The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Position of Anthroposophy among the Sciences

[ 1 ] If anthroposophy spreads into those areas of life where people usually seek their religious, and perhaps also their moral, impulses, then there are indeed already very many people today who feel at least a certain affinity for such a spiritual movement as anthroposophy. It is certainly the case that the spirit of modern humanity—I took the liberty yesterday of calling it the “spirit of science”—has in many respects shaken the old, traditional beliefs in people’s souls, and that, even though very many approach the anthroposophical movement with a certain skepticism, there are already, even in the present, very many souls who have at least an inclination toward such a search. Yet one must say that, in a certain respect, things become difficult for anthroposophy when it seeks to venture into the realms of the various sciences. This is precisely what is to take place within this course here, and it will fall to me represent the more general, comprehensive principles and research findings here, while the other lecturers delve into the specific scientific fields. But it is precisely at such an event that all—I mean this more in a theoretical than, say, moral sense—antipathies, which arise specifically from the scientific side against anthroposophy, must make themselves felt. And I can only assure you that anyone deeply involved in anthroposophical research fully understands the fact that, especially today, it is simply still extraordinarily difficult for a person immersed in current scientific practice to find the transition from today’s standard scientific approach into anthroposophy. And so it is that, although anthroposophy certainly has much to correct in the current state of scientific research—and although, especially as one moves into the organic and spiritual realms, has much to add to what is currently available to research, that this anthroposophy does not, in and of itself, actually contradict conventional science. It accepts its legitimate results and proceeds with them as I have just described. The reverse, however, does not occur, and, as I said, understandably not yet today. Anthroposophy is rejected. Its findings are regarded as something that does not meet the strict scientific criteria that people today feel entitled to set.

[ 2 ] It goes without saying that I will not be able, in a short lecture, to address everything that, from the perspective of anthroposophy itself, can serve as a sound justification for its findings. But I would nevertheless like to attempt in today’s lecture to characterize the position of anthroposophy within the scientific fields in such a way that one can infer from this characterization how seriously anthroposophy takes its foundations, just as seriously as any scientific conscientiousness and exact methodology in the present day. To this end, however, it will be necessary for me to subject you today to somewhat more abstract discussions, to matters that one might call difficult in everyday life, but which must nevertheless provide a certain foundation for what I will, however, perhaps present in a lighter and more accessible form in the coming days.

[ 3 ] Even today, many people still believe that anthroposophy somehow takes its starting point from that nebulous state of mind found in genuinely mystical or occultist movements of the present day. They are completely mistaken if one attributes such a truly questionable foundation to anthroposophy. And in fact, only someone who knows this anthroposophy either only superficially or even only from the perspective of its opponents can do so. What is, first and foremost, the fundamental orientation of anthroposophical consciousness is by no means taken merely in the sense as I characterized it yesterday, but in an even more precise sense, derived from that branch of contemporary science which is actually the least contested in terms of its scientific character and scope. However, in many cases, neither the supporters nor the opponents of anthroposophy view in the correct manner precisely what I am now about to characterize in this introduction.

[ 4 ] You have already heard about the place of mathematics in the sciences. And Kant’s statement that in any science there is actually only as much true knowledge and true insight to be found as there is mathematics present in it is, one might say, world-renowned. Now, I am not concerned here with mathematics as such, with what mathematics can be for humanity and for science in general, but rather with the state of mind into which a person enters when, if I may use the expression, they “mathematize,” that is, when they live within the activity of constructing mathematics. We find ourselves, after all, in a very special state of mind when we engage in mathematics. This state of mind can perhaps best be characterized by my first turning to that part of mathematics which is usually called geometry, and which, at least in those parts of this science known to the majority of people, deals with the study of space, with the treatment of space.

[ 5 ] In everyday life, we speak of three-dimensional space, and we imagine that this three-dimensional space is constituted in such a way that its three dimensions, as they say, are perpendicular to one another. What we perceive as space in our mind’s eye is something that initially stands before our spiritual eye quite independently of human beings and the rest of the world. That it initially stands before the eyes of the human being independently of that human being is evident to us from the fact that the human being defines himself as a being, as an individual, according to the determinations of space. He can certainly say that he is so and so far away from any point he takes into view. Thus, he situates himself within space. He also situates himself within the cosmos by regarding himself as an earthly being and placing himself within certain stellar distances and the like. In short, human beings initially regard space as something objective, as something that has nothing to do with their own being. This is precisely what led Kant to speak of space as an a priori intuition, an intuition that is, so to speak, given to human beings from the outset. He has no way of asking by what means he possesses this space. He must simply accept it as something ready-made, into which he must find his way once he has attained full consciousness of his earthly existence.

[ 6 ] But that is not how things really are. As human beings, we actually form space out of our own being. We simply do not follow this formation of space—or rather, the concept of space, the perception of space—with our consciousness, because it occurs during a stage of human life in which we do not yet reflect on ourselves and our own activities in the way we would need to if we were to fully understand the nature of space in relation to our own being. For we would not have such a conception of space as we do if we did not first experience the three dimensions of space within our earthly existence. We experience them. We experience the one dimension by placing ourselves, out of the powerlessness to walk upright as human beings after our birth, into this one vertical dimension. We simply come to know the existence of this dimension through the very way we ourselves form it. And we do not come to know just any dimension from our human existence that simply stands perpendicular to the other two dimensions, but we come to know this very specific spatial dimension—which stands, so to speak, perpendicular to the surface of the Earth—by the fact that we human beings are not born upright at once, but rather that it is part of the laws of form in our earthly life that we must first bring ourselves into this vertical dimension.

[ 7 ] We also become acquainted with a second dimension in an unconscious way. You are no doubt aware that human beings—and here I wish to mention less what pertains to the external than what pertains to the internal—by developing the individual abilities that serve them in later life, acquire an orientation from left to right, from right to left. One need only consider how, in a certain part of our brain, we have the language centers—the so-called Broca’s areas—and how the other side of our brain lacks such an organization. It is now well established by recognized science that the development of this language organization in the left part of the human brain is connected to the initially active dexterity of the right hand. We know, then, that an orientation from right to left takes place. This orientation from right to left—this stimulation of activity on the left through activity on the right, or vice versa—is something we experience within our developmental laws just as we do the process of sitting up. And in this mutual orientation of the symmetrical right and left, we as human beings first experience the second spatial dimension.

[ 8 ] We actually never fully experience the third spatial dimension. We actually only begin to perceive the so-called depth dimension in an approximate way. We carry this out continuously, although this process is essentially deeply rooted in the subconscious. When we cross our two visual axes at a point that we perceive with both eyes, we extend the space—which would otherwise have only two dimensions for us—into the third. And in all our judging and estimating of spatial depth, we actually unconsciously form the third dimension from our own being, from our own laws of formation. Thus, one might say, we derive the three spatial dimensions in a certain way from our own lives. And what we then perceive as space—the space we use in geometry, initially in Euclidean geometry—is nothing other than an abstraction of what we gradually learn to recognize concretely in our own organism as the real three dimensions connected to our subjective human being. In abstraction, we omit the very specific configuration of space. The specific vertical, the specific horizontal, the specific depth dimension—these become indifferent to one another. Such processes always take place in abstraction. And then, when we have formed, through abstraction, the external space of which we speak in geometry from the three-dimensional space experienced within us, we actually extend our consciousness only over this external space.

[ 9 ] But now comes the significant point: that which we have first derived from within ourselves is now applicable to external nature, initially in its inorganic, lifeless formations, but also to the various spatial and kinetic relationships of organic formations. In short, this is so decisive for our external world that, in effecting this transition, this metamorphosis of space from a realm that actually lives only within us to what we usually call space, we are now fully immersed in our conceptions of space, our spatial experiences in the external world, and can determine our own spatial dimensions and spatial measurements in relation to our location and our movement. In fact, by forming space in this way, we step out of ourselves. That which we first experienced within ourselves, we carry out into the world outside our body, and we then place ourselves at a vantage point from which we look back upon ourselves, filled with space. And by first objectifying space in this way, we can now, using the concepts we form geometrically within space, study the external conditions of motion and position of things in such a way that we truly feel: we stand on solid scientific ground when we now immerse ourselves in things with what we have thus formed from within ourselves. In fact, given these circumstances, we can never doubt that we can simultaneously live within things through what has emerged from within us. When we assess the distance or the changing distance between two bodies in the external world according to spatial relations, it does not even occur to us that this could be anything other than our establishing something entirely objective, into which subjectivity does not intrude.

[ 10 ] But here, in essence, lies an important problem: the problem that something we have subjectively experienced within ourselves, when we transform it—simply by means of a kind of process of abstraction in relation to space—then becomes, as it were, something that permeates the external world and appears as belonging to the external world. Anyone who considers impartially what is actually at stake here must conclude: When something like the subjective experience of space in its three dimensions and its subsequent objectification takes place, the human being stands within the objective external world with what he himself has experienced. Our subjective experiences, insofar as they are spatial experiences, are at the same time objective experiences. And ultimately, it is not at all difficult, but rather, in essence, trivial and elementary, to grasp this point. For as we move through space ourselves, we are indeed carrying out something that is a subjective process, but it is at the same time an objective process, something that happens in the world. Whether we see an automaton moving forward or a human being, subjectivity is irrelevant. For the external world, what takes place as the human being lives spatially is entirely objective.

[ 11 ] Now, however, if one considers how a human being objectifies something from subjective experience, so that when he traverses space with his own self, he moves within an objective realm—for by objectifying space, he actually carries this space within himself —if one considers what is actually present there as a state of mind unfolding in time, then one comes to say to oneself: If a person could carry out the same thing that they can perform in relation to mathematization, also in relation to other experiences, then they would, in a sense, be able to bring the mathematizing state of mind into other experiences. Let us suppose, for a moment, that we were able not only during our unconscious life course—for learning to stand upright and walk, and orienting ourselves to left and right, certainly belong to the unconscious course of life, and the way we gauge the depth dimension of space belongs to the life that remains semi-unconscious—but to consciously transform our subjective experiences in such a way that we could then, standing outside ourselves with the transformed experience, look back upon ourselves. If we could now, just as we create and form the experience of space from within ourselves—so that when we look at a cube of salt, we bring the shape of the cube from our geometry and know that a complete identification of the shape of the objective cube of salt with what we have formed in our conception of space takes place—if we could form other things in the same way, if we could do this, for example, with regard to sensory perceptions, with regard to how we perceive sensory qualities—colors, sounds, and so on—and then confront external objects, then we would, in the same way, project what we first form within ourselves out into the world, thereby placing ourselves outside our bodies and even looking back upon ourselves. In mathematics—I have cited the geometric image, though I could cite others as well—this has indeed been accomplished, but it is not taken into account. Neither mathematicians nor philosophers have taken into view this peculiar relationship that I have now presented to you.

[ 12 ] With regard to sensory perceptions, however, we have fallen into a veritable scientific confusion. People often believe—and in this respect, physiologists in the 19th century even aligned themselves with epistemologists and philosophers—that when we see red, for example, the external process is some kind of vibrational process that propagates to our visual organ, to the brain. Then the actual experience of red is triggered. Or the note C-sharp is triggered by the external vibrational process in the same way. Here we have fallen into confusion because we can no longer distinguish what lives within us, within the limits of our body, from the external world. Here one certainly speaks of the fact that all sensory qualities—colors, sounds, thermal qualities—are actually only subjective; that the external objective is something entirely different.

[ 13 ] If we could now, just as we first form the three spatial dimensions from within ourselves in order to find them again on and in things, if we could likewise draw from within ourselves that which otherwise appears within us as sensory perception and then place it outside ourselves, then we would find in things what we first found within ourselves, indeed, looking back upon ourselves, rediscover it, just as we find what we experience as space within ourselves in the external world, and looking back upon ourselves, find ourselves belonging to this space. Just as we have the world of space around us, we would have a world of interflowing colors and tones around us. We would speak of an objectified, colorful, resonant world, a flowing, colorful, resonant world, just as we speak of the space around us.

[ 14 ] But human beings can certainly achieve this: to come to know this world, which otherwise exists for them only as the world of effects, as the world of their own formation. Just as we unconsciously, simply out of our human nature, form the spatial structure in our minds, only to find it again in the world after we have first transformed it, so too can a person, through certain practice — which he must now carry out consciously — come to find within himself the entire scope of the world containing qualities, in order to then rediscover it in things, to rediscover it by looking back upon himself.

[ 15 ] What I am describing to you here is the ascent to what is called imaginative perception. What we have as the spatial world is possessed today by every human being who is not of a distinctly abnormal-mathematical or non-mathematical disposition. That which can live within a person in the same way—and live in such a way that the person thereby experiences the world simultaneously—can be cultivated in a person through exercises. To the ordinary, concrete perception of things, in which mathematics serves as a reliable guide, imaginative perception—it is merely a technical term and does not mean “imagination” or “imagination” in the ordinary sense—and open up a new realm of the world. I already mentioned yesterday that I will have to discuss a special method of exercise and research. I will then have to describe to you what one must do to arrive at such an imaginative perception, where we, in a sense, just as we do with space—which, admittedly, initially contains no reality of interest to us in the higher sense— come to have it as a total view, we now also have a total view of the qualitative in the world. But then, when we can face the world in this way, we are already within supersensible perception, on the first stage of supersensible perception. Sensory perception can be compared to that way of looking at things where we do not distinguish triangles and quadrilaterals in things, where we do not see geometric structures in things, but simply stare at things and take their forms only externally. The kind of perception that occurs in the imagination, however, is such an interweaving with the inner essence of things as mathematical perception is an interweaving with those world relationships that are indeed entirely accessible to mathematics.

[ 16 ] Whoever approaches mathematics with the right attitude will come to see, precisely in the way humans engage in mathematical thinking, the archetype of everything that is to be attained for a higher, supersensible perception. For mathematics is simply the first stage of supersensible perception. What we perceive as mathematical structures of space is supersensible perception. We simply do not admit it because we are accustomed to accepting it. But whoever knows the true nature of this mathematical thinking knows that, while what we have presented here regarding spatial structure is initially a science of little interest to our eternal human nature, it nevertheless fully embodies the character of everything that, in the anthroposophical sense, one can now demand of clairvoyance—without nebulous mysticism, without convoluted occultism, but simply with the aim of ascending into the supersensible worlds in an exact-scientific manner—what one can demand from clairvoyance in the true sense of the word.

[ 17 ] What clairvoyance is on a higher plane, every person can study through the process of mathematizing. And one might be most surprised that precisely mathematicians, who should know the process that takes place within a person when one mathematizes, do not actually demonstrate a deeper understanding of what appears as a higher, qualitative form of mathematizing in clairvoyant research, if I may use that expression. For what constitutes the first stage of this research—imaginative insight—is nothing other than a gaze into yet other realms of existence, attained through practice, than those permitted by mathematical thinking. But certainly, much changes with regard to human perception once one surveys this entire inner nature of mathematical thinking in true human self-knowledge. For then one arrives, for example, at the following: By looking back at how, in early childhood, one arrived at the structure of space through walking upright and standing upright, through orienting oneself to left and right, and through determining the dimension of depth; by building on this and coming to know the space of geometry—which is otherwise viewed only abstractly—through inner human experience, one also learns to recognize the disastrous consequences that arise when one cannot look back upon this living emergence of space, the conception and perception of space from the human being, but simply accepts space already in a metamorphosed form, independent of the human being. In recent times, we have come to view this space in its three dimensions in such a way that we have moved on, purely mathematically, to a fourth and further dimensions. Multidimensional spaces and the geometries that relate to them are, after all, something that has already become known in wider circles today. But for those who have now become acquainted with the living structure of space, it is indeed extraordinarily interesting to follow something like the extension of the arithmetic and functional operations performed for three-dimensional space by expanding certain elements, so that one then arrives at the no longer perceptible fourth dimension and so on—these things are not only interesting from a mathematical-logical perspective, but also entirely correct—but for those who are familiar with the development of the concept of space as I have described it, there is something quite special here. For example, if I may use this comparison, we can have a pendulum and watch it swing. We can observe this swinging of the pendulum purely from the outside, and imagine that the pendulum keeps swinging further and further. But it does not. When it has reached a certain point, it swings back to the opposite side. If we know the forces at work within the pendulum, then we know that the pendulum oscillates, that it cannot simply continue on because of the forces inherent within it.

[ 18 ] In a sense, one learns to recognize such force relationships in one’s own human state of mind with regard to space. Then the situation changes. Then, logically and mathematically, one certainly follows the process that constitutes the transition from arithmetic operations in three-dimensional to four-dimensional space, only to realize: it does not go any further. It does not proceed into an indefinite fourth dimension, but one must turn back at a certain point, and the fourth dimension simply becomes the third dimension with a negative sign. One returns again through the third dimension. This is the error made in multidimensional geometries. There, one simply proceeds abstractly from the second into the third, from the third into the fourth dimension, and so on. But what is actually present there, if I may express it comparatively, is not simply continuous, but oscillating. The conception of space must return upon itself. By taking the third dimension as negative, we in fact annihilate this third dimension. The fourth dimension is the negative third and annihilates the third, effectively making space two-dimensional. And in the same way, we can find a process for the fifth and sixth dimensions that is entirely real in itself, even though logically, mathematically, and algebraically it is simply continuous. If we are to imagine things in accordance with reality, we must return to the space that simply lies before us with the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions, and with the sixth, we have simply abolished space. We have arrived at the point.

[ 19 ] What is actually present in contemporary culture? What is present is that this contemporary culture has become abstract with regard to thinking, that one simply continues the course one has taken with thought from planimetry to stereometry, while reality leads back into space with the fourth dimension. But in returning now, we are by no means in the same position we were in when we emerged into the third dimension with the aiming; rather, in returning, we are imbued with spirit. If we find a way to conceive of the fourth dimension such that, since it is the negative third, we return to space through it, then space becomes filled with spirit, whereas three-dimensional space is filled with matter. And with ever higher spiritual forms, we find space filled as we proceed along the negative third, second, and first dimensions to the point where we no longer have spatial extension, but stand completely within the non-extended, within the spiritual.

[ 20 ] What I am describing to you is not formal mathematics; it is the reality of spiritual perception; it is that which shows how a spiritual path actually unfolds, in contrast to the path that has become so accustomed to material phenomena that, even when continuing with mathematics—which naturally no longer acts in a material way upon the soul’s constitution—it enters an imperceptible world where one can at most still calculate or form imaginary mathematical constructs.

[ 21 ] Here you can see that a complete immersion in mathematics leads to the point where one already takes in the inner nature of the spiritual as world-pervading through mathematics itself. A correct understanding of the mathematical state of the soul leads us directly into the concept of clairvoyant experience. And then we ascend to imagination, so that, in the manner that is yet to be described, we may now truly survey the spiritual realm through it—a realm that cannot be perceived in the ordinary way, but only in the manner I have described here, as we pass from the third to the fourth dimension and so on, up to the dimensionless realm, the point that leads us spiritually to the highest, once we have reached it—not as an empty point, but as a fulfilled point.

[ 22 ] I was once—and it made a significant impression on me—looked at with strange eyes when an older writer, who had written much about spiritual matters, saw me for the first time and asked: How did you first become aware of this difference between perceiving the sensory world and perceiving the supersensory world? - I replied, since I prefer to speak radically honestly about such matters: “At the moment when I came to know the inner meaning of what is called modern or synthetic geometry.” — So, when one moves from analytical to synthetic geometry, which allows one not only to approach the figures externally but to grasp the figures in their mutual relationships—that is, starting from the figures and not from external coordinates, one is inspired to study that state of mind which, when further developed, leads to entering the supersensible world. But if we merely construct spatial coordinates, we have not grasped the figure, but only the ends of the coordinates, and then we connect these ends and obtain the lines. But we cannot actually approach the figure with analytical geometry, whereas with synthetic geometry we live within the figures themselves. There we are inspired to study that state of mind which, when further developed, leads to entering the supersensible world.

[ 23 ] With this I have characterized the extent to which anthroposophy can certainly expect to proceed from mathematization in just as rigorous a manner as, albeit from a different perspective, modern natural science can proceed from it. This natural science makes use of ready-made mathematics. Anyone who wishes to grasp the clairvoyant process must seek it out where it exists in its most primitive form: in the structure of mathematics. If they can then carry it up into higher realms, they develop something that relates to the elementary, primitive aspects of mathematizing in the same way that later mathematical fields relate to the axioms. The first axioms of clairvoyance are alive. And if we succeed in developing mathematical thinking through exercises, we will not only perceive spatial relationships in the environment, but we will come to know spiritual beings—spiritual beings revealing themselves to us down to their spiritual innermost nature—just as we know the inner cubic nature of rock salt. We come to know spiritual beings when we carry what we develop in mathematical thinking up into higher realms in this way.

[ 24 ] That is what I wanted to say first about the foundation of what must be recognized within anthroposophy as clairvoyant research. We shall then see how this clairvoyant research can be applied to the individual fields of knowledge—both the natural sciences and the fields of medicine, history, and so on—and how the sciences are not to be challenged but enriched by bringing into their domains that which can be perceived through supersensible observation.

[ 25 ] But it can help us to correctly understand what is actually meant here if we consider the course of human development over a certain period of time, as it was, in that it ultimately led to the formation of our present-day scientific thinking. Let us just take a look at this scientific thinking. It is a kind of scientific thinking that, while acknowledging the mere formalism of mathematics, nevertheless learns the inner certainty and precision of research from mathematics and actually regards the laws of nature as valid only if they are capable of being formulated in a manner similar to that of mathematics. At the very least, this is a kind of ideal of modern scientific thinking. But this was not always the case. What we recognize today as the scientific spirit has only emerged in the course of human development. And today I would like to present to you, in a narrative form, just three stages of this evolving human spirit, the third of which we are currently experiencing. I will also touch upon some of the points that can be raised to substantiate what I intend to describe.

[ 26 ] If we look back at human development, we do not always find the same spiritual disposition that human beings have today. Today, human beings have precisely the state of mind that leads them, so to speak, to the highest development of the scientific spirit. If we go back to the ancient Orient—we need not even go back to the earliest times of Indian civilization—we find that what was the principle of knowledge in earlier times has been preserved there. In those days, the path to knowledge was called by a very different name than it is today. In those earlier times—even the history of language can corroborate this—when human beings looked inward, they did not perceive themselves as modern humans do, with their self-consciousness firmly grasped through thinking on the one hand, and their grasp of the mechanical through observation on the other. The people of the Orient, for example, could not have felt this way. As I said, even the history of language can attest to this. The people of the East initially felt themselves to be breathing human beings, breathing beings. A breather—that was what a human being was to them. And the process of breathing was what human beings looked to above all in self-knowledge, in self-contemplation. They even associated immortality with the breathing process: the onset of death was a kind of exhalation of the soul. Human beings as breathers! Why did people in this older state of mind perceive human beings as breathing beings? Because they truly felt life in the process of breathing—which did not take place unconsciously as it does today—in the inhalation and exhalation. The vibrations, the rhythm of life, were felt in the breath. Breathing was something one felt just as one feels hunger and thirst today. But this breathing process was a continuous sensation in the waking state. And when one looked with the eyes, one knew: now the breathing process extends into the head, into the eye. One perceived seeing as being permeated by the movement of the breath. The same was true of a movement of the will. One perceived the reaching out of the hand as if it were something connected to the breathing movements. One felt the expansion of breathing throughout the whole body as an inner life process. Both the more theoretical perception of the external world through the senses—one felt it animated by the breath—and the impulses of the will—one felt them animated by the breath. Human beings felt themselves to be breathing beings. And because they felt themselves to be breathing beings—because they could have said, “My breath is modified in such and such a way when I see through my eyes, hear through my ears, or receive thermal effects”—because they perceived differentiated, modified, metamorphosed, and refined breathing processes everywhere in their sensory perceptions, so for him the path of knowledge was also a systematic training of the breathing process. And this was for those earlier epochs of human intellectual development what our studying at the university is today. Today we study in a different way. Back then, if one sought religious fulfillment, if one wished to gain knowledge, one studied by systematically transforming the breathing process; in other words, by training what later came to be called yoga breathing, the yoga exercise. And what was being trained there? If one traces what the person who practiced yoga breathing actually achieved in order to ascend to higher levels of knowledge, one finds something remarkable. Those who had thus become scholars through yoga exercises—the term is not strictly applicable to these earlier conditions, but one might perhaps put it that way, and the study also lasted about as long as our university studies do—those who had become scholars in this way had grasped something in their soul’s constitution through this knowledge that, in a later era, for example in the Greco-Roman era, was regarded as the world of ideas and was now present as if by itself; it was present in the human soul in such a way that yoga was no longer needed.

[ 27 ] That is indeed the interesting thing: that what a person had to strive for in an earlier epoch through all manner of exercises is, in later epochs, naturally present in the course of development. There, it no longer signifies what it once did. When Socrates and Plato were active, the philosophy of a Plato no longer the same thing that it would have meant for the ancient yoga students or yoga teachers if they had arrived at the Socratic or Platonic truths. The yoga student was not organized in exactly the same way through his yoga breathing, but he was in the same state of mind as Plato, Aristotle, or Scotus Erigena. Thus we see what was practiced in the earliest times as regulated exercises of the breathing process, and we see that a certain vivid conceptual world was the result of this path of knowledge.

[ 28 ] One actually gains a proper understanding of what lived in Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras in later times when one says to oneself: This is what was taken for granted by people in that age, and what had been achieved in even earlier times through yoga. It was always through exercises that people strove for higher knowledge in a given age. Thus, in later epochs, the way of viewing the world was such that one no longer perceived one’s own breath by observing oneself, but rather perceived things as the Greeks did. I have elaborated on this in my *Riddles of Philosophy*. Back then, people did not form separate thoughts about the world; rather, ideas were one with sensory experiences. One saw one’s thoughts outside, just as one saw red or blue outside, just as one heard C-sharp, G, and B. Thoughts were out there in the world. Only those who know this can understand the Greek worldview. But people now perceived only spirit permeated by sensory perceptions, or sensory perceptions permeated by spirit—no longer the differentiated aspects of the breathing process.

[ 29 ] Once again, however, humanity now strove to attain a higher level of knowledge in all those fields where one was seeking higher insights. And this stage was again attained through exercises. After all, we have rather vague notions today about the period of the early Middle Ages, about the spiritual life of the early Middle Ages. Yet such abstract learning as we engage in today was not what a medieval student pursued. He was also expected to perform exercises, and ordinary learning was also connected with the practice of exercises. It was an inner practice and discipline that had to be undergone; though not in such a robust manner as the yogic practice of breathing, but rather a practice shifted more inward, yet still a practice. A legacy that is little understood today has been preserved in what was called the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, which anyone claiming a higher level of knowledge had to undergo. Grammar, which is the practical handling of language, was meant by this. Rhetoric, which meant not only the handling but the beautiful handling of language. Dialectic, the handling of language from the inner power of thought. And once one had mastered these three through inner practice as exercises, then came arithmetic—again, not our abstract arithmetic, but that arithmetic which became one with things, which had a clear awareness that human beings form everything inwardly. And so one learned geometry through inner practice. Geometry was made practically one’s own, woven entirely into the human being, made into a tool for human use. Then the whole process culminated in what was called astronomy. The human being integrated his being into the cosmos. They learned to recognize how their head relates to the cosmos, how their lungs and heart are a result of the cosmos. It was not an astronomy abstracted from the human being, but an astronomy in which the human being stood fully within it. And then, in the seventh stage—which was called music, though this is not today’s music, but a higher, living development of what had been more intellectually developed in astronomy—people came to know the weaving and surging of the divine being that interweaves and surges through the world. Thus, in a later era, humanity engaged in inner practice. What used to be breathing exercises was now more of an inner soul practice.

[ 30 ] And what was the result? In the course of human civilization, people gradually came to separate thought from sensory perception. This had to be achieved first. The Greeks still saw thought as part of the world, just as one sees colors and sounds. That thought is grasped by us as something we produce, as something that is not inherent in things—that this was perceived in the state of the soul and that it can be perceived this way today—is a result of practice in grammar, rhetoric, and so on, up to music. Through this, thought was detached from things. One learned to move freely in thought. This finally brought about what is now taken for granted by us, what we have today without these exercises, what we find today when we come to our schools, what is offered in the individual sciences, as was described yesterday. And just as one was supposed to make progress through exercises in earlier ages—in older times through yoga breathing exercises, later through exercises ranging from grammar to music— so that from the yoga breathing exercises one naturally acquired the Greek-Latin worldview, and from the exercises ranging from grammar to music, the modern scientific perspective—so this can be continued, and best of all by starting from the most certain foundation, from mathematics, which is indeed recognized today as the most certain. It is true, as surprising as it was to that writer when I said: It was through synthetic geometry that I primarily brought the clairvoyant process to my consciousness. It is, of course, not the case that anyone who has studied synthetic geometry is a clairvoyant, but the process can be illustrated in this way. As surprising as it was to this writer not to be told, not to hear anything that is recounted by such people who tell fortunes, it is nevertheless the case that anthroposophy proceeds from that upon which science is firmly established today, in order to carry it further; to take precisely that which exists as a certain science, from this foundation that it has laid itself, into the realms of the supersensible. We must therefore internalize the process even further. And an even more internalized process is what I had to describe as the path to modern clairvoyant research in my books *Esoteric Science* and *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*. But precisely such a historical perspective as I have outlined can show you that the person who today stands fully conscious within anthroposophy derives this consciousness from a standing within the course of human development; that they do not assert, out of some subjective preference or sympathy, that we need to undertake exercises today to continue the course that has brought humanity to its present point—but rather that they know how the course has been up to now and how it must continue. This historical consciousness, this awareness of being immersed in the entire process of humanity, is what is added to the insight one gains when one takes in the spirit of modern science—not externally, but internally—into one’s soul.

[ 31 ] Then it may well be said that anthroposophy knows what its place is in today’s science. It knows this in an absolute sense, in that it understands the peculiar nature of today’s sciences, in that it rejects all dilettantism and all amateurism, and builds on what true science is. On the other hand, it recognizes historical necessities. It knows how humanity’s path must continue from what has been achieved so far, if we do not wish to stand still, just as all our ancestors, wherever they participated in the development of civilization, sought to move forward. We must also move forward. But we must know what steps to take from the current standpoint of the scientific spirit. How this looks in detail, I will have to describe in the coming days. Then what I had to present today as a foundation may perhaps become easier to grasp. Perhaps, however, it has become evident that anthroposophy, already from a scientific and science-like mindset, knows what it actually wants in relation to the present and the entire development of humanity, as well as in relation to the individual sciences. It will work because it knows how it must work. Perhaps its path will be a long one. But when one considers, on the other hand, how deeply the longings in the subconscious depths of the human soul actually reach toward those heights that anthroposophy seeks to ascend, then it seems as though it would be necessary for the good of humanity that the path anthroposophy must take not be too slow. But whether the progress is slow or fast may be less significant for anthroposophy than for human progress. We speak of how, in many areas, we are living in a fast-paced age today. May that which humanity seeks to achieve in the knowledge of the supersensible be attained as swiftly as is necessary for the salvation of humanity.