Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Big Questions of Contemporary Civilization

GA 80c — 19 February 1921, Amsterdam

1. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Major Civilization Issues of the Present Day

Dear attendees,Those who seriously want to talk about topics such as those on which this evening's and February 28th's reflections are based must be aware that there are quite a number of souls in the present who, on the one hand, are striving for new ways of searching for the soul and, on the other hand, are striving for new directions for our entire public and social life. For a foundation for a new soul-searching and a foundation for new social directions in life is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to provide, and these two considerations will be based on this.

On the one hand, humanity has undergone a significant intellectual development in the course of the last three to four centuries, particularly in the natural sciences. Those who speak today of a new search for the soul must not ignore the great and powerful triumphs that have emerged from scientific research. But this scientific research has also produced tremendous results in practical life. Everything that surrounds us today as magnificent technical achievements, which we encounter at every turn in life, is fundamentally the result of scientific thinking.

On the other hand, however, it should not be overlooked – and as I said, many souls are already aware of this today – that in the face of these great achievements of scientific research, in the face of the tremendous technical achievements, a deep dissatisfaction runs through modern spiritual life and that it can be seen quite clearly – it can be seen quite clearly from the catastrophic events of recent years – how humanity needs new directions. And so there are really many people here today who want to look up to a spiritual realization, a spiritual insight, after science has told them so much about the world and about man. And there are many who are clear about the fact that these scientific views and these momentous technical achievements have indeed penetrated the outer life in an intensive way, but that something is needed that can permeate our moral, our soul life in a similar way in relation to the widest circles of humanity. And so some people want to look up from the abundance of individual sciences to a comprehensive view of the world. And so some appeal to that which can only have its seat in the deepest moral interior of the human soul, in order to gain those social impulses which, as it must already be clear to many today, cannot be gained without the deepest inner - spiritual and moral - impulses.

But on the other hand, we also see how, within the abundance of modern intellectual life and within the catastrophic chaos that has occurred in recent times, the inner courage is lacking for an inwardly active intellectual life, for a new creation in intellectual life. Therefore, we must note how numerous people are today who cannot yet rise to enthusiasm for such a new creation and who look back to ancient times of humanity when the human soul still had a knowledge that may seem childish to us now, but which was still intimately related to the whole of human nature, which could still build bridges above all to artistic creation and to religious feeling and action. Art, religion, science have fallen apart for the modern man, but he wants to build bridges between these three areas of life, which nevertheless - if man is to be satisfied in the long run, if he is to come to a fruitful social creation, if he is to be efficient for a life practice in general - which nevertheless must connect to a harmonious wholeness within the human being.

But we also see many looking back with great respect, and certainly from a certain point of view rightly so, with great respect to ancient Oriental wisdom, as if we could today, from the mysticism of the Orient or from similar spiritual currents, regain that deepening and elevation of the spirit at the same time, which the breadth of scientific and technical thinking cannot give us. If one develops such a longing for the old, then one only overlooks the fact that the development of humanity as such has a meaning, that it is impossible to follow the same paths of the spirit today that were taken thousands of years ago.

But on the other hand, much of the powerful human impulses have come down to the present day through the external science of observation; much of what connected our ancestors spiritually and emotionally with the depths of the world, connected them with the depths of the world in their own way. This has given rise in people to a longing to understand something of how our ancestors went their spiritual ways, how these our ancestors, in order to satisfy the innermost needs of the soul, strove for a knowledge of the eternal, the supersensible in the human soul. One can have respect for this striving, but ultimately one can only orient oneself by that which today, nevertheless, as a completely new creation, must arise from within the human being through an inner calling of the deepest soul forces. One can orient oneself. And so, dear attendees, in order to prepare what I actually want to express, allow me to say a few orienting words, just for comparison, so to speak, about the way in which our ancestors sought the paths of the soul and of the spirit.

Above all, we must look at the feelings that our ancestors experienced thousands of years ago in ancient India, but even as far back as the older Greek times, when they were shown the path to the spirit by the leaders of the wisdom schools of the time, which can also be called mystery schools. The students were to be prepared energetically and conscientiously. For these people were clear about something of which we are no longer strongly aware in our general education today: that man cannot ascend from the knowledge he can attain from the external sensual world to the actual heights of a satisfying knowledge of the eternal and of the connections between man and the divine, guiding forces of the world without tremendous inner struggles, without tremendous changes in his entire soul life. The soul should undergo thorough, intensive preparation before it is even given the opportunity to gain supersensible knowledge. And they spoke of something, my dear audience, that sounds almost fantastic today. They spoke a word, but today, too, one should gain an understanding of it in the face of a serious spiritual search; they spoke the word from the threshold into the spiritual world, from the guardian of the threshold to the spiritual world.

What was this threshold for our ancestors? What was this guardian of the threshold to the spiritual world? Oh, these were truly real, substantial experiences that a person underwent who became a disciple of the ancient wisdom, at the threshold and when passing the guardian of the threshold. What did our ancestors say to each other? Between what a person can go through in his ordinary, everyday state of consciousness, what he can learn about himself and the world through this state of consciousness, and between the actual knowledge that gives us insight into the nature of our soul and tells us about the most significant life forces – between There is an abyss between us and this knowledge, and man cannot cross this abyss without reflecting on the soul's inner struggles, without engaging in the most intense inner struggles, without, in other words, becoming a completely different person in spiritual and psychological terms.

The preparation that the teachers of the old wisdom schools gave their students consisted essentially of a certain education of the intellect and an education of the will. Above all, the will of the one who was to be initiated into the supersensible as a disciple of wisdom was to be made more energetic and intense. Why should this will be strengthened? Why should the disciple of higher wisdom, so to speak, unlearn the fear of the unknown? Therefore, the disciple of higher wisdom should be inwardly equipped with powers of courage that one does not have in ordinary life. Therefore, it should be made clear to him that if he has not unlearned the fear of the unknown , if he has not cultivated this inner courage in his soul, then, by crossing that threshold beyond which he could receive supersensible knowledge about the nature of the soul, he would have to fall into the abyss.

We can best understand what was there as intuition and what has changed so dramatically into our times by remembering something quite ordinary in the history of science. Today, we see our planetary world, our Earth in its relationship to the Sun, in the way that the Copernican worldview has entered the visual life of humanity and how it has developed from this Copernican worldview. We know today that we are not able to think of the earth as being at rest and the sun as moving around it in the same way as medieval man did; that we are not able to think of the different planets in the same movements as this medieval man. We know, looking back to those earlier times when the outer phenomena of the external astronomical world picture were also taken as a basis, the scientific spirit out of which the Copernican world picture arose, with all that followed. But we see something very remarkable: we see in Greek thought, for example in Aristarchus of Samos, something similar to what we profess today, with some variation, of course, corresponding to the old world view, a heliocentric world view. When we read in Plutarch how Aristarchus of Samos places the sun in the center of our planetary system and has the Earth revolve around it, then we find hardly any difference in the main features of how people thought, between what this Aristarchus — and anyone who studies such things knows that all so-called initiates have thought as he did — what this Aristarchus thought about our planetary system and what we ourselves think, except for the results of our extremely well-developed observation.

What do we have here? In ancient times, a worldview of the external and spatial that is so similar to ours, and in contrast to it, in the general consciousness of mankind, merely a registration of the external appearance! The fact that those who were the leaders of the wisdom schools in older times carefully guarded something like the heliocentric worldview from people who were not considered sufficiently prepared for such a worldview by them. And this heliocentric world view is only one part of a general world view that is not at all unlike what modern science has brought us, at least in terms of fundamental ideas, but which was withheld from the broadest circles of humanity. Yes, the peculiar fact is that today we have views in the general human consciousness that were strictly guarded in schools of wisdom in ancient times and that students were only allowed to receive after conscientious preparation of the will to be fearless in the face of the unknown and to courageously embrace such insights.

What did the ancient sages tell each other, when they did not even allow the students to know what every educated person today knows, one may [ask]. Why was it considered dangerous for people in those ancient times to know what every person knows today? Yes, there was thought to be a gulf between the general human consciousness and the knowledge of our world view that the ancient sages possessed, and the sentinel of that gulf, that is to say the experience that one could have when one had gone through that inner struggle, when one had educated oneself to fearlessness and to the courageous comprehension of what we learn in school today, what is general human consciousness today. So in those ancient times, people were virtually demanding preparation for what we are not prepared for today, what is simply poured into our ordinary consciousness. So times have changed, my dear audience. And basically, every historical consideration is a mere external one that takes no account of such a transformation of the soul experience in the course of human development.

The ancient sages said to themselves about the state of mind that humanity had at that time: If man knew something of the heliocentric world view and of that which stands on the same level with it, he would not be able to bear it, he would fall into a kind of spiritual faint, his ordinary consciousness would be clouded. Therefore, they wanted to steel the will through all possible pedagogical-didactic art; they wanted to create a courageous grasp of the supersensible, they wanted to create fearlessness. Because they said: Without the education of these willpower qualities, man will lose consciousness when, for example, he really thinks with the intensity with which one thought in ancient times and of which modern man no longer has a proper idea, that the earth moves with the sun through space at a tremendous speed. In the truest sense of the word, this meant losing one's footing for the student. One did not want to expose the person to this by leaving him in his ordinary consciousness. One said to oneself: He loses self-confidence.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” I have tried to show how, in fact, self-confidence of humanity has changed substantially since relatively recent historical times, how, for example, self-confidence in ancient Greece was quite different from what it is today. It is truly not just an external fact that with Copernicanism, with Galileanism, the intellectual comprehension of the world has come about, that since those times human beings have developed an unprecedented strength of abstract thinking. In this abstract thinking, in this intellectualism, not only was external scientific knowledge gained, but something was also gained for the inner being of the human being. A strengthening of self-confidence was gained for this inner being of the human being.

My dear attendees, what we have today, when we simply go through our school as children and learn in the way we learn today, being prepared for abstract thinking and intellectuality, as happens today, then self-confidence in the human being is cultivated in a different way than it was cultivated even by the most developed Greeks. Unfortunately, far too little attention is paid to such very significant facts of the world-historical development of humanity today. But one senses it, one feels it, and therefore has a longing to once again bring the deeper reasons for all human development to mind. Today, there is no danger of succumbing to spiritual impotence when we receive the external scientific results with a general average education. But to what we are given today with general education from childhood on, the adult human being in the ancient times had to be prepared through very special pedagogical-didactic measures. Then he was introduced to what fulfilled the famous Greek saying: “Know thyself”. For the ancients, however, all knowledge was such that at the same time a certain knowledge of the world arose from their instinct. They did not yet have the developed self-awareness that today's people have. They were exposed to the danger of falling into spiritual powerlessness in the face of the heliocentric world system, but they had an intuitive knowledge of the cosmos based on their instinct. When this intuitive knowledge was then passed on to humanity in myths, the wise men were always there to receive these myths as inner experiences. We must not perceive these as symbolic interpretations of the myths, but we must feel them as an inner sharing of the secrets of the world in the human soul itself. World knowledge was given to the ancients in their, compared to our, weak self-confidence with the soul life at the same time.

You can see for yourself when you take relatively late works of literature into your hands. Today, one may think as one likes about the natural science writings of the tenth to thirteenth century, if one wants to call them that at all. Basically, one cannot read them today if one is not particularly prepared, because they use a language that is no longer used in ordinary scientific life today. But in what is found in these works, what the human being experiences inwardly in his soul is everywhere not separate from what he beholds outwardly. Soul is in him and body is in him. Outside is the physical-corporeal nature, but everywhere he also sees soul in the outward physical nature. We may call this nebulous or false mysticism today and we may be right about it; but the man of earlier times had what carried his soul, what inwardly filled his soul, what consciousness taught him: I am connected with the eternal powers of the world and as the eternal powers of the world develop their powers from beginning to end, I develop my powers with them.

Today we have the opportunity to carry our strengthened self-awareness into what natural science knowledge gives us. We have a broad specialization in the natural scientific worldview, and from this specialization we are told a great deal about the physical body of the human being. But as a rule, the threads break when we seek to understand the relationship between this physical body of the human being about which science tells us so much, and that which we experience inwardly in our souls and in relation to which we cannot but ascribe a different origin to it than can be ascribed to external natural facts and natural forces and natural laws.

And so it has come about, my dear attendees, that modern man, especially when he is steeped in what natural science offers him in a fully justified way – for the spiritual science represented here fully recognizes the triumphs of modern natural science – comes to nothing else, especially when he is conscientious, but to the limits of knowledge. And basically it was precisely the best natural philosophers who spoke of such limits to knowledge, of the ignorabimus that is fatal for the life of the soul: we cannot know anything beyond the limits of what our senses provide us with and what the combining mind can extract from these sensory experiences. One only has to go along with such theories about the limits of knowledge with an intensely developed soul life and one must be able to unload the outdatedness of traditional religious views onto this soul life, which in turn are connected with the old knowledge of the beyond of the threshold. And one will feel the whole inner misery of the modern soul life.

One cannot but say to oneself, my dear audience: We have learned something in the last three to four hundred years with regard to scientific conscientiousness and scientific methods, and what has emerged from this ground as results has become popular and is already shared by all those who claim some kind of education. But at the same time, all of this gives rise to a certain lack of knowledge about what the human soul, out of its deepest longing, wants to know about the eternal destiny of this human soul and about its connection with the eternal powers of the world. After the contemplation of the ancients, we stand on the other side of the threshold. They first tried to prepare themselves for the knowledge that is now quite commonplace and familiar to us. But with their less intense self-confidence, which was therefore fearful of the supersensible world, they developed a pronounced world-consciousness that satisfied them and felt no limits. We have gained a more intensely developed self-confidence, but we have lost our world-consciousness. We feel limits everywhere in the breadth of our knowledge. We feel that we cannot enter into the actual depths of the world. We have gained self-awareness; we must first regain world awareness, otherwise we stand as hermits with our developed soul, admittedly beyond the threshold of the ancients, but not beyond that threshold, which we today call the limit of knowledge of nature or the like.

This is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science comes in, where this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give modern humanity something that in turn leads it over the threshold that has been set for it. However, we cannot stop at a renewal or a rehashing of some old or oriental wisdom. We can no longer unite all this with our consciousness. Today we have to create anew out of the elementary nature of the human soul, but we have to bring it forth from a depth of consciousness that is just as profound as that of the ancients in their own way. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is still rejected by many today out of a certain intellectual laziness, or because it seems to contradict what scientific knowledge has brought forth in modern times.

My dear attendees, one does, of course, run the risk of being misunderstood and, in particular, of being found immodest if one chooses such a comparison as I now want to use to characterize the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. But one can safely leave it to those who like to sneer and scoff. I am not claiming that what I am using as a comparison in terms of world-historical significance should be applied to what I am about to say, but the comparison will explain some things.

When Columbus set out to discover America, there was absolutely nothing in his consciousness that he would discover a new world, a previously unknown world. They believed that they would cross the ocean and land on the other side in India. They only believed that they could come to something known by an unknown path. This is roughly how it is for those who approach the modern scientific world view with the utmost conscientiousness and an inner, invincible desire for knowledge. They find that natural science is actually in the same position as Columbus initially. They want to use it to search for the secrets of the world and of life. They want to go down unknown paths. But either they step back discouraged and stay at home, as the others except Columbus did, or they try to venture out into the unknown. But then they only enter a world that they describe as something quite familiar. What is all that which is described beyond the limits of natural knowledge as moving atoms and molecules, ions and electrons, and all that which is supposed to be behind the curtain of the sensory world that is spread out before us? We search for the underlying principles of nature by unknown paths, and then describe what we encounter as something familiar.

But I would like to say that anyone who approaches things differently, who approaches them with a more lively soul life, especially in the face of this scientific world view, will indeed come to something different, to something comparable to Columbus's experience. He conducts research scientifically, he develops all the conscientious methods, all the intensive responsible thinking, through which one has come to the modern astronomical world view, to the modern biological world view, and then he reflects: What are you actually doing, how do you develop your soul life by experimenting externally, by using the microscope, the telescope, the [spectroscope], the X-ray apparatus, and thereby come to a summary of world phenomena? What is going on in your soul life? What do you discover by devoting yourself to living soul life?

The unknown becomes spiritually known; it is not material atoms and molecules that are discovered, but spiritual experience. Of course, it is rare for anyone to have the direct experience of happiness in natural science, to see the spirit within oneself, which pulses and undulates through the world from beginning to end, from top to bottom. But everyone can recognize the inner path of thinking in modern natural science. And then it can be further developed. And, you see, this further development, this taking up of a new path in the experiences one is having with natural science, that is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science! And what I have described in my books 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and 'Occult Science', is basically, despite the fact that some of the expressions and perhaps all of the terminology still seem adventurous to ordinary human consciousness today, it is nothing other than the higher training of the paths of knowledge that are cultivated by modern scientific research itself. But we must go further than the elementary experiences and develop special methods of knowledge of a purely spiritual nature. Then we shall be able to satisfy, in another way, the spiritual yearning that lives in many souls today, and which leads those who want to come to the spirit but who want to remain in the material world to spiritualism or similar superstitious things, instead of to real spiritual research. Only the intimate paths of the soul's inner life lead to true spiritual research. However, they are uncomfortable because they are different from the usual paths of science, although they are nothing more than a continuation of these usual paths of science.

When we enter life today, at whatever stage of development we do so, we have what we have as inherited qualities, developed through ordinary or higher school education. The results of school education are absorbed into the soul of educated humanity. But one has the awareness that one could remain at a certain stage of life. Today, people stop at a very specific stage of life. They are accepted into our highest scientific schools. There, they are not required to further develop their cognitive faculty, to add to the cognitive powers they have already developed, the cognitive powers that still lie dormant in their souls. They stop at the ordinary cognitive faculty. We observe natural phenomena, we make our observations, our experiments, we use the finest instruments, but we stop at the state of mental life, which is simply the general consciousness.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must proceed differently. It must start from a very specific feeling. I would characterize this feeling by the word “intellectual modesty”. And I cannot express myself about this intellectual modesty other than in the following way: Let us assume that a five-year-old child gets hold of a volume of Shakespeare. What will it do with it? It will play with it, tear it up. But when the child has grown ten or fifteen years older, it will behave in a different, more appropriate way. Its inner soul forces have been developed. That which was predisposed has been developed in these soul forces. Just as the soul forces of the child have developed through external educational influences or are being developed through the world, so something in the soul of the adult can still be developed today if he only says to himself: I must be intellectually modest. I must assume that I face the phenomena of nature in their totality in a way that this facing can be compared to the behavior of a five-year-old child towards a volume of Shakespeare. There is still something in the soul that can be developed in me just as the soul power of the five-year-old child can be developed up to the age of fifteen or twenty.

We must start from this feeling, which thoroughly encompasses the soul life in intellectual modesty. And then, then these forces slumbering in the soul must really be developed. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to do this for its students, for those who are suited to it and have enthusiasm for it. It is not something like a miracle of the soul or the like; it is the continuation of what ordinary soul life is, but a real continuation.

There are two soul powers, my dear audience, which are necessary in ordinary life, but which are different in ordinary life than in the soul life of the developed spiritual researcher in the field of anthroposophy. One of the soul powers is the ability to remember. This ability to remember must, as we say, be developed in a normal way in every human being; for if our ability to remember is somehow interrupted for any length of time, we are mentally ill. It is a serious mental illness when the thread of memory breaks; our sense of self is destroyed. You can read about how these symptoms manifest themselves in the relevant literature. But what do we only achieve in ordinary life through this ability to remember? We attain that which we have experienced, by which we were connected with the world of facts with our soul. This emerges in memories with greater or lesser vividness. We have to live in them. The stream of memories must reach back to a certain point in early childhood for our soul life to be normal. That which would otherwise flash by is given permanence in the soul life through the power of memory.

This is where spiritual scientific schooling comes in. What is called meditation and concentration in the books already mentioned is nothing other than a higher stage of what, at a lower level, is the ability to remember in the human being. When we – without being deceived by auto-suggestion, without being led astray by reminiscences of life – have images presented to our soul that we have been given by an experienced spiritual researcher or that we have been able to learn in some other way, but which must be fully comprehensible so that we can survey them with our consciousness – when we bring such ideas into the center of our consciousness and now rest on them quite arbitrarily, when we give duration to the ideas, which otherwise only follow external events and flit by, then something in our soul is developed in the same way as muscles are developed when they are used in work. This meditation, this constant resting on easily comprehensible ideas, in which nothing of auto-suggestion or reminiscences may be mixed, that is modern meditation. As an inner soul method, it is truly no easier to carry out than the modern scientific work in the observatory, in the chemical laboratory or in the clinic. For years, this resting on such ideas must be carried out.

But then we make the inner discovery that, on the one hand, the ability to remember naturally remains as healthy as a normal person needs it to be, but that, on the other hand, something else develops from this ability to remember for supersensible knowledge. The ability develops, at first in our lives, because that is where supersensible vision begins, not only to survey our lives in memories — for they are indeed pale, however vivid they may be — but to survey it pictorially, as I call it, “in imaginations”. We develop an imaginative view in a moment of everything that otherwise runs in the stream of memory. We survey our life from the point we have reached between birth and death back to childhood, as in a large tableau of life. Here one can say: Time becomes space. No longer do individual memories emerge from the stream of life, but a coherent and unified overview of what we have lived through. This is the beginning of supersensible knowledge through the developed faculty of memory. In a certain respect, the faculty of memory breaks away from bodily conditions; we experience purely in our soul what we have experienced in the outer world.

But as a result, something specific happens in the human being. By first coming to such heightened self-knowledge through an increased ability to remember, he finally comes to understand what it means to live with his soul outside the body. This is the significant event that occurs on the path to supersensible knowledge: living with one's soul outside the body. One reaches a consciousness where one experiences soul-spiritual, first one's own soul-spiritual, then an expanded soul-spiritual, with such clarity, with such an interweaving of inner arbitrariness, as one otherwise only experiences geometric, mathematical conceptions. I would like to say: In this way, one best learns for supersensible knowledge what is given as mathematical presentation; once one has learned to present mathematically, geometrically, to form inner views in contrast to this, so that, when one has a doctrine, one can say: If I know its teaching, then I see through its truth, no matter how many people speak against it. When one has gained the totality and essence of the inner vision, one can inwardly fulfill it and compare it with what one experiences quite differently as more vivid through the developed memory. One finally comes to gain new ideas about certain things that play into life.

One arrives, I said, at connecting a concept to what it means to live outside of the body. But then, the moment of falling asleep, the time between falling asleep and waking up, and waking up itself, becomes something else. For the ordinary consciousness, awareness is dulled when falling asleep and rises again when waking up; it is interrupted between falling asleep and waking up. Through a culture of memory life and the ability to remember as I have described it, the human being becomes aware of himself outside of the body and learns to recognize through direct observation how he leaves his physical body in his soul and spirit. It is not to be understood spatially, but dynamically. But it is correctly spoken: He learns to recognize how he goes out of his body; the spiritual researcher rises into states in which he is completely independent of his body, just as one is unconsciously independent of one's body when asleep. But he experiences himself in states of consciousness where, although his eyes do not see, his ears do not hear, he does not even feel the warmth around him, he is permeated by inner soul life. What he then experiences is as if, by sleeping, a person would experience a new world, a world beyond the physical-sensory world, and would again submerge, as if emerging from a spiritual sea into the ordinary sensory world upon waking.

Then, when one has such experiences, one can now move on to something else that must prepare one for the modern crossing of the threshold, as the old sage prepared his disciples for the unknown through fearlessness and courage. Then another power of the soul must be developed; another power must be transformed into a power of knowledge. Many a person wants to accept, out of modern consciousness, that the ability to remember can be transformed into an independent power of comprehension, because it is related to the intellect, and modern man loves the intellect. He accepts the intellect in the scientific field. But the other soul power, which the one who wants to cross the threshold today must also develop within himself, is not accepted as an objective power of knowledge. Yet it becomes an objective power of knowledge when it is developed in the right way, that is the power of love. Love in knowledge is not accepted; one says: Where love appears, cognition must lose objectivity. But you can read in the books mentioned, “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”, how you can actually make this love independent of what love is otherwise bound to in ordinary life.

Dear attendees, in ordinary life, love is bound to the bodily instincts, to that which a person is as a physical being. When you develop within yourself, just as I have explained before about meditation and concentration of thought, a certain way of looking at how to rise from level to level in life – after all, we basically become a different person every day; you just have to look seriously and honestly to consider what his view of life is today, what the purpose of his life is, what his soul's content is. One need only compare what he was nine or ten years ago with what he is today and he will have to admit that without the will's intervention in the course of life, he becomes another.

A certain schooling must take place in the spiritual researcher. He must learn to take full control of his self-education with complete arbitrariness. Self-discipline must become the education of life. And he must always be clear about what intervenes in his life. He must gain the possibility of confronting his own development of will as its own spectator. That this is necessary to attain a true consciousness of freedom is what I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Freedom, which I published in 1893 as a fundamental socio-ethical view and which has now appeared before humanity in a new edition. There I already dared to say, albeit in relation to ethical-liberal cognition: Love does not blind — but true love, which the human soul wins for merging with the object, educated to do so through faithful self-observation —, it makes seeing. This love makes man free. For by no longer acting out of instincts, out of impulsive drives, but by becoming absorbed in love in the outer world, and allowing himself to be guided only by what is necessary in the world of facts, he becomes free. Selfless love makes man free; but selfless love can also be educated to become a power of cognition. Then we can imbue what we have gained through the developed power of remembrance with what love becomes. And while the developed power of knowledge gives us an idea of how the human being is with the soul forces outside the body, the developed ability to love gives us a correct idea of the soul and spirit within. And when what one gains through the power of love connects with what one gains through the developed ability to remember, then such concepts expand. We know that one leaves the body with the soul, but is then in the spiritual world and that one enters the body again when one wakes up. This is a concept that has a certain significance for the time between birth and death and beyond life. By developing this higher knowledge, we gain the ability to see our soul in its journey before it connects with the earthly-physical human body through birth or conception. Just as we look at the soul as something real before it awakens, where it is indeed waiting for the prepared body, so we look at the soul that dwells in the spiritual worlds before birth and which now has different powers than the merely sleeping soul. The sleeping soul has only the power to revive the soul of the body lying in bed. The soul that dwells in the spiritual world before birth has the power, with the help of what is happening in its physical hereditary current, to organize the physical body so that the human individuality can live out its soul and spirit in it. And we come to gain insight into the eternal nature of the human soul. A view of what the soul is in the purely spiritual worlds is scientifically substantiated with mathematical clarity. And from this knowledge, the knowledge of what happens when we fall asleep as a transition through the portal of death, as the going out into a spiritual world when the physical body has been discarded, also develops. In brief, we attain as a higher stage that which appears on a lower stage as the merely imaginative overview of life up to birth; we attain an extension of this overview to an overview of the eternal of the human soul and the connection of the human soul with the spiritual cosmos. We learn to look into this spiritual cosmos. We learn to know: Here we are on earth in our physical body, looking through our eyes into the physical world, hearing physical sounds, perceiving physical warmth. But what rests in our physical body and says “I” to us, what thinks and feels and senses and wills, that lived in spiritual worlds before it took on this physical body.

And now we learn something extraordinarily characteristic: as we develop here in the body, the soul is shadowy, and we develop nothing but shadowy concepts with what lives inwardly as feeling, as thinking, as will, when we develop self-knowledge. But the world outside us, we have it clearly, it lies spread out before us. When one becomes conscious of what one was before birth in spiritual worlds, there is no external world of objects; we do not see through physical eyes into an external world, we do not hear physical sounds through the external ears, we perceive something else. We perceive the human being in his inner self as a world; the human being whom we have to help create when we are embodied in the world. Here the environment is our world. Before our conception in spiritual worlds, the human being's inner being was our world. The human being is revealed to the human being as the human being simultaneously cognitively grasps his or her eternal being. And here, then, my dear attendees, is where that which is anthroposophical spiritual science expands into a genuine feeling of true human significance and true human existence.

What has modern science ultimately brought? Conscientious research into the animal series, how it stands in development from the lowest creatures up to the perfect one, then, the human being, but nothing about the human being that describes him as a being of his own. He appears only as the end of the animal series. We look to him for what we found in the animal, only at a higher level, as a final point. But in a sense, we have lost the human being in his actual inner being. We stand before the boundaries of the world, we stand before a new threshold. We cross this new threshold in the way I have just described. What the ancients wanted to explore on the other side of the threshold is our present-day general human education; but what they had in world knowledge out of instinct, we must gain for ourselves by crossing the threshold, through such spiritual scientific methods as I have described. But then this spiritual scientific method is transformed into the feeling of true human respect. How this spiritual knowledge is transformed into the feeling of true human respect, how it is transformed into the knowledge of social impulses, is what I will be talking about in more detail on the 28th of the month, when I will draw the consequences for school and educational issues and practical social life issues from what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say.

When I had the honor of addressing the Dutch population here in 1912 and 1908 on the subject of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I could only speak of it as something that, using a new method, strives for spiritual knowledge that is intended to satisfy the soul of man. I could speak of something that is sought and developed by individuals. Since that time, despite the catastrophic events that have occurred in the meantime, much has been achieved in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, including external development.

We have established the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, in Dornach near Basel. The Goetheanum bears this name because we are aware that what appears in Goethe at the elementary level as an intuitive power of judgment, as his artistic and scientific attitude, must be further developed, as I have discussed it today; then one arrives at what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Nevertheless, although the building is not yet complete, we tried last fall to hold a whole series of college courses in this unfinished Goetheanum. These college courses were not held on spiritual science in the narrower sense, but were held by about thirty personalities, by scientists, specialists in the usual fields of science, specialists in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, sociology, law and so on, and so on. But men of practical life, too, who stand in commercial and industrial life, have spoken. Artists have spoken about their art. All this — besides the spiritual-scientific sifting of philosophy — has been presented by thirty lecturers in the content of the Dornach School of Spiritual Science.

What did these college courses aim to achieve? They wanted to show how everything that is modern scientific life, modern practical life and what basically forms the content of modern civilization contains many descending forces that would have to lead to chaos and decline if they remain descending, and how these descending forces can be transformed into ascending forces. It should be shown how spiritual science can illuminate and fertilize the science, the practice of life, the content of our civilization, so that souls longing for knowledge of the supersensible and for the permeation of social life with new impulses can be fulfilled.

Much has been achieved in the development of anthroposophical spiritual science during this time, ladies and gentlemen. Whether the Goetheanum in Dornach, this University for Spiritual Science that wants to intervene in a fruitful way in the life of modern civilization, can be completed will depend on whether people willing to make sacrifices continue to be found who are willing to see it through to completion, just as a great many people have already come together who were insightful enough for spiritual science as it is meant there and have brought it as far as it is today.

This spiritual science has also influenced civil life in other ways. I will discuss the principles in more detail in the next lecture and would just like to mention today how the practice of school life has been influenced by the founding of the Free Waldorf School, an initiative of Emil Molt in Stuttgart, for which I have been entrusted with the leadership of education and didactics as they are derived from spiritual science.

And a start has also been made in terms of practical life through practical economic foundations in Germany and Switzerland. I will speak about this next time too.

But what must underlie all this is the need for a rethinking, a relearning of the newer humanity in the deepest inner soul life. For we need a new self-knowledge of the human being, which can only be gained if we learn to cross the threshold in a new way, the threshold that leads us into the supersensible world in such a way that we can carry our modern strengthened consciousness into the realms that lie beyond this threshold, and gain a new spirit-filled world view to go with our strengthened self-awareness. This is the first question of civilization in the present day.

The second question is this, which confronts us wherever we look at life today. We cannot achieve a corresponding social coexistence if we are not able to recognize the human being in his essence when he comes to us; if we are not able to respect, feel and appreciate the full inner significance of the being that walks the earth as a human being. We can only truly approach people as people if we gain an understanding of people from spiritual knowledge, and true human love from that love that strives towards knowledge.

And we can only deepen all this religiously and develop it artistically if we come from mere abstract knowledge, the intellectualism of modern times, to a true spiritual insight that in turn not only takes hold of us intellectually, but as a whole human being; carries us as a whole human being into life. The science that we have had could only show us a world of nature that runs by itself, that has developed from nebulous states and produces man as an external form, and which in turn will one day fall back into the sun as slag. And on the other hand, what sits within us as ideals, what sits within us as moral impulses. But this modern science, if it is completely honest, cannot bridge the gap between a person's inner soul consciousness and the outer cosmic consciousness. By acquiring spiritual science in the sense described here, the human being regains the ability to say: “What I gain in social life is not only significant for a perishing humanity, but, in that the human being is born out of the spirit of the world, for this world spirit.”

Human deeds will in turn be recognized as cosmic deeds. That man may know himself, that he may learn to appreciate man, that he may learn to appreciate his position in the whole cosmos, spiritually as well as intellectually, these are the great civilizing questions of the present, which are more closely related to the field of knowledge. They expand into the question of schooling, into the economic and social question, into the legal and technical questions of social life, which I will allow myself to supplement today's reflection by speaking to you about on the 28th.

Answering questions

Question: Are there dangers associated with the path to the spiritual worlds?

Dr. Steiner: Dear attendees! It must of course be said that whatever a person does in life can, under certain circumstances, be associated with dangers and that there is always the possibility of avoiding dangers by taking the right path. As you will understand, it is not possible to give more than hints in a short lecture, and of course I could only give such hints today. Therefore, I could not describe the details of the path to knowledge in the supersensible worlds. If I could have done so, you would have seen that the matter of supersensible knowledge, as it is meant here in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the life of the soul in this way, stands in a very specific relationship to what the life of the soul otherwise is. We are familiar with the ordinary life of a human being as it manifests in the waking state, in which the human being makes use of his senses, combining the perceptions of the senses with the intellect, developing them into laws of nature or of history or of social life, and so on. But there is also another possibility, which is that the soul and spirit of man are more strongly bound to the body than is the case in ordinary life. According to the materialistic theory, it is as if the soul-spiritual experiences were nothing more than a result of the physical-bodily states. One refers, if one wants to prove something like that, to the fact that parallel physical-bodily states can indeed be proven for the soul-spiritual experiences. But if one approaches it only from a spiritual-scientific point of view, and it is precisely this that is important, that one goes into the details of spiritual-scientific knowledge, the view of the connection between spiritual-mental experiences and physical-bodily experiences, as it is usually given, is a thoroughly incorrect one.

Let us suppose, for the sake of a comparison, that I walk along a path that is somewhat soggy. The person following behind will see that there are tracks in the path that have been made by a human being. Another being, which is not visible to people, would be able to believe that these tracks on the path are determined from the inside of the path, from the earth; the earth would have powers through which these footprints arise. So anyone who just thinks about the configuration of the path could come to this conclusion. The one who has come to know the soul and spirit is not surprised that the traces of the soul and spirit are in the physical and bodily, for example, in the nervous system. They are imprinted, so to speak, like the traces in the soft earth. Therefore, everything that is experienced in the soul and spirit must be found again in the physical and bodily.

To do this, a certain independence of the spiritual-mental from the physical-bodily is already present in normal life. In the morbid life, in what we know as psychopathic, which of course occurs in the most diverse forms of mental illness, it turns out that the spiritual-mental life is strongly tied to the physical life, stronger than in the normal state. It should always be noted that mental illnesses are basically physical illnesses. Due to the physical illness, the soul-spiritual feels more bound to an organ than it should be. In this respect, medicine in particular will have to be deeply fertilized. Last spring I held a course for doctors and medical students in which I showed how medicine, especially therapy, can be fertilized. But it is precisely here, when one studies medicine in a spiritual scientific way, that one has to look at the physical and bodily foundations of mental illnesses. For they consist in the fact that the human being is more spiritually and soulfully bound to the body than in the normal state. The opposite state is brought about by the kind of education I have been discussing today, but not for spiritual knowledge, for spiritual insight.

The spiritual researcher will be fully immersed in practical life. If you sleep well and are able to function well during the day in your outer practical life, you are not a clumsy, useless, inept person, and you are not a proper spiritual researcher either. These things are definitely connected. Precisely because the spiritual soul becomes independent of the physical body, the method I have described lies in the opposite directions of mental illnesses. Mental illnesses are a sinking of the spiritual into the physical and bodily, and it is precisely through this method that I have described that one can, at the same time, make human life healthy, quite apart from the fact that they are methods of knowledge. And it is slander that dangers are associated with the spiritual or physical life of a person when these methods are followed. That is not the case. It is just that all kinds of amateurish methods of soul development are cropping up in the world. These are actually always associated with dangers, because they always push the spiritual-soul into the physical, whereas what is described here as the spiritual path from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not in any way attempt to connect the spiritual-soul with the physical-bodily in a pathological way, but to liberate it in such a way that the experience is as inwardly light-filled and clear as mathematical experience is. It is important to note that nothing that is striven for in spiritual-scientific methods is in any way mystically nebulous, but that everything is imbued with complete clarity. Therefore, there will be nothing more superficial than nebulous mysticism, which only appears to be deep but is in fact superficial. What is striven for is thoroughly intellectual and spiritual, but it is a healing of the soul, not an illness.