The Supersensible Element in the Study of History

Every branch of culture, of course, has many ramifications and consequently all kinds of secondary effects, but art by its very nature embodies something that leads to a deeper and more concrete understanding of man. He who makes a thorough study of the artistic forms in painting and sculpture, or of the nature of the inner rhythms in music and poetry—and the artists themselves often fail to do this today—he who has a deep inner experience of art is imbued with something which enables him to understand the human being in his picture-nature. In the epoch of the Consciousness Soul mankind must develop the capacity to comprehend man symbolically. You are already familiar with some of the basic principles of this symbolical understanding. When we look at the human head we are reminded of man's earliest beginnings. Just as a dream is seen as a memory of the sensible world and thereby receives its characteristic stamp, so for those who understand reality everything pertaining to the sensible world is an image of the spiritual. We must learn to perceive the spiritual archetype of man through his picture-nature. In future man will become to some extent transparent to his fellow man. The form of his head, his gait, will awaken in us an inner sympathy and understanding of a different nature from what we find in human tendencies today. For we shall only know man as an ego being when we have this conception of his picture-nature, when we can approach him with the fundamental feeling that what the physical eyes perceive of man bears the same relation to the true super-sensible reality of man as the picture painted on canvas bears to the reality which it depicts. We must develop this fundamental feeling in ourselves. We must approach man in such a way that we no longer see him as a combination of bones, muscles, blood, etcetera, but as the image of his eternal, spiritual being. Supposing a man walks past us; we would not recognize him if he did not awaken in us the realization of what he is as an eternal spiritual super-sensible being. This is how we shall see man and this is how we shall be able to see him in the future. When we perceive human forms and movements and all that is associated with them as an image of the eternal, we shall feel warmth or coldness and of necessity will gradually be filled with inner warmth or coldness. As we go through life we shall come to know man very intimately; towards some we shall feel warm, towards others cold. Worst of all will be the situation of those who evoke neither warmth nor coldness. We shall have an inner experience of others in the warmth ether that penetrates our etheric body; this will be the reaction of the enhanced interest that must be developed between men.