Eighth Lecture

We must start from pure thinking, free from sensuality, as I attempted to characterize it in my Philosophy of Freedom. This thinking free from sensuality, as paradoxical as it may sound, develops best and most intensively when one engages in the kind of scientific research that I have also spoken about in these evening lectures. It was not for nothing that I described Haeckelism, this particular way of immersing oneself in the development of animal and human life, despite the errors I recognize and admit in it. If one wants to apply, in the strict sense of the word, what spiritual research must demand for the external sensory world: the lively intermingling of pure perception and pure thinking, then one cannot arrive at any other results with regard to the organic world given by external sensory empiricism than those arrived at by Haeckelism. And if one wants to illustrate what one arrives at in this way, by means of external sensory perception and the methodical thinking that interweaves this perception, one must proceed in the following manner. One cannot then engage in all kinds of speculation about a life force based on some abstract thinking, as neovitalism does. One cannot speculate on the basis of pure concepts whether there is anything supernatural underlying what can be observed externally and sensually, and so on, but must remain with the world of facts, as Haeckelism has done. Precisely because of the demands of spiritual science, one must limit external natural science to this field and in this sense, otherwise speculating about external nature leads to nebulous mysticism. But this can easily lead to accusations of materialism. This accusation can then be turned around by saying: I once presented something from a materialistic point of view, and then I moved away from it again. That cannot be the case. These are only foolish objections that cling to words and cannot penetrate the whole spirit of spiritual scientific research. For it is precisely when one confines oneself to the phenomenal in the field of pure natural science, when one is able to practice that inner resignation of thinking which is necessary in order not to engage in nebulous mysticism, but to pursue the phenomenal world of facts, that one comes to use thinking for external research only, I would say as a working tool, not at all as something constitutive, as something that can say anything about the external sensory world other than that it orders the phenomena of this external sensory world so that they themselves express their secrets, as is entirely in the spirit of Goetheanism. But then, when one practices this resignation, one reaches a limit in this field of research. And at this limit, one does not begin to speculate philosophically, to think up all kinds of things about the transcendent that is to be opened up, but one begins to experience those inner struggles and overcoming that now do not stimulate thinking to speculate, but rather instill it with a kind of elixir of life, so that this thinking is transformed into those insights that then appear in the imaginations, and so that it can approach the world, which it can never reach through speculation, but only by metamorphosing itself into supersensible vision.