Anthroposophy: Its Roots of Knowledge and Fruits of Life

GA 78 — 2 September 1921, Stuttgart

Fifth Lecture

Anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to ascend from sensory perception to spiritual perception, and it seeks to ascend from the use of the intellect, as it must be in ordinary life and in conventional science, to other kinds of soul activity through which knowledge can be led into realms that reveal themselves in the ordinary sensory world but are not immediately recognizable as such through the senses and intellectual knowledge. And such inner soul activities live in what I have described in my writings as imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

When we speak of imagination, we should not think of something nebulous and mystical, which comes about when we replace clear, thoughtful intellectual insight with something dark and alive in the soul. Rather, we should think of something that arises from the complete and comprehensive use of thoughtful intellectual knowledge, but which is further developed by raising up forces hidden in the soul to an activity of the soul that now does not live in the usual concepts, but first in something image-like, which, however, in the further course of its activity must be lived out in concepts as clear as the knowledge of the intellect itself. In my books, I have described what human beings must accomplish as inner exercises in order to develop these powers, which remain hidden in the soul for ordinary life and ordinary science, and thus arrive at imaginative knowledge. Today I would like to characterize this imaginative knowledge, as it arises in the manner described in those books, with a few strokes.

This imaginative knowledge does not live in the abstract concepts to which we are accustomed in ordinary logical thinking, but neither should one think that this knowledge is something merely fantastical. If one wants to characterize what is at hand more externally, one must reflect on the form of experience that a person has when they retrieve memories from the depths of their being, or when these memories, stimulated by this or that, emerge from these depths as if by themselves. If we grasp precisely what a memory image is in the mind's eye, we will have found the way in which imaginations also live in the soul. They live with the same intensity, indeed with an intensity that is often far greater than that of memory images. But just as memory images show, through their own appearance and content, what the experience was that a person may have had years ago and of which they are a picture, so these imaginations, when they are called into the soul, show that they do not initially relate to a personal experience when they appear as real cognitive imaginations, but that they relate , although they appear with exactly the same character as the memory images, to a world that is not sensory, but nevertheless thoroughly objective, which lives and weaves within the sensory world, but does not reveal itself through the organs of sensory perception.

In this way, one could initially characterize the more external nature of the imaginative insights in a positive sense. In a negative sense, it must be said what these imaginative insights are not. They are not in any way similar to a vision, a hallucination, or the like. On the contrary, they lead the human soul in the opposite direction to that in which it moves when it falls into visions, hallucinations, and the like. Imaginations of knowledge are healthy soul experiences in the same sense that visions, hallucinations, and so on are unhealthy soul experiences. What is it about human beings themselves that actually characterizes visionary, hallucinatory life? One of the characteristics is a diminished sense of self, a diminished awareness of oneself. By surrendering ourselves to our healthy state of mind and our healthy experience of external sensory reality, we have precisely what we can call prudence in relation to our own ego. At every moment when we look at the external world in a healthy way, when we place ourselves in the external world in a healthy way, we must be able to distinguish ourselves to a certain degree from what is the content of our self. If what is the content of our consciousness, of our self, overwhelms us to such an extent that the necessary prudence toward ourselves is paralyzed, then unhealthy states arise, and these are also those of visionary, hallucinatory life. Anyone who acquires an unbiased judgment in these matters knows that a certain degree of the prudence described above is present when we live in healthy sensory experience, and knows that visionary, hallucinatory life stands beneath this healthy sensory experience. They will not be tempted to accept these descents of consciousness as revelations of a world that is more valuable than the sensory world.

One can simply take someone's attitude toward these things as a kind of criterion for whether they understand true anthroposophical spiritual science or not. If someone believes that they learn something more valuable about the world through visions and hallucinations than through sensory perception, then they do not really have a sufficient understanding of anthroposophical spiritual science. Sensory perception brings us into relationship with the outside world. Visionary, hallucinatory life reduces this relationship to a lower level of prudence by transferring what is already a purer, objective world in sensory perception to the subjective sphere, to the realm of experience in which, in an unhealthy way, content develops from within the organism itself and at least permeates our sensory perception, in cases of illness, it displaces it altogether and replaces it with something pathological. If one strictly adheres to what I have just said, then one will, under all circumstances, demand of the imaginative faculties that they do not lower or paralyze the relationship we have in the sensory world to the objective outside world, but rather raise it and stimulate it with a strong life.

If one is now clear that it is prudence toward one's own self, toward the I, that elevates sensory perceptions above mere visionary and hallucinatory, dreamlike experiences, then one will also understand why the spiritual researcher presents it as a necessity that, for the sake of cognitive imaginations, exercises be done that do not initially lower the inner intensity of the sense of self, but rather increase and enhance it. But this brings me to something that is eminently necessary for the attainment of supersensible knowledge, as well as to something that, if not carried out with observation of all the laws I have indicated in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and in my “An Outline of Esoteric Science,” may not in a certain sense be a danger to the organism, but it can certainly be a danger to the mental, and especially the moral, constitution of the human being. The sense of self must be heightened, and self-awareness must become more powerful. This can lead to a kind of psychological — not pathological — megalomania in people who do not take the precautions I have often described in order to endure such a heightened sense of self without moral or psychological loss.

This is something that can easily be noticed at first — if you'll pardon the expression — in “excessive” supersensible knowledge, because people want to rush over the necessary precautions, so that they do not become more modest, but actually fall into a kind of megalomania. This must be stated bluntly so that no one comes to believe that those who stand within a true anthroposophical understanding want to misjudge that such megalomania often rages among those who now perhaps profess anthroposophy for this or that reason. The peculiar thing that happens when self-esteem is increased in this way is the following: one can increase this self-esteem, one can bring it to the point where the ego has a much stronger sense of existence than in ordinary life. How does this increase occur in the first place?

In ordinary life, and also in ordinary science, there is something I would like to call momentary consciousness. One only has to be clear about what this momentary consciousness actually is. It becomes clear when one distinguishes between how one experiences an event in which one is immediately present, which one perceives with the senses, which one grasps with the mind, about which one forms ideas in the present, and with which one is perhaps also connected in the present through the stirrings of the will. Take a close look at your inner life when it is in the situation described, and then compare it with what your inner life is like when you indulge in a complex of memories; look at what the images of your memories represent. What we experienced as the present, say, ten years ago, is experienced in the present moment, albeit with less intensity, as a present experience. It is also experienced as something objective in relation to momentary consciousness. Momentary consciousness looks through the memory image at what was experienced ten years ago. And one compares the degree of experience one has of the present experience with that which one has of a past experience. How little one is involved with one's whole personality in the present experience in relation to that which is currently only present in the images of memory in consciousness!

This changes when one ascends to cognitive imagination, in such a way that one can handle the experience arbitrarily and is not overwhelmed. In fact, the I-experience gradually intensifies to such an extent that one has an I-experience for one's entire past life, which one otherwise only remembers, as if one were really living in the past events as if they were immediately present. The awareness of the moment is expanded into an awareness that flows in the stream of time. This is the first stage for experiencing cognitive imaginations. In a sense, one allows one's ego to flow out into the experiences one has had in this earthly life since birth. When I say that one is not overwhelmed by these intensified experiences, I mean that anyone who ascends to such a level of knowledge in the right way is able to bring about this outflowing of the ego into the past at will. They can fully determine the beginning and end of the process, while remaining the same person they were before, with the same degree of everyday consciousness. Nothing should overwhelm them, but what they acquire as the ability to perceive differently must be placed at their disposal just as the use of any complex of judgments in ordinary life is placed at the disposal of the person making the judgments; otherwise, these things are not on a healthy foundation. However, there is a considerable intensification of the ego when that which otherwise lives in the moment extends the strength of its experience over the entire stream of life.

For the moments of cognition in which imaginative knowledge is to become ability, one becomes, in a certain sense, a different person by no longer living in the present with only a certain sense of self, but by living in time, by having completely absorbed time into one's experience, whereas in ordinary experience only the present moment is subjective, while the rest of the passage of time, including one's own experience since birth, is actually objective. One can see that such systematic training of inner cognitive abilities is a submerging into objectivity, indeed, it is the first kind of immersion in objectivity, which consists in immersing oneself in the passage of time in the area indicated.

As the ego intensifies in this way, it reaches a kind of culmination. It is the case that the ego must first intensify itself through practice, but that, as it intensifies, it reaches a point where the intensification ceases due to the inherent lawfulness of the matter, in that from a certain point onwards the ego comes to weaken all by itself. The ego can only intensify itself in relation to its inner being up to a certain point; then it comes to experiencing this feeling of the I again in a descending curve in a weakening. This is because the I then moves out of its own experience, which was initially there in the experience of the stream of time, into an experience that is now not enclosed in its own stream of time, but into an experience of cosmic world existence. This experience is one that does not initially appear in abstract intellectual concepts, but in something that can be called imagination because it appears pictorially. Although the experience is exactly the kind I described for understanding freedom in my Philosophy of Freedom, the content of this experience is such that what enters consciousness in the pictorial form is not one's own content, but a world content, just as one has a world content in sensory perception.

Spiritual research can indicate in a very systematic way every single step, indeed every little step, by which it moves from ordinary intellectual cognition to the emergence of imaginative cognition. When this imaginative cognition occurs, it is, it must be said, an inner experience of destiny. And this brings me to a point where a difference must be made between the course of supersensible and ordinary striving for knowledge, which today is regarded as the only objective form of knowledge. In most cases, this ordinary striving for knowledge is carried out without catastrophes and vicissitudes. For what is experienced during the ordinary pursuit of knowledge in relation to the whole human being, not to the head-oriented human being, are externalities in relation to the actual process of cognition. As a researcher, one can certainly experience a certain joy and satisfaction when one has found something new, but what one feels as joy about the event, about the invention, the discovery, is at most only remotely related to the methodology of the discovery itself. Ultimately, the other catastrophic or peripeteia-like inner experiences, which must be described as exam pains and the like, have nothing to do with the process of cognition itself. Such things can occur in ordinary cognitive experience, but they have nothing to do with the process of cognition as such. On the other hand, what actually leads one from ordinary intellectual cognition into imaginative cognition is something that permeates the whole, complete human being with experiences that represent inner destiny.

One experiences such inner destiny especially when, in relation to some point in this development of knowledge, after one has first had more inner experiences that are still connected with the human being, these experiences are transferred to the insight into the mysteries of the cosmos. If I were to give an example that at the same time leads a little, figuratively speaking, into the laboratory of the spiritual researcher, I would like to say the following. Quite some time ago, I went through an inner process of consideration and judgment that dealt specifically with the following question: What is the spiritual experience of someone who is compelled by their life impulses to become a materialist, what is it like for someone who is compelled by their life impulses to become an idealist or spiritualist — I now use the word “spiritual” in the sense of German philosophical usage — or how do such states of mind acquired in the world relate to each other? I tried to stand objectively within the spiritual experience that fills the materialist, the naturalist, and again within the spiritual experience that fills the idealist, the spiritualist; I tried, as it were, to slip into the states of mind that can take hold of human beings in this way. Only in this way can one truly understand the inner world of the soul, that one can voluntarily, even if only on a trial basis, be a materialist with the materialist, and that one can, on the other hand, be an idealist or spiritualist in the same sense on a trial basis. This gives one a new relationship to the way in which human beings logically summarize what then becomes the content of their worldview.

However, I am only mentioning this now in relation to method. Anyone who goes through something like what I have just described in an honest and sincere manner will already experience fateful things in these particular states of mind, because one then understands in a completely different way why people can be driven to materialism or spiritualism. One ceases to be critically provoked in the usual sense, to rebuke others solely from one's own point of view. This takes the soul experience to another level; it is transformed. If one goes through this for a longer period of time, one notices that in such meditations, which, however, take hold of the soul life, there is something that represents a real soul process and that moves precisely toward the development of the abilities for objective cognitive imaginations. Because my soul had prepared itself in the way I have described, it was transformed in such a way that it suddenly understood how the sun's passage through the zodiac, which is otherwise viewed only in a sensual-mechanistic way, is a living, cosmic-organic process. What can otherwise only be viewed in a cosmic-mechanical image became imaginatively meaningful. I saw something new in the cosmos. It is precisely in such an expansion of consciousness about the cosmos that one experiences, as if by fate, what it means to have first strengthened one's ego by performing certain intellectual operations with greater power, and then, from a certain culmination point, to feel this ego flowing out into the world, so that one now stands within the world with this ego. This is an experience that indicates something fateful in the process of cognition itself, which evokes a process of cognition that indeed grips the whole human being; and this connection with the whole human being, whereas the ordinary process of cognition is actually only connected with the intellectual human being, is the distinguishing feature. In this way, I only wanted to draw attention to how what leads to cognitive imaginations should not be presented in some vague mysticism, but how this process can be described with the same precision as the solving of any mathematical problem. And what is acquired in this way in terms of abilities for cognitive imaginations is as present in the soul as mathematical-geometric structures are present in the soul with all their clarity and transparency. One does not have a soul content to which one surrenders oneself only in a hidden, inner experience, but one that is as transparent and connected with the maintenance of its own reality value as is the case with the mathematical soul content.

I have thus described in a somewhat external way how imaginative life takes hold in the soul, which then leads to insights into the supersensible world in the manner that will also be described further. However, I never want to lose sight of showing that the attainment of, the striving for, such types of supersensible knowledge is not something that arbitrarily wants to intrude into the cultural and civilizational development of humanity in our time, but rather something that follows with a certain necessity from the course of this time itself. What today can only be attained in full consciousness, as I have described, as imaginative knowledge, which can then also be expressed in concepts once it has taken the detour through the realm of images, was sought in earlier epochs of human development in a more instinctive way. The course of human development was such that in earlier times, knowledge was not gained through the logical-empirical considerations that we have recognized as our right path since the middle of the 15th century, but rather through a kind of instinctive striving for imaginations and also through the attainment of such imaginations.

At the time of this instinctive spiritual vision, it was not possible to conceptualize these imaginations. The ability to express oneself in concepts, as we are accustomed to doing today in science through the conceptual processing of the inorganic world, is only a result of the Galileo and Copernicus era. In earlier times, people were not able to express themselves in concepts in this way. Greek concepts were something quite different. People expressed themselves in images, in images that were created through lines or perhaps through combinations of colors. I would just like to mention in passing that in earlier epochs of human development, knowledge was not treated as generally I would say, democratically as knowledge and insight are treated today, but that those who had knowledge closed themselves off in smaller groups, which we have become accustomed to calling secret societies and the like, traces of which still exist today, albeit only misleading traces, in all kinds of orders and similar groups. Those who had attained knowledge closed themselves off in small groups. They carefully prepared those people whom they admitted into these groups so that they could safely, in terms of their moral life, attain the knowledge that was considered necessary. And what could be experienced in instinctive imaginations was taught in certain, let us say symbolic, pictorial representations. Such images formed the teaching content of the ancient schools of wisdom, just as our books form our teaching content today, but these teaching aids consisted entirely of images that were brought forth from within the human being.

In order not to talk to you in vague terms, I would like to remind you of something very specific, a single image: There was an image that was used again and again for the imaginative understanding of the process of cognition in human beings themselves. The process of cognition was not described in the same way as it is today by epistemologists. It was viewed in a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, and what was seen there was characterized by drawing the image of a snake biting its own tail. An essential characteristic of cognition could be seen in this image. But this image, as I have now described it to you, is actually only what has more or less passed into popular representations. The actual symbolic images were carefully kept secret within the groups by those who knew, out of a certain desire for power, so that they alone could be the knowers and the others the ignorant. The image that is actually meant by the exoteric symbol of the snake biting its tail is one in which the snake is painted in such a way that it not only bites its tail, but also devours its own tail, so to speak. As far as the tail end goes into the mouth, it becomes spiritualized. And then something appears which, if one draws the snake with a denser color, would have to be painted in with a thinner color like a kind of aura around the snake. This results in a complicated structure, but if one wants to characterize it in simple terms, it must be characterized with the words that Dr. Unger used in his lecture this morning, while continually apologizing for using this word. One has to apologize, in a manner of speaking, for many things that are highly justified today when one says them from the perspective of spiritual science. Unger used the word “turn inside out” several times. Imagine you have an elastic ball and you drill a hole in it at the top so that you turn the ball inside out, so that what was originally at the top is now pressed downwards, is now pressed downwards, so that you get a kind of small bowl or plate out of the ball, and now imagine that you not only turn it inside out to the bottom of the ball, but also beyond, penetrating it, as it were, but that on the other side the substance of the ball comes out in a different consistency, so that the ball, after you have pierced it, appears to be surrounded by a light from the outside, which, however, has arisen from the turned-out part itself. This is a figure that cannot be easily painted, but which in a simpler way reproduces what was symbolically intended to be indicated by what was painted in such secret societies for the process of cognition, in order to stimulate the perception of this process of cognition in those who were to learn through this perception.

As I said, these figures were kept very secret out of a certain sense of power. You could only obtain them if you experienced the visualization of a world process internally. There was no other way to gain a sense of the inner experience and understanding of such figures. If I may use an expression that is somewhat trivial in relation to the process, I must say: by ascending inner spiritual contents, one obtained something for which, as in something self-evident, one attempted such a symbolic expression. These were fixed instinctive imaginations.

Then came the newer research in natural science, which in a certain sense found a synthesizer in Haeckel. Haeckel thought about what he was researching in a certain synthesizing, one might even say magnificent sense. And, for reasons I characterized yesterday, he felt a need to draw what he was researching in animal life, namely that which is connected with the development of the entire animal organism. If you open Haeckel's writings and look at the drawings—others have made them too, but Haeckel has, I would say, the core of his entire thinking—the drawings Haeckel made of the first stages of embryonic life, the stages through which he wanted to show how the ontogeny of a being is a shortened becoming compared to phylogeny—then you will find drawings that, if you were familiar with what the ancients recorded as instinctive imaginations, would remind you of those imaginations.

Haeckel studied the initial process of embryonic development, called gastrulation, the formation of the germ cup, where the arrangement of cells actually occurs as if one were turning a sphere inside out; and he constructed in his imagination the gastrea, a hypothetical creature that once had such a form in tribal development, which is repeated in this early stage of embryonic development, in the gastrulation stage. In other words, what Haeckel drew there was supposed to be, although it was only obtained from the sensory external world, a faithful reproduction, at most somewhat imaginatively embellished and clothed in hypothesis, a reproduction of such processes that take place in the world that we can perceive with our senses.

I am hinting at something that may be of little interest to many people today, but which those who are honestly engaged in the pursuit of knowledge must regard as an outstanding cultural fact in the most eminent sense. Haeckel depicts the outside world and arrives at the origins of those symbolic figures that were considered the most esoteric in a certain past era, which are still preserved here and there today, but are kept very hidden. Certain power-hungry groups consider it nothing less than treason to speak of them. These figures were once drawn from inner experiences; they were recorded instinctive imaginations. Certain power-hungry groups consider it nothing less than treason to speak of them. These figures were once drawn from inner experiences; they were recorded instinctive imaginations. This means nothing less than this: we have reached a point in natural science — as it advances in its understanding of the processes in animal organization — where natural science must draw as a reproduction of external processes, just as one once drew from the imaginative life freely rising in the soul, which gained cosmic insights through an intensification of the inner life. Inner experience was cast into symbols which — and quite different ones will be found in the course of further natural science — are entirely similar to those now gained in the depiction of the external world. A cultural-historical fact of the highest order!

Thus, in terms of knowledge, we now stand at a point in human development where empirical external observation of the animal world imposes upon us that which was once found in the innermost depths of the soul. Exotericism today provides content that once belonged to the deepest esotericism. Haeckel arrived at these things in a very naive way. The process is even more interesting when we observe it in the spirit of someone who arrived at it less naively, who, as I characterized yesterday, went through the stages of his cognitive experience with a certain prudence, when we observe it in Goethe. In the 1890s, Goethe drew his archetypal plant, a symbolic plant, in front of Schiller. With just a few strokes, he drew what he believed could represent the plant that metamorphoses into all plant forms. Schiller said: That is not empiricism, that is an idea. Goethe replied: Then I see my ideas with my eyes. Goethe was aware that he had drawn something objective, something he had observed in the plant world. Why was Goethe able to do this? I have often described in my writings on Goethe the inner process that drove him to view plant life in such a way that he arrived at his view of metamorphosis. Since then, probably based on what has been presented as Goethe's path to knowledge, a dissertation on Swedenborg's influence on Goethe was published many years ago in Berlin by a younger man who used to visit me frequently at that time. This dissertation is one of the more outstanding literary works of modern times. Such things tend to disappear in the jumble of dissertations that otherwise appear and are not read. This dissertation on Goethe's natural philosophy in relation to Swedenborg shows how Goethe, precisely because he immersed himself in Swedenborg's state of mind as a young man, arrived at certain conceptual forms that then more or less unconsciously guided him to his morphological imaginings about the plant world. It is extremely interesting to consider Goethe's relationship to Swedenborg from this point of view.

In Swedenborg's case, he was definitely a scientific figure at the height of his time. Until the age of forty, he developed conceptual formulations that enabled him to proceed in a genuinely scientific sense, in accordance with the scientific standpoint of his time, so that his unpublished scientific manuscripts are now being published by a scholarly society as something of great value. Until the age of forty, Swedenborg was a leading, representative natural scientist of his time. He was so because he had synthesizing ideas that enabled him to establish greater connections between natural phenomena. Then he became ill in a certain way, and the conceptual formations he had previously developed for understanding nature poured into his sick organism. What certain mystical natures revere in Swedenborg is his previous scientific state of mind in its metamorphosis of illness.

Like Swedenborg, healthy spiritual perception cannot see the spiritual worlds, not in these personifications, in these images drawn entirely from one's own constitution, which, with a few changes, actually resemble earthly life completely, if one only removes a certain heaviness from it. I do not wish to go into further detail about the underlying causes of Swedenborg's illness, but in order to avoid misunderstanding, I would like to point out that Swedenborg's achievements as a seer may nevertheless be of the utmost interest because they were imbued with something that came from a great, comprehensive, scientifically minded soul. Goethe was inspired in the highest sense by what emerged in Swedenborg in this kind of conceptual synthesis, and he developed into a healthy form for his morphology, for the characteristic scientific penetration of plant life, what Swedenborg had developed as pathological vision.

This relationship between Goethe and Swedenborg is extremely interesting because one followed a path that was unhealthy, while the other followed a path that was healthy in the most intense sense. And the conceptual formulations that Goethe arrived at with regard to the plastic grasp of the plant world are already on the way to such drawings, to such “paintings,” I would say, taking a broad view of the concept of painting, as Haeckel was then compelled to apply to the organic world of animals. Goethe proceeds more cautiously. He is so cautious that he only participates in Swedenborgianism to the extent that it is healthy. But Goethe, too, sails into the imaging of the outer world in such images, which earlier, when human knowledge took more inner paths, arose or were brought up from within. Even in Goethe's time, at least for Goethe and those who understood him, the development of cognitive life had progressed so far that one was compelled to seek in the outer world the same imagery that had previously been found in an instinctive life of imagination.

One cannot remain stuck in the realm of instinctive imaginative life in the face of the progress of human development. The imaginative life must be sought as consciously as I described at the beginning of today's reflection. But then the following results. We advance with our intellectual knowledge to the point where we can comprehend and reproduce the inorganic external world in terms of measure, number, and weight, and arrive at constructive concepts about this world, which lives in measure, number, and weight. When we ascend to the plant world, ascend to the animal world, we are not satisfied with these intellectual considerations, precisely because scientific observation has achieved a certain degree of progress in our age. We need a different kind of representation, and when human beings have inorganic nature before them, they turn to their comprehending intellect and internalize this inanimate nature, arriving at a knowledge, a recognition of this nature that lives in measure, number, and weight.

But when human beings now have the plant world and the animal world before them, as they already have inorganic nature before them today, and as earlier ages did not have them before them with their instinctive imagination, then they are compelled not to comprehend plant and animal beings with an inner soul grasp that lives only in the concept of the intellect, but then it becomes apparent that Goethe, more consciously, and Haeckel, quite naively and unconsciously, enter into representations that are reminiscent of earlier instinctive imaginations. But this indicates that precisely because we have gradually come so far in observing nature, when we move up from minerals to plants, from animals to humans, to the recognition of the world in general, we must apply higher levels of knowledge, that we must move up from the ordinary comprehending mind to imagination, inspiration, and intuition. The rest will follow from the following considerations. This will show that there are other healthy areas besides those that are often listed in order to establish a relationship with the natural sciences of modern times, which Haeckel treated with a certain bias. This relationship must be a living one. We must address this natural science in order to show how its own development gives rise to the necessity of arriving at an imaginative life in full consciousness. And in the following, the objective presentation of the sources of knowledge of anthroposophy will simply show that the development of this anthroposophical worldview at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century could really be about showing how, from what Haeckel quite naively presented as merely indicative of external nature, we could arrive at a real spiritual knowledge. to the 20th century was really about showing how we must progress from what Haeckel naively presented as merely indicative of external nature to a true spiritual knowledge.

At that time, Haeckel developed a knowledge of nature in which only the images he painted were of any significance. In these images, he developed all kinds of concepts. He took these concepts from his own era. I often said this when I gave lectures on Haeckel at that time: Even if you take the much-maligned book “The Riddle of the Universe” and remove the polemics of the last pages, which make up the greater part of the book, leaving only the first pages, which present a positive, constructive view of animal nature, you are still left with a valuable book for those who want to understand how organic nature must be viewed today. But the concepts that Haeckel now takes from all this, and which are found in the part of the book that I said should be torn out, are borrowed from the general terminology of modern times. However, these concepts have gradually become obsolete in the field of organic nature.

Haeckel worked with living ideas, but with dead concepts. I often noticed this in lectures on Haeckelism, and so I wrote my paper “Haeckel and His Opponents.” It was based on the feeling that Haeckel had dead concepts that could not be used for his views, but that his opponents also fought his views with their dead concepts. Therefore, even then, it could be nothing other than what it must be today with regard to natural science for spiritual science: natural science should not be criticized by spiritual science with an anthroposophical orientation using dead concepts, but its views, which it has gained through the progress of natural scientific methods, should be carried forward to living concepts; what occurs in natural science should not be fought with a dead spirit, but carried forward to a living spirit.