Lecture II

GA 161/1915-05-01/p014 ·1915-05-01 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
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Today we know—have known for some -time how to give an answer about the precise qualities of the invisible spirit underlying man. If we take, to begin with, what today is offered us by philosophy, we shall admit that at the basis of man, too, there lies an invisible spirit. We now ask: Is it possible to know anything about this spirit? Most certainly it is. Just as man can acquire knowledge about the world outside through sense perception and the thoughts connected with the brain, this knowledge can go further; for in the spirit there lives Imagination—what has been described as Imaginative knowledge. We should then be able to see that it is not only in the hen’s egg that there lies an invisible spirit, but that in man is hidden an etheric body which, given the possibility (this is also mentioned in our writings), frees itself from the physical body and develops Imaginative knowledge—knowledge that works, in the world in Imaginations, standing before the soul in fluctuating Imaginations.

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Cite: GA 161/1915-05-01/p014 · edition English