The
Human Being as Being of Soul and Spirit
Berlin, 7 February 1918
Speaking about the problem of immortality and about the riddle
of freedom spiritual-scientifically is the task of the whole
cycle that I would like to hold in this winter here. These are
the two questions that admittedly the scientific worldview
cannot approach and in which the only philosophical world
consideration will always smash as it arises from my book
The Riddles of Philosophy and from an unbiased
consideration of the historical development of philosophy.
I
would like today to consider a partial question possibly in a
concluded whole: the question of the human being as a being of
soul and spirit. Already while pronouncing these words, one
touches, actually, the question of the human soul in a way that
is very far from the present worldview. The present worldview
— if it generally gets involved to look at something else
than that which experimental psychology, biology, physiology
give — speaks of a duality of body and soul. I would like
to show that this arrangement of the human being must lead to
serious misunderstandings that divert a scientific
consideration, actually, from the highest human riddles. One
believes today that in the so-called soul riddles the riddle of
spirit is already enclosed, and you will find, while you
dedicate yourself to this misunderstanding, the applause of
some scientific world viewers and also of some soul viewers.
Spiritual science generally is in a peculiar relation to the
scientific and to the philosophical worldviews.
You
know that I have stressed repeatedly that spiritual science
stands everywhere completely on the ground of scientific
research, and just because it stands more than the scientific
worldview on scientific ground, it feels forced to ascend from
the mere consideration of nature and her life to the
consideration of the real spiritual life. Only the scientific
worldview that became ingrained in a big part of our
contemporaries also behaves in their choicest representatives
in such a way that spiritual science has a rough ride to find
understanding anyhow. I would like to say some introductory
words about it because they will be necessary in case of our
further consideration.
Today one can find that in certain areas the scientific
worldview has almost got to a kind of ideal limitation of its
field. We have works in the scientific realm that you can
regard as exemplary in the way, how they restrict their task
with the realisation of single problems. After the unilaterally
Darwinian-Haeckel romanticism of the last third of the
nineteenth century biology, for example, has advanced so far
that we have such an exemplary work as the work of the Berlin
researcher Oscar
Hertwig (1849-1922) about The Origin of Organisms. A
Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). We also
have ingenious achievements for such areas, which touch the
borders of that what should be regarded here methodically, as
for example the Guide
to Physiological Psychology (1891) by Theodor
Ziehen (1862-1950, German neurologist, psychiatrist).
One may say that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual
science espouses such methodical research where it depends on
the consideration of the actually scientific area. I myself
always oppose with all that I would like to contribute to
spiritual science the sometimes indeed well intentioned, but
dilettantish worldview constructions that arise from some
inadequate attempts of knowledge.
However, just this methodical scientific worldview gives
spiritual science a hard fight to find understanding with our
contemporaries. Even in the so exemplary book by Oscar Hertwig
we find as it were the scientific conviction that natural
sciences can deal only with the finite and cannot consider the
infinite. However, natural sciences can explore the finite in
all directions. Hertwig repeats Nägeli's
(Karl Wilhelm N., 1817-1891, Swiss botanist) words from his
scientific point of view rightly, and Theodor Ziehen also says
that he wants to look at everything in the human soul life that
has parallel phenomena in the human body, so that physiology
can give information about these parallel phenomena. One must
leave everything else to metaphysics or the like. Then,
however, Ziehen says again that that is more important which
the present physiological-psychological research puts forward
in its details, which are, actually, nothing special which do
not say anything particular about the big riddles of soul and
spirit, than everything that was tried to perform about the
supersensible in the soul life and the like for centuries. If
we add the dictum which already before decades the great
physiologist Du
Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.R., 1818-1896) did that real
science is only allowed to deal, actually, with the sensory
world because science stops where the supersensible begins, we
find that by which the scientific worldview wants to pull the
rug out under the feet of any spiritual science. On one side
one always says rather benevolently: one has to leave all
questions which exceed the sensory consideration to metaphysics
or something similar, nevertheless, on the other side one
argues again that real science can be performed only in the
area of sensory consideration.
Thus, we realise that science blanks out everything mental and
spiritual, and it solely claims the character of scientificity
for that which is left. Compared with such attempts I would
like to stress that spiritual science stands even in the
question of the so-called old vitality absolutely on the ground
of such researchers like Du Bois-Reymond, Hertwig and others.
Since this vitality which haunted in science until the middle,
until the end of the second third of the nineteenth century is
a product of speculation.
Because one believed that the phenomena in the living organism
were not explicable with physical and chemical laws, one
speculated on an uncertain vitality to which one ascribed
everything that one could not explain chemically or physically.
Du Bois-Reymond said in his excellent preface of his
Researches on Animal Electricity (1848-1864) already at
the middle of the nineteenth century with a certain right that
the progress of physiology necessitated, actually, that once
somebody would come who banishes this vitality from physiology.
Spiritual science can agree even with such a hard condemnation
of vitality. Since it can figure everything out that is brought
forward from physiological-biological side rightly against such
a hypothetical, speculative vitality, and can consider what
appears today again as so-called neovitalism only as a reaction
which is caused by the fact that one realises sporadically: we
cannot already recognise that what lives simply as the only
physical and chemical. However, this reaction returns more or
less to the old speculation of an uncertain vitality.
Spiritual science represented here can also not agree with this
reaction against the purely mechanistic natural sciences. For
it, however, it must arrogate something else to itself. With
those cognitive forces and abilities which lead just to the
big, significant scientific results one cannot exceed the only
physical and chemical. Of course, the living beings are subject
to physical and chemical laws because they have physical
bodies. These must be investigated with physics and chemistry,
and one is not allowed to contrive any vitality. But the mere
cognitive forces and abilities as natural sciences apply them
rightly are not sufficient to understand life, soul and spirit,
and one only has the option either to stop in the area of
physical and chemical laws and then to renounce understanding
life, soul and spirit, or to appeal to quite different
cognitive forces.
With it, however, you are confronted again with a widespread
prejudice. Most people do not believe that the human soul
striving methodically gets to cognitive forces and abilities
that are quite different from those of natural sciences. So you
face a double possibility only not to comprehend soul and
spirit or to cross the Rubicon to familiarise yourself with the
advancement of the human souls. It can thereby get to such
cognitive forces that are more important to you than that what
natural sciences can say, just if they are perfect. You are
confronted with a severe prejudice. You must say from the
viewpoint of spiritual science, natural sciences behave,
actually, to spiritual science in such a way as somebody who
can only describe the letters that are printed on any page
behaves to that who can read them. Spiritual science tries to
read that which natural sciences can only describe. That what
it has to say about the phenomena of the world, about its
contents and about the significance of the processes behaves
like something read to the description of the letters that
compose the words. There is the possibility to penetrate really
into life, soul, and spirit, while one attains an ability of
reading nature. This ability behaves compared with the mere
physical consideration like the free ability of reading to the
mere description of letters.
Now
many contemporaries if such a thing is said remember of course
that this is a reference to all kinds of fantastic visionary
activities of the soul. However, that does not at all apply.
Spiritual science is rather something for which one has to work
hard and methodically, as natural sciences have to do it. But
spiritual science has a rough ride today to penetrate because
since centuries already any human worldview has intended to
blank out the spiritual from the soul more or less, to consider
the soul as the whole inwardness of the human being, and to
think it more or less dependent or also independent of the
body, but to search no such relation of the soul to the spirit
as it is searched on the other side by the soul to the body.
Someone who only with pure soul experiences — even if
these would be mystically increased soul experiences —
wants to find out something about the real nature of the human
being as a spiritual being resembles someone who wants to
inform himself because of hunger and thirst of those processes
which take place in the human body, and which are the basis of
that which the soul experiences as hunger and thirst.
Everybody easily realises that hunger and thirst are the inner
experience of something that happens in the body. The
scientific worldview says, if the human being feels hunger and
thirst, a chemical change has taken place in the blood or as
the case may be. It points to the fact that in the body
something has happened that expresses itself as the experience
of thirst and hunger in the soul. However, one has to look at
the soul experiences, if one wants to investigate what goes
forward in the body. Of course, you cannot investigate in a
living being that has no hunger how the hunger expresses itself
bodily, but you can never find out for yourself that you only
consider the inner experience of hunger or saturation with
which bodily processes this inner experience is associated.
Just as little you can get to know something from this mere
play about that which forms the basis of the soul as something
spiritual, even if you immerse yourself ever so mystically. As
well as natural sciences must proceed from the experience of
hunger and thirst with their methods to something that is not
observed in the usual soul life — for the human being
knows nothing of the chemical process in his body, while he
suffers from hunger and thirst —, you have to change into
something spiritual if you consider everything that can be
experienced by imagining, feeling and willing in the soul.
However, how can you find this spiritual being? The sensory
places itself before the senses, while the human being faces
nature; the spiritual does not do it in the same way. The
spiritual confronts the human being only if he rouses the
cognitive abilities from his inside that I have called
“beholding” in my book
The Riddle of Man that slumbers in the usual
life as it were. Now I would like to talk not about something
abstract, but I would like to show immediately at a concrete
example that — as the naturalist can go over by his
method from the subjective hunger and thirst to the bodily
processes which are unconscious in the usual experience —
it is as possible to go over from the soul phenomena to the
spiritual phenomena which relate from one side to the soul as
from the other side the soul relates to the body. Already with
such concrete questions you are confronted straight away with
opposition of the common consideration of the soul life. This
wants to consider, actually, the passive soul life only because
it takes the scientific methods as starting point. You cannot
consider the active soul life scientifically that is active in
its being from within, and it is often lost generally out of
sight. Today natural sciences often consider the mental
experience only how mental pictures form a group, how a mental
picture is maybe caused by outer perception, how it causes
another which is stored in memory, or also many other. One
observes how the mental pictures associate with gradations of
feeling, with will impulses or the like. One does not attain
methods that you can compare concerning the spiritual with the
strict methods of the scientific worldview. If you take the
Physiological Psychology by Theodor Ziehen, you realise
how everything results in the fact that our whole soul life is
built up on such associations if it exceeds the mere sensory
life. However, this kind of consideration just does not get to
the impartial beholding of the soul life.
Such consideration, for example, shows the following: you can
realise if you get to a real observation or introspection of
the soul, as I will show it after, that we are dependent in the
usual life with our soul experience on that what life gives us
as mental pictures. If the human being lets his soul life to
its own resources, the mental pictures play in it that have
come from the impressions of the outside world into his soul.
He is a kind of slave of his mental pictures in a way. Theodor
Ziehen says with a certain right, we cannot think as we want,
but we must think as the just available associations determine
it because this or that impression has been done on us that
causes another impression. Thus we are given away — after
Ziehen — to the play of impressions. We are not so free
in the usual life in relation to our imagining as we mean.
However, we are also not as dependent as Theodor Ziehen means.
Someone who can advance to the soul observation knows that,
indeed, the strong dependence on impressions is there, but it
lasts for a certain time. This is something to which modern
psychology does not give thought at all. However, a mental
picture that is caused by an impression tyrannises us. If I
have seen a friend, this mental picture pursues me, it causes
other mental pictures of other friends, of common experiences
with these friends and so on, and you are dependent on these
mental pictures, but only for some time. This time can be
determined even internally experimentally. This time takes two
to three days. However, after this time the power changes with
which such an impression works on our soul. Then we can
emotionally relate to an impression in such a way as the
impression has related to us before.
We
were its slaves before; we become its masters after two to
three days. You can do this, for example, in the following way.
If you have a feeling for the inner soul life, you can ask
yourself, which difference exists between being given to the
inner soul life, as it takes place by itself for some time, and
reading a book? If I read a book, I cannot be carried from one
mental picture to another. I would not advance reading if I
were carried by mental pictures that an impression has caused
in me, I must dedicate myself rather to that what flows from
the book as mental pictures. There I come under the control of
the author. The author controls the course of my mental
pictures. I become similar with my ego to that what happens if
my mental pictures are controlled by the mental pictures that
come from the book if I have lived with any impression for two
to three days, concerning this impression. Then I leave myself
not to the association that this impression wants to cause, but
I have the inner power to associate this impression with
others. An entire change of an image impression proceeds in the
human soul if it has lasted for two to three days in the
soul.
You
can already convince yourself of the truth of the just said
without being a spiritual researcher by usual, more intimate
observation of the soul life, indeed, in an area that is
considered only cursorily nowadays, and that the so-called
analytic psychology or psychoanalysis despises. However, I do
not want to go into that. However, I would like to point out
that someone who can really observe dreams knows that the
involuntary appearance of dreams is always associated anyhow
with the impressions of the last days, actually, only of the
last two to three days. However, do not misunderstand me! Of
course, bygone events appear in the dreams as memories.
However, it is something else that evokes these bygone events.
If you can observe the dream exactly, you always realise that
any mental picture of the last two to three days must be there.
That only evokes bygone events. For two to three days, the
impressions of the outside world have the power to generate
dreams. Then the other things are associated with them. Unless
such mental picture can generate the dream, it cannot
originate. However, you have really to observe what I have
indicated now, because the usual consciousness cannot observe
it. This is just so unknown to many people today because it
proceeds in the unconscious. As a rule, the human being attains
no knowledge how he relates different to a mental picture that
is not yet present for two to three days in his soul, and to
such which is present already so long. One can observe all
these things exactly and properly only as a spiritual
researcher. However, he needs a certain strengthening of the
usual soul life to the real observation. The imagining applies
for the usual soul life, actually, only to that which it
repeats and develops in a way what the senses perceive from the
outside. This soul life can now be strengthened, so that these
pale, uncertain mental pictures of the everyday life can appear
in another way in the soul so that its power matches a sense
perception. However, this must happen if you want to do
researches really in the spiritual area. With the usual
cognitive forces, you cannot do these researches. I have
described the method in detail in my books How Does
One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and
Occult
Science by which you can lift up imagining and by
which you change it into Imagination, into the beholding
percipience.
I
would like only to emphasise some things of the big wealth of
that which the soul has to carry out with itself to strengthen
its life. I want to refer to that what I have recently
emphasised in my last book The Riddles
of the Soul, the continuation of my book
The Riddle of Man: the fact that the human being
if he activates his usual soul life in science gets to certain
so-called limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge can
face you if you familiarise yourself with the worldviews of
profound thinkers. If I may bring in something personal here:
experiences have led me to this form of spiritual science
thirty to 35 years ago which I could gain in the worldviews of
such persons to whom knowledge is not an external occupation,
but something that constitutes the core of their longing and
feeling. If you are confronted, for example, with the thinker
Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) with words which have
come to him when he had thought about the connection of body
and soul, with words like: the soul cannot be in the body, but
it can also not be beyond the body, then you get in living
connection with an original, elementary thinker to such limits
in which the human soul life must come if it wants to be
cognitively active.
The
usual thinking just puts limits of knowledge in such points of
the soul life. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of “seven world
riddles” which cannot be solved; however, one could bring
in hundreds of such so-called limits of the human soul
life:
-
if you do not content yourself with
such limits, but if you try to go through everything that
the soul has to go through while it says to itself, you
have to put questions which the natural outside world
cannot answer, also that what comes up from your soul
cannot answer them,
-
if you combine in your innermost
soul life with these questions,
-
if you have patience to struggle
with them not only logically, but internally,
-
if you put them repeatedly to your
soul not only to get to know what they say logically, but
what they release vividly in the soul,
then something emerges from such questions gradually in the
soul. One experiences something emotionally that I want to
bring to mind in the following way by a comparison. Just the
scientific worldview often thinks that the lowest living beings
only have an inner life activity at first, develop it in
contact with the outside world and thereby transform their
still undifferentiated organisms, so that it touches the
outside world not only in an uncertain way, but that this
touching is differentiated to the sense of touch, and from the
sense of touch the other senses should have gradually developed
phylogenetically. That which the being experiences in living
matter can be really compared with that which the soul
experiences if it is confronted with such limits. If you get to
know the mental experience of such limits really, you feel that
with it nothing is meant that deals with the origin of outer
sensory tools. If you have patience to settle down in such
riddles, a sort of mental groping develops, then something
arises from it like a differentiation of the soul life. Today
most people do not believe in that, of course. However, one
will believe in it more and more if one realises that only in
such a way one can attain real knowledge of the phenomena of
the world and in particular of the riddle of the human being.
The human being gradually does not only reach questions of
limits, but he develops his soul with it, and thus those higher
organs of beholding originate by which the soul learns
gradually to penetrate into the spirit. This is only one of
those exercises that the soul has to practise to transform the
undifferentiated soul life, so that it can really penetrate
into the spiritual world.
I
would have to bring in a lot of that what you can read in the
mentioned books if I wanted to explain how imagining becomes
something else than in the usual life. Imagining is something
passive that follows the sensory percepts. Because the soul
life is invigorated by many exercises, it becomes something
else from imagining. The imagining becomes active so that as it
were an ego asserts itself which is much more concrete than the
usual one, and the human being gets to know that he can really
observe the soul phenomena with such increased soul life.
If
I now return, after I have developed the nature of real
self-knowledge, to that what I have asserted up to now, I have
to say, what happens there, actually, while the mental pictures
change from that state which they have for two to three days
into the other state which they have later, one can figure this
out only with such reinforced soul life. Since you get to know
then that the human being becomes as free compared with the
mental pictures that subjectively prevail for two to three
days, after this time, as he is usually free from his usual
body. The human being gets to know what he is in his inside
what controls the mental pictures in such a way, as we control
the hands and legs if we grasp or go with our usual ego. The
human being gets to know the higher ego that remains usually
unconscious and moves within the mindscape as the usual ego
moves in the bodily life. That means we come after two to three
days from that which is subjective to the objective of the soul
life.
We
enter that which outer impressions do not control, and which we
learn to recognise as that which carries the outer impressions
through the whole life between birth and death. We learn to
recognise something second in the human being to which we feel
as we feel towards our body in the usual life. We get to know
what I have called in one of the last numbers of the magazine
Das Reich (The Empire) the body of formative
forces, a supersensible body that is there, as well as the
usual physical body is there. However, it remains unconscious
for the usual soul life. As well as the hand of the physical
body is moved by the usual ego, the human being learns to
recognise how he works within that which carries the
imagination which lives in the imagination and this is only the
spirit. The spirit is not the imagination, but what lives in
the imagination in such a way as the usual soul lives in the
body. However, while the usual psychology considers, actually,
the whole soul life only as it prevails for two to three days,
calculated from the impressions, it does not get at all from
the soul to the spirit, blanks out the spirit. For the usual
soul life, it is blanked out in a way.
A
self-consideration shows this of which we can speak now, after
I have already indicated what its being consists of. You all
are clear in your mind that the ego stands in the centre of the
soul life. However, today the psychologist is less clear about
that in his mind. It is interesting what, for example, such an
excellent psychologist like Theodor Ziehen says in his book
Physiological Psychology just about the ego. This book
contains printed lectures. There he says to his listeners, if
you think about that which the ego is, actually, where to do
you come there, actually? If you really think about it, at
first your body will come into your mind, then everything that
you have as relations to the outside world; then everything
that you have as relatives and possession, your name and title,
your dominating mental pictures and your main inclinations,
your past will come into your mind. Indeed, Theodor Ziehen
says, the reflective consciousness distinguishes now —
except everything that comes into your mind in such a way
— the ego as that which prevails inside, which moves and
works from the inside imagining. Nevertheless, it is a fiction
of epistemology or of speculative psychology. Physiological
psychology has nothing to do with that.
This is such a place again by which the ground should be pulled
away under the feet of spiritual science. However, can anybody
really allow himself for the usual consciousness to think with
his ego only of everything that Theodor Ziehen thinks? Does he
not feel the inner activity of a central being in his soul
life? Does he only think really of his relatives and
properties, of his title and name and the like? No, there can
be no talk of it! The human being is aware that in his inside
something prevails. Still he comes, actually, to nothing if he
characterises the ego. The scientific psychology is right in a
limited sense if it cannot say much about this ego. How does
this ego behave in the usual consciousness? An introspection
shows this again.
If
this ego becomes something else by the exercises that I have
described, then one also notices what the ego is, considered
with the usual consciousness. One distinguishes two states in
the human life after the outer appearance: sleeping and waking,
and thinks, they alternate between day and night. One does not
know that for a real consideration of the soul something else
arises. We sleep not only at night, but a part of our being
also sleeps by day, sleeps perpetually. The invigoration of the
ego is in a certain sense a real arousal of the ego that sleeps
perpetually. We know nothing about the contents of our sleep;
we know only that it interrupts our usual life. If we survey
our life from birth to death, we look back, actually, always
only at the daily experiences, the night experiences are
nothing. If we look at our life in such a way, then is that
which we are in sleep as if it were not there. It is excluded
from our field of observation. However, that applies also to
the ego in the usual soul life. It is not there strictly
speaking for the imagining and other consideration; the real
ego escapes from the usual soul life because the human being
sleeps concerning his ego in his present stage of development
also by day.
We
know only negatively about our ego, we know about it in such a
way as the eye looks with the blind spot that it has inwardly.
We know that there is nothing. We know also about the ego as
about a black spot on a coloured surface. Although no colour
phenomena come from there, we see a black place. Thus, we see
that nothing is surrounded by our usual experiences, and thus
we have the consciousness of the sleeping ego. It is aroused
because the soul forces are increased in such a way as I have
described it. Thus, only the real essence appears in the human
being gradually. You learn to recognise the connections of the
soul life with the spirit, as well as you learn to recognise
from natural sciences if we have hunger and thirst that a body
is there in which chemical transformations of the blood take
place which express themselves in the soul life as hunger and
thirst. As there a body is connected with the soul life by
certain processes about which the human being knows nothing at
first in the usual life, you learn to recognise on the other
side that the soul is connected with the spirit. While the body
is recognised from without, the spirit is recognised, while you
become aware of the sleeping ego.
As
well as the ego is crowded together in one point, the human
being as a spiritual being is recognised by the usual
consciousness. If you strengthen the inner soul force, you
realise that this ego really gets contents as you attain the
contents of the bodily for the only inner sensations by
methodical scientific research. You get to a real investigation
of the spirit as you get to know the chemical transformations
which take place in the blood or, otherwise, in the body if the
human being has hunger or thirst or feels saturation.
Thus, you learn to recognise how a mental picture that lives in
you and is a mere mental picture at first is fulfilled with
pictorial contents that are not as abstract as the mental
picture of the usual consciousness. The spiritual researcher
lifts these contents up in the consciousness so that the mental
picture becomes like a perception of these pictorial,
Imaginative contents. The spiritual researcher beholds
Imaginative processes that change. If, for example, a mental
picture becomes warmer what proceeds for the usual
consciousness in the subconscious, then something else
originates from the mental picture. Then something originates
from it that is not only a cognitive or perceptual image, but
also an image motivating the will.
This is a very significant progress for the spiritual
researcher, if he can ascend to such a knowledge by which he
realises how the cognitive image changes into a will image
because its Imaginative contents change which pass then to that
what becomes or can become active in us. There you realise that
the spiritual stands behind the mental and is perpetually
changing. As we can describe chemical and physical processes in
the body, we can describe spiritually how behind imagining,
feeling, and will impulses changes are which go from the
Imaginative to the Inspirative and to the Intuitive. As from
the chemical transformation of the body subjectively hunger and
thirst appear, the spiritual appears vice versa subjective,
either as a perceptual image or also as an image of feeling
which changes then into an image of will. Thus, you become able
to describe that which lives behind the soul as a spiritual
being as the bodily lives behind the soul towards the other
side. Then you recognise that this becomes really concrete in
the human being what can appear before the strengthened soul
life so that we feel that which I have called “body of
formative forces,” as we feel the physical body usually
only. Then you also get to know that which lives outdoors in
the world beyond the sensory as something supersensible in
quite concrete way.
Sometimes I anticipate something in a former talk that I
explain more exactly in later talks. Thus, it is also with the
following. However, today I already want to point to it. The
plant is composed not only of that which physics and chemistry,
or biology or physiology can investigate but it contains
something else. If we have brought ourselves to the point where
we feel the body of formative forces in ourselves as we feel
usually in the physical body, we can perceive the supersensible
in the remaining world with this body of formative forces. Then
we behold the spiritual in any plant, in any animal and in the
physical human that is then not anything visionary in trivial
sense, but also is there before the strengthened soul like the
contents of sensory perception before the not strengthened
soul. However, we have to replace the spatial concepts with
temporal ones everywhere. In what way do we perceive, actually,
the supersensible in the plant? By perceiving our own
supersensible in the body of formative forces as if a tone
perceives the other in a melody.
The
perception of the supersensible in the plant realm is
completely based on the fact that the life of our body of
formative forces proceeds much slower than the life of the
plant body of formative forces. I have more exactly explained
this in a small writing The
Human Life from the Viewpoint of Spiritual Science
(1916, now in Philosophy and Anthroposophy, GA 35).
There you will find how everything depends on these different
speeds. Because our body of formative forces can interact like
a higher, malleable organ with the much faster proceeding life
of the plant, we really perceive the other kind of the life in
the plants. Thereby something else will face our soul than the
old, speculative vitality. We perceive, to put it another way,
something supersensible in the sensory.
It
is hard to speak impartially of these things already today.
Only if one feels obliged in certain sense to the knowledge of
truth, one does this. Since many people mean of course that
such things are not based on scientific spirit, but on
speculative fiction or daydreaming. Only slowly and gradually,
humanity will learn that this is no daydreaming, no speculative
fiction, but is based on a methodical research of the
spiritual. Certain denominations needed up to 1822, until they
acknowledged the Copernican worldview as a truth. I hope it
will not last so long with the recognition of this spiritual
truth, also for social reasons that should be stated in the
talk, which I hold in this cycle about the historical life of
humanity.
However, the most paradox prejudices exist concerning the whole
and concerning the details of spiritual knowledge. I have
already mentioned two weeks ago that recently Pastor
Rittelmeyer has written a treatise (On Rudolf Steiner's
Theosophy) in The Christian World about that which
spiritual science intends, and what it can become as a deeper
basis of the religious life. One has argued against that: if
already the human soul should rise to a spiritual world, it
must not happen in such a way that the human being carries his
mental into the spiritual world arbitrarily by exercises, but
this has to happen spontaneously. One can say nothing more
ignorant than this. Since just if this settling in the
spiritual world happens by itself if it appears without the
involvement of the human being, the human being does not come
into the real spiritual world but only in the mania of some
mental pictures which are not spiritual because the human being
does not behave actively but passively. He gets to a life which
is again dependent on the body, on some organic processes in
the body, and then it is pathological, or is dependent on mere
soul processes, and then it is autosuggestion or as the case
may be. The real penetration into the spirit is based just on
the fact that one notices that this can be only reached by
activity, by the will. This only carries us into the real
spiritual world. Someone who says, it is doubtful that
exercises are demanded by which the human being should
arbitrarily reach what he can only receive like by grace
understands nothing at all of the real significance of
spiritual science. However, today many people know nothing
about the real spirit. Hence, they cannot get to a real
consideration of the everlasting, of the immortal and the free
in the human soul.
On
two ways, you come out from that what either is only inner life
in the soul or is dependent from the body. On that way one does
not come out on which, for example, the Physiological
Psychology by Theodor Ziehen tries it. If Ziehen says,
we cannot think what we want, but we must think as the
associations determine it, then he just shows that he
distracts, actually, from the spirit with his whole
consideration. One can say, Ziehen looks at the soul life in
such a way that he oversleeps the real spiritual impulses of
the soul. Hence, Ziehen can say, the main principle of the
human soul life is that a mental picture combines with others
either after their inner resemblance or after their temporal
succession. If I have seen a friend at a certain place and see
the friend later again, the place that was temporally connected
with him can associate itself with him again. If the soul life
proceeds in such a way, only according to these principles of
association, then it proceeds in such a way as the body lets
this mental proceed. There just the spirit sleeps. The spirit
submerges in the soul life that is only dependent on the body.
Since the spiritual begins everywhere where we make ourselves
independent from the associations by inner activity. The
spiritual begins everywhere where Ziehen stops talking, and
where generally scientific psychology stops talking.
In
two directions, one comes out from the mere soul life. On one
side, we can come out and rise to the spirit, so that we can
behold the supersensible in the outer world, after we have
become conscious in our real ego, while we feel the body of
formative forces, as we feel, otherwise, the physical body.
However, we get to an even higher mental picture of our ego,
then we realise, why to the usual consciousness this ego is
hidden: this ego arises as little from the usual soul life as
from the lung the air originates that we breathe. Someone who
believes that the true ego is generated anyhow in the body
believes the same in this area as someone who believes that the
breath is anyhow generated from the lung. No, our true ego is
inside the world that we perceive Imaginatively. There on one
side we find the ego, while we arouse it, while we get from the
mere sensory perception to the supersensible. In this ego, we
find one side of the everlasting, that side which shows the
seedlings of everything that we become when we go through the
gate of death and settle in the spiritual world to return to
following lives on earth.
On
the other side, we find the ego again. It is the same. The
human being oversleeps the real being of his ego in the usual
life, however, he also oversleeps the real being of his will.
If the body of formative forces dawns on him, that awakes in
certain way which lives in the will. What does the human being
know about that which lives in the will in the usual life? If
he lifts his hand, he knows, it comes from his mental picture.
However, the human being oversleeps completely in the usual
awake consciousness how this works how it goes over in the
physical body. This also wakes gradually, even if not in the
body of formative forces.
Then we experience from which deeper impulses our actions put
themselves in the world, we experience something supersensible
behind our will about which the usual consciousness knows
nothing. While on the other side we exceed our usual soul life
to the spirit, we experience the spirit in the will, that
spirit which was active in us, before we entered by birth or
conception into the physical existence by which we have come
from the spiritual world in the physical existence. Thus
methodically exceeding the usual soul life, the spiritual
researcher experiences his everlasting.
I
explain in the next talks: how this everlasting is included in
the contents of the beholding consciousness how really this
everlasting is found because we can hold side by side that to
which we come, while we pursue the imagining beyond the only
sensory perception in the supersensible, and that to which we
come while we pursue the will beyond the only mental-bodily
into the spiritual.
With it, I have given something of the program of the next
talks at the end of this talk. I hope, spiritual science will
get beyond that dictum of Du Bois-Reymond with which he wanted
to take away the ground under the feet from any spiritual
research, while he asserted the principle that only that which
comes from the senses can be, actually, science, and where
supra-naturalism starts, science stops. No, it should be just
shown by our worldview that in future a general conviction will
be there which is based on the fact that where real
supra-naturalism, real penetration into the spiritual world
stops, science must die away also compared with the view of
nature. Thus, we also realise that natural sciences themselves
have more and more dead, dying away concepts, because the
living contents can come only from the spirit. The spirit is
the creator of life, and it can be the only creator of real,
lively, scientific concepts if it is recognised.
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