The
Supersensible Being of Man
And the Evolution of Mankind
Observations
and Results of Spiritual Science
A
Lecture by Rudolf Steiner
This
lecture was given in Stuttgart on 11th July, 1919. It was translated
by Pauline Wehrle and is published in agreement with the Rudolf
Steiner Nachlassverwaltung.
Every
individual has the feeling that part of his being is super-sensible,
whatever function it has within his soul. And
anthroposophical spiritual science — the name
applying to what I have been presenting for many years — has
something it wants to say about this feeling becoming an inner
scientific certainty in the consciousness of present-day
mankind. However, there are still all manner of prejudices against
the anthroposophical approach to knowledge of man's super-sensible
being and to knowledge of the super-sensible world altogether. But
anthroposophy cannot speak about the super-sensible being of man in
the kind of way people would still like to hear it spoken of in many
circles today. For we should imagine, in fact, we should be
certain that speaking about it in that way would not satisfy
people's present-day aspirations for knowledge, which are none the
less intense although they may still be unconscious. Nowadays when
people pass judgment on one or another aspect of anthroposophy you
constantly hear the remark that anthroposophy is difficult to
understand. They say that anthroposophy obtains its knowledge from
regions one does not need to go to in order to reach the
super-sensible. They emphasise the difference between anthroposophy's
search for knowledge and ‘simple faith’ based on the
creed and the Bible, and they keep on stressing that anyone who
has found the inner strength of this ‘simple faith’ does
not need anthroposophical spiritual science.
If
anthroposophy were to speak along the lines that people nowadays call
‘simple faith,’ it would certainly consider it was
failing to do justice to the deepest aspirations of the times. It
would have to admit, in that case, that although it was
presenting a point of view still popular with many people who find it
less difficult to understand than anthroposophy, this point of
view is nevertheless no longer appropriate for the real soul needs of
present-day mankind. I wanted this to be said because it is just from
this direction that objections are continually being raised against
the views which arise from a valid consideration of man's
present-day needs, views which are held by the kind of spiritual
science that will be spoken of here. This kind of spiritual science
is convinced that certain inter-relationships exist about which
many people nowadays have the most detrimental illusions. Today,
however, we are living in an age that has a long way to go before
confusion and chaos are over. We are entering a difficult period of
human evolution. Anyone able to look more deeply into the evolution
of mankind and seeing the amount of elemental unrest felt today
throughout the whole of the civilised world, of which everything of
the nature of inner tensions is only the ripples on the
surface, knows that this has a mysterious connection with that
obstinate attitude of ‘simple faith’ that wants to rely
solely on the creed and the Bible. The parts of man's being that are
attracted by this so-called ‘faith’ shut him off from
those very forces that could bring order into chaos and confusion at
the present stage of human evolution. If those people who speak
in the way I have indicated would now deepen their knowledge
somewhat, they would have to see all that is bringing mankind into
such terrible conflict and chaos. Then they would have to admit that
they now lack certain forces that they failed to develop because of
their determination not to go beyond their so-called
‘simple faith,’ which they and others find so convenient.
They would also have to admit that there is an inner relationship
between the unrest of today and this harping on ‘simple
faith.’ A causal connection there certainly is, today's
elemental restlessness being the result of this obdurate
harping.
I am not
speaking out of subjective feelings but out of the very kind of
knowledge I would like to tell you more about today, namely an inner
scientific perception. It is this that has moved anthroposophy to
bring knowledge of the super-sensible down from spirit heights.
Insofar as the so-called believers in a simple faith point to the
super-sensible, their knowledge has also come to them from spirit
heights. But they have no wish at all to ascend to these
heights.
This had to
be said first of all, because today, in particular, what I will have
to say concerning the super-sensible being of man will need to be
brought into connection with a number of those spiritual scientific
facts that people on the one hand find really incomprehensible
— though if they were to go into them more thoroughly they
would find they absolutely accorded with common sense; and that
people on the other hand consider unnecessary, because they do
not find they accord with the ‘simple faith’ they think
they ought to advocate. I attempted the day before yesterday to
characterise the paths by which the kind of spiritual science we mean
attains to knowledge. On that occasion I began by saying that on the
whole men of present times have very little desire to know about what
is taking place unconsciously in the depths of their being. On the
one hand people think the body is something external to themselves,
and that they can gain knowledge of it either by observing it with
sense perception or by considering it according to the outlook laid
down by natural science. On the other hand they think that their
thinking, sense perception, feeling and willing comprise the
whole of their inner being. However, the path of knowledge I
indicated the day before yesterday shows that the life of the
external body, on the one hand, and the soul experiences of thinking,
feeling and willing we have in ordinary consciousness, on the other,
do not comprise the whole of man's being. The essential point is that
man as spiritual investigator does not stop at the level of
ordinary consciousness but takes the development of his soul into his
own hands, as it were. In the realm of thought, in particular, he
raises thinking consciously onto a higher level than in ordinary
life, and in the other direction makes his will nature consciously
into an object of self-education. Thus the development of soul
forces beyond the level of ordinary life is the only thing that can
lead in an anthroposophical sense to knowledge of the
super-sensible world.
Now what is
this development of thinking? It consists of making human thinking or
human visualising stronger than it is in ordinary life, and
doing so in a completely systematic way based on the experiences of
man's inner soul nature. In ordinary life our thinking or visualising
is merely a spectator. And man is conscious of the fact that he
actually thinks best in ordinary life when he allows his experiences
of life or of external nature to work on him in such a way that he
forms his mental pictures as a passive spectator. With the
methods described in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
you can bring activity into the world of thought. You will
bring such activity into the world of thought that you will be
conscious that you are not passive whilst you think, but are as
active as you are when you use your limbs, even though this is an
inner activity. Will must be brought into thinking, the kind of will,
however, that does not make the thinking arbitrary, but adapts it to
the phenomena of the world. So it is a particularly good
preparation for the spiritual investigator if he precedes his
spiritual scientific endeavours with a thoroughly disciplined study
in the natural scientific method, thus training himself not to think
arbitrarily but according to the phenomena of nature itself. But he
also has to free himself from this mere looking at nature. His newly
acquired capacity of systematic thinking and of observing
natural phenomena must now be developed as a thought activity
independent of physical phenomena. A spiritual scientific training of
thinking is an activating of thinking. This is a fact that many
people still disbelieve today — we are only at the beginning of
spiritual scientific knowledge — namely the fact that man's
thinking and whole activity of mental picturing really takes on quite
a different character than it has in everyday life.
If we think
back to the dreamlike mental images of early childhood and compare
these with the clear thinking of adulthood, we find that man's inner
life of soul has undergone a change. A similar change takes place in
anyone who develops his thinking in the way we have described
and progresses from ordinary thinking to active thinking. He feels as
though he has awakened from the normal condition of existence, and,
provided we do not use the word in a dubious mystical sense, we can
certainly say that this activated thinking ‘awakens’
man.
By learning
to use this active thinking man acquires an entirely new way of
‘seeing’ things, a new way of seeing the qualities of the
human body, to begin with. Active thinking ascends to the kind of
seeing in which the human body appears in quite a new way. Above all,
a tremendous difference is to be seen between the form of man's head
organisation and the organisation that comes to expression in man's
mobile limbs and everything that is connected with these. By means of
the kind of seeing that active thinking opens up we come to realise
that the human head is of an entirely different character, even in
its bodily nature, from the rest of the body, particularly the limb
organisation. Inner perception shows us how thinking, especially this
activated thinking, is related to the whole nature of the human
head. We learn to know in a new way what the human body really is.
For as our soul development progresses by means of this active
thinking there enters consciously into this active thinking the kind
of life experience that is not solely of the type that enters
ordinary thinking or visualising.
Life
experiences that enter ordinary thinking or visualising have a
certain peculiarity. We experience the world within this ordinary
visualising. We experience it through our sense perceptions and the
thoughts that come to meet them. But we keep a bit of this
experience back for ourselves, too. We would not have our whole
human nature within ourselves if each external impression did not
leave behind it the possibility of our remembering it. It is
just this memory that keeps our whole human personality intact, and
we only have to think of the devastation wrought in the human
personality by any kind of loss of memory to realise what the power
of memory means for the cohesion of the human personality in
ordinary life. But the force that enables us to keep memories alive,
those memories acquired by opening ourselves to the outer world and
forming mental images of it via our sense perception, this force
remains unconscious. This is something that man carries out
unconsciously. But when it comes to the experiences of active,
super-sensible thinking, it is different. It would be quite impossible
to bring what is acquired in a really super-sensible way, through
active thinking, into any sort of connection with the human
personality if we were dependent on the activity that works
unconsciously within us. Something we have to learn about the
acquisition of super-sensible knowledge is that we are not taking
something unconsciously into the body by means of which we can later
on awake a memory, on the contrary the imprinting of something
in the physical body, the taking in of it, that normally takes place
as an unconscious activity and works on as memory, has to be carried
out consciously by the spiritual investigator. The higher,
super-sensible experience gained by activated thinking would
never come in place of an absolutely dreamy experience if we could
not acquire the capacity to introduce this super-sensible
experience to the body consciously.
We can only
introduce it, however, to the head organisation. But then this
head organisation teaches us something that eludes ordinary
science, but which sheds great light on the mystery of man's being.
We discover that when we make a conscious imprint of what we
experience in active thinking we are constantly bringing about a
process in the human head that is not an intensification of life but
a breaking down of life, a partial dying. This is a significant and
moving experience acquired through spiritual science: In order
to remember super-sensible knowledge, we have to imprint it into our
head organisation, and it is immediately evident that this
imprinting does not bring about an enlivening process but a process
of partial dying, a breaking down of the head organisation's life
processes. This teaches us how the bodily head organisation actually
functions in man. We discover something that is normally not known
because it remains unconscious, namely that our whole thinking
activity or mental imagery is not something that comes from forces of
life, as materialists believe, but something that comes from the
damping down of the life of the head. It arises because whilst our
soul is active our head is constantly in a state of partial dying. We
also discover a fact that strikes a man of today as being absurd: if
the thinking activity of the head were to spread into the rest of
man's body, he would immediately die.
Thus
spiritual science teaches us that the death-bringing principle is
constantly at work in part of man's bodily nature. We learn that
because our head is organised that way, death is at work in us
throughout our life. You see, this approach, that people in many
circles today imagine has nothing useful to offer, leads to the kind
of conceptions that completely contradict the usual views. We
find that this imprinting that I have just described as a conscious
process which must be carried out by active thinking, cannot actually
directly imprint into man's physical organisation the super-sensible
world where the experiences have been undergone. We find out the real
fact that eludes external sense observation. We discover that
incorporated into the ordinary life of the senses is what I
took the liberty, in my books on spiritual science, to call the
etheric body or body of formative forces. We
discover a delicate body of light between the activity of active
thinking and man's physical body, particularly in the head
organisation. This finer body is the formative force — a thing
that modern natural science makes fun of — underlying the
physical body, and it is discovered in this way by
super-sensible sight, which at this stage we can call an
Imagination. We discover a higher, super-sensible member of
man's being. At this point we experience an extraordinarily
shattering phenomenon. When we imprint our super-sensible
experiences into our etheric body and on into our physical
body, we feel as though we were no longer master of our ego. We
thought our ego filled our soul being through and through, but now it
feels as though it were being sucked into the body.
The way to
overcome this phenomenon is to have other soul exercises going
parallel with the activating of thinking. These outer exercises
are to do with disciplining the will. Although I characterised them
the day before yesterday, I want to refer to them again briefly. I
described how man changes from one week to the next, from one hour to
the next, from one year to the next. We know we are becoming a
different person. Our experiences are not the kind of thing we
have, but the kind of thing that is perpetually making
us into a different person. But nowadays an unconscious
activity is also at work here. Present-day man gives himself up to
external experiences. If he goes so far as to observe his inner being
to any extent, he may notice that on the whole he is becoming a
different person from week to week, year to year, and decade to
decade; that his soul constitution is changing. But he does not
take this development of his soul constitution in hand. This,
however, the spiritual investigator has to do. He has to work on
himself in such a way that his own will controls the progress he
makes from one year to the next and from one decade to the next, and
this also has to be systematic. He has to practise self-discipline
and self-education systematically and fully consciously, not merely
arbitrarily or according to the pattern of ordinary more or
less unconscious existence. He has to bring under the control of his
own will what otherwise takes place in us involuntarily.
This calls
forth another experience of a kind that is very far removed from
present-day consciousness; we realise that we have to put aside a
scientific prejudice that prevails nowadays in a particular realm of
science and has taken general hold of people's minds. This scientific
view — which I want to mention because it could be the very
thing that might make my present argument intelligible — is
that man has two kinds of nerves: the so-called sensory nerves and
the motor nerves. The sensory nerves run from our sense organs (so
people believe) or from the surface of the skin to the nerve centre
and convey perceptions in the same way as telegraph wires. The
so-called motor nerves, the will nerves, go out from the nerve
centre. A kind of demonic being is imagined as residing in the
central nervous system, although of course present-day science will
not admit this, and he is supposed to change what comes in
through the telegraph wire nerves from the senses to the telegraph
exchange into will through the motor nerves, the will nerves. People
have thought out such beautiful theories that are really extremely
clever, especially those derived from the terrible illness tabes, to
explain this theory of the two kinds of nerves. Nevertheless this
theory is nothing else than the result of a lack of knowledge of
super-sensible man. It would lead too far for me to go into it now
— although tabes proves it if we observe it correctly —
but there is no difference between the sensory and the motor nerves.
The same as with the so-called sensory nerves, the function of which
is to convey external perceptions, the only function of the so-called
motor nerves is to convey internal perceptions when we walk or move
our arms. The motor nerves are sensory nerves too, only their
function is to perceive our movements.
The reason
why people believe the motor nerves to be the bearer of the will is
only because they have no idea what is the real bearer of the will.
We only discover what this is when we really practise the kind of
self-discipline of the will I was speaking about: become actively
engaged in self-education and become at the same time independent of
what the body does with us, so to speak. Then we discover that it is
not the motor nerves that create will, for they only perceive its
movements, but that it is created by a third member of
man's being, a super-sensible member that we could actually call the
soul. I have called it the astral body in my books, though
people do not like the term yet. Again it is by means of direct
vision, acquired through this self-disciplining of the will, that we
get to know this super-sensible member of man's being; and we discover
that it is this ‘soul body,’ if I may call it that, that
is the soul and spirit entity underlying all the bodily
movements arising out of will. Nerves are there only to convey
the perception of movement. If we take this disciplining of the will
to further stages, however, we must then ascend from the level of
imaginative knowledge, to which I have just referred, to those of
Inspiration and Intuition, as I call them in the book just
mentioned. We then discover this soul body to be a higher member of
man's being than the etheric body or body of formative forces. We
find, however, that we cannot experience this soul body in
ourselves but only when we are outwardly active and when we become
conscious of our will impulses.
When we have
reached the point where we discover this actual soul body in
ourselves, this second super-sensible part of man's being, the will,
grows stronger and stronger, and we recognise it as our sentient
body, as the force that works into our limbs and sets our body in
motion, as an organisation totally different from our head
organisation. In contrast to this head organisation, which I
characterised as being constantly in the state of partial
dying, we discover that this organisation is constantly in the
process of spiritual birth, in which life is increasing and
developing all the time. Thus through the head organisation on the
one hand, we experience a perpetual dying, and in the will
organisation, the second super-sensible member of man's being, we
experience a perpetual continuation of the birth process. Out
of this continuation of the birth process, out of this increase of
life which has to come out of our whole being, there then rays back
to us the true, super-sensible nature of our ego, and enters into what
we have imprinted into our body. Our ego arises again and again out
of the grave of our partially dying head. This perpetual interplay of
dying and being born is what we experience within ourselves when we
develop our soul life in this way. So we discover that birth and
death take place not only at the beginning and end of our lives but
that dying and becoming are the expression of forces working in our
organisation throughout our lives.
Only when we
have thus encountered man's super-sensible forces through Intuition
and Inspiration are we in a position to recognise the evolutionary
path of mankind; for in developing this kind of vision, the
forces we acquire from our head organisation and the organisation of
the rest of our body combine to illuminate for us the inner forces at
work in the historical development of mankind. How does historical
development appear, as a rule, to the ordinary consciousness of
present times? If we ignore what men believed in early stages of
human evolution out of a primitive conception of mankind and which is
now considered childish, namely that there is spirit working in
history; if we ignore this, we can say that people nowadays regard
history, or rather the evolution of mankind, as a collection of
facts gleaned from documents, archives and tradition which, at the
most, they link together with the intellect. Not until we perceive
the super-sensible being of man, as I have just described it, does the
ability to see the progression of higher super-sensible beings through
the course of history associate itself with the historical facts
which even a spiritual investigator has to take from external
history. He gets to know human evolution from the inside, whereas it
is usually only looked at from the outside.
So as not
just to talk round the subject in the abstract, I will speak of one
fact in particular, to show you the evolution of human history
from the point of view of symptoms. As man's outlook is restricted
solely to the material world, what is presented as history today is
just an external picture, and is largely a fable convenue.
Anyone who is able
to look with inner vision at the connecting link between the facts,
discovers that the first thing he sees on looking backwards into our
historical evolution is, strange to say, a nodal point in the
evolution of modern humanity around the middle of the fifteenth
century. We see in a number of spheres something like a forward leap
taking place in human development. We know of course that leaps
like this take place in nature, too. If we look at the evolving
plant, and see first the green leaves developing, then the calyx, and
then the transformation into petals, we see a leap from the
green leaf to the coloured petal, even though there is a steady
development. There is a similar leap in the evolution of humanity in
the middle of the fifteenth century, only it passes unnoticed when
historical facts are looked at solely from the outside. Something
then begins to make itself felt in human evolution that lifts
men's souls onto quite a different level of development from the one
preceding it. Earlier epochs of human evolution, it is true, also
attained considerable heights from time to time, but human souls were
quite differently constituted before and after the middle of the
fifteenth century. Looking at history from the inside, the middle of
the fifteenth century was the end of an epoch of human evolution that
actually began in the eighth century
B.C.,
roughly with the founding of the Roman Empire.
Anyone
observing history from a spiritual scientific point of view sees a
continuous line of development running through the centuries from 800
B.C.
until the middle of the fifteenth century
A.D.
And anyone looking from
inside at the Greek or the Roman era will find what is said here
thoroughly substantiated. The kind of soul constitution that was
developing in man during that epoch was of a kind that
nurtured feeling (Gemüt) and intelligence.
The surprising thing is that when observing history from the inside,
we find that prior to the eighth century
B.C.
the power of feeling and
intelligence was not yet actively at work in the human soul. In those
days man was still to a great extent united with nature; he did not
step back and reflect on the things he had seen, for his life of
feeling was still a part of nature. Not until the eighth century did
he free himself from nature and develop forces of intelligence and
feeling independently within himself. By and large the whole of
historical development from the eighth century
B.C.
to the fourteenth century
A.D.
is a gradual unfolding of
those particular forces of soul in mankind that produce a flowering
of the qualities of feeling and intelligence from out of man's inner
being.
This
development of the forces of feeling and intelligence, however, still
had an instinctive quality about it during this epoch,
intelligence and feeling still working in an instinctive way.
In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, these forces
previously working instinctively in the intelligence and
feeling took on a fully conscious quality. Men felt more strongly
isolated from outer nature than they had felt before, because in
order to think about things consciously and experience their
instinctive feelings of sympathy and antipathy consciously, they had
to draw back from external nature, so to speak. Everything
became conscious. Therefore we can say, from a spiritual
scientific point of view, that whilst in earlier epochs the
instinctive life of thought and feeling was being developed, from the
middle of the fifteenth century onwards what we can call the
consciousness soul has been developing, and this stage of
development is something that will continue for a very long period of
human evolution. Relatively speaking, we human beings are still
at the beginning of this evolution of the consciousness soul, which
is already responsible for the great progress made in natural
scientific thinking. However great Plato and Aristotle were, they did
not possess natural scientific thinking, which requires the kind of
withdrawal of man's inner being from nature that did not take place
until the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution. Thus our
development of natural science is part and parcel of one epoch of
human evolution. Lessing described this very beautifully, whichever
way you interpret his words, by saying that the whole of human
evolution is “a kind of Education of Mankind.” Since the
middle of the fifteenth century the education of mankind consists of
the education of the consciousness soul, and this it is that has
actually brought with it the natural scientific outlook. Looked at
from inside this is a section of human evolution.
We only
understand fully what belongs to the era from the eighth century
B.C.
till the middle of the fifteenth century
A.D.
when we look at it from the inside, from the point of view of man's
soul development. For the founding of Christianity
falls in the first third of this era, and the
spiritual scientist sees this as the greatest event that has ever
occurred in earthly evolution. With his ability to look down the
centuries from inside at man's soul development, the spiritual
scientist recognises better than anyone else that in the first third
of the epoch I described as the era of the evolution of intelligence
and feeling, something was still present that had existed in
the highest degree in the days of early humanity, namely something
that made man feel a part of the natural world around him; but in
those times this feeling arose out of the subconscious depths
of the soul. Then there broke upon human evolution the Event of
Golgotha, the nature of which can never be understood if people try
to understand it merely out of a material conglomeration of
historical facts. There broke in upon human evolution a
fructification of man's evolution, in that a super-sensible
element united with this evolution from out of cosmic heights,
preparing the way for man's being to become conscious and inwardly
strong to an ever greater and greater degree.
Initially
the Event of Golgotha, the Incarnation of Christ as Man, met
with a way of thinking and feeling that was still of an instinctive
nature. It took the next two-thirds of this epoch for these forces
emanating from the Event of Golgotha to flow into man's more or less
unconscious instinctive forces of intelligence and feeling.
Then from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards came the
conscious soul evolution of man and, with it, the epoch of
natural science, when men turned their attention to external
processes of natural phenomena. The beginning of this epoch was the
time in which the earlier connection with the spirit, with the
super-sensible element in the world, tended to withdraw in favour of
conscious existence. This spiritual element, which in earlier times
man perceived as though by instinct in the very phenomena of the
world, now sprang to life in his inner being by virtue of the fact
that the Being of Christ had united Himself with human evolution. But
this new life within man came at the point in his evolution when, as
I said, man was becoming increasingly conscious and therefore
increasingly external. Thus it happened that just at the
beginning of the age of the consciousness soul, the age of the
conscious development of intelligence and feeling, although the
Christ Impulse was at work in human souls, men's consciousness was of
a kind that made them lose sight of their spiritual and
super-sensible being. Therefore it also happened that people had less
and less understanding for the Event that had united itself
with human evolution in a super-sensible way — the Event of
Golgotha. In the nineteenth century there was a climax in this
respect. Now the point had been reached when the Event of Golgotha
was divested of its super-sensible character even in the eyes of most
of the faithful. Even for these the Event of Golgotha was, in the
nineteenth century, relegated to the world of external facts, so to
speak. Jesus the Christ Bearer became the ‘simple man of
Nazareth,’ a person no greater than a somewhat more
highly developed human being. And this happened solely because, while
they were developing the consciousness soul, men also lost the
understanding for the super-sensible element in history. The
conception of Jesus as the simple man of Nazareth brought materialism
into Christianity. And nowadays there is not only a materialistic
science, there is also a widespread materialistic faith.
Now,
however, we have come to the time — in this epoch of human
evolution that began in the middle of the fifteenth century —
when we face the necessity of ascending once more to the
spirit. And the path I described to you today and the day before
yesterday is the path that coming humanity will have to tread to
ascend to the spirit again and to find its way once more to
super-sensible knowledge and to the super-sensible phenomena lying
behind the sense world and behind external historical facts. It is
this which will also lead it to the super-sensible nature of the Event
of Golgotha. Then this unique Event will appear as the kind of
turning point in the whole evolution of mankind that everybody can
understand and accept. With the coming of this new super-sensible
knowledge the Event of Golgotha will be divested of all its
sectarianism, and, rising above separate denominations, even above
the religious differences existing in different parts of the world,
an understanding of it will become the general possession of mankind.
Then the Mystery of Golgotha will be seen to be the most important
super-sensible fact of all human evolution. The narrow view of Christ
that prevents people from seeing the true mystery — and which
still inhibits a number of denominations, because materialism
has even found its way into faith — this narrow point of view
will be superseded; people will find a new understanding of
this Impulse, which is the greatest and most powerful Impulse in the
whole of mankind's evolution.
This should
show you that spiritual science does not deprive people of what they
believe to be the results of ‘simple faith.’ On the
contrary, spiritual science reaches up to the highest level of
knowledge in order to show mankind the greatest Event of human
evolution. This is something modern man longs for if he is honest
enough with himself and admits that he is more and more disenchanted
with ‘simple faith.’ It had to be stated here as
belonging to spiritual science. And as we are in the age of
consciousness, in which mankind is dividing and becoming
disharmonious to an ever greater degree — because the
individual is thrown back on his own personality and his personal
loneliness — it is essential to point to what men, the whole
world over, need to re-unite them once again.
What is
needed today is a new understanding of the central Event of
human evolution. Spiritual science does not take anything away from
man. On the contrary it gives him just what his present-day
consciousness needs. And if people, out of their healthy human
understanding, want to complain of the views and teachings of
anthroposophical spiritual science, we shall have to tell them that
their thinking is not healthy enough and that they must throw off the
illusions with which the purely external, material theories of
natural science have befogged them; they should think about their own
thinking, and then they will make a remarkable discovery about the
particular nature of man's present-day life of soul. They will hear
what natural science tells them from reliable, strictly methodical
sources about the evolution of the physical body. But, when their
minds are healthy, they will not be able to agree that there is no
more to life as they know it than natural science tells them. They
will find that when they listen to spiritual science in a really
healthy way, and draw comparisons with life, the contradictions
arising out of the illusions produced by materialism are enough
to make them ill, and that they will only rediscover life if they
refer, with the help of spiritual science, to the super-sensible
nature of man and the super-sensible world in which the evolution of
man and mankind are embedded.
If you have
acquired the possibility in this way of seeing historical life
supersensibly, the present world epoch, or epoch of human
evolution, will appear before you — it is not the right
occasion today to include a description of the whole of earthly
evolution; you can read that up in my
Occult Science
— and you will be far enough advanced to aspire to the kind
of perception Lessing spoke of in his
Education of the Human Race,
which he had attained out of his much admired healthy human
understanding within the German spiritual stream of development. Then
you will be capable of perceiving that in the course of spiritual
evolution human life runs its course in repeated earth lives. For the
whole span of man's life consists of an altenation between the kind
of lives he spends in a physical body and another form of existence
between death and a new birth, spent in the super-sensible worlds
which are connected with our world through the spirit that is also at
work in historical evolution. We discover then, as
Lessing also did, that in coming back for repeated lives on
earth, man himself carries evolution forward from one epoch to the
next. This knowledge of repeated earth lives cannot become a
theory in the accepted sense, for when you are capable of penetrating
into the spirit of human evolution in the way I have described,
you can find this knowledge for yourself, but you have then acquired
it as a fact of man's higher super-sensible nature.
A new
perception of spiritual life, a perception which will help us
find the spirit again in our materialistic world, is about to enter
present civilisation. The materialistic outlook prevailing today is
largely responsible for estranging man's inner life from a real
perception of the spirit, and depriving him of the courage to
plunge into this spiritual perception, making him believe that
the only way to the spirit is the way of ‘simple creed’
based on a literal acceptance of the Bible. This ‘simple
creed’ and the materialism of our time are closely related, for
before such a thing as materialism existed, there was not this
perpetual harping on a simple creed. After all, at the time when
Christianity arose, the teachings about Christ Jesus came out
of highly developed spiritual vision, though of course it was
atavistic. This old spiritual vision cannot be the way of
modern man. Modern man must work for spiritual vision in the way I
have tried to describe. If you become aware of what is living deep
down in people's souls nowadays and colouring their whole outlook,
although they are not fully conscious of it — this mood that
unconsciously flashes into consciousness, sometimes in a
pathological way, so that people feel it as inner unrest, as a
psychopathic tendency, even though they cannot explain it
— this mood is the striving for a new spirituality. I certainly
do not wish to be so immodest as to suggest or maintain that the
spiritual science or anthroposophy I give lectures on is the only
thing that has to happen on the path to the spirit. What I have
given here is just a humble attempt. And anyone who makes a
humble attempt like this, yet is aware that it comes out of the
deepest longings of the present time, is also aware that there will
be more and more people coming along and attempting to tread the
paths to spiritual vision and to proclaim the possibility of
ascending to life on a super-sensible level.
But you can
see too, that when I lecture on anthroposophy I cannot spare
anybody's feelings, at the first encounter, that these things
are rather difficult to understand. You will also see that what leads
to these spiritual worlds is neither a damping down of clear thinking
nor a damping down of the will that works in practical life, but is
an intensification of both thought and will. Many people of the
present day cannot muster sufficient inner courage for this as yet.
So they look at anthroposophy and say: They mean well, these people,
but with their anthroposophy they tell us all kinds of things about
mankind's evolution, even about cosmic facts of a spiritual nature.
Looking at anthroposophy from a safe distance, people like this
call it ‘crazy stuff’, etc., terms used here recently in
Stuttgart, to apply to the world of physical facts. Yet, ladies and
gentlemen, people will never get beyond a nonsensical, merely hazy
presentiment of the spiritual world if clear, mathematical thinking
and a light-irradiated, self-disciplined will are not applied to
bring down real facts from the super-sensible world to replace mere
phrases. Modern man needs these facts.
I have
spoken to you about what mankind is longing for. And it was this very
longing that caused such a caricature of super-sensible striving to
arise in the nineteenth century. People only know how to strive in a
materialistic way. But alongside this materialistic striving
they acquired a yearning for the spirit. So they investigated the
spirit on the pattern of their research in the material world and
carried out a caricature of spiritual research, namely
spiritualism, which is nothing else but a material search for
something that can never be matter, namely spirit. What comes out in
a pathological way in spiritualism as a caricature of spiritual
striving, is the same thing that is being sought for by
anthroposophical spiritual science, but in the latter case it
is healthy and is based on a further development in clear
consciousness of forces already inherent in man.
Anthroposophical
spiritual science therefore appears, in the best
sense of the word, as an attempt (we mean this modestly) to bring
perceptions of the spiritual world, super-sensible man and his
evolution into the age of great and outstanding perceptions of an
external, scientific nature. Not until these scientific perceptions
have been supplemented by the perceptions of spiritual vision will
modern man understand his being in the way he longs to. Therefore
spiritual science as we pursue it must shake off all the reproaches
it encounters, even those from well-meaning people.
To conclude
I should like to draw your attention to the fact that even the kind
of people who have no intention of rejecting spiritual science are
offended when we speak to large audiences about ‘spiritual
secrets’, as they call them, instead of keeping these in
intimate sectarian circles. Oh, they know very well that it is a
sacred duty of the times to stand up and speak to large audiences.
Therefore I must not pay attention to the kind of reproach that was
made recently: — That it is just not done to speak about cosmic
things to a large city audience, like Dr. Steiner does. What is
needed is a master of the art of divine gesture who can inexorably
drive everyone from his presence who does not know when to be silent.
What we need is an approach that can distinguish in more than mere
words between what is profane and what is holy. — In answer to
this reproach we have to say that we have also entered the age of
democracy in the spiritual sphere, and that it is a sin against
mankind to wish to distinguish between what is profane and what is
holy. Anyone whose destiny allows him to penetrate into the spiritual
worlds has the obligation to speak as widely as possible to people's
healthy human understanding, so that this healthy human understanding
can find the way to the spiritual worlds again.
Although
this is an absolutely general task of the times — an obligation
to the whole of mankind — we have a special obligation to the
middle European region in which we live. If anyone has been deeply
interested for decades, as I have, in the beginning made in German
spiritual life in the direction of a new spiritual perception by
Lessing (who I have mentioned today), Herder, Goethe, Schiller and
the German philosophers, then he knows — through the
interest he takes in this spiritual life, if he does so in such a way
that he makes those forces his own which motivated Goethe, Schiller
and the rest — that this spiritual life leads straight into
what I have been speaking about today and the day before yesterday.
In order to overcome the terrible materialistic development of recent
times, we in middle Europe can begin by bringing to mind again that
which had its beginnings in the Great Age of Germany. Then what is
called anthroposophical spiritual science will follow on
naturally. That is why, just at this time when the German
spirit is so little appreciated anywhere, we chose to call the
building conceived as a High School for Spiritual Science the
‘Goetheanum.’ ‘Goetheanum’ as a sign that
from the spiritual point of view, the Goetheanistic German
spirit has the courage to face the world.
I know, too,
that we are not sinning against Goethe if, in order to link on to
something historical, we use the term Goetheanism for the new way of
thought and vision we have spoken of today and the day before
yesterday. However much is taken away from us in external ways, and
however much power the world has today to make things as difficult as
possible for us in external matters, it can never take away from us
our connection with the best of German qualities, if we ourselves
intend having this connection. If we have this intention, however,
then even in these dark and sad times we shall not lose hope —
the hope of a re-awakening, in a new form, of the spiritual life of
mankind, that we are perhaps destined to have just in this time of
greatest need.
If we
continue with the kind of thing the materialistic age has brought
into human evolution in recent times, we shall get further and
further removed from the spirit and more and more attached to matter.
But if we turn our minds to our super-sensible nature and develop this
in ourselves, we shall add the results of spirit vision to the
dazzling achievements of the materialistic natural scientific
outlook. This spirit vision will then be like the soul of the world
conception of outer nature. These two ways are open to human
evolution today: either to keep to a perception of the material world
and drag mankind further into chaos and distress, or to give birth to
our higher inner being from out of our super-sensible nature and the
super-sensible world. One of these directions, the materialistic way,
can already be seen in the ripples it sends to the
surface.
With its
external logic of the intellect and its inability to find its way to
the inner logic of facts, external science actually sees things very
inexactly. I will give you one example of what I mean: There is a
philosophical view prevalent at the present time that is a genuine
product of materialistic thought. It was advocated by Avenarius and
Mach, and it is to the effect that man's field of experience is
limited to what he takes in through ordinary sense perception and
ordinary consciousness. These two particular men expressed the
materialistic outlook by means of some very clever philosophy,
and if we inquire into what they expressed with such dedication we
shall acquire great respect for their intellectual
achievements. If we remain within the ordinary outlook,
we shall accept philosophers like Avenarius and Mach as individual
philosophical phenomena. But if we go beyond the ordinary
outlook, and recognise the inner impulses behind world conceptions
such as these, our eyes will be opened, and we shall see the
mysterious way these world conceptions work in life. We shall
then hit upon the remarkable connection existing between these world
conceptions and the decline that threatens European civilisation
today, and comes from the East, from Russia, from bolshevism.
We shall realise that the practice of bolshevism is the end result of
world conceptions like these. This is further confirmed by the
fact that the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach is the state
philosophy of bolshevism. This connection is known today only to
those who penetrate into the spirit of things and who can rise above
the noise of party opinion. Party opinion rides roughshod over
everything that has to be said right now for the salvation of
mankind. This kind of factual logic I have shown you is more
important for the man of today than all the logic of sophistry, which
would certainly never lead over from Avenarius and Mach to
bolshevism. But the facts do. If you want to understand the origins
of the things happening today to destroy civilisation within the
civilised world, look at the philosophies of the past few
decades, the second half of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth, and you will find further confirmation of
the fact that two ways are open to us today: One way continues with
the materialistic approach, despite the fact that its logic is as
subtle as that of Avenarius and Mach; and the other, that has been
characterised here, wants to participate in the spirit. If we carry
on in the first direction, the effect on European spiritual life will
be that man's spirit will become mechanised, man's soul
vegetative and man's body animalised. This is the fate
that actually threatens us today. If men become addicted to this
western mechanisation of the spirit, this state of being will combine
with eastern animalisation, which means that social demands
will be on a level of animal instinct and blind impulse. Western
mechanisation and eastern animalisation are connected one with
another. In between these is the vegetative or drowsy nature of soul
that does not want to be woken up by a treading of the path to the
spirit. This is the one perspective. Mankind will have to choose
between becoming mechanised in spirit, vegetative in soul and
animalised in body or going the other way. Hardship and
distress will no doubt eventually drive us into going the other way.
And although it will be the other people who have the power, they
will not be able to bar us from going this other way, the way leading
to the spirit. We shall have to want to go this way. We shall have to
want to keep our spirit free, even if our bodies are in bondage. Out
of the feelings and experience which can come to us out of a
consciousness of super-sensible man and the super-sensible world, we
shall have to resolve to have inner self-reliance. Then the others
will not be able to harm us. And I should like to describe in the
following words what might then come about after all:
In the
course of the nineteenth century we middle Europeans were foolish
enough to copy the western nations, even though there were no grounds
for this in western civilisation. Through hardship and
distress, through the very power these have over us, we shall perhaps
find the way to stop imitating all that we were foolish enough to
imitate when we chose them for a model.
Now, when
they want to use their power to give us the lead in the mechanisation
of the spirit, may we find the strength, in this old middle Europe of
ours that has such a great heritage, to tread the path to the spirit
from out of ourselves. We shall then avoid the materialistic
mechanisation of the spirit and attain the freedom I attempted to
characterise as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my
Philosophy of Freedom.
The liberated spirit will bring us to a
real vision of the spiritual world. The spirit will also help us find
the way to the equality of man. For human equality can never exist in
the external economic order only. As soon as man
understands the super-sensible nature of his own ensouled spirit
being, however, he will be able to find the law that makes him an
equal among equals. He will also deepen science; for with spiritual
vision, as I have indicated here today, medicine, law, and the art of
education will find their real source. Science will then lead neither
to the mechanisation of the spirit as it has hitherto, nor to the
inequality of man, for complete freedom of the spirit will come
to man when the spirit seeks it on spirit paths; human equality will
come to human souls when the spirit seeks it on paths of the soul;
and finally, when the human being who knows himself to be a
super-sensible spirit being approaches another person lovingly,
then — because human beings will be associating with one
another as conscious spirit beings in a loving way — in
addition to having a liberated spirit and a soul that is equal with
its neighbours, man will have, both in his human nature and in social
life, a true, spiritualised, ensouled, thoroughly human
brotherliness!
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