The Human Being as Spiritual Being Evolving through the Course of History E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 403

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'If we lived only in worlds of spirit, as we do between death and a new birth, we would never be able to acquire freedom there. It is something we can only achieve by our efforts within the physical world...' – Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner's lucid account of our current phase of evolution focuses on the threefold human being and the significance of incarnation on Earth. In a nuanced presentation, he supports the modern scientific outlook but highlights the urgent need to broaden it, emphasizing the importance of balance in thinking, feeling and will. Withdrawing into abstract intellectualism while letting feeling and will run amok, leads to unconscious egotism and, ultimately, the War of All Against All. In place of nebulous mysticism or narrow materialism, Steiner calls on us to bring our thoughts, feelings and actions under conscious self-control so that – for our benefit and society as a whole – we can live our lives with clarity, far-sightedness and purpose.  Intrinsic to this reassessment of ourselves and our place in the universe is a recognition of death as a gateway to continuing existence. Only by acknowledging our journey into the afterlife and our return to earth (reincarnation) will we take charge of a truly human evolution.  This previously-unpublished course of lectures ­– released in tandem with the twin course in CW 205 – features an introduction by Matthew Barton, notes and an index. Eleven lectures, Dornach; July–Aug. 1921, GA 206

Leseprobe

THE HUMAN BEING AS SPIRITUAL BEING

EVOLVING THROUGH THE COURSE OF HISTORY

HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL AND SPIRIT OF THE UNIVERSE, PART II

Eleven lectures given in Dornach, 22 July to 20 August 1921

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY MATTHEW BARTON

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

CW 105

Rudolf Steiner PressHillside House, The SquareForest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2025

Originally published in German under the title Menschenwerden, Weltenseele und Weltengeist—Zweiter Teil, Der Mensch als geistiges Wesen im historischen Werdegang, Der Mensch in seinem Zusammenhang mit dem Kosmos, Band VI (volume 206 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the third German edition (2019), edited by Johann Waeger und Hendrik Knobel

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 2019

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2025

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Rudolf Steiner Press expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 708 8

Cover by Morgan CreativeTypeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Visakhapatnam, IndiaPrinted and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

CONTENTS

Introduction by Matthew Barton

LECTURE 1

DORNACH, 22 JULY 1921

The twelve human senses

The twelve human senses. Classification of the senses according to: experience of the outer world, experience of one’s own inner life, and those that touch on both these realms. Mathematical aspects in relation to the senses. Understanding space, by contrast to the Kantian view. The thought-related and will-related senses.

LECTURE 2

DORNACH, 23 JULY 1921

Moral world order and natural necessity. The logic of Aristotle. The gnosis. Sensory experiences of the human being’s upper and lower realms. Oriental and Occidental culture. Knowledge and faith

Human experience encompassed either by knowledge or by faith. The dogmatic nature of the Council of 869, illustrated by modern judgements. The human being’s relationship to spirituality since Plato. The Gnosis up until the emergence of pure intellectualism in the mid-fifteenth century. Attribution of the senses to spiritual and to intellectual soul-life. Occidental and Oriental culture in relation to the senses. Thoughtless article by Professor Traub. The denial of the Aristotelian doctrine of pre-existence in Christian theology, leading to an enforced, dogmatic belief in life after death.

LECTURE 3

DORNACH, 24 JULY 1921

Memory and love. The threefold human being. Human life as a battle with natural causality

Reality by contrast to methodological errors in thought. Connections in the child between memory and head-oriented sense perception, and between concept-forming and blood formation. The head as transformation of the body, especially of the metabolic and limb system, from a former life on earth. Memory has capacity to look back into pre-existent life. In the forms of the head the physical body, etheric body and astral body fashion their imprint. The expression of soul-life in the outward sculpting of the brain. The I in the head remains mobile. Relationships between the head system and memory, as well as between the rest of the organism and the capacity for love. The contradiction between an experience of the moral constitution of the soul and natural causality.

LECTURE 4

DORNACH, 5 AUGUST 1921

How modern science developed out of Scholasticism

The evolution of worldviews from gnosis to intellectualism. The period from Aristotle to Augustine. The growth of intellectualism in humanity up to the time of high Scholasticism. Thereafter, until the nineteenth century, the intellect engages with natural science. Christian dogma recedes and fades. Modern science is a child of Scholasticism. The materialism of Spiritualism. Attempts by nineteenth-century philosophy to justify its existence.

LECTURE 5

DORNACH, 6 AUGUST 1921

Ernst Haeckel’s 60th birthday. Anti-social impulses as the outcome of materialistic head thinking and spiritual will nature. Worldview as medicine

Philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century: sensualists (such as Czolbe) and the Haeckelians. The content of speeches given at Haeckel’s 60th birthday. In the nineteenth century, intellectualism affects the neurosensory system in the human being. Cultural anxiety in Rollett. Spiritual nature in human feeling and will. The individual emerges into an egoism of instincts; further such development will lead to the war of all against all. Supersensible cognition as engagement between what is of and what is beyond the earth. The social problem of eastern Europe illustrates un- and anti-social existence. Spiritual knowledge is necessary as a counterpole to head knowledge.

LECTURE 6

DORNACH, 7 AUGUST 1921

Child development up to puberty

Forces working upon the child’s organism transform into soul capacities after the change of teeth. The content of a child’s concepts before and after the change of teeth. Growth forces in conflict with the breathing process between the change of teeth and puberty. Contradictory effects between the etheric body and the astral body in a child around nine and ten. The separation of the I and astral body from the physical body and the etheric body. On the death of children up to the age of nine. After the age of twelve, the process whereby a person becomes autonomous. The dualism between natural science and a moral world of ideas. The human being in the period between Greek culture and modernity. The need to bring knowledge of the world of spirit into all life. The nonsense written in an article by Dr Kolb about lectures by Geyer.

LECTURE 7

DORNACH, 12 AUGUST 1921

The human organization of physical body, etheric body, astral body and I

I-consciousness and sense perception. The astral body connected with thoughts, the etheric body with memory. The physical body as bearer of pictures of outward experiences. Physical body: interplay of forces with images. Etheric body: interplay of what surges upwards from forces of growth and nutrition with what underlies memory. Astral body: interplay of instincts and thoughts. I: interplay of willed action and sense perceptions.

LECTURE 8

DORNACH, 13 AUGUST 1921

Thoughts and memories and the world of the hierarchies

The connections between I-consciousness and sense perception, thought and astral body, memory and etheric body, image and physical body. The interaction of sense perception and memory. The meaning of the symbol of the serpent biting its tail. Thoughts are reflected images, are the reflection of experiences in the outer world. In memories the will is at work. The difference between subjective and objective in thought. Imaginative cognition in the world of the third hierarchy.

LECTURE 9

DORNACH, 14 AUGUST 1921

The connection between the human soul and spirit and physical corporeality. Evil

The interplay of soul and spirit with the material human body. On the grasping of ideas. Thinking and its counterpole, will-related life of growth. The alternation between the dying of matter in thinking and the metabolic process in growth forces. One-sided development of the spirit-soul or of physical-bodily nature promotes visions and hallucinations. How consciousness penetrates the etheric body. The etheric body streaming into consciousness as a source of evil. The being to whom the human being owes the faculty of memory. The bridge between the moral-religious and the physical, corporeal world.

LECTURE 10

DORNACH, 19 AUGUST 1921

Goethe, the Greeks and the pre-Grecian era

Changes in views of history illustrated by Goethe’s worldview. The development of intellectualism from the fifteenth century onwards. The difference between universal reason and the word as it lives in a particular language. Cosmogony in Greek culture by contrast to the views of modern intellectualism. Sensitivity to artistic speech. Evolution from a period where language was subordinate through into the intellectual era as an example of the transformation of human conditions of soul.

LECTURE 11

DORNACH, 20 AUGUST 1921

Knowledge of living things, of sentience, of the true nature of the human being and of the I in ancient times and today

Epochs of the human soul condition from primal revelations granting insight into the life of nature through to our modern age, with its cognition of dead nature. The breathing process in ancient times and yoga breathing. The need for contemporary humanity to advance again from a mere grasp of what is inanimate to a knowledge of life. The upbuilding process in the human being and the continual process of dying which undermines life. The I in its battle with the death process. Using living concepts to grasp the human being’s physical, etheric, astral and I nature.

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

INTRODUCTION

WHAT could be the relevance to us today of a series of lectures given over a hundred years ago? The lucid account in these pages of our present phase of evolution, and of the potential and actual problems it presents us with—which have only grown more acute in the intervening period—highlights how contemporary forms of knowledge are themselves an intrinsic part of the problems they seek to address. Steiner here celebrates the human intellect and the scientific worldview as an essential stage in our human development, one that has led to huge achievements and extraordinary advances in many fields, yet brings with it inevitable shadows and shortcomings for society and our relationship with the world around us. Rather than the final, triumphant accomplishment of the human race, as many today would regard the scientific outlook, Steiner sees it as only a ‘seed’ of future human conditions, of new forms of consciousness which we now urgently need to anticipate.

In his diagnosis, the ‘head knowledge’ we have developed, despite all its genuine benefits in terms of understanding of material things, has lifted us out of a true relationship with the rest of the world, which includes the rest of our own being. We have emancipated ourselves not only from old, seemingly outmoded belief systems and redundant mythologies but also from reality itself, which is far greater in scope than the intellect alone can fathom. In doing so, we have lost touch also with vital dimensions of knowledge and self-knowledge as well as with the whole context of a life that surrounds, indwells and sustains us.

In his subtle and highly nuanced account of our threefold nature, Steiner describes the dreamlike realm of feeling and the unconscious sphere of will impulses as equally integral and vital aspects of our nature which, if overlooked or ignored, evade our control and begin to lead their own, often chaotically egotistic life. He repeatedly points here to the contradiction in us between intellectual enlightenment and the enslavement of our unconscious depths by impulses that we fail to master, which, slipping from our grasp, can cause havoc in our interplay with each other and the world. At the same time, having emphasized head knowledge above all else, the very thinking upon which we tend to pride ourselves becomes abstract, distancing us from the totality of being of ourselves, others and the natural world, and our true place within this living context. Even our social ideals themselves become abstract and therefore ineffectual. Likewise, any vestiges of religious feeling we may have, tend to inhabit a realm divorced from this larger context of reality, a vague faith we keep in the ‘Sunday’ corner of our minds, disassociated from, though living alongside, the predominant materialistic outlook with its increasingly fixed ‘certainties’.

Just one of Steiner’s many clear-sighted insights (page 117) conjures a dystopian future that could fast be becoming reality. Describing the ordinary human faculty of thinking which we take for granted—by which he means linking ‘one thought with another’ or ‘making distinctions’—he asks us to imagine ‘…what your inner life would be like if you could not voluntarily connect the thoughts you have with each other, but if instead these thoughts linked with each other compulsively and involuntarily. You would be like a robot.’ (My emphasis.) While this scenario has not quite arrived yet, the increasing addiction to devices that think for us, as well as the advent of AI and transhumanist efforts to connect us up to machines, means that we may be well on the way towards it. This brings into sharp focus the first of his ‘supplementary exercises’: the simple yet surprisingly difficult concentration practice of pursuing connected thoughts about an everyday object (such as a clothes-peg) without allowing these thoughts to wander—thus a salutary remedy for any growing inability to think for ourselves.

In other words, we have to start from where we are: rather than lifting off into a nebulous mysticism, Steiner was intent on showing how we can bring our thoughts, feelings and actions under our control as first steps towards a better, more human future. He believes that the unleashing of unconscious egotism within us by our withdrawal into the intellect alone will have dire repercussions, which he calls the ‘war of all against all’. In other words, every individual will be out for themselves and against all others, failing to observe that it is only in our heads that we are separate from everything and everyone else, or believe ourselves to be, while in fact we are inherently united with each other, the earth, and the invisible realities that constitute us.

The parts of this organism cannot thrive unless the whole does, and the starting point for such healing (which means ‘making whole’) is a new or hugely broadened worldview. We should not dismiss our thinking, for it is the seed-point, the growing tip, of new ways of seeing and knowing. But we must—in our thinking firstly, and then in reality—try to reintegrate aspects of ourselves that we have suppressed or ignored for too long. To do so, says Steiner, we need to grapple with ideas that may seem to make no ‘sense’ in a solely material world, but which come alive for us when we ‘penetrate them by the strength of our own inner impulses’. The ideas and perceptions of spiritual science are therefore not ones we can simply ‘understand’ with our accustomed, rational intellect. We have to live with them, dwell on them—which means drawing on more of ourselves, becoming more active and alert in our realm of feeling, our otherwise dreamy apprehensions, descending into the dark, unconscious regions of the will, beginning to intuit, in that usually unlit place, aspects of reality hidden from sense perceptions; and in all such seeking, developing what Steiner calls a ‘sense of reality’ that can guide us further into regions the ordinary mind alone cannot penetrate.

The intellect ‘cannot understand life’ because, to be what it is, it has removed itself from living processes. To enlarge our outlook and embrace the whole of our being means at the same time to find sources of morality and empathy that materialism fails to sustain. In recognizing that the other is as intrinsically and vitally a part of the existence I belong to as I am, I can open, in freedom, a space within me for the being of the other to fill—be it another human being, or any other living entity. Which is what it means to love.

None of this means denying the real achievements and gifts of the increasing individuation that evolution has brought us. Love itself, as Steiner emphasizes, can only unfold in freedom if we first feel ourselves to be separate, an experience that belongs solely to our lives on earth. The poet Robert Frost says something very similar in his poem ‘Birches’: ‘Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better…’ The poem is also a kind of meditation on death and reincarnation: ‘I’d like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over’, he writes, a thought that follows on a sense of despair when life becomes too stuck and painful, ‘too much like a pathless wood’. The poet may be only half-aware here of realities he is hinting at, while for Steiner, in the last lecture, it is absolutely clear that there is at work within us, throughout life, a power that continually ‘combats death’, a deeper reality available to us only ‘where merely abstract cognition becomes inward experiencing’ of what we call the ‘I’. This is something we cannot grasp, paradoxically, except by means of death: ‘…we are able to form an idea of the essentially human only [when] we have no means of defining the human being in terms of the body.’ There is good reason for Steiner ending this series of lectures with this thought, since it is one that challenges the very roots of materialism: we bear within us a power that exists ‘immortally’ and thus gives far deeper meaning to all evolution. Only by acknowledging both our ‘going’ and ‘coming back’, this great breathing rhythm of the human spirit, will we develop ‘a new state of soul’ and, by recognizing the real depths of our nature, take charge of our own, truly human evolution.

Matthew Barton

March 2025

LECTURE 1

DORNACH, 22 JULY 1921

As we continue to study our human relationship with the world, I’d like today, firstly, to connect our forthcoming reflections with those recently presented by referring to an aspect of our anthroposophic outlook I spoke of a good while back—that is, the anthroposophic view of the human senses. As I said a long time ago, and have often reiterated,1 external science takes account only of the senses supported by more palpable organs, such as the sense of sight, of hearing and so forth. This way of seeing things cannot satisfy us in a deeper way since the sphere of our experience, of our overall experience, encompassed for instance by sight, is no less delimited and defined within the totality of our experiences than is, let us say, our perception of another person’s I, or our perception of the meaning of words. Nowadays, when everything has been turned upside down, you might say, it has become very common to think that when we meet another I we firstly apprehend the human form. We know that we ourselves have this human form and that this form of ours harbours an I—and so, it is said, we conclude that an I is also dwelling in the human form, resembling our own, of another person. This assumption shows no true awareness of what is involved in the immediacy of our actual perception of another person’s I. It is completely meaningless. You see, in the very same way that we directly encounter the outer world and encompass an aspect of it through our sense of sight, so likewise, with similar immediacy, another person’s I penetrates our field of experience. If we ascribe a sense of sight to ourselves, we must also ascribe to ourselves a sense for the other I.

Here above all we must recognize that this sense of I is something completely different from the unfolding of our awareness of our own I. Becoming aware of our own I is a completely different process—it is not perception at all really, and differs radically from the process involved when we perceive the I of another. Likewise something completely different is at work when we listen to words and apprehend a meaning in them, compared to hearing a simple tone or sound. While it is harder to demonstrate any particular organ for the sense of word compared to the organ of hearing involved in the sense of hearing, nevertheless we will, if we are really able to analyse our entire experiential field, inevitably recognize that we must distinguish between the sense that apprehends tones, musical sounds and sounds in general,2 and what is at work in our word-sense. And then we must also further see that words, word configurations and contexts are distinct from our perception of the thoughts of another person coming to expression within these words. Furthermore we have to distinguish between this perception of another person’s thoughts and actual thinking itself. The rough and ready manner in which people regard phenomena of soul today fails to distinguish the thinking we unfold in this subtler way as an inner activity of our soul-life from the outward directed activity involved in perceiving another person’s thoughts. Certainly it is true that we need to think when we perceive the thoughts of another so as to be able to understand these thoughts, and to relate these thoughts to other thoughts that we have also previously entertained. But this thinking itself is something entirely different from our perception of another person’s thoughts.

But when we then make such differentiations within the compass of our overall experience between areas that really are different from one another, yet have, in turn, an inner affinity which allows us to call them ‘senses’, we arrive at the twelve human senses as I have often described them. Nowadays one of the weakest points in our modern science is its account of the senses from a physiological or from a psychological perspective, since basically it lumps them all together.

Now within the domain of the senses, the sense of hearing, say, is of course radically different from the sense of sight or taste. And likewise, when we develop a clear understanding of the sense of hearing or the sense of sight, we must also distinguish a sense of word, a sense of thought and a sense of I. Most current terms relating to the senses are in fact really taken from the sense of touch. Philosophical premises of today establish a whole theory of knowledge on this basis, consisting of nothing other than the transference of a few sense perceptions based on the sense of touch to the whole realm of our perceptual capacity.

But if we now analyse the reality of this whole field, the compass of our outward experiences, which we perceive in ways that resemble, say, our experiences of vision or touch, or warmth, we arrive at twelve, clearly distinguishable senses, which I have often previously listed as follows:3 firstly the sense of I which, as I said, must be distinguished from an awareness of our own I; the ‘sense of I’ refers only to the capacity of perceiving another person’s I. The second is the sense of thought, the third the sense of word, the fourth the sense of hearing, the fifth the sense of warmth, the sixth the sense of sight, the seventh the sense of taste, the eighth the sense of smell, the ninth the sense of balance. If we are able to make clear distinctions in this realm, we will know that, like the sense of sight, there is a very specific and defined field of perception which conveys to us the fact that we stand in a certain state of balance as human beings. If we did not have this sense of standing in balance, or this capacity to maintain balance while swaying and dancing, we would not be able to fully develop our awareness.

The next sense is that of movement. The sense of movement is perception of what we are when either at rest or in movement. This perception is one we must experience in us in exactly the same way as we experience our visual perceptions. The eleventh is the sense of life, and the twelfth the sense of touch.

Sense of I

Sense of thought

Sense of word

Sense of hearing

Sense of warmth

Sense of sight

Sense of taste

Sense of smell

Sense of balance

Sense of movement

Sense of life

Sense of touch

These different sense fields can be clearly distinguished from one another, and at the same time we can find the common element in all of them to be that we perceive the outer world by means of them, interact with it, relate to and know it through them. They mediate the world to us, albeit in very diverse ways. Firstly we have four senses that connect us indubitably, immediately with the outer world—if I can use the word ‘indubitably’ in this way. These senses are: the sense of I, the sense of thought, the sense of word and the sense of hearing. It will be clear to you that our whole experience is involved with the outer world whenever we perceive the I of another person. This might be harder to recognize with the sense of hearing, but this is only because we have become accustomed to an abstract view of the senses: they have been summarized under a catch-all term, one that aspires to be a unified idea or concept about the life of the senses and does not really address the specific nature of each sense. Naturally we cannot ascribe terms to these things by outward experiment, as it were, but have to have a capacity to approach them feelingly.

Ordinary thinking does not in the least concern itself, for example, with the fact that hearing is mediated by movements of air, thus something physical, which basically take us directly out into the outer world. And if you consider how very outward the sense of hearing is, really, compared with the way we experience our whole inner organism, then you will soon see that you must regard the sense of hearing differently than, say, the sense of sight. In the case of the sense of sight, simply reflecting upon the organ of the eye will rapidly show you that what it mediates is, after all, to a great degree an inner process. We close our eyes when we sleep, but we do not close our ears. Such things, seemingly simple and trivial, give expression to matters of deep significance for the whole of human life. In sleep we have to close off our inward life from visual perceptions since we ought not then to be perceiving anything outward, whereas we do not need to close our ears, which live in the outer world in an entirely different way. The eye is much more a part of our interiority. Visual perception is a much more inward directed sense than auditory perception. I am not speaking of our feeling for what we hear, which is after all something different. A feeling for what we hear, upon which music is based, is different from the actual process of hearing.

These senses which, you can say, mediate between outer and inner, are the outward senses per se [see drawing p. 15]. The senses which, as it were, stand on the cusp between outer and inner, which are just as much outer as inward experience, are the four following senses: the sense of warmth, the sense of sight, the sense of taste, the sense of smell. Try for a moment to consider the whole sum of experiences that each of these convey; and you will see how on the one hand all these senses involve sympathetic experiencing of the outer world but at the same time also an experience within your own interiority. If you drink vinegar, which affects your sense of taste, you most certainly have an inward experience with the vinegar and at the same time one that is outwardly oriented, that can be compared, for instance, with the experience you have of another I, or of someone’s words. But it would be a very bad thing if you were, in the same way, to infuse your hearing of someone’s words with the same kind of subjective, inner experience. Consider this: when you drink vinegar you pull a face, and this shows clearly that your outward experience is accompanied by an inner one, that outer and inner experience are mingled. If it were the same when you hear someone speaking—if for instance someone was talking to you and you were compelled to experience their words inwardly in the same way as you experience the drinking of vinegar or a fine wine or suchlike, then you would never gain any objective clarity about the words the other was speaking to you. The unpleasant inward experience of drinking vinegar, and the pleasant one of drinking a fine wine both colour the outward experience that you have—but when you hear another person’s words, this is an outward experience that you ought not to colour in the same way. We can put it like this: the moral element enters at the moment one sees things in the right light. You see, there are nevertheless people who are so strongly immersed in their middle senses, in the sense of warmth, the sense of sight, the sense of taste and the sense of smell, that, especially in relation to the sense of I but also in respect of the sense of thought, they judge others, or their thoughts, accordingly. But then they fail to hear what the other person is saying: instead they perceive them in the same way as they perceive the taste of vinegar or a fine wine or any other drink or food.

Here we see how something of a moral nature arises simply from an otherwise completely morally neutral mode of observation. Let’s take the example of someone whose sense of hearing, but especially their sense of words, their sense of thoughts and sense of I, are poorly developed. Someone like this lives without a head, you might say—that is, they employ their head senses in a way that resembles the more animal-like senses. The animal cannot discern objectively in its objective-subjective mode of perception through the sense of warmth, sense of sight, sense of taste, sense of smell. An animal sniffs and smells; you can imagine that it is scarcely capable of objectifying, objectively picturing, what it encounters, let us say through the sense of smell. This is to a very great degree a subjective experience. Now of course all of us also have a sense of hearing, a sense of words, a sense of thoughts, a sense of I; but those who tend to live more immediately, with their whole organism, in the senses of warmth and sight, and especially in their sense of taste or even smell, modify everything they perceive according to their subjective tasting of it, or their subjective smelling of their surroundings. We can observe such things everywhere in daily life. If you want an example, observe people who cannot perceive anything objectively but whose perceptions instead are of the same nature as those mediated by the sense of taste and smell. This is apparent in the latest pamphlet published by the priest Kully.4 He is completely unable to apprehend the words or thoughts of another, instead grasping everything in the same way as one drinks wine or vinegar, or eats some food or other. Everything becomes subjective experience for him. And to the extent that one pushes the higher senses down to the level of the lower, this become immoral. It is indeed perfectly possible to connect morality with one’s whole outlook whereas at present what works so destructively in our whole civilization, and undermines it, is the fact that people do not know how to build a bridge between what they call ‘natural law’ and what they regard as morality.

Moving on now to the next four senses, that of balance, movement, life and touch, we arrive at the most inward senses. These are inner senses because what the sense of balance conveys to us is our own balance. Similarly the sense of movement conveys to us the state of motion in which we find ourselves. Our state of life involves the general perception of how our organs are functioning, whether they are enhancing or detracting from our life. The sense of touch might seem surprising here, but whenever you touch anything the experience you have of this is an inner one. One can say that you are not feeling the chalk you hold in your hand but rather the skin contracted by it, to put it very roughly. Of course the process involved is subtler than this sounds: what is present in the experience is the reaction or response of your own interiority to an outer process; an experience which is not present in the same way in any other sense experience.

But now, however, this last group of senses is modified by something else. Here you have to recall something that I said a few weeks back.5 Consider the human being in relation to what is perceived through these last four senses. Despite the fact that we here inwardly perceive things—our own movement, our own balance—that are decidedly subjective, the processes themselves are entirely objective. This is the interesting thing here. We perceive these things within our organism, but what we perceive is completely objective for, basically, in terms of physical realities, it does not in the least matter whether a lump of wood moves, or a person, whether a piece of wood is in equilibrium, or a human being. In terms of the outer, physical world, a moving person can be seen in the very same way as a piece of wood. The same is true of balance. And if we consider the sense of life, this does not initially appear to relate to the outer world; yet this appearance is illusory for our sense of life in fact mediates entirely objective processes. Picture a process occurring in a test tube: it unfolds according to certain laws and can be described objectively. What the sense of life perceives is one such process, except that it unfolds within us. If this process is working as it should, it conveys this sense of life to you as objective occurrence; and likewise if something is awry, your sense of life still objectively conveys this. Even though the occurrence is enclosed within your skin, the sense of life mediates it. An objective process, ultimately, has no connection in particular with the content of your life of soul. And this is true of the sense of touch also: understood rightly, it always brings about an alteration in the whole structure of our inner organism. So what we have described in these four senses contains something absolutely objective, something that embeds us in the world as objective beings who can also be outwardly seen in the sense-world.

And so we can say that though they are decidedly inward senses, what we perceive through them lives in us in exactly the same way as what we perceive outwardly in the world. In terms of the physical course of events, it does not matter whether we set a block of wood in motion or whether we ourselves are in motion. The sense of movement is there only so that what occurs in the outer world also comes to our subjective awareness, is perceived.

And so you see that our truly outward senses are the ones that are really subjective. They have to transmit into our human experience what is perceived through them. And then the middle group of senses can be characterized as a swinging back and forth between the outer and the inner world, while the last group of senses convey to us an experience of what we are by virtue of belonging to the world rather than to ourselves.

We could greatly enlarge on these observations and then we would discover many characteristics of one or the other senses. We need only acquaint ourselves with the idea that, in seeking to develop a theory of the senses, it would be wrong to describe them merely in terms of the more palpable sense organs but instead we must analyse the relevant experiential field. It is not true to say, for instance, that no distinct and separate organ exists for the sense of words; it is just that materialistic physiology has not yet located, investigated and determined this in the same that it has for, say, the organ of hearing. And likewise the sense of thoughts exists too, and simply has not yet been studied in the same way as, for instance, the sense of sight.

In surveying the human being, we will have to recognize clearly how the life we ordinarily refer to as ‘soul-life’ is bound up with what we can call the higher senses. The range of experience passing from the sense of I to the sense of sight more or less fully encompasses what is ordinarily called the life of the soul or psyche. If you call to mind everything you possess through the sense of I, the sense of thoughts, the sense of words, the sense of sound,6 the sense of warmth and the sense of sight, this gives you more or less the scope of what you call soul-life. From these decidedly outward-oriented senses, from their distinctive qualities and characteristics, something still intrudes into the sense of warmth, a sense we are far more reliant on in our soul-life than we ordinarily realize. The sense of sight of course has huge and broad importance for our entire soul-life. But with the sense of taste and smell we delve downwards already into the animal realm, and with the sense of balance, movement, life and so forth, we delve down fully into our corporeality. One can say that these senses are already entirely inward-oriented, perceiving what no longer belongs to our soul-life.

If we were to try to draw our human nature and being schematically, we would have to do it as follows. We would have to say that our true inner life resides in our upper realm [yellow]. This inner life cannot exist at all if we do not have these specifically outward-directed senses. What sort of human being would we be without other I’s alongside us? What kind of human being would we be if we had never heard words or received thoughts and suchlike from others? Just imagine this clearly. By contrast, the senses that pass downward from the sense of taste perceive what occurs within us, mediate processes that initially unfold internally [red]. But these become ever unclearer. It is true, certainly, that we have to have a very clear perception of our own state of balance, for otherwise we would faint and fall. To fall down in a faint means nothing other, for the sense of balance, than becoming blind means for the eyes.

But what these senses convey now becomes unclear. The sense of taste still unfolds, you can say, on the surface, and we have a clear awareness of this sense of taste. But although our whole body—well, except for the organism of limbs, yet even this too—is involved in tasting, very few people are still able to taste different foods once they reach the stomach since—what shall I call it?—civilization or culture or perhaps we can say gourmet culture, is not yet evolved enough to do so. Scarcely anyone can still taste the various foods in their stomach. They just about discern taste in their other organs but once food reaches the stomach most people couldn’t care less about it, despite the fact that the sense of taste does in fact continue subconsciously but decidedly through the whole digestive tract. Basically we taste what we eat in our whole being but, as the food imparts itself to our body, it very soon grows dim to our perception. Likewise our whole being unfolds the sense of smell through the organism, in passive relationship to whatever we smell. This merely concentrates itself, is focused, in the uppermost region although a fragrant flower or anything that smells does actually take hold of our whole being. Once we know this, know how the sense of taste and the sense of smell permeate our whole being, then we also know what this experience of smelling, of tasting, involves, how this continues within us—and then, if we know for instance what taste really means, we distance ourselves entirely from every kind of materialistic outlook. And once we recognize that this tasting process permeates our whole organism, we can no longer describe the further course of digestion in terms of mere chemistry as modern science does today.

On the other hand, though, it cannot be denied that there is a huge difference between what I named here as ‘yellow’ and what I named, schematically, as ‘red’: a huge difference between the content we possess in our soul-life by virtue of the sense of I, of words and so on, and the experiences we have through the sense of taste, smell, movement, life and so forth. The difference is a huge and radical one. And you can best discern the nature of this difference if you recognize what you absorb, what you inwardly experience, when, say, you listen to someone else speaking, or when you hear a sound. What you inwardly experience in response initially has no significance at all in itself, has no meaning for the outer process itself. What cares the bell for the fact that you hear it? All we have here is a connection between your inner experience and the process at work in the bell in so far as you attend to it.

You cannot say the same if you consider the objective process involved in taste or smell or, even, let us say, in touch. A world process is at work here, most certainly. You cannot separate what here unfolds in your organism from what occurs in your soul. You cannot now say what you can say of the ringing bell: that it is indifferent to whether you are listening to it or not. You cannot say that what occurs on the tongue when you drink vinegar cares nothing for what you experience in response. You cannot say this for there is an intimate connection between them. Here the objective process is one with the subjective process.

Modern physiology commits the gravest sins here since it regards a process such as tasting in the same way, more or less, as seeing or hearing. There are philosophical discourses that lump everything together and speak in merely general terms of sensory qualities and their relationship to the soul. Locke, and even Kant, speak very generally of a relationship between the external world of the senses and human subjectivity. In fact everything comprising the senses we describe as rising higher from the sense of sight onward, is entirely different in nature from all that can be ascertained as descending lower from the sense of taste. It is impossible to unite these two realms in a single theory. And doing so has sown enormous confusion in the theory of knowledge—since Hume or Locke, or even earlier, authors have caused havoc that continues to this day in modern physiology. You see, we cannot discern the true nature of processes, nor, therefore, the true nature of the human being, if we pursue these things according to such preconceived notions, without unprejudiced observation.

And so we have to recognize that in studying human nature we find on the one hand a clearly inward-oriented life that we live simply by being in relationship with and perceiving the outer world. And on the other hand we also perceive, but what we perceive places us into the world. To put it radically, in conclusion, we have to say that what happens on my tongue when I taste is an entirely objective process within me; it is a world process, a cosmic process, unfolding within me. On the other hand I cannot say that the picture or image that arises in me through seeing is, to begin with, a world process of the same kind. If this picture did not arise, the whole world would still be what it is. This distinction between our upper and lower aspects is one we must definitely maintain. If we don’t, it will be impossible to pursue our studies in certain directions.

We have mathematical truths, geometric truths. Superficial observation of human nature will say that a person draws mathematics from his head or somewhere (for the ideas people form are not very clear). But this is not true. Mathematics comes from quite different realms. When you consider the human being, you find before you the regions from which mathematics does originate: the sense of balance and the sense of movement. Mathematical thinking derives from the depths to which our ordinary soul-life does not reach, does not descend. At levels below our normal life of soul there lives what conveys us upwards, which we unfold as mathematical forms. And we can therefore see that mathematics is really rooted in what is at the same time cosmic within us. We are only truly subjective in the senses that lie in this upward direction, starting from the sense of sight; and in the senses that lie below this, we are rooted in the world. With these we are embedded in the world. But with what lies lower here, we are no different than a block of wood, no different from the whole of the rest of the external world. And therefore we can never say, for instance, that spatial dimensions have anything subjective about them, for they arise from something within us in which we ourselves are objective. The space we measure with our step as we walk through it, and which our movements mediate to us, is exactly the same space we apply to what we observe once we have drawn it forth from us in a picture. We cannot possibly say that space is in any way subjective, for it does not emerge from the realm from which subjectivity emerges.

The outlook I have described here is far removed from all Kantianism, since the latter knows no distinction between these two realms or aspects of human life. It does not know that spatial relationships cannot be subjective since space is a realm that emerges from a sphere within us that is intrinsically objective, and with which we have an objective relationship. We just have a different connection with this sphere from the kind we have with the outer world, but it is nevertheless outer world, really an outer world, and above all becomes so every night when we withdraw our subjectivity, the I and the astral body, in sleep.

One has to realize that there is no use in compiling as many outer facts as possible in order to create a supposed ‘science’ that is intended to advance civilization, if very confused ideas and concepts still hold sway in our thoughts and comprehension of the world, if no clear concepts exist about things of the greatest importance. The task most decidedly before us now if we are to counteract the powers of decline and instead work towards powers of regeneration, is this: to see the necessity, above all, of forming clear concepts and ideas rather than muddled and confused ones; to see that concepts and definitions on their own offer us no foundation, but that our starting point must be the unprejudiced observation of realities.

No one is entitled to limit, say, the field of vision to something they then describe as a sense field if they do not at the same time, for example, identify the field of ‘word perception’ as such a field too. If you try to organize or classify the field of overall experience in the way I have often been doing, you will see that it is wrong to say that we have eyes and therefore we have a sense of sight,