Seventh Lecture

Thus we see a second power working in the human being, in that we perceive the harmony of the slowing down and the renewal of life. We see the significance of man's entire rhythmic life, and how it is bound up with his whole being, body and soul. And as we survey this second element in man, it will certainly become clear to us that man bears in himself a real force, which is in rhythmic interchange with an outer force active in the super-sensible. And we could also survey in a similar way the metabolic limb system. In that we raise ourselves to Inspiration, Intuition and Imagination we see, soul-spiritually, what is active in man as a real though unconscious force. Our customary objective knowledge gives us only the forms. Through it we are as it were only observers of the world. That, however, which we reach through Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration we have first as a free inner soul product, obtained from super-sensible knowledge, from something which is objective in man, through which we can see clearly how the human will works in moral deeds. If we have first recognised that pure thinking involves a breaking down of matter, and is connected above all with a death-bringing process, through and through a process working in matter in a backward direction, then one comes to the point of being able to recognise that everything which appears as soul-willing is connected with the up-building processes, the processes of growth. These growths, these up-building processes, the activities of the organs and the reproductive process in us, damp down our ordinary consciousness of the depths of the human organism, and the will arises out of those depths of the human being to which the ordinary consciousness does not reach. Thus, as thinking lives in the death process, willing lives in what is growing, thriving, fructifying.