Lecture I

We must do that, ladies and gentlemen, because only thereby does consciousness awake, because only thereby do we become conscious human beings. Just as each morning upon opening our eyes we achieve consciousness in our interaction with the external world, so essentially did consciousness awake within the evolution of humanity. Consciousness, as it is now, was first kindled through the interaction of the senses and thinking with the outer world. We can watch the historical development of consciousness in the interaction of man's senses with outer nature. In this process consciousness gradually was kindled out of the dull, sleepy cultural life of primordial times. Yet one must only consider with an open mind this fact of consciousness, this interaction between the senses and nature, in order to observe something extraordinary transpiring within man. We must look into our soul to see what is there, either by remaining awhile before fully awakening within that dull and dreamy consciousness or by looking back into the almost dreamlike consciousness of primordial times. If we look within our soul at what lies submerged beneath the surface consciousness arising in the interaction between senses and the outer world, we find a world of representations, faint, diluted to dream-pictures with hazy contours, each image fading into the other. Unprejudiced observation establishes this. The faintness of the representations, the haziness of the contours, the fading of one representation into another: none of this can cease unless we awake to a full interaction with external nature. In order to come to this awakening which is tantamount to becoming fully human—our senses must awake every morning to contact with nature. It was also necessary, however, for humanity as a whole to awake out of a dull, dreamlike vision of primordial worlds within the soul to achieve the present clear representations.