Freedom, Immortality and Social Life

GA 72 — 23 November 1917, Basel

3. Anthroposophical Research Findings on the Eternal in the Human Soul and on the Nature of Freedom

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which will be discussed here again, as it was discussed in the lectures a few weeks ago, is still perceived by many people in our time as one might perceive — one could make the comparison — an uninvited guest within a society. At first, of course, one behaves quite dismissively toward an uninvited guest, if one must regard him as such. Other scientific currents, other branches of science, are, due to the already recognized needs of human beings, quite simply, I would say, invited guests in the spiritual striving of humanity today. However, if one then realizes that an uninvited guest has something to offer that one had lost and that can be very, very valuable in a certain respect, then one begins to treat the uninvited guest somewhat differently than before. And this is basically the situation of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It has to speak of the spiritual and soul goods of humanity which, in a certain sense, have been lost to modern civilization in a quite understandable way and which must be brought back. They have been lost because, during centuries and millennia of historical development, humanity had a certain instinctive recognition of what is at stake here; humanity can no longer preserve this instinctive recognition in the same way, and has even lost it to a certain extent.

Just as humanity could not remain with the medieval worldview of the Earth standing still and the heavens and sun revolving, so too could humanity not remain with the old instinctive knowledge about the nature of the soul and thus about the actual core nature of the human being. And in the lectures I gave here weeks ago, it was my particular task to explain how, in a comprehensible and justified way, the scientific way of thinking has taken possession of people's souls, how this scientific way of thinking is spreading more and more, and how it must increasingly influence the entire cultural development of humanity. But this scientific knowledge, as clear and vivid as it is, is not suitable for revealing to human beings the secrets of their own soul nature, especially if it wants to remain strong and powerful in the field assigned to it. And this scientific conception has the peculiarity that it can no longer accept the old instinctive insights into the soul, that it destroys them, so to speak.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants, in the same way as natural science in its field, to consciously illuminate the spiritual realm through regulated knowledge and thus consciously restore to human beings what they have lost as instinctive knowledge.

Certainly, those who today still regard anthroposophy as an uninvited, unwelcome guest will, precisely for that reason, regard it as a most welcome guest – such is the hope of those who are involved in this spiritual scientific endeavor – when they have realized that it brings the knowledge, the insight into a lost treasure of life.

If we look at the various representations of the human soul and its nature that have appeared in the period since scientific thinking began to exert its profound influence, right up to the present day, we see that two of the most important questions that were characteristic of the old science of the soul have virtually disappeared from this newer, scientifically influenced science of the soul. Admittedly, a whole series of other questions are connected with these two main questions; but these others are, so to speak, included when attention is focused on these two main questions: the question of the eternal in the human soul, the so-called question of immortality, and the question of human freedom. I have spoken in recent lectures about the extent to which the question of the eternal has had to disappear more and more from the field of view of newer considerations, as far as science is concerned, and I already remarked at that time that my task today would be to deal with the question of the soul, as well as can be done in a lecture, from the point of view of at least a sketchy consideration of human freedom.

When natural science extends its way of thinking to the soul, it must first focus its attention on the extent to which the soul has its basis in the physical body of the human being. However, this natural scientific approach is entirely dependent on causally observing the course of external processes, including the course of mental processes, as they occur over time. When natural science becomes a theory of the soul, it can only consider the soul in the closest connection with the body. The body, however, belongs entirely to the material, physical context of the external world. For this context, the scientific way of thinking finds lawful connections in a magnificent form. But these lawful connections lead us away, not toward, a consideration of the two main questions about human soul life that have been indicated.

To give just one example: as natural science increasingly took possession, so to speak, of the consideration of the life of the soul, it also attempted to apply the laws that were so fruitful in its own field to the consideration of this spiritual realm. In doing so, it cannot help but look at how human actions, human impulses of will, and everything that human beings undertake from their souls flow out of physical experience. She must conduct experiments in her own way, as she is accustomed to doing in her field of natural science, and she feels, rightly so in a sense, deeply satisfied when she finds in her experiments that the life of the soul in no way breaks through what has been established by natural science for external natural life. One need only consider such things as the experiments conducted by physiologists and biologists to determine the amount of energy that humans and animals absorb through their food; and then, in turn, the amount of energy that humans and animals develop when they undertake spiritual expressions in the world. Rubner, the biologist and distinguished researcher, conducted experiments with animals in which he showed that everything that manifests itself as energy in the movement and actions of animals is nothing more than the calculable conversion of the food energy that is absorbed. And Atwater has conducted experiments that show how this law also applies to humans, how everything we expend in terms of movement and the like can be calculated numerically as the product of what we take in materially with food as energy and then transform into heat and the like within ourselves.

Thus, based on its way of thinking, natural science also traces spiritual life back to the so-called law of conservation of energy. From its point of view, it cannot help but say: Where should something spiritual intervene of its own accord in the workings of the human being, creating something new as if by miracle, when it can be proven that everything that is expressed outwardly by the human being is only a product of the transformation of what the human being in turn absorbs from the world? If human expression is what the body has absorbed, then the law of conservation of energy, which has been so significant in natural science since Julius Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, and so on, is fulfilled. Nowhere does a new force appear; everything that appears as an expression of force is only a transformation of what already exists. So we cannot say that when a human being performs a so-called free, arbitrary action, it comes from his soul, because then a new force would join the forces that are already there, as it were out of nothing.

Those who have become accustomed to scientific ideas naturally perceive this as a completely coherent train of thought. And because this is so, because natural science achieves such great and impressive things in its field, anthroposophy, which seeks to extend scientific rigor to the spiritual realm, naturally has a difficult position to defend. But not in a few abstract sentences; rather, I would say, through the whole spirit of what I have to present in these lectures, it should become clear that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is by no means in contradiction with natural science, but that, on the contrary, it fully continues and develops natural science, even though it takes the path out of the realm of sensory observation and into the observation of spiritual life.

However, it encounters countless prejudices. Those who live within anthroposophy know best how captivating prejudices can be and how they inevitably arouse opposition to anthroposophy. One could say that there are sufficient reasons to object to and oppose the very way in which research is to be conducted in the field of anthroposophy – if one is prejudiced enough to recognize them. For “proofs” as we know them in ordinary science and ordinary life are certainly present within anthroposophy; but they must be held and understood in a certain way that is different from what we call “proofs” in ordinary science and ordinary life.

Above all, in ordinary science and ordinary life, it is a matter of having before us what we want to investigate. No one can deny that the world of the senses is spread out before our senses, that it poses questions to us.

In a certain sense, this is not the case in anthroposophical observation. Here, the world itself must first be revealed, so to speak, in the same way that the world of the senses would be revealed to a being from the lower order of organisms if it were to develop further and acquire senses. To the same extent that the being would acquire senses, the sensory world would open up to it. Then, when the sensory world opens up to it, its existence is proven. Therefore, much — not everything — of the proving power inherent in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will depend on the realization that The preparatory work in one's own soul, which the spiritual researcher has carried out in order to first arrive at the world he is observing, is justified.

In other sciences, one works on a certain basis, and only then does spiritual activity begin, only then does the soul begin to process what it has to process. In anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the soul must work first, and its work is not something that devises laws about other things, but rather something through which it prepares itself to observe what the spiritual world is actually about. This leads us to the conclusion that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science requires something that is so reluctantly acknowledged at present: that as soon as it is a matter of gaining insight into the supersensible, the abilities in the soul that can see this supersensible must first be awakened, must be brought out of the soul. But just as, in the course of evolution, lower organisms that do not yet have certain senses develop such senses from their still undifferentiated organism through their interaction with the outside world, so it is possible to develop abilities from the undifferentiated human soul that lead to the perception of the spiritual world in the same way as the physical senses lead to the perception of the sensory world.

I will not go into the development of these soul abilities today. In many lectures I have given here over the years, including in recent lectures, I have presented some principles about the development of such abilities and about bringing such abilities to the fore. Today, I would simply like to refer you to my books on this subject, namely my work How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds and my Secret Science, which shows what the soul must do in order to attain the ability — which is entirely attainable — to perceive the spiritual world. It can only attain this ability if it makes its inner being independent of the physical body. In order not to repeat myself, I will not talk today about how such abilities are attained. I would just like to mention a few of the peculiarities of this spiritual path, which leads into the supersensible realm to which human beings belong.

I would like to express a truth about this path to the supersensible that may seem strange at first. The spiritual researcher must develop abilities in the soul for a kind of knowledge that relates to things which, basically, every self-respecting human being would like to make the object of their contemplation, if they were not prevented from doing so by scientific or other prejudices. The eternity of the soul, the nature of human freedom, and everything connected with it—these eternal philosophical questions of humanity—are questions for every human being. Ancient instinctive knowledge has dealt with them. Newer spiritual scientific knowledge must follow a path of knowledge that relates to something that is, so to speak, desired by every self-respecting human being. But the paths that must be taken in order to penetrate this supersensible realm through real knowledge are less loved, are downright rejected. And not merely rejected in prejudice, but, I would say, rejected by certain peculiarities of human nature itself. And here the following comes into consideration.

When we form ideas and concepts, we are accustomed to basing them on something that exists, on something essential that approaches us independently of these ideas and concepts. We stand in the world as sensory beings in connection with what exists, about which we form ideas. As human beings between birth and death, as human beings who live in the body, we are not in direct connection with that to which supersensible knowledge refers. Therefore, this supersensible knowledge must draw on a greater power of the soul, a far higher inner energy than the knowledge of the ordinary sensory external world, which always comes to our aid because it is there from the outset. This inner strengthening of the soul life, which consists in particular in the awakening of higher cognitive abilities, this bringing forth of active, not merely passive, cognitive powers, is something that many people shy away from, something that appears to very many people, precisely because it does not relate directly to a being, as something fantastical, as a mere figment of the imagination. It is perfectly understandable that those who do not penetrate to a deeper understanding of the matter take the ideas and concepts of spiritual science for figments of the imagination, because they are accustomed to accepting as real only those ideas for which what exists, what is real, as it is called, is already spread out before the senses. But what interests people most about the supersensible world, what lives on beyond their own being, beyond birth, or let us say conception, and death, what is not exhausted in this sensory world and in the life of this sensory world, must be grasped in such ideas of supersensible knowledge. These ideas must be drawn from the great depths of the soul. The soul, accustomed to pursuing the sensory world and penetrating it scientifically with certain laws, is weak in comparison to the soul that must summon the powers of cognition in order to look into the supersensible world through them. Not how they are explored, but how they are related to each other, these powers of cognition, is what I want to talk about in today's lecture.

Human beings are accustomed to forming an idea of something that is happening in reality, so to speak, and then they have an image of something real; they can then remember it; it remains with them as a memory. This is a peculiarity of our ordinary imagination, a peculiarity that actually gives us security in life, that we feel able to retain what the outer world presents to us. When the spiritual researcher draws from the depths of his soul those powers that enable him to look into the supersensible, then it is so that in “seeing consciousness” — as I have called this ability in my book “The Mystery of Man” — he is able to take a look into the supersensible. But if he were to try to preserve what he has seen, what has appeared before his soul in the same way as anything else he has experienced from the outer sensory world, through memory, he would initially make a futile attempt. Experiences of the spiritual world, experiences that relate to the eternal, to the immortal nature of our soul, can be recognized through supersensible powers of cognition; but they cannot be incorporated into memory in the usual way; they are, so to speak, immediately forgotten, like a dream fleetingly rushing through the soul.

Now you may say: What then of these insights? Can they really be regarded as nothing more than the results of a fleeting dream? —- One must say: In a certain sense, absolutely! But the following now applies: In order to have such insight into the supersensible, one must prepare the entire human soul in a certain way; one must bring about such an inner state of mind each time anew, before which spiritual vision can occur. What one does in the soul as an activity, what one undertakes in the soul in order to look into the spiritual world, can be kept in memory, can be remembered. So once you have gained insight into this or that event in the spiritual world, into this or that being of the spiritual world, you will have known what exercises you must perform with your soul in order for this spiritual vision to occur. If, after some time, this spiritual vision is to occur again, you must create the same conditions in your soul. You can remember these conditions. What one sees must occur again and again. This is a major difference from ordinary knowledge.

Paradoxical as it may sound, the spiritual researcher is not in a position to experience something once, then learn it by heart, so to speak, in order to be able to bring it to life again and again in his soul like a memory. No, if he wants to encounter the same spiritual being or the same spiritual event again, he must bring about the opportunity within himself to experience it anew. As strange as it may sound when the spiritual researcher speaks of the most elementary truths — I would like to say: on five consecutive days to any community, to any audience — and he wants to speak in such a way that what is said is directly expressed from spiritual experience, then he must have this spiritual experience anew each time.

What I mean to say is that one of the most important laws, a special characteristic of our spiritual experience, is this: while our sensory perceptions seem — and this is only an apparent case — as if they could reappear later from memory, as if they were a spiritual possession, this is not at all the case for the practice of spiritual knowledge. Spiritual insights must always be acquired anew and anew.

Why am I discussing this in particular? I would like to draw attention here—as I have often pointed out—to the fact that the acquisition of spiritual science, the path of spiritual research, is by no means a necessity for everyone who wants to engage with spiritual science in the modern sense. Certainly, there is a general tendency today to want to experience for oneself, to a certain extent, what one believes to be true; and in this respect it is justified that those who hear about spiritual science and its results also ask: How can I arrive at such things myself? However, the essential thing in man's relationship to spiritual science is not at all that one becomes a spiritual researcher oneself. For the path of spiritual research is one that only gives something to life, and also to immortal life, when what appears in spiritual vision is transformed back into ordinary human concepts, such as we also have for the sensory world. The spiritual researcher might be a highly developed being in terms of supersensible knowledge, but as a human being he would have no special advantage over other human beings through this spiritual vision; for everything that enters into this spiritual vision is only a means, not the goal. The goal is to transform what is gained through spiritual vision back into workable human concepts, into those ideas that we have just gained from the outer sensory world, even if much of what we express through such ideas gained in the sensory world must sound figurative.

If, therefore, someone — let us say hypothetically — did not want to become a spiritual researcher at all, did not want to follow an inner path at all, then he could take from the spiritual researcher what the latter finds through his research. The results he arrives at are understandable in themselves, if one is sufficiently unprejudiced. And the possession of these insights in ordinary human imagination — not in supersensible vision — is what constitutes the real treasure of life. The spiritual researcher would gain nothing from his spiritual research if he only wanted to revel in supersensible vision and be blissful; that would be something much more transient, much more temporary than the ordinary external sensory results. What matters is that what is transient in the soul, the vision of the spiritual, is transformed back into viable human ideas. These are then communicated to the soul; they are what the soul can take with it when it passes through the gate of death from this sensual life into another spiritual life. Spiritual vision as such cannot be taken along, only what spiritual vision brings. And just as a spiritual researcher communicates from the spiritual world what can be transformed from such ideas, how this can become a benefit for oneself, so too can it become a benefit for others who are not spiritual researchers themselves, but who understand things only from the perspective of common sense, which is quite capable of doing so.

This must be said with all clarity, because even many people within the anthroposophical movement have the prejudice that what matters is to withdraw from life and immerse oneself in a completely different, mystical darkness of the soul. That is not what it is about. What it is about is that through certain activities of the soul — as I said, you can read about this in my writings — what is true for the supersensible world is found, and that what is found can then be transformed into ordinary human concepts, which, however, are still rejected by people today because they believe that these concepts cannot be penetrated by common sense. But they are comprehensible, and in the course of time people will realize that they are comprehensible.

If, nevertheless, there is a need today for everyone to want to look into the spiritual world to a certain extent, this is justified in life. Literature meets this need. And it corresponds to a demand of our time to not just believe, but to see for oneself. However, as I said, this is not the main thing at stake. And when I describe in detail the path of knowledge through which one enters the spiritual world, it is firstly to meet the needs I have just mentioned, but secondly, and more importantly, because the spiritual researcher himself must see it as his goal to give an account of the way in which he has arrived at his truths. Then, however, those who read a work such as How to Know Higher Worlds or the second part of my Occult Science can see from the way in which the spiritual researcher describes the path of spiritual research that this is not a matter of fantasy, but of a real, actual entry into the supersensible world. They can, in a sense, see how an account is given of a reality.

This is something that must be said in relation to the fact that, in many respects, the evidence that the spiritual researcher has to provide must be presented in a different way than ordinary evidence. The spiritual researcher must demand that the comprehensibility and validity of the path he indicates step by step, which leads into the spiritual world, be recognized. But when he nevertheless emphasizes such a special characteristic feature of spiritual vision as the one just mentioned — that looking into the spiritual world does not correspond at all to our ordinary soul life — then this is done precisely in order to characterize the supersensible world into which one enters.

For ordinary soul life, I said, it is a characteristic peculiarity that we retain in our memory what we have once taken in from the sensory world; this does not apply to spiritual vision. By saying something like this, one points out that standing within the spiritual world is something quite different from standing within the sensory world. One points out, as it were, the peculiarities of the spiritual world; one shows that, through spiritual research, one enters a world that is not connected to our body in the same way that the sensory world is connected to it. When we perceive the sensory world with our body, it connects with us in such a way that we can retain what we have perceived in our memory. The spiritual world is so distant from us physically that it does not cause the changes in our body that lead to memory. This is precisely a peculiarity of the spiritual world that must be taken into account. And the correct recognition of this peculiarity is proof that spiritual vision places us in a world that has nothing to do with our physical body, that it is entirely justified to say: While everything that is perceived in the body evokes memories to a greater or lesser extent, what is perceived when the soul is outside the body, as in spiritual vision, does not evoke memories precisely because it only enters into a relationship with our supersensible soul, not with our body.

So, in order to illustrate a peculiarity of the nature of the spiritual world, something like this is mentioned. And other peculiarities that arise before the spiritual researcher when he enters the supersensible world are mentioned for the same reason and in the same sense. In the ordinary physical world of perception, the situation is as follows: if we repeat an idea over and over again — how much of education is based on this! — then it becomes more familiar to us, we can retain it better, it connects better with our soul. The opposite is true for what we experience in the spiritual realm. As strange as it may sound, one can say that if I have a spiritual experience and try to have it more often, it does not become easier, but more difficult. One cannot practice having spiritual experiences better and better.

There is something very peculiar about this. There are people who make efforts to gain insights into the spiritual world through certain soul exercises. The powers gathered in every soul, which are located in the depths of the soul and directed toward the supersensible world, are thereby called upon. As a result, a blissful, perhaps often magnificent experience occurs, which I would describe as dreamlike and temporary. Even if the person concerned has made efforts to recreate the same soul conditions, which can even have a stronger effect, it is not necessary for them to recur the second or third time. One can say quite literally: a true spiritual experience flees from us once it has been there, and we have to make stronger, more considerable efforts if we want to bring it back.

Those who have made the initial efforts are often surprised that a very significant spiritual experience does not arise again and again from the soul. I mention this also to show how the experiences that the spiritual seeker has when approaching the supersensible world are completely different from the experiences one has in relation to the world of sensory perception.

Another peculiarity is this: as one advances in spiritual knowledge, one senses that one must master the events that appear spiritually before one with the mature state of one's imaginative life, if one does not want to arrive at phantasms, at all kinds of fantastic ideas. One must therefore realize that preparation for spiritual vision is of very special importance. One must already have developed the most mature, versatile, and penetrating powers of imagination possible in order to be able to master what one encounters in spiritual experiences. This is quite different from experiences in the ordinary realm of sensory perception. There, this realm of perception is spread out before us; we gain more and more ideas from this realm of perception; we enrich our ideas from it. After we have had the perceptions, we enrich our ideas. With spiritual experiences, it is the other way around: we must first make our ideas rich and varied so that they are prepared when we want to have supersensible experiences. You see something completely different from what is in ordinary life and ordinary science.

What I wanted to suggest is that the path into the supersensible realm is one that leads us into a completely different experience, a completely different way of experiencing and perceiving than what we have in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Many people today still shy away from this other way of perceiving, from this completely different way of having concepts and ideas. And what spiritual science will have to go through is this: above all, it will depend on people finding the courage and strength to form ideas that are not, I would say, supported by what we do nothing for, to which we contribute nothing: by the already existing external world of perception.

However, it is primarily the scientific way of thinking that forms these ideas. And since it has achieved great success in its own way, it has for a time led people away from spiritual knowledge. It will, in turn, lead them back to this spiritual knowledge precisely because of its peculiarity. Precisely because it points to the material and because people are increasingly seeing through the material, they will be compelled to recognize that the spiritual must be sought in a different way.

I would now like to use certain research findings from spiritual science to show how human knowledge will become something completely different when anthroposophically oriented spiritual science gradually intervenes in human work toward the goals of knowledge. Those of you who are here today and who hear me speak often know that I am very reluctant to talk about personal matters. But I may make one suggestion, because it is connected, in a sense, with what I have to say: What I have set out to say about the relationship between the human spirit and soul and the human body is, for me, the result of more than thirty years of research. For in the spiritual realm, things are not gained by having some object or process in front of you, as in a laboratory, from which you can deduce what can be said about it once you have developed the method. Spiritual research is primarily a process that takes place over time. And it is a matter of only arriving at certain things when one is able to relate experiences that are separated in time to one another.

The transition from ordinary scientific knowledge and ordinary consciousness to spiritual scientific knowledge can initially be compared to listening to individual tones without musicality and to perceiving melodies or harmonies with musicality. When you hear a single tone, it is a perception of that single tone; it is a single experience. If you want to enter the world of music, the single tone must be related to other tones, and it only becomes what it is by entering into a relationship with other tones. In ordinary sensory perception, the soul enters into a relationship with a sensory external world, with a material external world. This can be compared to the perception of a single tone. In spiritual cognition, the soul must enter into a relationship with that which unfolds in time. I would just like to suggest how important it is, for example, that the spiritual researcher is able to experience what he or she is experiencing today, say, today, not only as an individual event of immediate present existence, but that he is able to relate it to an experience that may have taken place a year ago, just as one note of a melody is related to another note of the melody if a musical concept is to exist. Just as we connect with something outside ourselves through ordinary perception with the soul, so in spiritual experience we first connect with the present experience, but then relate it to what has been brought up vividly in the soul from the past. One looks at a present experience from a point in the past; then again from an experience further back in time. In this way, by looking within time, the soul experiences are structured so that one can say: ordinary cognition becomes something like a musical overview of the soul.

This also enables the soul to take in more than just what it experiences in the body. It brings together what it experiences and what can be remembered between birth and death—just as the ear relates one musical tone in a melody to another— when it has the inner “musical” conception of the soul's existence, it relates this present soul life, which takes place between birth and death, to what lies before birth, or let us say before conception, and what lies after death. But the soul must prepare itself for this by relating individual experiences within the life between birth and death to each other like the notes of melodies, not merely perceiving the individual experiences, not merely living through them, but extending the experience over time and in time, truly experiencing the various gradations, the various differentiations as inner music.

What then occurs is not only inner music, but something like inner reading or listening to words, where one not only hears tones that enter into melodic or harmonic relationships with others, but also expresses a meaning that lies within them. Then, for the spiritual researcher, something will arise that I can characterize by saying: Ordinary scientific observation looks at things as one would look at a printed page, describing only the shape of the letters, the lines and angles between them, and the sequence of letters. Applied to nature, as natural science does, this is natural science. It is a description of the letters. The spiritual researcher learns to read. He detaches himself completely from what is merely reading letters. And what he finds in nature as supersensible relates to what is spread out before the senses in nature, just as the meaning of what is read and heard relates to the individual mere sounds that form the words, or to the individual letters with which the paper is printed.

But this essentially depends on an inner progress, which one can also achieve if one is not a spiritual student oneself, but only takes in the concepts and ideas that are gained through spiritual research. One learns to know the world, as it were, in its actual harmonious sounding and resonating; one learns to recognize the meaning that lies behind this, comparatively speaking, “sounding” world.

In this way, over the course of more than three decades of spiritual research, I have come to understand something that I would like to describe as the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporeal, something that will certainly also emerge in the near future in natural science, which today is still far from hearing such a thing. For spiritual research and natural science will meet, spiritual research from the spiritual side, natural science from the material side. They will meet, like workers digging a tunnel, if they are properly oriented, meeting in the middle from both sides.

What I have to say has been found through spiritual research. But even today's natural science, physiology, and biology offer sufficient opportunity to fully corroborate what I now have to say as the result of spiritual research. In discussions and considerations of the connection between the soul and the body, people today indulge in what I would almost call a fatal one-sidedness. Anyone who picks up a book on psychology or spiritual science today will see that it always begins with a discussion of the nervous system. From a scientific point of view, this is entirely justified today. It is fair to say that natural scientists can do nothing other than relate the spiritual one-sidedly to the nervous system alone. A comprehensive view of life reveals something quite different. A comprehensive view of life shows that only part of the soul experience can be directly related to the nervous system, namely the life of imagination. So we can say: Everything in our soul experience that is the life of imagination finds its — let's use the term — physical counterpart in the nervous system. The nervous system is the foundation, the carrier, the physical carrier for the life of imagination.

But not for the life of feeling. Emotional life is treated very shabbily by natural science psychologists who want to conquer psychology for natural science. Theodor Ziehen — rightly from his point of view — does not consider emotional life in the soul to be something independent at all; he speaks only of the “emotional emphasis of ideas.” Every idea has, so to speak, an “emotional tone.” This, of course, contradicts the most common psychological experiences. For ordinary psychological experience, emotional life is as real as the life of ideas. It is not merely a question of some “emotional tone” of our ideas, but rather that emotional life develops alongside the life of ideas. If one relates this emotional life as directly to the life of the nerves as the life of ideas, one commits an error that is still quite understandable today, but no less so for that. For just as directly as the life of imagination is connected with the life of the nerves, so directly is the life of feeling — strange as it may sound today — connected with all the rhythmic processes in our organism that are dependent on and limited by the rhythm of breathing and its continuation, by the rhythm of the blood, by the rhythmic inner movements; whereby, of course, we must not think only of the coarse rhythm of breathing and blood circulation, but also of the finer ramifications of the rhythmic system. We must think of what rhythm and rhythmic movement are when we seek the physical, bodily basis for the life of feeling.

I am well aware that hundreds of objections may arise when something like this is said. I could really list all these objections. But I would like to mention just one, simply to give an example of how one must approach these things — more precisely, much more precisely than “exact” science demands — if one wants to recognize them in their true form. For example, someone might say: Well, here comes someone who amateurishly explains that in order to be physically present, emotional life directly affects the rhythmic movement of the body in the same way that the life of the imagination affects the nervous system. Doesn't he know that, for example, when we experience a musical impression, we take it in through our ears, that it is therefore first conveyed as an idea, that the aesthetic experience lies in this life in the musical idea, that it is therefore nonsense to say that the feeling, which is of course connected with a musical impression, is not a result, a consequence of the life of ideas?

I know that for today's way of thinking, this objection must actually be universally valid; in reality, it is not. We just have to be clear that what we take in as the sound image through our ears isn't yet the musical experience. It only becomes a musical experience when the sound idea is met by what reaches the brain as the ramifications of the breathing rhythm from the breathing process. In the encounter between the rhythm that rises from the breathing into the brain, into which the sound image penetrates, we have the physical counterpart to the musical impression. Everything that is emotional life is originally physically connected with the rhythmic life in our body.

Thirdly, there is something we have in our soul: the will. Just as imagination is connected with the life of the nerves, and just as the life of feeling is connected with the rhythmic interplay of forces emanating from the breathing rhythm and the blood rhythm, so all volition in the human organism is connected with the metabolism. As strange as it may sound, all processes of will are directly expressed in metabolic processes, just as all processes of feeling are expressed in rhythmic movements, and all processes of thinking and imagination are expressed in certain nervous processes. I have drawn attention to this in my latest book, Von Seelenrätseln (Mysteries of the Soul), where I have had these scientific findings printed for the first time, albeit in a shorter form, as is appropriate given the current paper shortage.

If one wants to understand these things, one must realize that nervous life, rhythmic movement, and metabolic life do not exist side by side in the organism. The nerves must also be nourished, of course. So that nutritional processes are constantly taking place in the nerves. All organs of rhythmic movement must be nourished. All these individual members, these three members of the organism, permeate each other. But precise, truly exact research shows us that what is metabolism in the nerve, for example, has nothing to do with imagination, but has to do with the process of the will, which also extends into imagination. Of course, if I want to imagine something, I want to imagine it; if I focus my attention on imagining, that is already an unfolding of the will. This germ, which is connected with the will, is also connected with the metabolism in nerve life. But the essence of imagination is connected with processes that have nothing to do with metabolism, but, on the contrary, have to do with a breakdown of metabolism, with something in the nerves, yes, which can be compared — the comparisons will still be paradoxical, spiritual research is something young, new, and must first gradually become established in people's minds — which can be compared not with metabolism, but rather with the withdrawal of metabolism, with the emergence of hunger. But the point is that we are dealing with a breakdown in the nervous system, which must not be confused with the breakdown in the whole organism.

Such confusions have occurred. And it is precisely by pointing out such confusions that I will be able to emphasize the specific characteristics of the newer anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in contrast to older spiritual currents that are still recognized as valid today. Who would not know that what the new spiritual science, as it is meant here, seeks to achieve through purely inner soul processes that have nothing to do with anything physical, was previously attempted to be achieved through means that had a great deal to do with all kinds of physical activities, with all kinds of ascetic practices. One need only recall how certain mystics achieved union with the spirit through certain processes of starvation, through asceticism, that is, through the breakdown of the organism. This is not a path that has anything to do with true spiritual research in the modern sense. But this spiritual research must point out that a breakdown, which is not abnormal but normal, does take place in the nervous system if the life of imagination is to find its expression through the nervous system. And in the lecture I gave here weeks ago, I pointed out how the consciousness experienced in the life of imagination is connected with death. I even said the following sentence here weeks ago: As we imagine, we continually die into the nervous system.

Only when such ideas are developed will natural science be able to encounter spiritual research. And so — I can only hint at this, as there would not be enough time to present a wide-ranging view in all its details — we must say: On the physical side, the threefold soul life, the life of imagination, the life of feeling, the life of will, is connected with the whole body, not just with a part of the body, not just with the nervous life, but with the whole body; for the whole body is involved with its three organic members: the nervous life, the rhythmic life, the metabolic life. Our soul life is not connected to our nervous life in a one-sided way, but the whole soul finds its full expression in the whole body. This is a conclusion that spiritual science has reached in its research: that the life of imagination, feeling, and will have their counterparts in the body.

But just as these three members of human soul life have their physical counterparts, so they also have their spiritual counterparts. Just as the life of imagination, even for the natural scientist, is increasingly linked to the nervous life on the physical side, so it is linked to a supersensible knowledge, as I have characterized it today and as you can find it characterized in my books, with a spiritual life that can only be grasped in certain inner experiences, which I have called in my writings: imaginative cognition. This is the first stage of spiritual cognition, the first stage of looking into the spiritual world. Just as we find the nervous life as a physical counterpart to the life of imagination on the one hand, we find on the other hand the life of imagination emerging from a spiritual realm that can only be grasped through supersensible perception, namely through the first stage of supersensible perception, through what is known as imaginative cognition. In a reality that lives itself out in images, that lives itself out in images of the drama of knowledge, we see what corresponds spiritually to the life of imagination. And in this, what corresponds spiritually to the life of imagination, when it is grasped through supersensible knowledge, we now have before us at the same time that which, in a temporal sense, pervades our entire existence as the image-forming body from birth, or let us say from conception, until death. While our substance is constantly changing, while it is constantly being replaced, from birth to death we retain the uniform formative body, which is at the same time the spiritual basis of our life of imagination.

This is the first supersensible member of the human being, which is connected with the life of imagination in the same way as the physical nerve life is connected with it on the other side.

But let us consider the life of feeling. On the physical side, it is connected with the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation; on the other hand, it is spiritually connected with a spiritual essence that can be grasped at a higher level of spiritual vision of supersensible knowledge than imaginative knowledge, through what I have called in my writings inspired knowledge, the kind of knowledge that no longer needs images but rises into the supersensible world without images. But if what is the spiritual origin of our emotional life is truly understood through supersensible knowledge, then it is that in our spiritual being which does not merely extend from birth to death or from conception to death, but which is our own. It is in the spiritual world before we enter physical life through birth and with which we pass through the gate of death; for to truly unite spiritually with what underlies the life of feeling means to extend one's spiritual vision beyond what goes beyond birth and death.

And — it is paradoxical again, but precisely in the field of anthroposophy, because things are new, some paradoxes arise for this reason alone – just as our life of will is connected on the physical side with metabolism, so on the spiritual side it is connected with the highest that we humans can now attain in spiritual vision, with what I have called intuitive knowledge in my books. This does not refer to the ordinary, vague intuitive knowledge that is usually spoken of, but to what is characterized in my books as intuitive knowledge: I have called the real living into the essence of the spiritual world intuitive knowledge. This encompasses what spiritually underlies our human nature as the highest.

And something remarkable occurs: while metabolism — if we want to use these terms at all — is the lowest aspect of the physical side, conversely, that which corresponds to the will on the spiritual side is the highest aspect underlying our being. And what we must regard as the highest between birth and death, the nerve life that corresponds to the life of imagination, is based on the lowest aspect of the spiritual world, namely that which can be attained through imaginative knowledge.

For human beings themselves — I would like to explain this again here, although I may have already pointed it out years ago — one thing in particular becomes clear when they learn about the relationship between their spiritual-soul life and the spiritual life that can be grasped through intuition. But I can only characterize this in the following way. What I am characterizing here is not only something that is experienced in spiritual vision, but something that every human being who understands the results of spiritual research through common sense can experience. If one truly takes in these results of spiritual research, learns to recognize what spirit is, experiences in the soul what spirit is, then this means something special. This event can be described because it touches the soul in a very special way, this event that awakens our inner consciousness for the first time: now you know what spirit actually is, what the eternal in your soul is; now you know it.

This experience can only be described as an inner experience of destiny. Under certain circumstances, one's entire human life changes, takes a different direction under the influence of this experience, which manifests itself in the knowledge of what spirit is within one. This does not mean that one becomes less sensitive to other experiences of destiny. Certainly, in the outer life in which we find ourselves, we experience events that make us jubilant, events that make us deeply sad; we experience happiness, uplifting moments, blissful moments, and we experience sadness and devastating moments. The spiritual researcher does not need to become dull to this. On the contrary, he becomes more sensitive to it because he also sees through the spiritual side of it all. But whatever happens — even though he is experiencing life in the same way as someone who is not a spiritual researcher — whatever comes his way in his outer life: a major turning point in life, a more significant fateful situation, is the intervention of what is the experience of the spirit, of the eternal within oneself. This teaches us how to bring about our own destiny, for we must bring about spiritual knowledge through our own powers, just as we bring about changes in life, in that spiritual knowledge becomes a question of destiny of the very highest order.

This also brings one to an understanding of the rest of human destiny. But it also brings one to a full understanding of what intuition is. Then one realizes how human will is connected to the spiritual side. And then, through such a destiny that breaks into the life of the soul, one evokes a power that leads supersensible knowledge not only to what takes place in life between birth and death, and not only to what takes place in life between death and a new birth, but to what is the eternal spiritual core of the soul and what also occurs in repeated earthly lives. What a person brings forth in the innermost core of their being, they then learn to recognize as connected with the impulses that were present in earlier earthly lives. And what they now experience as fate, what they now experience by carrying out their own actions, becomes, when this knowledge has become fate, the basis for subsequent earthly lives.

Through the connection of the threefold soul life — the life of imagination, feeling, and will — with the nerve life, the rhythmic life, and the metabolic life, one comes to know the transitory nature of the human being. Through the relationship of these three soul elements to the spiritual, one learns to know the immortal, eternal, which passes through births and deaths, so that one can survey this complete human life, which indeed runs in successive earthly lives and in the intervening spiritual lives between death and a new birth.

In this way, one sees into what is eternal in human life, unlike through philosophical speculation. Unlike mere conceptual analysis or synthesis, spiritual research seeks to lead us into this eternal realm by evoking a vision of it. What we are as temporal, physical beings is formed out of the eternal, which consists of the imaginative, inspired, and intuitive parts, just as our physical being consists of nerve life, rhythmic life, and metabolic life.

These are some of the research findings that have been hinted at concerning what emerges as the eternal in the human soul. Only this eternal, only that which is independent of physical life, can be said to possess what we call human freedom. The natural scientist must remain within the experience that takes place in the transitory: in the nerve life, in the rhythmic life, which he does not yet investigate from this perspective, and in the metabolic life, which he still confuses with the nerve life, seeking in the metabolism what underlies the nerve life. The natural scientist must remain within this material life. Therefore, he also finds something for every act of will that brings about this act of will. But if one learns to recognize what works as eternal in the human soul, if one learns to recognize that this eternal has a content in itself that is independent of physical life, then what is experienced inwardly and soulfully as human freedom becomes a reality. Why?

Well, I have just explained in the last lectures and in today's lecture that a process of dismantling must take place within us, that consciousness is in a certain sense similar to death, that it is a dying into the nervous system when we come to conscious perception. This shows spiritual research that everything that belongs to the soul being is not an outflow of the physical being, but that the physical being is only the basis for the soul experience, and that this soul experience finds its basis in physical life precisely when this physical life does not develop its growing, progressive forces, but when these growing, these progressive forces are broken down. It is processes of regression within us that underlie conscious soul life.

Natural science will find that these truths just stated are entirely consistent with the findings of natural science. I would just like to point out, as an aside, that nerve cells, for example, are not divisible, whereas reproductive cells are divisible. The abilities that are peculiar to growing, progressive cells are precisely what are broken down in nerve cells, and are broken down for the same reason in red blood cells. What develops in conscious life does not correspond in the body to a plant-like progression, growth, or procreation; it corresponds to a regression, a reduction of life. So that where conscious life is to develop within us, bodily life must first be reduced, the processes that particularly serve bodily life and its functions must recede.

Spiritual life is recognized in its independence by spiritual science. But this is what gives the concept of freedom its meaning, and it becomes completely compatible with the concept that natural science quite rightly develops in its field, namely that everything that occurs in our actions, in our impulses of will, must be caused by our organism. These scientific ideas are entirely justified. But the organism, by serving consciousness more and more as a basis, leads to serving this consciousness as a basis precisely by suspending its processes, by receding from conscious processes.

This gives the concept of freedom a meaning that we can express comparatively in the following way: The child is certainly physically the result of the parents; but it detaches itself from the parents. If we look for the causes, we must look for them in the parents. But when the child has grown up and acts independently, we will not always have to go back to the parents for its actions and for what it is. When the child does this or that after it has reached the age of thirty, we do not go back to the parents for the causes. The child breaks away from its parents and becomes free. In the same way, spiritual life eventually detaches itself from physical life, so that the law of conservation of energy is fulfilled in all causality. But just as the cause in the child lies with the parents, yet the child grows up to be independent, so the soul life develops independently of the body, in which the causes of the soul life lie.

I have thus pointed out, by way of comparison, how the concept of freedom acquires meaning when we approach it from another angle and seek to explain this soul life in a real sense: not merely in relation to physical conditions, but in relation to the independent spiritual life that passes through births and deaths. It is to this spiritual-soul essence of the human being that we can attribute freedom. Freedom has always been treated in philosophy in such a way that one spoke of either/or: either man is free, or he is not free. By approaching the question of freedom solely from a philosophical perspective, I have already shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1894 and now out of print but available for consultation in libraries, that the concept of freedom can be grasped by considering the independent life of the soul. However, this independent spiritual life is only gradually attained in the course of physical human development. One cannot say: Man is either free or not free. Instead, one can only say: Freedom is something that man acquires in the course of his development, something he approaches more and more — by supplying the inner spiritual-soul being with the forces that strengthen this being within itself so that it can develop causality for human action, for human will, yet, on the other hand, from another direction, this causality lies in the human body.

A strange contradiction, isn't it! On the one hand, it is claimed that everything that human beings put into their actions must come from the human body between birth and death; on the other hand, the independent, free life of the soul is claimed. I would like to clarify what this is about by means of another comparison. Let us assume that we have a space that we can evacuate, i.e., the space under the receiver of an air pump. We can allow air to flow into it if we make an opening in the air pump; the air flows in after we have made the opening.

In this relationship, which must first be found, stands the free human decision to what is a human, willed action. Spiritual research will reveal that when human beings follow not merely the impulses of their instinctual life, but what I have called in my Philosophy of Freedom the purely spiritual impulses, which one must first struggle to attain, then they do not allow the will that is expressed outwardly through physical causes to be carried out immediately. Certainly, free action also takes place in such a way that physical causes are present. But these physical causes are first prepared in such a way that the free concept, the free idea, creates a spiritual cavity, as I create a cavity under the recipient of an air pump; and just as it then necessarily follows that the outside air flows in through an opening, so the action that is conceived entirely in soul forces by our soul is followed by the effect on our body. And just as the air flowing in from outside flows into the empty air space according to purely natural causes, so the body then carries out, in accordance with its laws, which are now purely scientific laws, that which was first prepared in it by the foundation being laid through the free decision of the soul.

We will have to build on this concept of freedom in tomorrow's lecture, and I will then elaborate on it further. I wanted to culminate today's discussions by pointing out the concept of freedom, culminating in the fact that spiritual science shows how the concept of freedom is only conceivable when one rises through spiritual research to a soul life that is truly independent of physical life. Only from what spiritual science recognizes as the intuitive, inspired, and imaginative part of the human being does free action arise.

What then, under the influence of spiritual science, emerges for the social and moral concepts that are so crucially important for our present, to which so much points in relation to renewal, in relation to the exploration of what confronts us in this tragic present, what results for concepts of law, and for external human community life in general, will be discussed tomorrow. Today I only wanted to show that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can certainly stand alongside modern natural science in terms of the seriousness and precision of its research, but I also wanted to show how completely different paths must be taken for the spirit if it is to be recognized in the same sense as nature is recognized by natural science, but how spiritual research itself also sheds light on nature, how spiritual research shows that the whole spiritual-soul human being is related to the whole physical human being, according to the nervous system, rhythmic life, and metabolic life. Precisely because spiritual science will work in harmony with natural science, something great will be able to emerge for the progress of humanity.

People will gradually stop talking about how it is downright shameful for modern people to still recognize real spiritual knowledge. Not only are there prejudices today when spiritual science is mentioned, but it can already be said that many people today are so inclined that they are downright ashamed to believe that they are falling into an old superstition when they acknowledge what has been presented as the nerve center of today's presentations.

People today like to refer to Goethe. In my last lecture here, I said that if it were up to me, I would prefer to call the spiritual science I represent “Goetheanism” and the building in Dornach dedicated to it “Goetheanum.” I say this again in view of the fact that today there seem to be quite a few people who consider themselves enlightened, people who want to stand fully on the standpoint of present knowledge, who say: Yes, Goethe was also one of those who wanted to think of nature as something all-encompassing.

But even as a young man, Goethe did not regard nature as something that could be exhausted by such ideas as those held by today's prevailing monistic or similar worldviews. Instead, even as a young man, Goethe addressed nature in his prose hymn, also entitled “Nature,” saying: “She has thought and continues to ponder.” Spiritual science is the least concerned with words. If someone wants to call that which consists of matter and spirit in the world “nature” and seeks only spirit in nature, then he may call the entire universe “nature”; if he goes as far as Goethe to say: Nature thinks and reflects constantly — though not as a human being, but as nature — then for such a thinker as Goethe, the concept of spirit is already contained within the concept of nature.

And to those who would like to derive from this recognition of the concept of nature a concordance between Goethe's view and some view of the limits of knowledge, that one cannot penetrate the spiritual world, it must be replied again and again, as has already been mentioned here in earlier lectures, that Goethe said to a very distinguished physiologist, the physiologist Albrecht Haller, who also — from his point of view, quite rightly — uttered the words:

«No creative spirit penetrates
into the innermost depths of nature.
Blessed are those to whom
it reveals only its outer shell!»

that Goethe protested against this natural scientist, protested so strongly that he made it clear through this protest: Man can find within himself those powers of knowledge that present the spirit to him not only as something unfathomable, but as something into which he can gradually enter through diligent, truly intellectually precise research. For Goethe objected to Haller's words, which have just been quoted, in his old age, I would say, on the basis of mature insight:

“No creative spirit penetrates the innermost depths of nature.
Blessed are those to whom only the outer shell is revealed!”
I have heard this repeated for sixty years,
and I curse it, but secretly;
I have heard this repeated for sixty years,
And curse it, but secretly;
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
It is everything at once;
Nothing is inside, nothing is outside,
What is inside is also outside, —
Just examine yourself most of all,
Whether you yourself are core or shell!

These are the words that point us to true Goetheanism, which consists in recognizing the possibility of penetrating the spirit of the universe with the human spirit and recognizing the immortal and free nature of human beings.

How infinitely necessary this is, and how infinitely necessary it is in these tragic times to turn our gaze to such ideas that come from spiritual research, for our practical life, which has brought itself into such catastrophes, I would like to speak about that tomorrow, in order to show that spiritual research is an uninvited guest only for those who do not recognize any other needs in human beings than those that can be satisfied by mechanistic knowledge. If we learn to recognize other human needs—those human needs that are clearly indicated by the signs of the times, especially today in these tragic times—then we will also recognize the necessity of spiritual research in the social and moral spheres.