PART II
THE WISDOM OF THE SOUL (Psychosophy)
Berlin, November 1–4, 1910
LECTURE I
The Elements of the Soul Life
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: A transcription by Dr. Steiner of
Goethe's youthful poem. The Wandering Jew, referred to by Frau
Marie Steiner toward the end of her Preface, was recited at the
beginning of this lecture, following a few explanatory remarks. The
original is little known in Germany and entirely unfamiliar to
American or English readers, and it is unthinkable that Dr. Steiner's
transcription of it could have any meaning for those unacquainted
with the original. The extraordinary experiment, however, is so fully
explained in the course of the lecture that both the object and the
method are wholly clear, even without a knowledge of the poem in
either version. Since Frau Marie Steiner was herself in doubt about
the advisability of having it appear in the published version of the
cycle, she would surely approve of omitting it in the translation.
T THE General Meeting last year you heard a
course of lectures on Anthroposophy. This year I shall deliver
a series entitled, Psychosophy, from a similar point of view,
and later on it will be necessary to give a third course on
Pneumatosophy. In this way the three cycles will combine and
form a bridge connecting the three worlds in which we live. This will
close the circle that takes us in a roundabout way back to our
starting point.
Psychosophy is intended as a study of the human soul
starting with what it can itself experience here in the physical
world, but then ascending to higher realms in order to show that the
life we encounter and can observe in the physical world leads up to
glimpses of a higher soul life, from which the light of theosophy
will come to meet us, as it were. A variety of considerations will
occupy us during these lectures. Beginning with apparently simple
matters, we will ascend to a contemplation of those phenomena of the
soul life that we call attention, memory, passions, emotions.
We will consider the realms of the true, the good and. the
beautiful. Then we will examine the phenomena that affect human
life beneficially or harmfully, out of which arise actual causes of
sickness that at the present time intervene and influence our soul
lives. This will bring us to the point where the psychic element
enters our physical life, our daily work. We shall have to study the
interaction of bodily weal and woe, and the forms of the soul life.
Our observations will lead us up to the high ideals of human society,
and we will consider phenomena of our daily life, such as the origin
of means for passing the time and how these, in turn, affect the soul
life and reveal themselves in manifold concatenations. Then the
curious effects of boredom and much else will be presented, as
well as remedies for poor memory, lack of forceful thinking, and the
like.
You will readily understand that a detailed exposition
of the soul life calls for consideration of the adjacent realms.
Theosophy, of course, has provided you with ready mental images for
relating the soul life of man to other realms. You are familiar with
the organization of the nature of man as body, soul, and spirit, from
which it is natural to infer that the soul life comes in contact on
the one side with the bodily life and on the other with the spiritual
life. This is the step that leads up from anthroposophy to
psychosophy, and at some future time we must ascend from psychosophy
to pneumatosophy.
If we would study this soul life by itself, within its
two boundaries, we must ask what it is. Well, all that we are
accustomed to call the outer world, all that we see before and about
us — animals, plants, minerals, clouds, rivers — whatever
we encounter on the physical plane, we do not include in our
soul life, no matter what mental pictures we may add to our
perceptions.
A rose, when encountered on the physical plane, is not a
part of our soul life, but when the rose gives us pleasure, when it
stimulates something like gratification in our soul, this fact then
pertains to our soul life. To meet a person and to form a conception
of his hair, his expression, etc., is not a function of the soul
life, but to take an interest in him, to feel love or antipathy for
him, that is an experience of the soul. That is the way in which
matters pertaining to the soul must be characterized.
Now let us turn to something different. Suppose we are
watching a man carrying out some action that induces the feeling in
us of a good deed, morally laudable. A psychic experience of that
sort comprises something more. Here it is not a question of how the
action arose, nor even of whether we were moved by love or hate in
estimating it; we find something beyond what has thus far been
characterized. As soon as we judge an act to be good or bad, higher
interests play a part. When we call an act good, we know that it
would be wrong for this quality to depend upon our verdict. We must
dissociate our personality from the question of whether an act is
good or bad. True, the verdict must arise in us, but independent of
ourselves. Nothing in the outer world can tell us that the act is a
good one; the verdict must come about within ourselves, but
uninfluenced by love or hate. In all such inner experiences that
nevertheless have a significance independent of our inner frame of
mind, so that it is immaterial whether we pass judgment or not
— in all such experiences the spirit plays a part in the human
soul. Thus we have characterized the relation of the soul to the
outer world by reviewing these three cases precisely from the outer
world.
Summing up, first, we observe something as pertaining to
the outer world: the rose. Second, we experience something in
connection with it: pleasure. Third, something arises in us, but
something that must be independent of us: judgment (good or evil).
The outer world must reveal itself to the soul by way of the body.
Soul experiences take place wholly within us, and the spirit declares
itself within the soul. The point is to keep firmly in mind that the
soul flows and ebbs in inner facts.
It now remains to find something through which the
character of our soul life is brought to our consciousness from
within as well. Thus far we have considered the soul life as it is
bounded from without. Now we shall see how it can be characterized
from within, disregarding what is adjacent, and clearly expressing in
a conception what we mean by the pure soul principle. We must acquire
a mental picture of the nature of the soul as it has its being on the
physical plane.
The basic character of pure soul, of pure psychic
experience, can be described in two ways. Speaking accurately in
regard to earthly conditions, and indicating the inner phenomena of
the soul life exactly as far as its boundaries, there are in the
first instance two conceptions that we can apply to man's pure soul
experiences and to nothing else. The inner phenomena of the soul life
— its inner fluctuation — clearly indicate its
boundaries, and the attributes of these boundaries must be mentioned.
My next task will therefore be to characterize these inner phenomena
of the soul life, and this, as I said, can be done in two ways. We
will devote today's lecture to gathering conceptions, but never mind;
it will greatly help us to understand phenomena that concern us
intimately. It is a matter of gleaning hints that are extraordinarily
important in connection with the soul life, whether healthy or
diseased.
One conception by which the pure soul principle can be
characterized is reasoning. Reasoning is one activity of the
soul, and all remaining psychic experiences can be summed up in what
we may call the inner experiences of love and hate.
Rightly understood, these two conceptions —
reasoning, and love and hate — comprise the entire inner soul
life. Everything else denotes something that derives from without
through the body or from within through the spirit. We shall see how
fruitful a careful study of the two psychic activities can become.
Everything pertaining to the soul, then, is either reasoning or
living in love and hate; at bottom these two conceptions are the only
pure soul activities. Reasoning on the one hand, loving and hating on
the other — these are the forces of the soul life exclusively
pertaining to it.
If we are to understand each other aright with regard to
these two basic forces of the soul, it behooves us to visualize
clearly first, the significance of reasoning within the soul life,
and then, the role played in the soul life by love and hate. I refer
to reasoning not from the standpoint of logic, but of the activity
comprising the inner soul process of reasoning; not judgment, but the
activity, reasoning.
If you are led to concede that the rose is red, you have
reasoned; the activity of reasoning is involved. If you are inwardly
constrained to say that the rose is red, that man is good, the
Sis-tine Madonna is beautiful, that steeple is high, you are dealing
with activities of the inner soul life that we designate as
reasoning.
Now, how about love and hate? A little introspection
will show you that we do not pass by the outer world in such a way
that our soul remains untouched by the majority of external
phenomena. Passing through a landscape you see cloud-capped mountain
peaks, and you experience joy in your soul. What underlies this is
that you love what you experience through this landscape. Whatever
exists of joy or horror in an experience, that is love or hate. If
love or hate hides in many kinds of soul experiences, that is merely
because these accompany us incessantly from morning to night. If you
see someone committing an evil deed and are repelled by it, you have
a hidden experience of hate, exactly as you have when you turn from a
malodorous flower. Love and hate accompany the soul life continually
and so does reasoning.
If we now observe an important concomitant of reasoning,
we can learn to know the phenomena of the inner soul life better
still. It is this, that all reasoning has an effect in the soul life,
and this fact is the key to the soul life. By forming the judgment,
“the rose is red,” “that man is good,” you
retain a result in the soul. It can be characterized this way: When
you have given the verdict, the inference is the conception, “the
red rose,” “the good man.” The verdict “the
rose is red” has been transformed into the conception “the
red rose.” As a being endowed with soul, you then continue to
live with this conception. Every judgment is a confluence of
conceptions. Here we have, on the one hand the rose, on the other,
red. These flow toward each other and combine in the conception “the
red rose,” which you carry with you in your further soul life.
This may sound dry, but it is indispensable for an
understanding of the soul life. Neither the soul life nor its
relation to the higher planes could be accurately comprehended
without the knowledge that judgments converge into visualizations.
Experiences of love and hate, on the other hand, do not
give rise to the question of how do they converge, but rather as to
where they arise. In the case of reasoning, the question is, Whither?
and the answer is. Toward the conception. But with regard to love and
hate the question is. Whence? We will always find one impulse in soul
experiences themselves that gives rise to love and hate, an impulse
that breaks into the soul life from another quarter, as it were. All
love and hate can finally be traced back to what within the soul life
we call desire. Entering from another direction and underlying love
and hate, as these manifest themselves in the soul, desire can always
be found streaming into our soul lives. Into one side of it flows
desire, manifesting itself in love and hate. On the other side the
activity of reasoning leads to visualization.
Desire is something you can easily recognize as arising
naturally out of the inner soul life. The external cause of it may
not at all be known to you, but you do know that it appears in your
inner soul life, and that invariably love and hate result. In like
manner you realize that your verdict “the rose is red”
arises in the soul, but when this verdict has culminated in a
visualization, the latter must have external validity. Reasoning
takes place in the soul; it arises out of the inner life. We can put
it this way: primarily, desire — for reasons not known to us
today — manifests itself in the soul and expresses itself in
love and hate. But in the same way — also for unknown reasons —
the soul is impelled to permit judgment to enter from the wellspring
of its own being, and provided the verdict has been arrived at in a
certain way, the visualization must be valid for the outer world.
It will seem strange to you that I should be so prolix
in expounding the elementary concepts of the soul life. You may think
that these matters could be skipped over more rapidly, and indeed,
they could, but just because these relationships remain largely
unnoticed in scientific circles, error after error is committed. I
will mention one prime error common today. By drawing far-reaching
conclusions, those guilty of this error become entangled in
misconceptions; they start from entirely false premises. In many
books on physiology you can find the statement that the raising of a
hand or leg is brought about by the fact that we have two kinds of
nerves. Those that run from the sense organs to the brain or the
spinal cord and that transmit messages to the brain, so to speak, are
supposed to be contrasted with another set, called motor nerves, as
against the sensory or perceptive nerves. According to this theory,
when an object is seen, the message of the sense organ is first
carried to the brain, where the stimulus thus exerted is supposed to
stream out into a nerve that leads to a muscle, and only then does
the impulse arise that entails motion. According to spiritual
science, however, that is not the case. What is called the motor
nerve does, in fact, exist as a physical unit, but it does not serve
to instigate the motion. It serves only to enable us to perceive the
motion ourselves, to check up on it, to bring our own movement to
consciousness. Just as the optic nerve, through which we perceive an
external event, is a sensory nerve, so the muscle nerve leading to
the hand is also a sensory nerve, whose function is to keep track of
the movement of our hand. This example of faulty scientific thinking
is a prime error that has poisoned all physiology and psychology.
Our task is clearly to understand the role played by
these two elements of the soul, reasoning, and love and hate. They
play an enormous role, for the entire soul life runs its course in
manifold combinations of these two elements. We should misconstrue
this soul life, however, if we failed to allow for extraneous forces,
not properly psychic, that constantly enter in across the border. The
first example that occurs to us, to be met with everywhere in daily
life, around which, indeed, our everyday soul life is built, is that
of sense experiences. These are the various experiences brought about
by the ear, the eye, the tongue, the nose, etc. What we experience
through our sense organs we take into our soul, in a way, and there
it lives on. With this in mind we can actually speak of our soul
reaching as far as a certain boundary, which is the boundary of the
sense organs. We have posted sentinels, as it were, at the boundaries
of our soul life, and what these sentinels report of the outer world
we take into our soul life and carry further.
We can now ask about those impressions in the soul that
we experience through our sense organs. What is represented within
the soul life by what we experience through the ear as tone, through
the eye as color, through the nose as smell? Well, the study of these
sense experiences is as a rule pursued in a lopsided manner. Science
fails to face the fact that the processes taking place at the
boundaries of the soul life are composed of two factors, two
elements. One element is perception, our immediate experience of the
outer world. You hold the tone, the color, the smell, and so forth —
that is, the impression of these — only as long as you are in
contact with the external stimulus. The impression, the interaction
of inner and outer factors, ceases at once when you turn away, close
your eyes, or the like.
What does that prove? If you consider the immediate
perception in conjunction with the fact that later you know something
(you know the tone, the color, etc.), it proves that you have
retained something of your experience of the outer world, even though
the experience has ceased. What does this imply? That something has
completely entered your soul life. Something that has become part of
your soul life must inevitably run its course there because you carry
it with you. If it were part of the outer world you could not carry
it with you. You can continue to hold the impression of color, the
perception of the color impression, only if it has remained within
your soul.
It is necessary to distinguish between a sense
perception proper and what you continue to carry in the soul, what
you detach from the outer world. The experience you thus derive from
objects we will call perception, and what you continue to
carry in the soul, sensation. As a foundation, then, for subsequent
expositions, keep in mind the sharp distinction between sense
perceptions and what we retain as sensation (sentience). The
perception of color ceases when you turn away; the sensation of it
remains. Ordinarily such fine distinctions are unnecessary, but for
these four lectures they are apposite.
So we continue on our way, carrying these sensations
about with us in our soul. We now ask if it could be that these
sensations, derived from external objects, constitute a new element
of the soul life, as opposed to reasoning and the phenomena of love
and hate, which we termed the exclusive elements? If that were the
case I should have been guilty of omitting to name something that
also constitutes an inner experience, namely, sentience. But that is
not the way matters stand; sentience is not a separate element of the
soul life.
If you have sensed the color red, the color red
is not an inner soul experience, for it is the object that is red. If
“red” were an inner soul experience your whole
color-perception of red would avail you nothing. The quality “red”
did not originate in your soul life. What did arise there was the
activity in which you engaged for the purpose of carrying away with
you something of the red. What you did while confronting the rose,
that is inner soul life. This activity of your inner soul is in
reality nothing more than a fusion of what I have described to you as
the two basic elements of the soul life.
But then we must consider the following. If what I have
told you of the two elements is true — if love and hate,
deriving from desire, and reasoning lead to visualization —
then what was characterized as sentience would have to be related to
those two elements in the case of a sense experience as well. A sense
experience must be accompanied by love and hate, and reasoning.
Imagine you have a sense experience of color, and observe closely
what happens:
| Diagram 3 Click image for large view | |
Desire
and reasoning flow to the boundary of the outer world
and become visualization of the material object.
Above the heavy line is the outer world, below it the
world of the soul. The line is the boundary. When at this boundary an
object makes an impression upon the sense organs and induces an
experience — for instance, of color, this experience must be
met by the result of love and hate and of reasoning, emanating from
the soul as visualization. Nothing else can flow out of the soul.
Note, however, an important distinction that can exist
between different kinds of desire, different kinds of reasoning. As
an example, let us assume that while you are waiting for a train,
day-dreaming, the visualization of a disagreeable past experience
appears in your soul life, and side by side with this appears
another, namely, everything unpleasant that has happened to you since
then as a result of that experience. Then you can sense how these two
visualizations combine into a more intensive visualization of that
distressing event. During this process nothing related to it has
occurred in the outer world. A judgment has been reached that remains
wholly within psychic experience. Nevertheless, love and hate
appeared in the soul life; they amalgamated with the visualization,
as it were. As you sit there dreaming, your environment need show
nothing of all this; your surroundings are of no consequence; yet
something occurs. A visualization comes about through love and hate,
and reasoning, without any stimulus from without.
That is quite a different thing from confronting a sense
experience. When we perform such an inner act — let judgments
arise, provoke love and hate — we remain within the sea of our
soul life. But when a sense experience arises we must advance to the
boundary of the outer world, and there it is as though the currents
of the soul life were directly stopped by the outer world.
Whenever a sense experience is involved we are stopped
by the outer world. Desire, love and hate, flash to the boundary; the
capacity for judgment flows there too, and both are obstructed at
that boundary. The result is that reasoning and desire are checked.
They are there, but the soul does not perceive them, and the sense
sensation is brought about by this flowing to the boundary and there
being stopped. The sense sensation is nothing but a phenomenon of
love, hate and reasoning that remains unconscious, though these are
obstructed and held fast from without (cf. previous diagram).
We can put it this way. Ebbing and flowing in the sea of
our soul life, psychically substantial, is what can be designated
love and hate, and reasoning. This manifests itself in various ways.
When a judgment is reached within the soul itself, the
soul is aware of the activity of reasoning as visualization.
When the soul directs the activity toward the outer
world, it must stop at the boundary and it perceives the outer world:
perception.
When, however, the soul directs the activity toward the
outer world but stops before it is reached, sensation arises.
Sensation is the confluence of desire and reasoning within the soul
life.
If we consider what the soul life ordinarily comprises,
we find that our inner experiences really consist, as a rule, of what
we have carried away with us from sense experiences. A little
introspection will convince you of this. If you want to create higher
visualizations for yourself, you will notice how helpful it is for
your inner soul life to try to substantialize what is not of the
senses, to imagine it pictorially, to clothe it in a garb that is
faintly a sensation of color or tone. Speech itself could teach us
how extensive is the soul's need to express higher things in such a
way as to symbolize them in sense sensations. As a rule, the symbol
is a necessity, though people usually have no inkling of the fact,
because in symbols the likeness is shadowy, nebulous.
Try, for a moment, to imagine something without the aid
of a symbol — a triangle, for example; a triangle without color
or any link with any sense sensation. Just try it, and you will see
how difficult it is to visualize a triangle un-symbolized,
that is, a visualization not associated with any sense picture. Most
people are quite incapable of accomplishing this. Symbols alone
provide the possibility of rising to higher visualizations. Even
language is aided by symbolization. Observe how we are forced at
every turn to symbolize speech. I said that a symbol must be
verknüpft (linked) with the visualization of a triangle:
what a crude conception, knüpfen! [TRANSLATOR'S
NOTE: Knüpfen means literally to knot together.]
Even words themselves disclose the prevalence of symbols, and we see
to how great an extent the soul life consists of products of
sensations.
We have just one conception that cannot be directly
classed as an outer sense experience, although it keeps recurring as
an inner soul experience and we must continually relate it to the
outer sense experiences: the conception of the ego. If we face
the purely psychic state of affairs, we must concede that man lives
largely in a world of sense sensations. In this world the conception
of the ego keeps bobbing up and crowding forward, but this ego is not
always present as a conception. It would be foolish to assume that
the ego conception could be present continually or for a prolonged
period. Fancy what it would be like to keep saying to yourself, to
keep visualizing incessantly, I, I, I ...! No, that is not what you
do. You have other conceptions, such as red, blue, tone, large,
small. Nevertheless you know that your visualizing occurs in your
ego, that your ego must participate whenever a sense experience takes
place. What we call soul experience is in a sense at the same time
ego experience. You know that soul experiences — desire,
reasoning, etc. — must always be opposed by the ego, but no
matter how insistently visualizations are stimulated by the outer
world, the conception of the ego can never possibly be created merely
through the outer world. It does not enter from without. True, the
ego sensation, the ego conception, invariably accompanies these sense
conceptions that originate in the outer world, but it does not itself
arise there. It emerges from the sea of the soul life and, as a
visualization, joins the other visualizations, as it were.
Out of the sea of soul experience the other sense
experiences emerge as well, but only when outer causes are in
question. In this fact is to be seen primarily the sole difference
between the ego sensation and sensations consequent upon sense
perception. A significant phenomenon thus confronts us. In the midst
of our soul life there appears a conception that joins the others
coming from without. How is this to be explained?
Among present-day philosophers and psychologists, even
outside the anthroposophical movement, there are some who point out
the importance of the ego conception, but strangely enough these
psychologists, no matter how well-meaning, invariably overshoot the
mark. The French philosopher, Bergson, was one who emphasized the
significance, the distinctive character, of the ego conception. From
this the philosophers infer a permanence of this ego conception, or
at least, that it points to something permanent, and they
substantiate this view as follows. The ego differs from all other
experiences of the senses and the soul by participating, as it were,
in the other experiences and conceptions in such a way as to lend
them their true form; ergo, it must be of a permanent nature.
Here, however, a grave error appears, and a certain
objection that must be raised against Bergson's argument proves quite
fatal for his inference. Let us assume that the ego conception
yielded something that constitutes the soul within itself. The
question would then necessarily arise as to what happens to this
during sleep at night. The ego conception ceases entirely, of course,
during sleep.
All these concepts concerning the participation of the
ego in visualizations apply only to our waking life. They merely
appear anew every morning. If the ego conception were to prove
anything concerning the permanence of the ego, it would have to
remain present during sleep. From the absence of the ego conception
during the night it follows that after death it need not necessarily
be present either. Thus there is no testimony available for the
permanence and the immortality of the ego. It might be lacking, for
it disappears every day.
Hence we must keep in mind that, on the one hand, the
presence of the ego conception without external stimulus is
significant, but that, on the other, this presence in no way proves
the permanence of the ego, as the latter is away during sleep. In
this way we have today reached an inference upon which we shall build
further.
We have seen that two elements emerge from the surging
sea of the soul life: reasoning, leading to visualization, and love
and hate, deriving from desire. At the boundary of our soul life is
the confluence, of which we are not aware, of desire and reasoning.
An ego conception appears without external stimulus, but it shares
its destiny with the other visualizations of the soul life; just as
tone, color, and so forth, come and go, so does the ego conception
emerge and disappear.
In the following lectures we will examine the connection
of this ego conception, this soul center, with the other conceptions
of the soul life — sensation, desire, reasoning, love and hate.
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