Freedom, Immortality and Social Life

GA 72 — 31 October 1918, Basel

8. Justification of Supersensible Knowledge through Natural Science

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I would like to characterize it in outline in these lectures, is usually not judged by our contemporaries on the basis of a more detailed acquaintance with it, but, one might say, from the outside, on the basis of a superficial acquaintance, which forms the judgment according to some catchphrases.

It is particularly against this background that two prejudices, or one might say misunderstandings, against the spiritual-scientific worldview referred to here come to the fore. One is that spiritual science violates the serious, conscientious method of research of the scientific worldview, which must dominate modern times and modern human thinking, which has rushed from triumph to triumph in modern times and which must not be violated.

Certainly, if the spiritual science referred to here were not able to justify itself before the scientific worldview, it would have to be condemned. Therefore, this will be one of the questions that must be addressed here today: How can the spiritual scientific worldview, as represented here, be justified before contemporary science, before real, true science?

Another, similar prejudice, which is actually closely related to the one just characterized, is that this spiritual science leads into darkness, into the gloom of a mystical state of mind, a worldview. Today's considerations should show that the first prejudice is just as unfounded as the second, for we want to start from this point.

The entire path that research must take to lead to the spiritual science under consideration here must, above all, pass through two gates of knowledge, I would say. And one cannot really enter into what is meant here in the right way unless one has passed through these two gates. One gate can be characterized in such a way that the spiritual researcher must have truly been immersed in the entire mindset, in the entire way of thinking and researching that leads to knowledge of nature in the present sense, but that he has not only been immersed in this way of researching, but has also had an important, meaningful experience with this research. For most people who are involved in natural science, natural science remains just that: science, something that one has as knowledge, with which one believes one can penetrate into this or that area of existence.

For the spiritual researcher, knowledge of nature must not remain just that. For him, it is a matter of having tried, I would say, inwardly, spiritually: How suitable or unsuitable are scientific ideas as instruments for penetrating the foundations of existence? He must, in a sense, have learned — if I may express myself trivially — how to use scientific thinking and, with this scientific thinking, have conscientiously tried it out in various directions, well, I want to say: How suitable or unsuitable is it for penetrating what external nature itself is?

Now, one could say that in the field of natural science itself, personalities have emerged who have more or less consciously sought to answer the question: How far does scientific research take humans with regard to the great mysteries of knowledge? — And again and again we must remember the speech given by a great natural scientist, a great physiologist, Du Bois-Reymond, in the 1870s, the famous speech on the limits of natural knowledge, in which he sought to explain that natural knowledge must reach a certain limit, a limit that is actually very close to human aspirations. Du Bois-Reymond argued at the time that although natural science was capable of reducing the interrelationships between natural phenomena to certain laws and finding connections in the atomistic world behind these laws, even if one thought one had achieved the ideal of this knowledge of nature, one could not even answer the two fundamental questions: What is matter, what is substance? - and the other: What is even the simplest sensation, the simplest mental experience?

Du Bois-Reymond believed at the time that scientific observation must stop at these two questions. And since he was of the opinion that scientific observation was the only real scientific observation, he believed that humans could never arrive at any knowledge regarding the two questions mentioned above, and therefore also could not arrive at any knowledge about human mental life and about what actually lies behind nature, that there were not only limits to the knowledge of nature, but that there were limits to human knowledge in general.

What Du Bois-Reymond and many others—I cite him only as an example—have formed as a judgment based on a certain logical speculation must be translated into life by the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher must, if I may use the expression, have experienced all the hopes and disappointments of natural cognition. He must have allowed natural cognition to affect him in such a way that he tried to use it to overcome the obstacles to human spiritual striving. He must have gone through the bitter experience that, no matter how rigorous and conscientious this research is, there are certain points that this knowledge of nature cannot overcome. What arises in the soul of the spiritual researcher must, in a sense, be experience. He must have learned to come up against certain cornerstones of natural science that present themselves in the existence of nature.

Now I could cite many such cornerstones, and the same could be said about all of them as can be said about the simplest things, for example, the concepts of force and matter. With the ideas that knowledge of nature presents to human beings, one can penetrate nature to a certain degree. But what remains incomprehensible in the picture of nature that one can form in this way is always that which is represented in words such as force and matter and many others. I will not go into the other. One sees that with the same methods, with the same way of thinking, with which one fruitfully penetrates the essence of what is chemically present in nature, one cannot penetrate with these concepts, with these ideas, that which spreads out as matter, that which as force conditions the phenomena of appearances, the processes of nature. One comes up against force and matter, so to speak. One must ultimately come to the conclusion that the more suitable the scientific ideas are in the accessible areas, the more unsuitable they become for these cornerstones.

And I would like to say that when one has experienced enough in this experimentation, one comes to a certain question. Then one asks oneself: Yes, what is actually the reason why one comes to such cornerstones in the knowledge of nature? — And then it becomes clear to the inquiring soul that the basic condition for encountering such cornerstones lies in the human organization, in the human being itself. One finally realizes: Nature does not provide certain solutions to riddles because one would have to be different oneself if such solutions were to come to one.

The train of thought I am developing here is quite different from Kant's. But with regard to the difference, I can only refer to my “Philosophy of Freedom,” which has just been published in a new edition. It would go too far to discuss this distinction in detail.

For the spiritual researcher, it is a matter of coming to the realization, through genuine self-observation, that something in the human organization prevents us from penetrating the cornerstones described above. The first thing that becomes apparent is that the same force that prevents human beings from getting past these cornerstones is the force that enables us to love in our everyday lives, indeed in our entire existence. And that is the significant discovery that one makes on paths such as those I described yesterday. As a spiritual researcher, one must hypothetically ask the question: What would a being have to be like — one that would not be human — that would develop such scientific views that, in the same way as what is accessible in nature, these cornerstones would also reveal themselves to be transparent, transparent in the sense of being conceivable?

Such a human being would have to have a spiritual organization that was not permeated by the power of love. For if one examines in real self-observation what comes to light in that expression of life which we call love in the broadest sense, not only love for any human being, which we call love for anything lovable, if one examines this peculiar soul power, its character is precisely that in this activity of loving, that imaginatively active activity which must occur in the pursuit of a natural phenomenon or in the setting up and pursuit of an experiment is suppressed, initially instinctively suppressed in human nature.

Love and scientific research must be two opposite activities of the human soul life. But the capacity for love must be part of human nature. Human beings cannot, so to speak, shelve their capacity for love, eliminate it for the time when they are engaged in scientific research. On the one hand, they can express themselves in terms of scientific ideas. But what enables them to love is also within them. And that is what, in a sense, dulls and slows down the imaginative activity at the boundary pillars I have characterized.

This is a first significant experience, an inner observation that the spiritual researcher must have made on his path. Certainly, one can say: Prove this logically. - This question is obvious. Less obvious is the question of in which cases such a question can actually be asked. After all, one cannot ask the question: Why, for logical reasons, does the bull have horns or the fish fins? These things are initially still the results of observation. And the spiritual researcher can only point to the observation that arises on the path indicated, with the experiences of scientific research in particular.

One can say: I do not want to lead my soul in such a way that it comes to such experiences. — Well, of course, one can refrain from doing so. But then one cannot claim to have any say in the realm of truth. For only those who have actually encountered such obstacles as those described and, I might say, have then navigated around them, can penetrate to the real truth.

The second experience that leads to the second inner spiritual-scientific discovery is the one you have when, for example, you arrive at the conclusion I have just explained. Expressed and exemplified as modern spiritual science has to do, what I have just outlined will hardly be done in any other field. But instinctively, more or less consciously or unconsciously, people have realized how useless the view of nature is as an instrument for penetrating the mysteries of existence. Then they turned away from this view of nature and tried to explore these mysteries in other ways, namely mystically, through inner self-observation and inner self-experience. Just as the spiritual researcher must be well acquainted with what can be experienced through scientific observation, so too must he be well acquainted with what emerges through inner, mystical contemplation. He must also have tried, in a sense, to find out whether it is possible to reach the sources of existence by descending into one's own soul life, by following the path that is often referred to as mystical. These are the sources with which human beings must be connected in some way, if they concern them at all. The spiritual researcher will also experience hopes and disappointments along this path and finally arrive at the important conclusion that one can no more attain the secrets of existence by descending into one's own inner being through dark mystical contemplation than by merely observing nature from the outside. Here, too, he encounters, I might say, a wall, a wall that is, however, within his own soul. And once again, he has the task of investigating why it is that even through mystical contemplation, as it is often called, one cannot reach the sources of existence.

In order to achieve clarity in this area, it is necessary to apply a truly unreserved, truly unreservedly apply a scientific approach, not proceeding with those delusions, those unclear ideas of contemplation of the inner self, with which mysticism often proceeds, but studying this inner self with all – it does not always have to be sober – but with all clear research. Exploring this inner self is not so easy, especially for those who strive for clarity. For this inner self often appears quite complicated to our own eyes. I would like to cite an example from literature, scientific literature, which is suitable for illustrating this. It could be multiplied a hundredfold, but so that you can read it for yourselves, I would like to quote from a treatise on the subconscious self, published by Bergmann Verlag: “The Subconscious Self, Its Relationship to Health and Education” by Louis Waldstein. As I said, it could be multiplied a hundredfold, but I would just like to cite one such example that shows how careful one must be when exploring one's own inner life, and how easy it is to be deceived in this particular area of research.

For example, someone who has approached such self-knowledge with a scientific attitude tells the following story about himself: One day he was standing in front of a bookstore on the street. His eyes fell on a book about mollusks. And as a naturalist, he reads the title of this book about mollusks and has to smile and laugh. At first, he has no idea why this book title about mollusks makes him smile and laugh. And one must also say that it is something highly remarkable: a serious natural scientist sees a serious scientific book in a bookstore — and has to laugh. And lo and behold, it occurs to him: perhaps I will find out why I start laughing when I close my eyes. He closes his eyes and listens. In the distance, he can barely hear the sounds of a melody he heard decades ago and learned to dance to. It is audible through a barrel organ. He can vaguely remember that he has not heard these sounds for decades. He didn't consciously register them while he was looking at the book title, but they flitted past his soul, so to speak, and made him smile; in a completely subconscious way, his soul was prompted to turn to the impressions he had had decades ago, which were quite vague. For he must admit to himself: back then, he was more concerned with taking the right steps when learning to dance for the first time than with focusing his thoughts on the melody itself. His thoughts were also focused on something else insignificant, because he had a partner, didn't he? But all of this had an effect on his subconscious, and he had to smile.

Now, let us take this example, which, as I said, could be multiplied a hundred times over, and take it seriously. It is decisive for countless experiences that flow through our existence and show us how little human beings are actually connected in their consciousness with what is going on deep down in their soul life, how long-forgotten things resurface in this soul life, and not only long-forgotten things — I have elaborated on this in more detail in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” — not only long-forgotten and once-clear things resound in the soul life, but also things that have not been consciously perceived. We do not even need to have fully seen or heard what was there, and yet it has made a certain impression and comes up at the right moment!

Those who are conscientious spiritual researchers pave the way that is indicated here with a first step. They investigate everything that is present in the depths of the soul life, and then they realize how gullible, naive mystics often fall victim to such things. These gullible, naive mystics immerse themselves in their inner selves, bring up all kinds of things from within, bring up what they then call a feeling of being together with the original source of existence, but perhaps these are only the transformed sounds of the barrel organ! Perhaps it comes about in the same way as what I have told you about. For it is peculiar to the life of the soul that such reminiscences, such things that once made an impression and then continue to have an effect, do not just come up, but are transformed, purely within our own organization, not just as they were originally, but as something completely different. Nevertheless, they are nothing more than a pictorial representation of what we have experienced. Some people believe they can pass on deep mysticism from their self-observation, but all they are dealing with are transformed impressions from their youth or the like.

It is precisely in this way that spiritual science must proceed with the utmost care, for it should be the clearest and not the most confusing. I have already noted this repeatedly.

And so the spiritual researcher comes to study precisely that in the human soul through which what one has in ordinary, fully conscious memory life is connected with all kinds of subconscious life reminiscences, transformed memories, and so on. And by following this path, by proceeding in this way with a scientific attitude, the spiritual researcher arrives at the answer to the second question: What is the experience of mysticism like? Why does the path of ordinary mysticism ultimately lead only to something unsatisfactory, if one truly feels the right powers of knowledge within oneself?

It then becomes apparent that something must exist within the human being: just as the power of love must exist, which provides the scientific boundary, so something must exist within the human being that prevents him from really diving down into the depths of his own being, as the mystic wants, in ordinary consciousness. For if human beings had the ability — one can again ask this hypothetical counter-question — to descend completely, to pursue everything that is to be found on the path I have spoken of, and which the mystic believes can be found in the human inner being, then human beings would not have the other ability that is necessary for life: namely, the power of memory, the power of remembrance itself. In a sense, the impressions of life, the ideas of life, must accumulate. They must not penetrate into our innermost being. We must have a veil before our inner being, which acts like a mirror and from which our experiences shine back as memories. And just as little as we see what lies behind a mirror when we stand in front of it, so little do we see the human inner being that lies behind that mirror, which actually brings about our memories.

And so, in the end, those who have this second experience come to realize that, basically, everything that can be achieved through ordinary mysticism is of no use to the spiritual researcher, because in some way, if it is only processed in ordinary consciousness, is essentially a reminiscence of life, transformed memories, or the like.

So there are two starting points, two experiences that must be gone through if one wants to be a spiritual researcher: the experience with the view of nature and the experience with the reminiscences, with the transformed memories. And from these experiences, one gains, I would say, a certain way of knowing. And these experiences, if they are taken seriously, if they are not merely, I would say, passed on theoretically, but learned, with all the disappointments associated with these two experiences, experienced in one's own soul, then such an experience means at the same time the generation of an inner strength. And this strength leads one to pursue the path of knowledge in a different way than it is pursued with ordinary consciousness.

What I have just explained is the basis on which the spiritual researcher builds his further work, which aims not to penetrate the supersensible world with ordinary consciousness — which must be capable of love and memory for ordinary life — not to penetrate the supersensible world with ordinary consciousness, so that the mysteries we are investigating must reveal themselves; but first to cultivate a different consciousness, to develop a different consciousness, in order to penetrate the supersensible world with the help of this different consciousness.

It has just been suggested here that in order to arrive at the truth that is attainable for human beings, it is necessary to be able to go beyond the ordinary state of consciousness, which is the right one for everyday life and also for ordinary science, to another state of consciousness. But most of our contemporaries still shy away from this demand. They prefer to dismiss this requirement as something fantastical, something fanciful, and thus fall into one of two traps: either rejecting the possibility of knowing higher truths, or attempting to approach them with ordinary consciousness. It goes without saying that neither of these approaches will lead to any goal.

Now, in a certain way, it is precisely from these experiences that the nature and essence of the path to be taken will emerge. According to what has been said, what is it that prevents one from descending into one's own inner being in ordinary consciousness? It is memory, it is the power of remembrance. If one investigates everything that underlies the human ability to remember something, one finds that the ability to remember is bound up with the human physical organism.

It is a colossal error on Bergson's part to believe that memory, or at least part of memory, is not bound up with the human organism. Spiritual science shows precisely that the process of sensory perception, which we penetrate through thinking, is classified in physiology in such a way that it pushes toward memory. The fact that we can remember is already inherent in the process of sensory perception, which is penetrated by imagination.

Now, everything that leads to memory, that is, everything that aims at the perception of nature, cannot, as has been shown, lead down into the human interior. The question therefore arises: Is there a possibility of developing such an imaginative inner soul activity that has nothing to do with memory, that is, as it were, lifted out of everyday and other scientific life, which, if it is to be healthy, must always appeal to memories?

Perhaps because the personal and subjective could have an objective value here, I may interject here how I myself was led many decades ago to take the first elementary steps that then led me to further spiritual research in relation to this essence of the ability to remember.

It is an experience from my childhood years that may seem very insignificant to you. But time and again during my school days, I had to realize that although I made the very best progress in all subjects related to mathematics or geometry, I had no talent whatsoever for memorizing mathematical formulas — you may know what that means. I could also say that it wasn't even that I couldn't remember them, but that I had no inclination to learn them. So when we had a test or assignment in these subjects, the others did their calculations algebraically according to the mathematical formulas they had memorized. I always had to develop these mathematical formulas from scratch based on the basic principle, i.e., always doing the entire derivation, and then I calculated using the formula. Because I did not understand how to remember them, I always had to search for the conceptual conclusion that led to the formula, that is, to develop something in my mind that did not appeal to my memory, so to speak.

For me personally, this was the starting point on the path that every spiritual researcher must take to cultivate the kind of inner soul work that truly leads to a changed state of consciousness, which could be called contemplative meditation, dwelling in the inner imaginative life of the soul. But this imaginative work must be arranged in such a way that, if it is to recur, it comes out of the same impulse, so to speak, and is not a repeated, memory-based work of imagination.

If I may speak of the present, I must say again—you see, I sometimes give ten, twenty, thirty lectures on the same topics in different places—that I would never be able to give a lecture on the same topic in the same way again. Each one is different, because I don't want to go through it by memorizing anything, but rather so that the moment I say the things, they are truly created in the present. So there is no reflection on what can remain in the memory.

Don't misunderstand me; it would never occur to me to claim that spiritual research consists of switching off memory. Of course, taking away a person's memory would render them useless for life. Nor is it taken away if they train their thinking in such a way that they introduce into their ordinary soul life a kind of soul activity that needs to be generated again and again and does not reflect on the faculty of memory. This is basically what I have described in great detail in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, in my Occult Science, and in other books; this is what can be striven for in one way or another through this or that spiritual aid, but which always boils down to the following: To the thinking I spoke of yesterday, which must actually only accompany external observation and then lead to memory if ordinary life is to be healthy, there is added another kind of thinking that does not aim to produce what is remembered, but rather what lives in the soul in ever new and new ways and must be produced ever new and new.

In this way, the human being connects spiritually with a completely different element than when he or she only takes in what is remembered. In this way, the human being gradually develops ideas, an activity of imagination, which is really not just the pale activity of imagination that we know as an accompaniment to ordinary life or ordinary science, but rather, in the practice of such ideas that do not appeal to memory, a liveliness gradually emerges, a strengthening of the imagination which, without having sensory perceptions, visual or auditory perceptions, is as lively as our soul life is when we have sensory perceptions. One arrives at an imagination, at a mere imagination, which is as powerful, as saturated, as lively as otherwise only the life of the soul is when it faces the whole, full-bodied external sensory world: a thinking that is like seeing, and a seeing, but an internally generated seeing that is like thinking.

This can teach us about the nature of actual human life. For now, when we have taken in the possibility of having such vivid imagining, only now can we compare this imagining with the ordinary imagining of everyday life and ordinary science. And only then do we realize what the latter itself has as its essence. Then one comes to say to oneself: Yes, natural science uses only those ideas which, by their very nature, are organized according to memory; it never uses those ideas which are brought up in human nature in the way I have characterized.

But then, when one develops such thinking, such vivid thinking, one also comes to that experience which, in a sense, pierces the mirror I spoke of earlier by way of comparison, which really penetrates behind memory and can penetrate into the human interior.

However, it becomes apparent that when one enters the region that is otherwise obscured by the mirror of memory, one encounters something that initially affects the unprepared consciousness in a peculiar way. One goes through an experience that can only be compared to the personal experience, I would say, of over-saturation, and one comes to realize that there is something living in human beings that can only be found in the way I have indicated, something that instills in human beings an unconscious antipathy toward themselves, their own inner being, which constantly repels them. There must be a repulsive force, just as light is repelled by the mirror coating. The mirror coating can be compared, in a sense, to what manifests itself as a subconscious feeling of antipathy or over-saturation. One does not notice this in ordinary consciousness because it is precisely the mirror coating, because one experiences what is reflected back in one's memory.

But now, with the newly developed life of imagination, one penetrates downwards and has to overcome the antipathy described behind the mirror of memory. One overcomes it only by adding other experiences to those described, by not only trying to develop within oneself such imagination that does not make demands on the memory, but by trying to develop within oneself that power which is present in a very everyday, I could better say, nightly human activity, but in a very weak way, in a useless way. I mean that activity of the human soul that comes to life in dreams.

Dreaming, dream activity, is something that spiritual researchers must study very carefully, for the soul naturally also lives in dreams. As everyone knows, it lives in a certain way in unreality by living in dreams. Dreams have always led people to raise certain enigmatic questions about life.

The spiritual researcher will not be able to investigate dreams in the way that was done in the past, following the pattern of dream books, nor will he have to investigate in the way that modern psychoanalysis does, for neither of these approaches leads to the recognition of the power that actually lies behind dreaming. If one can follow the dream, it always becomes apparent that the inner human body is involved in every dream. Somehow, it is always bodily processes that are connected with dreaming, but bodily processes that express themselves in such a way that they go beyond the quiet life of sleep in a certain way, intrude into the life of the soul, and find expression in some kind of pictorial obscurity.

To take these dreams as they appear in their images is something that would never occur to a spiritual researcher. Once, after a lecture, a psychoanalyst asked me: Yes, what you call anthroposophy takes dreams at face value. But we psychoanalysts take dreams by trying to explore what is rumbling in the subconscious from their images. — Well, I don't want to go into further detail, but the response to this is: Just as the psychoanalyst — albeit with inadequate means — does not take dreams directly in their pictorial form, but wants to explore something behind them, so does the spiritual researcher, but not with inadequate means. It is clear to him, precisely from an exploration of the human soul driven by a truly scientific attitude, that the same thing that goes on inside the soul can be clothed in very different images when one dreams. I mean to say: one climbs a mountain in a dream and falls down the other side — the same thing could happen when one dreams that one has a piece of paper in front of one, which one pierces, making a hole in it. The images that appear in dreams are only a decoration, only an outer covering. And those who search for the content of the dream, for the image content of the dream, will never discover the secret of that power in the human soul that lies in dreaming. Only those who can follow the dream in its dramatic sequence — quite apart from how it is expressed in images — can discover the power that lies in dreaming. They can follow how tensions and resolutions or lingering tensions arise in the life of the soul. These can then be clothed in a wide variety of images. Only such thinking as I have described, only such thinking can penetrate those regions of the soul life from which the confused dreams in ordinary consciousness arise. For dreaming belongs to that region of the human organism which lies behind the mirror.

One plunges into the realm that lies behind the mirror when one submerges into the human inner life with a trained imagination that does not appeal to memories. For there one encounters the power that otherwise only lives out, I might say, in an embryonic or imperfect way in dreams; there one encounters this power of the human inner life in its true form. Otherwise, what lies beneath as the subconscious nature of the human being is something that rises up into consciousness, into the life of the soul, out of subconscious antipathy, and thereby causes the reflection of memory. Now one dives down. And only what has been described here, not the memories, can dive down in such a way that the antipathy is overcome. It is antipathy that dulls our consciousness to our own inner being, that prevents us from descending, from shattering the mirror, from penetrating beneath the mirror coating, into a region that otherwise proves to be antipathy, unconscious antipathy for human soul life.

In this way we develop a power that is also present in other areas of life. I have already mentioned its significance for ordinary life today: that power which is the human capacity for love. We learn to recognize this capacity for love, I would say, in its beginnings, as it manifests itself in ordinary life. But if we penetrate into our own inner being in the way I have indicated, if we penetrate into this realm with imagination that is not based on memory, then the power of the capacity for love is increased. And that is the second aspect of the life of the soul that the spiritual researcher must develop.

The first power consists in developing a life of imagination that is not based on memory. The other is that he develops such an inner life — and it soon turns out to be a life of will, for everything that is experienced there lives out in the impulses of the will — develops such a life that essentially increases the capacity for love. So while memory must be excluded in the field in which one wants to explore the spirit, the capacity for love must be increased to a degree that ordinary consciousness has no idea of, because this ordinary consciousness usually only develops love in relation to external beings and external things, but not in relation to the spiritual; and the spiritual is encountered in the way I have just spoken of, which enters into the human interior through the breaking of human memory.

Thus, the perhaps paradoxical fact emerges that what is necessary for the ordinary natural scientist and ordinary life, the ability to remember and the ability to love, develops in such a way on the path that spiritual research must take that, on the one hand, the life of imagination must enter a region where no claim can be made on memory, while the life of the will must enter a region where the capacity for love is essentially increased.

In this way, the human being penetrates into those areas that otherwise lie beyond the boundaries of natural science. If he develops what I have spoken of, precisely in accordance with the two sides of human nature, then he will reach beyond those cliffs that present themselves at the cornerstones.

What otherwise presents itself only as a natural connection is, in a sense, seen through. However, one does not arrive at atoms, one does not arrive at the hypothetical substance, the matter that is otherwise spoken of; by seeing through nature, by investigating it, one arrives at the supersensible, at the spirit. In this way, one comes to the spirit that lives behind nature and in nature, in that one awakens, so to speak. For what I have just described is an awakening in relation to ordinary consciousness. Just as a person — I can say this by way of comparison — can live in a dull state of sleep or dream and then awaken into ordinary daytime consciousness, so what I have described is a higher awakening, an awakening such that, compared to the experience one goes through with imagination and will, as I have described, ordinary waking life is like dream life is to waking life.

I would like to elaborate on the comparison with regard to one thing in particular. Every healthy consciousness regards the dream as a sum of images, and it knows that by emerging from the dream and entering ordinary reality, it is stepping out of the world of images and into the sphere of being. In the dream, the ordinary world of being becomes a world of images. Thus, those who have become spiritual researchers begin to confront the world they now experience in supersensible consciousness, in awakened supersensible consciousness. They know that this ordinary world, which we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and perceive with our other senses, becomes a world of images for them for what they experience supersensibly. The whole of nature becomes a world of images for the supersensible experience, just as the world of dreams is otherwise a world of images for ordinary, external sensory life. It turns out that the course of modern natural science, with all its magnificent, tremendous achievements — for the spiritual researcher takes an affirmative, not a negative, view of natural science — that all this modern natural science has actually only become great by limiting itself to providing a pictorial nature, not wanting to penetrate with the means at its disposal into what is the mystery behind the images.

I would like to illustrate once again, by means of a parable, how one arrives at that will which I have said is an elevation of the capacity for love, by means of a comparison, a very simple, elementary comparison, which can then be developed further and further: one does not usually know that what one calls human writing, when one looks at different people, represents two very different activities. Very few people make these finer psychological observations with regard to writing. When one person writes, the writing, in terms of its inner essence, does not necessarily have to be exactly the same as when another person writes. For there are people — and this is the case with most people — who write by forming the letters in such a way that the entire configuration of the letter, I might say, lies in the wrist. And of course I mean more than that in everything that is connected with it. People have their own handwriting, but it lies in their organization; it does not detach itself from their organization.

I know other people who write differently; they write in such a way that the writing is more detached from their organization; they paint, so to speak, by writing. It is extremely interesting to realize that there are people who actually paint as they write, who always have a vision of the shape of the letter, who always form the letter, who draw it, who therefore live much more objectively in the letter. They do not have the shapes of the letters in their wrist, but rather they draw the letters.

Usually these are people who showed great capacity for love in their youth and who displayed the peculiarity in their youth that once they had seen a person they admired, they also wrote like that person, imitating their handwriting. When they began to like another person, they copied their handwriting. And so they retained this ability for life, that writing is actually a form of drawing, of painting.

This makes us aware that a completely different elementary activity of the human being can detach itself from the human being, can enter more into the object, and that this entering into the object is precisely connected with the human being's capacity for love. One finds that capacity for love, which I spoke of earlier as a training of the will, that capacity for love for the spirit, developed to a greater extent in those people who do not actually have a handwriting determined by their organization, who can basically always write as they want, to the left, to the right, standing, lying down, whatever they want, who can form the letters in any way they want. This is connected with the ability to immerse oneself, to lovingly immerse oneself in the objective world.

Now, what I have described here as the elementary activity of writing can become actual, it can become such for human beings that it also leads to higher activities. That is what lies on the path I meant when I showed that, in addition to imagining without appealing to memories, there must be impulses of will that, in a sense, grow together with external objectivity.

This, in turn, is what must be developed to a high degree in the spiritual researcher, I would say. Then, what otherwise appears coarse and robust to ordinary consciousness becomes an image for him, as it reveals itself in its very truth, and he then penetrates in truth to the supersensible.

This then results in something that I would like to characterize in the following way: There is a philosopher today whom I must greatly appreciate from a certain point of view, although I cannot actually agree with anything he says. But he is a philosopher who has dealt well with the question: What can a scientific attitude actually know about the world? — And he has answered this question from various angles. This philosopher is Richard Wahle. I would like to present this philosopher as a representative not only of the way many people think, but also of the way thinking in general tends to be at the present time, just as yesterday I did not want to present philosophers as teachers of humanity, but as those who represent certain symptoms of the times. This Richard Wahle tried to ask modern worldviews, as he knows them — he does not know spiritual science and does not want to learn about it — he tried to ask modern worldviews: What can you learn about true reality? And he came to say: Nowhere, when we look at the world according to the scientific model, do we come to recognize the powerful, that which causes the processes; rather, we only learn to recognize the succession of processes, the formation of one process from another. But what is pushing in one event so that the other can become, the force, the primal factors, as Wahle calls them, we do not learn to know. And so, in conscientiously trying to answer the question: What can be done with natural science? — Richard Wahle, who is a contemporary university professor, comes to the conclusion that this modern view of nature does not actually provide a true picture, a realistic picture of the external world, but rather provides something that is not actually present in the reality of nature, but rather a ghostly image of nature. And the more the ideal of natural science is fulfilled, the more ghostly becomes what is now present in the image of nature. Richard Wahle, in his “On the Mechanism of Spiritual Life,” says that one can come to nothing else but such a ghostly view.

Well, for him, I would say, this amounts to a condemnation of all philosophical endeavour. He is a philosopher, and he has made a peculiar judgement not only about contemporary philosophy, but also about the philosophy of the past. It is, however, a curious fact that the official representative of philosophy at a university today comes to the conclusion I am about to quote about philosophy, that is, about his own craft, so to speak. It is extremely characteristic of the present day, but that is how it is. And in a certain respect, it is also extremely noteworthy as a phenomenon, as a fact. This Richard Wahle looks at what philosophy is, what he himself has achieved in the field of philosophy, and says something like: Philosophy used to be like a restaurant where cooks and waiters served inedible food to guests; and now philosophy is a restaurant where cooks and waiters stand around and have nothing to do at all. He thus refers to these waiters, that is to say philosophers, in this strange restaurant of the present and starts from a question that is, in a certain respect, precise: What can natural science do? And he comes to visualize the limits of natural science by bringing to mind its ghostly nature, which must cling only to the outside. He brings it to the realization of the pictorial nature of all knowledge of nature. And that is a significant phenomenon in contemporary intellectual life.

Natural science tends, especially when it recognizes itself well, to have to recognize more and more that it actually only provides images, that what it calls nature is only an image of something.

Those who are conscientious scientific thinkers today do not arrive at foolish monism, but rather at the recognition of the pictorial nature of all knowledge of nature. Countless examples of this can already be cited today, taking those observations that do not pettily devote themselves to the scientific epistemological process, but rather conscientiously attempt to answer the question: To what extent is natural science a suitable instrument for recognizing truth and reality? — On the one hand, natural science is reaching its limits today. And the more it develops, the more its ideal is fulfilled, the more it will come to recognize its pictorial nature, precisely through itself, through conscientious pursuit of its own essence.

And on the other hand, we have the course of spiritual research, which develops in human beings a kind of recognition that goes beyond the image to reality. Natural science shows: What I can find is image. Spiritual science shows that by developing a higher consciousness in precisely defined ways, you demonstrate that what exists in ordinary consciousness, for ordinary consciousness, and for ordinary science, is pictorial in nature, and that you can only find the real by going beyond the pictorial nature.

How could spiritual science be better justified before natural science than by the fact that spiritual science itself leads human development to recognize that which, when it understands itself, natural science itself must find as its result.

Not words, but the facts that spiritual science produces in the human soul will correspond to what flows from natural science. Through their collaboration, what can be called the justification of spiritual science before the forum of natural science will arise quite naturally between the two.

This is precisely what I wanted to suggest with a few remarks and observations today: What justifies spiritual science before natural science is natural science itself, properly understood.

I will continue to elaborate on the path of human spiritual culture as conceived by spiritual science in the two lectures next week, in one of which I will trace the existence of the human being from birth to death and beyond birth and death into the eternal course of the human soul; in the other, by showing how historical, social, moral, and religious life appear from the standpoint of spiritual science. But there is something that, I would say, must run like a fundamental tone through the consciousness that the spiritual researcher would like to convey to humanity, must run as a fundamental fact in contrast to natural science, which rightly places itself in time as it does. This fundamental tone can be expressed in the following way: if natural science understands itself correctly, it will reach a point where it must say: here I have reached my limits, here something else is required.

Well, this something else will be provided by spiritual science. And thus it will appear justified not on its own behalf, but through natural science itself.