The Essence of Anthroposophy

GA 80a — 16 January 1922, Munich

The Essence of Anthroposophy

Dear attendees! Today, anthroposophy is still seen by many people as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge, which serious science should have nothing to do with. Now, however, there are also scientists who are to be taken very seriously indeed, who speak of the fact that going beyond the usual scientific methods to knowledge of worlds into which these scientific methods do not lead must be striven for, and one speaks then of all kinds of abilities that one or the other person may have in order to penetrate into such worlds. They then endeavor to fathom what comes to light through such abnormal abilities and register it in the usual scientific way. But even such serious scientists will not want to have anything to do with anthroposophy for the reason that they do not want to recognize the path by which anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into supersensible worlds as a scientific one, but at most want to regard it as a kind of fantasy, as a special kind of impossible mysticism or even as a special kind of superstition. Now, my dear audience, those people who strive for enthusiasm, for nebulous mysticism or even for superstition will sometimes come close to what anthroposophical knowledge wants to incorporate into our spiritual life, but in the long run they will hardly get their money's worth. People who run everywhere where there is talk of some “Sophie” or some “occult” will very soon see that Anthroposophy in particular endeavors to work entirely out of the spirit of modern scientific spirit, and even to take this spirit of modern science to its very last consequences, but above all that a thoroughly healthy and as far-reaching thinking as possible is necessary for anthroposophy. And that is not exactly what the devotees of enthusiasm and nebulous mysticism love. The fact that anthroposophy has such aspirations cannot, however, prevent those people who would like to reject it with a slight wave of the hand from repeatedly saying that only neurasthenics or hysterical people can approach anthroposophy.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, this evening I would like to take the liberty of addressing the essence of anthroposophy, as it is intended by those who who, in the spirit of this serious science and serious thinking, strive for an expansion of our knowledge because they recognize that, in our scientific culture and in that which opposes it, the modern person must remain unsatisfied in two directions. In the first instance, where it is a matter of research in natural science, anthroposophy places itself firmly on the ground of this natural science research, and it sees, with all those who proceed as cautiously as, for example, the famous du Bois-Reymond, it sees precisely the limits of this natural science research. It sees how human thinking, which has celebrated such great triumphs in modern times and is justifiably so proud of its methods, can nevertheless only work in the direction of natural scientific research by adhering to external, sensually given facts, by more or less summarizing these sensually given facts and arriving at natural laws. When we realize that our present thinking, which is so conscientiously applied in science, is trained entirely on external, sensory facts, that it can only have methods that correspond entirely to the course of these sensory facts, then we will have to speak of the limits of scientific recognize the limitations of scientific knowledge and admit that all philosophical speculation that seeks to go beyond these limitations by means of pure thinking, by thinking left to its own devices, will enter into uncertainty in those areas where the actual being of the human being is rooted in its immortal foundation. That is why there is so much controversy about the one or other philosophical system that wants to speak about the immortality of the soul, about the divine spiritual foundations of the world. One feels how thinking, tearing itself away from sensual facts and wanting to build on its own foundations, how this thinking absolutely enters into uncertainty, so that one can actually have the feeling: this thinking no longer deals with anything outside of the sensual facts. On the other hand, there are numerous people today who have a more or less clear feeling that they still want to penetrate to the deepest human longing, to penetrate to the world reasons with which man is connected in his innermost being and through whose knowledge he could gain insight into his immortal being. Then such people probably surrender to one or the other direction of mysticism, that is, they say goodbye to all knowledge. They delve into their own inner selves. They believe that if they delve into their own inner selves, if they dig deeper and deeper into the shafts of their own human soul, then the eternal essence of man must also be found.

In this area, I would say that anthroposophy takes exactly the same scientific approach to observation. And by engaging in taking what some mystics present as the actual essence of the human being, it sees how there is nothing in it but transformed perceptions of the external sense world, which to a certain extent withdraw into memory and the ability to remember. And who knows how, over the course of years and decades, that which this mysticism may have half-consciously taken up into its memory can be transformed and how it is brought forth by mystics as something quite different, how they believe that something is telling them about a certain divine spiritual being in man, while in fact they are only dealing with the transformed memories of external perceptions. Anyone who has insight into these things will see, precisely in these mystical endeavors, however well-intentioned they may be, a stumbling block to truly scientific penetration into a spiritual world to which the human being truly belongs.

And so, dear attendees, there are two pitfalls that anthroposophical research must avoid. The first is mere mental work, which wants to be left to its own devices, philosophical speculation about the supernatural and the beyond, which leads into uncertainty and even into nothingness. The other is mysticism, which, although it believes it is penetrating to the divine-spiritual through immersion in one's own inner self, nevertheless has nothing to do with anything other than what the human being has first led down into his soul through observation of nature, through observation of the external sense world, and what he then later brings up again.

These two pitfalls stand in stark clarity before anthroposophical research. Therefore, anthroposophical research tries to simply say: the paths of knowledge that one must take in the field of external knowledge of nature do not lead at all into the spiritual, supersensible realm. Other paths of research must be taken. And since the usual paths of research make use of the cognitive abilities that a person has in ordinary life, anthroposophical research must seek out other cognitive abilities. It can be said right from the outset: the anthroposophical research referred to here is not based on any kind of abnormal ability that individuals may want to have through grace or illness, but on the fact that there are abilities slumbering in every human soul – if one wants to express oneself scientifically – that are latent abilities that can be brought out by certain methods, so that only when man has come into full possession of the cognitive faculty, which is applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science, only then does he begin, I might say, to imitate the child once more. We see the child as it enters the world with only limited abilities to gain insight into its surroundings. We see how these abilities lead ever deeper and deeper into the outer and inner world and how these abilities develop. In our ordinary lives, we complete this development at a certain point. And having acquired a certain way of thinking, a certain way of feeling and a certain way of willing as adults, we stop at that point, using these to drive our everyday lives and our ordinary science. Those who want to do anthroposophical research must continue this development. At a certain point in their life, they have to say to themselves: the abilities in the soul are not fully developed in this way; more can be raised up from the depths of the soul. And this bringing up leads to those cognitive abilities that can guide us into the supersensible worlds. I have described in detail, Ladies and Gentlemen, what a person has to do to bring up dormant abilities in his soul. I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in the second part of my “Occult Science” and in other writings. I would like to take the liberty of now quoting in principle what is described in detail there.

What a person has to do in order to develop their higher, their supersensible cognitive abilities is not an external process, but a process that takes place within the most intimate depths of the soul itself. There are certain soul exercises, soul exercises that lead in two directions. One direction is a certain treatment of thinking, of imagining, and the other direction is a certain treatment of the human will. The way in which imagining is in every human being can be transformed and furthered by certain soul exercises, and the same applies to the human will. What is to be achieved through thinking is a certain inner strengthening, a certain inner strengthening of the thought life itself in the first instance. This is not achieved by some arbitrary act, by an arbitrary inner contemplation or the like, but it is achieved in the sense of anthroposophical research by giving thinking itself a kind of inner schooling, and indeed a schooling that works, I might say, according to the principle by which we otherwise also make the human being stronger in life. If I may use a very trivial example, I can say: If a person repeatedly strains a particular muscle system in his work, this system becomes particularly strong. The same can now be achieved in relation to the act of visualizing itself. For example, you can do the following – and many such exercises are mentioned in the books I have mentioned – you can place any idea or a set of ideas at the center of your entire mental life. I call this meditation and concentration of thought. This is truly not some kind of magic, but a development of the very ordinary, normal human abilities. So you put some idea that you can easily grasp at the center of your mental life. It is often recommended — and rightly so — that you look up such an idea in a book or elsewhere so that it is new to you, or that you get it from an experienced anthroposophical researcher so that it is new. Why should it be new?

Because when we have an idea that we have had for a long time in our lives, or even for a short time, because such an idea, by bringing it into the center of our attention, evokes all kinds of memory remnants. Much remains in the subconscious and unconscious. We do not overlook what we put into the soul when we take such an idea or series of ideas from our treasure trove of knowledge. But if we take something that is completely new to us, or something that we have been given, then there can be no question of any reminiscences emerging. Instead, we then devote our entire soul life to a new, but now inner, impression, an impression that we can only grasp with thought. We give ourselves over to such an image with all our soul life as intensely as possible, and we try to bring it to the same kind of vibrancy in the act of visualizing such an image as we otherwise have vibrancy when we are confronted with an external sensory impression. This activity of the soul in response to an external sensory impression must in every respect be the model for every exercise that the anthroposophical researcher first undertakes in his soul.

This clearly shows — my dear audience — that it is not a matter of bringing something out of the depths of the human organism in a pathological way, so that what I am describing to you now can by no means lead to hallucinations, visions or the like, but on the contrary, leads precisely to the other pole of human soul life. The ideal is not what can be achieved by some kind of morbid brooding, isolated from external perception, but rather the ideal is, so to speak, that healthy human devotion of soul that one develops when one faces external sensory impressions with full consciousness and with the most absolute control of the will. And by applying this liveliness to that which one places at the center of one's soul life in the manner described, one actually comes to strengthen one's imaginative and thinking life, to make it more powerful, just as one strengthens a muscle when one uses it continually.

If you continue such exercises — they require a lot of patience and perseverance, because anthroposophical research is no easier than research in any field of external science — you will eventually notice how your thinking has become more intense, more vigorous, more powerful. And one arrives at developing within oneself what can be described as a kind of first step on the path to supersensible knowledge, and what I have called — names must be there, one must not be offended by them — imagination. One gradually learns to live completely, as otherwise in the world of the senses, in an inwardly intensified thinking.

But what is most urgently needed now, above all, is to be clear about one thing: when one's entire soul life is concentrated on such a complex of images, then — I would say — the soul life gradually submerges into a realm in which it , to imagine them vividly, to have such images in abundance, they would arise with an inner intensity that is otherwise only found in external sensory perceptions; but if one did not develop another faculty, one would ultimately come to be dominated by these images in a certain way. They would besiege you, they would be there, you would be devoted to them. It would come to pass that the ideas have the person and not the person the ideas. Therefore, it is necessary that these exercises — modified in the most diverse ways — are accompanied by others, exercises that consist of suppressing such ideas, of removing them from consciousness; so that on [ on the one hand, to develop the ability to make one's consciousness as intensive as possible through thinking, and on the other hand, to remove these thoughts at will and to pass over into a state that can be called empty consciousness. But one notices that after such exercises have been continued for some time, one's entire thinking has become free of that which the body has as its share of ordinary thinking life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, can only be realized, I would say, through the experience itself. In the practice of thinking, as I have described it to you, of thinking that has been thoroughly worked through, it becomes apparent how one moves freely in thought and then has the thoughts as something like an external table or some other object. And just as little as one would think of placing an external object in the interior of the soul or the human body, so little would one, when one has penetrated into such a modified imagination, place what then arises in consciousness only in the interior of the organism. It is an experience that one comes to a soul life that takes place outside the body. It is important, my dear audience, that this first stage, the stage of imaginative knowledge, be transcended before moving on to higher stages.

But now we must be clear about one thing: everything that arises in this way initially takes on a pictorial character. The usual abstract way in which we otherwise follow natural phenomena, carefully lining them up link by link, can certainly be evaluated by the spiritual researcher in the right way, and must remain so, because common sense must run entirely parallel to what I describe as supersensible research, this kind of linking-together abstract thinking ceases for the field of supersensible research itself and an inwardly intensive, pictorial imagining occurs. One lives in pictures and manages to remove these pictures from consciousness in order to remain with an empty consciousness.

Dear attendees, it actually seems quite easy to remain with an empty consciousness. But most people who have not undergone this training immediately fall into a kind of sleep when there is no content of consciousness, when the content of consciousness is suppressed. That is what must be achieved for anthroposophical research: that after one has first brought the life of thought to its fullest development of strength, one can then immediately suppress it again and, so to speak, face the emptiness on one's own initiative. One does not stand there facing the void, because we will see in a moment that if one makes the consciousness empty from within, after first having permeated it, that if one has become free of the body penetrates with his imagination into the supersensible world, that this is the way not to remain with a sleeping consciousness, but that this consciousness is filled with the content of a supersensible world. But man still has to imagine — I would like to say — undergo a transition. When one enters ever more strongly into this world of images through intensified visualization, one comes to the point where one can simply say, from the facts that one experiences inwardly: You do not have the same lightness of thought within you that you used to have and that you reserve for ordinary life; you do not have this lightness within you in imaginative thinking. You live in these images now in such a way that you are devoted to them. You know that you cannot simply structure one image within another as you used to, but that the images structure themselves. They demand, through their own essence, the form they are to take, and you feel yourself in a world that is a reality.

You enter this imaginative world and from a certain point onwards you experience how you are immersed in reality, I would even say, how you are immersed in the soul. And the first experience one has when one has penetrated to such imaginative vision is that one's life on earth since birth comes to life before the soul as in a great tableau. Otherwise, a person has the stream of memories from this life, from which this or that emerges, either voluntarily or involuntarily. This is not the case with what I am now describing, but what emerges from a certain point of imaginative knowledge is that the human being has before him, as in a broad overview, the workings of his inner being. He overlooks how certain forces have given rise to this or that disposition in him, how he has come to this or that heroic or unheroic decision. He does not so much gain insight into the individual facts of life as into the forces that lie behind them, that have shaped us ourselves, that have given our thoughts their direction and content, that have guided our feelings from within when they have been stimulated by the outside world, that have impulsed our will. All that has been incorporated since birth, one can see.

One comes to experience, not through fanciful arbitrariness but through the realization of the experience of anthroposophical research, what is called the formative forces, or, with an older term, the etheric body. One experiences that which the human being carries within, which has not only a spatial character but also a spatial-temporal character. What stands as a unity above the time space since birth is experienced as something that cannot be depicted in detail, unlike a flash of lightning. One can depict this formative body in a single moment; but it is in motion, it is that which works in us, which flows through and pulses our entire soul life. In that, one lives initially.

But – dear attendees – once you have acquired the ability to extinguish the images that arise in the imagination over and over again as I have described, so that you can penetrate to the empty consciousness, then you have gradually acquired the ability to powerfully concentrate and suppress this entire formative force body, so to speak, to remove it. Just as one otherwise only removes the individual images that one has brought to, so one removes this formative force body, thus emptying one's consciousness of this content, which now contains not abstract ideas and images, but the forces of inner growth. When you remove it, you have not only stepped out of your body, you not only perceive spiritually outside of your body, you have stepped out of your earthly existence. Then you perceive in that in which the essence of the soul lived before birth or - let us say - conception, and in which it will live after the human being has passed through the gate of death.

You see, dear attendees, for the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, it is not a matter of philosophical speculation, but of something that is achieved through gradual, truly systematically applied inner methods as a human ability. One does not penetrate to human immortality with mere thoughts, but one penetrates to that which precedes birth and follows death — I would like to say — through an inner method of experimentation — please do not misunderstand this word — but one must continually make the attempt. When you have come so far that you can imagine without the body and can suppress the images that arise in the imagination, that you can step out of the life between birth and death and enter into the essence of the human being, which is the immortal part of the human being, when you have strengthened the soul to such an extent that it can become empty, then it is not an empty consciousness that enters. Rather, this consciousness is filled with facts that one could never perceive otherwise, with facts from a purely spiritual, supersensible world, from a world that is always around us, permeating all sensuality, in which the human being lives without his sensual body before birth or, let us say, conception as in a spiritual world. And in this way one actually enters into concrete spiritual ideas that cannot otherwise be obtained except through inner experience. One arrives at the experience of human immortality.

You see, dear audience, you may doubt the results of anthroposophical research at first – not only do you have the right to do so, but it is even understandable for the first attempt at human understanding – but if you look at what underlies the anthroposophical researcher, if he puts himself in a position to get these results, then you will have to admit: He has the right attitude for true science and scientific conscientiousness. He tries to change his soul, but not arbitrarily, but out of such inner conscientiousness as can be found in the laboratory or clinic.

The fact that a person, having created an empty consciousness, now perceives something, means that in the most eminent sense he no longer perceives with the body – which he otherwise always does for ordinary and scientific consciousness – but perceives with the soul, freed from the body. And when a person perceives, as I have now indicated, that which is not contained within the sense world, that which is the essence of the human being before he enters into embryonic life, then one can speak of the second stage of higher knowledge, of knowledge through inspiration. That which penetrates into the soul because the consciousness has learned to empty itself, is inspired into this consciousness. And from experience we know that through such inspiration alone man can form an opinion about immortality. But if it is presented as a result, then everyone can follow with common sense what anthroposophical research does. Anthroposophical research does not lead to visions or pathological states, but can be followed at every stage with common sense. Therefore, one can always verify whether the paths taken by the spiritual researcher are reasonable and whether reason can therefore also be found in the results he gives.

And when one now advances to such inspired insights, then the first step is indeed the recognition of the supersensible entity of the soul, as it was before birth or – let us say – conception, as it will be after death, the realization of the immortal essence of the soul But one can only penetrate to this immortal essence of the soul if the soul has come to a body-free realization, if it exercises pure mental, transparent cognitive activity, which it otherwise exercises with the help of the brain and nervous system. This is independent of brain and nerve activity. And just as, to the ordinary consciousness, man must be more or less a materialist, as materialism is right for the ordinary consciousness, that it is bound to the physical organization, that the physical organization must underlie its activity, so it is true on the other hand that, by developing such abilities as I have described here, man then comes to make free use of the soul as an organ of knowledge. In this way he not only penetrates into the supersensible world just characterized, but also into that which is continually around us, of which the ordinary sense world is only a manifestation. That is to say, now man can penetrate into a world that lies behind the sense phenomena, not merely through philosophical speculation, but by using purely soul organs that he has first — I would almost say, if it did not sound philistine — laboriously acquired. And then one does indeed enter into regions that are still very much resented by today's familiar modes of representation.

But before developing knowledge for these areas, other methods of imagination and concentration must be added to those described. These other methods go in the direction of the will. Just as thought, for ordinary consciousness, is dependent on the brain and nervous system — I cannot go into the details here, but for those who are truly familiar with modern scientific developments, this will be beyond question — so too is the human will, as it unfolds in all that leads a person to action, dependent first of all on the human physical organization. Just as one has to free the life of thought from the bodily organization for supersensible research, so one also has to free the life of will from the bodily organization. But even that strong effort of the will, which one must unfold in imaginative knowledge, leads one to gradually apply the will in a body-free way.

Dear attendees, perhaps I may make a seemingly personal comment here, but one that is entirely relevant. I published my “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the nineties and tried to show what human freedom is actually based on. The usual question is: Is man free or subject to an absolute necessity? Does everything that leads to a decision of the will, to an act, flow from the necessary conditions of his organism, or does the possibility lie within man to decide freely out of himself, without necessity? I tried at the time to show that, for the vast majority of human actions, one must indeed speak of necessity, that the instinctual, the drive life, the emotional life, that everything that is bound to the human organism, is the basis for the vast majority of our actions, but that man can also rise to have pure thoughts as his volitional motives, pure thoughts that live inwardly in moral ideals.

When man lays such pure thoughts as moral ideals at the foundation of his volitional impulses, then he gradually comes to be a truly free being as a personality. And I called this sum of moral ideals that can find a place in a person, and which then find their outward expression in the way a person morally lives, I called this sum of moral ideals moral intuition. And I have said that the truly free life of man is based on such an intuition, an intuition of which I said: What its content is does not come from the human organism, but is taken from a spiritual world, and it is from a spiritual world that the free man is determined. And if one now pursues the philosophy of freedom in this way, then this philosophy of freedom is thoroughly a preparation for insight into such cognitive abilities as I have described today.

When one sees the essence of these moral ideals that are to be realized here, then one comes to expand this essence more and more. And when one adds such inner exercises as I have described today in principle, then one realizes: what is granted to man as an earthly being in terms of free actions can take part in a spiritual world. This can fill his entire soul, it can bring him to imagination, through which he surveys his body of formative forces, and can bring him to inspiration, through which he surveys the soul that he was before he entered earthly existence through birth or, let us say, conception, and that he will be when he has crossed the threshold of death. But the capacity for such supersensible knowledge as this in man must be cultivated also in the sphere of the will.

Here one can indeed bring forth the best fruits by endeavoring to make one's will ever stronger and stronger in relation to the purely inner life. This can be done in many ways.

I will give the following one. We are accustomed to thinking in terms of how external facts unfold. We treat what is earlier as the cause and what comes later as the effect. And when we are immersed in ordinary life, we think along the lines of external facts. The one who only thinks in this way along the thread of external facts, who thus, so to speak, passively surrenders to the course of external events, cannot achieve the development of will that is necessary for the purpose of supersensible knowledge. But the one who, for example, does the exercise – and does it again and again – that he, instead of thinking along the thread of external events, imagines these external events backwards, the last ones first, then the penultimate ones and so on and so on – let us say, for example, the course of a drama from the last act to the penultimate, third-last and so on, in the smallest possible portions backwards – or if he considers his experiences of the day in this retrospective view in the evening, then, if it is to be done seriously, a different effort of will is required than that used when he lets his thoughts run along the thread of external facts.

This effort of will, which one then arrives at, ultimately brings about what otherwise – I would like to say, although this is perhaps not popular with those people who only ever speak of objective knowledge — this effort of will brings about a deeper sense of what, in ordinary life, is tied to the organization as the most beautiful and best expression of the human will: to develop love. I know, dear listeners, that love is not readily seen as a cognitive faculty. And in the way it is in ordinary life, anthroposophy does not seek to appropriate it. But when the will unfolds in the way I have described, then the human being comes to discover that the capacity for love is one of the most significant cognitive faculties.

Through this cognitive faculty, which he can still increase by, when he has, as it were, grasped this ability to love within, when he has become aware of it, by now pursuing the external facts in such a way that he really lovingly puts himself in the individual kingdoms of nature — I have described this in detail — as a person develops such cognitive abilities, as he lovingly follows the life of a plant from germination to fruit, so that he experiences how leaf by leaf unfolds. Likewise, one can — I would say — with such a developed capacity for love, delve into the animal organization and so on. If one also strengthens the life of the will in this way and begins to observe oneself more seriously than usual as an active human being, if one observes oneself in one's actions as objectively as one otherwise only observes external objects, if one gets into the habit of walking beside oneself like a second person and always watching oneself in his volitions, then the will comes to not only let inspiration unfold in man, but to let that which speaks into the human soul from a spiritual world also be experienced through the imagination. Then man comes to make his own soul a living organ of knowledge for the spiritual. In inspiration, the spiritual world does not yet reveal itself to the soul in a clear way. In the third stage, which I have called intuition — real intuition, not the vague one that one also speaks of in one's outer consciousness — in this intuition, man truly penetrates into the spiritual world.

This is what anyone who wants to penetrate the spiritual world, which always surrounds us and of which the external sense world is only the manifestation, only the outer expression, should have achieved.

But then one comes to see this world of the senses in a completely different way than before, in such a way that one must expose oneself to the accusation of being a fantasist, because one is so inclined to regard the unfamiliar as fantastic. But I will not refrain from showing at least one example of how what was previously available to us in a certain form for sensory perception, how it occurs in a completely new form for imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Just so that I am not misunderstood, I would like to say in advance: when a person enters into abnormal, pathological states of visionary life, when he is taken in by a hypnotic state, when he is suggested something by others, then he is in this abnormal state of mind and the other state is, as it were, suppressed. The person is completely surrendered to the abnormal perception or experience. Those who are really pursuing the anthroposophy referred to here will see that there is not the slightest reason to confuse what is referred to here as the anthroposophical method of knowledge with anything hallucinatory, visionary, or pathological. The latter comes from a completely different direction. This can be recognized mainly by the fact that in all hypnotic, hallucinatory, visionary, pathological states, the person is given over to these states, and his ordinary soul life is extinguished, either temporarily or permanently. In the case of the supersensible form of knowledge described here, we do indeed penetrate into a completely different way of looking at things, into a perception of the world of the spirit that has nothing in common with the world of the senses. However, in every moment in which one surrenders oneself to this supersensible knowledge, ordinary knowledge and the ordinary state of consciousness, the completely normal, healthy human understanding, remain present at the same time. In the process of realizing spiritual life, this maintained healthy state controls the other unusual, but no less healthy, state in every moment.

I must say this before I describe how things appear under the influence of supersensible knowledge. Let us take something cosmic, the sun. We see it for ordinary observation in the way you know it: as a disk within space. We construct its true size and shape and so on with the physical methods we have. For the knowledge I have described here, the picture we have of the sun through ordinary science is completely transformed. The solar phenomenon that appears with firm contours and emits rays ceases to exist in this way before supersensible knowledge. For supersensible knowledge, the solar phenomenon, as it were, fills the whole space. The sun-like quality is everywhere and we become aware that this sun-like quality, which is everywhere, is only concentrated, so to speak, on the physical sun, that this physical sun is only the physical manifestation of something spiritual that fills all of space. Then one becomes aware of how this sun-like quality is a process, an event, and indeed an event that one is now [getting to know], since one has indeed got to know the formative body of the human being, which is the creative force in the human being, the creative force that gives us our abilities and forms our organs plastically.

By getting to know this formative body of the human being and how the forces of this body are connected to the forces of the sun, we recognize that everything that is constructive growth forces, that is the progressive forces of flourishing, of increasing, of becoming, is contained in the sun. In short, I would like to say that the cosmic space that has now been transformed into spirituality is filled with the power of becoming, of growth, which unfolds outside in nature and underlies nature. One sees this solar aspect as that which is becoming, growing, penetrating everywhere, one sees it penetrating into the own constitution of the body of formative forces. One learns to recognize how the human being, with his intimate spiritual-soul and bodily organization, is integrated into a cosmic principle of development. The world of facts is truly enriched by a sum of spiritual processes.

Just as one gets to know the solar, one gets to know the lunar. It becomes apparent as the process that asserts itself in everything as that which dies, decreases and withers, and which also extends into the human being, constantly bringing about the fact that not only ascending forces of growth are within us, accompanying us from youth, becoming less and less towards old age, but which nevertheless accompany us until death, that not only the forces of growth are in us, but also the others, those of destruction, of decline, of aging, that the lunar forces are this.

The human being learns to fit into the solar and lunar process. And in this way, I would say, the human being appears as a member of the whole cosmos. Just as our hand appears as a member of our organism, which, as we know, is no longer what it is as a member of our organism when we cut it away; it only makes sense through the whole organism. In the same way, when we look at it with the means of knowledge, we perceive how man, though closed off from the other things of the sensory world by his outer sensory form, is nevertheless backed by the forces that shape this sensory form, but which at the same time make it a member of the whole cosmos.

Here it is possible to show that to get to know the cosmos as a sum of spiritual beings is not based on fantasy, but on the fact that man first grasps within himself the means by which he can see through the processes and events of the cosmos in their spirituality. In this way one goes further and further, and comes to recognize the cosmos as a spiritual world. And when one has ascended to the point of really seeing the spiritual in the soul in this way, then one actually only ascends to that which is now exalted above the forces of growth and destruction, which, in the case of a person with an inner struggle, so to speak, carries the victory over what is solar and lunar in man. There one arrives at the most complete realization of the human ego, and one learns to recognize that this ego is not limited to this one earthly life.

Once one has recognized through inspiration what goes through birth and death, and what the soul is like outside the body, one has recognized how that which is outside the body connects through conception with that which is given to it through the powers of inheritance. Then one notices, when one can perceive this together, that something else is at work in the soul that is purely spiritual, but which works in our ego. Without this spiritual element, the ego in man would be a completely powerless thing. This spiritual element, which manifests itself when one reaches intuition, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives. Man has gone through earlier earthly lives and lives again and again between death and a new embodiment. And that which, in an earthly life, is active in the ordinary life and ordinary science with the help of the ordinary organism, and which finds its expression through this ordinary organism, passes through the gate of death and through the spiritual worlds. Having passed through the spiritual worlds, having absorbed everything that it had previously only worked and experienced through the body in the world, it enters a new earthly life.

What one experiences in this realm is one of the most intimate experiences of the soul, one of those experiences in which one becomes aware that behind even the spiritual-soul activity at work in the organism lies something else, something that has already gained earthly experience, that brings something into this life that is not contained in the two worlds that one has already become acquainted with. It is not contained in the sense world and not in the spiritual-soul world. One learns to recognize that which is now elevated above the sensual and the soul-spiritual in that it has already experienced a sense world. One learns, because one has first got to know those other two worlds, also to know that world where the repetitive in man reveals itself.

This can be said about the world outside of man in connection with man himself.

In this way, I have roughly indicated to you the essence of anthroposophy, how through it one can penetrate into the immortal part of the human being, how one can penetrate into the cosmos and into the connection of the human being with the cosmos. But when we get to know the human being in this way, and his or her relationship to the world, we gradually advance to the areas where anthroposophy is not just a form of knowledge, although that is what it seeks to be at first, and from which it but one advances to that which anthroposophy is already capable of in a certain sense today, namely to the applications of anthroposophy to the most diverse fields of science and practical life. I can only make brief references to these things here, but I would like to make them based on the principles that I have just discussed about the nature of anthroposophy.

First of all, we get to know the human being as a sensory being, as a being that exists as a natural being within natural facts, natural forces and natural substances. When we learn through physiology and biology how the substances of the external world penetrate into the human being, which paths they take, which forces then continue to work, then we become aware of how the human being stands – I would like to say – as a physical-sensual whole. But when we get to know the human being in the way I have just described, then we see not the physical-sensuous whole, but we become aware of the many different ways in which the human being is determined by the cosmos in relation to his various members. Thus, for the characterized supersensible knowledge, it shows that the solar element, which has an effect on man from the cosmos and continues to have an effect on man, has its effect on everything that I would like to call the main, the head organization of man, the one that is mainly the nerve-sense organization. This is therefore what has to do with the development and growth of the human being, and what is most active internally in the very young child.

In the course of life, the moon-like forces, the [dampening] forces that lead to physical death, become more and more effective. These are mainly active at the opposite pole of the human organization, in the system of limbs, the organs of movement and the internal organs of movement, the metabolic organs. In short, we now learn to understand the human being not just as a whole, but learn to integrate it into the outside world. This can then be further specialized. What seems to us to be closed off in the human being for the ordinary consciousness becomes an event, a process for supersensible knowledge. We learn to speak through supersensible knowledge not only of the brain and its parts, but of the brain process, the lung-like process, the heart process, in short, of the human being as a form that is mobile in itself, even in its physical organization, permeated by the formative forces of the body, moving it, and we get to know what the etheric body accomplishes with the physical body as a sum of processes. In this way, however, we penetrate deeper into the human being.

We get to know the human being's relationship to its surroundings, in the broadest sense to the cosmos. In this way we arrive at a real, genuine knowledge of the human being. And you have seen that we not only gain knowledge of the human being, but also of the outer world. We get to know the sun-like, moon-like, that which otherwise lives in the cosmos, in the plant, animal and rock world. We learn about the processes that take place in healthy and sick people. We recognize external processes that are, in a sense, the opposite processes of these processes. We get to know the plants and minerals that contain the opposite processes. We penetrate to a pathology and therapy, to a medical science that is not only based on trial and error, but that, like any rational science, learns from knowledge of man and the world how to observe health and disease and how any medicinal substance helps any process in the human body that deviates from what is beneficial for the human body. So you can see how it has come about that anthroposophical research has been made fruitful by setting up our Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart, where we are looking for new remedies and new therapies. The experiments have already progressed so far that they can go out into the world and prove how it has been possible to make anthroposophy fruitful in this field of practical scientific life.

Likewise, my dear attendees, we were able to find a path that may be said to fulfill Goethe's path of art in a certain way, by which I mean a path that leads from what is there into what is formative, for example, through our building in Dornach, the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, which is not only, so to speak, an external framework for anthroposophical activity, but is artistically so imbued in its architectural style as anthroposophy with that with which it, as a world view, presents itself to humanity. If any other spiritual movement had needed its own building, it would have turned to this or that master builder, who would have created a setting for it out of the Romanesque or Gothic or some other architectural style.

Anthroposophy does not want to be abstract knowledge, it does not want to be mere theory. It cannot merely fertilize the individual sciences, but it penetrates from the formed world to the forming world. And let us take a saying by which Goethe has just characterized his own artistic perception. He says: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never be revealed without art. By creating art, Goethe does not want to implant human arbitrariness into the material, but rather what is felt or, as we would say today, seen in the spiritual from the cosmos itself. A building could arise that says exactly the same thing in its forms for external observation as is said in words, by representing the anthroposophical view, the view of the spiritual world, from the idea. And so anthroposophy will also be able to have a fruitful effect on artistic life.

In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School in 1919, which I run. This Waldorf School is by no means a school of world view, and those who think that anthroposophy is taught there as a world view are quite wrong. That is not the case. It has gone so far that the religious worldviews are represented by the representatives of the individual religious denominations. Catholic worldview is taught by the priests of the Catholic Church, Protestant worldview by the priests of the Protestant Church. We have introduced special religious education only for those children who would otherwise have no religious education at all, but this does not aim to graft an anthroposophical worldview onto the children. The educational method of the Waldorf School, its didactics, should express what anthroposophy can give in this most important area of practical life.

And, dear ladies and gentlemen, anthroposophical knowledge gives us knowledge of the human being. With it, we can follow how the soul and spirit of the child express themselves from the first moment of life, how the soul and spirit have an ever-increasing plastic effect on the external physical form. Certain laws can be found that are different in the child up to the time he learns to speak, then different again up to the age of nine, and then again up to sexual maturity. We can get to know the child completely without having to become a revolutionary with regard to the basic laws of life. What we need is practical knowledge of human nature. Anthroposophy does not want to create revolutionary new principles at any price; it wants to get to know the child in such a way that anyone involved in teaching can, so to speak, deduce everything that is developed in the curriculum and teaching objectives from the spiritual, mental and physical knowledge that anthroposophy can provide, as I have described it.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is fair to say that if anything in any other field had been able to bear fruit in the same way as some things did at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart this past summer, the world would have looked at something like this differently. At this congress, for example, we saw how external experimental psychology and education were so excellently discussed, as in the lecture by Dr. von Heydebrand. If this had been given in other fields too, it would have been the talk of the day for a long time for all those involved in education and teaching. Anthroposophy, which has to fight for its field, to fight for it in the field of education and also in other fields, will then also be fruitful for other fields.

We have experienced in modern culture that thinking, the whole way of imagining, which simply emerges from the scientific way of thinking, has led us into a social world view and outlook on life that is now bearing its terribly destructive fruits in Eastern Europe in particular. We have seen the fruits of a purely scientific life that does not want to penetrate to the spirit in the social sphere. The Anthroposophy that is to be revealed does not merely comprehend man as a natural being and also think him into social life as a natural being, but comprehends him as a being of body, soul and spirit. And in this way Anthroposophy can fertilize social life. However, this can only be shown little by little, it must gradually be lived out in individual practical things, which have already been pursued. I do not want to talk about that, but about the fact that even economics, which arose from purely external views, has been subjected to an excellent critique by Emil Leinhas, so that here, in his lecture 'The Bankruptcy of Economics', which is now also available in print, a way has been shown to introduce spirituality into social life. But social life is not steered in the right direction merely by speaking to a stove: “Dear stove, your task is to warm the room, so warm it up.” That is of no use, as we know; instead, you have to put fuel on the stove, and then the warming will come of its own accord. Social life is not steered in the right direction by persuasion, by a categorical imperative. This can only be achieved by making use of the forces that can really be introduced into practical life.

And finally, where anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect – but this is perhaps the most important thing, although it does not belong to our topic – I mention the area of religious life. It is precisely here that anthroposophy is misunderstood, in that people believe that it wants to incorporate something sectarian into life, when in fact it shows how knowledge — which is as rigorous as ordinary science — penetrates to the spiritual and soul life in the world and, in the core of the human being, fulfills that which comes from it, the human soul, with religious intimacy. In a sense, the human being learns to recognize this through being a religious adult, illuminated by the light that can only come from beholding the spiritual worlds to which the human being truly belongs.

Nothing would like to be anthroposophy for religious life more than what, according to the demands and longings of modern man, can live through this life in such a way that it offers inner security, that it gives support for life, that it can also enter into life practice. Because ultimately that is what everything depends on: life practice. If we were to ascend to a spiritual world that we only half-dreamt of, glimpsing it out of cloud-cuckoo-land, and if our lives on earth were to continue without the influence of this spiritual world, then this spiritual world would be of highly questionable value to human beings. Anthroposophy does not present itself to people in such a way that they should follow the example of certain mystics for whom the material world is always too bad. It also wants to advance to the higher worlds, but it knows that the higher spiritual worlds are those that bring their lives to a revelation precisely by creating the physical-material.

And so anthroposophy seeks to become the basis for a true practice of life. We permeate ourselves with what can be seen in the spiritual life, but we try to carry it into all areas of life, into the practice of life. Because it is not the spiritual world in which one must flee that is the right one, but the one in which one can actively immerse oneself in life. And so anthroposophy does not want to become something that turns against the great advances in knowledge of nature and what comes from it, but something that further develops this knowledge of nature in the sense of a knowledge of the spirit, but also in the sense of a true spiritual practice worthy of human beings. No one more than the one who stands on the ground of this spiritual-scientific anthroposophy will recognize the great importance of modern science and reject any dilettantism in any field if it wants to set the tone for the spiritual life. But it must nevertheless arise from the deepest longings of the human heart and all human striving for knowledge, which ultimately wants to be anthroposophy.

Just as we only have the whole, the full human being before us when we not only consider the outer nature of the human being, the outer, bodily organization, but when we see him or her as ensouled and spiritualized , we only have real knowledge of the world and of the human being and a spiritual and humane way of life if we want to penetrate our natural practice and our natural knowledge with what comes from the spirit, from the soul. And so anthroposophy does not want to oppose scientific progress, but wants to have genuine scientific meaning itself, wants to be that which is soul for the whole human being, which is spirit in corporeality. It seeks to be this for external natural knowledge and for external natural practice. To a certain extent, it seeks to see a soul and a spirit in the magnificent and powerful contemplation and practice of nature in recent times, and it is this anthroposophy that is meant here that seeks to act as and be understood as the center, as the soulful and spiritual center for natural knowledge and natural practice.