Scientific Disciplines and Anthroposophy

GA 73a — 15 October 1920, Dornach

20. Questions During the First Anthroposophical College Course III

Preliminary note: At the beginning of the evening's discussion, a question was asked about the third Copernican law. Rudolf Steiner's detailed answer is published in the volume “The Fourth Dimension”, GA 324a, pp. 177-189.

Rudolf Steiner: Now a series of other questions have been asked, to which I would like to refer only briefly, because some of them are nonsensical. Here, for example, this question:

What criteria can a non-clairvoyant use to distinguish whether communications from a clairvoyant originate from spiritual knowledge or from illusions?

Dear attendees, I would actually prefer to eliminate the word 'clairvoyance', which so many people use to do mischief with, like Count Keyserling recently. If such words do not give rise to mischief, then it does not matter if they appear in our literature, but with all that such people call 'clairvoyance', who would rather do anything than set out , which I also characterized in my lecture cycle on the “Limits of Knowledge”, I would rather use a different word for the real seeing of the spirit - seeing brightly, that is, seeing brightly. That is why I have tried to gradually eliminate this word everywhere in the newer editions of my books, which always causes confusion with all kinds of amateurish and charlatan-like stuff.

Now, if it is a single case of someone coming to you and saying that he is a psychic and telling you something he has seen, then you have no way of distinguishing whether he is telling you some kind of illusion or whether what he is saying is based on truth. You can't do that in an individual case; there is no universal guide for that. You can only, as a reasonable person, gain a judgment from the whole context of life, but also an almost completely certain judgment. You see, if some alleged psychic tells you all kinds of stuff and, when he talks about things of ordinary life, talks nonsense, then you can be pretty sure that what he tells you from the higher worlds is also nonsense. But if you find that a person has a healthy sense of external, physical reality, that he looks at external reality with a healthy mind, like other rational people, that he finds his way into it, that he orients himself to external reality, then when he speaks of things of the spiritual world, there is something that speaks for him, that is, not for him as a person, but for the correctness of his view. If, in addition, he presents what he says about the spiritual worlds in such a way that it is logical, then one can test the reality of the context without being clairvoyant. As I said, you cannot draw any conclusions from a single message, but from the context of a whole series of messages, you will, simply through an ability that every person has, even without being clairvoyant, come to understand what is meant by what someone says. Furthermore, a person who deserves to be called a clairvoyant today – but now in a higher sense – when a person speaks about the spiritual world as it must be done here in this place, then, my dear audience, he does not stop at telling things only from the higher worlds, but he always speaks at the same time about the things of this world, in which the higher worlds play a role. He speaks to you, for example, about how what one has experienced in the spiritual can be applied to medicine, to the kind of medicine that really needs to be studied. He does not speak of medical charlatanry, where a person is chosen by some Luciferic or Ahrimanic spirit and then dabbles and cures whatever comes to hand. It cannot be about anything like that. The only thing it can be about is the penetration of that which is physically real, but in which the spirit always lives, with the spirit. For materialism never understands the physical. And I believe that, for example, working in the social sphere could be one of the external reasons for proving the inner justification of what is being asserted here in spiritual terms.

So there is no externally abstract criterion, but only from the whole context of life can one know whether one is dealing with illusions or realities when it comes to the claims of the spiritual researcher. His spiritual research is certainly no illusion if he can descend into realities with them, if he is able to give something to the life that is allotted to man here between birth and death precisely through his spiritual science. For example, when I presented research results about higher worlds, people often objected to me, saying that I was starting from abstractions. Yes, but all that could be mere auto-suggestion, just as there are people who get a taste of lemon in their mouths just by thinking of lemonade, even if they don't get any lemonade. — I could only tell people: Of course, it is true that one can evoke all kinds of illusory hallucinations or visions through thought, but these are just illusions. You can indeed have the illusion through suggestion that you have a taste of lemonade, but whether the mere thought of lemonade will quench your thirst, I would doubt; you would still need the real lemonade for that.

Anyone who is completely involved in things, not outside of them, can distinguish between what is reality and what is merely thought, and for them it is clear that there are just as many differences in life for looking into the higher worlds as there are here in the physical world. I can even reveal to you, my dear audience, the criteria for determining whether something is a lie or the truth, which apply to the clairvoyant as well as to anyone else. The clairvoyant cannot test whether his observations are based on reality better or worse than the person to whom they are communicated, because he too must test them from the whole context of life, which one simply finds with common sense, even if one has common sense in ordinary life. Another person, if they have common sense, can always test the clairvoyant results.

We are not at all afraid of a scientific criticism of spiritual science, especially not if this scientific criticism is carried out with the utmost exactness and precision. What harms us is only the criticism of superficial people, those people with empty thoughts, with thought-shells. Such people, who are afflicted with mere thought-shells, like Count Hermann Keyserling, who has no will at all to go into the matter, then simply end up telling lies. In his latest book, Keyserling makes the very nice claim that Steiner's entire anthroposophy is actually just materialistic natural science elevated to the spiritual; this can be seen from the fact that Steiner started from Haeckel.

Now let us examine this utterly dishonest assertion in the light of what I wrote as a starting point in the introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You see, dishonesty is actually always the height of mental dullness.

These things must be said, ladies and gentlemen. I always wait a long time before I am forced to say such a thing myself, and I actually only talk about these things when they have not been emphasized by others for a long time. Because after all, these things do not affect me at all. I cannot read Count Keyserling's books because I cannot find any thoughts in them. And I am used to people complaining. But today it is about something else. Today it is about the fact that we are indeed rapidly sailing into destruction if full clarity and courageous clarity are not established in this area. Today it is about the salvation or destruction of humanity, and today the pests must be sharply pointed out who try to drive out the necessary thoughts from people through such filth by saying that it is not necessary to undergo a spiritual development because what one can learn from something like the writing “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” is not needed by someone who is a gentleman and has a good upbringing.

Now, my dear attendees, at a time when such assertions can be made, the fire is burning, and it must be extinguished!

I would now like to quickly discuss another question:

What is anthroposophy's position on the use of hypnosis in medicine?

Well, dear attendees, all these things, hypnosis or suggestion and the like in therapy, always lead into an area that lies below that which we encompass with our ordinary day-consciousness. If I were to draw you a diagram quickly, it would look like this: (diagram missing)

If ordinary consciousness is here, the anthroposophical science in question strives upwards into a higher consciousness, into imaginative, inspired, intuitive consciousness. But one can also bring consciousness down to a lower level. This is already the case in ordinary dreaming; in deep sleep, in dreamless sleep, it is moved down even further. Now there are all kinds of intermediate states, and such a tuning down of consciousness actually transforms the human being into an Untermensch, in that his soul and spirit are so elevated that they cannot fully engage with the physical body and also cannot be conscious of themselves and the world, because the human being is not yet developed enough to have consciousness outside of the body. In this case, we are dealing with a demotion of the spiritual-mental to the etheric-physical plane, and then all the effects that can be brought about, which you are indeed familiar with, actually take place in a subhuman sphere. You downgrade the whole constitution of the person, the spiritual-soul-physical constitution of the person. And that is why such things are only to be applied when it comes to therapeutic issues. But even in the therapeutic area it is a matter of ensuring that they may only be applied by the person who understands the things – by which I do not want to claim that modern medicine, as it is practised today, is a good guide to understanding these things. But once these things are understood, they can of course be applied to the human organization in the same way as other poisons – because they are poisons.

So, in all these things, we are dealing with the fact that, therapeutically, we can resort to anything that can improve a person's state of health in a desirable way. However, we should not imagine that we are leading people into a higher sphere when we convey something to them where their consciousness, their ordinary consciousness, is completely shut out. Instead, we lead them into the subhuman, into the etheric-animalistic, not into the physical-animalistic but into the etheric-animalistic, if we put him into a state like hypnosis and if he is receptive to such a state. This lowering of consciousness is basically particularly loved today because the upward development into the spiritual worlds is perceived as something uncomfortable.

Here is another question: What is anthroposophy's position on healing magnetism?

Well, my dear audience, this can only be discussed if one can really treat things seriously. With a simple yes or no or with a simple sentence, such things cannot be treated if one has a scientific conscience. Today's healing magnetism – yes, one would not have to have learned about it in order not to know that there are a great many people working in it who have sought employment everywhere else, and when they have not found any anywhere else, they have become healing magnetizers. To demand spiritual-scientific explanations for such things is a bit much. But I would like to point out to you that these things must all be traced back to their elementary prerequisites. For example, there is the fact that for certain mental and physical conditions of the soul, the mere loving assurance contributes something to the healing process. Just think how much real therapeutic effect comes from genuine loving treatment of the sick person in one direction or another. Now imagine these things intensified, imagine loving treatment intensified to caressing treatment, and you have something that leads very strongly to what is healing magnetism. However, these are such imponderable things that they cannot be grasped in rough terms. It is entirely possible – depending on the case, it really depends on the how and not on the what – that the person who talks about these things, depending on whether he has the imponderables in mind or not, may just as well say something important or talk nonsense. So it is more important that one approaches these things only with a truly scientific conscience. And that is why I have always been careful to discuss these things publicly, for example, because some things are extremely colored when they are passed on.

Now, I would not want anything personal to come of it either, but anthroposophy must be something that really meets the necessary demands of our time, and one must not do anything that could in any way bring one into the danger of being a dilettante. It is very easy to fall into this amateurish neighborhood when dealing with these matters. One could say that healing magnetism is beneficial, depending on whether it occurs with knowledgeable, but now imponderable, genuine healers, or whether it occurs with people who are mere charlatans, who, after trying their hand at other fields, now also try their hand at the field of healing. Of course, as soon as the subject of healing magnetism was mentioned, before that it was suggestion, and now Christian Science is mentioned, which is asked about here:

How is it that Christian Science can heal if it merely suggests the mind?

Isn't it true that with Christian Science one must say approximately the same as with healing by magnetism, only in a somewhat different field. Whether a thing works or not does not depend on what we think about it. Because just imagine if you were to slap someone and you had the opinion that it was about some forces that don't even exist, the slap on the person's cheek will be exactly the same regardless of whether you have a false theory, a self-suggested theory, or something similar. When we speak of Christian Science, we are dealing with similar phenomena; you can also test these very similar phenomena in the field of education.

I have repeatedly spoken of the imponderables that operate from person to person and also applied them to the field of education. Suppose you want to explain the immortality of the soul to a child, the passing of the soul through the death of the human being, and you point to a butterfly pupa: that is, so to speak, the human body. The butterfly comes out: that is the soul. And you then apply this to the supersensible. You can now get two things. In your own state of mind, you can be a very clever, intelligent person who, of course, in this day and age does not believe that what you are describing with the butterfly chrysalis really has any other connection to immortality than as a symbol. The clever person makes it up; he does not believe in any connection himself, but says it to the child because the child is stupid and he is clever, because he makes something up that he presents as a comparison. That is one state of mind. The other state of mind is that of the spiritual researcher. He sees everywhere stages of an existence that is in polarity and intensification - words that Goethe already used. He looks at the chrysalis from which the butterfly crawls out, and he himself comes to believe that the butterfly crawling out is an image that the spiritual worlds are drawing for him. He is not a clever person in today's sense, he is not a clever person, but he is a person with a sense of reality. In reality, the deeds of the spirit are everywhere.

Now there is a difference in teaching: if you are a very clever person and want to make the child understand the matter through the invented symbol, you will generally achieve nothing. But if the picture lives in us, if we are imbued with the feeling that here the spirit of nature itself has drawn the image of the immortal soul in the emerging butterfly, then imponderables work from your soul to the soul of the child, then the child, because it receives something of life, also has something for life.

However, forces are at work from person to person that cannot be weighed with a scale or measured with a ruler, even though everything is set up according to measure, number and weight. And these things will still provide a rich contribution to what should enrich our lives, things that will be more meaningful for the salvation of humanity than some applications of science. If we look into these things, we will see that there are still quite other forces that will come to humanity precisely through the application of spiritual science. But for this to happen, on the one hand, true scientific conscientiousness must be taught, and on the other hand, the will must arise to penetrate into the spiritual worlds with this scientific conscientiousness.

I would like to conclude for today. We will then try, tomorrow, before you leave, my dear honored attendees, to present a summary in the evening, not so much in the form of questions as in the form of a lecture, as a farewell.