Man as a Being of Sense and Perception

CONTENTS

Lecture 1

Ego-consciousness and the content of the senses; the ego as reality. The sphere of transmission of sense-perception: the four subjective outer senses, the four senses oscillating between outer and inner, the four objective inner senses. Man's soul-life and his cosmic being. The inner activity of soul-life and its outwardly directed activity. The specific characteristics of individual senses. Analysis of the field of experience.

22nd July, 1921

Lecture 2

The distinction between upper and lower man; both representative of the world-process. The two poles of our experience show the relationship of morality to natural necessity. The separation between the spheres of knowledge and faith. Historical consciousness must be acquired by the survey of ever-greater periods of time. The Greek philosophers. The real connection with the spiritual world later became tradition, but with the mark of knowledge; Gnostic ideas. By the fourth century the content of these ideas lost. Augustine. Transition to the abstract intellectualism of the fifteenth century. Ancient oriental culture based on the six upper senses. Western culture based on the six lower senses. Aristotelianism in Christian theology. Attack on the doctrine of pre-existence.

23rd July, 1921

Lecture 3

The faculty of memory and the capacity for love, though facts of soul-life, belong to the bodily life. Faculty of ideation dependent upon the formation of the head, faculty of memory upon the metabolic-limb organisation; relation to world of feeling. The images of the members of man's being bound up with the physical organisation. Teething as an example of a kind of image in the physical. The spiritual members as either free or bound to the physical organisation. The interplay of the spiritual and the bodily in memory and love. The pictorial representation of the spiritual world in the material world gives us an insight into the origin of matter from spirit. Within the soul-spiritual we experience morality, within the physical-bodily, natural necessity. The dematerialisation of the human being. “I am free.”

24th July, 1921