thinking illuminated its first thoughts; that this power has been transformed into the power that produces thinking. But before it was transformed, it was there, because nothing in our world simply comes into being, but is transformed. That which underlies thinking before thinking has ignited, it has first built up the organism that is expressed in thinking, which it in turn removes in thinking.

And so we look beyond birth or conception into that which has entered the physical world from a spiritual world. But in the process of investigating this, I would say that what is connected with the experience of the soul's attitude is that, as long as you live between birth and death, you are bound in your thinking to the fact that this second human being is active within your physical organization. You are connected with it.

And the harrowing thing is that when you get to know the inner experiment from this side, as it has just been described, you have no prospect: where does this power go when it has consumed the physical body? At first one can only imagine it in connection with the physical body. One only knows that it is indeed the power that has brought the human being into the sensual world, into sensual existence; but how it is to go out into the spiritual world when the human being comes to death, how it is to enter the spiritual world again, one cannot yet have any experience of that. One can grasp in the indicated way how, I might say, the path of development has proceeded from the spiritual in order to build up this human being, and to bring him to the point where what has been built up is again taken away, and in this taking away the magnificent property of human thinking appears. What can be called meditation, what inner concentration, must now be developed in a completely different way if one wants to progress. It has been emphasized that the inner soul processes have been brought to a special development, to a special development of thinking, through this first experiment that I have indicated.

But one can also bring about a special development of the soul life, to a development that leads beyond the everyday and the merely scientific life, by now not developing thinking but the will, the will that underlies what enables us to go through life actively. We speak of this will in our everyday life, in our ordinary scientific thinking. But in speaking of it in this way, we do not in any way encompass everything that lies in it. Just as thinking has the hidden side that I have just described, which leads to such an end point as I have indicated, so will also has a hidden side, only this turns out to be quite different. In order to get to know the basis of the will, it is not enough to simply develop the will as it accompanies us in life when we are active; one must, so to speak, develop the possibility within oneself not only to do, not only to be active, but to be active with a much higher part of one's soul life than one is accustomed to in everyday life. One must be able to connect one's will more inwardly with the will impulse than one usually does in everyday life. One can get into the habit of this inward concentration of the will, in contrast to the earlier concentration of the thoughts, by contracting the life of the will, by creating moments, creating instants - they certainly do not have to be long, but they must be repeated again and again if the performance is to bear fruit - when you create moments in which you withdraw from the external world and look inwardly at the world of your desires, at the world of your longings, at the impulses of your will that you can unfold, at those impulses of your will that you can bring together with the great goals of humanity in such a way that they shine in the soul when the ideals of humanity shine for us – in short, when we can engage with our will inwardly in such a way that we can bring this will more strongly into the field of attention than we can when we direct this attention to the outer form we give to the world. By letting these or those impulses of will flow out into what one is doing, when, for example, one reflects in such a way that one says to oneself, “You did that” and then tries to recall the impulse of will that was involved. When you look back on your deeds in life and pay attention to how the volitional impulse has [been incorporated], when you look at how you have willed, how you have directed the volitional direction, in short, when you become intimate with the forces of will.

I will say something else that seems quite simple in its characterization: But all the fruit of the work depends on the human soul organization being led again and again into such activity, into such an experience, as it has just been indicated, as a concentration of will, so that one actually experiences what can be experienced in this way: that one experiences, as it were, a new birth within oneself; that one feels oneself permeated and strengthened by what previously escaped one's attention, by a new human being; again by a new human being, but now by a human being who lives through one like an inner will-person.

But that is not the important discovery. This inner warming and illuminating of oneself, this inner strengthening of oneself with the will impulses with which one has become familiar, with what the will can be in a person, what pulses into our actions as will, this inner interweaving, this inner becoming familiar, this ultimately leads to a development of the will, so that one makes the discovery: There is something in the will, like a germ, like a seed in him, which is always there, which is there when one acts in everyday life, but which escapes one, to which one does not pay attention, which remains unconscious. But it is there as a living entity, but as an entity that in turn must evoke a very special mood of the soul, because it is again a kind of shattering experience. If you have encountered the experience of death in the way of the special development of thinking that I have characterized, in the way that I have characterized it, in the way that you vividly imagine it, in the way that you vividly experience it—in other words, if you develop the will, you learn to recognize something else: One learns to recognize the essence of human suffering, the essence of pain, in vivid contemplation. For one does, in fact, live into the essence of pain; into the essence of that pain which is a deprivation directly intensified to the point of vivid experience. Because that which one, like a germ, like a seed, knows how to give birth to out of the will—by having experienced it—proves to be that which, in one's present life as a human being, has no place, no position.

You have the experience that arises when you have said to yourself – and you have to say this to yourself, because it imposes itself on you – then you feel: There you are with your physical organization, with what you can experience with people in general, there you stand in this life. What you have experienced through what you are, in that you are a human being of will, has produced in you a germ of will, an inner, now newly transformed human being. But this human being is inadequate for what you are now in the present. It is so inadequate that, when you become aware of it, it represents something like a knife piercing the skin.

Of course, because it is translated into the physical, it is only meant symbolically. But one gets to know how suffering is caused by something that belongs to an inner being coming into conflict with the outer form of that being, with what happens on the outside. One sees that what one can carry out here in life is basically inappropriate to what develops within as a seed of will.

Just as something that destroys the body is, I would say, inappropriate for the human organization, so is what now develops as a will germ – one cannot find a better name for it at first – as a will seed; which is always there, as unconscious pain in the depths of the soul.

But it is a harrowing experience when one discovers this capacity for pain, this possibility of pain in man. For all particular pain, all particular suffering, is of the same kind as this suffering that one discovers.

Spiritual research is not something that proceeds in such an abstractly uniform way as external research, but it is something that is connected with human feelings and inner experiences that go to the depths of life.

So the nature of suffering is learned in this way. And so one gets to know, side by side, that which is death-bringing in man and, as a death-bringing force, unfolds the most glorious powers of thinking; one gets to know that which lies in man as suffering at the very foundation of his soul and that which lives in the powers of the will; one learns to recognize that this will would not be there if unconscious pain did not lie at the bottom of the soul. But one also learns to recognize, by bringing these two poles of otherwise unconscious soul life to one's consciousness, so to speak, one learns to recognize how they belong together. And one learns in their sight - and one can only learn to recognize it through spiritual experience, one can only learn to recognize it through spiritual experience - one learns to recognize how the one must be seized by the other, so that what must be separate here in the physical life of man so that [the human being] can develop this physical life between birth and death, and that which must be separate here must mutually enrich each other, must come together so that the human being can pass through the gate of death and enter into a spiritual life after death. Because what one learns to recognize in this way is that what we have come to know as this second human being, who contains death within him, can be redeemed from the physical organization of the body.

That which can have a redeeming effect on this second human being is the will seed. And when the former, the human being who has united with death so that death slowly consumes life – when this human being is released from the physical body, when the physical body no longer serves him, then the moment has come when the will seed can take hold of this human being, and what that which otherwise only carries death, is developed into new life, which now enters the spiritual world, and carries into this spiritual world everything that the person has developed as an impulse of will, what he has brought to life in himself by being a being that wills with the senses. And also that which we develop as our most intimate soul life, for it too is connected with the will. The will radiates out into the whole soul life. What we develop through this subconscious seed-being of the will takes hold of our image-bearing human being, who has carried us into physical existence, and carries him out again, so that the human being can now pass through the spiritual world between death and a new birth. For the life that now begins after death begins in exactly the opposite way to which physical life begins here.

Through spiritual science, one can get to know the elements that make up this life. But try to see what could be characterized as the content of this living being that goes out into the spiritual world through the gate of death. What is it? It is that which one experiences when one has brought one's thinking to the utmost extreme, which – I would say – as the very, very end of the perspective of thought, the thought perspective, presents itself to the soul.

And with this, the element of will unites, that which, only in a different form of consciousness, is that which we carry with us through death. And if we now compare what we carry through death, which is initially the content of consciousness, with what we develop in our human life between birth and death, it is the case that in ordinary life we initially develop the outer physical form; only from this does consciousness emerge. However, as has been indicated, spiritual science has shown us that this physical body organization has only just been built up.

So, through birth or conception and death, we follow what the eternal forces of human nature are, which must be brought into the field of research through training, through the elevation of consciousness. Now, in this spiritual science, we are doing exactly what someone who wants to get to know the full extent of plant life does. What does he do? He sees how this plant life unfolds in the flower, in the fruit, in the seed. He then follows how from this same seed, which develops at the summit of the plant, a beginning arises, and how the beginning develops again, and he sees that the end and the beginning is the seed.

Thus, by bringing out of the consciousness that which passes through the gate of death, that which is the fruit of this earthly life, we see it in such a connection with what, as a seed, as a beginning, underlies earthly life. And we see, as we look out through the gate of death, I would say, the seed of a new life, we also see this seed coming to fruition in the life that begins here on earth. But this develops the prospect of repeated earthly lives.

What appears so grotesque to people today, but which Lessing, in the dawn of the newer spiritual life, sensed in such a wonderful way from German culture, the idea of repeated earthly lives, which Lessing's spiritual life at the end in his literary testament on “The Education of the Human Race”, to make this the scientific result, that is the task and possibility of spiritual science, in that spiritual science grasps that which works in human nature as the eternal.

And so we can say that what can be grasped as eternal is quite unlike even the most astute philosophical concepts that have been used to try to grasp the eternal in human nature. The mistake that has been made in this area, dear attendees, and which, so to speak, exposed this science of the soul, as it was, to all the challenges of natural science, which had reached such a high level of perfection, the mistake that was made, was that one kept thinking that one had to posit something more or less finely substantial – even if only as refined matter, as a refined substance – but as something in the external life that could be experienced, as the basis for the life of the soul. The mistake was that one sought the life of the soul in a stationary being, to which, as it were, the soul phenomena adhere. For that which one presupposes in the life of the soul as such soul substance cannot be found in reality; the phenomena of the soul detach one from the results of natural science. One must rather live in these phenomena of the soul and that which one then finds is a purely spiritual life, containing the eternal powers of the human soul. A purely spiritual life that can only be grasped in the consciousness of the human soul. Just when one is so thoroughly accustomed to the simplest ideas of natural science, one sees what, of course, very few people can see today: the full agreement of particularly meaningful scientific concepts with such research in the spiritual and soul realm.

Perhaps you, dear lady present, know how the entire state of motion, the force and direction, pass from one billiard ball to the other. It is precisely by knowing how the same state, which is in one, passes into the second, that one can direct the motion and direction of the two billiard balls. It would be a mistake, which of course becomes blatantly obvious, to imagine that something inside one billiard ball jumps over into the second. Nothing material, nothing substantial passes over, but nevertheless the state that passes over is determined by the state of the first ball. It is something that is completely unrelated to what happens to the first ball in the immediate sense.

So you have to detach everything that you think of as the eternal powers of the human soul from what you can somehow imagine as substantial, and what you can somehow imagine as being contained in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. It must be developed purely in consciousness. For that which is carried into the spiritual worlds is consciousness; for they are indeed nothing but elements of consciousness. And what an ordinary pantheism, for example, cannot grasp is that it is precisely consciousness that passes through the gate of death. And so how - this thought could now indeed be carried out in the widest sense, for spiritual science is capable, with its means, as I have already often indicated, as it can in later lectures, to also pursue the realm of the supersensible worlds further, to show in detail - how now this human soul between death and a new birth develops those powers again: Just as the seed develops and unfolds the forces of the new plant, so, when passing through the purely spiritual world between death and a new birth, it unfolds that which a human organization - corresponding to the forces of the previous human organization of the previous life on earth - will in turn develop in a new life on earth.

We look beyond the individual life on earth to the repeated lives on earth. And through what has been described as an inner soul experiment, through that, it is really strictly transferred - corresponding to the scientific attitude and the scientific way of thinking - to the spiritual side of human life.

As unusual as the results of the natural scientific way of thinking were to people relatively recently, so that everything that was accustomed to old ideas resisted them – as unusual as these ideas were, so unusual are the results of spiritual science for present-day thinking, of course. But anyone who follows the development of truth through the development of mankind and gets to know the laws of the development of truth can imbibe the awareness that just as the scientific way of thinking has worked its way through against all opposition, against prejudices and against all opposition, spiritual science will also work its way through.

Of course, to someone who believes that they are firmly grounded in natural science, the spiritual-scientific world view, as it often appears today, must seem much more paradoxical than Copernicanism seemed to people who, in their earlier way of thinking, believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and that this universe was bounded at the top by the blue vault of heaven. I have said this here before. But what these people had overcome: to believe that the celestial world in which they live is bounded at the top by the blue firmament – how these people had overcome it and how they had convinced themselves that this blue firmament is actually no boundary, that the spatial world is infinite, that worlds upon worlds are embedded in space; how they came to know that this blue firmament is the product of their own imagination, which only extends to that point – in this way people will learn that what presents itself in the life of the soul between birth and death is only limited between birth and death because human imagination itself initially limits itself. Such a spiritual firmament exists, but it is actually a nothing. Beyond birth and death, the powers of the human soul lie embedded in the infinity of time. And just as world after world can be observed in space, so human life after human life can be observed in the infinity of the succession of time, some belonging together, some developing apart.

Of course, anyone who, through what he recognizes as the results of spiritual science, is imbued with the truth of these results of spiritual research, can very well understand how opposition to this spiritual science must develop even today. Better than others who do not stand on the ground of the spiritual researcher, the spiritual researcher can understand when someone, after perhaps hearing for the first time or at the very beginning what seems so grotesque, perhaps so foolish, so fantastic, - if he has heard it, if he says afterwards: It is really strange, what grotesque fantasies, what swamp flowers of the human imagination emerge today in our so-called progressive culture! Such opposition can be understood quite well, as one could understand everything that was raised against Galileo, against Copernicus and their world view. – Which, of course, is not meant to suggest any kind of historical comparison.

But not only what has just been mentioned, but also many other things come into the horizon of human consciousness, so that what otherwise strikes our soul like an inexplicable riddle of life becomes explicable.

Let us see how spiritual research leads us to these concrete results: that there is a second person within the human being who, as it were, carries death. When we see this, then we can also approach such a result with – I would like to say – an abnormal life riddle.

And today, when presenting spiritual-scientific results, one need not shrink from putting forward something that might seem rather wildly fantastic to one or the other, even if one is completely serious about such research results.

Human life does not end only because this inner man, whom I have described, gradually consumes life in order to connect with the will seed, go through the portal of death, and make preparations for a new life in a spiritual world between death and new birth. We see such deaths a hundredfold, a thousandfold happening around us in our present time, which forcibly end a person's life from the outside, by making a person a victim of a great, meaningful context. Then we see that what there is as a formative context, like a second human being - but one who, so to speak, ceases to be alive between birth and death, so that he can only just come to life at the moment of death through the seed of will - like this second human being, before his life cycle on earth is complete, before he has brought forth out of himself in thought everything that he can develop as thinking in the way indicated today, that this second human being separates himself from the physical body.

Then we have the remarkable fact that the outer physical organization is torn away from the second person, that is, through outer physical connections before time, by a bullet or the like from the outside – this must of course not arise through one's own decision – as happens to so many flourishing human lives in our present time. That the outer physical organization is taken away from the second human being, that what is enlivening connects with this second human being, with the human being of death. In other words, we see that which had the potential in physical life to express itself as further thinking, to enter the spiritual world prematurely. But it is the same in the spiritual world as in the physical world. As we know it for the physical world, since we have learned about the law of conservation of energy, how heat is produced from work, how work is transformed into heat, how everything is transformed, nothing actually comes into being in the sensory world, but everything is transformed – so it is in the spiritual world. That which was present in terms of forces, so that these forces could have continued to live out for a long time, remains present, but it changes. And now arises – as I said, I will say it again: it may seem quite paradoxical, quite strange, quite wildly fantastic, but it is an honest product of the way of thinking that develops on the ground, which I have tried to characterize from a certain point of view with a few strokes today – for those who honestly research in this field, other phenomena arise in addition to the premature deaths that arise in this way in human life.

Is it really so strange, esteemed attendees, that through the kind of research that has been characterized here this evening, that through this kind of research a connection is created for our observation, for our consciousness, between the expanding physical and the spiritual world? And is it not clear to any reasonably thinking and feeling person that spiritual elements are constantly entering our physical world, that these spiritual elements support and enliven physical life? In a particular area, we see, I would say, a beneficial influence of the spiritual on physical human development, for the sake of human progress.

When we consider human life as it has developed from historical epoch to historical epoch, we see that the way in which human beings create out of their powers is composed of two elements. One kind of power we acquire through being educated as children, through our powers being developed, through our gradually acquiring them; so that we know exactly what we have done, either what the educator has done or what we have achieved through self-education, through self-discipline, in order to arrive at this or that development of the soul's powers.

But there is another realm of powers to which we as human beings are particularly grateful, feeling that a completely different world extends into these powers.

And when I speak of these forces, I do not have in mind only the forces that arise in the great, divinely gifted geniuses, but rather, every person needs something of this in the simplest of life situations – even if only a small part of it is present in many - of what we call the creative powers of genius, those powers of which we know we have not acquired, but which, as we say, have been “poured into us by divine grace,” have been “bestowed” on us. We have them in that they are within our nature, permeating us as our divine heritage. Whether we seek out these powers in the simplest human being who needs them, or whether we see them manifesting themselves in the creations of great geniuses for the benefit of humanity – these powers are there. They represent a penetration of spiritual elements into the continuous mental life of history, in that the human being's will unfolds in historical life as it works through genius.

And when the spiritual researcher, having developed his soul to such an extent that he can now observe this phenomenon, such as the experience of the forces of genius, with the opened spiritual eye, which he receives when he can observe such, as has been indicated, then a special connection arises between the forces that work in a genius and the sacrificial deaths, the martyr deaths. Just as in direct observation one finds the seed of will in the individual human soul life, which invigorates that which is a carrier of death in the individual human physical organization, so one notices, when one looks with the soul eye, which has been trained through meditation, as it has been described, on the connection between what wants to live out in history as ingenious forces - to use this expression - one notices the connection between these forces, which appear as ingenious, and what has ruled as sacrificial deaths.

As mysterious and wonderful as this connection is, it is a connection like that of cause and effect. One learns this, which is still so unusual for today's human conception of the world, one learns this, that one can look with respect to the divine, wisdom-filled connection in historical life as well. One learns to recognize that sacrificial deaths, martyrdoms, and the early withering away of human life form causes. Behind the sensual and intellectual connections, it is revealed that these sacrificial deaths, these martyrdoms, merge into the effect of those abilities that express themselves as ingenious abilities in the course of human development, thus gradually revealing the mysterious.

And just as one recognizes that which is also presented in nature as an effect of a completely different kind in its connection with the completely different cause, so one gets to know cause and effect in the individual human life, insofar as it is rooted in its eternal forces and passes through birth and death, but also that which stands in the historical context.

And so it is that a view is opened up from the perspective of spiritual science on the significance of such eras as ours is. In a completely unbiased, by no means forced way, it results - I would like to say - an inner understanding of what happens in such eras. And an inner understanding arises as to why causes must be created through sacrificial deaths for something that will later arise in human life as forces that will serve the welfare and progress of this human life.

Truly, by getting to know the connections of human life through spiritual science, understanding spreads to much that is otherwise incomprehensible and painful. The basis of the hopes that now permeate the Central European population is an infinitely wide field of pain and suffering.

Now spiritual science is truly not suited to make people dull-witted by trying to console them in a trivial way for their pain. We have just seen that suffering must be recognized as one of the elements that lead the human being into the spiritual life, on the basis of the soul. By becoming acquainted with the eternal forces of the human soul, which it passes through the gate of death under all circumstances, by becoming acquainted with the significance of those forces, which have been left unconsumed in life, of people who pass through the gate of death through an early death, by seeing them in a great historical context, so that he can say to himself: If a dear friend must also die, the wise guidance of human progress requires me to do so. When a person says this to himself, he certainly encompasses this rule of wisdom in all world phenomena. But it must not be taken as a trivial consolation, as a banal consolation. The individual pain that we feel is justified; the individual suffering that permeates our soul is justified; we will indeed learn to be strong in suffering when we are given a glimpse of the world that spiritual science shows us; we will be strong in suffering. We will learn the meaning of suffering, but we will not be tempted to dull life by trying to console ourselves in an easy way. Not flattened, but rather deepened, is all joy, but also all pain in life, when we get to know the depths of life through spiritual science.

I have only been able to hint at how man can find the way by being led to look at the processes in spiritual life in an equally clear - one might say scientific - way, as in today's time the outer natural processes are looked at. And it is a completely different way of looking at things, which must first develop out of the human soul.

The best who have lived in the development of humanity have pointed to this way of looking at things. Our time is called upon to draw humanity's attention to this way of looking at things, to incorporate the results of this way of looking at things into cultural life. What Goethe called the eyes and ears of the spirit, and what develops out of the spiritual organization of the soul just as the physical eyes and physical ears develop out of the bodily organization, is meant. It arises in the same spiritual and soul-like way that the bodily organization arises in a natural way. And when it is said in this context that the human being's ability to perceive clairvoyance and clairaudience must be developed so that he can look into the spiritual world, it must never be forgotten that what is meant here as truly spiritual-scientific clairvoyance and clairaudience is the complete opposite of what is so often referred to as clairvoyance or even clairaudience. The spiritual scientific result is already inclined, dear honored attendees, to be belittled by many people, in that there is talk of special, slumbering abilities in the soul, through which the eternal powers of the human soul can be explored. And it is indeed something that is the result of the scientific attitude to refer what in the ordinary, trivial sense is called clairvoyance and clairaudience to the realm of hallucinations, to the realm of illusions, and in any case not to seek paths that lead into the spiritual world through the development of such abilities, which in ordinary life are called clairvoyance and clairaudience. Here too, I would like to say, spiritual science is completely in line with the healthy scientific method of research, because those abilities that really unfold as new soul abilities on the path that has been indicated today, and which, as I said, can be found in detail in the books mentioned, are spiritual abilities; they are abilities that the soul develops precisely when it becomes independent of the body, when it is no longer active with the help of the bodily organization. While that which can occur in ordinary life, morbidly, as hallucination, as illusion, consists precisely in the fact that it is, as it were, the caricature, the shadow image, of true clairvoyance, of true clairaudience. Yes, spiritual science leads us precisely to recognize that the right way to know the spiritual worlds is to unfold the forces that can fight the ordinary clairvoyance, the trivial clairvoyance in man, so that it does not show itself, that which is usually known as clairvoyance.

For the clairvoyance that has been spoken of today as the true clairvoyance can only be known through the paths indicated. The clairvoyance that is commonly known consists precisely in the fact that its powers are developed within the physical body; that they are powers that come into existence precisely because the spiritual has a stronger destructive effect on the physical than in ordinary thinking. Ordinary thinking represents the normal: how the second human being works and must work destructively so that human life can develop in the right way. The development of so-called clairvoyance, which goes into the hallucinatory, the illusory, the visionary, is shown by spiritual science [as described by me here] to be something that must be characterized: that this second human being develops stronger destructive powers. But what can be experienced in this caricature, in this shadow image of true clairvoyance, is much more intensely connected with the human being in time than ordinary thinking, everyday thinking, is connected with this human being. If a person, through coming to morbid hallucinations, to morbid illusions, to some often admired education of the soul life, then that which can be brought into his soul in this way is something much more fleeting than the ordinary, fleeting ideas and things of life. One can only reach the eternal powers of the human soul when thinking and willing have been developed in the indicated manner to a higher level, to a supersensible point, not to an infra-sensible one.

There is an inner connection, dearest ones, between what I said yesterday and what I am saying today. Although I am not referring to anything that has emerged in the development of world views over time, , this that has been developed today nevertheless has a certain objective connection with what was discussed yesterday, with that which was linked to the world view of German idealism. Not in a connection that would necessarily result logically, let me now point out the relationship of what was considered yesterday to what was considered today. The connection lies rather in the feelings that can flow into our souls today. Therefore, I apologize if the transition to the conclusion today is not chosen with strict logic, but rather chosen in such a way that it is formed out of the feelings that must bless us today if we are feeling human beings, if the transition to the conclusion is formed out of these feelings.

Yesterday we saw how German idealism expresses a striving, so that one of its leading figures, the most nationalistic German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, seeks a strong development of the will element, which, progressing from moment to moment, creates the human ego. And now we see, within the scope of the world view of German idealism, a striving that emerges directly, as described yesterday, from the substance, from the spiritual substance of the German national character; we see a striving that points to meditation of the will. World history has for once established the fact that the soul can follow a path that we today call meditation of the will.

And if we look at the other pole, at Hegel, within the world view of German idealism, we see in his thinking - which takes logic so far that even the world spirit, with which the human ego wants to unite, becomes a pure logician - we see this thinking taking the path that only needs to be followed further. And this thinking does not lead to where it led Hegel at a certain point in his psychology, but it leads into the very weaving of the spiritual life to which Hegel did not yet arrive, but to which his striving leads if it is continued with this energy. And in a similar way, Schelling – indeed, every personality who develops within the true world picture of German Idealism – also stands in relation to what the spiritual researcher must today consider the path to spiritual science itself. This is how world-historical events present themselves to us, and our time will excuse us for drawing attention to these world-historical events. Wherever one may place oneself in the spectrum of world spiritual culture, wherever one may look for something that so intensely represents a striving that can only find its continuation in spiritual research, one does not find it in such an inwardly intense way as in the world view of German Idealism.

One sees that which, out of the need of developing humanity, the spiritual researcher must strive for today; one sees it shining forth as in a kind of dawn in Hegel's pure thinking, in Fichte's meditation on the strong will, which even within Fichte himself has come so far that Fichte once spoke of the sense by which one investigates [supersensible] things, which could be recognized just as little — as Fichte expressed himself to his audience in his last Berlin lectures, which he gave — as the sense of ordinary people needs to be recognized by the blind, as color is recognized. If we allow this thought to penetrate our soul, we can arrive at a further development of the thought, which may mean: If we try to understand spiritual research today, as an element that must be dear to us if we want to introduce it as a new element into the spiritual progress of humanity , one tries to characterize it properly, and one finds it justified in its necessity, historically justified, when one looks back at the development that the German national spirit took at that time, when - as was indicated yesterday - the world view of German idealism was most gloriously, most highly developed. It seems as if the German national spirit itself, through the personalities characterized yesterday, fell into meditation in order to make the first approach to something that will carry the future, and so what is being achieved on the stage of German idealism. Does not this German idealism, does not this meditation of the German national soul, speak to us in such a way that we have to say: it carries within itself the forces of many far-reaching future developments?

Does the fact that the German national spirit, the German national soul, has developed such meditation over time, has taken such an approach to something that presents itself as the seed of a fruit of the future, does that not mean that the vitality, the ability to live, the moral strength of the German national spirit, of this German national soul, is present? Do we not already see the seed germinating into what must be the fruit of the future? Can it be allowed to perish through a world of enemies, that which bears fruit by the very fact that it contains them as seeds? That which is predisposed, which therefore bears within itself the necessity of its development, will develop, will form itself in the world, even if its existence is contested by enemies who rise up against it.

Thus the German national spirit in every feeling German soul feels itself united with the forces that live into the future, and thus it hopes for its development in the future, thus it hopes for its victory over all opposition, thus it lives full of confidence in the future in every German who can feel this.