Fourth Lecture

Thus man himself stands in an ambivalent way within the world order. And one is pointed to man in his ambivalence if one wants to understand the whole context, if one wants to find a transition from cosmic hatred to the individual-soul hatred that occurs in human nature. You know that when we look at the human being as he stands before us today, we can say that his nature is made up of perception, feeling and will. He divides himself into a perceiving, a feeling and a willing being, which form a unity. But all the beautiful things that philosophy says about it come to nothing if we cannot also clearly and precisely distinguish the other side. Now even the somewhat conceptually-minded psychologists of the present day are realizing that we actually know nothing right about will. I have already explained the nature of will to you; today it is enough to point out that even contemporary psychology has to admit that we know nothing right about will. In fact, will is also overslept in the waking life of a person, in its entity, in its essence. One could also say that the human being does not reach down with his soul to the will. He believes – I have discussed this in the context of Augustine on the basis of a concrete fact – he believes that he stands inside the essence itself by imagining; but he cannot say this with regard to the will. For, however any intended purpose is connected with the complicated mechanism of the hand or the movement of the legs, man knows as little about it in waking life as he knows about his body when he sleeps or about his surroundings when he sleeps. The present man actually oversleeps the will. If one now advances through the method of spiritual science from mere imagining to willing, one learns from the facts, albeit from spiritual facts, to understand how it comes that man today oversleeps his will.