Fourth Lecture

These are the three stages: the intuitive experience of the spirit, which is of course something hallucinatory because one takes the spirit in the present and does not recognize that it is a germ for the future; the intuitive experience, the dreamy-intuitive experience of the spirit. The second stage is the prophetic vision, where, in the sense of the old Hebrew prophets, for example, the future is really experienced in visions, where something of the spirit being germinal for the future is already living in it. And the third stage, which is still little understood, but which has something profound about it, is the apocalyptic view of the world. But all these are preliminary stages for the spiritual-scientific view, which, on the other hand, must be connected — because otherwise it would be in the air, figuratively speaking — with the pictorial view of nature. A pictorial view of nature lifts one above the illusory nature of science. Real behavior towards that which goes beyond the intuitive perception of the future, the visionary view of the future - prophetic visionary vision, apocalyptic vision - lifts us above the hallucinatory nature of intellectual life.