Freedom, Immortality and Social Life

GA 72 — 30 October 1918, Basel

7. The Essence of the Human Soul and the Nature of the Human Body

In this lecture, I would like to present a picture of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say about the most diverse areas of life, and today I will start with some of the most significant findings of this spiritual science for understanding human soul life and its relationship to the essence of bodily life.

It seems that this science of the soul must gradually provide the foundations for the most important questions of human life, for those questions that are the very limits of existence. For it cannot be denied that contemporary cultural life tends to accept only those insights that can be scientifically substantiated from one side or the other. When the great mysteries of the soul life approach human beings, they will feel compelled to ask more than just this or that creed, because they are convinced that the mysteries of the world must be approached scientifically; they have the feeling that this must be so. So one will also want to approach the science of the soul, one will want to ask: What does the science of the soul have to say about the entry of the human being into physical life, the departure of the human being from physical life? In other words, what does the science of the soul have to say about the relationship between what is transitory in and around the human being and what is eternal in the human being?

But now we must say: from the moment that the science of the soul, which is still recognized today by tradition, turned to modern thinking, from that moment on, this modern science of the soul has more or less entered very unclear waters. When speaking of modern psychology, one must always remember a contemporary psychologist, Franz Brentano, who recently passed away here in Switzerland and who, in the last third of the 19th century, decided to devote his entire life and research to the study of the human soul. When he published the first volume of his so-called Psychology, his science of the soul, in 1874, he uttered some remarkable words. He spoke of the necessity of taking no other path in the present with regard to the knowledge of the soul than one that can justify itself before natural science. Whether the path discussed in this lecture can justify itself before natural science will be the subject of tomorrow's discussion.

So Franz Brentano attempted to approach the life of the soul using the same methods and the same way of thinking that are common in natural science, as he believed that this was necessary. And he then uttered the remarkable words: In the course of time, the science of the soul seems to have turned solely to the consideration of what is called human imagination, feeling, volition, what is called memory, what is called attention, what is called love and hate, and the like. He noted that modern science has brought all kinds of things to light about these matters, but that it seems as if the introduction of modern scientific thinking and modern scientific methods into the study of the soul has prevented it from approaching the great hopes — as Franz Brentano says — that the Greek sages Plato and Aristotle already had for the study of the soul: the hopes of gaining, through the study of the soul, a glimpse into that life of man which, it seems, is stripped away when the mortal body perishes, into the eternity of the human soul.

And so Franz Brentano says: Even if one could provide very precise information about how ideas follow one another, how they connect in the human soul, how they connect with feelings and impulses of the will, one would still be faced with the impossibility of arriving at the actual borderline questions of the life of the soul, because what is gained through scientific methods, even if they consist of the most rigorous research, cannot lead there. But Franz Brentano also harbored the hope at that time that, by applying scientific and methodological research, he would ultimately be able to arrive at a theory of the soul that would provide insights into these borderline questions of existence.

Now, there is the remarkable fact that when Franz Brentano published the first volume of his “Seelenlehre” (Theory of the Soul) in 1874, which was planned to be three to four volumes, he promised the next volume for the fall of the same year and wanted to follow up with the subsequent volumes shortly thereafter—but nothing more was ever published. I have already mentioned this fact here.

Anyone who—as I explained in the last chapter of my last book, Von Seelenrätseln — who delves into Franz Brentano's particular course of development — which only came to a conclusion last year in Zurich — will find inner reasons why this serious researcher, who was so immensely serious about researching the life of the soul, was unable to continue his book, not for external reasons, but for internal reasons. And anyone who follows Franz Brentano's subsequent essays and books will see how this man repeatedly attempted to penetrate deeper into the life of the soul, and how he repeatedly failed. And anyone who seeks an answer today, an answer from the various experiences that can be gained when one approaches the currently valid, publicly accepted teachings on the soul, will find that Franz Brentano, like his entire school and almost all other currently recognized teachings on the soul, shy away from taking the step that I want to tell you about in this lecture: the step into a true spiritual science.

It is clear that the doctrine of the soul must take on a completely different face if it is to be effective for human beings again, but this is something that scientific circles in particular shy away from today. And when one takes in the whole breadth of psychological, i.e., soul-related literature today, one gets the feeling that this soul doctrine is still dominated by ideas that have been propagated by humanity for centuries, perhaps even millennia. Soul doctrine has not changed these ideas very much.

In other areas, however, many things have changed, and the study of the soul has not kept pace with developments in other fields. Above all, today's scientific views of the world reveal what has changed in the course of human development over the last few centuries. Only a superficial view of this development can go beyond this without seeing the most essential thing, without seeing that only a few centuries ago, people's entire worldview was dominated by completely different ideas and thoughts than is possible today.

People do not want to acknowledge this. Even today, they do not want to understand how it is really in the nature of human progress that concepts and ideas have changed so fundamentally. But so far, this change has only been applied to the field of natural science.

As an introduction to my reflections today, I would like to characterize this change as follows: In the past, people had certain ideas — and anyone who has studied the literature, the scientific literature of earlier times, will find what I say justified — in the past, people had certain ideas through which they could comprehend both the life of the soul and the life of nature outside, the manifestations of nature, in a way that satisfied the demands of the time. The same ideas that were applied to understand the causes of lightning and thunder, rain and sunshine, the changing of the seasons, and other natural processes, the same ideas that were applied to these phenomena, were also applied to human soul life. The life of the soul and the life of nature were not yet as separate in human perception as they are today through advanced natural science.

And natural science itself, I would say, has created order in its field. Through rigorous scientific observation methods, namely through the art of experimentation, it has forced new ideas in its field.

Psychology has mostly remained stuck in the old ideas, even among the broadest circles of the educated public. And so it happens that what psychology offers today is basically not based on facts or content, but appears only as words. Ideas, feelings, will, memory, recollection, attention, even such things as love and hate: certainly, one can feel them, one can sense that they are realities present in one's own inner soul life. But in scientific psychology, there are empty phrases, words that no longer correspond to what must be demanded of true science today, that no longer correspond to the results of observation.

Just as natural science has had to progress toward new concepts and ideas over the last three to four centuries, and especially in the 19th century and up to the present day, so too must psychology progress if it is not to remain fruitless for human life. And it must take the bold leap to completely new starting points.

I will not detain you further to show you how, especially in what is called thinking, willing, and feeling in today's psychology books, what is presented there is basically no longer real. I will only point out that it is precisely because of this that psychology has withdrawn from its actual vocation.

You probably all know that when people today look at the great questions of human existence that I mentioned earlier, they very rarely turn to university psychology, which should provide answers to these questions, since it is, after all, the study of the soul. They find nothing there either. They find all kinds of, I would say, minor descriptions of how one idea follows another, how ideas give rise to other ideas, and so on, but they find no way to arrive at what actually interests them. No one wants to admit in this field that precisely the thinking that humanity has generated from within itself in its progress has only been applied in very special, remarkable ways in natural science, that this thinking, however, precisely when it understands itself quite properly, does not progress in the study of the soul, that, so to speak, in wanting to take real steps in the study of the soul, it runs into nothing but dead ends, comes to nothing but empty words.

But that would be the way, so to speak, the first negative step, to enter into a real study of the soul. Spiritual science takes this path. Above all, spiritual science thoroughly examines the whole way in which the modern world approaches the revelation of natural events. Spiritual science attempts to gain clarity about the nature of scientific ideas. And by taking an absolutely positive attitude toward scientific research in this way, spiritual science comes to recognize that the research that can lead to triumph after triumph in science comes to a halt when one wants to grasp the life of the soul. This spiritual life can only be grasped if one takes refuge in a different way of thinking, in a completely transformed way of thinking, in a transformed inner life.

It may be a long time before this inner boldness awakens in wider circles of humanity, truly preparing the whole inner being to look into the soul. But if spiritual science is to arise again in a way that is fruitful and promising for humanity, then this step is necessary.

I will have the opportunity to discuss the details of spiritual scientific soul research in tomorrow's lecture. Today I want to touch on just one thing, namely how spiritual science attempts from two sides to prepare the inner being of the human being so that it can truly look into the soul life. One side is a special training of thinking and imagining. One has a completely false idea of spiritual science if one believes that it has anything to do with methods derived from spiritualism or mysticism. For those who really want to penetrate it, spiritual science will prove to be the clearest science to be found in the present day.

Above all, it is a matter of strengthening and reinforcing imagination itself, thinking — as I would like to put it. The point is that in ordinary life and in ordinary science, we only carry out thinking, as it were, as a side effect of life and research. In our outer life, we allow all things that want to affect our senses to have an effect on us. In science, we also allow those things that observation through experimentation makes possible to have an effect on us. We allow ourselves to be stimulated by thoughts that then lead us to the laws of nature.

These thoughts, which arise in the soul only in connection with external life, prove to be insufficient at the very moment when one wants to look into the soul life itself. They lead to nothing.

This is an experience that must first be had. Therefore, it is a matter of immersing oneself in the life of imagination itself in such a way that one imagines, so that one experiences inwardly what actually happens when one only thinks, only imagines. It does not matter what one imagines. The point is simply that one — I will speak more about this in detail tomorrow — engages in this imagining and thinking in such a way that one devotes oneself to it extensively, meditatively, so to speak. So that in this thinking, in this imagining, one experiences what one cannot otherwise experience, either in life or in science, that one experiences how the inner self of a human being attunes itself when it follows a mere thought, be it a fantasy thought or a thought taken in from outside.

But then, if one experiences, in the way I have described, for example, in my book “How to Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” or as I intend to indicate tomorrow in principle from a certain point of view, if one really experiences thinking inwardly in such a methodical way as one otherwise experiences the external phenomena that present themselves, then you experience something that must touch you in a strange way as a modern human being, especially if you have tried to grapple with the traditional views of the soul.

Those who, in a sense, immerse themselves in meditative thinking, who rest on mere thinking, come into conflict with the most widely accepted views, which originate primarily from Augustinianism, which then passed on to Descartes, which also haunt the present soul, and which, basically, have crept into all the thinking of those who approach the soul in the old way, approach the soul in the old way, with old methods and old thinking.

There is a sentence that, I would say, runs like a motto through all of modern philosophy. It is Descartes' sentence: “Cogito, ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I am.” It is, only expressed in a more precise form, the word that Augustine already spoke. It is the conclusion reached by thinkers who said to themselves: Well, if the external world presents itself to us, perhaps it deceives us, perhaps everything it reveals to us is an illusion, the external world, that is, the impressions revealed to me by my eyes and ears, perhaps these are only illusions, perhaps they are only phantoms. There is one certainty, as Augustine said, as Cartesius, Descartes, said in particular, a certainty that cannot be denied, that is experienced directly, and that is: when I think. For even if I doubt everything that the world reveals to me, even if I live only in doubt, I must still doubt, that is, think. So: I am in my thinking itself. When I doubt, I think; therefore I am: Cogito, ergo sum.

I am not saying all this because I believe that philosophical views dominate thinking in the widest circles, or because I believe that what modern humanity thinks about the soul is an outflow of what these philosophers have said. No, I mention this not for such a reason, but because what these philosophers have said is precisely a reflection of what humanity has thought for centuries. It is not that people have learned to think from the philosophers, but rather that the philosophers have used concepts familiar to people, precisely those concepts which must be eliminated by the methods that modern spiritual science must point to. This modern spiritual science, by urging people to immerse themselves in thinking itself, to put themselves into it, to experience it as I have described, leads to the realization that the more one thinks, the more one continues in mere thinking what one otherwise has only as an accompaniment to outer life, the more one enters into unreality; not into the reality of inner life, but into unreality. And until one acknowledges the statement, “I think, therefore I am not,” one will not come to understand true modern psychology.

It is so radically necessary today to take the step toward a true teaching about the soul that we draw a line under the view: “I think, therefore I am” — and can rise to the insight: By beginning to think inwardly in a lively way, we distance ourselves from actual being: I think, therefore I am not.

One learns to recognize this by placing oneself more and more meditatively in the act of thinking; by refining and strengthening one's thinking, one comes to realize: by thinking, I cease to be.

Actually, the statement “I think, therefore I am,” in seeking to build on an inner certainty, would be refuted by every sleep. For in sleep we do not think in the sense of Augustine or Descartes, nor of Bergson or similar researchers. Sleep refutes “I think, therefore I am” every night.

Well, that is the first thing: to take the step of recognizing the unreality of inner experience in thinking.

The second thing is that one must then feel unsupported, that it is actually something terrible for every person who understands how to take these things seriously, that in wanting to advance to inner contemplation, to so-called self-knowledge, one is led into non-being precisely through thinking, that is, through what is intimately connected with one's inner life. From a second perspective, this inner method used by spiritual science must then be assisted. If the meditative life is a culture of thinking, then on the other hand a culture of the will must be pursued.

We actually only recognize the will by entering into some kind of relationship with the outside world. Just as we have thinking more or less as a side effect of external observation or scientific research, we have the will as a side effect of our actions: we experience it by being active externally. In doing so, we again overlook something from our observation where the will plays a very significant role. Even if we initially focus only on our transient physical life, we live in time. Each of us looks back on the time leading up to our birth and knows that there will be a time leading up to our death. We live in time. But we do not only live in time, we also create ourselves in time, so to speak; we develop in time. And those who can take a thoughtful look at their inner selves know that it is not only, say, the constitution of their bodies, not only their upbringing; they know that with the help of the constitution of their bodies, with the help of their upbringing and other means, they themselves are working on their transformation, on their development. We are different in every epoch of our lives, and we are always working on becoming different.

This inner work, insofar as it originates from ourselves, is necessary, if I may use the paradoxical expression, to take matters into our own hands, to practice self-discipline. This means not only allowing self-education and self-development to happen unconsciously, but also consciously working on one's transformation using those methods – I will talk about this in more detail tomorrow; I have described them in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “An Outline of Esoteric Science” – that can be applied. This leads to the realization that this conscious reworking is a very essential work of the will. And one only really gets to know the will when one takes self-discipline into one's own hands.

But this gives the human soul life certain powers from two sides, through which completely different starting points for a study of the soul can now be gained than have actually existed up to now. And above all: those who have sharpened their thinking as intended in these methods will come to see the whole course of human life in a different way than is otherwise possible. They will be able to truly observe this earlier soul life that always accompanies us. They will be able to grasp certain moments in this soul life and really bring them into their field of vision, into their spiritual field of vision, which cannot be achieved with any other concept than those ideas and inner soul impulses that are formed in the way I have described. They can take steps and come to the inner soul life. While all other concepts try in vain to grasp what is soulful.

This leads us to recognize not only the unreality of our being in our imagination. The first step is to know that imagination is unreal. No matter how much modern psychology — that is, modern psychology that still works with the old methods — wants to extract from ideas, no matter how much it wants to rely on the phrase " I think, therefore I am" in all its forms, it will never extract a spiritual reality from thinking, because we are not when we think, because we can only find in thinking that which is not really part of us. The unreality of imagination is the first thing that dawns on a person when they can truly grasp their thinking, when they want to exercise self-discipline over their will.

If one wants to focus one's gaze on feeling, which one wants to observe in psychology, one cannot. Why? — The answer to this question is provided by those who have researched imagination and will as I have described them. They learn to recognize that feeling, when observed by ordinary means, appears confused. Just as thinking is unreal, so feeling is confused.

And a third thing — which, I would say, is demonstrated by the enlightened psychological research of the present day — a third thing becomes particularly clear when one takes the path I have described: the incomprehensibility of the will. The unreality of imagination, the confusion of feeling, the incomprehensibility of the will.

Isn't it true that one need only, I would say, pick up books such as the one by Ziehen, which is excellent in a certain respect, to see that precisely those who rely on contemporary ideas, contemporary scientific ideas, allow themselves to be blinded in the study of the soul. At least they believe that one can understand something of imagination from it. Even feeling is only an emphasis of imagination. But the will is completely omitted. One sees that one is acting. One assumes that something is happening there. But ordinary concepts cannot look into what the will actually is.

Now it is a matter of applying those forces in the soul that have been gained in the manner described to the life of the soul. And it is good to take the starting point from feeling, not from imagination, which we will come to in a moment. Not from the will, but from feeling. And here it becomes apparent that feeling cannot be understood by considering just a single moment of human life. What I am feeling now can never be understood by considering only this present feeling. What is now being felt by a human being can only be understood by considering what came before and what comes after. It is very strange that in order to understand feeling, it is necessary to conduct serious research, as is customary in the natural sciences. Let me start with a concrete case.

Let me say that someone sets themselves the task of understanding Goethe's feelings in 1790, for example. They struggle by first trying to imagine: How did Goethe feel in 1790? How were his feelings about the world nuanced, shaded, and so on? Once you have formed some ideas about this, you come to ask yourself the question: Yes, how does Goethe's feeling in 1790 relate, say, to his feeling 15 years earlier, to his feeling 15 years later? The method I have described pushes you toward the correct answer. You are finally compelled to consider Goethe as a whole, his entire life. And to do this, psychology will have to come into play, looking at biographies from a perspective that I will now try to characterize. Goethe's feelings in 1790 would have been incomprehensible, even to Goethe himself in 1790. We are only beginning to understand them now that we have Goethe's entire life before us.

Let us carefully study what was revealed about Goethe's nature between 1790 and 1832. And then let us study what influenced Goethe, what was revealed through his inner nature from his birth in 1749 to 1790, and let us try, as we are accustomed to doing, to relate scientific things to each other. Let us try to consider Goethe's life after 1790 in terms of its effect on what he experienced before 1790, and then the special emotional nuance, the special emotional mood of 1790, will emerge. Everything we feel at a given moment is an effect of our own future on our own past.

This is how biographies will be studied in the future! This is also how we will view individual human beings. We will say to ourselves: How remarkable that what is expressed in feelings already reveals, I would say, the impact of the life to come, but also the whole of the life that has gone before.

In such studies, however, one will find that a certain inner determination is necessary. For example, one of the methods of arriving at the point suggested here in the right way will be to ask oneself: How is the emotional life of people who died very soon after the point in time under consideration peculiarly shaped?

The most interesting results for a study of a person's emotional life are obtained when one considers people who died soon after the point in time under consideration. This peculiar retroactive effect of what has an effect on the emotional nuance is something that, despite all the resistance that the present has to offer, will already surrender to the future, as has now been indicated. One will realize that what lives in a person in the immediate present is the pressure of their future on their past.

By keeping the past in our memory and shrouding the future in darkness, we have also created the confusion of emotional life, the mystery of feeling. If we now really want to delve into the human being in a research-oriented way, is the next step then to try to find our way into the life of imagination, to ask ourselves: Yes, what is it actually in human beings that they imagine, that they can decide to have this or that thought? No one can answer this question who is not capable of making an appropriate observation. That is the observation of the moment of waking up.

Just as a future teaching about the soul will not be based on all the beautiful phrases that are now found about feeling in books on the soul, in so-called psychology, so a future teaching about the soul will not be based on so-called observation of imagination — for that leads to nothing more than empty words, tautological empty words that contain no reality — but the doctrine of the soul will feel compelled to connect with a reality, but a reality that is beyond ordinary life: waking up. For ordinary life, waking up happens in an instant. Human beings go from sleep to waking life, and they rarely find an opportunity to reflect in the disorderly manner of awakening on how they woke up. But even if they did find it, they would not be able to comprehend it with ordinary imagination. They can only understand it when they bring themselves to such an idea as I have described as the result of meditative imagination, of meditative thinking.

Admittedly, this throws the human being, I would say, into an abyss, in that he must recognize something unreal in his imagination. But in return, this imagination is refined and also strengthened internally. And this is what enables the human being to truly observe the moment of waking up.

The method—as I said, we will describe it in more detail tomorrow—that spiritual science has in this field enables the researcher to face such a moment as that of awakening in the same way that the natural scientist faces the electrifying machine or another apparatus, or as he faces an observation provided by nature. And then, before the thus empowered or transformed imagination, the moment of waking up appears in such a way that one can look directly into it and say to oneself: Here you emerge from a world that, from falling asleep to waking up, is just as permeated by thoughts as your daily life is permeated by thoughts.

This is the great discovery that can be made. Certainly, some individuals have suspected it. They find references to it everywhere in the works of individual soul researchers, namely in the form of the statement: even if one does not know that one is dreaming continuously, one dreams continuously. But you don't just dream — that is the discovery made through energized thinking — you don't just dream, but you learn to recognize: the consciousness you have when you are awake during the day is something completely different from being filled with thoughts. It is looking at the thoughts you have during the day. One cannot look at the thoughts that fill one from falling asleep to waking up, precisely because at the moment of waking up — if one does not have this sharpened, energized thinking, which must first be cultivated — because at the moment of waking up one forgets what has been experienced during the night in sleep.

And this is a great, meaningful moment in which one begins to realize: you emerge from a life of thoughts that remains unconscious to ordinary consciousness, you emerge from a veritable sea, from a veritable flood of thoughts.

And this is connected with another observation. Only when you can look at the flood of thoughts that also pass through the soul when it is not in daytime consciousness do you realize why you know nothing of these thoughts in daytime consciousness. For you realize: there, in the moment of waking up, you cannot take in everything you have experienced in your soul during the entire time you were asleep; you cannot take it into your body during waking hours. But the body is the only tool for thinking. You must use the body. You cannot draw in what your soul experiences in nighttime thoughts. The body is unsuitable for taking this in.

And now, when you have recognized what real process underlies this, when you have recognized that you do indeed live in a spiritual world during sleep, which cannot enter into the nature of physicality, which exists for itself, which has the characteristic that it cannot enter — when one has recognized this through observation, then one can find the transition from this experience to ordinary imagination, to ordinary thinking.

For exactly the same thing that takes place in a certain way as a kind of reality when one wakes up, the same thing takes place, only in a pictorial way, when one comes from ordinary drowsiness or from ordinary mere observation of the outer world to a thought image, to a grasping of thought. Forming a thought, forming an idea, is nothing other than an awakening that is shadowed in relation to reality. We awaken at the moment we form any thought.

And that will be the significance of the new psychology, that it is able to see that awakening is not only present in that special moment when we rub our eyes in the morning after waking up, but that we are constantly awakening. And only in a special intensity and translated into reality does what is called “awakening” occur, which is a force that dominates our entire life insofar as we grasp ideas, grasp thoughts. Thus, the force that reveals itself to us in awakening, in grasping thoughts, permeates us continuously.

But this also tells us that this grasping of thoughts corresponds to a world that cannot enter the human organism at all. When we think, we must indeed dampen reality into images, because our body compels us to do so. Reality is not allowed in, as the moment of waking up shows us. But we also learn to recognize that we could not have these images of imagination if the spiritual entity, the spiritual reality, did not exist in our body. And from there, having progressed from awakening to imagination, we now have the opportunity to regress from awakening to a meaningful moment in life, to the moment of birth, or let us say, conception. We have gained this possibility by awakening within ourselves that inner soul power which allows us to recognize that imagination is a continuous awakening.

Once you have this soul power, it also enables you to look back from observing awakening to what can be called: entry into the physical-sensory world. This will be discussed in more detail in the third lecture.

You can see from this that modern psychology, as spiritual science seeks to develop it, is based on real observation, but that it brings about this observation not with the observations one already has, but with the concepts one must first acquire in psychology, one must educate oneself in the soul itself. The important thing here is to recognize that we only have pictorial existence in our imagination and that, when we enter physical life, our imagination must take on this pictorial character because physical life cannot directly perceive the reality of the soul.

One learns to recognize that in imagination, images of the entire prenatal or, let us say, the spiritual-soul life that lies before conception, just as at the moment of awakening all the thoughts that we have experienced from falling asleep to waking up come before our soul, so, if we methodically continue our observations, the spiritual-soul experience that connected with the physical when the human being entered this physical life appears independently before us. There is a direct progression on the one hand from understanding the moment of waking up to imagination. On the other hand, this enables us to progress from observing waking up to the human being's entry into earthly life.

The incredible thing about these things for today's humanity is only that, of course — the spiritual researcher knows this as well as anyone else — human beings must say: Yes, I don't understand any of this, I can't form any ideas about it. But that is precisely the point, that is precisely what matters, that one cannot enter into these things with ordinary imagination. That is the first great discovery one makes, that is what it is all about. It is only by acquiring powers other than those one already has that one comes to observe the spiritual and soul life that exists before birth or before conception.

One recognizes imagination in its actual roots in the spiritual only by following a path such as the one I have indicated.

On the other hand, this path also leads to a deepening of the will. The will—as I have already said—must be raised to a different level than it has in ordinary life, than it has in ordinary life, by taking self-discipline into one's own hands. However, this leads to something quite different from what I have described so far. So far, I have described the path toward ideas, the path toward ideas that broadens our view beyond birth or conception, but also into the unreality of the life of ideas. We gain certainty of the independence of what is revealed in our imagination by following the path I have indicated.

The situation is different when we also get to know the will more precisely through self-discipline. In imagination, which is cultivated meditatively, we make ourselves independent of physical life in a certain way. We notice this independence in that what the body cannot take in—all the night thoughts—now enters consciousness, so that one sees how one really rises out of a sea of thoughts.

By taking control of the discipline of the will, one feels more and more dependent on the body. One feels, so to speak, more and more familiar with the body. One enters more and more into the body. One arrives at what external science can never achieve. It can only explore the exterior of the interior in an external way, by means of anatomical and physiological methods. In an internal way, one learns to recognize what actually happens in the body when one wills, when a will impulse takes hold in some way. It sounds very strange to people today, but you get to know this bodily life in the will in such a way that you have the same experiences when you will as you otherwise only know when you are hungry or thirsty, when you have immediate feelings connected with bodily activity. While the image of imagination makes one further and further removed from bodily life, increasingly independent of bodily life, the cultivation of the will leads one to actually experience the will in the same way as one otherwise experiences hunger and thirst, satiety, and the like. One arrives at the most everyday feelings associated with bodily life. In particular, one learns to recognize how the thought that turns into a volitional impulse cannot help but express itself as something internal, something emotional, something felt, in someone who has developed the will in themselves as I have indicated, just as this inner feeling expresses itself when one is hungry. As paradoxical as it may sound to contemporary humanity, a thought of will is experienced in a cultivated will through a feeling of hunger or thirst; you can call it what you will.

It is therefore a matter of recognizing the great difference between the cultivation of the life of imagination, which makes us increasingly independent of the nature of our physical life, and the cultivation of the life of will, which shows us how, in ordinary existence, it is precisely through the will that we are connected with our physical life.

But it also becomes apparent, when one advances in this way to the observation of the will, when this observation of the will really becomes as much an inner experience as the feeling of hunger and thirst, that there is something in this will which, every time a will impulse is grasped, proves to be very similar to the moment of human falling asleep. And now, I would say, one also learns to recognize the mystery of falling asleep, this peculiar entering into the unconscious state. This proves to be quite parallel to the observation of allowing a thought impulse to penetrate the will. The decision of the will that is made proves to be a falling asleep that has begun but not been completed.

And now you learn the opposite of what you previously learned in the culture of imagination. In imagination, you experience that the spiritual-soul aspect that you live through from falling asleep to waking up cannot enter. The spiritual-soul life that expresses itself in the will cannot leave the body in the normal waking state; it is held back. And this holding back expresses itself as the power of the will. When it is released, when it is no longer held back by the body, the moment of falling asleep occurs.

This will be the other starting point for modern psychology: finding the connection between will and falling asleep, between the inability to hold back the spiritual-soul aspect, which then unites with the general universe through the human body, and falling asleep, just as we have found the connection between the formation of ideas and waking up in another way. If we then learn to recognize what actually happens on the other side when we fall asleep, how it is intimately related to every impulse of the will, then through the line we have drawn in our research between falling asleep and willing, we again gain the inner soul power to continue the line to the other side. By researching imagination, one has gained the opportunity to look at the spiritual-soul aspect before birth or, let us say, conception. In this way, one can explore the other line in the opposite direction. First, one follows the line from falling asleep to the will. One finds the relationship between the impulse of will and falling asleep. Then, with the power that one has thereby acquired inwardly, one follows human soul life beyond falling asleep, and then the other side of human existence reveals itself: death. For then the intimate relationship between the will, the power that lives in the decision of the will, and death becomes apparent. A significant discovery that has been made here will be systematized by natural science itself in the not too distant future; it will prove what spiritual science must establish from the other side. For natural science will show — and is already partly on this path — that everything connected with the impulses of the will is connected with certain toxic phenomena, with the formation of certain poisons, with everything that leads human beings in the same direction in which they are led when they approach death.

The forces that enable human beings to develop their impulses of will are the forces that lead them toward death. And how are they on this path toward death? If imagination is merely an image, a reflection, so to speak, of its true reality, then volition is embryonic, a mere germ, so to speak. And our ability to volition is based on our ability to hold a certain force in this mere germ.

If you think of the seed of a plant and then the whole plant in its development, you have an image that you can apply to what spiritual research shows with regard to the will; for what we call the will, what we express as an inner force in every single impulse of the will, is an embryonic dying. Just as we are constantly waking up, constantly being born, by passing over to thought, we are constantly dying by exercising our will. The power of dying lies within us, but we dampen it, dampen it precisely through the nature of our bodily life, keep it within our bodily life, release it for a short time when we fall asleep, allowing the body to recover. But the power we carry within us through our ability to develop impulses of will is the embryo of the power with which the soul passes through the gate of death.

Thus, the most everyday ideas, the ideas of imagining and willing, are linked to the great boundary questions of existence. We look beyond physical life when we truly learn to understand imagination and will. Empty phrases have become imagination, feeling, and will — I will speak about other concepts in the following lecture — because we have not managed to apply the real way of thinking in natural science, the observational way, to the life of the soul. As a result, the whole doctrine of the soul has, in a sense, become a scholarly squabble.

Isn't it true that those who drill themselves in certain concepts, even if they are only empty phrases, ultimately believe that they are really thinking something when they use these words? This is more or less how it is in the common doctrine of the soul today. But the person of life, who wants to know how he stands at the limits of this life, who realizes that he is dealing with empty words, simply does not benefit from what is written in the common teachings on the soul. These common teachings on the soul arise from a way of thinking that simply does not have the courage to truly transform thinking and willing in the manner described. For if one transforms them, new perspectives arise for the explanation of feeling, imagining, and willing.

I will talk about other things in the third lecture. However, ideas arise that show feeling as the result of the whole life between birth and death, that show imagination as the result of life before birth or conception, that show will as the embryonic, the germ of what we carry beyond death.

One cannot arrive at a real, meaningful concept of imagination, feeling, and will unless one begins to view the whole of life as it has been described today, whereby one arrives at being born and dying through waking up and falling asleep.

It must be said, however — tomorrow I will have to justify before the forum of natural science what I have presented today as results — that the thinking necessary to find one's way into these things must have the courage to break with many things.

But do not believe that anyone who has come to such things, which must rightly appear paradoxical, perhaps even foolish, to people of the present day, especially to scientists of the present day, has not, if he has taken the matter seriously, gone through everything that others who doubt it also know. Refuting this matter is easy. And everything that can be objected to could be dealt with in the same way that Eduard von Hartmann did, albeit in a less important matter, when he attempted to dismiss the materialistic-Darwinist concepts that were common at the time from his philosophy of the unconscious — I have already told you about this. At that time, natural scientists, famous natural scientists at that, said: Oh, he is a philosophical dilettante! He knows nothing about real science. We can ignore him. A wide variety of counter-writings appeared against this “dilettante,” roughly reflecting the attitude of today's very intelligent people, who shake their heads at the things that can be communicated today, I would say preliminarily, from the future doctrine of the soul. Counter-writings appeared, including one by an anonymous author, someone who did not give his name: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and Descent Theory.” And lo and behold, Darwin's biographer, Oskar Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel, and other Darwinists praised this writing as stemming from a true scientific way of thinking, in contrast to the dilettante Eduard von Hartmann. And one of them said: Let him call himself to us, this anonymous author, we consider him one of our own! — Another said: I myself could not have said anything better against Eduard von Hartmann's writing. — And these people contributed greatly to the fact that the writing was very soon discontinued. A second edition was soon necessary. The author then revealed his name and was no longer unknown: it was Eduard von Hartmann!

He had once taught a lesson to those who are incapable of truly understanding everything they themselves know and much more besides.

Well, spiritual science could provide complete refutations of itself. I myself once attempted in Prague, in two public lectures in succession, first to refute spiritual science and then to justify it. Refutation is, of course, much easier than justification. But something else is much more significant. In the present, one should actually say, especially in view of some things that have happened again in the very recent past: Humanity must relearn so many things, and indeed quite a few people have recently taken the trouble to relearn one thing or another. Must it be external coercion that leads people to relearn? For many people, it will always be external pressure that leads them to relearn, but today is truly a time when it is necessary to practice a kind of self-reflection, that self-reflection which then in turn leads one to realize how that step into the soul leads into the unreal, which proceeds from the clear scientific ideas leading from triumph to triumph or from other contemporary ideas, how such an exploration of the soul forces, as has been described today, can lead into the soul alone, and that one can come to acquire the strength for this research from within oneself, that, on the other hand, modern science itself leads into spiritual science for those who truly understand the nerve of this science. That is what I would like to show tomorrow.

In the third lecture, further details will be given for the foundation of that psychology of the soul, the results and the path of which have been shown in general today. In any case, by establishing this modern psychology, spiritual science will take it out of the realm of scholarship and give it to those who are searching for a science of the soul that can serve human existence, especially in relation to its mysterious questions.

Those who delve more deeply into the science of the soul as it is currently practiced, and then into the science of the soul as attempted by the spiritual science referred to here, will find that The study of the soul as it is taught in our universities today, and as is repeatedly attempted, leads either to empty words or to what it led a serious, profound person like Franz Brentano to: that one can no longer make any progress at all. Progress can only be made if this study of the soul is based on spiritual science.

It will then lead from the temporal nature of human beings — as we will see in the third lecture — into the eternal nature of the human soul. This will show that in the future, if people do not take the trouble to follow the path indicated, there will either be no teaching about the soul or one that provides the soul with useless nourishment. There will either be no teaching about the soul, or a useless teaching about the soul, or there will be a teaching about the soul based on spiritual science. This teaching about the soul requires energy and — without wanting to sound silly — inner courage. But the nature of the times is such that, by placing human beings in an external existence that requires a certain amount of courage, also points to the fact that now the treasures, now the achievements of the human inner life, can be gained not by merely letting oneself go, but only by boldly advancing the life of the soul, namely through methods that must first be sought, that were not already there.