Fourth Lecture

GA 184/1918-09-13/p030 ·1918-09-13 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
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This is, in a somewhat deeper sense, the basis of the dualism in man, this dualism that must be bridged, but that cannot be bridged by merely turning to theories, but that can only be bridged by turning to the facts themselves, to the facts of spiritual life, by knowing that our intellect originates in the world differently than our will. Our intellect and our will are like placing a child and an old man side by side, and artificially deceiving oneself by positing the abstractum man, which is just a mere abstractum, and saying: The child is a man, and the old man is a man. Such concepts are, of course, to the liking of people today, who mix everything up. Thus, for example, the assertion of the unified soul is made today, and it is believed that the soul as such arises in the same way with intellectual thinking as with loving volition, whereas, in the way I have just indicated, if one really, actually wants to understand the human being, one must distinguish. What we think through mere intellect as a world view can therefore never approach reality, but remains hallucination, because it comes from our intellect being permeated with a spiritual essence that does not belong to this world: with Ahrimanic spiritual essence that does not belong to the world order into which we look with our eyes. Likewise, on the other hand, it is in relation to the will, which is permeated with Luciferic essence.

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Cite: GA 184/1918-09-13/p030 · edition English