Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

GA 80a/1922-05-16/p032 ·1922-05-16 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
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This is the first step for modern man. To bring abstract, dead thinking to life, and in so doing, to live in the spirituality of the world. But all of you – my dear audience – can raise a significant objection as I describe this living thinking. You can object that there have been all kinds of thinkers, natural philosophers Oken, Schelling, who have had such living thinking in a certain sense; they have known how to grasp the thought of an external object in a certain imaginative way and have understood how to transform it in order to find something that then coincides with another thing of its own accord. And modern humanity has indeed recognized how much fantasy there is in Schelling and Oken precisely because of this thinking. But there is something that anthroposophy must add to what the most recent ancient times did not have. When such thinkers as those mentioned describe what actually takes place in their spiritual life, one does not find what anthroposophical research and experience must point to.

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Cite: GA 80a/1922-05-16/p032 · edition English