Fourth Lecture

'But one must not stop at nature. One needs a correlative, one needs something supplementary. He who speaks of nature in this way would again become a fantasist if he were to understand nature only in this way and were not to explain on the other side: What more recent philosophy opposes to nature as spirit is also hallucination, and this too must not be left at that. Because that which lives today has developed slowly, humanity has gone through the most diverse stages, in order to gradually, I might say, advance to the state of the human soul in the spirit. And there we can distinguish three stages. Just as the concept of nature today can still be somewhat confused, and tends towards the levels of knowledge described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds?' as imagination, inspiration and intuition, so one can say that the human soul has gradually developed intellectually through three stages to a real standing in the spirit, to a real grasping in the spirit.