The Science of the Spirit
and Modern Questions
When speaking about such a subject as this evening's we
must earnestly bear in mind that there are countless human
souls at the present time whose experience of the various kinds
of knowledge and of the tendencies of practical social life to
be found today makes them long for a renewal of these things,
for a new way of looking at the world. Such souls feel that in
certain respects we cannot take for granted that we can
continue to exist as beings with spirit-soul life and social
life with the ideas, feelings and impulses of the will which we
have taken over from the last century and with which we have
been brought up.
Living in the civilized world we have experienced the
immense progress of the scientific outlook on the one hand, and
we have experienced the tremendous results of this scientific
outlook in practical life and in technical achievements
which meet us from morning till evening at every turn. But we
have also received something else with these tremendous
achievements of science and with the practical consequences of
this scientific knowledge in social life. Whatever a
person does today, whether in reading or whether
in his ordinary everyday life or in whatever else
he does, he constantly takes in from morning to evening
scientific knowledge in one form or other. When he then
faces the eternal questions of the human soul and of the human
spirit, questions about the immortal being of the human
soul, about the meaning of the whole world and about the
meaning of human activity, he can only link them to what his
own soul thinks and feels about these questions, to the
impulses of his own actions and to what science has been saying
for three or four centuries in a way in which it had not spoken
to men of earlier ages. Earlier he would have received the
answer through the various religious confessions, but even if
he belongs to one of the latter today, the search for his
answers will be influenced by his modern outlook. And in living
this existence which has become so complicated and the whole
style of which is dependent on modern technology, the modern
person cannot help seeing how dependent on this technology is
his life. And he has to say to himself: Fundamentally,
human beings in the whole civilized world have become quite
different from what they were when conditions were simpler. And
he must then become aware and feel that today there are many
questions to be answered about social life, about the way in
which people live together.
We can even say the following: Scientific knowledge is
such that we are compelled to recognize it, and the practical,
technical results which our modern life has brought are such
that we are compelled to live with them. But neither really
gives us any answers to the great questions of human
existence; on the contrary, they only produce new
questions. For if we take an unprejudiced look at what science
so significantly has to say about the human being, his
organization, his form of life on the earth and so on, we do
not acquire any answers about the eternal nature of the human
being or about the meaning of the world and of existence; on
the contrary, we acquire deeper and more meaningful questions.
And we have to ask ourselves: where do we now find the answers
to these questions which modern life has caused to become
deeper and more urgent? For as far
as knowledge is concerned, the achievements of natural science
have not brought solutions for the great riddles of the world,
but new questions, new riddles.
And what has practical life given us? Of course, all the
means of our enormous and widespread industrial life and world
transport and so on have been placed at the disposal of our
practical social life. But it is precisely this practical life
which presents us with ethical, moral and spiritual
questions as to how human beings live with one another.
And it is just this kind of question that concerns the minds of
people today as a social problem and which often appears as a
quite frightening problem to those who think earnestly and who
take life very seriously. So we see that the practical side of
life also presents the human being with riddles.
As against these questions which confront the human soul
from two sides we can now place what the present speaker calls
an anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit. This
starts, first of all, from the foundation of knowledge and then
seeks in the foundations of social life those sources of man's
being which can lead at least to a partial solution of these
questions, to a solution which is not only possible, but
necessary, because it is quite clear to an
unprejudiced observer that humanity will
suffer a decline and be unable to rise out of the problems
which face it concerning these questions of present-day
civilization if life simply goes on as before, if human souls
face such urgent questions and simply dry up, and if no new
impulses for the renewal of social life are found out of the
depths of the human soul.
What the anthroposophically orientated Science of the
Spirit strives for is not directed against the knowledge of
natural science. Anything directed against this
knowledge, which has brought so much good to humanity, would be
amateurish and superficial. But precisely because the
anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit takes
very seriously the fruits which natural science has given
modern humanity, it comes to quite different results from those
attained by the kind of scientific research which is
practiced in every sphere of ordinary
life.
The anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit
follows the same path, indeed, in one respect
is continued further along it. I would like
to make use of a comparison in order to illustrate and explain
the relationship of the anthroposophical Science of the Spirit
to natural science. In using it I certainly do not wish to link
what anthroposophy has been able to achieve so far with
an historical event of world importance and to put it on an
equal footing with it. It is only intended to be a
comparison — there are always
people who wish to make fun of such things, and I will leave it
to them to decide whether they wish to make fun of this
comparison.
When Columbus undertook his journey across the ocean he
was not at all sure where he would arrive. At that time there
were two possible ways of looking at the problem of world
travel (which, in fact, came into the world through
Columbus): either one did not
bother about the great unknown which exists beyond the sea and
stayed in the area of one's home, or one set out across the
great ocean as Columbus and his followers did. But at that time
nobody hoped to find America or anything like that. The
intention was to find another way to India, so that one only
really wanted to reach what was already known.
The scientist of the spirit who seriously studies the
researches of natural science finds himself in a position
similar to that of Columbus who wanted to reach something
already known by a new route, but then on the way found
something quite different, quite new. In following the work of
natural science most of us do not get beyond the observation of
sense phenomena and the ordering of them by the intellect. Or
if we are equipped with instruments and tools which then help
our observation, with the telescope, microscope,
spectroscope, x-ray, and if we are armed with the
conscientious and excellent method of thinking of modern
science and then with all this set out across the sea of
research, we shall only find on the other side something that
is already known and which is similar to what we already have:
atoms, molecules with complicated movements, the world, in
fact, which lies behind our sense world. And although we
describe it as a world of small movements, small particles and
the like, it is fundamentally not very different from what we
have here and can see with our eyes and touch with our hands.
This then is what lies at the root of the world of the natural
scientist. But if with the same seriousness we journey
further across the sea of research, only this time using
the anthroposophical Science of the Spirit, we arrive at
something quite different. We do not meet the well-known
atoms and molecules on the way. First of all, we become
conscious of questions: What are you then actually doing when
you investigate nature as has been done in recent centuries?
What happens in you when you investigate? What happens to your
soul while you are investigating in the observatory, in the
clinic? And anyone who has linked some self observation
with what he does will say to himself
— your soul is working in an
absolutely spiritual way, and when it tries to investigate the
evolution of animals up to the human being and to penetrate the
course of the stars, it is working in a way which was not
followed by men of earlier times. But of course humanity has
not always looked at these things in this way. People have not
always said to themselves: When I investigate nature it
is the spirit, the soul which is really working in me, and I
must recognize this spirit, this soul. The results of an
anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit are really
reached on the path of scientific investigation. They are
reached as something unknown in the same way that Columbus
reached America. But what happens when we are engaged in true
investigation is that we become aware of spirit, of soul, and
this can then be developed further. And through this we then
acquire a true knowledge of what spirit is in the human soul.
And it is precisely the task of an anthroposophically
orientated Science of the Spirit to evolve the methods by which
we develop what is active in the soul of the modern scientist.
But we have to choose a quite definite starting point for this
Science of the Spirit and that is what one might call
intellectual modesty. Indeed, we must have this intellectual
modesty to such a degree that the comparison which I am
now about to make is justified. We have to say to ourselves:
supposing, for instance, we give a volume of Shakespeare to a
five year old child — what
will the child do with it? He will tear it to bits or play with
it in some other way. If the child is ten or fifteen years old
he will no longer tear the volume of Shakespeare to pieces, but
will treat it according to what it is really for. Even as a
five year old, a child has certain capacities in his soul which
can be brought out and developed so that through the
development of these capacities the child becomes different
from what he was before. As adult human beings who have
achieved our normal development in everyday life and in
ordinary science we should be able to produce intellectual
modesty and to say to ourselves: as far as the secrets of
nature are concerned we are fundamentally in the same position
as the five year old child with a volume of Shakespeare. There
are certainly capacities in us which are hidden which we can
draw out of our souls and which we can then develop and
cultivate. And we must evolve our soul life so that we can
approach the whole of nature anew in the same way that the
child who has reached fifteen or twenty years approaches the
volume of Shakespeare anew as compared with his treatment of it
when he was five. And I have to speak to you about the methods
by which such forces which are to be found in every human soul
can be developed. For, in fact, by developing these methods we
acquire quite a new insight into nature and into human
existence. The modern seeking soul is in a way unconsciously
aware of these methods, but this is about as far as it has
gone.
There are, as you know, many people already among us who
say to themselves: If we look back to ancient times or if, for
example, we look across to the East where there are still
remains, albeit decadent remains, of an ancient wisdom of
humanity, we find that knowledge or what we might call science
takes on a religious character, so that the human soul can
experience a certain satisfaction in its research for answers
about the world and its own existence. And because we see this
and because in our civilized life anthropology has produced
profound knowledge about such old ways of looking at life, many
people long to go back to these earlier soul conditions. They
want to bring ancient wisdom to life again and want to further
in the West what is left of this ancient wisdom in the East
according to the saying, “ex
foriente lux.”
Those people who long for knowledge which does not belong
to our age do not understand the purpose of human evolution.
For each age brings particular tasks for
humanity in all spheres of life. We cannot fill our souls
today with the same treasure of wisdom with which our
forefathers filled their souls hundreds or thousands of
years ago. But we can orientate ourselves to how our
forefathers did it and then in our own way we can seek a path
to lead us into the super-sensible. But the human soul has a
fairly good idea that in the depths of its being
it is not connected with physical nature,
with which the body is connected, but with a super-sensible
nature which is connected with the eternal character of the
soul and the eternal destiny and goal of this soul.
Now our forefathers of hundreds or thousands of years ago
had a quite definite idea about the relationship of the human
being to the world to which he belongs beyond birth and death.
When they entered on the path which leads to super-sensible
knowledge, into the super-sensible world, there arose quite
definite images, and these filled the soul with deep feelings.
And there is one image in particular which made people shudder
who knew about it from the past. This is the image of the
Guardian of the Threshold, of the threshold which has to
be crossed when we progress from our ordinary way of thinking
which guides us in daily life and in ordinary science to
knowledge of the spirit and of the soul. Men felt
in ancient times: there is an abyss between our
ordinary knowledge and that which gives us information about
the nature of the soul. And these people had a very real
feeling that something stood at this threshold, a being that
was not human, but spiritual, and that prevented the
threshold from being crossed before they were
sufficiently prepared. The leaders of the old schools of
wisdom, which are also called mysteries, did not allow anyone
to approach the threshold who had not first been properly
prepared through a certain training of the will. We can show
why this was so by means of a simple example.
We are very proud today that for centuries we have had
quite a different way of looking at our planetary system and
the stars from the outlook of the Middle Ages and from the one
we think existed in the Ancient World. We are proud of the
Copernican outlook, and from one point of view quite rightly
so. We say: we have the heliocentric outlook as compared
with the geocentric outlook of the Middle Ages and of the
Ancient World, where it was imagined that the earth stands
still and that the sun and the stars move round it. We know
today that the earth circles around the sun at a tremendous
speed, and from the observations which are made in this
connection we can work out the framework of our total world
picture concerning the sun and the planetary system. And we
know that in a way this medieval world picture can be called
childish when compared to the heliocentric system. But if
we go back even further, for instance, to a few centuries
before the birth of Christ, we find the heliocentric system
taught by Aristarchus of Samos in ancient Greece. We are
told about this by Plutarch. This world picture of Aristarchus
of Samos is not basically different from what everyone learns
today in the elementary school as the correct view. At that
time Aristarchus of Samos had betrayed this in the widest
circles, whereas it was normally taught only in the confined
circles of the mysteries. It was only conveyed to those people
who had first been prepared by the leaders of the schools of
wisdom. It was said: In his normal consciousness man is not
suited to receive such a world picture; therefore the threshold
into the spiritual world had to be placed between him and this
world picture. The Guardian of the Threshold had to protect him
from learning about the heliocentric system and many
other things without preparation. Today every educated person
knows these things, but at that time they were withheld if
there had not been sufficient preparation.
Why were these things withheld from people at that time?
Now, our historical knowledge does not normally suffice to
penetrate into the depths of the evolution of the human soul.
The kind of history that is presented today offers no
explanation of how the constitution of the human soul has
changed during the course of hundreds and thousands of years.
In the Greek and even in the Roman and early medieval periods
human souls had quite a different constitution from today.
People then had a consciousness and knowledge of the world
which arose out of their instincts and out of quite indefinite,
half dreamlike states of the soul. Today we can have no idea of
what this knowledge of the world was. We can take up a work
which at that time would have been called scientific. We can
think what we like about it, we can call it
superstitious, and as far as present day education is
concerned, we would be right. But the peculiar character of
these works was that people never looked at minerals, plants,
animals, rivers and clouds or at the rising and setting of the
stars in such a dry, matter of fact and spiritless way as is
done today, because at the same time they always saw spirit in
nature. They perceived spirit-soul nature in every stone, in
every plant, in every animal, in the course of the clouds, in
the whole of nature. The human being felt this spirit-soul
nature in himself, and what he felt in himself he found spread
out in the external world. He did not feel himself so cut off
from the outer world as people do today. But instead of this,
his self-consciousness was weaker. And one quite rightly had to
say to oneself in past periods of human
evolution: If the ordinary
human being were to be told about the nature of the
heliocentric system in the same way that it was told to the
wise — if it were simply
said, “the earth circles
through space with tremendous
speed,” this ordinary person
would suffer a kind of eclipse of his soul.
This is an historical truth. It is just as much an
historical truth as what we learn in school about Alcibiades
and the Peloponnesian and Persian wars. But a truth we do not
normally learn is that the Greek soul was differently
constituted from the modern soul. It was less awake in
connection with the powers of inner self-consciousness, and the
wise leaders of the mysteries were quite rightly afraid that if
such souls acquired super-sensible knowledge without
preparation, knowledge which today is the common
possession of all educated people, they would suffer a kind of
spiritual eclipse. Therefore the souls of men had first to be
strengthened through a training of the will so that they
did not succumb when their self-consciousness was led into a
quite different world from the one it was accustomed to. And
the souls had to be made fearless in face of the unknown which
they had to enter. Fearlessness of the unknown and a
courageous realization of what was literally for such
souls the losing of the ground under their feet (for if we no
longer stand on an earth that stands still, we lose the ground
from under our feet), a courageous disposition of the soul and
fearlessness and several other qualities were what prepared the
student of the schools of wisdom to cross the abyss into the
spiritual, super-sensible world.
And what did they learn then? This sounds surprising and
paradoxical, for they learnt what we learn today in the
elementary school and what is common to all educated people.
This was in fact what the ancient peoples were afraid of and
for which they had first to acquire the courage to face. The
human soul has evolved during the course of the centuries
so that today it has quite a different constitution, with the
result that what could only be given to the ancient peoples
after difficult preparation is now given to us in the
elementary school. In fact, we are already on the other
side of the threshold which the ancient peoples were only
allowed to cross after long preparation. But we have also to
deal with the consequences of this crossing of the threshold.
We are at the point which they feared, and for which they had
to acquire courage — but at
the same time we have also lost something. And what this is
that we have lost in our modern civilization is clear to us
when we read what scientists who take our modern civilization
seriously have to say about what we cannot know. Why this is so
should really be explained by those who face such facts on the
basis of a serious study of the Science of the Spirit. We have
arrived at quite a different form of self-consciousness
since the time of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. We have
progressed to abstract thinking. We are developing our
intellectuality to an extent which was unknown to the ancient
peoples with their less awake kind of consciousness. And
because of this we have a strong self-consciousness which
enables us to enter into a world which the ancient peoples
could enter only after being prepared. Even the most
unbiased scientists who speak about what we
are unable to know and about the limits of knowledge show that
we enter into this world through a self-consciousness which has
been strongly developed through the thinking and through an
intellectuality which people in the past did not possess. But
at the same time we have lost the connection with the deeper
basis of the world. We have become rather proud of ourselves in
having achieved a heightened self-consciousness,
but we have lost real knowledge of the world. It
is no longer possible for us to achieve such connection
instinctively, as it was in the tenth or twelfth centuries. We
therefore have to talk about a new threshold into the spiritual
world. By means of our heightened self-consciousness we have to
develop something that will lead us into the super-sensible
world, which we can no longer enter instinctively as did the
people of earlier times. These people developed a heightening
of their self- consciousness through self discipline in order
to be able to hold out in a world which we enter without
preparation. So now we have to prepare ourselves for something
else? In order to do this we have to develop powers which are
latent in our soul and of which we become aware
through intellectual modesty.
Thus, rather than starting with something obscure in the
human soul, we start with two of its well-known powers. In the
Science of the Spirit we begin with two powers which are
absolutely necessary in human life, and they are then developed
further. In normal life they are only at the beginning of
their development, and this development is continued through
our own work. The first of these is the human faculty of
memory. It is through this faculty of memory that we are really
an ego. It gives us our ordinary self-consciousness. We
look back to a particular year in our childhood, and the
experiences which we then had appear in the picture of our
memory. It is true that they are somewhat pale and faded, but
they do appear. And we know from ordinary medical literature
what it means when part of our life is extinguished, when we
are not able to remember something in the sequence of our life.
We are then ill in our souls, mentally ill. Such an illness
belongs to the most serious disorders of our soul-spirit
constitution. But this faculty of memory which is so necessary
for ordinary life is, bound to the physical body, so far as
this ordinary life is concerned. Everyone can feel this. Those
who have a more materialistic outlook show how this dependence
is manifested, how certain organs or parts of organs only need
to be damaged and the memory will likewise be damaged,
interrupted, destroyed. But this faculty of memory can also be
the starting point from which a new and higher power of the
soul can be developed, and this is done in the way I have
described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of
Higher Worlds and in other writings. I have shown
there how the faculty of memory can be developed into something
higher through what I have called meditation and, in a
technical sense, concentration on certain spheres of
thought, of feeling and of the will.
What then is the peculiar characteristic of the images of
the memory? Normally our images and our thoughts are formed in
connection with the outer world, and they slip by, just as the
outer world slips by. Our experience is made permanent by our
memory. Out of the depths of our being we can recall what we
experienced years before. Images become permanent in us through
our memory. And this is what we use in meditation, in
concentration, when we want to become scientists of the spirit.
We form images which we can easily comprehend
— or we allow ourselves to be advised
by those who are competent in such matters
— and these should be images which
are not able to arise out of the unconscious, nor should
they be reminiscences of life, but they should be images which
we can comprehend as exactly as mathematical or geometrical
ideas. The cultivation of these methods is certainly not easier
than clinical research or than research in physics or chemistry
or astronomy. It is, to be sure, an inner effort of the soul,
and a very serious effort of the soul at that. It can take
years, although with some people it can also take a shorter
time; it simply depends on the inner destiny of the person, but
it always takes some time before
this continual concentration on particular images can lead to
any result. Naturally the rest of life must not be disturbed
through these exercises, in fact we remain sensible and able
people, for these exercises claim only a little time. But they
have to be continued for a long period, and then they will
become what one can call a higher form of the power of memory.
We then become aware of something in our soul which lives in
the same way as the thoughts which we have about our
experiences. However we know that what now lives in our soul
does not refer to anything that we have experienced in life
since birth, but in the same way that we normally have pictures
of such experiences, we now have other pictures. In my writings
I have called these Imaginations. We have pictures which
are as vivid as are the pictures of our memory, but they are
not linked to what we have experienced in ordinary life, and we
become aware that these Imaginations are related to something
which is outside us in the spiritual world. And we come to
realize what it means to live outside the human body. With our
faculty of memory we are bound to our body. With this developed
faculty of memory we are no longer bound to the body, we enter
into a state which is on the one hand quite similar to, but on
the other hand quite different from the condition which the
human being lives through from the time he goes to sleep until
he wakes up. He is normally unconscious at this time, because
he cannot see with his eyes or hear with his ears. This is the
condition we are in when we use our developed faculty of
memory. We do not perceive with our eyes and ears; we are not
even able to feel the warmth of our surroundings. On the
other hand we do not live unconsciously as in sleep, but we
live in a world of images and perceptions. We now perceive a
spiritual world. It is really as if we begin to go to sleep,
but instead of passing over into the dullness of
unconsciousness we pass into another world, which we then
perceive through our developed faculty of memory. And the first
thing that we perceive is what I would like to call a tableau
of the memory, that is, a developed tableau of the memory of
this life which reaches back to birth. This is the first
super-sensible perception.
The memories we normally have are of our life; we allow
the pictures of our memory to arise out of the stream of life.
This is not the case when we look back on life through this
supersensibly developed faculty of memory. In this case in one
moment the whole course of our life is drawn together into a
single picture which we can comprehend as something spatial
before us. When we achieve this independence from our body, the
fragments of our memory which normally appear as single
events in time now form a coherent whole. When we have become
accustomed to forming images independently of the
body — in the same way that a
sleeping person would if he could —
there is then developed what one can call a real view of
what going to sleep, waking, and sleep itself are. We get to
know how the spirit-soul part of man draws itself out
— not spatially, but dynamically,
though despite this, the first is the right expression
— and how this normally remains
unconscious, how the human being can however develop this
consciousness outside the body, and how consciousness arises
when the spirit-soul part again enters into the body. When this
has been developed it is possible to advance gradually to
further images.
When we are able to imagine what kind of living spirit-
soul beings we are when we sleep, we are able, through working
further on the developed faculty of memory which we have
described, to recognize how the spirit-soul part lived in a
purely spiritual world before it descended into the physical
world through birth and conception. We can then distinguish the
following: A person who is sleeping has a desire which is both
physical and super-sensible, to return to the physical body
which is lying in bed and to revive it in a spirit-soul sense.
We also meet this as a strong force in the soul that is waiting
to be received by a physical body which comes from the father
and mother in the line of physical heredity, but we also come
to see how this soul descends from this spirit-soul world and
penetrates the body. We acquire knowledge of how our soul lives
in the spirit-soul world before birth; we come to know the
eternal in the human soul. And we no longer merely rely on our
faith concerning the eternal in the human soul, but on
knowledge which has been acquired through super-sensible
perception. And through this we also acquire knowledge of the
great going to sleep which the human being experiences when he
passes through the gates of death. What happens to the human
soul when it passes through the gates of death is similar to
what happens in sleep when consciousness is not lost but merely
subdued, only here it is the other way round: whereas the human
being is strongly attached to the body when he goes to sleep
and wishes to return to it, thereby retaining his
consciousness in normal sleep in a subdued form, when he
goes through the gates of death he acquires full consciousness
because he no longer has any desire for the body. Only after he
has lived for a long time in the spiritual world does he
experience something which may be compared to the age of the
physical body which has reached the 35th year of life. After
having lived for a long time after death the soul
experiences a desire to return to the body, and from this
moment it moves toward a new life on earth. I have
repeatedly described in detail these experiences of the
human being between death and a new birth. When such things as
these are described, people today often make fun of them and
regard them as fantastic. But those who regard as fantastic
what has been won in this way should also regard
mathematical ideas as fantastic, for what I have
described has been won through true and earnest scientific
investigation.
And now we experience a tremendous and significant image.
In a memory image we have before our souls something
which we have experienced years before. We have what we once
experienced as an image before our souls. But if what we have
before us does not arise through our normal memory but through
the developed faculty of memory, we then have the spiritual
world before us in which we are when we sleep and in which we
also exist before we descend to a life on earth. What we now
experience is not what appears to the senses in the outer
world, but what appears to the eye of the spirit, the eye of
the soul. We have before us the spiritual roots of existence,
the widths of the universe. We rise up and go past a new
Guardian of the Threshold, we cross over a new threshold into
the super-sensible world, to what lies spiritually behind the
natural existence to which we belong. The stones and clouds and
everything that belongs to the kingdoms of nature arise like a
mighty memory. We know what a stone or a cloud looks like to
the eye. But now to the eye of the spirit something appears to
which we are related because we lived in it before our birth or
conception. This is the great world memory. Since this world
memory of our own super-sensible existence before our birth
appears and since our eternal nature appears before the eye of
the spirit from the world outside us, we acquire at the same
time a world tableau of the spirit that is spread out in the
world around us. We acquire real spiritual knowledge of the
world. The Science of the Spirit must speak about such things,
for it is something which must be taken into modern
civilization just as the Copernican and Galilean outlook
entered the world a few centuries ago. Today the Science of the
Spirit is regarded as fantastic in exactly the same way as the
new outlook of that time which was rejected as paradoxical and
fantastic. But these things will be accepted into human souls,
and we shall then also possess something for the external
social and the entire existence of the human being, which I am
now about to mention. But first I must point out that there is
another faculty of knowledge which must be developed in
order to acquire full knowledge of the spirit.
People will be prepared to admit that the faculty of
memory can be developed into a power for acquiring
knowledge. But perhaps the more strict scientists will not be
able to accept the second faculty for acquiring knowledge which
I have to describe. And yet, despite this, it is a real power
for acquiring knowledge, though not as it appears in life, but
when it is developed. This is the power of love.
In normal life, love is bound to the human instincts, to
the life of desires, but it is possible to extricate love out
of normal life in the same way as the faculty of memory.
It is possible for love to be independent of the human body.
The power of love can be developed, if by means of it we are
able to obtain real objectivity. Whereas in normal life the
original impetus for love comes from within the human being, it
is also possible to develop this love through being immersed in
outer objects so that we are able to forget ourselves and
become one with the outer objects. If we perform an action in
such a way that it does not arise out of our inner impulses
which originate in our desires and instincts, but out of love
for what is around us, then we have the kind of love which is
at the same time the power of human freedom. That is why I
already said in the book which I published in 1892 under the
title, The Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity, that in a higher sense the
saying, “love makes one
blind,” is not true, but that
on the contrary, “love makes
one seeing.” And those who
find their way in the world through love, make themselves
really free, for they make themselves independent of the
inner instincts and desires which enslave them. They know how
to live with the world of outer facts and events, and how their
actions should be directed by the world. Then they can act as
free human beings in the sense that they do what should be done
and not what they would be led to do out of their instincts and
desires. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
I wanted to provide a foundation for a new social feeling
of freedom which would enable a new form of social life to
arise out of the depths of the human being. And now I would
like to underline this by saying that
we must cultivate this love as a power for acquiring
knowledge, for example in developing a sharper faculty of
perceiving how we become a new person each day. For each
day are we not fundamentally a different person? Life drives us
on, and we are driven on by what other people experience in us,
and by what we experience in them. When we think back to what
we were ten years ago, we have to admit that we were quite
different from today.
Fundamentally, we are different every day. We allow
ourselves to be driven by ordinary life and what the
scientist of the spirit has to do as a training of the will is
to take this development of the will into his own hands and to
note to himself: What has influenced you today? What has
changed in your inner life today? What has changed your inner
life during the last ten, twenty years?
— On the one hand we have to do this,
but on the other hand we also have to do something else: we
ourselves have to direct quite definite impulses and motives so
that we are not always changed from outside, but that we
ourselves are able to be our own witnesses and observe our
willing and our action. If we do this we shall be able to
develop quite naturally the higher kind of love which is
completely taken up into the objects around us.
We therefore develop these two faculties of the
soul — on the one hand, the
faculty of memory which is independent of the body, and
on the other, the power of love which really enables us to
unite ourselves with our true spiritual existence for the first
time and leads us to a higher form of self-consciousness. With
these two we then cross the threshold into a spiritual world.
We then supplement our ordinary scientific
knowledge, and through this
anthroposophically orientated Science of the
Spirit, every branch of science becomes more
fruitful.
I can remember how the great medical authorities at a
famous school of medicine spoke of a
“medical
nihilism.” And they spoke of
it because it had begun to be said that for many typical
illnesses there were really no remedies. In modern scientific
life the connection with nature has been lost, for we have no
real picture of nature. This or the other substance is tried to
see if it has any ability to heal a particular illness,
but in fact there is no real knowledge of such things. Through
the Science of the Spirit we can come to a real understanding
of plant life, of each individual plant and of the great
differences which exist between the roots, the leaves and the
flowers, and we can come to understand how connections of a
spiritual nature lie behind the life of the roots, the leaves,
the flowers and in the life of the herbs. We learn how man
stands in relation to this world of nature, out of which he has
grown. We obtain an over-all view of the relationship of
animals, plants and minerals to the human being, and it is
through this that we acquire a rational therapy. In this way
medicine can be made more fruitful. Last spring I gave a course
for physicians and medical students, in which I showed how the
art of finding remedies and pathology, the knowledge of various
illnesses, can be made more fruitful through this spiritual
knowledge.
And in this way all the sciences can be fructified by
spiritual knowledge. In acquiring this knowledge, in uniting
ourselves with what we are, with the spirit-soul life, which
now works on our physical body, we come to a quite
different kind of knowledge from the one advanced by
ordinary science, for this latter only wants to work with
logical, abstract and limited concepts about nature and human
existence, and it is said: no science is real and true
unless it arrives at such abstract laws.
— But supposing nature does not work
according to such abstract laws? We can talk about them for as
long as we like, but we are limiting our knowledge if we are
intent on a logical and abstract method, and if we wish to
proceed with abstract experiments only. Then nature might well
say: In these circumstances I will reveal no knowledge about
the human being.
In approaching nature through the Science of the Spirit
we get to know that it does not work out of such laws, but
according to principles which can be reached only through an
artistic way of perception, in real Imagination. We are not
able to fathom the wonderful mystery of the human form, of the
whole human organization by means of abstract laws or
through the kind of observation which is
practiced in ordinary science. Instead, we
must allow our elementary knowledge to be developed and to rise
to imaginative perception. Then the riddle of true human
nature will be solved. And so a view of the human being is
given us out of the Science of the Spirit in an artistic
way.
With this a bridge is formed, leading from spiritual
knowledge to art. Knowledge does not merely assume an outward
character for those who devote themselves to it in an
anthroposophical sense. If they are artists they do not employ
abstract symbols or learned theories, but they see forms in the
life of the spirit and then imprint them into matter. In this
way art is renewed at the same time. We can certainly
experience it if we are unbiased and impartial. The artists of
the past created great and impressive works. How did they
create? First of all, they looked with their senses at the
material of the physical world. Let us take Rembrandt or
Raphael — they looked at this
material and idealized it according to the age they lived in.
They knew how to understand the spiritual in the outer world of
physical reality, and how to express it. The essence of
their art lay in the idealization of what was real in the
world. Whoever takes an unbiased look at art and at how
it has developed, knows that the age of this art has come
to an end and that nothing new can be created in this way any
longer. The Science of the Spirit leads toward spiritual
perception. Spiritual forms are first perceived in their
spirit-soul reality. And artists will now begin to create
artistically through the realization of the spiritual with the
same sense of reality which artists worked with earlier where
the outward reality was idealized. Earlier the artist
drew spirit out of matter; now he takes it into matter, but not
in an allegorical or symbolical way.
— The latter is believed by those who
cannot imagine how absolutely real the new kind of art can
be.
So we see how the Science of the Spirit really leads to
true art. But it also leads to true religious life. It is
remarkable how those who find fault with the Science of
the Spirit today say: The Science of the Spirit sets out to
bring down into daily life a divine world which should only be
felt in exalted heights. Of course, but this is exactly what
the Science of the Spirit wants to do. The intention is that
the human being is so permeated with spirit-soul existence that
the spirit can be borne into every aspect of practical
existence and not just be something which is experienced
in nebulous mysticism or exercised in an ascetism which has
little connection with life. People believe they have already
gone a long way if they have given others an education so that
when their work is finished, and the factory gate has been
closed behind them, they are then able to have all sorts of
nice thoughts and ideas. But a person who has to leave the
factory gate behind him in order to devote himself to the
edification of his soul is in fact not yet able to experience
his full human existence. No, if we wish to solve the great
problems of civilization we have to advance so far as to take
the spirit with us when we go through the factory gate into the
factory; we have to be able to permeate with the spirit what we
do in daily life. It is this outer, spiritless life which we
have created, this purely mechanistic life that has made our
life so desolate and that has brought about our
catastrophic times. The Science of the Spirit fulfills
the complete human being. It will be able to bear the spirit
from out of the depths of the human being into the practical,
into what appears to be the most prosaic spheres
of life. When the Science of the Spirit, which
can combine knowledge and religious fervor, enters life, it
spiritualizes all aspects of our daily life, where we work for
other people, where we work our machines and where we work for
the good of the whole through our division of labor. When we
work like this it will become a social force
which will help men. Economic and ordinary
practical life will be taken hold of by a science
which does not possess only an abstract spirit in
concepts and ideas, but a living spirit which can then fill the
whole of life.
It is not possible to solve social problems simply by
changing outer conditions. We live in an age in which
social demands are made. But we also live in an age in which
human beings are extremely unsocial. The kind of
knowledge which I have described will also bring new
social impulses to man, which will be able to solve the
great riddles which life brings in quite a different way from
the abstract kind of thinking, which appears in Marxism and
similar outlooks, which can only destroy, because they arise
out of abstraction, because they kill the spirit, because only
the spirit can revitalize life.
This is in a way what the Science of the Spirit can
promise of itself: that it can not only give satisfaction to
the soul in its connection to the eternal, but that it can also
give a new impetus to social life.
Because of this there has been no intention in the
Science of the Spirit of getting no further than a mere
mystical outlook. We have no abstract mysticism. What we
have does not frighten us from crossing the threshold into the
spiritual world and to lead other people into the super-sensible
world in a new way. But at the same time, we take what we have
won in this way down into the physical sense world. This has
resulted in the practical view of life which I have
described in my book, The Threefold
Commonwealth, and in other writings,
and which are represented by the movement for the threefold
order of the social organism.
There are some people who say: The Science of the Spirit
leads away from the religion of the past; they say it is even
anti-Christian. Anyone who looks into the Science of the Spirit
more closely will find that, on the contrary, it is well suited
to bring before people the Mystery of Golgotha and the real
meaning of Christianity. For what has become of the Christ
under the influence of the modern naturalistic outlook? What
has become of Him as a super-sensible Being, who entered into a
human body, who gave the earth a new meaning? He has been made
into the simple man from Nazareth, nothing more than a man,
even if the outstanding man in the history of the
world. — We need
super-sensible knowledge in order to understand Christianity in
a way that will satisfy the needs of modern humanity. And it is
precisely through the Science of the Spirit that we can
attain an understanding of Christianity which can satisfy the
modern person. Those who speak of the Science of the Spirit as
being opposed to Christianity —
even if these people are often the official advocates of
Christianity — seem to me to
be lacking in spirit, and not like people who have a right
understanding of Christianity. Whenever I hear such
faint-hearted advocates of Christianity I am always
reminded of a Catholic theologian, a professor, who was a
friend of mine who said in a speech about Galileo: Christianity
can never be belittled through scientific knowledge; on the
contrary, knowledge of the divine can only gain as our
knowledge of the world grows and reveals the divine in ever
increasing glory. One should therefore always think about
Christianity in a large way and say: its foundation is such
that non-spiritual and spiritual
knowledge will pour into humanity —
it will not belittle this Christianity, but will enhance
it.
We therefore need a Christianity that takes hold of life,
that is not content to say,
“Lord,
Lord,” but lives out the
power of the spiritual in outer activity. And it is just such a
practical Christianity that is intended in the threefold
division of the social organism.
The gentleman who introduced me at the beginning of the
lecture said that I had already spoken in Holland in 1908 and
1913. At that time I had to speak about the
anthroposophically orientated Science of the
Spirit in a quite different way from today, for at that
time what the Science of the Spirit had to
contribute as a solution to the questions of modern
civilization was only to be found in the form of thoughts in
one or two human souls. But since that time quite a lot has
happened, despite the bitter war years which lie in between:
Since 1913 when the foundation stone was laid, we have been
working in
Dornach near
Basel on the School for the Science of the Spirit, the
Goetheanum. This School for the Science of the Spirit is not
supposed to serve an abstract Science of the Spirit alone, but
is supposed to make all the sciences more fruitful through the
Science of the Spirit. That is why we held the first course in
the autumn of last year, although the Goetheanum is not yet
finished and still needs a great deal to be done to it, and we
shall also hold a second course at Easter, though this will be
shorter. Thirty people spoke during the course in the autumn,
some of whom were great experts in various sciences, in
mathematics, astronomy, physiology, biology, in history,
sociology and jurisprudence. But there were also people more
connected with practical life, industrialists, people in
business, and artists also spoke. As I have said, thirty people
spoke, and they showed how the results of spiritual knowledge
can be brought into the individual sciences. It was possible to
see that this science has nothing superstitious about it, but
that on the contrary it is quite rational in its inner,
spiritual nature and thereby acquires the character of truth
and reality. And it is in this way that we shall try to work in
this Goetheanum.
The Goetheanum itself is built in a new artistic form, in
a new style. If in the past one wanted to build a place for
scientific work one discussed with a particular architect
whether it was to be in the Greek, Gothic or Renaissance style.
The Science of the Spirit was not able to do this, for it forms
out of itself what it knows as reality, not only in ideas, not
only in natural and spiritual laws, but in
artistic expression. We would have committed a
crime against our own spiritual life if we had employed a
foreign style for this building, and not a style which arises
artistically out of the Science of the Spirit. And so you see
an attempt in Dörnach to
represent a new style, so that when you go into the
building you will be able to say to yourself: each
pillar, each arch, each painting expresses the same spirit.
Whether I stand on the rostrum and speak about the content of
the Science of the Spirit, whether I let the pillars, the
capitals or something else speak for me, these are all
different languages, but the same spirit which comes to
expression in all of them.
This is in fact just the answer which an
anthroposophically orientated Science of the
Spirit can give to the great questions which humanity has about
civilization. For the first of these questions about
civilization is the one concerning a real knowledge of
ourselves, suited to modern times. This is gained in crossing
the threshold in the new way that I have described, in
acquiring powers of knowledge which enable us to have a view of
the eternal in human nature through the developed faculty of
memory and the developed power of love. And through this we
arrive at a new feeling, worthy of the human being, as to what
man really is. In meeting our neighbors we notice in them what
is born out of the spiritual world, and see in them a part of
this spiritual world. The ethical aspect of human life is
then ennobled, social life is ennobled by the spirit. That is
the answer to the second question, the question about human
social life.
And the third great question of present day civilization
is this. The human being can know: In what I do in my actions
on the earth I am not only the being that stands here and whose
action only has a meaning between birth and death, but what I
do on the earth has a meaning for the whole world
— it becomes a part of the whole
world. When I develop social ideas I am developing something
that has meaning for the whole world.
Let me sum up: Ordinary science of modern times makes a
division between outer nature and the inner aspect of
human life. It regards the development of
the earth and of the whole planetary system as having
originated in a kind of chaos. Man came into being, but then he
will also disappear again after a certain time. The earth
will sink back into the sun as a clinker, it will gradually
become a field of dead bodies. Natural science has to say this
when it stands upon its own ground. But moral ideals arise out
of the human soul, and they are altogether what is most
valuable in it. The outlook which has achieved so much in
technology has no room for ideals —
ideals will disappear like smoke. That is why what is
called “the ideological
outlook” has taken root in
millions and millions of people. The modern proletariat speaks
of customs, law, religion, science and art as an ideology
because the feeling for the living spirit has been lost. If we
recognize this living spirit again we know that what lives in
the human soul as moral ideas, as something spiritual is
like the seed in the plant. This year's plant dies, but a new
plant arises out of its seed. In the same way we can say out of
spiritual scientific knowledge: the clouds, stars, mountains,
springs, stones, the plants, the animal and the physical human
being will all disappear, decline and pass away like the
withered leaves of a plant. But just as the new seed arises out
of the plant, moral ideals rest in the human soul as a seed,
not only for the following year, but for the eternal
future. — And we can repeat
the wonderful words of Christ: Heaven and earth will pass away,
but my words — that is, what
we develop as spiritual knowledge in the human soul
— will not pass away. We can say that
we have a unity again before us: the declining physical world
and the rising spiritual world. Through this man acquires a
meaning for the whole world. His social life also becomes
important. And the empty solutions which worry mankind so much
today and which have caused such social upheavals in the east,
will disappear when we make the social question a question of
our total outlook, when we try to find the impulses for solving
this social question in what the human being in
his inner nature can fathom as living spirit.
Thus the questions of modern civilization will be
activated by the Science of the Spirit.
We have also made some experiments in this direction in
education. The Waldorf School has been founded in
Stuttgart by Emil Molt and is directed by me. What can
result from a living Science of the Spirit is here transformed
for the uses of education and given to the children in an
artistic, pedagogical form.
The anthroposophically orientated Science of the Spirit
feels itself called upon to reconcile religion, art and
science, to introduce real science, real religion, real art
into practical life. For this the Goetheanum in
Dörnach has been built, to be a first
place where such a science can be cultivated in a free
scientific atmosphere, in a free life of the spirit. From the
beginning until now many people have been ready to make
sacrifices to build the Goetheanum, but, as I said
before, it is not yet completed. Its completion depends
upon whether there will be enough people who have an
understanding for such necessary progress in the
world — whether the
Goetheanum remains a torso and humanity says: We do not want to
awaken the spirit again, or whether an understanding for
the living spirit will lead to the completion of its first new
home. Then others will follow. For it is certain that in the
long run the cultivation of a knowledge of the living spirit
will be essential. It is certain that even those who hate the
spirit and who regard spiritual investigation as something
fantastic, need the spirit. Searching souls need the spirit,
and souls that are not seeking need it all the more. And this
fact will not allow itself to be driven out of the world. We
shall seek the spirit, because if we wish to be true men, we
need the spirit.
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