(aka: Science, Dreaming of Soul and the Intoxication
of Religion)
February 8, 1916
I
have a few things to add to the four lectures on freedom and
necessity which more or less form a connected whole. Let
us take another look at one of our basic truths of spiritual
science, the structure of the human being that we have
become so well acquainted with. We consider man as a synthesis
of four members: the physical body, the etheric body, the
astral body and the I. If we confine ourselves to what
is in the physical world, to the part of the human being that
is given, we can state that in our ordinary waking condition we
have in the first place the physical body. We know our
physical body for the very reason that we can obviously
observe it externally with our senses, and everyone else
in the physical world can observe it in the same way and has to
agree with us that the physical body exists. Therefore, in the
physical world this physical body can be perceived from
outside.
A
simple reflection can convince you that you cannot observe what
we usually call the etheric body. It escapes ordinary physical
observation. The astral body also escapes ordinary
physical observation, and the I even more so, for the
essence of the I, as we have often said, can be so
little observed externally that human beings cannot even name
it from outside. If someone were to call out the word
“I” to you, you would never come to the conclusion
that he could mean your I. He can only mean his own
I. The I as such is never named from outside. Yet
it is obvious that we know something about it. We name it from
within. Thus we can say after all that while the etheric and
the astral body are inaccessible on the physical plane,
as things stand now, the I is not inaccessible. We refer
to it by saying “I.” Nevertheless, it remains
a fact that the I cannot be seen in the same way as the
physical body or any other physical object. It cannot be
perceived at all by the senses.
What does the fact that we know something about the I
and that we come to the point of naming it actually tell us
about the I? Philosophers often say, “Human beings
have direct certainty of the I. They know
firsthand that the I exists.” In fact, there
are philosophers who imagine they know merely from philosophy
that the I is a primary being, that it cannot be
dispersed or die. Yet anyone with sound thinking will
immediately respond to this philosophical opinion by saying,
“However much you prove to us that the I
cannot be dissolved and therefore cannot fade away, it is
quite enough that after death, probably for eternity, the
I is to be in the same condition it is in between
falling asleep and waking up.” Then of course we would no
longer be able to speak of an I. Philosophers are
mistaken if they imagine there is any reality in the I
they speak of. If we speak of something that really exists, we
are speaking of something entirely different.
Between falling asleep and awakening the I is not there,
and a person cannot say “I” to himself. If he
dreams about his I, it sometimes even strikes him as
though he is encountering a picture of himself, that is to say,
he looks at himself. He does not call himself “I”
as he does in ordinary daily life. When we wake up, it is in
regard to our true I as though we were to strike against
the resistance of our physical body. We know, don't we, that
the process of waking up consists of our I coming into
our physical body. (Our astral body also does so, but for the
moment we are interested in the I.) The experience of
coming in feels like hitting our hand against a solid object,
and the counterthrust, so to speak, that this experience
engenders is what brings about our consciousness of our
I. And throughout our waking day we are not really in
possession of our I, for what we have is a mental image
of our I reflected back from our physical body. Thus
what we normally know of the I from philosophy is a
reflection, a mirror image of the I. Do we have nothing
more than this ego reflection? Well, this reflection
obviously ceases when we go to sleep. The I is no longer
reflected. Thus on falling asleep our I would really
disappear. Yet in the morning when we wake up, it enters our
physical body again. So it must have continued to exist.
What can this I be, then? How much of it do we possess
so long as we are active solely on the physical plane? If we
investigate further, we have, to begin with, nothing of this
I within the physical world except will, acts of will.
All we can do is will. The fact that we are able to will makes
us aware of being an I. Sleep happens to be a dimming of
our will; for reasons we have often discussed we cannot exert
our will during sleep. The will is then dimmed. We do not will
during sleep. Thus what is expressed in the word I is a
true act of will, and the mental picture we have of the
I is a reflection that arises when our will impinges on
our body. This impact is just like looking into the mirror and
seeing our physical body. Thus we see our own I as
an expression of will through its effect on the body. This
gives us our mental image of the I. Therefore, on the
physical plane the I lives as an act of will.
So we already have a duality on the physical plane: our
physical body and our I. We know of our physical body
because we can picture it with our observation outside in
space; and we know of our I through the fact that we can
will. Everything else underlying the physical body cannot
at first be discovered through physical observation. We can see
how the physical body has developed and what it is composed of.
Yet the description we have to give of this composition
in the course of our passage through the Saturn, sun, moon, and
earth evolutions remains a mystery if we consider the physical
body only. Everything underlying the physical body is a mystery
to physical observation in the physical world.
How
the will enters our physical body, or enters into what we are,
is a further mystery. For you can become conscious of your
will, can't you. Therefore, Schopenhauer
[
Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860, German philosopher.
]
regarded the
will as the only reality, because he had an inkling that in the
will we actually become conscious of ourselves. But of
how this will enters into us we know nothing at all on the
physical plane. On the basis of the physical world, we know
only that in our I we can take hold of our will. I pick
up this watch, but how this act of will passes through the
etheric body into the physical body and actually turns into a
picking up of the watch remains a mystery even for the physical
body. The will descends straight from the I into the
physical body. Nothing else remains in the I but the
inner feeling, the inner experience of the will.
The
way I have described this here has actually been applicable to
the greater part of humanity only for the past few centuries,
and this fact is usually overlooked. As for us, we have studied
the matter so much that it ought to have become second nature
with us. If we look back to the middle of medieval times, it is
pure fancy to imagine that people lived then in exactly the
same way as they do today. Humanity evolves, and the way human
beings relate to the world changes in the different
epochs.
If
we go back beyond the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, we
find many more people than we do now who not only knew of the
physical body but who really knew that something lived in the
physical body that we nowadays call the etheric body, people
who actually perceived something of the aura of the physical
body. By the Middle Ages of course these were only the last
remnants of an ancient perception. Even in the tenth century,
though, people did not look into a person's eyes like we do
today when we simply see the physical eyes. When they looked at
other people's eyes, they still saw something of the aura, the
etheric. They had a way of seeing uprightness or falsehood in
the eyes, not through any kind of external judgment but through
direct perception of the aura around the eyes. It was
also like this with other things.
In
addition to perceiving the aura of human beings, people then
saw it to a far greater extent than now in animals and also in
plants. You all know the description in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
that if we observe one seed, we see it
shining differently from other grains of seed.
[
Rudolf Steiner,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
(Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
]
Nowadays this perception can only be achieved through training,
but in earlier centuries it was still quite an ordinary,
everyday phenomenon. People did not first have to
investigate, possibly with a microscope, what plant a seed came
from — even that can in many cases no longer be done
today — for they were able to determine such things from
the light aura surrounding the seed. And in the case of
minerals too, you will find descriptions in old writings
classifying them in a certain way according to their value in
the world. When the ancients looked at gold, what they
described was not invention, for to them gold really appeared
in a different way from silver, for instance. When they
connected gold with sunlight and silver with moonlight, this
was really founded on observation. When they said, “Gold
is pure sunlight that has been condensed, silver is
moonlight,” and so on, they expressed what they saw
in the same way as they still saw elemental life in the outside
world, the elemental aura that modern people have lost sight of
because modern mankind has to evolve to freedom, which can only
be acquired by a complete restriction of observation to what is
physically objective.
Just as human beings have lost the ability to see these auras,
they have also lost another ability. Today, we must acquire a
feeling for how very different it was when the ancients spoke
of the will. They had much more of a feeling of how the will,
which nowadays lives only in the I, entered the organic
realm, the astral body as we would say today. They still felt
the I continuing on into the astral body. This can be
explained in a quite specific field.
The
fact that painters believe they can no longer manage
without a model is due to their having totally lost the faculty
of experiencing in any way at all how the I continues on
into the organism, into the astral body. Why is it often
precisely the old portraits that people admire today? Because
they were not painted as they now are, where the artist merely
has a sitter to copy, and is duty bound to copy everything that
is there. In the past people knew that if a person forms the
muscles round his eyes in a particular way, then what lives in
his I enters in a very definite way into his astral body
and produces this form of the muscles. If we were to go back as
far as ancient Greece, we would be quite wrong to imagine that
the ancient Greeks used a model for the wonderful forms they
created. They had no models. If a particular curve of the arm
was required, the sculptor, knowing how the will brought the
I into the astral body, created the curve out of this
experience. As this feeling for what was going on in the astral
body faded away the necessity arose to adhere as strictly to a
model as is customary today.
The
essential difference is that in fairly recent times human
beings have come to the point where they see the outer world
devoid of all its aura and see themselves inwardly with no
awareness of the fact that the will ripples into the astral
body and throughout the whole organism. Things have only been
like this for a short while.
After a much longer time has elapsed, a new age will arrive for
humanity. Then even more will have been taken away from both
the outer aspect of the physical plane and from man's inner
awareness. We know that at present we are only a few centuries
into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch that began in the
fourteenth century, for we count the fourth
post-Atlantean epoch from approximately the founding of Rome
till the fifteenth century, and the fifth post-Atlantean epoch
from the fifteenth century till as long again; so we are now
only in the first third of it. But mankind is steering toward
an entirely different kind of perception. We are moving toward
a time when the outer world will be far more bleak and empty.
Nowadays when a person looks at nature, he believes it to be
green and the vault of heaven to be blue. He sees nature in
such a way that he believes the colors to be the outcome of a
natural process.
In
the sixth post-Atlantean epoch he will no longer be able to
believe in the colors of nature. At present the physicists only
talk about there being nothing outside us but vibrations, and
that it is these that, for example, bring about red in us. What
the physicists dream of today will come true. At present they
only dream of it, but it will then be true. People will no
longer be able to distinguish properly between a red face and a
pale one. They will know that all those things are caused by
their own organism. They will consider it a superstition that
there are colors outside that tint objects. The outer world
will be grey in grey and human beings will be conscious of the
fact that they themselves put the colors into the world. Just
as people today say, “Oh, you crazy anthroposophers, you
talk about there being an etheric body, but it is not true, you
only dream it into people!” People who then see only the
outer reality will say to the others who still see colors in
their full freshness, “Oh, you dreamers! Do you really
believe there are colors outside in nature? You do not
know that you are only dreaming inside yourself that nature has
these colors.” Outer nature will become more and
more a matter of mathematics and geometry. Just as today we can
do no more than speak of the etheric body, and people in the
world outside do not believe that it exists, people in the
future will not believe that the capacity to see colors in the
outer world has any objective significance; they will ascribe
it purely to subjectivity.
Humanity will have a similar experience in regard to the
relationship of the will in their J to the outer world. They
will reach the point where they will have only the very
slightest awareness of the impulses that come to expression in
their will. They will have scarcely any awareness of the unique
personal experience of willing anything out of the I.
What is willed out of the I will only have a very faint
effect on a person. If all that mankind receives by nature
continues along the lines described, then in order to do
anything at all people will need either long practice or outer
compulsion. People will not get up of their own accord,
but will have to learn it until it becomes a habit. The mere
resolve to get up will not make the slightest impression. This
would be an abnormal condition at present, but natural
evolution as such is tending in this direction. People
will have less belief in moral ideals. Outer dictates will be
necessary to activate the will.
This would be the natural course of events, and those who know
that what comes later is prepared beforehand know that
the sixth epoch is being prepared in the fifth. After all, you
can see with half an eye that a large part of humanity is
tending in this direction. People are aiming more and more at
having everything drummed into them, at being spoon-fed, and
consider it the right procedure to be told what to do. As I
said, we are now roughly in the first third of the fifth
post-Atlantean epoch, i.e., in an age in which —
although the physicists already have the ideal of the sixth age
— there is still the belief that colors really do exist
outside, and that it is a human attribute to have a red or a
pale face. Nowadays we still believe this. We can of course
allow ourselves to be persuaded by the physicists or
physiologists that we imagine colors, but we do not really
believe it. We believe that the nature we live in on the
physical plane has its own colors.
We
are in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which
will obviously have three thirds. During these three thirds
post-Atlantean humanity has to pass through various
experiences, the first one being that people have to become
fully conscious of what I have just described. People must
realize fully that in their considerations of the physical body
they have completely lost sight of what is behind the
physical, totally lost sight of it in all respects. In the
second third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch — if
spiritual science has been successful — there will be
more and more people who will know with certainty that
something more, something of an etheric-spiritual nature,
is bound up with what we see around us. People will begin to be
conscious of the fact that what existed in earlier times
for clairvoyance, and is now no longer a part of our relation
to the world, must be rediscovered in a different way. We will
not be able to rediscover the aura that used to be seen, but if
people accept and practice exercises, such as those given in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,
they will realize that they can rediscover along a different
path that an auric element surrounds and interpenetrates the
human being and everything else in the world. People will
acquire a consciousness of this once again.
People will also become aware that they are able to grasp moral
impulses once again. However, they will have to take hold of
them with a stronger resolve than they do today, for there is a
natural tendency in the will to gradually lose its impelling
power. The will must be taken hold of more firmly. This kind of
will can be developed if people are determined to
exercise the strong thinking necessary for the understanding of
the truths of spiritual science. People who do understand these
truths will be pouring more strength into their will, and they
will therefore acquire, instead of a will that is
deteriorating to the point of paralysis, a powerful will,
able to act freely out of the I.
As
humanity progresses, merely natural development will be
counteracted by the efforts people make: on the one hand,
efforts to do the exercises of spiritual science in order to
become aware once more of the aura, and on the other hand,
efforts to strengthen themselves by means of the impulses
coming from spiritual science for the invigorating and
activating of the will.
It
is actually as follows. What has to be developed by spiritual
science in the second third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch
does not yet exist at all. What is the position of human beings
today when they observe the external world? And how do
scientists stand in this regard? It is very instructive
to look at the position of present-day science, especially
present-day scientists — of course only in so far as this
science presents the natural relation of human beings to
their environment. When they look at outer, physical nature,
whether it is the mineral, plant, animal, or human kingdom,
neither modern scientists nor ordinary human beings have the
power really to enter into what they observe. Physicists carry
out experiments and then describe them. But they do not venture
to fathom the mysteries of what they are describing. They do
not feel able to search more deeply into the processes the
experiments reveal. They remain on the surface. In relation to
the outer world they are in exactly the same situation as you
are when you are on a different plane when dreaming. You dream
because your etheric body radiates the experiences of the
astral body back to you. Anyone observing nature or making an
experiment nowadays also observes what it radiates back to him,
what it presents to him. He only dreams of nature. The moment
he were to approach nature as spiritual science does, he would
wake up. But he does not want to. In this first third of the
fifth post-Atlantean epoch people only dream of nature. Human
beings must wake up! Occasionally someone does wake up out of
his dream, and says, “What is out there is no mere dream;
there is something living within it.”
Schopenhauer's philosophy was an awakening of this kind, but he
did not know what to do with it. It gave offense to those who
philosophized cleverly in the modern way such as the
eminent philosopher Bolzano of Bohemia did in the first half of
the nineteenth century.
[
Bernhard Bolzano, 1781–1848, mathematician and logician
from Bohemia.
]
If you see his copy of Schopenhauer,
you will find that he wrote in the margin, “Sheer
madness!” Of course, it struck him as sheer madness,
because the following statement was really made out of a kind
of delirium, “There is something resembling will in outer
nature.”
And
when modern science remains true to itself and, as it were,
draws its own conclusions, what will it arrive at? Dreaming
about the physical body! It has no inkling that there is
something besides the physical body, otherwise it would
have to speak of an etheric body, an astral body, and an
I. It does not want to grasp reality, however, but only
what presents itself. The modern physicist or physiologist
feels like a somnambulist. He is dreaming and if someone shouts
at him, which happens if someone talks to him about
spiritual science, he falls down just like a somnambulist who
is shouted at. And the impression he has is, “I am now in
a void!” He cannot change immediately and has to go on
dreaming. Just when he thinks he is most awake in
relation to external nature he is dreaming most of all.
What will be the outcome? The modern physicist or physiologist
will gradually lose all possibility of finding anything in the
outer world except for his mental images of it. He will
even gradually lose the capacity to form any idea of anything
beyond his own mental images of the outer world. What is
left for him if he relinquishes the human body to the
scientist? The human body is there in front of him and he
observes it in great detail, but he leaves it to the scientist
or the medical profession to tell him what changes take place
if one or another part does not function normally. He dissects
this physical body very carefully. But he stops at that and has
no notion that there is anything beyond it. In this
physical body there is no trace of an I or of will.
What would this scientist actually have to do? He would have to
deny the 1 and the will altogether and say, “There is no
will, no trace of it exists in the human being, for we cannot
find it.” Down in the organism is where the will is
hidden, imperceptibly. As we have said, it is only taken hold
of, felt, and experienced in the I. Thus, the will would
have to be shown in order to prove the existence of the
I. That is to say, if a scientist who is only
dreaming now were to be absolutely honest, we would hear him
say to his audience, “When we speak of the human being,
we ought really to speak of will. To us scientists that is an
impossibility. The will is nothing. It is an absolutely
unfounded hypothesis. It does not exist.” That is what he
ought to say if he were to be quite consistent. He would dream
of external processes and deny the will.
I
have not merely invented what I have just told you. It is an
inevitable conclusion of the modern scientific view. If a
scientist were to follow his way of thinking to its logical
conclusion, he would arrive at what I have just told you. It is
not mere invention on my part. I have brought along as an
example the
Introduction to Physiological Psychology in Fifteen Lectures
written by the celebrated Professor Dr. Ziehen of Jena.
[
Theodor Ziehen, 1862–1950. Published
Theory of Knowledge on the basis of Psycho-Physiology and Physics
in 1913.
]
He endeavors here to describe
what is manifest in the human being as a creature of body and
soul. In the course of these lectures, he speaks about
all the aspects of the sensations of smell, taste, hearing,
sight, and so on. I will not bother you with all that, but will
just discuss a few passages in the fifteenth lecture about the
will. There you will find statements such as the following:
From the countless material stimuli of the outer world we
isolated stimuli of the cortex which correspond in the
psychological realm to sensations. We then followed these
sensations to the brain cortex along the associative fibers
into the motor zone from where the material stimulus was led
once again towards the muscular system at the periphery
where it caused muscular contraction. This transcortical
process corresponded on a soul level to the association of
ideas, and the resultant movement we designate
psychologically as action. We were able to derive the latter
sufficiently satisfactorily from the sensation and from the
memory pictures of previous sensations, mental images
functioning according to the laws of the association of ideas,
to be able to pursue the psychic process to its final stage. At
this point, however, we encounter a hypothesis that used to be
almost universally taught by psychology and which the
ordinary human understanding has always arrived at apparently
unconsciously. I refer to the assumption of a distinct will as
the cause of our actions.
Ziehen goes on to show that there is no sense in speaking of
such a will, that physiologists do not find anything in any way
corresponding to this word “will.” He also shows in
the particular way he interprets the effects of forces that one
might call depravity of will, that there too, it is not a
matter of will but of something quite different, so that we
cannot speak of will at all.
You
see how consistent this is. If people get no further than
dreaming of the external physical world, they cannot arrive at
the will. They cannot find it at all. All they can do if they
create a world view, is to deny the will as such and say,
“So there cannot be a will.” The so-called monists
of our time do this often enough. They deny the will. They say
the will as such does not exist at all. It is only a
mythological creation. Ziehen expresses himself a little more
cautiously of course, but he still arrives at some strange
results though he will no doubt take care not to take them to
the ultimate conclusion. I would like to read you a few more
statements from his last lecture, from which you will see
that although he drew the conclusions, he nevertheless still
plays around with the nonexistence of the will. For he says,
“What about the concept of responsibility?”
He
cannot find the will, but in answer to the question about the
concept of responsibility he says,
This does indeed contradict physiological psychology. For this
told us that our actions are based on absolute necessity,
(i.e., in the physical sense) and are the necessary product of
our sensations and memory pictures. Thus we can blame a person
for a bad deed just as little as we can blame a flower for its
ugliness. Therefore an action is still bad — also in a
psychological sense — but not directly blameworthy.
The terms blame and responsibility, to put it briefly, are a
religious or social matter. So we can disregard them here. To
recapitulate, psychology does not deny absolute laws of
aesthetics and ethics, provided they are seen to be in another
sphere, but psychology itself is confined to the empirical
realm, to empirical laws only.
This is perfectly natural. If external nature is only
dreamt about, then we see some people doing one good
deed after another and others who keep on attacking people for
no reason at all. Just as one flower is beautiful and another
ugly according to natural law, one person may be what is called
a good person. But on no account should the goodness or
hatefulness be explained as meaning more than a flower's beauty
or ugliness. So the logical conclusion is,
We
can blame a person for a bad deed just as little as we can
blame a flower for its ugliness. Therefore an action is still
bad — also in a psychological sense — but not
directly blameworthy. The terms blame and responsibility, to
put it briefly, are a religious or social matter. [Not a matter
of understanding but purely a religious or social matter.] So
we can disregard them here. To recapitulate, psychology does
not deny absolute laws of aesthetics and ethics, provided
they are seen to be in another sphere, but psychology is
confined to the empirical realm, to empirical laws only.
Ziehen continues to express himself cautiously, and does not
yet create a world view. For if one does form a view of life
from this, there is no longer any possibility of holding a
person responsible for his actions if one takes the stand of
the author of this book, this lecture. This is what comes of
people dreaming about the outer world. They would wake up the
moment they accept what spiritual science says about the outer
world. But just think, these people have a science that makes
them actually admit that they know nothing at all about what
points the way from the external body to the human I.
Yet what is bound to be living in the I? First of all
the laws of aesthetics, second the laws of logic. All these
must live in the I. Everything that leads to the will
must live in the I. There is nothing in this science
that can in any way live as a real impulse in the will. There
is nothing of that sort in this science. Therefore
something else is necessary.
If
this science were the only one the world had today, you can
imagine people saying, “There are ugly flowers and there
are beautiful flowers and nature necessarily makes them so.
There are people who murder others, and there are people who do
good to others, and they also are like that by nature.”
Obviously, everything appealing to the will would have to
be discarded. So why is it not discarded? You see, if we no
longer take the I into account, and if we do not accept
it as part of what we can know through observation of our
world, we must find it in some other way. If we do not want to
continue to uphold “social or religious laws,” as
Ziehen does, we must somehow get people to accept them in
another way. That is to say, if we dream with regard to the
outer world and with regard to what we see, then what we will
has to be stimulated in some other way.
And
this way can only be the opposite of dreaming, namely, ecstasy.
What lives in the will must enter into it in such a way that
the person under no circumstances stops to think about it or
realize fully that it is an impulse of will. That is to
say, what has to be aimed for in an age like this is that a
person does not attempt to have a clear view of the will
impulses he accepts, but they should work in him — and
this is a fitting image — like wine does when a person is
drunk. An impulse that is not brought to full consciousness
works in the same way as intoxicating drink does when it robs a
person of the full possession of his wits. That is to say, we
live in an age when one has to renounce a really close
examination of will impulses. Religious denominations
would like to provide impulses, but these must not be examined
at any price. On no account ought the motivating ideas be
submitted to objective scrutiny. It should all enter into the
human being by means of ecstasy.
We
can actually prove this all over again in the present
time. Just try with an open mind to really listen to the way
religious impulses are spoken of nowadays. People feel most
comfortable if they are told nothing about why they should
accept one or the other impulse, but are spoken to in such a
way that they become enthusiastic, fired up, they are
given ideas they cannot fully grasp and that surround them with
mystery. And the most highly acclaimed speakers are the ones
who fill people's souls with fire, fire, and yet more fire, and
who pay least attention to whether everybody has conscious hold
of himself. The dreamers come along and say, “We examine
the Gospels. Even if we go so far as to admit to the existence
of Jesus of Nazareth, we find no evidence at all that
there was in fact a supersensible being dwelling in him.”
We need only remember how many dreamers there are who simply
deny the existence of Christ because it cannot be proved on the
external physical plane. On the other hand, there are
theologians who cannot prove it either, and who therefore
speak about the Christ in as vague a way as possible, appealing
as much as possible to the feelings, drives, and instincts.
An
example of this kind of thing took place in a strange way in
public very recently. On the one hand, there were the dreamers
— it began with Eduard von Hartmann in the realm of
philosophy, and Drews made a lot of propaganda out of it
— and these dreamers went so far as to deny the whole
message of the testaments by showing that the Mystery of
Golgotha is not a historical occurrence.
[
Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906, German philosopher.
Arthur Drews, 1865–1935, philosopher.
Denied the existence of Jesus.
]
Certainly, it
cannot be proved on the plane of external history but has to be
approached on the spiritual plane. Now these dreamers had
opponents. Read all the literature on this issue and you
will see no sign of any thought, no sign of anything
scientific; the whole thing consisted of words one can
only describe as drunken and intoxicating words. No sign of
thorough study! The opponents are appealing the whole time to
what will excite unmotivated instincts. This is how things
stand in our life of soul. On the one hand, there is dreaming,
which is supposed to provide a world view grounded in natural
science, and on the other hand, there is intoxication, which
people are supposed to acquire from the religious
confessions.
Dreaming and intoxication are the principal factors controlling
mankind today. And just as the only way to stop people from
dreaming is to wake them up, the only way to overcome
intoxication is to look at our inner impulses in total clarity.
This means giving people spiritual science that, far from
making the soul drunk, awakens the soul to spiritual
impulses. But people are not yet ready to go along with this. I
have said before that if we offer the challenge of spiritual
science to a hardened monist of the Haeckelian school,
one who desires only to prove his monism on the basis of
natural science, he falls on his face with a thud,
metaphorically speaking, he falls down with a loud thud as a
matter of course. That is the obvious thing to happen, for he
immediately feels he is in a void and his consciousness
is completely bowled over. If you take an ordinary person,
someone who wants to base his whole world view on natural
science, they mean nothing to him; he cannot understand a
thing. If he is honest, he will say, “Here we go again,
it makes my head spin.” Which means he plops down with a
thud.
Concerning intoxication, if someone allows himself to sober up
properly, it is a straightforward matter of embarking on a
truly ennobled inner religious life. The fact that he can
familiarize himself with the impulses coming from spiritual
science will enable his belief to deepen into concrete
concepts. But if you approach someone who does not want to
awaken his soul to the ideals of spiritual science, yet you
bring them to him and want him to accept them, that is to say,
if you bring spiritual science to someone who is completely
under the sway of modern theology, he will sober up, in a
strange way, like people who have been drunk and have not quite
recovered from the organic aftereffects. He gets a hangover.
You can really notice it.
If
you observe theologians nowadays — and we can do this
especially well in the Dornach area where the theologians take
more notice of it — if you observe them in cases where
spiritual science is familiar to them but still undigested, and
if you listen to them, you will find that all they say is
basically a kind of hangover, caused by the fact that they
ought to acquire ideas and knowledge about spiritual
matters, yet still prefer to be drunk with ecstasy over them
and to introduce them into people's mental organization
in an entirely unmotivated way. They shrink from becoming sober
because they cannot bear the thought that it will not bring
them enlightenment but a throbbing headache.
These things must absolutely be seen in their historical
necessity. If it can come about that spiritual science brings
people at least the rudiments of an understanding of how
to regain in a new way the sight of what has been lost, how to
motivate the will once again, then humanity will acquire in
freedom what nature can no longer give us. You see then that a
certain necessity underlies our program. The kind of lecture I
gave last Friday and have often given, drawing your attention
to the development of thinking on the one hand and the
development of will on the other, showed how thinking proceeds
until we discover the will in it and come out of ourselves
through thinking. It also showed how we find the other
spectator on the other side, and demonstrates that
through the very fact that we bring thinking to the point where
we can emerge out of ourselves, we will have a chance not to
fall flat on our faces when we are shouted at and awakened.
We
fall down only because we cannot understand * outer processes
and have nothing to hold on to when we are awakened from our
dreams. What one has to hold on to, so as not to get into the
kind of inwardly inorganic, disordered state we call a
hangover, is what one can acquire through developing one's
thinking. This comes about when the inner spectator I spoke of
can emerge unhindered from our inner being. Thus what should be
imparted to humanity above all is intimately connected
with the real inner laws of human progress.
Yet
if you think about what has been said here today and often
before, and bear in mind its implications, you will avoid
certain obvious mistakes. Some mistakes, of course, will be
extremely difficult to avoid, and I will point out just one of
these today. Again and again individuals among us say,
“There are, for instance, the followers of this or
that confession,” assuming in this case that we live
among a more or less Catholic population “who have their
Catholic priest.” Our friends very often believe that if
they explain to this priest that we do represent Christianity,
speak about the Mystery of Golgotha in the right way, and do
not deny the existence of Christ, we will be able to gain
the priest's friendship.
This way of thinking is completely wrong. You will never win
these people over by showing them that we do not deny what they
are duty bound to preach. We simply cannot do that. Actually
you would get on better with these people if you were in a
position to say that you are people who do not believe in
Christ. Then they would say, “You see, there are people
who do not believe in Christ. They do not belong to us.
We shall stick to our community who are content to learn from
us about Christ through ecstasy.” They do not say that,
but that is how they act. Yet when other people besides
them affirm the existence of Christ and even maintain
they have positive knowledge of Christ, and we become the sort
of people who follow our own way, and who want to present
Christ in a different way from them: they then become far worse
enemies than they would be if our friends were to deny the
existence of Christ. For they consider it their
privilege to present Christianity, and our mistake is
precisely to present it in another way.
Therefore you only make certain theologians furious with
spiritual science if you tell them, “We speak of the
Christ.” You would make them far less angry if you were
able to say — which of course you are not —
“We deny the existence of Christ.” What infuriates
them is that we refer to Christ in a different context. Out of
the best intentions in the world our friends will very easily
say, “What do you want? We are on a completely
Christian footing.” That is the worst thing you can
possibly say to them, for that is just what goes so much
against the grain with them.
This touches again on an area where we encounter freedom and
necessity in a very special way. The main thing I keep trying
to bring home to people is that we should not take these ideas
lightly. Freedom and necessity are among the most
important human concepts, and you have to realize time and
again that we have to gather a great number of ideas to arrive
at a more or less correct understanding of the concepts of
freedom and necessity.
Where would it lead if present-day humanity were to follow
nothing but natural necessity? People would obviously dream
more and more, until they had nothing left but a
dreary grey in grey, and they would become less and less
able to use their will, until they: reached actual paralysis of
the will. That is necessity. Out of the freedom of spiritual
science people must obviously work to counteract this;
for the time is now dawning when we will have to acquire our
essential freedom out of an inner necessity which we ourselves
acknowledge. Of course we might all say, “We are not
going to concern ourselves with what is supposed to
happen.” In that case things would come about as
described. Yet that things can be different is a
necessity, a necessity, however, that can only be taken hold of
through understanding. We might call it a free necessity,
a genuine and absolute necessity.
Here again the concepts freedom and necessity come very close
together. It might sometimes have seemed as though I was only
playing with the words “dreaming and intoxication.”
That was most certainly not the case. You can find individual
examples, and I could tell you many, many more, of the way
people speak, as though in a kind of dream, about outer
reality. For instance, a particular objection is often raised
against what I say in anthroposophical lectures. A pet remark
is, “But how can you prove that?” meaning that
people require to have what is presented to them proved by
comparing it with outer reality. They assume that an idea is
valid only if one can point to its physical counterpart, and
that this external counterpart is the proof. This is such an
extremely obvious idea, that people think they are great
logicians if they say, “You see, it all depends on being
able to prove that a concept links up with its counterpart in
outer reality.”
You
can easily point out that this is no great logic but proper
dream logic. When people say things like this, I usually give
the answer that even where the external sense world is
concerned you cannot prove reality, for if someone had never in
his life seen a whale, you could never prove the existence of
whales through logic alone, could you? Pointing to the reality
is something quite different from proving a thing. So much for
dream-logic.
I
can put it even more plainly. Suppose I paint a portrait
of a living person, and someone gives as his objective
opinion “This portrait is very like the person,”
and goes on to explain that this is so because when he
compares the portrait with the person, they both look the
same. The likeness is due to the fact that the portrait agrees
with reality. Does the correspondence to external reality cause
the likeness? Why does he say the picture is like the model?
Because it corresponds to external reality. The external
reality is what is true. Now imagine that the model dies, and
we look at his portrait thirty years later. Is it no longer
like him, thirty years later, because it does not agree with
external reality any more? The person is no longer there. We
can assume that he was cremated a long time ago. Does the
likeness depend on the external reality being there? Clear
thinking knows it does not. In the case of dream-thinking
one can say that in order to prove anything one has to be able
to point to external reality. But this is only true for
dream-thinking, dream-logic. For surely, just because a
person passes from existence to nonexistence, a portrait of him
does not change from being like him to being unlike him!
You
see, many things can be made into a necessity if people want to
adapt their logic accordingly, especially when we find in every
article about logic nowadays “The truth of a concept
consists in, or can be proved by, the fact that one can point
to the external reality in the physical world.” But this
definition of truth is nonsense, and this becomes evident
in cases like the comparison with the portrait. If you
consult so-called scientific books today — not the
kind that deal with pure science — all they do is
give descriptions, and if we stick to descriptions, what does
it matter if we remain in mere dreams? If some people want to
describe nothing more than the dream of outer life and do not
pretend to build a world view, let them. However, a world view
based on this is a dream view. And we can see that. Wherever
this step is taken, you usually find dream-philosophy.
It
is quite ridiculous how unable people are to think, that is to
say, to think in such a way that their thinking is based on the
element on which it ought to be based. I have copied out a
statement Professor Ziehen makes on page 208 of these lectures,
in which he wants particularly to point out that we
cannot find the will that underlies an action. He puts it like
this, “Thinking consists of a series of mental
images, and the psychic part” — that is, the soul
content — “of an action is also a series of mental
images with the particular characteristic that the last link in
the chain is a mental image of movement.”
There is the clock. The will is eliminated, isn't it? I see the
clock. That is now a mental image. The will does not exist and
I see the clock. This clock has an effect on me in some way by
setting my cerebral cortex into some sort of motion, and then
passes from the cerebral cortex into a kind of motor zone, as
physiology tells us. One thing passes on to the next. This is
the thought image of movement. I have first of all an image of
the clock, and the image of the movement succeeds the activity
of the imagining the movement, not by way of will but by way of
the image of movement. “I have only a series of mental
images,” says Ziehen. Thinking consists of a series of
mental images, and the psychic part of an action is also
a series of mental images. The will is unquestionably
eliminated. It is not there. First of all I observe the clock
and then the movement of my hand. That is all.
You
can track down the logic this contains by translating
this statement into another one. You can just as well say,
“Thinking consists of a series of mental images. So
far so good. And when we look at a machine, the psychic process
is just another mental image, with the particular
characteristic that the last link in the chain is a mental
image of a moving machine.” One is exactly the same as
the other. You have merely eliminated the machine's driving
power. You have merely added the mental image of the moving
machine to what you were thinking before.
This is what this dream-logic consists of. Where the outer
world is concerned, a person who applies dream-logic does of
course admit the existence of impulses of some sort, but not in
the case of the inner world, because he wants to
eliminate the will. Ziehen's whole book is full of dream-logic
of this kind, eliminating the will. At the same time of course
the I is also being eliminated, which is
interesting. According to him, the I is also nothing
more than a series of mental images. He actually explicitly
says so.
The
following interesting thing can happen. Forgive me if I let you
into some of the intimate secrets involved in the preparation
of a lecture like today's. I had to give today's lecture,
didn't I? I wanted to bring you not just an overall picture of
what I had to say but also some details. So I had to get this
book out and look at it again, which I did. I could of course
not read you the whole book but had to limit myself to a
selection of passages. I certainly wanted to show you that
today's world view based on dream-science cannot include the
will, the will is really not there. I have shown you what the
author has to say about it in this book of his. I wanted to
draw your special attention to what the author says about the
will, that is to say, what he says against it. So I look up
“will” at the back of the book; aha, page 205 and
following, and turn there to see what he says about it. I
did tell you today too, though, that in the first instance the
will is only perceptible in the physical world in the I.
So when we speak of the true I, we actually have to
speak of the I that wills. Therefore I also had to show
you how the person who has nothing but a dream view based on
science speaks of the I. To show you that he simply
denies the will, I read you the passage from “Mental
image of movement” to “the will is
eliminated.”
I
also wanted to read you something briefly on what he says about
the I. So I turned to the index again — but
I does not occur at all! That is entirely consistent, of
course. So we have as a matter of course a book on
physiological psychology or psychiatry that does not mention
the I! There is no reference to it in the index and, if
you go through it, you will see that only the mental image of
the I occurs, just a mental image of course. The author
lets mental images pass, for they are only another word for
mechanical processes of the brain. But the I as such
does not figure at all; it is eliminated.
You
see it has already become an ideal, this eliminating of
the I. But if humanity follows nature, then by the sixth
post-Atlantean epoch the I will be eliminated
altogether in earnest, for if the impulses of will
proceeding from the center of one's being are lacking, people
will hardly speak of an I. During the fifth epoch human
beings have had the task to advance to talking up an I.
But they could lose this I again if they do not really
search for it through inner effort. Those who know
anything at all about this aspect of the world could tell
you things about the number of people one already meets who say
they sense a weakness of their I. How many people are
there today who do not know what to do with themselves, because
they do not know how to fill their souls with spiritual
content? Here we are facing a chapter of unspeakable misery of
soul that is more widespread in our time than one usually
imagines. For the number of people unable to cope with life
because they cannot find impulses within themselves to support
their I in the world of appearances is constantly
growing.
This in turn is connected with something I have often spoken
about here, namely, that up to now it was essential that
people should work towards acquiring a conception of their
I. And we live in the time when this is finally being
properly acquired. You know that in Latin, which was the
language of the fourth epoch, the word ego was only used
as an exception. People then did not speak of the I, it
was still contained in the verb. The more world evolution, and
language too, approached the fifth post-Atlantean epoch,
the more the I became separated. The Christ impulse is
to help us find this I in the right way. The fact that
in Central Europe in particular this I is uniting itself
in its purest form with the Christ impulse is expressed in the
language itself, in that through the inner necessity of
evolution the word for I (German: Ich) is
built up out of the initials of Christ: I-C-H, Jesus
Christ.
This may well seem a dream to those who want to stay nowadays
in the realm of dream-science. Those who wake themselves from
this dream view of life will appreciate the great and
significant truth of this fact. The I expresses the
connection the human being has to Christ. But people have to
cherish it by filling it with the content of spiritual science.
However, they will be able to do this only if with the help of
science they make freedom a necessity. Really, how could people
have said in earlier times that it used to be the normal thing
for people to remember previous incarnations? Yet for our
coming earth lives it will be normal.
Just as in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch human beings
have to take hold of their I and bring it to life, so it
will be the normal thing in the future for people to have a
stronger and stronger memory of their previous lives. We could
just as well say, “Spiritual science is the right
preparation for remembering earlier lives in the right
way.” But those who run away from spiritual science will
not be able to bring this memory of past lives up into
consciousness. Their inner being will feel something
lacking.
That is to say, people will fall into two categories. One group
will know that when they examine their innermost soul, it will
lead them back into earlier lives. The others will feel an
inner urge that comes to expression as a longing.
Something does not want to emerge. Throughout their whole
incarnation something will not want to come up, but will remain
unknown like a thought one searches and cannot find. This will
be due to insufficient preparation for remembering previous
earth lives.
When we speak of these things, we are speaking of something
real, absolutely real. You have to have properly taken
hold of the I through spiritual science if you are to
remember it in later earth lives. Is there anything you can
remember without making a mental picture of it? Need we wonder
that people cannot yet remember the 1 when they did not
have a mental picture of it in earlier epochs? Everything is
understandable with true logic. But the dream-logic of the
so-called monism of our time is obviously always going to
oppose what has to come into being through the true logic of
spiritual science.
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