2. Anthroposophy and Psychology

Let us first ask ourselves: What do we actually see when, in ordinary life, as beings who recognize, understand and perceive, we enter into a relationship with our natural environment? We actually see only the external world. This is clear from what I mentioned at the beginning today. We actually see only the outside world, the cosmos. What takes place within us we see, too, but only by making it into something external through physiology and anatomy. Imposing as these sciences may be, we see what is within only by first externalizing it and then investigating it exactly as we are accustomed to do with external processes. Yet it remains dark down there in the region into which we descend, where we feel our spiritual element flowing into our body. In the last analysis, we see in ordinary life only what is outside ourselves; by direct observation we cannot look directly into man and see how the spiritual informs the bodily organs. Anyone, however, who can examine life impartially from the spiritual viewpoint I have established will conclude: noble and great is external appearance and the laws we discover in the external world of the stars and of the sun, which sends us light and warmth; noble and great is our experience when we either simply look—and we are complete men when we do so look—or when we investigate scientifically the laws by which the sun sends us light and warmth and conjures forth the green of plants; noble and mighty is all this—but if we could look into the structure of the human heart, its inner law would be even nobler and greater than what we perceive outside!