LECTURE I Dornach, April 2, 1921
It was in the
middle and second half of the nineteenth century that
materialism had its period of greatest development. In
today's lecture we will center our interest more on the
theoretical side of this materialistic evolution. A
great deal of what I shall have to say about the theoretical
aspect can also be said in almost the same words of the more
practical aspect of materialism. For the moment, however, we
will leave that aside and turn our attention more to the
materialistic world conception that was prevalent in the
civilized world in the middle and second half of the
nineteenth century.
We shall find
that we are here concerned with a twofold task. First, we
have to gain a clear perception of the extent to which this
materialistic world view is to be opposed, of how we must be
armed with all the concepts and ideas enabling us to refute
the materialistic world view as such. But in addition to
being armed with the necessary conceptions, we find that from
the point of view of spiritual science we are required at the
same time to do something more, namely, to understand this
materialistic world view. First of all, we must understand it
in its content; secondly, we must also understand how it came
about that such an extreme materialistic world view was ever
able to enter human evolution.
It may sound
contradictory to say that it is required of man on the one
hand to be able to fight the materialistic world view, and on
the other hand to be able to understand it. But those who
base themselves on spiritual science will not find any
contradiction here; it is merely an apparent one. For the
case is rather like this. In the course of the evolution of
mankind moments must needs come when human beings are in a
sense pulled down, brought below a certain level, in order
that they may later by their own efforts lift themselves up
again. And it would really be of no help to mankind at all if
by some divine decree or the like it could be protected from
having to undergo these low levels of existence. In order for
human beings to attain to full use of their powers of
freedom, it is absolutely necessary that they descend to the
low levels in their world conception as well as in their
life. The danger does not lie in the fact that something like
this appears at the proper time, and for theoretical
materialism this was the middle of the nineteenth century.
The danger consists in the fact that if something like this
has happened in the course of normal evolution, people then
continue to adhere to it, so that an experience that was
necessary for one particular point in time is carried over
into later times. If it is correct to say that in the middle
of the nineteenth century materialism was in a certain sense
a test mankind had to undergo, it is equally correct to say
that the persistent adherence to materialism is bound to work
terrible harm now, and that all the catastrophes befalling
the world and humanity that we have to experience are due to
the fact that a great majority of people still tries to cling
to materialism.
What does
theoretical materialism really signify? It signifies the view
regarding the human being primarily as the sum of the
material processes of his physical body. Theoretical
materialism has studied all the processes of the physical,
sensory body, and although what has been attained in this
study is still more or less in its first beginnings, final
conclusions have nevertheless already been drawn from it in
regard to a world view. Man has been explained as the
confluence of these physical forces; his soul nature is
declared to be merely something that is produced through the
workings of these physical forces. It is theoretical
materialism, however, that initiated investigation of the
physical nature of the human being, and it is this, the
extensive examination of man's physical nature, that must
remain. On the other hand, what the nineteenth century drew
as a conclusion from this physical research is something that
must not be allowed to figure as more than a passing
phenomenon in human evolution. And as a passing phenomenon,
let us now proceed to understand it.
What is
really involved here? When we look back in the evolution of
mankind — and with the help of what I have given in
Occult Science
[Note 1]
we are able to look back rather far — we can see that
the human being has passed through the greatest variety of
different stages. Even if we limit our observation to what
has taken place in the course of earth evolution, we are
bound to conclude that this human being started with a form
that was quite primitive in comparison to its present form,
and that this form then underwent gradual change, approaching
ever nearer to the form the human being possesses today. As
long as we focus on the rough outline of the human form, the
differences will not appear to be so great in the course of
human history. When we compare with the means at the disposal
of external history, the form of an ancient Egyptian or even
an ancient Indian with the form of a man of present-day
European civilization, we will discover only relatively small
differences, as long as we stay with the rough outlines or
superficial aspects of observation. For such a rough
viewpoint, the great differences in regard to the primitive
forms of development emerge only in early man in prehistoric
ages.
When we
refine our observation, however, when we begin to study what
is hidden from outer view, then what I have said no longer
holds good. For then we are obliged to admit that a great and
significant difference exists between the organism of a
civilized man of the present and the organism of an ancient
Egyptian, or even an ancient Greek or Roman. And although the
change has come about in a much more subtle and delicate
manner in historical times, there has most assuredly been
such change in regard to all the finer forming and shaping of
the human organism. This subtle change reached a certain
culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Paradoxical as it may sound, it is nevertheless a fact that
in regard to his inner structure, in regard to what the human
organism can possibly attain, man had reached perfection at
about the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, a
kind of decadence has set in. Since that time, the human
organism has been involved in retrogression. Therefore, also
in the middle of the nineteenth century, the organs that
serve as the physical organs of human intellectual activity
had reached perfection in their development.
What we call
the intellect of man requires, of course, physical organs. In
earlier ages, these physical organs were far less developed
than they were in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is
true that what arouses our admiration when we contemplate the
Greek spirit, particularly in such advanced Greeks as Plato
and Aristotle, is dependent on the fact that the Greeks did
not have such perfect organs of thinking, in the purely
physical sense, as had men of the nineteenth century.
Depending on one's preference, one might say, “Thank
heaven that people in Greek times did not possess thinking
organs that were as perfect as those of the people in the
nineteenth century!” If on the other hand, one is a
pedant like those of the nineteenth century, wishing to cling
to this pedantry, then one can say, “Well, the Greeks
were just children, they did not have the perfect organs of
thought that we have; accordingly, we must look with an
indulgent eye upon what we find in the works of Plato and
Aristotle.” School teachers often speak in this vein,
for in their criticism they feel vastly superior to Plato and
Aristotle. You will only fully understand what I have just
indicated, however, if you make the acquaintance of people
— and there are such! — who have a kind of vision
that one may call, in the best sense of the word, a
clairvoyant consciousness.
In such
people, the presence of clairvoyant consciousness — if
there are any in the audience who possess a measure of it,
they will please forgive me for telling what is the plain
truth — is due to the inadequate development of the
organs of intellect. It is quite a common occurrence in our
day to meet people who have a measure of clairvoyant
consciousness and possess extraordinarily little of what is
today called scientific intellect. True as this is, it is
equally true that what these clairvoyant people are able to
say or write down through their own faculty of perception,
may contain thoughts far cleverer than the thoughts of people
who show no signs whatever of clairvoyance but function with
the best possible organs of intellect. It may easily happen
that clairvoyant people who, from the point of view of
present- day science are quite stupid — please forgive
this expression — produce thoughts cleverer than the
thoughts of recognized scientists without being themselves
any the cleverer for producing them! This actually occurs.
And to what is it due? It comes about because such
clairvoyant persons do not need to exercise any organs of
thought in order to arrive at the clever thoughts. They
create the corresponding images out of the spiritual world,
and the images already have within them the thoughts. There
they are, ready-made, while other people who are not
clairvoyant and can only think have to develop their organs
of thought first before they can develop any thoughts. If we
were to sketch this, it would be like this. Suppose a
clairvoyant person brings something out of the spiritual
world in all manner of pictures (see drawing, red). But in
it, thoughts are contained, a network of thoughts. The person
in question does not think this out, instead, he sees it,
bringing it along from the spiritual world. He has no
occasion to exercise any organ of thought.
Consider
another person who is not gifted with clairvoyance, but who
can think. Of all that has been drawn in red below, there is
nothing at all present in him. He does not bring any such
thing out of the spiritual world. Neither does he bring this
thought skeleton with him out of the spiritual world (see
drawing on left). He exerts his organs of thinking and
through them produces this thought skeleton (see
drawing).
In observing
human beings today, one can find among everywhere examples of
all the stages between these two extremes. For one who has
not trained his faculty of observation, it is nevertheless
most difficult to distinguish whether a person is actually
clever, in the sense that he thinks by means of his organs of
reason, or whether he does not think with them at all, but
instead by some means brings something into his
consciousness, so that only the pictorial, imaginative
element is developed in him, but so feebly that he himself is
not even aware of it. Thus, there are any number of people
today who produce most clever thoughts without having to be
clever on that account, while others think very clever
thoughts but have no special connection to any spiritual
world. To learn to apprehend this distinction is one of the
important psychological tasks of our age, and it affords the
basis for important insight into human beings at the present
time. With this explanation you will no longer find it
difficult to understand that empirical super-sensible
observation shows that the majority of mankind possessed the
most perfectly developed organs of thought in the middle of
the nineteenth century. At no other time was there so much
thinking done with so little cleverness as in the middle of
the nineteenth century.
Go back to
the twenties of the nineteenth century — only, people
do not do this today — or even a little earlier, and
read the scientific texts produced then. You will discover
that they have an entirely different tone; they do not yet
contain the completely abstract thinking of later times which
depends on man's physical organs of thought. We need not even
mention what came from the pen of people like Herder, Goethe
or Schiller; grand conceptions still dwelled in them. It does
not matter that people do not believe this today and that
commentaries today are written as if this were not the case.
For those who write these commentaries and believe that they
understand Goethe, Schiller, and Herder simply do not
understand them; they do not see what is most important in
these men.
It is a fact
of great significance that about the middle of the nineteenth
century the human organism reached a culmination in respect
of its physical form and that since that time it has been
regressing; indeed, in regard to a rational comprehension of
the world it is regressing rapidly in a certain sense.
This fact is
closely connected with the development of materialism in the
middle of the nineteenth century. For what is the human
organism? The human organism is a faithful copy of man's
soul-spiritual nature. It is not surprising that people who
are incapable of insight into the soul and spirit of man see
in the structure of the human organism an explanation of the
whole human being. This is particularly the case when one
takes into special consideration the organization of the
head, and in the head in turn the organization of the
nerves.
In the course
of my lectures in Stuttgart,
[Note 2]
I mentioned an experience that is really suited to throw
light on this point. It happened at the beginning of the
twentieth century in a gathering of the Giordano Bruno
Society of Berlin
[Note 3].
First, a man spoke — I would call him a stalwart champion
of materialism — who was a most knowledgeable materialist.
He knew the structure of the brain as well as anyone can know
it today who has studied it conscientiously. He was one of
those who see in the analysis of the brain's structure
already the full extent of psychology — those who say
that one need only know how the brain functions in order to
have a grasp on the soul and to be able to describe it. It
was interesting; on the blackboard, the man drew the various
sections of the brain, the connecting strands, and so on, and
thus presented the marvelous picture one obtains when one
traces the structure of the human brain. And this speaker
firmly believed that by having given this description of the
brain he had described psychology. After he had finished
speaking, a staunch philosopher, a disciple of Herbart,
[Note 4]
rose up and said,
“The view propounded by this gentleman, that one can
obtain knowledge of the soul merely by explaining the
structure of the brain, is one I must naturally object to
emphatically. But I have no cause to take exception to the
drawing the speaker has made. It fits in quite well with my
Herbartian point of view, namely, that ideas form
associations with one another, and connecting strands of a
psychic character run from one idea to another.” He
added that as a Herbartian, he could quite well make the same
drawing, only the various circles and so on would for him not
indicate sections of the brain but complexes of ideas. But
the drawing itself would remain exactly the same!
A most
interesting situation! When it is a matter of getting down to
the reality of a subject, these two speakers have
diametrically opposed views, but when they make drawings of
the same thing, they find themselves obliged to come up with
identical drawings, even though one is a wholehearted
Herbartian philosopher and the other a staunchly
materialistic physiologist.
What is the
cause of this? It is in fact this: We have the soul-spirit
being of man; we bear it within us. This soul-spirit being is
the creator of the entire form of man's organism. It is
therefore not surprising that here in the most complete and
perfect part of the organism, namely the nervous system of
the brain, the replica created by the soul-spirit being
resembles the latter in every way. It is indeed true that in
the place where man is most of all man, so to speak, namely
in the structure of his nerves, he is a faithful replica of
the soul-spiritual element. Thus, a person who, in the first
place, must always have something the senses can perceive and
is content with the replica, actually perceives in the copy
the very same thing that is seen in the soul-spiritual
original. Having no desire for soul and spirit and only
concentrating, as it were, on the replica, he stops short at
the structure of the brain. Since this structure of the brain
presented itself in such remarkable perfection to the
observer of the mid-nineteenth century, and considering the
predisposition of humanity at that time, it was
extraordinarily easy to develop theoretical materialism.
What is
really going on in the human being? If you consider the human
being as such — I shall draw an outline of him here
— and turn to the structure of his brain, you find that
first of all man is, as we know, a threefold being: the limb
being, the rhythmic man, and the being of nerves and senses.
When we now look at the latter, we have before us the most
perfect part of the human being, in a sense, the most human
part. In it, the external world mirrors itself (see drawing,
red). I shall indicate this reflection process by the example
of the perception through the eyes. I could just as well
sketch the perceptions coming through the ear, and so on. The
external world, therefore, reflects itself in the human being
in such a way that we have here the structure of man and in
him the reflection of the outer world.
As long as we
consider the human being in this way, we cannot help but
interpret him in a materialistic manner, even though we may
go beyond the often quite coarse conceptions of materialism.
For, on the one hand, we have the structure of the human
being; we can trace it in all its most delicate tissue
structures. The more closely we approach the head
organization, the more we discover a faithful replica of the
soul-spiritual element. Then we can follow up the reflection
of the external world in the human being. That, however, is
mere picture. We thus have the reality of man, on the one
hand, traceable in all its finer structural details, and on
the other hand we have the picture of the world.
Let us keep
this well in mind. We have man's reality in the structure of
his organs, and we have what is reflected in him. This is
really all that offers itself initially to external sensory
observation. Thus, for sensory observation, the following
conclusion presents itself. When the human being dies, this
whole human structure disintegrates in the corpse. In
addition, we have the pictures of the outer world. If you
shatter the mirror, nothing can mirror itself any longer;
hence, the pictures, too, are gone when the human being has
passed through death. Since external sense observation cannot
ascertain more than what I have just mentioned, is it not
natural to have to say that with death the physical structure
of the human being disintegrates? Formerly, it reflected the
outer world. Human beings bear but a mirror-image in their
soul and it passes away. Materialism of the nineteenth
century simply presented this as a fact. It could not do
otherwise, for it really had no knowledge of anything
else.
Now the whole
matter changes when we begin to turn our attention to the
soul and spirit life of man. There, we enter a region which
is inaccessible to physical sensory observation. Take a fact
pertaining to the soul that is near at hand, the simple fact
that we confront the outer world by observing it. We observe
and perceive objects; then we have them within us in the form
of percepts. We also have memory, the faculty of
recollection. We can bring up in images from the depths of
our being what we experience in the outer world. We know how
important memory is for the human being.
Let us
consider this set of facts some more. Take these two inner
experiences: You look through your eyes at the external
world, you hear it with your ears, or in some other way you
perceive it with your senses. You are then engaged in an
immediately present activity of the soul. This then passes
over into your conceptual life. What you have experienced
today, you can raise up again a few days later out of the
depths of your soul in pictures. Something enters into you in
some manner and you bring it up again out of your own being.
It is not difficult to recognize that what enters into the
soul must originate in the external world. I do not wish to
consider anything else for the moment except the fact that is
clearly obvious, namely, that what we thus remember has to
come from the outer world. For if you have seen some red
object, you remember the red object afterwards, and what has
taken place in you is merely the image of the red object
which, in turn, arises again in you. It is therefore
something the external world has impressed upon you more
deeply than if you occupy yourself only with immediate
perceptions in the outer world.
Now picture
what happens: You approach some object, you observe it, that
is to say, you engage in an immediate and present soul
activity in regard to the observed object. Then you go away
from it. A few days later, you have reason to call up again
from the depths of your being the pictures of the observed
object. They are present again, paler, to be sure, but still
present in you. What has happened in the interval?
Let me ask
you here to keep well in mind what I have just said and
compare this singular play of immediate perceptual thoughts
and pictures of memory with something that is quite familiar
to you, the pictures appearing in dreams. You will easily be
able to notice how dreaming is connected with the faculty of
memory. As long as the dream images are not too confused, you
can easily see how they tie in with the memory images, hence,
how a relationship exists between dreams and what passes from
living perceptions into memory.
Now consider
something else. Human beings must be organically completely
healthy if they are to tolerate dreaming properly, so to
speak. Dreaming requires that a person has himself fully
under control and that at any time a moment can occur when he
is certain he has been dreaming. Something is out of order
when a person cannot come to the point of perceiving quite
clearly: This was a dream! You have met people who dreamed
they were beheaded. Suppose they could not distinguish
afterwards between such a dream and the actual beheading;
suppose they thought they really had been beheaded and yet
had to go on living! Just imagine how impossible it would be
for such people to sort out the facts without becoming
totally confused! They would constantly feel that they had
just been beheaded, and if they presumed they had to believe
this — one can just about imagine what sort of words
would break from their lips!
You can see,
therefore, that human beings should be able at any moment to
have themselves in hand so well that they can distinguish
dreams from the thought life within reality. There are
people, however, who cannot do this. They experience all
kinds of hallucinations and visions and consider them
realities. They cannot distinguish; they do not have
themselves well enough in hand. What does this signify? It
means that what dwells in dream has an influence on their
organization, and that the organization is adapted to the
dream picture. Something in their nervous system is not fully
developed that should be developed; therefore, the dream is
active in them and makes its influence felt.
Thus, if
someone is not able to distinguish between his dreams and
experienced realities, it means that the power of the dream
has an organizing effect on him. If a dream were to possess
itself of our whole brain, we would see the whole world as a
dream! If you can contemplate such a fact and appreciate its
full value, you will gradually learn to apprehend the facts
to which ordinary science today does not wish to aspire
because it lacks the courage to do so. You will learn to
perceive that the very same power that energizes the dream
life is present in us as organizing and quickening power, as
power of growth. The only reason why the dream does not have
the power to tear asunder the structure of our organism is
that the latter is too strongly consolidated, that it has so
firm a structure as to be able to withstand the effects of
the ordinary dream. Thus, the human being can distinguish
between the dream experience and that of reality.
When the
little child grows up, becoming taller and taller, a force is
at work in it. It is the same force as the one contained in
the dream; only in the case of the dream we behold it. When
we do not behold it, when it is instead active inside the
body, then it, the very same power that is in the dream,
makes us grow. We need not even go so far as to consider
growth. Every day, for example, when you eat and digest and
the effects of digestion spread throughout your organism,
this happens by means of the force that dwells in dreams.
Therefore, when something is out of order in the organism, it
is connected with dreaming that is not as it should be. The
force we can, from the outside, observe working in dream life
is the same as the one that then works inwardly in the human
being, even in the forces of digestion.
Thus, we can
say that if we only consider the life of man in the right
way, we become aware of the working of the dream force in his
organism. When I describe this actively working dream force,
I actually enter upon the same paths in this description that
I must tread when I describe the human etheric body.
Imagine that
someone were able to penetrate with his vision everything
that brings about growth in the human being from childhood
on, everything that causes digestion in man, everything that
sustains his whole organism in its state of activity. Imagine
that I could take this whole system of forces, extracting it
from the human being and placing it before him, then I would
have placed the etheric body before the human being. This
etheric body, that is, the body that reveals itself only in
irregularities in a dream, was far more highly developed
prior to the point in time in the nineteenth century to which
I have referred. Gradually it became weaker and weaker in its
structure. In turn, the structure of the physical body grew
correspondingly stronger. The etheric body can conceive in
pictures, it can have dreamlike imaginations, but it cannot
think. As soon as this etheric body begins to be especially
active in a person of our time, he becomes a bit clairvoyant,
but then he can think less, because, for thinking, he
particularly needs the physical body.
Therefore, it
need not surprise us that when people of the nineteenth
century had the feeling that they could think particularly
well, they were actually driven to materialism. For what
aided them in this thinking the most was the physical body.
But this physical thinking was connected with the special
form of memory that was developed in the nineteenth century.
It is a memory that lacks the pictorial element and, wherever
possible, moves in abstractions.
Such a
phenomenon is interesting. I have frequently referred to the
professor of criminal anthropology Moritz Benedikt.
[Note 5]
Today as well, I would like to
mention an interesting experience he himself relates in his
memoirs. He had to address a meeting of scientists, and he
reports that he prepared himself for this speech for
twenty-two nights, not having slept day or night. On the last
day before giving the address, a journalist who was supposed
to publish the speech came to see him. Benedikt dictated it
to him. He says that he had not written down the address at
all, having merely impressed it onto his memory. He now
dictated it to the journalist in his private chamber; the
following day he gave this speech at the meeting of
scientists. The journalist printed what he had taken down
from dictation, and the printed speech agreed word for word
with the speech Benedikt delivered at the meeting.
I must
confess, such a thing fills me with admiration, for one
always admires what one could never find possible to
accomplish oneself. This is indeed a most interesting
phenomenon! For twenty-two days, the man worked to
incorporate, word for word, what he had prepared into his
organization, so that in the end he could not possibly have
uttered a single sentence out of the sequence impressed onto
his system, so firmly was it imbedded!
Such a thing
is possible only when a person is able to imprint the whole
speech into his physical organism purely out of the gradually
developing wording. It is actually a fact that what one
thinks out in this way stamps itself onto one's organization
as firmly as the force of nature firmly builds up the bone
system of man. Then, the whole speech rests like a skeleton
in the physical organism. As a rule, memory is tied to the
etheric body, but in this case the latter has imbedded itself
completely in the physical organism. The entire physical
system then contains something in the way it contains the
bones, something that stands there like the skeleton of the
speech. Then it is possible to do what Professor Benedikt
did. But this is only possible when the nerve structure of
the physical organism is developed in such a way that it
receives without resistance into its plasticity what is
brought into it; gradually, of course, for twenty-two days,
even nights, it had to be worked in.
It is not
surprising that somebody who relies so much on his body
acquires the feeling that this physical body is the only
thing working in the human being. Human life had indeed taken
such a turn that it worked its way completely into the
physical body; people therefore arrived at the belief that
the physical body is everything in the human organization. I
do not think that any other age but ours, which has attached
this high value on the physical body, could have come to such
a grotesque invention — forgive the expression —
as stenography. Obviously, when people did not rely as yet on
stenography, they did not attach so great a value to
preserving and accurately recording words and the sequence of
words such as is the aim in stenography. After all, only the
imprint in the physical body can make so fast and firm a
record. It is therefore the predilection for imprinting
something in the physical body that has brought about the
other preference for preserving this imprinted word, but by
no means for retaining anything that stands one level higher.
For stenography could play no part if we wished to preserve
those forms that express themselves in the etheric body. It
takes the materialistic tendency to invent something as
grotesque as shorthand.
All this, of
course, is added only by way of explanation of what I wish to
contribute to the problem of understanding the appearance of
materialism in the nineteenth century. Humanity had arrived
at a certain condition that tended to engrain the
soul-spiritual into the physical organism. You must take what
I have said as an interpretation, not as a criticism of
stenography. I do not favor the immediate abolition of
stenography. This is never the tendency underlying such
characterizations. We must clearly understand that just
because one understands something, this does not imply that
one wishes to abolish it right away! There are many things in
the world that are necessary for life and that yet cannot
serve all purposes — I do not want to go further into
this subject — and the need for which still has to be
comprehended. But we live in an age, and I have to emphasize
this again and again, when it is absolutely necessary to
penetrate more deeply into the development of nature as well
as into that of culture, to be able to ask ourselves: Where
does this or that phenomenon come from? For mere carping and
criticizing accomplish nothing. We really have to understand
all the things that go on in the world.
I would like
to sum up what I presented today in the following way. The
evolution of mankind shows that in the middle of the
nineteenth century a certain culmination was reached in the
process of the structural completion of the physical body.
Already now, a decadence has set in. Further, this perfection
of the physical body is connected with the rise of
theoretical materialism. In the next few days, I shall have
to say more about these matters from one or another
viewpoint. I wished to place before you today what I have
just summed up.
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