III
What
Spiritual Science Has to Say About the Eternal Aspect of the
Human Soul and the Nature of Freedom
Basel, 23 November 1917
Many people still consider anthroposophy, for example, as an
uninvited guest within a society. One behaves rather refusing
at first. Other scientific currents are well-invited guests of
the modern spiritual striving because of the already recognised
needs of the human beings. However, if one notes that the
uninvited guest has something to bring that one had lost and
that can be very valuable, nevertheless, in a certain respect,
then one begins to treat the uninvited guest somewhat different
from before. Anthroposophy is in this situation. It has to
speak of spiritual-mental goods, which in a certain respect the
modern civilised humanity has lost and which it has to receive
again. They got lost because humanity had a certain instinctive
cognition during millennia for that what is considered there;
humanity cannot retain this instinctive cognition in the same
way in future, it has even lost it up to a certain degree.
Just as little humanity could adhere to the medieval astronomy,
it could adhere to the old instinctive knowledge about the
being of the soul and with it about the real core of the human
being. In the talks that I have held here weeks ago it was my
task in particular to explain how in justified way the
scientific thinking has taken possession of the human souls and
has influenced the whole cultural development more and more.
However, this scientific cognition is not suited on the other
side to unveil the secrets of his own soul being to the human
being, just if it wants to remain strong in the area that is
assigned to it. This scientific imagination has the peculiarity
that it destroys the old instinctive knowledge of the soul as
it were.
Spiritual science wants to illuminate the spiritual area
consciously with controlled cognition and to bring consciously
again, what the human beings have lost as instinctive
knowledge. Most certainly, the human beings who feel this
anthroposophy as an uninvited guest will consider it just as a
very welcome guest — I hope — if they have realised
that this guest brings the knowledge of a lost treasure for
life.
If
we consider the different representations of the human soul and
its being as they have appeared in the time in which the
scientific way of thinking already had an impact, we realise
that two of the most important questions, which were typical of
the old doctrine of the soul, have disappeared almost from the
scientifically oriented view of the soul. These two main
questions are the question of immortality and the question of
freedom. I have spoken in the last talks to what extent the
question of immortality had to disappear more and more from the
horizon of modern science, and I have already said that it
should be my task today to approach the soul problem from the
viewpoint of an at least sketchy consideration of the human
freedom.
If
natural sciences extend their way of thinking to the soul, they
must focus their attention at first to what extent the soul has
its basis in the bodily of the human being. However, this
scientific view completely depends on considering the course of
the outer processes causally, also of the soul processes as
they take place in time. The scientific way of thinking can
consider the soul only in the closest connection with the body.
However, the body completely belongs to the material coherence
of the outer world. The scientific way of thinking finds laws
of this coherence. Nevertheless, these laws lead away from any
consideration of the human soul life.
I
would like to bring in one example only, while natural sciences
took possession more and more of the consideration of the soul
life, they also tried to apply their laws to the consideration
of the soul. There they cannot but consider how a human action,
how a human will impulse, how everything that the human being
undertakes from his soul flows out of his bodily experience.
They must experiment in their way as they are accustomed in
their scientific field, and they feel deeply contented if they
find with their experiments that also the soul life does not
break what is ascertained scientifically for the outer natural
life. One has only to consider such a thing that physiologists
have experimentally found the amount of energy which the human
being or the animal have taken up with their food is the amount
of energy which the human being or the animal develop if they
have emotions. The biologist Max Rubner (1854-1932)
experimented with animals where he could show that everything
that expresses itself as power in movements, in actions of
animals is nothing but calculable energy of the food that they
have taken up. Atwater (Wilbur Olin A., 1844-1907) carried out
experiments that show that this law also applies to the human
being. Everything that we exert in the work with movement and
the like can be calculated as a transformation product of that
what we take up materially with food as energy and transform it
into warmth and the like in ourselves.
Thus, natural sciences trace the soul life back to the
so-called principle of conservation of energy. They cannot but
say from their viewpoint: where should something mental
intervene of its own accord in the human being, create anything
new like by a miracle if one can prove that everything that is
active from the human being outwardly is only a transformation
product of that what the human being takes up from the world?
If the human emotion is that what the body has taken up in
itself, then the principle of conservation of energy is
fulfilled. Nowhere a new force appears; everything that appears
as energy is only something that was already there. One cannot
say if the human being accomplishes a so-called free, arbitrary
action, it comes out of his soul, because then as if a new
force would join the forces out of the blue which are already
there.
Of
course, someone who has familiarised himself with scientific
mental pictures feels such a thing as a closed line of thought.
Because this is in such a way, anthroposophy that wants to
extend scientific severity to the spiritual area has a hard
time. But not from some abstract sentences, but from the whole
spirit of that what I have to bring forward in these talks
should arise that anthroposophy does not contradict natural
sciences, but that it continues and develops these natural
sciences completely, although it follows a way from the
sense-perceptible area to the spiritual life.
However, it meets countless prejudices there. As an
anthroposophist, one knows best of all how enchanting
prejudices are and how they evoke opposition. Since
“proofs,” as one knows them in the usual science
and in the usual life, absolutely exist within anthroposophy;
but one has to understand them different from the
“proofs” of the usual science. Above all that what
one wants to investigate is a given. Nobody can deny that the
world of the senses puts questions to us. This is not the case
with anthroposophy. There the world itself must be disclosed
first, about which one has to talk. Hence, a lot of the
validity of anthroposophy depends on the fact that one
realises: the preparatory work in the own soul that the
spiritual researcher has carried out is necessary to come into
the world at which he wants to look.
In
science, one works on a certain basis, and then only the
intellectual activity begins. In anthroposophy, the soul has to
work at first, and its work is not something that finds laws
about other things, but its work is something at first by which
it prepares itself to observe what it concerns in the spiritual
world, actually.
There one recognises that for the anthroposophically oriented
spiritual science the following must be demanded what the
present acknowledges only reluctantly: if one wants to attain
insight of the supersensible world, one has to develop the
appropriate abilities in the soul. Then it is possible to
develop abilities from the undifferentiated human soul that
lead to the view of the spiritual world.
Today I do not want to go into this preparation. Today I would
like to refer only to my books, in particular to my writings
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and
Occult Science. An Outline, in which I have shown what
the soul has to carry out with itself, so that it becomes able
to perceive in the spiritual world. It can attain this ability
only if it makes its inner being independent from the body.
Because I do not want to be repetitive, I will today not speak
of how one attains such abilities. I would like only to state
something of the peculiarities of this spiritual way into the
supersensible area.
I
would like to pronounce a truth which appears weird at first,
concerning this way. The spiritual researcher must develop
abilities of a path of knowledge that refers to things, which
every human being would like to do the object of his
consideration unless some scientific or other prejudices retain
him from it. The everlasting of the soul, the nature of the
human freedom and everything that is associated with it are
questions for every human being. The old instinctive knowledge
dealt with them. The spiritual-scientific knowledge has to go
such a path of knowledge, which refers to something that
everybody desires. However, the ways into this supersensible
area are less popular, are almost rejected because of certain
peculiarities of the human nature. There one has to consider
the following in particular.
Forming mental pictures and concepts we are used to founding
them on something essential that approaches us regardless of
these mental pictures and concepts. We are connected as
physical human beings with that which exists about which we
form our mental pictures to which they refer. However, we are
not immediately connected with that what the supersensible
knowledge refers to. Hence, this supersensible knowledge makes
use of a bigger strength of the soul than the knowledge of the
sense-perceptible outside world that just is there from the
start. Many people shrink from this inner strengthening of the
soul life because it does not immediately refer to a being and
appears as something fantastic. One can understand very well
that someone who does not penetrate deeper into the matter
considers the mental pictures and concepts of spiritual science
as fantasy pictures because he is accustomed only to accept the
mental pictures of the physical reality. However, that of the
supersensible world in which the human being is interested
above all must be grasped in such mental pictures of the
supersensible cognition, which must be pulled out of the depths
of the soul. This can happen only with stronger forces than
they are necessary in the everyday life.
In
the today's talk, I do not want to speak how one investigates
them, but how they are in a certain respect.
The
human being is used: if he forms a mental picture of something
that proceeds as it were in reality, he just has a picture of
something real; then he can remember it; it remains in his
memory. This is a peculiarity of our usual imagining, which
gives us life security, so that we can keep that, what depicts
the outer world. If the spiritual researcher brings up those
forces from the depths of his soul that enable him to behold
into the supersensible world, he can look with the
“beholding consciousness” as I have called this
ability in my book The Riddle of Man. However, if he
wanted to keep the beheld in mind in the same way as something
of the outer sense-perceptible world, he would do a vain
attempt at first. Experiences of the spiritual world,
experiences that refer to the everlasting, to the immortal of
our soul can be recognised with supersensible cognitive forces;
but they cannot be added to the memory, they are fugitive as
dreams are and are forgotten straight away.
Now
you may say, may one consider this knowledge generally only as
results of a fugitive dream? — One has to say, definitely
yes, in a certain sense! Now the following is valid: one has to
prepare the whole soul condition in a way to be able to behold
into the supersensible realm; one must cause such an inner
constitution every time anew so that the vision can appear. One
can remember the activities that one carries out in the soul.
If one has attained an insight of this or that event or being
of the spiritual world, one knows which exercises one has to
carry out, so that this vision can take place. Should this
vision take place again after some time, one has to produce the
same conditions in the soul. One can remember these conditions.
What one beholds has to appear again anew. This is a big
difference compared with the usual knowledge.
The
spiritual researcher cannot experience something once —
as paradox as it sounds —, and learn it by heart to bring
it back to life again in himself like a memory.
No,
if he wants to face the same spiritual being or the same
spiritual event again, then he has to cause the opportunity in
himself to experience it again. As weird as it sounds, if the
spiritual researcher speaks of the most elementary truths
— for example, during five successive days to any
audience —, and he wants to speak in such a way that the
spoken comes immediately from the spiritual experience, then he
must do this spiritual experience every time anew. I want to
express with it that one of the most important laws of our
spiritual experience is: while our sensory images seem —
it only seems so —, as if they could emerge later again
from memory, as if they were a spiritual possession, this does
not at all apply to the praxis of spiritual knowledge. One has
to attain spiritual knowledge always anew.
Why
do I explain just this? I would especially like to point out
here that the appropriation of the spiritual-scientific way is
by no means a necessity for everybody who wants to deal with
spiritual science. Indeed, today it is a general aspiration to
get to know to a certain degree what one should believe; and in
this respect, it is justified if those who hear about spiritual
science and its results ask, how can I myself conceive of such
things? — However, the essentials of the relation of the
human being to spiritual science are not at all that one
becomes a spiritual researcher. Since the spiritual-scientific
way can give life something, and the immortal life, too, only
if that which appears in the vision is transformed into usual
concepts. The spiritual researcher could be an ever so
sophisticated being concerning supersensible knowledge, as a
human being he would have nothing over any other human being
because of his vision; since everything that takes place in
this vision is only a way, is not the goal. The goal is to
transform that what is attained with the vision into human
concepts, in those mental pictures, which we have just attained
in the outer sense-perceptible world even if a lot must seem to
be pictorial what we express with such mental pictures attained
in the sense-perceptible world.
Unless anybody wants to become a spiritual researcher, he could
adopt what the spiritual researcher finds with his research.
The results which he gets are clear for themselves if one is
only enough unbiased. The possession of this knowledge in the
usual human imagination — not in the supersensible
beholding — constitutes the real treasure for life. The
spiritual researcher would have nothing of his spiritual
research if he wanted to indulge himself only in the
supersensible beholding; this would be more transient than the
usual outer sensory results. The point is that the transient
vision is transformed into usual mental pictures. The soul can
take them with it if it enters another spiritual life after
death. You cannot take the visions as such with you, only that
which the vision brings.
I
have to say this once with any sharpness because even with many
persons who are within the anthroposophic movement the
prejudice prevails, as if a withdrawal from the outer world,
from life, or a mystic deepening is important. That is not the
point. The point is that one finds with certain soul exercises
what applies to the supersensible world and that it can be
transformed into usual human concepts. Nevertheless, it is
entitled if the desire exists that everybody wants to behold
into the spiritual world to a certain degree.
Literature accommodates this wish. This just corresponds to a
demand of our time to believe not only, but to behold
independently. However, this is not the central issue. When I
have described the path of knowledge in detail with which one
enters in the spiritual world, it is first to satisfy the
mentioned needs, secondly, however, mainly because the
spiritual researcher has to regard as a goal to give an account
of how he has come to his truths.
Then, however, also that who reads such a writing as, for
example, How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?
or the second part of my Occult Science, can realise
from the way, how the spiritual researcher describes the
spiritual-scientific path that it does not concern any
speculative fiction but a real entering into the supersensible
world. He can realise as it were how an account is given of a
reality.
This is something again that one has to add to the fact that in
many respects the proofs that the spiritual researcher has to
adduce have to be different from usual. The spiritual
researcher has just to claim that one acknowledges the
entitlement of the way that he gives bit by bit and which leads
into the spiritual world. However, if he emphasises such a
special peculiarity of the vision as the just suggested one is
— that the beholding into the spiritual world does not at
all comply with our usual soul life —, then I do this
just because I want to characterise the supersensible world
which you enter there.
For
the usual soul life it is typical that we keep in mind what we
have taken up once from the sense-perceptible world; this does
not apply to the vision. While I pronounce such a thing, I
point to the fact that the existence in the spiritual world is
quite different from the existence in the sense-perceptible
world. I state peculiarities of the spiritual world as it were;
I show that one enters into a world that does not at all
combine with our body as the sense-perceptible world combines
with it. The sense-perceptible world combines in such a way if
we perceive it with our body that we can keep the percepts in
mind. The spiritual world is so far away from our body that it
does not cause the changes in our body that induce
memories.
This is just a peculiarity of the spiritual world that you have
to consider. The right knowledge of this peculiarity is just a
proof, that you are with the vision in a world that is not at
all concerned with our body. That is why it is completely
entitled to say, while everything that is perceived in the body
causes memories more or less, that which is perceived if the
soul is beyond the body, like in the vision, does not cause any
memories because it is only related to our supersensible soul,
not to our body.
Other peculiarities of the supersensible world are also
mentioned for the same reason and in the same sense. In the
usual sense-perceptible world, the matter is as follows: if you
repeat a mental picture over and over again — how much
educational is based on it! —, then it becomes more
familiar to us, we can keep them better in mind, it combines
better with our soul. The opposite is the case for what we
experience in the spiritual area. As weird as it sounds, one
can almost say, if I have a spiritual experience and I try to
have it once again, it is not easier but more difficult. One
cannot exercise to get spiritual experiences better and
better.
With it something very typical is connected. There are persons
who strain to get insights of the spiritual world by certain
soul exercises. Forces slumbering in the depths of every soul
are called that way. Thereby once a blissful, often great
experience takes place, fugitive like a dream. It may not
appear again for a second or third time even if the person
concerned makes any effort to cause the same soul condition
again. One can almost say, a right spiritual experience escapes
from us if it has been there once, and we must make stronger
efforts if we want to get it again.
Often those are surprised who have made the first efforts that
a very significant spiritual experience does not always
re-appear. I also bring in this to show how the experiences of
the seer are quite different from the experiences that one has
in the sense-perceptible world.
Another peculiarity is the following: you feel, while you
advance in spiritual knowledge, that you have to cope with the
events that face you spiritually with the ripe state of your
power of imagination if you do not want to get to fantastic
images. Hence, you have to realise that the preparation for the
vision is of particular importance. You must already have
developed a ripe and versatile power of imagination, so that
you can cope with the spiritual experiences. This is again
completely different from the usual sense-perceptible world.
There this area of perception is spread out before us; we get
more and more images of this area; we enrich our images with
it. After we have had the perception, we enrich our
mental pictures. With the spiritual experiences, it is just the
opposite: We have first to make our mental pictures rich
and versatile, so that they are prepared if we want to have
supersensible experiences. This is something else than it is in
the usual life and in the usual science.
With that, I wanted to indicate that the way leads us to quite
different experiences and percepts in the supersensible area.
Many people shrink from this other kind of perceiving, from
this quite different kind of having concepts and mental
pictures. Hence, spiritual science will depend, above all, on
the fact that the human beings again find courage and strength
to form such mental pictures that are not borne by the
available sense-perceptible world.
However, mainly the scientific way of thinking develops these
mental pictures. Because it has achieved great results, it has
led the human beings away from the spiritual cognition for a
while. Nevertheless, it will lead them back again to this
spiritual cognition. Just because it points always to the
material and the human beings also see through the material
more and more, they will be urged to acknowledge that one has
to search the spiritual in another way.
There I would like to show using certain research results of
spiritual science how human knowledge will generally become
something else if bit by bit the spiritual science intervenes
in the pursuit for knowledge. Those listeners who listen to me
more often know that I speak about something personal only
reluctantly. However, I would like to indicate something
because it is associated as it were with that which I have to
argue: what I say now about the relation of soul and mind to
the body is the result of my research for more than thirty
years. Since in the spiritual area one does not obtain the
things as in the laboratory one can infer from any object or
any process what is to be said about it if one has developed
the method. The spiritual research proceeds mainly in time. It
concerns that then only one conceives of certain things if one
can relate experiences with each other that are widely
separated in terms of time.
The
progress of the usual scientific knowledge and of the usual
consciousness to the spiritual-scientific knowledge can be
compared with the unmusical listening of single tones and the
musical understanding of melodies or harmonies. If one hears a
single tone, it is a perception just of this single tone; it is
a single experience. If one wants to enter into the world of
music, the single tone is to be related to other tones, and
then it becomes what it is only because it is related to other
tones. In the usual percipience, the soul relates to a sensory
outside world. This one can compare with the perception of the
single tone. In the spiritual cognition, the soul has to relate
to that what proceeds in time. I want to indicate only that it
is, for example, of big importance that the spiritual
researcher is able to experience that which he experiences in
his soul today not only as a single event of the immediate
present existence but that he can relate it to an experience
which maybe dates back a year as well as a tone of a melody
relates to another tone of the melody if a musical conception
should be there.
As
one is connected by the usual percipience with the soul, with
something spatial, one is connected by the spiritual experience
at first with the present experience, relates it then to
something that is brought up vividly from the past. One looks
from an event of the past at a present experience and then from
an event which is even further away. While looking within time,
the soul experiences are structured, so that one may say, the
usual cognition becomes something like a musical overview of
the mental.
The
soul is thereby not only enabled to adopt what it experiences
in the body. But it relates what it experiences and remembers
between birth and death — like the ear relates a tone to
another in a melody —, to that which is there before
birth or conception and which is there after death. However,
the soul has to prepare itself for it while it relates single
experiences like the tones of a melody to each other within the
life between birth and death; it not only lives through the
single experiences, but also extends the experience over time
and experiences the different gradations, the differentiations
in time like inner music.
What also appears is not only inner music, but also something
that is like inner reading or listening of words where one
hears not only tones which relate to other tones of melodies or
harmonies, but also express a sense. Then that will originate
for the spiritual researcher which I can characterise in such a
way that I say, the usual scientific consideration looks at the
things as one would look at a printed page if one described the
form of the letters only. This method, applied to nature, is
natural sciences. This is a description of the letters. The
spiritual researcher learns to read. He goes adrift completely
from reading letters. What he finds in nature as something
supersensible relates to that what is spread out in nature
before the senses like the sense of something read and heard
that one takes in to the single tones that form the words, or
to the single letters that are printed on paper.
However, this depends on an inner progress to which one also
comes if one is not an esoteric student, but if one only grasps
the concepts and mental pictures of spiritual research. One
gets to know the world as it were in its real harmony; one gets
to know the sense that is behind this “sounding”
world, comparatively spoken.
In
such a way, something has arisen to me spiritual-scientifically
in the course of more than three decades that I would like to
pronounce as the coherence of the mental-spiritual with the
bodily that will also arise to natural sciences, which are
still far away from it in the next time. Since spiritual
research and natural sciences will meet each other in the
middle, spiritual research from the spiritual side, natural
sciences from the material side.
What I have to bring forward I have found
spiritual-scientifically. However, already the modern natural
sciences, physiology and biology, offer sufficient opportunity
to harden completely what I have now to bring forward as a
spiritual-scientific result. Considering the coherence of the
soul with the body one cherishes, I would almost like to say, a
fateful one-sidedness.
If
you take a textbook of psychology, you will realise that you
find a consideration of the nervous system as introduction.
This is completely entitled from the scientific point of view.
One can absolutely say, the naturalist can only relate the soul
unilaterally to the nervous system. An entire
consideration of life proves something else, namely that only
one part of the mental experience may be directly related to
the nervous system, namely only the imagining activity. So that
we can say, the whole imagining activity finds — we use
the term — its physical counter-image in the nervous
system.
The
nervous system is the physical basis of the imagining activity,
but not of the emotional life. The scientific psychologists put
the emotional life in second place. Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950)
does not regard — rightly from his point of view —
the emotional life as something independent; he speaks only of
the “emotional emphasis of the mental pictures.”
Every mental picture would have as it were an “emotional
nuance.” This contradicts the usual soul experiences. For
these the emotional life is as real as the imagining activity.
It is not only any “emotional nuance” of our mental
pictures, but the emotional life develops beside the imagining
activity. If one relates this emotional life directly to the
nervous life as the imagining activity refers to it, one
commits an error. Since as the imagining activity is directly
associated with the nervous system, the emotional life is
directly associated with all rhythmical processes of
respiration and blood circulation especially with the subtler
ramifications of the rhythmical system. These rhythmical
processes are the physical basis of the emotional life.
I
know very well that numerous objections may arise if I
pronounce such a thing. I cannot come on everything, but I
would like to mention one thing only, bring in one example only
how one has — indeed, much more precisely than the
“exact” science — to bear down on these
things if one wants to recognise them in their true figure.
There, for example, somebody could say, oh well, there comes
somebody and explains amateurishly that the emotional life
seizes the rhythmical processes in the body as directly as the
imagining activity seizes the nervous life. Does he not know
that, for example, if any musical impression takes place in us,
we take it in with the ear that it is delivered at first as an
image that in this living in the musical image the aesthetic
experience is contained that it is nonsense to say, the
feeling, which is connected with a musical impression, is not a
result of the imagining activity?
I
know that this objection, actually, must be generally valid for
the today's mental pictures; however, it is not valid for the
reality. We have only to realise that that which we take in as
the sound picture with our ear is not yet the musical
experience. It becomes musical experience only if the sound
image is coming up to meet what reaches the brain from the
ramifications of the respiratory rhythm. The rhythm of
breathing, which reaches the brain, meets the sound image,
which penetrates into the brain; it is the bodily counter-image
of the musical impression. The whole emotional life is
originally associated with the rhythmical life in our body.
Thirdly, we have the will in our soul. As well as the imagining
activity is associated with the nervous life, the emotional
life is associated with the rhythmical interplay of the forces
which originate from the respiratory rhythm and from the blood
rhythm, any will impulse is associated with metabolism. As
weird as it sounds, all will processes are directly expressed
in metabolic processes. I have published these scientific
results in my last book The Riddles of the Soul for the
first time, indeed, in a shorter form because of the present
paper shortage.
However, one has to envisage that the nervous system, the
rhythmical system, and the metabolic system are not next to
each other in the organism. The nerves must be also nourished,
of course. So that perpetually food processes take place in the
nerves. Of course, all organs of the rhythmical movements must
be nourished, too
Three members of the organism penetrate each other. But a
precise research shows that that which is metabolism, for
example, in the nerves has nothing to do with imagining but
with the will process, which extends also into the imagining.
Of course, if I want to imagine anything, I will imagine it;
directing my attention upon the imagining is already a will
process.
The
embryonic state that is associated with the will is also
associated with the metabolism in the nervous system. But the
essentials of imagining are connected with processes which have
nothing to do with the metabolism, but, on the contrary, which
deal with a metabolic destruction which deal with something in
the nerves that can be compared not with metabolism, but rather
with a withdrawal of metabolism, with the emergence of hunger.
Save that, one deals with a destruction in the nervous system
that must not be confused with the destruction in the whole
organism.
Such mistakes have happened. Just while I point to such
mistakes, I can emphasise the characteristic of anthroposophy
compared with older and even today-approved spiritual currents.
Who does not know that what the new spiritual science attempts
to attain with inner soul exercises which are not concerned
with anything bodily, one tried to attain in former times on
such ways which were much concerned with all kinds of bodily
performances, with asceticism. Think only that certain mystics
produced their union with the spirit by starving, by
destruction of the organism. True spiritual research has
nothing to do with those ways. However, spiritual research must
point to the fact that a destruction that is not abnormal but
normal, takes place in the nervous system if the imagining
should find its expression by the nervous system. I have
pointed out in the talk that I have here held weeks ago that
the consciousness that one experiences in the imagining
activity is associated with death. I have even pronounced the
sentence: while we are imagining, we die down perpetually in
the nervous system.
Only if such mental pictures are formed, natural sciences will
be able to meet spiritual research. Hence, we have to say, the
tripartite soul life, imagining, feeling, and willing, is
connected with the whole body, not only with a part of the
body; since the whole body is involved with its three organic
members, the nervous system, the rhythmical system and the
metabolic system. Our soul life is not unilaterally connected
with our nervous system, but the whole soul finds its
expression in the whole body. This is a result of spiritual
science that thinking, feeling, and willing have their
counterparts in the body.
However, just as these three members of the human soul life
have their bodily counterparts, they have their spiritual
counterparts. As imagining is connected with the nervous
system, it is connected with something spiritual that can only
be grasped with spiritual cognition, which I have called the
Imaginative knowledge. It is the first level of spiritual
knowledge, the first level of the beholding in the spiritual
world.
As
well as we find the nervous system as a bodily counterpart of
the imagining activity, we find the imagining activity arising
from something spiritual that can only be grasped with the
first level of supersensible beholding with the so-called
Imaginative knowledge. In a reality that appears in pictures,
one can recognise what corresponds spiritually to the imagining
activity. At the same time, we face what penetrates our whole
existence from birth or conception until death as body of
formative forces. While the substances of our physical body are
substituted perpetually, the uniform body of formative forces
that is at the same time the spiritual basis of our imagining
activity remains to us from birth until death.
Let
us consider the emotional life. To the bodily side it is
connected with the respiratory rhythm and the blood rhythm; on
the other side it is associated spiritually with something
spiritual that can be grasped on a higher level of vision that
I have called the Inspired knowledge in my writings, which does
no longer need pictures, but arises without pictures in the
supersensible world. However, if this spiritual origin of our
emotional life is figured out with supersensible knowledge, it
is not that which extends from birth to death, but which we
possess in the spiritual world, before we go by birth to the
bodily life with which we walk through the gate of death. Since
uniting spiritually with that what forms the spiritual basis of
the emotional life means: extending the vision beyond birth and
death.
In
such a way as our will life is associated with the metabolism
of the body, it is associated with the highest that the human
being can attain in vision, with that what I have called
Intuitive cognition. I do not mean the usual washed out
intuition, but that what I have characterised in my books as an
Intuitive knowledge: I have called the real settling in the
spiritual world Intuitive knowledge. This is the highest
spiritual level that the human being can attain.
Now
the strange appears: while the metabolism is the lowest of the
body side, is that what spiritually corresponds to the will the
highest that forms the basis of our being. What we have to
acknowledge as the highest between birth and death, the nervous
system that corresponds to the imagining activity is based on
the lowest of the spiritual world, namely that what one can
attain with Imaginative knowledge.
The
human being realises one thing in particular if he gets to know
the relationship of his spiritual-mental with this spiritual to
be grasped with Intuition. However, I can characterise this
only in the following way. It is not only anything that one
experiences in the vision but something that every human being
can experience who understands the results of spiritual
research with common sense. If one accepts these
spiritual-scientific results really, one gets to know what
spirit is, then this means something special. This event may be
described because it intervenes as something particular in the
soul, this event that wakes our internal consciousness for the
first time: now I know what, actually, spirit is what the
everlasting is in my soul.
One
can call this experience only in such a way that one says, it
is an inner karmic experience. The whole human life changes
possibly, gets another direction under the influence of this
experience which makes known itself in the fact that we know
what spirit is in us. We thereby do not need getting dull
towards other karmic experiences. Indeed, we experience events
in the outer life where we are on top of the world or down in
the dumps. The spiritual researcher does not want to get dull
towards these experiences. On the contrary, he becomes more
sensitive of them because he also figures out the spiritual
side of all that.
Whatever meets him in the outer life, the intervention of that
what is the experience of the spirit, of the everlasting in
itself is a bigger break in life, a more radical karmic
situation. One recognises with it how one causes karma, because
one must cause spiritual knowledge with own forces as one
causes twists and turns in life, while spiritual knowledge
becomes a vital question of the very first degree. This gives
the understanding of the remaining human destiny, but also full
understanding of Intuition. Then one notices with which the
human will is associated on the spiritual side.
Then one evokes a force by such a karmic intervention in the
soul life that does not only lead the supersensible cognition
to that which appears in the life between birth and death, not
only to that what takes place in the life between death and a
new birth but to that everlasting-spiritual core that works in
the repeated lives on earth. What the human being represents in
his innermost core, he recognises it as associated with the
impulses which have been there in former lives on earth. What
he experiences now as destiny, while he performs own actions,
becomes to him if the knowledge has become destiny, in such a
way that he also knows it as basis of the following life on
earth.
With the coherence of the tripartite soul life one gets to know
the transient in the human being. With the relation of these
three soul members with the spiritual one gets to know the
immortal, the everlasting that goes through births and deaths,
so that one surveys this entire human life which proceeds in
successive lives on earth and in intermediate spiritual lives
between death and a new birth. Thus, one beholds into the
everlasting in the human life other than with philosophical
speculations.
Not
with conceptual analysis or conceptual synthesis spiritual
research attempts to lead into that everlasting while it evokes
the view of this everlasting. What we are as temporal-bodily
beings has developed from the everlasting which consists of the
Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive part, as our body consists
of the nervous system, the rhythmical system and
metabolism.
These are some research results about the everlasting in the
human soul. The human freedom can only be attributed to this
everlasting. The naturalist must stop within the transient
experience: in the nervous system, in the rhythmical system
that he does not at all investigate even in this respect, and
in the metabolism that he confuses with the nervous life even
today, while he also looks in the metabolism for the basis of
the nervous life. The naturalist must stop within this material
life. Hence, he also finds something for every act of volition
that produces this act of volition. However, if one recognises
the everlasting in the soul, one recognises that this
everlasting has contents in itself which are independent of the
bodily life, then that becomes reality which one experiences as
freedom internally. Why?
Well, I have just explained in the last talks and in the
today's one that in us a destructive process must take place
that consciousness is similar in a way to death that there are
death processes in the nervous system if we form a conscious
mental picture. However, thereby it arises to spiritual
research that not everything that belongs to the soul being is
an outflow of the bodily being, but that the bodily being is
only the basis of the soul experience and that this soul
experience finds just its basis in the bodily life if this
bodily life does not develop its growing forces, but if these
growing forces are diminished. Processes of degeneration in us
form the basis of the conscious soul life. Natural sciences
will discover that this truth complies absolutely with the
scientific results.
I
point only to the fact that the nerve cells are not divisible,
for example, while the reproductive cells are divisible. The
typical abilities of the growing cells have just been
diminished in the nerve cells and in the red blood cells for
the same reason. No plant-like growing corresponds in the body
to the conscious life but destructive processes. So that
— where in us conscious life should develop — the
bodily life must be deleted first.
Spiritual science recognises the soul life in its independence.
With it, the concept of freedom gets a sense only, and it
becomes completely compatible with the concept that natural
sciences develop completely rightly in their area, with the
concept: that our organism causes everything that appears in
our actions, in our will impulses. These scientific mental
pictures exist completely rightly.
Nevertheless, the organism just causes, — just because it
serves as basis of the consciousness — that it
annihilates its processes that it withdraws compared with the
conscious processes. With it, the concept of freedom gets sense
that we can characterise possibly in the following way with a
comparison: the child is physically a result of the parents;
but it goes adrift from the parents. If we look for the causes,
we have to search them with the parents. However, if the child
has grown up and acts independently, we cannot always ascribe
its actions and that what it is to the parents. If the child
carries out this or that, after it is thirty years old, we do
not ascribe the causes to the parents. Thus, the spiritual life
goes adrift from the bodily life, so that the law of the
conservation of energy is accomplished after any causality.
However, as with the child the cause is in the parents, and the
child grows up and becomes independent, the soul life evolves
into the independence from the body in which are the causes of
the soul life.
With it, I have pointed out comparatively how the concept of
freedom receives a sense, while we do not explain this soul
life from the bodily conditions, but from the independent
spiritual life that goes through births and deaths. We can
ascribe freedom to this spiritual-mental being. Freedom was
philosophically treated always in such a way that one spoke of
either-or: either the human being is free, or he is not free. I
have already shown in my Philosophy of Freedom that one
copes with the concept of freedom if one envisages the
independent soul life. However, this independent soul life is
only gradually gained in the course of the physical human
development. One cannot say that the human being is either free
or is not free. One can only say that freedom is something that
the human being acquires in the course of his development that
he approaches it more and more. He approaches it, while he
supplies the forces to the internal spiritual-mental being,
which strengthen it in such a way that it can develop causality
for the human action, for the human will.
This is a weird contradiction, isn't it? On one side, one
states that from the body between birth and death everything
has to come that the human being puts into his action; on the
other side the independent free soul life is claimed.
I
would like to bring to mind again by a comparison what it
concerns. Let us assume that we have an air-evacuated
container. The air flows into it if we open this container.
The
free human decision is related in this way to an intended
action. The following will already turn out by spiritual
research: if the human being does not follow the impulses of
his instincts, but that what I have called the purely spiritual
impulses in my Philosophy of Freedom to which he has to
bring himself. Then he does not let that willing immediately
take place which originates from bodily causes. Indeed, the
free action also takes place in such a way that bodily causes
are there. However, these bodily causes are first prepared in
such a way that the free concept, the free mental picture
spiritually creates a void as it were, and the effect on our
body follows that action which is completely conceived by our
soul. As the air streams from without into the void after
purely natural causes, the body carries that out according to
its laws, which are now purely scientific ones, what was
prepared only in it, while the free soul decision created the
basis.
Tomorrow we will build on this concept of freedom, and then I
will still explain it further. I wanted to show how the concept
of freedom is only conceivable if one rises by spiritual
research to that soul life which is independent of the bodily
life. The free action only originates from the Intuitive,
Inspired, and Imaginative parts of the human being.
What arises from spiritual science for the social-moral
concepts that are for our tragic present of so big significance
what arises for legal concepts, for the outer social life, I
want to explain tomorrow. Today I only wanted to show that
anthroposophy can absolutely compete concerning the seriousness
and the precision of its research with natural sciences.
However, I also wanted to show that for the spirit quite
different ways must be taken that spiritual research itself
throws its light also on nature that the whole spiritual-mental
human being is assigned to the whole physical human being, his
nervous system, rhythmical system and metabolism. Just because
spiritual science will work with natural sciences in harmony,
something great will arise for the progress of humanity.
Today one often likes to refer to Goethe. I have said in the
last talk here that I would like to call my spiritual science
“Goetheanism” and the building in Dornach
“Goetheanum.”
The
young Goethe already looked at nature not as anything that can
be exhausted by such mental pictures as the modern monistic or
similar worldviews have them. However, Goethe already appealed
as a young man to nature in his prose hymn Nature:
“She has thought and is continuously reflecting.”
Spiritual science does not at all struggle for words. If
anybody wants to call that “nature” what consists
of matter and spirit in the world and looks for the spirit in
nature only, then he may call the whole universe
“nature.” If he goes so far like Goethe saying:
“Nature thinks and is continuously reflecting”
— even if not as a human being, but as nature, then
already the concept of spirit is included for such a thinker
like Goethe in the concept of nature.
To
those who would like to derive from this recognition of the
concept of nature that the Goethean view is consistent with any
view of the limits of knowledge that one cannot penetrate into
the spiritual world one has to answer repeatedly as Goethe did
to the very meritorious physiologist Albrecht Haller
(1708-1777) who was absolutely right from his viewpoint
saying:
“No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her
appearance only!”
Goethe protested against this naturalist. By his protest, he
made clear that the human being can find those cognitive forces
in himself that do not put the spirit as something unfathomable
to him, but as something into which he can enter gradually with
industrious, exact spiritual research. Since Goethe argued in
old age against Haller's words on basis of a matured
knowledge:
O
you Philistine!
Do
not remind me
And
my brothers and sisters
Of
such a word.
We
think: everywhere we are inside.
“Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her
appearance only!”
I
hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I
grumble about it, but covertly,
I
say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She
gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She
is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.
These words make us aware of the true Goetheanism, which
acknowledges the possibility to penetrate with the human mind
into the spirit of the universe and to recognise the
immortality and freedom of the human nature.
Tomorrow, I would like to speak how necessary it is for our
practical life to envisage such social ideas that originate
from spiritual research to show that spiritual research is an
uninvited guest only for those who attribute no other needs to
the human being than those, which can be satisfied with the
mechanistic knowledge. If one still gets to know other needs of
the human being, one will also recognise the necessity of
spiritual research in the social-moral area.
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