Lecture XI

Now since the intellectual or mind soul takes flight into the astral world every night, something else again comes about. When we use the expression “intellectual soul” in the sense of spiritual science, we must not think of the dry commonplace intellect of which we speak in ordinary life. For spiritual science “intellect” is the sense for harmony which cannot be embodied in external matter, the sense for harmony experienced inwardly. That is why we say “intellectual or mind soul.” Now when this intellectual or mind soul dips every night into the harmonies of the astral world and becomes conscious of them in the astral body—though this same astral body in modern man has no consciousness of its inner nature—then the following occurs. In the night the soul has lived in what has always been called the “Harmony of the Spheres,” the inner laws of the spiritual world, those Sphere Harmonies to which the ancient Pythagorean School pointed and which one who can perceive in the spiritual world understands as the relationships of the great spiritual universe. Goethe too pointed to this when he lets Faust at the beginning of the poem be transported into heaven, and says: