Spiritual Knowledge: From Thinking to Supersensible Investigation

GA 78 — 6 September 1921, Stuttgart

Eighth Lecture

Through what I have taken the liberty of characterizing as imaginative, inspired, intuitive knowledge, human beings are led to the results of supersensible research, which truly lead them to their own essence. However, it must be emphasized again and again that this is not a matter of acquiring imagination, inspiration, and intuition themselves, in which one has the means of research, I would say, in which one has for the supersensible world what one has in the scales, in the scale for the physical world. Rather, it is a matter of developing these means of research within spiritual research in such a way that the starting point is taken from something that is already present in ordinary consciousness, in everyday consciousness, in the consciousness that underlies ordinary science, if only one can rise in the right way to this ordinary consciousness with its possibility of real ideas that are free from the senses and ideas that can be grasped in the spirit. Simply a higher animation of what is left unnoticed in ordinary consciousness is what leads into the supersensible worlds. And those who want to become spiritual researchers themselves through imagination, inspiration, and intuition must strive above all to have before them in consciousness what must already be present in real physical research in order for this physical research to lead to realistic results.

What I have just said actually applies only to our time, for it is only since the 15th century that our epoch of human development, in rising to the level of actual scientific research, has also introduced into human consciousness, in the conduct of this research, such concepts that can be trained and enlivened in the manner indicated. In earlier times, completely different means had to be used. These were mentioned, at least in passing, when reference was made to the yoga system and the like, but these older means can no longer be ours. Just as what an adult accomplishes in life cannot be the same as what a child accomplishes, so too what civilized humanity of the 20th century uses as a means of spiritual research cannot be the same as what humanity of the ancient Oriental or ancient Greek cultures used.

We must start from pure thinking, free from sensuality, as I attempted to characterize it in my Philosophy of Freedom. This thinking free from sensuality, as paradoxical as it may sound, develops best and most intensively when one engages in the kind of scientific research that I have also spoken about in these evening lectures. It was not for nothing that I described Haeckelism, this particular way of immersing oneself in the development of animal and human life, despite the errors I recognize and admit in it. If one wants to apply, in the strict sense of the word, what spiritual research must demand for the external sensory world: the lively intermingling of pure perception and pure thinking, then one cannot arrive at any other results with regard to the organic world given by external sensory empiricism than those arrived at by Haeckelism. And if one wants to illustrate what one arrives at in this way, by means of external sensory perception and the methodical thinking that interweaves this perception, one must proceed in the following manner. One cannot then engage in all kinds of speculation about a life force based on some abstract thinking, as neovitalism does. One cannot speculate on the basis of pure concepts whether there is anything supernatural underlying what can be observed externally and sensually, and so on, but must remain with the world of facts, as Haeckelism has done. Precisely because of the demands of spiritual science, one must limit external natural science to this field and in this sense, otherwise speculating about external nature leads to nebulous mysticism. But this can easily lead to accusations of materialism. This accusation can then be turned around by saying: I once presented something from a materialistic point of view, and then I moved away from it again. That cannot be the case. These are only foolish objections that cling to words and cannot penetrate the whole spirit of spiritual scientific research. For it is precisely when one confines oneself to the phenomenal in the field of pure natural science, when one is able to practice that inner resignation of thinking which is necessary in order not to engage in nebulous mysticism, but to pursue the phenomenal world of facts, that one comes to use thinking for external research only, I would say as a working tool, not at all as something constitutive, as something that can say anything about the external sensory world other than that it orders the phenomena of this external sensory world so that they themselves express their secrets, as is entirely in the spirit of Goetheanism. But then, when one practices this resignation, one reaches a limit in this field of research. And at this limit, one does not begin to speculate philosophically, to think up all kinds of things about the transcendent that is to be opened up, but one begins to experience those inner struggles and overcoming that now do not stimulate thinking to speculate, but rather instill it with a kind of elixir of life, so that this thinking is transformed into those insights that then appear in the imaginations, and so that it can approach the world, which it can never reach through speculation, but only by metamorphosing itself into supersensible vision.

But it is only by applying such means of knowledge that man truly gives himself to himself. And since the spiritual researcher starts from this thinking and takes it with him everywhere, he must everywhere trace back what he sees imaginatively, what is revealed to him through inspiration, to the formation of the pure idea. But with regard to what he then presents as ideas, anyone who reflects on ordinary consciousness in the right way can follow him. Therefore, the spiritual researcher is verifiable even in his highest results, and only intellectual laziness claims that one must enter the spiritual world oneself in order to find the results correct. But through the emergence of the results of the imagination, what encompasses the whole of a person's life since birth as a coherent stream is brought before their soul — I have already explained this in these lectures. The ego expands beyond the moment by feeling and experiencing itself in the whole stream of life since birth. And as the human being then rises to inspiration, the world in which they lived before birth or conception, and in which they will live after passing through the gate of death, opens up to them. That which lives with the human being as their immortal self thus becomes an object of knowledge. And in intuition, the view opens up over the repeated earthly lives of the past, so that what anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of can be characterized in such a way that one indicates everywhere the individual steps through which one arrives at these results and which, as I said, are verifiable because they must be given in thoughts that are accessible to everyone.

But this presents human beings with the purely human result of this anthroposophical spiritual science. Just as we begin to come to ourselves when we learn to express in summary form what we experience in our spirit, in our ego, so we come to our whole self, laid out before us, spanning time and eternity, by making the results of spiritual science our own. In this way, human beings come to themselves, and that is initially the most significant result for human beings in general. At the same time, however, human beings are given an expansion of their entire consciousness; for as the results of spiritual research emerge from enlivened, transformed thinking, they in turn have an enlivening effect on human souls when they are taken up and examined by them. This brings about a new kind of insight into the world for human consciousness, and I would like to begin by briefly describing two of the fruits of life that come about precisely through this expansion, this intensification of consciousness.

Today we are faced with a burning social question. What has been at work in social life up to the present day has emerged from the vague and subconscious instincts of humanity. People have established social relationships that have arisen as if by natural law from all kinds of instinctive circumstances. Anyone who is able to view social life impartially will see this. But we live in an age where these instinctive relationships in the social organism of humanity are no longer sufficient. To the same extent that individual economies, tribal economies, and then national economies have become global economies, economic thinking has had to become more and more conscious. And it has become necessary for people today to look at the possible relationships that arise between people engaged in economic activity, and indeed between people who have to get along with each other in social life. It must be admitted that these relationships are of a complicated nature. To the same extent that it has been necessary to bring these relationships from the instinctive into clear consciousness, attempts have been made to do so from the same point of view from which scientific thinking has been learned in recent centuries. I need not praise again this scientific method, which has developed as the one that can properly investigate the outer secrets of nature. For these outer secrets of nature, this method, which emerged from Copernicanism and Galileanism, is indeed a fruitful one. Over the course of recent centuries, humanity has become accustomed to this method; it has used this method to bring clarity to what it perceives vaguely as nature through sensory observation.

Now the need arose to also understand what presents itself in social life as human relationships. It is no wonder that people initially approached these human relationships with the knowledge they had gained from observing the external natural world. And so our national economic and socio-economic views arose, from those that were only represented in the lecture halls to those that gripped millions and millions of people, to Marxism. I have described this in my “Key Points of the Social Question.” Attempts were made to understand how capital performs its functions, how labor works in a social context, how the circulation, production, and consumption of goods work. All of this is represented in complicated relationships; all of this presents itself to our soul as, I would say, living processes with infinite possibilities. The best scientific methods are not sufficient for what presents itself as such processes, and because they were not sufficient and yet wanted to penetrate this social life, we now find ourselves in the midst of the world's misery on the broadest scale. Those who do not want to remain on the surface, but penetrate into the depths of our social needs, will see that these are connected with what I have just tried to characterize. One cannot bring about social transformation with the kind of thinking that has proven itself in natural science. On the other hand, the kind of thinking that works its way through to imagination, that grasps something objective, that presents itself as something dynamic, not as something static, but as a process with infinite possibilities in a relatively small area or even over a large area — that penetrates into this dynamic life of capital, labor, economy, and so on. It can grasp what people experience in the social order, and that is ultimately no surprise, because what people experience in this way ultimately springs from within the human being. The inner being of the human being is the spiritual-soul, or at least it is directed by the spiritual-soul. So when we encounter the social order, we encounter something spiritual. No wonder that spiritual methods are necessary to understand social conditions.

That, my dear audience — forgive me if I now express this in a personal tone — gave me the courage to write my “Theosophy,” my “Outline of Secret Science,” from the same foundations from which I wrote the “Philosophy of Freedom,” my Theosophy, my Outline of Secret Science, that is, from the same foundations from which I attempted to describe the spiritual-supernatural world, to also grasp the spirit where it manifests itself in immediate social human life. And that led me on the path to my Key Points of the Social Question. It is described only in the form of a personal nuance, but this personal nuance conceals what is my objective conviction with regard to the relationship of human beings to the understanding of the social order, which they must shape in the present age in a fully conscious manner, that is, out of the spirit. That is one thing.

The other thing, however — I am only giving examples from the fruits of anthroposophical research, I could cite many more — the other thing I want to mention can confront us when we look at the human organism. We first see it in relation to its outer form. Let us disregard this for the moment. The outer form conceals the inner organs. We study these inner organs in physiology and biology according to their form and structure. We cannot do otherwise if we are initially operating on the basis of the natural science that is customary in the modern age. But in reality, the lungs, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys, all the organs of the human being, are not what they appear to be when we look at them in their enclosed form, with their, I would say, essentially resting structure, especially resting for human sensory perception. No, these organs only pretend to have this form, because in living human beings these individual organs are in constant living motion. They are not organs with a static form at all; they are living processes, and we should not really speak of lungs, heart, kidneys, liver. We should speak of a heart process, of a sum of heart processes, of a sum of lung processes, of a sum of kidney processes; for what is taking place there is a continuous metamorphosis, which takes place in such secrecy that the whole can be taken for a form, indeed, must be taken for the external view. But to penetrate from the observation of this form, which actually reveals only the exterior, to what is a living process, to what is in fact changing at every moment in these organs, to what actually constitutes the life process of these organs, one cannot penetrate with the observation of the senses, but with the moving inner observation which is present in imaginative knowledge.

If social processes are such that their complexity immediately eludes us when we approach them with scientific concepts, then the processes in the lungs, heart, liver, and kidneys are such that they actually conceal their inner essence through what we grasp with these ordinary scientific concepts. And one enters into these condensed processes with the imagination. On the one hand, imagination is able — if I may express myself trivially — to follow the fleeting, complicated social processes. On the other hand, it is able to dissolve what appears to us as a static form in the human organs into the moving life of the organ processes, which then, when viewed directly, cannot be speculated upon or deduced. For thinking must come to a standstill when sensory research is present, at what is there in the phenomena, and from there it must transform itself into living supersensory intuition. Only then does it penetrate the real processes that are hidden from sensory intuition, even in the individual human organ processes.

And here lies the path to the enrichment of our external medicine, which is fully recognized by spiritual science, through what spiritual research can add to this external medicine. Spiritual research does not want to take the side of quackery or mysticism in the therapeutic field. Spiritual research wants to rely on genuine, true research in this field as well, on genuine, true sensory knowledge, but to carry this on to those mysteries of existence that we must also explore if we want to penetrate into the whole of life, so that this penetration in turn bears fruit for the immediate life of the healthy or sick individual human being or of human society. This leads to a view of the fruits of life that arise from supersensible anthroposophical knowledge.

All of this then comes together to form something that I would like to characterize in the following way. People often believe that they can overcome materialism by leaving the whole world of matter, I would say, outside in the world, by saying goodbye to it in spirit and now rising into something spiritual, abstract, into a cloud cuckoo land, and mystifying themselves there, behaving in such a way that they regard material life as something lowly that must be risen above. Then, of course, one rises to a spirit in which it is pleasant to live, to a kind of humane Sunday pleasure in the spirit alongside the rough work of the weekdays, to which one devotes oneself within the very matter in which one must live. Real anthroposophical knowledge cannot stand on this ground. It attempts to grasp the spirit in such a way that, once it has it in its creative activity, it can follow it into the outermost ramifications of material life. Thus, for this spiritual science, which is meant here, it is not merely important to state that, in addition to the human body, which consists of the brain, lungs, liver, and so on, there is also a soul and a spirit in human beings. This leads to little more than talking in circles, for it leads to abstractions with reference to the world in which we stand between birth and death. What spiritual science strives for is to immerse itself everywhere with the spirit with which it has permeated itself, to say how spiritual nature, spiritual essence, lives in every single organ of the human being, how the essence of the lungs, liver, heart, stomach, and so on, how spirit and soul permeate the entire human organism, shining with the spirit into the most individual cells, so that nothing remains that is not illuminated by the light of the spirit. Then one no longer has matter on the one hand and abstract spirit on the other; then what is spirit on the one hand in abstraction and matter on the other in abstraction has grown together into unity. And the same is true of social life.

But then, when one allows the spirit to submerge into reality in this way and submerges oneself with it into this reality, the human soul deepens in such a way that those ropes and cords of which I have spoken on these evenings, which lead from the innermost human being out into the innermost world being, that these cords, these ropes, this spiritual connection between the human being and the world, enter into the consciousness of the human being in such a way that a living current, I would say, an inhaling and exhaling of the world arises. What is otherwise grasped in theoretical, abstract concepts becomes, in free spirituality itself, as transparent as ideas are, and as alive as life itself, and as free as the freest action can be, but therefore also thoroughly objective, even if the objective in this case must be grasped in free spirituality. That is why it is necessary to enliven those abilities that otherwise struggle unconsciously to the surface in human beings, based on this spiritual research, this spiritual knowledge.

With regard to ordinary external science, those who are artists rightly have a kind of shyness. And modern aesthetics, which has emerged from the thinking of recent times, which has become accustomed to natural science, is something that artists avoid, and rightly so, for it is something abstract, something that leads away from art rather than into it. Spiritual science does not lead to such abstract concepts, but brings to life what is initially only a concept or idea, which in turn enlivens other human abilities. This makes it possible for something truly artistic to grow in a natural way from the soil from which this spiritual science springs. The art cultivated in Dornach, of which I will show some examples in pictures tomorrow, never has anything to do with translating ideas into artistic perception, nor does something like eurythmy, which is drawn from the same soil as spiritual science. No, the soil is only the same; the soil is that of the living creativity of the whole human being. Sometimes it forms ideas as one branch, and sometimes, from the same root, the other branch, the artistic one, emerges. That is why I have always found it extremely unsympathetic when allegorical or symbolic elements have appeared within the anthroposophical movement. What is artistic must come from the same source as anthroposophy, but it is not anthroposophy translated into art. In this way, a certain fruit of life is produced in the artistic field, as indicated in the social or medical fields.

And when one considers the way in which human beings are brought together with their eternal immortality and with those forces that actually shape them as human beings from the spiritual world, then one will also understand how what human beings have gained through anthroposophy in terms of experiential knowledge and cognitive experience is connected with religious deepening. In our age, which has become so indifferent to religion, we need elementary religious forces again. We need paths into those places of spiritual experience from which human morality, human artistic creativity, and everything that constitutes human value and human dignity can be fertilized as if from a divine center. Anthroposophy is slandered when it is accused of sectarian aspirations that it has no intention of pursuing. It is slandered when people believe that it wants to be a new religion. No, it does not want to be that, simply because it strives to understand the course of human development in its true form. It must be said that the divine powers that have shaped the world and guided human development were understood in earlier times according to the understanding of earlier populations. We must advance to other metamorphoses of knowledge and motives for action; we must bring what is eternal in the sense of the present age closer to our souls. Certainly, spiritual science will not speak of any other Christ than the Christ who passed through the mystery of Golgotha; but spiritual science must speak of stages of knowledge that it considers necessary in the 20th century, also in relation to the Christ event. To those who believe that, on the basis of some existing creed, they must fear that their foundation will be undermined by anthroposophy, it must always be said again: Is the one who fears at every opportunity that the truths of Christianity may be compromised a true believer in Christianity? Or is it the one who knows — even if millions of insights arise on the physical, soul, and spiritual ground — that the real truths of Christianity can only shine more brilliantly before the human soul as a result? No one will ask why there is no mention of America in the Bible, and anyone who would have wanted to oppose the discovery of America from the standpoint of the Bible would be like someone who today wants to oppose the views of anthroposophical spiritual science from the standpoint of the Bible.

These things must be seen through and thought through in all honesty. Otherwise, what lies in the confessions will always be a stumbling block for real research, whereas if it penetrates to the spirit in the way that anthroposophical spiritual science wants, it will certainly bear fruit in the form of a revitalization of the religious being of the human soul. We must bring what we research in the various worlds into harmony with what forms our religious sensibility and feeling. And we take nothing away from the religions when we try to bring their truths into harmony, into justified harmony, into cognitive harmony with what emerges as the insights of different epochs. Thus, our age will also bear the fruit of anthroposophical research, which consists in a deepening of religious life, which has become indifferent. When this fruit ripens, it will provide the warmth and enthusiasm that we as Christians need if we want to move forward in our time of decline. And whatever else we may recognize in social life, in human organization, whatever we may produce artistically: humanity can only develop all this if it is supported by the warmth of the innermost human essence and creative power. But this is contained in the true religious feelings of humanity.

But what is now particularly opposed to these types of spiritual scientific research in our time is deeply connected with the fact that we have gradually lost touch with reality, looking on the one hand at nature, which has been devoid of spirit, which modern science can therefore not perceive in its true form, but only in its outer, sensory form, and on the other hand looking at the spiritual world, perhaps only in a certainty of feeling — I spoke about this yesterday — but then not going beyond abstractions. All of this together has its roots in the fact that we have gradually become too comfortable to want to grasp the spiritual in spiritual freedom, in free spiritual experience, in inner activity, so that we can follow it into the hiding places of material events. Because scientific truths are found in close connection with external events, because they are formed everywhere on the basis of observation and experiment, because people no longer attempt to think beyond what chance experiments and chance observations yield, they have become accustomed to replacing the former dogma of revelation — as I expressed in my very first writings — with the dogma of experience, namely external sensory experience. This has led to dissatisfaction in one's inner state of mind. People have lost the habit of experiencing what the soul can experience as something objective, not in relation to something external, but in free inner experience. This free inner experience is what we must seek above all else if we want to arrive at true spiritual research. And that is what people now resist most.

I would like to give an example of this, not because I want to use this essay, which was published recently, here in these lectures to settle scores, so to speak, with anything that is objected to against spiritual science in anthroposophical terms. No, I do not want to deal with any opponent in this direct way in these lectures, least of all with what is written in this essay, which I am referring to here. For the person who speaks in this essay is talking about something completely different from anthroposophical spiritual science, which he does not know at all and which he has formed an opinion about based on hearsay and a glance inside, one could almost say, admittedly after looking into perhaps a single book and after hearing certain news reports — for himself, it must be said, in a fundamentally honest way, as far as he is able. I do not want to go into what is being discussed here in contrast to spiritual science. I would only like to consider the matter from a cultural-historical and contemporary perspective. This highly respected author speaks of the exercises he has heard about, which I describe, so that human beings can truly ascend with their soul life into the spiritual world. And he has obviously also heard or read that in the initial, very elementary exercises, one should think about an indifferent object for five minutes, so that one really holds on to the thought in inner freedom, without anything forcing one, but only by following what one wants to do. That is why I said, to indicate what is important: one can use a pin or a pencil, for it does not matter what one thinks about. What is important is not that one is bound by what one thinks, but that one holds on to the thought for five minutes in inner freedom, that the thinking is transferred into the sphere of free activity. In ordinary life, we are not accustomed to keeping our thoughts in the sphere of free activity in this way. When we turn our thoughts to an object, we want to be captivated by that object; we think about it for as long as the object captivates us. This means that we never enter into spiritual research; on the contrary, it leads us further and further away from supersensible research and perception. It is therefore characteristic of a person who stubbornly wants to remain completely in the decline that is currently manifesting itself when they say: "I would not be able to do that at all now; and I fear, I fear that even with all my self-discipline, I will never learn it. On the other hand, I have already been reproached for being able to be so absorbed in a subject that interests me for more than five minutes that I am no longer available to the rest of the world at all." That is precisely the opposite approach. If one is so captivated by the subject that one is no longer present for the rest of the world, then one surrenders oneself to the subject, then one sells one's freedom to the subject. That is what matters: that the object does not captivate you, that you take an object that does not captivate you, and that you hold your consciousness on the object for five minutes out of your own inner free will. It is therefore extremely characteristic when it is said here: “I would rather leave this ability to people who have nothing in their real human lives that interests them so much that it holds their attention for five minutes.”

For this man here, who is a famous man of the present day, there is so much that binds him, again and again for five minutes and probably longer — I will accept this to his credit — that he cannot bring himself to hold an inner complex of thoughts for five minutes out of inner freedom. He leaves that to those people who are not as bound by the outer world as he is, and that also reveals how he clings to what has developed in the modern way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, as characterized this evening. This is far removed from what spiritual science must promote: putting oneself into the sphere of free thinking.

Another example I give to help people enter such a sphere of free thinking is the one I describe in the second part of my “Occult Science” as the contemplation of the Rosy Cross. You can read there how this exercise is done. The author in question says: “The cross often appears before my soul uninvited” — that is, not through an inner call in freedom, but uninvited — "But then it is not a black cross, perhaps made of polished ebony, but a very common, rough gallows of a dirty gray color. And hanging on this cross is not a wreath of seven red, radiant roses, but a pale, bloodied human being in the agony of death, indeed in the agony of hell."

So, for the purpose of inner liberation of thought, an exercise is given, and the person concerned can think of nothing else but what comes to mind under the coercive forces of his entire upbringing, of his entire habits of life, and he even considers this to be self-evident, to be right. With such an attitude, one can never approach what spiritual research can really bring. For the same man did not need to describe what I depict in my “Secret Science” as a cross that one forms in free spirituality, but he could, for example, also learn that someone somewhere speaks to him of a window cross and describes it to him. Then he would also say: You have no right to speak of a window cross, because I do not think of a reddish painted window cross, but always of a black cross as a common crude gallows — and so on. And if one wanted to tell this man how one works with the cross, namely with the abscissa and ordinate axes, in analytical geometry, he would forbid it. And if Einstein drew him the abscissa or ordinate axis, the crude gallows would come to his mind, and nothing else. One must only look at these things in their true context, then one will see what forces are at work in our time to lead us in the opposite direction from what, as the esteemed audience may have gathered, is so extraordinarily necessary for our time in social, religious, and scientific terms.

No wonder that the author in question says something else that is highly remarkable. I have presented what I have called the Akashic Records as that through which man attempts to shape his thoughts in such a way that he can survey the becoming of the world in inner activity. I had to reckon with the fact that when describing something like this, one actively maintains one's inner state of mind and that one elevates this state of mind in free spirituality to the supersensible realm. But this man says the following: "And — believe me or not — this renunciation is not even that difficult for me. If Dr. Steiner wanted to present me with an illustrated deluxe edition of the Akashic Records, I wouldn't even read it." Well, this man thinks it could happen to him that he would be presented with an illustrated deluxe edition of the Akashic Records so that he could passively indulge himself, so that no one would expect him to engage in inner soul activity.

It is absolutely necessary in our time that those who want to work with the rising forces view such phenomena without hatred or antipathy, but as they are, all the forces of ascent and all the forces of decline. Many people stand there and cannot even notice that they have these transitional forces within themselves, and numerous other people, thousands and thousands of people, rush after them. They rush after such passive religious natures because they want to remain passive, because they do not want what is so necessary: objectivity, objective essence, that is, grasping the supersensible in free spirituality. This requires an active inner soul state, a free inner soul state.

This is what I would like to say in summary at the end: Anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to cultivate supersensible knowledge, knowledge that leads to such results as I have summarized in the preceding days and today. This anthroposophical spiritual science does not seek to lead to dead concepts that only speak of a dead external reality. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to limit science, knowledge, to those results that are gained like withered leaves by the abstract mind from external sensory reality and which, when transferred into the human soul as withered leaves, wither away and, by their withering, weaken the inner power of the human being.

Anthroposophical spiritual science wants rather to bring forth in its results true fruits of life, not withered leaves, fruits of life that can become spiritual nourishment for the living soul, just as blood in its circulation brings nourishment to the body. But for this to be possible, spiritual science needs the air of freedom. Knowledge itself must be moved into the spiritual air of freedom, that freedom which can awaken the deepest depths of the human soul to knowledge, but which can also awaken it to truly free action, to action that can establish harmony, social harmony, among human beings. For what must necessarily happen in the social organism from the present into the near future must ultimately emerge from what the fully conscious human being achieves in free knowledge, can experience in the innermost depths of the soul as the free fruit of this knowledge, and can in turn carry out as social action into the whole of human society, into the whole of human development, so that it leads humanity from the present into the near future, not through forces of decline, but through forces of ascent, to new human, healing, and creative things.