6. Intuitive Insight in the Happy and Serious Hours of Life

In yesterday's lecture, I took the liberty of pointing out how the struggle and striving of German intellectual development contains the seeds of a true spiritual science that the future is to bring us, that is to be born out of the present. And I tried to suggest that in that spiritual work, in that spiritual striving, which was necessary to lead to the ideas, to the conceptions and views that emerged in German intellectual life in the first half of the nineteenth century , that in this striving and wrestling lies the preparation for the recognition of what, admittedly, can still be recognized only to a limited extent in our present time – for understandable reasons that have, after all, been discussed here in these lectures on several occasions. The point is that one can only arrive at this spiritual science through a development of those powers of the human soul that are hidden in this soul, that one can only arrive at it if, through energetic inner thought work – through so-called concentration and meditation – those forces are brought out from the human inner being, which once, in more dim states of consciousness, led to the clairvoyance mentioned yesterday, which were present in the souls at the origin of humanity and of nations, and which can be brought out again through conscious thought work. But then they arise as conscious powers in the soul, so that these states of clairvoyance, revealing the conditions of the spiritual world, approach the soul fully consciously and while preserving human individuality, just as the conditions of the material world approach the human soul. The meditation, concentration and inner soul work in the life of thinking, feeling and will that are necessary for such a development of the soul have often been the subject of these lectures. Today, however, we will not speak of this. For today I would like to point out how the results of this spiritual knowledge, attained through spiritual work to increase our life energy, to strengthen and invigorate our human life in the serious and happy hours of life, can lead to this.