Bondarev-Philosophy_Freedom_Vol_2

IX Memory Picturing

1. The ‘Ur’-Phenomenon of Man’s Evolution to Spirit

We stated earlier, that all efforts of the human being to get to know Anthroposophy in a way that is in keeping with its essential nature, are doomed to failure if they have the character of the mere understanding. When this is the case, it is impossible to find a relation to its qualitative aspect. It is absolutely necessary, not only to grasp, but to experience the fact that Anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science, although it embodies a coherent system and despite its colossal range, has been left incomplete in all its parts by Rudolf Steiner. Therein lies its methodological peculiarity, which stems from the cognitive principles that were customary in the great Mysteries.

Out of an ocean of unbounded cosmic wisdom Rudolf Steiner created a kind of ‘conduit’ into the realm of human cognition. As it streams through this ‘conduit’ into the thinking consciousness of the human being, irrigating and enlivening it, this wisdom has the impulse to return to itself and to carry the human being with it on its waves, and in this way to lead him, as a matured individuality, back into the ocean of the spirit which he left behind on his entry into earthly being.

In this reciprocal relation between man and world, both are incomplete. For, the human being proceeded from the spirit as an integral part of it and, therefore, both retained the urge to restore the lost unity, thus providing development with its impulses in its passage through the multiplicity of forms. In this sense, every form whatever of cognition is merely a phase of transition between the forms of the being of forces in the free play of creative activity. As these forces ‘flow down into’ the sphere of sensory being, they experience the tendency to rigidify in forms, and one of these is the ‘I’-consciousness that thinks according to the laws of logic. The formal nature of logic sets limits to it, conditioning thereby the abstract character of its form. To overcome this form, the ‘I’-consciousness needs to develop within itself a new kind of ‘capacity to flow’, which is able to metamorphose both itself and the form of logic.

‘Capacity to flow’, evolution and metamorphosis are not synonymous, yet in the case in question they are related. Through operating with them as with attributes of consciousness, the teachers in the ancient Mysteries imbued cognition with a playful character and clothed it in the form of riddles. Thus imagery, phantasy and also elements of spiritual freedom entered into the cognitive process – that is, everything that actualizes the will in the thinking. Something similar is true of the Anthroposophical method of cognition. The huge multiplicity of facts contained in Anthroposophy can only be handled with difficulty by intellectual means such as classification, formalization, schematization etc. In reality they are all riddles or components of riddles. Like the mythical Sphinx, Anthroposophy comes towards us in the shape of a mighty system of riddles. It is in their solution that the process of cognition consists, which is at the same time a process of the conscious reunion of the cognizing subject with his many-membered being and with the being of the universe.

Not only outside Anthroposophy, but – strange as this may sound – not infrequently among its adherents, one meets people with a nominalist way of thinking who reproach Rudolf Steiner for “inconsistency”, “self-contradiction”, “errors of judgement” etc. They are unable to grasp the “non-Euclidian” character of the relations between the ideas of spiritual science. In these circumstances, what can they do when they read in a lecture of Rudolf Steiner that, for example, the soul of the human being is formed by memories (cf. GA 232, 24.11.1923), in another, that the “preserver of the memory” is the ether-body (GA 266/3, p.248) and, finally, in a third, that our ‘I’ is woven out of our memories? Is then, so they have to ask themselves, the soul identical with the ether-body, and this with the ‘I’?

No, anyone who wishes to know spiritual science must at the same time learn to love both the free play of concepts and soul-forces, and a strict development and organizing of concepts – but, with regard to himself, the movement from the conditioned to the free, to free self-conditioning (or ‘conditioned-ness’). Where this is the case, the process of cognition of Anthroposophy will be organized in consonance with its methodology. We will be endeavouring to work in this spirit as we complete our study of the triad which we arrived at in Fig. 56 in our discussion of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’.

It is out of the totality of the three worlds that there germinates and develops the human individuality, which is subject to the conditions of sensory being. Two of them he finds before him as given elements: one outside him and one within. These are the world of percepts and the world of concepts. We need only use our sense-organs, and experience of the percepts is impressed into us. From a certain age onwards the percepts begin to call forth in us the concepts, and then we move on to the forming of inner representations – the third world. These penetrate into the depths of our being and unite with the sheaths. From then on, a part of them can be drawn out from there thanks to the power of memory.

Through their manifold activity, these three worlds form the lower ‘I’. This emerges as our own strength (force) of consciousness, of spirit, which has the capacity to draw together into a unity within us the workings of the three worlds. The lower ‘I’ shows itself to be identical with the scope of our memories. “In everyday existence,” says Rudolf Steiner, “the human being is the product of his memories” (GA 115, 16.12.1911). The world of percepts and the world of concepts bring to us the streams of experiences, and the way in which our experiences become memories determines the forming of the triune soul. Pathological irregularities in the memory becloud the ‘I’.

Thus, the dynamic totality of four components – percepts, concepts, memories and ‘I’ – constitute the phenomenon of the conscious, earthly human being. Of these, the most important is the memory, the remembering of oneself as a quality of the ‘I’. Before we investigate this phenomenon further, we must decide whether we conceive of it as a single object of cognition (in which case, we risk treading the path of natural- scientific positivism), or as a constituent part of a kind of dialectical tri-unity, or finally as an element of the seven-membered metamorphosis, which corresponds to the evolutionist principle of the spiritual- scientific method. In the latter case, the first step in a methodological organizing of the research is a highlighting of the question as to the principle of self-movement of the phenomenon ‘I’.

The appearance of the lower ‘I’ within the tri-unity of percept, concept and self-remembering shows signs, unquestionably, of having been “induced”. It is the counter-pole to another unity, and therefore the striving towards the higher is immanent to it. In the triangle of forces which we have arrived at, the ‘I’ appears as an impulse that remains, in its entirety, on the side of the human being. The counter-pole that corresponds to this reveals itself on the side of the Divine. The dialectical movement within the ‘I’ is conditioned by the similarity, as an inherent principle, between the lower and its higher counter-pole. For this reason the higher, which corresponds to the earthly phenomenon of man, is also triune. Its three structural components draw the higher ‘I’ of the human being into a unity.

At this point it is worth referring again to the symbol of the Holy Grail, which we already spoke of in Ch. VIII, as this corresponds to that reciprocal relationship which we are about to discuss. The symbol expresses the many-sided relation of man to God, which is anchored, on an evolutionary level, in the constitution of the human astral body. For this reason, epistemological research must necessarily assume an ontological character.

The higher tri-unity we are now seeking, which reveals itself to the higher ‘I’, can have different constituent parts. For example, it can be the tri-unity of Manas, Buddhi and Atma. If we seek a relationship to it of the lower triad which we are studying, we need to acquaint ourselves with a whole series of intermediary stages. It would therefore be advisable to find a higher triad that corresponds more directly to the lower, but above all contains within its structure at least one element of the lower triad. We find the solution in a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in 1923. He says there: “This is what arises as a threefold force of the soul in its innermost depths: freedom, the life of memory, the power of love. Freedom – the primordial inner form of the etheric or body of formative forces. The power of memory – the inwardly arising, dream- forming power of the astral body. Love – the inwardly arising power of love, which leads the human being to surrender in devotion to the outer world (this power is rooted in the ‘I’ – G.A.B.). Through the fact that the human soul can partake in this threefold force, it imbues itself with the spiritual life. For, this threefold permeation with the feeling of freedom, with the power of memory, through which we hold together past and present, with the power of love through which we are able to devote ourselves to the outer world, through the possession of these three forces of the soul, this soul of ours is imbued with spirit. ...the human being bears the spirit within him. And whoever cannot grasp in this way this threefold inner permeation of the soul, cannot understand how the soul of the human being contains the spirit” (GA 225, 22.7.1923).

One could italicize this communication of Rudolf Steiner for greater emphasis, as it makes possible for us an important discovery in the sphere between consciousness and being.

The higher or, rather, upper tri-unity of which Rudolf Steiner speaks applies to the soul-structure of the human being, on whatever level or within whatever structure we view it. In the context of the task we have set, we will bring it into connection with the tri-unity which we are investigating. Then we arrive at a system that has the form recognizable in Fig.93.

In this situation the soul-spiritual being of man can be compared to a dipole in which, through a force working from above (our ether and astral bodies possess the higher consciousness of Buddhi and Manas), the structure working below in the earthly-individual element is in a certain way ‘induced’. And the latter, as it unfolds, begins to exert an influence on the upper tri-unity, on the character of its impulse.

Rudolf Steiner points to the connection of the process of gaining freedom with the ether-body, but the ‘nuance’ of our discussion is of a different kind. Our aim is to highlight the symbol of the human astral body, on whose individualized activity an understanding of the idea of freedom depends. It possesses its ‘ur’-phenomenon, expressed in the symbol of the Grail, which shows its macro and microcosmic nature. In Fig.93 this is represented through the upper and the lower triangle. In them stand, in polar opposition to one another as the principles of their unity, the two ‘I’s, which are the precondition for the development, the individualizing, of the astral body. This comes to expression in the steadily increasing immanence of the upper triangle in the lower. The connecting link between the two triangles is memory. This is born in the lower triangle and reborn in the upper. Overall, we have to do, if we follow our methodology, with a perfect sevenfoldness of elements, which form the lemniscate of development, thanks to which the lower ‘I’ is gradually transformed into the higher ‘I’. We merely have to resolve the question: What is it, concretely, that effects the transformation in this lemniscate? Which ‘I’?

In our seven-membered metamorphosis of thinking, element 4 is the centre (the point) of transformation of the lower to the higher. It is important, not so much for its content, but because of its ability to perform certain actions. This is also the field of force in which the triune soul reveals itself and develops. Different human beings possess the capacity of ‘beholding’ in differing degrees. Here, everything depends upon the soul-member in which the person mainly functions. In individual development he is moving simultaneously on two axes: the vertical in a lemniscatory movement, and the horizontal in space and time. Along the second axis the human being, in the process of education, of the life of culture etc., involutes the triune soul. By virtue of the ‘I’ strengthening within it – which is on the path from the lower to the higher ‘I’ – he brings about in himself an individual evolution. Its foundation stone is laid through the activity of the lower ‘I’, which reaches through consciously into the three worlds – described above – of the individual life of the human being (Fig. 94). In the transition into the higher sphere, an inwardizing takes place of the activity of the ‘I’, which has gained higher qualities through emanations of the World-‘I’. Thus we have arrived at the best possible lemniscate of individual development, in which its principle and its process are revealed with special clarity. One can regard it as the ‘ur’-phenomenon of man’s evolution to the spirit. As opposed to the gnoseological lemniscate of the thought-cycle, this lemniscate has an ontological character, which will now be developed and discussed in further depth.

2. A Leap across the Abyss of Nothingness

In the lower loop of the lemniscate shown in Fig.94 the everyday ‘I’ of the human being, which grows in strength thanks to the experience of perceptions and also of thinking, gradually achieves mastery over these, creating out of them the basis for its own being – in the form of inner representations and memory pictures. The subject receives the initial impulse for this individual activity from the sphere of its supra- individual, higher nature – from the upper loop of the lemniscate – which has formed in the course of the preceding evolution, of the experience of many reincarnations. To begin with, it works unconsciously, whereby to a significant degree it is mediated by the cultural and social environment.

In the upper loop there arises, as the driving force of the soul-spiritual life of the subject, the higher ‘I’. Its genesis is complicated and many-faceted. To reveal its content our best approach will be to deal with the question again and again in relation to the different aspects of our discussions. From the statements of Rudolf Steiner we know that the human race (or species) was endowed by the spirits of Form, in the Earth aeon, with a single and universal ‘I’ (cf. Fig.35). Thanks to this, the three bodies of man are formed from the beginning of the aeon in a different way than in the animal kingdom. As a counterweight to the universal ‘I’ the human being has developed, in the genesis of the tri-une soul, the personal, lower ‘I’. Their reciprocal relation is expressed in the Fichtean ‘I = not-I’. Their equality is not a constant; this is a potential equality; in it is gradually formed the higher, individual ‘I’, in which body, soul and spirit of the human being achieve a conscious unity. In the equality of I = ‘I’, development assumes the character of gradual mastery of the higher stages of consciousness which surpass, at a certain level, even the consciousness of the spirits of Form. In the primal source of all the ‘I’s in the world there holds sway the Divine World-‘I’, which is conditioned by nothing and conditions all other things. It is free in all eternity; leading the human being to Itself, It leads him to freedom. Its centripetal tendency is at the opposite pole to the egocentrism of the lower ‘I’. For this reason there arises, in the transition from the lower to the upper loop of the lemniscate – shown in Fig.94 – but also in the lemniscate of thinking, the necessity to cancel and set aside (aufheben) the lower ‘I’. Ontologically, this takes place in the transition from memories of one to another kind, which is accompanied by the development of the triune soul.

The cancelling and setting aside of the ‘I’ requires a high degree of development of the ‘I’-consciousness. This can be acquired in the individual experience of learning how to control the life of thoughts, feelings and expressions of will. This is shown in the fact that in the consciousness-soul love for the deed becomes the motive and the spring of action. This love for the deed germinates in the intellectual soul by way of the development of love for the object of cognition, which finds its expression in the ability to identify with it. In the process of this cognition and activity the higher love enters the human soul and transforms the ego-centredness of intellectualism, which manifests in dialectic, into the indirect egoism of ‘beholding’*, which embraces the real-ideal (not abstract, but having the nature of essential being) content (existence) of the object. Such a process (or mode) of cognition (of action) cannot but contain within itself a moral purpose. The human being forgets himself in the cognized object and thus cancels and preserves the earthly memory within him, in order to attain to a ‘beholding’ of its content in supersensible reality.

* It is indirect, because the phenomenon of the ‘I’ itself is not cancelled and set aside (aufgehoben).
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As man’s evolution to the spirit begins already in the sentient-soul, it is bound up with the experience of perception. It is thanks to this, that the human being receives his first experience of the ‘I’. The first impulses to freedom enter this ‘I’ from above, but as this soul is weak and imperfect the idea of freedom it holds to is invariably a mistaken one. Freedom is confused with arbitrariness, political freedom is demanded instead of equality and economic freedom is sought, which can only lead to the enslavement of human beings, etc. In the sentient-soul the freedom impulse is itself strictly determined by the nature of the perceptions, especially of the lower senses – of life, movement, balance and touch. Only gradually, thanks to the development of the higher soul-members, does the human being learn to perceive in an entirely selfless way: to ‘behold’. Then he comes into immediate contact with freedom.

As in the lower triangle of the lemniscate (cf. Figs.93, 94) all the elements are drawn into a unity, the changes in the character of perception and thinking have their effect on the development of the memories. In the present case, this triad is also dialectical. The antithesis between perceiving and thinking attains to a synthesis in the memory-representation which forms the content of the ‘I’. Is this content form or being (life)? In the lower triad we have unquestionably to do only with the form – void of substance – of the existence of the ‘I’. This contradicts the nature of the ‘I’ as such, but if it could not be cancelled and set aside (aufgehoben) the lower ‘I’ would attain real being, and the path to freedom would be closed to us.

All the processes in the lower loop of the lemniscate must have a conceptual-pictorial-reflective character (the concept, too, is picture). “In this fact,” says Rudolf Steiner in ‘Anthroposphical Leading Thoughts’, “that the human being in his momentary act of inner representation is not within being, but only in a mirror-reflection of being, in picture-being, lies the possibility of the unfolding of freedom. All being within consciousness is something that compels. The picture alone cannot compel” (GA 26, p.216).

Through ascending, with the help of conceptual-pictorial-reflective thinking, to the consciousness-soul – its pictorial nature amounts in this case to an experiencing (not thinking-through) of the processes of its metamorphoses – the human being is freed within himself from any kind of natural or naturally conditioned existence and then makes the leap across the abyss of nothingness, of not-being – not in the Hegelian, but in the occult sense – and now finds himself in the world where consciousness has the character of essential being. This leap signifies a radical change in the direction of development, a certain “bouncing off” from the boundary of being, which has the form of a sudden “leaping forth” of the upper loop of the lemniscate from the lower, into which its gaze was always turned, as into man’s unconscious being. (Fig.95)

The human being moves round within the closed circle of the dialectical triads, but on an unconscious (supersensible) level the processes within him correspond always to the upper (inside the lower) loop of the single lemniscate. This is one of the meanings of the words: “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17, 21). By bringing

about within himself an empty, but waking consciousness the human being turns, as it were in one stroke, the inner loop “outwards” into the supersensible world, and emerges there as a self-conscious individuality. One question remains, however: What maintains him during this leap?

If the processes of perception and thinking were to produce lasting forms within the human being, he would lose himself in them; in them as the object he would lose himself as subject. For this reason, the process of forgetting helps the subject to maintain itself. In fact, the system of the sense-organs, for the human being who has descended from the spirit into incarnation, is the outer world. The human being enters it gradually with his soul-spiritual being which advances from one incarnation to the next. Thus, as Rudolf Steiner explains, “the colour... together with the eye, does not ‘belong’ to the human being; the eye together with the colour belongs to the world. During his earthly life the human being does not let the earthly surroundings stream into him – he grows outwards into this outer world between birth and death” (GA 26, p.232 f.).

Also in his thinking organization the human being does not belong to himself, but to the world; the world-thoughts hold sway in him through his thought-organization, with which he “grows outwards into world-thinking”. “With respect both to the senses organization and to the thinking system the human being is world. The world builds itself into him. Thus, in sense-perception and in thinking he is not himself, but there he is world-content” (ibid. p.233 f.).

And, finally, in the unfolding of the memory in the human being, Divine-spiritual being is at work. In the lower ‘I’, however, the memories arise in us only in picture form and void of substance. But they are active within us in connection with the life-forces: the ‘I’ needs only to become somewhat weaker and we become a plaything in their hands; they can even take on a compulsive character through returning again and again and stirring up the emotional sphere.

The human being, surrounded only by the world of pictures, nevertheless finds the strength to create out of them the forms of his memories. This force proceeds from the upper loop of the lemniscate shown in Fig.94. From out of the sphere of the higher ‘I’ there stream into us impulses and forces which condition the development of our self-consciousness, so long as this has not attained the power to condition itself.

Indeed, the processes of perception and thinking represent within us a kind of non-material “painting activity” of the soul, which is unable to leave behind in us lasting traces, but parallel to them a further process occurs “where the forces of growth, the life-impulses are at work”. “In this part of the soul-life there is imprinted through perception, not a merely transitory image, but a lasting, real image. This, the human being can bear (i.e. not lose himself in it – G.A.B), as it is connected with the being of man as world-content (i.e. that which comes from the up- per part of the lemniscate – G.A.B.). As this takes place, he can lose himself just as little as he loses himself when he grows, is nourished, without his full consciousness” (ibid., p.214).

It is out of this parallel, unconscious process that we draw our memories as a content of our individual life. But they, too, must of necessity retain, intermittently, an ephemeral character, remain pictures – until we are able to endow them with the character of imaginations. Then the memories in us will become the faculty of higher ‘beholding’. This is what “awaits” us on the other side of the abyss of non-being. Rudolf Steiner describes as follows what happens as the transition takes place: “What we experience in our consciousness as inner picturing has originated from the Cosmos. Vis-à-vis the Cosmos, the human being plunges into non-being. In inner picturing he frees himself from all the forces of the Cosmos. He paints the Cosmos, outside which he is standing. If only this were the case, freedom would light up in the human being for a cosmic moment; but in the same instant the human being would dissolve. – But through the fact that in inner picturing the human being becomes freed from the Cosmos, he is nevertheless linked together in his unconscious soul-life with his previous earthly lives and lives between death and a new birth. As a conscious being, man is within picture-existence, and with his unconscious he maintains himself in spiritual reality. While he experiences freedom in the present ‘I’ (i.e. the lesser – G.A.B.), his past ‘I’ (i.e. the higher – G.A.B.) maintains him in the realm of being. With regard to being, man is in his inner picturing given up entirely to what he has become through the Cosmic and earthly past” (ibid., p.216 f.). In this, he is bound up in his lower being with the guiding higher Cosmic forces, which represent world-life and the Cosmic Intelligence. It is they, who preserve the human being when, striving towards freedom, he makes the leap through emptied consciousness over the Abyss of non-being. “Michael’s working and the Christ impulse make the leap possible,” Rudolf Steiner concludes (ibid., p.217). They help the human being to transform the “nothingness” of the pictures into the “All” of the free imaginations.

3. The Threefold Bodily Nature and Memory

These two ‘I’s, of which Rudolf Steiner speaks in the statement quoted above, we have shown in Fig.94 on the axis which separates the lower from the upper loop of the lemniscate. The higher ‘I’ is closely connected on this axis with development in time. It is present in the upper loop of the lemniscate in the one-dimensionality (point-nature) of the spiritual space, which the time of the (lesser) ‘I’ becomes in individual experience. The “past” ‘I’ is also the “future” ‘I’, into which we bear the fruits of the development of the lower ‘I’. The ‘I’ that illumines us from above is potentially identical with the Divine ‘I’; they are separated by a series of stages or, rather, forms of the existence of consciousness.

Through the Divine ‘I’ was revealed the absolutely unconditioned freedom of will through which our evolutionary cycle was posited. On its entry into the world of otherness-of-being this will originally became the absolutely conditioning principle. Thanks to it, we have acquired our bodily nature. It works, unconscious to us, in our limb-metabolism nature, in the process of growth, nourishment, reproduction etc. – that is, it constitutes the seven life-processes. One stage higher, the same will works in the forming of the system of the twelve sense-organs and, finally, the processes of perception and thinking. At this last stage the human being reaches a boundary above which the conditions arise for a free setting of goals. On this level of individual development (it corresponds to the upper loop of the lemniscate) the human being turns himself in evolution, figuratively speaking, with his gaze directed backwards. There takes place, in a certain sense, a repetition of the evolutionary process which once formed the transition from the Lemurian to the Atlantean period (see Fig.89) – but now on a higher level. – It becomes the task of the human being to absorb into his onto- genetic being, consciously, the soul-spiritual phylogenesis of humanity. For this reason the power of memory begins to play a decisive role at this stage of development.

We have already pointed out that in empirical time, on the etheric-physical level, the world-process moves from the past into the future, through a union of the three world-forces – substance, life and form. On the astral level the movement of time flows in the opposite direction. Every moment of the encounter of the two movements is characterized by the ‘I’-phenomenon. One of them is also the (lower) ‘I’ of man, and therefore everything in it is a dynamic process of becoming and transformation. The activity of transformation begins in the lower ‘I’ with the conducting of the will into the thinking. It is upon the will that the ‘height’ of the thinking depends in relation to the stream of development, and upon the ‘height’ depends the depth of conscious penetration into the future (exclusively in ‘beholding’) and into the past (on the level of essential being).

Manifold preconditions exist in every human being for a maturation of this kind. On a subconscious level they are created in the preceding phase of development. At any given moment of the present we bear the entire past within us. Even the metabolism preserves within it the memory of man’s evolutionary past. In the animals and plants this process is different because their past and also the memory of it are different. The human being also retains the memory of the entire cultural and historical past of humanity, in which his personal biography embraces the totality of the reincarnations he has already completed. A memory of this kind is bound up with the process of individualization of the astral body and also with its activity within the other two bodies.

Among the numerous ways of imagining the astral body, says Rudolf Steiner, there is the one that sees it as a reader of the occult script which is written, as on a tablet, onto the ether body by the entire world process gone through by the human being. Therefore “the ether body of the human being is indeed a true copier in miniature of the entire Cosmos. There is nothing in the Cosmos that does not imprint itself as an imaginative picture in the human ether body and, if one wishes to use the expression, is reflected as in a mirror” (GA 156, 12.12.1914).

The astral body of every human being is macrocosmic in nature. The primal source of its activity is still in the first globe, in the upper Devachan, into which we will only ascend consciously in the future. On this spiritual height the astral body stands in immediate, concrete relation to the revelation of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, which creates within us the ‘I’-consciousness. The human being incarnates on earth in such a way that his astral body – unconsciously, of course – is connected with the spiritual being of the fixed stars and with the astral aura of the Solar system. After his death, the human being unites with this astral body, but so long as he is living on the earth his astral body forms a small loop within the large loop of our macrocosmic astral body (as shown on the left in Fig.95). The inwardized (small), subjectivized as- tral body is especially influenced by rays coming, so Rudolf Steiner tells us, from the Zodiacal sphere of Aries. It tries to hold these rays fast in a particular form and confine them within a beautiful contour. Through forces proceeding from the constellation of Libra, movements arise in the astral body, which enable it to open itself up to its surroundings. In all, the earthly astral body receives from the Zodiac twelve kinds of movement. Also from the planets movements enter it, but they have a more inward character; there are seven of these (ibid.).

Through the totality of the influences streaming in from Zodiac signs and planets, particular ‘habits’ develop in the astral body. For example, they determine what lives in speech as vowels and consonants. With the help of its 19 ‘habits’ the astral body reads the ‘inscriptions’ in the ether body and inscribes new ones into it. Suppose, for example, that we have met someone. The astral body builds up his image with the help of the 19 habits, creates the inner representation of an impression it has received, and of which we become conscious. It does, of course, fade within us quickly, but the astral body engraves it into the ether body, from which it can later be retrieved – read – again.

An important role in the act of remembering is also played by the physical body. Without it we would have no relation to the ether body as a preserver of memory. When we remember, or think, the astral body makes imprints in the ether body, and this in the physical body. The latter works as a kind of instrument for registering what we wish to impress into our memory. But in no way is it, itself, the organ of memory. Astral and ether body have to reach through to their imprints in order to remember them. Here, of course, a certain impulse must also come from the physical body. But one should not imagine that this process is like a ‘taking down’ from the ‘memory shelf’ in the brain, of the ‘memory chits’ one has previously placed there. In order to play a part in the process of memory the physical body also needs to have developed habits, and this happens if we repeat the observations we have made and, by giving greater nuance to our feelings, deepen the impression made on us by what we have observed.

In the world, everything is pervaded with movement and rhythm. When these change in the human sheaths, and in their substances, his consciousness, his existence, changes, the forms of their expression change. The astral body envelops us like a cloud in which passions, desires, instincts of all kinds are in movement. If one gives them too much freedom, this leads to chaos in the memories. Chance influences from outside then begin to conjure them forth from us. We become the plaything of certain memories. For this reason, thinking must bring order into the astral body, generate within it stable vibrations and bring these gradually, on a higher level, into conscious relation with the cosmic vibrations.*

* The ‘Rückschau’ exercise, for example, aims to achieve this.
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In the ether body the memories change that part of it which is freed from activity in the life-processes and serves consciousness. In those kingdoms of nature where there is no free part of this kind, there is also no memory.

In the physical body the forming of memory-representations and the forgetting of them goes hand in hand with material deposits and their dissolution.

The ‘I’ leads everything that takes place in the three bodies to a unity through working in a flexible interplay of the two processes – imprinting in the memory, and forgetting. This happens in the following way. Thanks to the astral body the impressions aroused in us by outer objects become conscious. But the working of the astral body alone here is not enough. In the process of perception it is necessary to move with one’s everyday ‘I’ into the astral body and change its character by way of the judgement; then the character of the perception also changes. If this process does not occur, the sense-perceptions are dulled, and with them the ‘I’-consciousness also. Through the combined activity of the ‘I’ and the astral body the percept becomes inner representation. Initially, this has a pictorial character that reminds one of Imagination, but then it imprints itself into the ether and physical bodies. These ‘imprints’ are described by Rudolf Steiner as something like fine, shadowy ‘ghosts’, which have the form of our head and of what attaches itself to this from below – the system of the spinal marrow. There are as many “ghosts” clustered together and rooted within us, as we have memories, but they bear no resemblance at all to the things we remember. The physical body reveals, by virtue of its habits, certain signs which repeat the image of the head and of what is below it. As the astral body reads these, it metamorphoses them radically, and ‘deciphers’ them. And just as in the reading of a book, one must undertake this deciphering anew, again and again, if one is to remember anything. The light-ether is bound up with the imprints of the memories, which appear in the ether-body.

Thus, the process of memory-formation always has a sensible-supersensible character. In the power of memory we feel, so Rudolf Steiner tells us, our affinity with all the forces of the Cosmos that work creatively in development. Whether we are observing trees, mountains, clouds, stars, and the way they all come into being and change their forms, or whether we try to behold the form-building forces in the world – there always arises something in the soul, that has an affinity to what is happening outside. These are the forces of memory. They are cosmic reflections of all that is working, weaving, undergoing meta- morphosis in the outer world (cf. GA 335, 22.7.1923).

The percept arises in us because the ‘I’ (here, both ‘I’s are working, the lower and the higher) and the astral body receive, not just an external impression, but a revelation of the things. If no imprinting in the memory takes place, the process ends with a (conceptual) conclusion in which the everyday ‘I’ is at work. But the part of the perception that remains in the subconscious lives on within us, is mirror-reflected in the instrument of the sense-organs, in its nerves, reaches down into the depths of our physical and ether bodies. The ‘I’, which is involved in perception, lends extra movement to the blood (working upon it via the nerve, with the help of the astral body) and thereby stimulates the ether-body. In this, various currents arise. Together with the bloodstream they move from the heart to the head. Rudolf Steiner remarks that Aristotle and Descartes still knew of this stream.

* * *

If we wish to understand this process more concretely, it should be pointed out that in perception we enter into contact with the entire etheric world which, in this case, comes towards us as the external world. As it works upon us, it brings into vibration all the four ethers of which our etheric body consists. The process in them unfolds parallel to what happens in the astral body and ‘I’ when we are perceiving with the physical sense-organ. Suppose we see a human being. The impression made on us arouses vibrations in, for example, our light-ether (whereby the other ethers also vibrate). The thoughts that are aroused in us by the perception also come to expression in the inner light movements. There arise in us the image of the percept and also the inner representational picture. When the meeting is repeated, the light-body makes the same movements as it did before, and we remember the person in question. To remember the inner movements of one’s own light-body (ether), which are brought about by the external ether, means to remember.

All that we have spoken of here takes place, of course, on a subconscious level. Down there in the depths of the human being, the movements of the light-body “strike” – as the ether body is connected with the physical body – everywhere against the physical body and thus transform themselves into memory representations (see GA 165, 2.1.1916). If we could consciously leave the physical body, rid ourselves of it while retaining our perceptions, the memories would stand before us in their supersensible form – as imaginations.

What Rudolf Steiner calls a “striking” of the ether body on the physical, he describes in the lectures of the cycle ‘Occult Physiology’, as follows: Our ‘I’ gathers the impressions of the outer world, works upon and transforms them in the astral body and finally imprints them in the ether body, from where they can be retrieved again as memory-representations. The blood participates actively in this process (because it is the outer, physical expression of the ‘I’). With its whole movement (especially from below upwards) it stimulates the ether body; in it various currents are then formed. They merge with the bloodstream, flow from the heart to the head and gather, like unipolar electricity, at a certain point in the head; there, a great tension of the ether-forces arises, which become forces of memory and imprint in the ether-body the impressions received from sense-perception and from thinking, with the aim of making them into memory representations (Fig.96).

Flowing counter to the above-mentioned current, into a different point in the head, comes another current – from the lymph system. When the memory representations form we have in fact to do with these two currents in the brain. They stand over against one another, create a considerable field of tension, comparable to positive and negative electricity. A “difference in potential” arises, which is neutralized when a newly-formed representation which has streamed into the head becomes a memory representation – i.e. passes over into the ether body. The physical organs in which these two currents are concentrated, are epiphysis and hypophysis. The first gathers the etheric current that flows with the blood and strives to become memory. It radiates out streams of light that flow across to the hypophysis, which receives them (cf. GA 128, 23.3.1911). Thus the soul element of the human being joins together with his bodily nature; they influence one another. Rudolf Steiner makes clear what he is saying, with the help of an illustration (Fig.97).

The process unfolding in this way in the head extends further from the brain along the entire spinal column, it pervades the whole system of the nerve-centres and arrives at the points where the peripheral and central nervous system meet. Here, there is a kind of ‘barrier’, which shuts off the consciousness from the subconscious. Like a mirror, this barrier reflects back the thoughts, keeping them away from the system of the metabolism, and also stops the unconscious element as it approaches in the opposite direction, coming from the other side of the barrier – the element in which is contained the higher ‘I’, which works in the organic processes.

The system of the spinal marrow and brain carries to the blood (the instrument of the ‘I’) the impressions received by the sense-organs. And the sympathetic nervous system, behind which stands the inner (microcosmic) world-system – i.e. the system of the inner organs – has the task of preventing the processes taking place in the organs from being carried into the blood and entering the ‘I’-consciousness. In this way the true, higher ‘I’ of man is closed off from his lower ‘I’.

That which flows from outside into the soul of the human being enters into close connection with the blood and strives to unite with its opposite: with what enters the human being materially. But the latter is confined within the sympathetic nervous system. And the appendage to the brain (the hypophysis) is the sentry that prevents the inner life of the human being from entering his blood. The glands in the human being are the organs of secretion. The stream of etheric forces proceeding from them (via the lymph system) to the hypophysis is accompanied by a secretion that also represents an obstacle to the stream of nourishment when it wishes to enter consciousness via the sympathetic system and be consciously perceived. This is in a certain sense the coarsest form of reflection. External means of nourishment can be compared to spiritual thought-beings – indeed, they are the fruit of their spiritual creative activity and of evolution. It follows from this, that these beings approach us from two sides. We reflect them back and receive concepts above and, below, also a form of consciousness that is extremely dull, but nevertheless essential for the development of ‘I’-consciousness.

The etheric streams that flow with the blood away from the heart are not burdened with the world-encompassing spiritual process taking place in the bodily organs, and they work via the epiphysis upon the brain, thereby making it into an instrument of the soul life. Together with these streams there also flow the currents of the astral body. The brain allows to flow through it the etheric streams but the astral ones it holds fast. These retained currents are, as Rudolf Steiner says, subject to the force of attraction from the external astral substance of the earth. The astral body of man, insofar as enters the head region, is as it were ‘sewn together’ from two astralities: one coming from the Cosmos, and the other arising (from below) from the body. On the head of the human being there is a certain densification which can be compared to a ‘cap’, where the two astralites are ‘sewn together’ by the etheric current. When the astral substance is held fast by the brain it is reflected back, and that is our thoughts, our feelings that have become conscious. But the etheric stream passes through the brain and the astral ‘cap’. And if it is the new etheric of our memory representations, of pure thinking, the etheric of the ‘power of judgement in beholding’, then it forms beyond the limits of the physical brain a new centre of self- consciousness – that which Rudolf Steiner refers to as the “etheric heart”. Thanks to this organ (or centre) “the thought” thinks ... “the thought” (GA 266/2, p.135). In this way the foundation stone of human freedom is laid, as the ‘I’-consciousness overcomes the compulsion of all three sheaths of the human being.

There is yet another peculiar feature of this metamorphosis. The etherized thoughts (memories), in contrast to the astral (those that are reflected), do not transform matter into ash. They dematerialize it. It quite simply disappears from the human being, and the World-Will – the Will of the Father – which dies in the non-organic realm, appears in those places where the vanished matter had been. But as this, however, arises anew as a result of the individual activity of the human being, it is in him the will of his own freedom. Rudolf Steiner says that, at the Baptism in the Jordan, Christ in Jesus united himself with the “newly arising ether body which streams to the brain from the human heart” (GA 129, 26.8.1911). This stream is muddied if the human being bears many desires in his blood, and this dulls the brain. For this reason, the attainment of freedom depends upon moral self-perfection, the ennoblement of the entire three-membered soul.

* * *

The two streams we have described spring from the entire being of man, to the extent that he is pervaded by organic activity, but also by perceiving and thinking. Two poles are formed in the human being: the one, through the activity of the self-conscious ‘I’-organization, and the other, through unconscious activity (see Fig.98). The conscious element of the ‘I’-organization has as its basis the sense-impressions, the perceptions, which exert an influence on the blood. Working in connection with it are the brain and the spinal marrow. The impressions stimulate the nerves, these excitations bring the blood into movement; in the points of contact of nerve and blood there arises, as a result of the increased blood-flow, a combustion process which causes a dying of the nerve-cells. As the matter has died, the spirit (thinking), the astral body approaches the ether body and unites with it. But we experience the union of concept and percept. The inner representation is formed, and this is connected with a new kind of etheric nature which arises thanks to the freeing of the ether body from the dead cells. And, what is especially important: this etheric nature is freed as a result of the conscious activity of the human being. This means that we have here to do with a partial awakening to consciousness of our ether body. This is the ether of our memory representations (they arise when the tension between epiphysis and hypophysis is released). But it does not yet become conscious at the point of the uniting of the concept with the percept. It meets up with the counteractive working of the unconscious part of the ether body, arising from the metabolic system, from the water organism represented by the lymph. This is the working of the above-mentioned dull, animalic consciousness of the organism. It is normally referred to as the subconscious.

The subconscious processes in us are adjoined by our sympathetic nervous system. This is bound up with the unconscious will, which also, in fact, drives the blood to the nerve when a percept begins to stimulate it (a chemical process in the eye, for example). This will is rooted in the blood-warmth (originating from the epoch of ancient Saturn), and when a splitting of the nutritive substances takes place (e.g. in the eye) the warmth that is thus generated does not destroy the cells of the sympathetic nervous system; for this reason we do not perceive consciously what is going on in the metabolic system. In terms of evolution, its processes must enter consciousness at a later time, when the ‘I’-organization is sufficiently developed. But initially, the lower sphere in man comes into opposition with the higher when consciousness arises in the latter. Sensory perception comes into conflict with the absorption by the organism, of substances from the outer world; the subconscious comes into conflict with waking, object-oriented consciousness; and this all happens within the triune human being of body, soul and spirit.

* * *

A kind of summary of what takes place in the threefold bodily nature of man and in the ‘I’ in the process of impressing into the memory, is given by Rudolf Steiner in a lecture held in 1921. There he explains his thought with the help of a diagram which we reproduce below (Fig.99). Both the spoken communications and the diagram are of special importance for us, above all because in them the nature of the reciprocal relation of the lower and the higher ‘I’ in the memory process is clarified; we will return to this in connection with Fig. 94. We should not assert, says Steiner, that “our ‘I’... insofar as we become conscious of it, (is) inside us: we experience it from without inwards. – Just as we experience our sense-perceptions from without inwards, so do we experience our ‘I’ itself from without inwards. It is therefore actually an illusion to speak of our ‘I’ as being inside us. If I may express it in this way, we breathe in, as it were, the ‘I’ together with the sense-perceptions, if we think of the taking hold of the sense-perceptions as a finer breathing. So that we must say to ourselves: This ‘I’ actually lives in the world outside (the line in orange, Fig.99 – G.A.B.) and fills us through the sense-perceptions; and fills us then still further as the inner representations (yellow), pressing forward as far as the astral body, connect on to the sense-perceptions (GA 206, 13.8.1921).

With the help of the perceptions and in the perceptions themselves, the (higher) ‘I’ stretches out its feelers in us, so to speak, through to the astral body. Rising up towards it, come our memories which, as we said, begin with the shadow-like images in the physical body. Then they unite with the activity of the ether-body which, in addition, awakens the inner representations in the astral body (arrows in diagram). An etheric-physical stream arises, flowing from the heart to the head. In it our ‘I’ is also present. It is also present in the physical body (red), where it calls forth the memories (green), which then become inner representations (yellow).

But already here, Rudolf Steiner continues, the diagram given for clarification becomes inadequate. When we consider the memories, we discover the ‘I’ as something that is in the physical body and does not only come from outside with the perceptions. In order to grasp this phenomenon in its full significance, Rudolf Steiner suggests that we imagine a person standing before us and that we become aware of him/her thanks to the fact that our ‘I’ is present in him/her and reaches us in the perceptions. If we have seen this person before, our inner ‘I’ encounters in memory the first ‘I’, which comes with the perceptions. They meet, and we recognize the person.

The ancients expressed this phenomenon in the form of a serpent that bites its own tail; in modern times it is more appropriate to use the picture of a human being standing before a mirror. Let us imagine that he has no knowledge of his own existence, and that the experience of his reflection in the mirror represents his first knowledge of it. Then pointing to the mirror-image, he says: That is me. We are doing something exactly like this when we describe our everyday ‘I’ as the genuine one. No – our true ‘I’ strives towards us from outside in the form of a kind of stream and enters us through the stimulus of the sense-perceptions. When it reaches the physical body, it pushes this away. This act of repelling is perceived by us in sentient experience.

Thus our concepts, our inner representations, are also reflections of the experiences that come into us from the outer world – the outer world, in the sense that they arise within the sphere of our true ‘I’. And in this case, when we return to the antitheses ‘I’ and world, ‘I’ and not- ‘I’, we must say that the world is the ‘I’. So, what is the entity that we regard as the ‘I’? It has a twofold nature. Our waking consciousness is the form of the real existence of our higher ‘I’ which, unconscious for us, enters us via the astral and ether bodies and reaches through to the physical body, by which it is reflected back. Thanks to this process of reflection, we become conscious of our sense-perceptions and inner representations. They are all images of the true reality, but lack substance, and we can therefore join them together in whatever combination we wish. And therein lies the activity of the lower ‘I’. In it we are free: through it is posited the beginning of the higher freedom.

Such is the nature of our (human) subject. It is shadow-like, but its basis is constituted, though unconsciously to begin with, by our higher ‘I’ which comes to us as object. From a certain moment – or a certain stage – onwards, subject and object begin to coincide: when our inner representations become memories. The higher ‘I’, which remains in the subconscious, works in the process of remembering; here we have to do with the reality in us. What its nature is, in the being of the three bodies, we have already described.

* * *

When the human being perceives and thinks, he experiences within himself a process with two stages. On the subconscious level the senses, so Rudolf Steiner says, accomplish “a process that I do not perceive; they vitalize for me the real process into my inner being (this is how the higher ‘I’ works in them – G.A.B.) for mental representation. So that, when I have a sensory perception, I initially form by way of this sensory perception the inner representation; but then a second process is there, through which something real is brought about, not merely a picture.... When I remember, then this inner representation sends its influence upwards, just as the sense-perception did previously, and I perceive what was really conjured forth in me when I had the sensory representation, but without realizing it” (GA 212, 30.4.1922).

It is in all circumstances necessary to bear in mind what has just been said, when we are working with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. The inner representations of which its content is woven are encountered by the reader again and again in the most varied elements of their structures. Particularly often the theme of naïve and metaphysical realism is discussed. And we must realize that we have to do here, not with empty repetition, but with work in the different parts of the soul.

Thus, we are developing “results of soul-observation”, and not results of a speculative or any other kind. To encounter for the first time the attitude of naïve realism is one thing; it is quite another thing to draw it up from the memory in the form of different inner representations which serve, in the one case, a given synthesis and, in the other, ‘beholding’ etc. In this way is woven the fabric of ontological, ‘beholding’ thinking – frequently parallel to the conceptual. If one does not know what it is all about, one can very well fail to notice the development of the thought as ‘beholding’. Then it also remains “esoteric”.

This is the new and remarkable way in which the soul-life of the ‘I’ can unfold – the personal life of the human being. In this life we are woven out of our memory representations. And the task stands before us: How can we unite with the reality of the memories, ascending to it from the memory pictures, which are without substance? Rudolf Steiner recommends that we carry out an inner “reversal” – turning our soul towards the place from which our memories rise, which bear within them our true ‘I’. This requires the development of great mobility of soul, whereby we come into contact in our consciousness with the element of the will, as subconscious processes are inadequate here. For this reason the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ places a main emphasis on the question of the carrying of the will into the thinking, for this is where the higher soul-life begins.

* * *

These discussions make possible for us a broader and more detailed development of the theme, whose picture we have represented as a synthesis in Fig.94, by means of a lemniscate. Here we have before us a symbol of the ‘ur’-phenomenon of man, which is realizing itself at the point of the transition of the subject from sensible to supersensible reality. In this state the ‘ur’-phenomenon represents a system that is, both in its lower and its upper parts, open and at the same time autonomous, and therefore – from the standpoint of the universalism of the evolution of the microcosmic ‘I’-consciousness – also self-contained (see Fig 100a). In the upper part of the lemniscate the system of the primordial revelation of the triune God is open, through which was posited the ‘becoming’ that is, on all its levels, seven-membered.

In the system of the microcosm the primal tri-unity manifests the peculiar feature, that the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit forms within the element of the higher memory an entirely inward phenomenon, whose reality grows to the extent that the human being possesses an individual Manas. This is the sphere where the human being has the task of attaining to free imaginations. The lower ‘I’, which lives from the content of the lower memory representations, is separated from the higher by the sphere of the subconscious, which it strives to imbue with the light of cognition, on the path of the development of the triune soul. We have shown this part of the diagram again, separately, so that it can be studied more closely.

In the course of evolution, and of the cultural-historical process in particular, the human being undergoes his development from the sentient to the consciousness-soul, using the support provided by the experience of perceptions, feelings, thinking and action. To begin with, on the stages of group-consciousness, there stands behind these the higher ‘I’, which was bestowed on humanity by the spirits of Form and has ‘Father God’ character. Within it work the primordial world-freedom and world-love which in otherness-of-being, before they become freedom and love in the individual human being, are turned into predestination and duty. Let us call this working (the totality of Atma and Buddhi) – Iʹ. The everyday ‘I’ of man, which lives in the threefold soul, approaches the individual higher ‘I’. Let us call it – Iʺ. It ascends continually the stages of likeness to God and is able, potentially, to identify with the world-‘I’. The sphere of individual human freedom extends – as will be shown in our analysis of chapter 9 of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ – between the consciousness-soul and Manas. Study of the evolutionary constellation of the Trinity in the upper loop of the lemniscate (Fig.100a) will explain to us why, above the sphere of the consciousness-soul, one can experience conceptual and moral intuitions, and not imaginations. The relation Father – Holy Spirit has revealed itself to evolution from its beginning. Therefore this very relation, above all, is also revealed to the individual soul at the height of its development: conceptually in the aspect of Manas and intuitively in the aspect of Atma. But in this way the human being receives only the idea of freedom. If he is to be able to bring this to practical realization, the Second hypostasis must reveal itself – in moral intuition.

As a preparation for this state, in which freedom is born, the Manas in the three-membered soul unites with the lower ‘I’, which calls forth in it an involutive process; this comes to expression in the development of the memory. The (lower) ‘I’ itself works within the soul as the power of remembering. In the consciousness-soul this power can grow to the point where the (lower) ‘I’ receives the capacity to look back in time (point A’, Fig.100b), but it sees, not itself, but the world-‘I’ that works in evolution; admittedly, the precondition for this is that the (lower) ‘I’ is cancelled and set aside and that consciousness is maintained in pure actuality.

Steps of this kind are taken by the human being in the flow of time, along axis BB’, which is also the threshold of the supersensible world. Vertical to this axis of symmetry, there runs the working of the impulse proceeding from God the Son. He it is who, after the Mystery of Golgotha, leads us in the condition of the cancelled and preserved (aufgehoben) ‘I’ over the threshold of the point of nothingness of the lemniscate. The success of this action can be judged by the degree to which the intuitions received on the other side prove, when connected with the practical life, to be moral and free from the egoism of this side.

One can say that in the lemniscate in Fig.94 we have before us the “what” of the microcosm, whereas in Fig.100 its “how” is revealed to us and, therewith, the method required to solve the problem we encounter at the nodal point of the lemniscate. As we acquire in the consciousness-soul the strength to look backwards to the higher (evolutive) Iʹ which works in our memory (in it is hidden the entire foregoing evolution of the world), we approach in the “retroactive” movement of the cancelling and preserving of the ‘I’ (which is identical with the intellectual soul) the nodal point (A) of the lemniscate, and there we are taken hold of by the forces of the metamorphosis of lower processes to higher and are borne upwards. It is clear that in this situation the decisive role is played, not by the feelings and thoughts, but by the element of the will. And in the case in question this is the will of God the Son, who says: “My meat (i.e. real life – G.A.B.) is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4, 34). In Christ is united the world-will of the Father with concrete love for the human being, love of the human being to his fellow-men, love of the human being to the object of cognition. The blind love arising from the blood relationship is imbued with the light of knowledge, with the Holy Spirit.

Of Christ it is said: “God is love.” In his working within the human being, Christ helps the one who walks, to overcome the egocentricity of the abstract ‘I’, to develop love for the world as for himself and thus for his own higher ‘I’. In such a case one can, without hesitation, “die” on the cross of the world-principles (BB’ – CC’); that is, extinguish percepts, thinking, the earthly memory: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it (in increasing materialization and abstraction – G.A.B.): and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16,25). Not everyone is ready and able to take upon himself so concretely and practically “his” cross, which is at the same time the world-cross. But whoever fails to take it upon himself, will not resurrect.

4. The Phenomenon of the Human Being

The human being as a phenomenon embodies a sensible-supersensible totality of processes which are permeated by a unitary organization. From a certain point of evolution onwards the nodal point of this organization shifts from the spirit (the group-‘I’) to the physical body, which explains the decisive significance of the earthly incarnation for the evolution of the human monad to an ‘I’-being.

This organization is a system whose elements and connections do not all become conscious to the human being. Their being made conscious is the movement from lower to higher ‘I’, which is a process of self-realization. Its various stages consist in the establishing of boundaries, the “membering-out” of the phenomenon of man from the complex phenomenology of the macrocosm. In this sense we are – as Rudolf Steiner emphasizes – quite simply schematizing when we speak of man as a many-membered being consisting of, for example, physical body, ether body, astral body and ‘I’, because in no circumstances do these members delimit, separate him off from the material-spiritual world around him. They are merely elements of the organization which are endowed with a content by the processes taking place within them. The boundaries of the human subject are formed thanks to the fact that in it the following arise: 1. images, 2. experiences of inner representations, 3. experiences of the memory, 4. experiences of perceptions (cf. GA 206, 12.8.1921).

An examination of these boundaries provides us also with an answer to the question of the limits of knowledge.

Let us return briefly to the way this process of boundary-forming stood before us in the previous discussion. Perception which has be- come an experience within us brings the universal activity of the ‘I’ into connection with our earthly individuality. The percept becomes the possession of our emerging everyday ‘I’. In addition, our inner representations (cf. Fig.99), which have been ‘implanted’ in the ether-body, become percepts. In the first years of childhood there arises already a certain ‘blockage’. The perceived inner representation is reflected back by the physical body and there emerges the capacity to remember. If no blockage were to arise in the physical body, so Rudolf Steiner says, the human being would be at the mercy of outer events and imitate them in an empty fashion. For this reason, what we experience in the outer world must not pass through us; we must hold it back, and this is what our physical body does.

The individualization of the soul-life begins, therefore, with a process in the physical body that is conditioned by the body’s materialization. This has made the body impermeable to sense-impressions which, for their part, have assumed an earthly character. The physical body itself consists of a working together of forces and pictures. But underlying both is the working of the ether-body upon which the physical body imposes its laws.

Then, also the astral body and ‘I’ work upon the ether body. There arises a complex system of forces and their effects which permeate the entire fourfold man. “If,” says Rudolf Steiner, “you imagine the forces of growth from the inside, and think of them as permeated on the other side by that which underlies memory – but now, not as inner representations that hide one another, but as that which lies at the basis of memory – in other words, etheric movements on the one side, which well up and are dammed up through the inner processing of the nutritive substances taken in, and are dammed up through the movement of the human being, in conflict with what wells downwards from all that has been perceived through the senses and has become inner representation and has then descended into the ether-body in order to preserve memory; if you imagine this interworking from above and below, of what swings down from the inner representation and of what rises up from below from the process of nutrition, growth and eating, both of these in interplay with one another; then you will have a living picture of the ether body. And again, if you think of all that you yourself experience when instincts (in the subconscious – G.A.B.) are active, where-by you can understand very well how in the instincts there work blood circulation, breathing, how the whole rhythmic system works in the instincts, and how these instincts are dependent on our upbringing/education, on what we have absorbed (also in the memory – G.A.B.), then you have the living interplay of what is astral body. And if, finally, you imagine an interplay of the acts of will – in this realm everything is stirred up that has the character of will-impulses – with what are sense-perceptions, then you have a living picture of what, as ‘I’, lives its way into consciousness” (GA 206, 12.8.1921).

In concrete terms, fourfold man is also constituted in this way. We need this description in order to grasp the “atomistics” of soul life, not in its sensory allegory, but in its sensible-supersensible essential nature.

Let us suppose we have received a sense-perception of the colour red. If we reflect upon it, then we have distanced ourselves from it in our ‘I’. But while we are perceiving it we ourselves are merging together with it with our higher ‘I’ and our entire astral organism. The colour fills our consciousness completely. The perceiving of it also calls forth significant processes in the physical body. It is well-known that the human being consists, to more than 90%, of fluid. The organs that regulate the watery organism are the kidneys.* They have a relation to all the watery processes, also in the eye. The watery element, says Rudolf Steiner, is in a certain sense "rayed out" from the system of the kidneys over the entire organism. And this is living water. On its waves move the outward radiations of the ether body. It is in this way that they reach the optic nerve. Moreover, the picture that in the perceptual process has arisen in ‘I’ and astral body streams into the fluid that fills the eye and is permeated by the ether body. Thus the act of visual perception is conditioned by the connection of what comes from without and what comes from within.

* These are also closely bound up with the airy organism.
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Within this phenomenon of soul-life the triune human being of limbs, rhythm and head comes to expression in a special way. Rudolf Steiner says that throughout a human life the head (from which plasticizing, form-building forces stream into the organism) is continually attacked by the metabolic-limb system. Their relation is mediated by the rhythmic system, and this process has an effect upon the functioning of all the organs. Let us again take the eye as an example. This is pervaded by the blood vessels and therefore also the metabolism. Here, "that which takes place in the venous membrane of the eye (in perception – G.A.B.) ... (wishes to) dissolve, already in the eye, what wants to consolidate itself in the optic nerve. The optic nerve would like continually to create (on the basis of the perception – G.A.B.) clearly-contoured formations in the eye. The venous membrane, with the blood flowing there, wants continually to dissolve it”* (GA 218, 20.10.1922). Both activities have the character of a vibration. The relation of their rhythms is 1:4. These processes are of an extremely fine nature. Rudolf Steiner advises that, if we wish to understand them, we should abandon the crude assumption according to which the arterial blood passes over directly into the venous. In reality, the blood pours, in the rhythm of its circulation, from the artery (into the organ) and is then sucked up by the vein, pours again and is sucked up again. Here, the rhythm of the circulation prevails. In the optic nerve, however, vibrates the rhythm of the breath. The process of seeing consists in the fact that the two rhythms strike up against one another. Their ratio is 1:4. This is the relation of breath and circulatory or pulse rhythm. If the rhythms were the same, visual perception could not occur. And behind them stand the astral and ether bodies; their mutual influence determines the state of the entire organism. If the former changes, the relation between the processes of hardening and dissolving is disturbed, with illness arising as a consequence.

* Incidentally, here the same world principles are at work as those that stand at the beginning of the universe: substance, life, form/
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When the perception has taken place in us, it becomes conscious. Then the rhythmic process, “which is regulated by the heart and the lung,” propagates itself “via the cerebro-spinal fluid up into the brain. ... Those vibrations in the brain, which occur there and have their stimulus in the human rhythmic system, are that which, in fact, conveys physically the understanding (of what was perceived – G.A.B.). We can understand by virtue of the fact that we breathe. ... However, through the fact that the rhythmic system is connected with the process of understanding, the latter comes into a close relation with human feeling. And anyone who cultivates self-perception of an intimate kind can see what connections exist between understanding and actual feeling” (GA 302a, 21.9.1920). What then happens, is that everything sinks down into the system of the metabolism, the internal organs, where it becomes memory.

Not all sense-perceptions function in the way described above. In the human being there are altogether, as Anthroposophy teaches, twelve forms of sense-perception, and they are capable of development. They can be divided into three groups, such that in the first group the nature of thinking and of the forces that build it up comes to particularly clear expression; in the second, the nature of feeling; in the third, that of the will. The sense of hearing belongs to the last group. It is in a certain sense the antipode to the sense of vision. Their opposite nature lies in the fact that vision is mediated by the sensitive nerves and hearing by the motor nerves. Here we must bear in mind that in reality all human nerves are sensitive. The motor nerves allow the human being to perceive with the sense of movement (the second in the system of the twelve senses). And, as Rudolf Steiner says, they have “nothing to do with the stimulation of the will as such” (ibid.).

What we hear penetrates via the auditory nerve deep into our organism and, in the nerves, takes hold of that which normally only the will works upon if it is to be perceived by us. It is therefore no coincidence, Rudolf Steiner remarks, that Schopenhauer experienced music as being closely bound up with the will. What we hear is perceived by the whole system within which the will is rooted in us: namely, the metabolic-limb system, where all that has happened is imprinted in our memory. What we have heard is recalled to memory in the place where what we see is perceived – in that part of the metabolic system which reaches up into the head.

The inner representations arising from the senses of sight and hearing are understood with the help of the rhythmic system. Thanks to this, they come into a reciprocal relation; they cross each other “like a lemniscate in the rhythmic system, where they reach into and across one another”. In this process, “the visual representations” have “a stream into the organism; the aural representations have a stream from the organism upwards” (ibid.). The development of the speech organs is connected with this orientation of the stream of aural experiences.

* * *

On the basis of the single examples we have discussed, we can present the main features of bodily-soul-spiritual ontogenesis which has, already on the level of sense-perceptions, the character of a system (Fig.101). The polar inversion of their twelve-membered totality (from the sense of life to the sense of ego) is related, and is analogous in its functioning, to the polar inversion of the nerve-sense and the metabolic-limb systems. The two types of inversion share a common element – namely, the rhythmic system of breath and blood circulation. Behind the activity of all three systems stands the higher ‘I’ of the human being. The systems mediate its connection with the body, and sense-perception mediates its connection with thinking, feeling and the expression of will. If one removes one of the elements from this totality, its holistic, spiritual-organic character is destroyed, thus making access impossible to knowledge of the qualitative side of the phenomenon of man.

In one of his lectures Rudolf Steiner presents an illustration of the human aura viewed in profile from the right. This is reproduced here in Fig.102. We have made to what has really been beheld, a small diagrammatic addition in order to crystallize out the lasting elements within the continually changing process which the aura is, or rather to show the principles of its existence as a whole, which combines within itself this series of tri-unities. The complexity of the depiction of the aura is explained by the fact that our spatio-temporal conceptions can unite with it only with great difficulty, because they appear in it, not as a precondition of experience, but as experience itself. Why, for example, is it necessary to specify that the aura is seen from the right? Because in the human being the stream of ether-forces flows from right to left, and those of the physical forces, from left to right. Visible in the aura from the right, in this case, is the supersensible working of the ether-forces ‘against the background’ of the physical forces.

The second peculiarity of the aura is that the human being is not closed off within from the spiritual surroundings as he is (visibly to the outer senses) separated off from his surroundings in the sense-world. In the substance of the soul-spiritual there takes place a continuous movement of what pulses in man's inner being, over into the objective, universal spiritual surroundings, and from this into the human being. The human being swims, as it were, in this environment (blue in Fig.102).

Of course in a certain sense one must also speak of the boundaries of soul-spiritual man. In the world of Divine revelation everything remains within boundaries of this or that kind. Thus, on the one hand, the universe reaches its limit in the abstract spirit of the human being; on the other hand, every life-condition sets a limit to it; it is bounded by the substance and by the forms. For example, the sense-perceptible universe can extend as far into the distance as spatial forms are found in it.

The human aura has two boundaries (lines A and B in Fig.102). One of them, A, is formed by the process of remembering. This is the barrier from which the memories are mirrored back (orange). Behind it is the unconscious soul-body (red), which has condensed out of the universe in the course of evolution. It is also a fruit of the fall into sin in the Garden of Eden; in the soul-body is rooted, to this day, the turmoil of the Luciferic passions and desires which, as time went on, intensified as a result of Ahrimanic materialization. This is the sphere of the subconscious: it is the source of all the evil, eruptive passions that can inundate the entire world.

When the sense-organs of man opened themselves to the outer, sensory world and the life of inner representations lit up, this placed itself in opposition to the impulses of the dark subconscious; there arose a kind of barrier, a dividing wall that barred them entry into the conscious life of the human being. Everything that approaches this wall from the other side – from the perceptions and the thinking – he reflects back in the form of memories. On the evolutionary level, the creation of the barrier had its effect in the structuring of the human body. As the Luciferic desires, which rise up against the Divine order, the world-plan, were striving to reach through, not only to the sense-perceptions, but also to the life-processes in man, the higher ‘I’ of the human being worked counter to their intentions in the structuring of the inner organs. All the inner organs reflect back memories (we have already spoken of the kidneys), and have a connection to the barrier mentioned above.

The battle between the higher and lower in man continued on into the forming of the nervous system and came to expression in the crystallizing-out of two kinds of nerves. As the human being of head and nerves comes, via the activity of the sense-organs, into connection with the metabolic system, their structure, too, reflected the dual character of the nerves. One group of sense-organs showed more of a connection with the will, while the other group was more connected with man's nerve-sense activity. This brought about yet another metamorphosis in the human being. In him the lower man of the metabolic-limb system is metamorphosed – this time, from incarnation to incarnation – into the upper, ‘head-man’. In the lower man we are building up what is to become our head in the next incarnation. That which unites the two incarnations to form a cycle of metamorphosis, that which constitutes the nodal point of their lemniscate – is to be found in the spiritual world, in the life between death and a new birth. But this node is also present in sensory being: namely, in the fact that the sense-nerve has no material connection to the motor nerve. Thereby is maintained the separation of the upper from the lower man, which is indispensable for the completion of the metamorphosis. The nerve-impulse has, to paraphrase Rudolf Steiner, to make a leap in the transition from one kind of nerve to the other, working at something like a ‘sensitive fluid’. There are in the human being an immense number of such transitional points; all of them, including the system of synapses, are the bodily correlate of the mirror of memories that works in us (line A, Fig.102).

Thus, everything that conditions the human intelligence begins with the receptivity to sense-impressions, which are then worked upon by the intellect and, as a further step, gather in the form of memories as a kind of inner boundary of human consciousness. This runs along the spine and bends away in a curve in the region of the diaphragm. You can trace out this boundary, says Rudolf Steiner, “by joining up all the nerve endings and all the ganglia.” It reminds one of a ‘sieve’ through the ‘holes’ of which the will percolates from one side (from below) and the intelligence from the other (from above). And Rudolf Steiner continues: “in the middle you have the ‘Gemüt’, the sphere of feeling. For, all that belongs to the feeling is actually half will and half intelligence. The will pushes from below, the intelligence from above: this results in feeling. In feeling there is always on the one side intelligence in a dreaming state, and on the other the will in a state of sleep” (GA 194, 7.12.1919).

On the basis of what has been said, we may conclude that the everyday ‘I’, whose content is composed of memories, always has the tendency to condense its shadow-like being into experiences, to endow it with the nature of feelings, and bring it into connection with the rhythmic system, the ether-body; and, consequently, the foundation-stone of the synthesis of consciousness and being can be laid in it. Already in the lower ‘I’ the synthesis of science, religion and art should be striven for.

* * *

The second boundary is set for the human being who ‘swims’ in the soul-spiritual environment, on the side of his sense-perceptions (line B, Fig.102). The philosophers experience it as the limit of knowledge. It is actually visible in the human aura. With the entire content of his soul-life, consisting of percepts, feelings, expressions of will and memory-pictures (green, yellow, Fig.102), the human being, who moves outwards from the ‘I’-centre, meets up with the boundary which holds him fast within the sense-world. It begins in the region of the head (violet, passing over into green) and merges with the inner boundary below. Its existence is due, not to man, but to the universe. When he perceives with his senses and thinks abstractly, the human being experiences nothingness at this boundary and therefore begins to invent concepts that have no content whatever: matter, atom, force etc.

This boundary can be crossed, but only when one has undergone a certain metamorphosis – namely the one that is brought about by our seven-membered cycles of thinking. If the limits of the intellect alone are to be overcome, the ‘power of judgment in beholding’ is an absolute necessity. It has the capacity to open up the lemniscate of morphological thinking. Rudolf Steiner says to Fig.102: “What I am drawing here as an open loop is not something merely thought out, it is something that you can really see, like in and out streaming (into the air – G.A.B.) lightning flashes in a gentle but very slow movement, as an expression of the relation of man to the universe. The streams of the universe approach the human being continually; he draws them towards him, in close proximity to him they intertwine and stream out again” (GA 183, 18.8.1918). These streams greet the human being, as it were, as they whirl around in his aura, establishing his relation to the spiritual universe; on the other side, behind the mirror of the memories, the world-will approaches man.

Such a configuration, or such a form of being and consciousness, was assumed by the relation between God the Father and God the Spirit, which conditioned the process of becoming of our evolutionary cycle. Their cosmic impulses meet in the human being in the way we have described. These encounters are mediated by man, and he thereby becomes an ‘I’-being.

The cosmic influences of will and of spirit do not simply reach the human being – they shape him. The opened lemniscates in Fig.102 identify their closed loops with the upper loops of our thought-lemniscates. With the movement up to the inner boundary, our thought-lemniscates turn one of their parts inside outwards and into the inner space of the other (this is also shown in Fig.102); thus arises the effect of the reflecting-back of the memories (Fig.103).

In step with his attainment of the higher stages of consciousness (the imaginative etc.), the human being can enter with his ‘I’ the opened part of the world-lemniscate, cross its rays at his own discretion and begin to perceive supersensible objects. A more difficult task of initiation is the unfolding and opening of the lower lemniscates.

But if the human being, already on the path of initiation, acquires the three higher states of consciousness, his ‘I’ begins to live individually within the metamorphosis of the universe. There then open up for him, as shown in Fig.103, behind the outer boundary Imaginations (A) in which he begins to think; behind the inner boundary he masters the Inspirations (B). The synthesis of the one and the other leads upwards to the Intuitions (C) in which “all in all” is attained.

By virtue of the Christ impulse the human being can bring about the joining together of the three lemniscates into a unitary process of development, if he sacrifices the strong everyday ‘I’. Its strengthening is only possible, however, given the existence of the two boundaries we have mentioned. Without them, the spiritual forces of the universe would pass through us and, like the animals, we would be unable to make them individually conscious.

The animal’s physical body is embedded totally in the stream of cosmic forces, and forms itself within this under the influence of the ‘I’ of the group or species which exists on the astral plane. Working from above, it leads these streams together into a given physical-material form, molds the forms of the individual creatures like castings, but when it separates itself from them, they simply dissolve. The plants come into being in a similar way. The special nature of human development consists in the fact that the human being, within the cosmic streams that surge around the earth, raises himself vertically and emancipates himself from them. With his head he ‘lifts himself’ above them, so to speak; which explains why he dies in it more quickly than in the other parts of the body. But whilst the one body is dying, another body in the limbs is growing ripe for the next incarnation. The whole human being is actually nothing but a head, which undergoes metamorphosis of its forms, unceasingly.

On earth, man only incarnates really with his head-formation, leading, as he does so, his higher ‘I’ from the astral plane down to the etheric-physical. Such a development is bound up with immense risk. In reality the human being is climbing upwards on a descending ladder and his fate depends on whether he can reach the top more quickly than the ladder is leading downwards – i.e. whether he can make use of the fruits of perception and reflection for the transformation of his organ of thinking to an organ of ideal perception before they exhaust and destroy his etheric-physical nature.

In esotericism one understands the salvation of man to signify, actually, the need to cross the two boundaries of the soul that we have described. ‘Beholding’ thinking begins with love for the object of cognition, which makes possible identification with it. The outer boundary helps us to develop this love. We could not love if we were always merging together with things before we had individualized ourselves. But if the power of love begins to grow in the ‘I’-endowed human being, he can at a given moment supersede its earthly quality, and thinking also. And then we cross the outer boundary.

We bring with us from our pre-earthly existence the outer ‘boundary of love’ and also the inner boundary of memory. Rudolf Steiner ex- plains this as follows. Before birth, the human being dwells in perfect unity with the Divine hierarchies and forgets himself. On the earth he comes to himself, whereby he concentrates on his own inner being and, as it were, renounces the hierarchies. – All this is the same ongoing process of the fall into sin in Paradise. But the forces connecting us with the hierarchies remain within us. These are the moral forces, the forces of love (cf. GA 218, 9.12.1922). At the outer boundary they await us in the form of the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. An echo of our liberation from the hierarchies, our coming-to-ourselves, is memory. It extends across the threshold of birth, because the human being begins to have the experience of “existence for oneself”, of separation, already on the way to incarnation.

Already in the womb of the hierarchies there germinates in man the wish to encounter soul-spiritual resistance against him in the world of otherness-of-being. For this reason, God willed the existence of the Luciferic beings. This will united in the course of evolution with the retardation of the substances of otherness-of-being and this led to a remaining behind of the beings from the hierarchy of the Angels. Part of them were unable, in the transition from the Moon aeon to the Earth aeon, to develop within themselves sufficient strength in the ‘I’, which the present Angels have. There arose in them self-will, which was experienced as weight by the Divine world; this drew the Luciferic Angels into astrality, which is connected to a special degree with the processes of mineralization. Thus, a “first barrier” was formed, which every human being today bears within him as the mirror of memory.

The Luciferic spirits strive – in their own way, of course – towards spiritual heights. In their search for a way out of the blind alley which consists in the fact that they were forced to live in the world of mirror- reflection, they “pierced through”, as it were, the sense-organs of man out into the sense-world, in the hope that they would be able, by means of the human being, to reach through the outer boundary into the spiritual world. But this led to a still greater coarsening of the astrality, its individualization in man, and also to an increasing materialization, which brought to manifestation the Ahrimanic beings – those diametrically opposed to the Luciferic. The Ahrimanic beings made the outer boundary impenetrable – the human being remained enclosed within sense-perceptions –, but they themselves strove, together with the percepts and man's abstract thinking, towards the inner boundary. At this boundary, however, they encountered the self-will of Lucifer, which reflects them back.*

* All these processes belong only to the Earth aeon.
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In this constellation, the human being truly embodies a twofold nature. In his upper part he stands in relation to the world of cosmic thoughts and, in his lower part, to the world of cosmic will. But on the way to the one and to the other he encounters Lucifer and Ahriman. “Ahriman” would like “continually to make the human being entirely into a head. Lucifer would like continually to chop off man's head, so that he cannot think, that everything streams out in warmth via the detour of the heart, so that he overflows with world-embracing love and flows out into the world as world-embracing love, flows out as a cosmically delirious being” (GA 205, 3.7.1921) – i.e. loses himself as an ‘I’.

This is the way – seductive and, because Christ also leads us on the path of love, difficult to recognize – in which the Luciferic beings strive to bypass the Ahrimanic barrier. They try to pour themselves through us into the Father cosmos of love and thereby to drive us back into the old conditions where we were still monads with no individual qualities. For his part Ahriman strives to rob our thinking of the will-element, so that all we have left are the thought-shadows which link together according to the laws of formal logic. This leads to the loss of the individual element in our thinking. And if the aims of Ahriman were to be greatly successful in us, we would “arrive at the moment of death with an exaggerated, instinctively-developed thought. But we human beings would be unable to hold on to this thought, and Ahriman would be able to take possession of it and incorporate it into the rest of the world, so that this thought would work on in the rest of the world” and the world would be consolidated ever further by such thoughts, which would obstruct the metamorphosis into the Jupiter aeon (ibid.). It is worth noting that nearly all factors of contemporary civilization are working in the spirit of the aims of Ahriman mentioned here – and the human being is becoming ever more scleroticized in his brain system. And Church Christianity with its Luciferizing impulse is completing the operation from the other side.

While the Divine hierarchies were permitting the subversive activities of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings so that man could acquire a soul-spiritual life of his own and become free, they placed in opposition to them, at the same time, the metamorphosis of the metabolic-limb system to the head and nerve system in the human being. This metamorphosis works from incarnation to incarnation. As the individualization of the human being grows ever more intensive, it becomes necessary in the course of a single incarnation to undertake, with one's own forces, something in the spirit of this metamorphosis. Those lemniscates which remain open unconsciously (Fig.102, line B; Fig.103) he must close by means of the ‘beholding’ power of thinking and thus, himself, through the strength of his own ‘I’ – not thanks to Lucifer in him – cross the threshold of the supersensible world. With regard to the memories, however, one must develop their lemniscates into the system shown in Fig.94: work on their inner loop has to be made conscious.

If now, proceeding on the basis of the discussions above and the illustration drawn by Rudolf Steiner, we create a synthesis of all this pictorially, it could be shown as in Fig.104. As is the case with other diagrams of ours, this is a schematic symbol; but according to the poet, symbolist and thinker Andrei Beliy the symbol is “a picture of the spirit, in the soul” – that is, it expresses quite concrete supersensible realities.

The figure makes visible for us how the limits of cognition shift before supersensible experience has begun. This shift takes place thanks to the increasing strength of the ‘I’-consciousness, which can alter qualitatively the entire structure of the soul-life and realize in practice in a remarkable way the reunion of the gnoseological and ontological aspects of consciousness. In Fig.104 this is shown with the help of two lemniscates which need to be reunited. Then a third is added to them, which we will call the “ethical” lemniscate.

A great deal in human ethics is connected with the inner boundary of the soul – with what is on the other side of it. This sphere preserves within it the earlier experience of the transition from animal-man to the human being. To speak in a metaphor, we could say that this is the place to which we carry the history of our fall into sin. At the same time, there also took place in that sphere the still older evolution of man as a creation of the Divine. If one penetrates far enough into this sphere, one can reach through to the Gods themselves – the Creators of the human being. The Chthonic Mysteries of antiquity were concerned with the treading of this path. The true Gods can also be reached behind the outer curtain of the soul. In this sense, subconscious and super-conscious mean the same thing. But the sphere of the subconscious, which is hidden behind the inner curtain of the soul, is dark. With a weak consciousness it is better not to enter there. Some mystics, says Rudolf Steiner, have succeeded in “perforating”, corrupting, normal consciousness to such a degree that they overcame the barrier of the memory and entered this sphere. The result of such an operation was often the subjugation of the soul by Lucifer.

The leading over of the spiritual-biological into the spiritual individual phase of evolution makes it possible for the human being to illumine, ennoble, the dark area of the subconscious. How this is done, will be shown in detail in our study of the 9th chapter of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. The sphere of soul-ontogenesis is seen supersensibly when one views the human aura in profile from the left – i.e. not against the background of physical forces. Then, the working of the soul-forces in man is revealed to supersensible observation against the background of the etheric forces.

In order to change one’s perception of the human being in this way, great spiritual mobility is needed. The main difficulty here is the rootedness of consciousness within three-dimensional space. When consciousness is freed from spatial images, conceptions, their interpretation on the sensible-supersensible level is helped by an understanding of the fact that seven-membered man, as he was shown in Fig.89, is the reality of three-dimensional space. We can see from the illustration how the life of soul becomes light-filled through the fact that the stream of its forces in the human being begins to work, as it were, “vertically” to the forces of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. We mentioned earlier on, that the working of these forces has a similar direction in the aura of the earth. But if one seeks for the primal source of this orientation, then it is the original and all-determining world-constellation of the Divine Trinity in evolution – the three rays of its forces. Seven-membered man, as he has evolved through their working, is the real being of three-dimensional space, the earthly embodiment of the Trinity.

To overcome the abstract idea of space (the system of Cartesian coordinates) one must imagine that the inner soul-space becomes a kind of external space; one has to bring about a difficult soul-reversal of one’s standpoint (and consciousness) so that what in one case was the outer boundary of the soul (line A, Fig.102) becomes the inner boundary. This also means looking at the human aura, not from the right, but from the left. Rudolf Steiner gives an imaginative picture of what we now wish to explain (Fig.105). In it we recognize all that, on earth, comprises the dark ‘provinces’ of the soul, as spheres of the soul-world (astral plane, kamaloka) traversed by the human being after death. They have been described by Rudolf Steiner in his book ‘Theosophy’ (GA 9). After death they stand before man as something external.

When we are born, we turn ourselves ‘outside in’ and thus carry within us the planetary soul-world through the course of our earthly life. Contained in it is the experience of all our previous incarnations, and it also provides “material” for the building up of the three-membered individual soul. The first thing that, proceeding from there, comes to intensive expression in our sensations and feelings, is the ‘soul-life’ (purple). Following after it is ‘active soul-force’ (orange).

What is shown in purple and orange in Fig.105 is the same as what was shown in orange in Fig.102; one can, in part, include in it what is shown there in violet. In Fig.102 we encounter the inner boundary of memory. If we view the aura from the left we see, instead of this boundary (or the same boundary, only changed), the boundary of the soul-body. It works in the human being in the direction from front to back (Fig.89) if one views the aura from the right, and in the opposite direction if one is looking from the left. In the latter case, there opens up behind the soul-body the sphere of the sentient soul (yellow, green, blue, Fig.105) – the sphere of wishes, desires, pleasures, displeasures etc.

Thus the human being on his cultural-historical path of development, looking back, in his soul ontogenesis, upon his earlier evolution, finds himself confronted face to face, so to speak, with his own dark subconscious nature (in Figs.102 and 105 this is shown in red and bluish-red), and begins the conscious struggle with it – i.e. with the negative consequences of the fall into sin.

The life of soul enters us at a pre-self-conscious stage; when it takes hold of the sense-organs it merely becomes individually conscious – thanks to the inner perceptions, to begin with – but then it is taken hold of by the ‘I’, raises itself above seven-membered spatial man* and assumes the form of the sevenfoldness of the three souls, the triune spirit and the higher ‘I’. It is with this sevenfoldness, above all, that the human being has to do when he treads the path of individual evolution – the path that leads to freedom.

* Beginning with the intellectual soul the human being, even on earth, lives outside three-dimensional space.
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5. Memories outside the Physical Body

In the lecture of 25.8.1918 (GA 183) Rudolf Steiner gives another drawing (in addition to the one shown in our Fig.102), which helps us to understand better what happens to our memories in the upper loop of the lemniscate shown in Fig.94. Normally, we enter that sphere when we fall asleep, or after death – in other words, when we leave the physical body. But when we metamorphose our consciousness, we strive to do this in waking life.

Concerning this illustration Rudolf Steiner says: “You direct your senses outwards (blue, and arrows from below upwards). There you find through your senses the outer world spread out as a sense-perceptible world... You see all that is inclining inwards. Now follows the difficult conception, which I have to refer to, however. All that you are looking at presents itself to you from within.” We should understand this to mean that we do not have the ability to grasp consciously what is perceived from the other side. This is only possible if, with the astral body and ‘I’, we leave the physical body. Then we will see from the other side (arrows above) everything that we experience when we see, smell, hear. Then will be revealed to us what we normally experience in the state between death and a new birth – namely, the entire past evolution of the world. We find it within ourselves as the content of our memory (red, top left). In the case of such a memory it is the laws, not of the sensory, but the supersensory world of perceptions that are at work.

In order to reach through to these memories, one must unfold the inward-turned lemniscate parts at the inner boundary of the memory, in which the great cosmic memory is enfolded in our earthly memories of the present incarnation, which are dependent on the experience of perceptions and thinking. If we do this (as shown in Fig.104) we leave behind our own body and three-dimensional space and enter the realm where the time that has passed has become space. Instead of “inside” and “outside” we experience “before” and “after” in the form of pictures of past existence, of evolution, as the result of which all our three bodies have come into being. The human being as a microcosm “turns himself inside-out” as he emerges on the other side of the sense-perceptions, and experiences his own sense-organs as being formed by the entire Zodiac and reaching up into his own spiritual heights. The whole picture that now stands before the human being gleams and radiates in the astral light and brings knowledge of the ‘ur’- phenomena of soul-life and of the evolution of the world. And all this is experience by the human being in his astral (i.e. starry!) body (see GA 153, 9.4.1914).

The reciprocal relation of the micro and macro aspects of the earthly incarnation is realized in such a way that the twelve-membered macro-cosmic system of the sense-organs is “bent” into a lemniscate when the human being enters incarnation. In our methodological studies the twelve-membered metamorphosis is a new phenomenon. For reasons of space we cannot examine this in full and will therefore only consider a few of its laws. The highest ‘ur’-phenomenon of this metamorphosis is the planetary incarnation consisting of Pralaya and Manvantara. The first is fivefold, the second sevenfold. We obtain thus a universal twelvefoldness which reveals itself in two different ways: 1. as a twelvefold circle (circulation or system) with a thirteenth, system-forming element (principle) in the centre; 2. as a lemniscate, whose upper loop has five elements and the lower, seven. It is with this lower, seven-membered loop, which is itself a lemniscate, that we are concerned at the moment; but the whole twelve-membered lemniscate has in common with the sevenfold one only the relation between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’; in it the principle of ‘turning inside-out’ is also at work, but there is in it no development of metamorphosis from element to element. Its upper and lower loops relate to each other on the macro level as the essence and the appearance of the whole; and on the micro level as, mostly, the inner and the outer. It is according to this second principle that is formed in the human being the system of the twelve senses. To seven of them the macrocosm appears from without, the five others are borne by man in his inner being; they condition within him the general feeling of existence in the sense-world, but each one, taken individually, becomes conscious to a very limited degree for the present – these are the sense of life, of movement etc. Their working in us remains half instinctive.

As in psychosophy the connection is researched between the system of the sense-perceptions and the system of the Zodiac, one can speak of the seven outer senses as ‘day-senses’ and of the five inner ones as ‘night-senses’ (Fig.107).* It is specifically the inner, ‘nocturnal’ sense-perceptions that are found behind the mirror of the memories (Fig.106, blue below). On them depends – we repeat – the general feeling of existence, and in the supersensible they are bound up with the mystery of life. To penetrate the inner boundary of the soul and reach through to their supersensible reality has been attempted by Christian mystics (and is still attempted today), and for many of them this attempt ended with a psychical catastrophe. The safer way leads first behind the outer, ‘daytime’ sense-perceptions, and then, when one is on ‘the other side’ and has strengthened one’s connection with the higher ‘I’, one tries to step behind the inner sense-perceptions, behind the mirror of the memories, as one moves around the Zodiac. Then one gains knowledge of the unutterable mystery of good and evil which is connected with the evolution of the world and man. All of this is attained, also, by whoever treads the path of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. For, the Zodiacal constellation which “bends” the circle of cosmic perceptions into the lemniscate of the sense-organs is the Aries-Libra axis of the Zodiac. It is this, too, which underlies the ideal-realist monism of Anthroposophical philosophy. But that is the theme of future discussions.

* This theme is developed by us in greater detail in the book ‘Triune Man of Body, Soul and Spirit’, chapter III. Not yet translated into English.
_______

* * *

When we fall asleep, our astral body moves out on the lemniscate of sense-perceptions into the outer spiritual cosmos. And then it consists entirely of the memories of the impressions experienced during the day. The old memories surge on within it, also. As they turn themselves inside outwards in the cosmos, they all unite with the forces that are present behind the phenomena and kingdoms of nature. “Our soul,” says Rudolf Steiner, “dives down with its memories into the inner being of nature during sleep. ... When I fall asleep I hand over my memories to the powers that hold sway spiritually in the crystal, the plants, in all natural phenomena” (GA 232, 25.11.1923). Thus during sleep everything to do with morality also passes over into the spiritual world and leaves behind its imprints in the world-ether. These are then used by the hierarchies as a seed for the future of the Earth. In this way is woven the karma of man and the world.

In memory, therefore, the subjective later becomes objective: as an imaginative memory picture. We prove to be not a mere apparatus for the world, with the help of which it remembers itself; we bring much that is new into the world-memory. The human being needs to have a feeling of responsibility for his memories: “Remembering is not just a personal matter, remembering is a process in which we relate to the universe” (GA 194, 7.12.1919).

With the awakening of the human being, the memories enter him again: the dream-like imaginations of the memories descend into his physical and etheric body and are assimilated into the order of the physical world. We would be unable to remember, if we had not brought the dream with its forces into the physical body. And these forces are mighty, indeed. Outside the body we behold the past conditions of the world, and we behold them with the eyes of the beings of the Third hierarchy. We enter deeply into the reality of the world, and when we awaken we bring it into our etheric and physical body.

With memories after death, the situation is different. On leaving the physical body, the one who has died experiences for a few days the panorama of the entire life that has come to an end. All that has happened in the course of time appears now in spatial extension. As if from a fiery star, says Rudolf Steiner, there shines towards us in spiritual space the cosmic wisdom, “which first shows us, however, – it is in constant movement within itself – what one could call a memory tableau of the earthly life just passed” (GA 153, 13.4.1914). The human being experiences this star as his own body, consisting of will-substance; he has a feeling of gratitude that, thanks to this star-body, which is the spiritual aspect of his physical body, he can take into himself all that he has produced on the physical level, the fruit of his earthly incarnation. And that which radiates as wisdom is the activity, the ceaseless movement of the ether-body (ibid.).

Such is the experience of the memories behind the curtain of the outer senses, when one enters there, with not only one’s astral, but also one’s ether-body, which one can do on the path of initiation – before the moment of death. But to begin with, the human being has the task of entering consciously the world of dreams. Then a radical change takes place in spatio-temporal relationships, and we approach the practical, real, not merely theoretical-cognitive, overcoming of the dualism of ‘I’ and world. Through developing self-consciousness on the sensory level of being we make this dualism unavoidable. In one of the notebooks of Rudolf Steiner we find this dualism expressed in a simple formula (Fig.108).

In the transition to the other side of being, into the spiritual world through 1. the curtain of the outer senses (object), and 2. the curtain of the memory pictures, object and subject reverse their position, but both reveal themselves as man. In the rôle of the macrocosmic subject he then beholds himself with the eyes of the being of the Third hierarchy – Angels, Archangels, Archai – as an object that has arisen in the process of world evolution from its beginning up to the present and reveals itself as the content of the (cosmic) memory of the subject. This content then stands as object before the higher ‘I’ of the subject (Fig.109).

With the help of these two Figures one can finally resolve the problem of dualism, when what is represented in them draws into a unity what is actually taking place also in the spiritual being of man (Fig.110).

The last Figure has, like the previous ones, of which it is composed, a relation to the science of initiation. But this path alone enables one to attain the real unity of man and world. How necessary is the striving of the human being for this unity was expressed in the following remarkable words by the Russian author and Slavophile K. Aksakov:

Only in his own way can the human being
Comprehend the great, the higher things;
But if this is not possible – it is better
To be limited but moulded in one single casting.

(‘Monologue’, 1845).

Was it not this, towards which in the last resort, the philosopher Immanuel Kant inclined? – But then we have all the weightier reasons to turn to spiritual science, to the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, which restore the holistic nature of the human being, not compelling him to sacrifice knowledge, but leading it up onto a higher level. Not a ‘simplification’, but ‘still greater complexity’ of the human spirit – this is the only way out for the future of the human race. To realize this in practice is the task, above all, of the vanguard of humanity – of that part of it which thinks and has the destiny of the world at heart.

* * *

The human being bears within him simultaneously the principle of essential being and of cognition. His own development proceeds in each of these (the ontological and the gnoseological lemniscate). The ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, if it is approached correctly, helps one to unite the two principles on a practical level. Rudolf Steiner said: “There are two things that must initially be heeded, if one wishes to develop the spiritual-scientific method. The first is what arises inwardly as a necessary capacity of our everyday soul-life and also of our usual natural-scientific research – namely the ability to recall, or the memory” (GA77a, 27.7.1921). The second is the power of love, love for the object of cognition, for true (not tribal, instinctive) love can only be conscious. The higher worlds must also become an object of cognition, and this requires a method of its own that is able to free us from the body and help us to overcome the lower memory, which is given to us by self-consciousness. Love as the power of self-control leads us to the higher stages of cognition.

In the case of a normal development where initiation is not involved, the human being unites with higher love by passing, after death, through the world of purification – kamaloka, where he frees himself from everything of a base nature to which he became attached in life. The human being enters the world of kamaloka after the panorama of life which is viewed after death has faded away and there remains in the soul only a certain extract of the earthly memories. With this the human being enters what is known as the “soul-world” or the astral globe. In this world he passes through seven spheres. In the course of his life the human being has the task of preparing for these spheres through the development of the seven virtues. In this way the ground is laid for acquisition of uninterrupted consciousness, in which there are no longer any leaps from being into non-being, and back. In uninterrupted consciousness the human being becomes an integral whole.

The virtues necessary in this case also form a system – an ethical lemniscate (Fig.111), in which the higher ones can be developed through metamorphosis of the lower, which have arisen as a result of ordinary spiritual efforts.

People are normally encouraged to develop the highest three of these seven virtues, whereby their relation to them is trivialized or sentimentalized. Neither faith nor hope, and certainly not love, is accessible in its pure manifestation, to the human being who has not first acquired the principal virtue of the earthly aeon – justice (see Fig.33). It is the first that can be inwardized individually and with the help of which one can transform the macrocosmic virtues of past aeons – which have worked upon the three bodies of man – into future virtues of a supra-individual nature (cf. Fig.33).

Justice can only develop in inter-personal relationships when the lower astrality that works in the triune soul has been to a certain degree overcome. “I must”, says Rudolf Steiner, “first feel myself as a separate being if I am to exercise justice in relation to my fellow men (GA 88, 2.12.1903). The chief enemy of justice is the struggle for existence, which forms the first, darkest zone of kamaloka and therewith also of the dark subconscious of man on earth, where ‘burning desire’ etc. are rooted (cf. Fig.105).

As the nodal point of development in the ethical lemniscate we find sagacity. Its transforming power depends upon our ability to aim for a higher development, with perseverance and undeterred by whatever mistakes are made. The love that we develop on this path enables us to unfold so high a degree of individualized selflessness, that it protects us as we cross the threshold, in the world of imaginations where our lower ‘I’ is cancelled and set aside.

Penetration behind the mirror of memories depends upon our inner mastery of a truly, no less than God-like, power of love, and to acquire this is not granted simply through the superseding of the lower ‘I’ as we enter the state of ‘beholding’, but requires that we “die in Christ”.

Chapter 7 – Are there Limits to Knowledge?

We have to a considerable degree anticipated the solution to the question of the limits of knowledge in the chapters devoted to the methodology of spiritual science. But there our main emphasis was placed on the supersensible aspect of the question. To view it as a whole presupposes – above all else – work on the level of theory of knowledge. This is what is presented in the first Part of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. Quite clearly, its main theme is the gnoseology (epistemology) of the freedom of the spirit and of the will, but already from the first chapter there stirs below the surface the question of the limits of knowledge, because the question is being asked concerning the source of thinking. Thus the way we view the limits of knowledge proves to depend on the ability of thinking to change its character, and the ability of consciousness to change its state, its level. In the previous chapters the self-sufficient reality of thinking was pointed out and it was shown that in this begins the human being’s own activity. If this can be free, there can be no limits to knowledge. And any setting-up of such limits is merely an episode on the path to freedom. But it is just such episodes which bring philosophy and the entire world-view of agnosticism and the latest metaphysics to a halt, because they absolutize them. In the seventh chapter discussion is taken up with them again, but in its character it is already the drawing of a conclusion. According to the structure of the first Part of the book, which we showed in our discussion of chapter 6 (cf. Fig.92), Ch.7 is a synthesis of the triad of the synthesis (chapters 5-7). Its sevenfold Cycles are clear and simple, no great effort is required to recognize their structure. The elements in the Cycles are concise; the nature of the conclusion dominates in them. Basically speaking, they are all syntheses, albeit varying subtly in harmony with the laws of metamorphosis. The nature of the synthesis dominates here throughout, as in no previous chapter. The entire content of the chapter flows smoothly and easily, and presents no difficulty of comprehension. Approaching it superficially, one might even say that, taken alone, it enables us to grasp the essence of the matter. But the chapter is simple and clear, only if one bears in mind what has gone before. Such is the simplicity of what is complex.

In the chapter the final conclusions a posteriori of reflection and ‘beholding’ are formed. But when one has started to read it one can also move through the content of the first Part in the reverse direction. Then there will stand before us the preceding chapters as an unfolding of the grand deduction contained in the seventh chapter. But this takes one only to the middle of Part one; for then, between the two halves, a certain symmetry and correspondence between structure and content becomes apparent, because, as we have discovered, the content of the whole of Part I also develops from its centre outwards – to the first and seventh chapters. On the outside it is of a more intellectual and in the middle a more ‘beholding’ nature.

But in addition to this correspondence the first and last sections of Part I contain essential differences. They consist in the fact that – as was taught in the Scholastic school – the beginning reveals the ideas “before the things” (the things arising from the experience of knowledge and of ‘beholding’, we could say here) and the end reveals the same idea “after the things”. Here it is different existentially, namely in the character of its unity of form and content. As was to be expected, there are seven Cycles in the chapter. They are, as we said before, succinct, with the exception of Cycle IV – understandably so. Let us try this time to experience the Cycles as a whole, without stopping to analyse their elements, and bear in mind as we do so the character of each of them in connection with the configuration of the large lemniscates of the chapter.

In the thesis-Cycle the battle resumes, which was raging in the preceding section on the question of a unitary world-picture. It is stressed yet again that cognition overcomes the duality of concept and percept.

CYCLE I

1. We have established the fact that the elements for the explanation of reality need to be drawn from the two
spheres: perception and thinking. As we have seen, it is due to our organization that the full, all-encompassing
reality, including our own subjective being, appears initially as a duality.

2. The act of cognition overcomes this duality by ‘assembling’ the whole object out of the two elements of reality:
the percept and the concept that has been produced by thinking.

3. Let us call the way the world presents itself to us before it has attained its true form by means of cognition,
the world of appearance, as opposed to what has been put together out of percept and concept to form a single
unity. Then we can say: The world is given to us as a twofold entity (dualistically), and cognition works upon it to
bring about a unity (monistically).

4.   A philosophy based upon this fundamental principle can be called monistic philosophy, or monism. Standing
   over against it is the two-world theory or dualism. The latter assumes there are, not two sides of the single reality
   which are held apart by our organization only, but two worlds that are absolutely distinct from one another. It then
   seeks the principles it needs to explain the one world, in the other.

5. Dualism rests upon a mistaken conception of what we call knowledge. It divides the whole of being into two
realms, each of which has its own laws, and places these realms opposite and external to one another.

6. Stemming from a dualism of this kind is the distinction, introduced by Kant into scientific thought and never
since removed from it, between the object of perception and the ‘thing-in-itself’.

7.   Our discussion has shown that it lies in the nature of our mental organization that it is possible for a particular
   (separate) thing to be given as a percept only. Thinking then overcomes the separateness by allocating each
   percept to its rightful place in the world-whole. As long as the separate parts of the world-whole are given the
   character of percepts, we are simply following, in the act of separating-out, a law of our subjectivity. If, however,
   we regard the sum-total of all percepts as one part and then set over against them a second part, as the ‘things-in-
   themselves’, we are philosophizing into the blue. We are involved in nothing more than a conceptual game. We
   are constructing an artificial pair of opposites, but can find no content for its second component, since it is only
   from perception that content can be drawn for a particular thing.

Such is the thesis of chapter 7. If we compare it with the thesis-Cycle of chapter 1, we discover in the content of the two a reversal as in a mirror-image. At the beginning we had to describe the author’s position as player in a peculiar “draughts game” with his opponents. Now, however, the monist position is definitely gaining the upper hand over that of dualism. Dualism has been allowed to speak again and again, and every time it has, itself, revealed its inadequacies. The moment has come to draw a line under it once and for all – and, again, not just intellectually. Following the “law of the genre”, so to speak, we must let it speak now in the antithesis. Only, the initiative is now in our hands. Our right to it has become entirely obvious. In its “closing objection” dualism reveals the artificial, even phantastic, character of its arguments.

CYCLE II

1.   Any form of being that is assumed to exist outside the realm of percept and concept should be consigned to
   the sphere of unjustified hypotheses. The ‘thing-in-itself’ belongs in this category. It is entirely natural that the
   dualistic thinker is unable to find the connection between the hypothetical world-principle and that which is given
   in experience. A content can be found for the hypothetical world-principle, only if one borrows it from the world
   of experience and pretends to oneself that this is not the case. Otherwise it remains an empty concept – a non-
   concept that only has the form of a real one.

2. The dualistic thinker’s usual reply to this is: the content of this concept is inaccessible to us; we can only know
that a content of this kind exists, but not what it is.

3.   In either case an overcoming of dualism is impossible. By introducing into the concept of the ‘thing-in-itself’ a
   few abstract elements from the world of experience, it still remains impossible to explain the rich, concrete life of
   experience on the basis of a few qualities which have, themselves, been drawn from this experience.

4.   Du Bois-Reymond thinks that the non-observable atoms of matter give rise to sensation and feeling, through
   their position and movement. He then draws the following conclusion: We can never arrive at a satisfactory
   explanation of how matter and movement give rise to sensation and feeling, as “it is, and will forever remain,
   entirely incomprehensible that it should not be a matter of indifference to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen,
   nitrogen, oxygen etc. how they lie and move in the present, how they lay and moved in the past and how they
   will lie and move in the future. It cannot in any way be conceived how consciousness could arise out of their
   interworking.”

5.   This conclusion is characteristic of the entire school of thought. Position and movement are separated out
   from the rich world of percepts, and are carried over to the hypothetical world of atoms. Then the thinkers
   concerned are astonished to find that they cannot develop concrete life out of this principle, which they have
   constructed themselves and borrowed from the world of perception.

6.   That the dualist, working with a concept of the “in-itself” that is completely void of content, cannot arrive at an
   explanation of the world, already follows from the definition of his principle as quoted above.
      In any case the dualist sees himself obliged to set insuperable limits to our cognitive capacity.

7.   The adherent of a monistic world-view knows that everything he needs for the explanation of a phenomenon
   he meets in the world, must lie within the latter realm. Whatever prevents him from reaching through to it can
   only be incidental limits of a temporal or spatial nature, or defects of his organization. Not, however, of the
   human organization in general, but of his particular, individual organization.

Whatever may be our rights in the matter, the second Cycle is always a conflict of the opposites. Its true outcome takes into itself something of each of the two opposing sides. In the case in question it is the human subjects who are engaged in conflict. In the synthesis they experience rebirth on the new level and raise, even epistemologically, their appeal to the higher ‘I’, the world-’I’.

CYCLE III

1.   It follows from the concept of knowledge, as we have defined it, that one cannot speak of limits of knowledge.
   Cognition is not an affair of the world in general, but a matter that the human being has to resolve within his
   own sphere. Things do not demand explanation. They exist and work upon one another according to the laws
   that can be discovered by means of thinking. They exist in inseparable unity with these laws.

2.   Our ‘I’-nature encounters the things and, to begin with, only grasps that side of them which we have called
   the percept. But in the interior of this ‘I’ the capacity is found that enables us to discover the other part of reality.
   Only when the ‘I’-nature has united for itself the two elements of reality that are inseparably united in the world,
   has the need for knowledge been satisfied: the ‘I’ has returned to reality again.

3.   The preconditions for realization of the act of knowledge exist through and for the ‘I’. It is the ‘I’ that poses to
   itself the questions in its search for knowledge. And it draws them from the elements of thought that are perfectly
   clear and transparent in themselves. If we ask ourselves questions that we cannot answer, then the content of
   the question cannot be clear and intelligible in all its parts. It is not the world that poses the questions to us; it is
   we ourselves who ask them.

4. I can imagine finding myself quite unable to answer a question that I see written down somewhere, when I do
not know the sphere from which the content of the question is taken.

5.   In our act of knowing, we have to do with questions that arise for us through the fact that a sphere of perception
   conditioned by factors of place, time and our subjective organization stands over against a conceptual sphere
   which points towards the world as a totality.

6. My task consists in the reconciliation of these spheres, both of which are very well known to me.

7.   We cannot speak here of a limit of knowledge. At any given time this or that question can remain unresolved
   because we are prevented by limitations of the standpoint that life has allotted to us, from perceiving the things
   that are relevant to the question. But what cannot be found today can be found tomorrow. The limits arising
   from such conditions are only temporary, and can be overcome with the further advance of perception and
   thinking.

In this chapter one third of its entire length is devoted to ‘beholding’. This is explained by the fact that in the synthesis of the synthesis tribute has to be paid to the two components of the course followed by the discussion hitherto – the conceptual and the ‘beholding’ component. And then the dominance of the intellectual element in the final phase of the lemniscate must also be toned down. In the content of the Cycle we see again the main “pillars” of dualism in its various forms, the working of the cognizing ‘I’ when, losing sight of the naïve-realist character of its initial premises, it constructs the theory of the two worlds and finally loses itself in metaphysics. We have, of course, gone through all this in previous chapters where, admittedly, the aspects of the discussion were always different. The outcome of chapter 7 is the derivation, the building-up of a monistic world-view on the basis of contradictory dualistic, naïve, metaphysical operations of the mind or spirit. It is towards this goal that we are led by the extended act of ‘beholding’. Anticipating this and giving it a direction, is the fundamental conclusion we have arrived at throughout the first three Cycles. It is embodied in element 7 of Cycle III, and declares that all limits to knowledge are temporary. The material familiar to us – the views of various idealists and realists – has never before been examined by us in this light. But to bring to an end our discussion with them because we here “defeated” them is not possible, because the true monism towards which we are moving (we have spoken of this in our own chapters) is an ideal-realism. This fact becomes clear once and for all in Cycles IV and V of chapter 7.

CYCLE IV

1.   Dualism makes the mistake of transferring the antithesis of object and subject, which only has meaning within
   the realm of perception, to purely imaginary entities outside it. However, as the separate things within the
   perceptual sphere are separate only so long as the perceiving subject refrains from thinking, which overcomes
   all separateness and shows it to be due to purely subjective factors, the dualist transfers qualities to entities
   behind the perceptual world which have, even there, no absolute but only relative validity. He thereby divides
   into four the two factors involved in the cognitive process – percept and concept: 1. The object in itself; 2. The
   percept which the subject has of the object; 3. The subject; 4. The concept which relates the percept to the object
   itself. The relation between the object and the subject is real; the subject is really (dynamically) influenced by the
   object. This real process is believed not to enter our consciousness, but to arouse in the subject a reaction to the
   effect brought about by the object. The outcome of this reaction is believed to be the percept. Only this enters
   consciousness. The reality of the object is said to be objective (independent of the subject), and that of the
   percept, subjective. The subject relates this subjective reality to the object. This relation is said to be ideal in
   nature. Dualism thus divides the cognitive process into two parts. One of them, the constituting of the perceived
   object out of the thing-in-itself, he regards as taking place outside consciousness, and the other, the connecting
   of the percept with the concept and the relating of it to the object, occurs within consciousness.

2.   Given these assumptions, it is clear that the dualist believes he obtains in his concepts only subjective
   representatives of what lies before his consciousness. The objectively real process within the subject, through
   which the percept arises, and, even more so, the objective relations between the things-in-themselves, remain for
   such a dualist unknowable by direct means; in his view the human being can only obtain concepts that do no
   more than represent the objectively real. The bond that draws things into a unity, connecting them with each
   other and objectively with our individual mind or spirit (as a thing-in-itself), lies beyond consciousness within a
   Being-in-itself, of which we can have in our consciousness no more than a conceptual counterpart.

3.   Dualism thinks it will cause the world to evaporate into an abstract conceptual scheme if it does not posit real
   connections next to the conceptual connections between things. In other words, the ideal principles discoverable
   by means of thinking seem too airy and insubstantial to the dualist, and he seeks for real principles on which they
   can be supported.

It is a most interesting fact that in Cycle IV – as is the case throughout the structure of Part I of the book – the actual content begins in the middle, in the fourth element, and this content is naïve realism. This is the point of departure for monism. But if our inquiry into the nature of the relation between percept and concept follows a wrong path, we arrive at the ideal-realism of metaphysical realism, which embodies the main dualistic antithesis to the monism of ideal-realism.

4. Let us examine these real principles more closely. The naïve person (naïve realist) regards the objects of
   outer experience as realities. The fact that he can grasp these things with his hands and see them with his eyes
   is, for him, proof of their reality. “Nothing exists that one cannot perceive”, can be regarded as the primary axiom
   of the naïve man; and the converse of it is also accepted as true: “Whatever can be perceived is real.” The best
   proof of this statement is the naïve man’s belief in immortality and in ghosts. He imagines the soul as consisting
   of a fine material substance, which under certain conditions can become visible even to the ordinary person
   (naïve belief in ghosts).
      Contrasting with this world which is real for him, everything else – the world of ideas in particular – is for the
   naïve realist unreal, “nothing more than an idea”. What we add to things by way of thinking activity is mere
   thought about the things. Thought adds nothing real to our perceptions.
      However, it is not just in relation to the nature of things that the naïve man views sense-perception as the
   sole criterion of reality, but also in relation to happenings. A thing can, in his opinion, only affect another if a
   force that is perceptible to the senses proceeds from the one and takes hold of the other. Earlier physics believed
   that very fine substances stream out from material bodies and enter the soul via our sense-organs. The fact
   that we cannot see these substances in reality is due merely to the coarseness of our senses relative to the
   fineness of the substances in question. A basic conviction led people to attribute reality to these substances
   for the same reason as it was attributed to the objects of the sense-world – namely, because of their form of
   being, which was considered analogous to that of sense-perceptible reality. The self-contained nature of what
   can be experienced ideally is not held by the naïve consciousness to be real in the same sense as what can
   be experienced on the sensory level. An object grasped as “just an idea” remains nothing more than a figment
   of the imagination until conviction of its reality can be provided by sense-perception. In short, the naïve person
   demands, in addition to the evidence of his thinking, the real testimony of the senses. It is this need of the naïve
   man which explains the origin of the primitive forms of belief in revelation. The God who is given us by way of
   thinking remains for the naïve consciousness no more than a God we have conjured up in thought. The naïve
   consciousness demands that knowledge be conveyed by means accessible to sense-perception. The God must
   appear in the flesh, and little value is attached to the evidence of thinking; Divinity must be proved by the
   changing of water to wine in a way that can, in principle, be witnessed by sense-observation. The act of
   knowledge is also imagined by the naïve person as a process analogous to that of sense-perception. Things
   make an impression in the soul, or they project images which enter via the senses, and so on.
      All that the naïve person can perceive with his senses, he regards as real; and the things he does not perceive
   in this way (God, soul, knowledge, etc.) he conceives as being analogous to the objects of perception.
      If naïve realism wishes to provide the basis for a science, it can see this only in an exact description of the
   content of perception. Concepts are, for it, only a means to an end. They are there to create ideal counterparts
   to the things perceived. For the things themselves they are without significance. For the naïve realist only the
   individual tulips are real, which are seen or can be seen: the single idea of the tulip is for him an abstraction, an
   unreal thought-picture constructed by the soul out of the characteristics common to all tulips.

5.   Naïve realism with its basic principle of the reality of everything we perceive, is refuted by experience, which
   teaches us that the content of perceptions is transitory in nature. The tulip that I see is real today; in a year it
   will have completely vanished. What has survived is the species tulip. For naïve realism, however, this species
   is “only” an idea, not a reality. Thus this world-view finds itself in the position of seeing its realities appear and
   disappear, while what it regards as unreal is more enduring than the real. Naïve realism must therefore allow
   something of an ideal nature to exist, in addition to the percepts. It must incorporate into itself entities that it
   cannot perceive with the senses. It comes to terms with itself by conceiving their form of existence as analogous
   to that of sensory objects. These hypothetical realities are the invisible forces through which sense-perceptible
   things work upon one another. Such a force is that of heredity, which transcends the bounds of the individual,
   and is the reason why there develops out of the individual a new one which resembles it, whereby the species
   is maintained. A similar thing is the life-principle pervading the bodily organism, the soul, for which the naïve
   consciousness always finds a concept formed by analogy with sense-realities; and then, finally, it is the Divinity
   as conceived by the naïve person. This Divine being is viewed as working in a way that corresponds exactly to
   the perceived way of working of the human being himself: that is to say, anthropomorphically.

6.    Modern physics explains sensory perceptions in terms of processes of the smallest particles of bodies and
   of an infinitely fine substance, the ether, or similar things. What we experience as warmth, for example, is, within
   the space occupied by the body radiating warmth, movement of its parts. Here too something unobservable is
   conceived by analogy with the observable world. The sensory image analogous to the concept “body” is,
   according to this way of thinking, the interior of a space enclosed on all sides, in which elastic spheres are
   moving in all directions, colliding with one another, hitting against and bouncing off the walls etc.
      Without assumptions of this kind, the world would, for naïve realism, fall apart into a disconnected aggregate
   of percepts that is without mutual relations and is unable to draw itself together into a unity. It is clear, however,
   that naïve realism can only make this assumption on the basis of an inconsistency in its thinking. If it wishes to
   remain true to its principle: only what is perceived is real, then it cannot allow itself to assume something real
   where it perceives nothing. The non-perceivable forces proceeding from perceivable things are actually unjustified
   hypotheses from the standpoint of naïve realism. And because it knows of no other realities it endows its
   hypothetical forces with perceptual content. Thus, it ascribes a form of being (perceptual existence) to a realm
   where it lacks the only means that would enable it to make a statement about this form of being – namely,
   sensory perception.

7.   This self-contradictory world-view leads to metaphysical realism. And this constructs, parallel to perceivable
   reality, one that is non-perceivable, which it thinks of in an analogous way to the first. Consequently, metaphysical
   realism is, of necessity, dualism.

When ‘beholding’ has shown us how the illusory “tree” of metaphysical realism “grows” and “develops”, we can see behind it in ideal form the idea of monism, which it has so carefully concealed from us. Cycle V is also devoted to the process of this perception of the culmination in the ascent of the primal idea of Part I of the book, which is highlighted at the beginning of the first chapter. We say to ourselves something like the following: Can the human being be free in his thinking and his action? – Yes, he can if, in the activity of knowing, he unites into a single whole the ideal and the real, the idea and the percept (including perception of the idea itself); then in his ‘I’ he is a monist.

CYCLE V

1.   Where metaphysical realism observes a relation between perceivable things (movement drawing them into
   closer proximity with one another; consciousness becoming aware of something objective etc.), there it posits
   a reality.

2. The relation it notices can, however, only be expressed by means of thinking; it cannot be perceived. In an
arbitrary manner, the ideal relation is made into something similar to what is perceivable.

3.   Thus, for this way of thinking the real world is composed of objects of perception that are in an endless
   process of becoming, appear and then disappear, and of the non-perceivable forces, by which the perceived
   objects are brought into being, and which are the element that endures.
      Metaphysical realism is a contradictory mixture of naïve realism and idealism.

4.   Its hypothetical forces are non-perceivable entities with perceptual qualities. It has decided, in addition to the
   realm for whose form of existence it has a means of cognition in sense-perception, to posit another realm where
   this means cannot be applied, and which can only be known through thinking. But it cannot decide at the same
   time to recognize the form of being accessible to him through thinking, the concept (or idea), as a factor that is
   valid on an equal basis with the percept. If one wishes to avoid the contradiction of a non-perceivable percept,
   one is forced to admit that, for the thought-mediated relations between the percepts there is, for us, no other
   form of existence than that of the concept.

5.   The world shows itself to be the sum-total of percepts and of their conceptual (ideal) relations, once one has
   eliminated from metaphysical realism its invalid component. In this way metaphysical realism moves over into a
   world-view that requires for the percept the principle of perceivability and for the relations between percepts, that
   of conceivability. This world-view must reject the existence of a third realm, added to the perceptual and
   conceptual world, for which both principles – the so-called real principle and the ideal principle – are
   simultaneously valid.

6.   When metaphysical realism asserts that, in addition to the ideal relation between the object of perception and
   its subject of perception there must be a real relation between the thing-in-itself of the percept and the
   thing-in-itself of the perceivable subject (what is called the individual spirit), then this assertion rests on the
   false assumption of a non-perceivable process of being, analogous to the processes of the sensory world.
   When metaphysical realism goes on to say: I come into a conscious, ideal relation to my world of perception;
   but I can only come into a dynamic (force) relation with the real world, – he is no less guilty of the error we
   have already criticized. It is possible to speak of a relation of forces only within the world of perception (the
   sphere of the sense of touch), but not outside it.

7.   Let us call the world-view characterized above, in which metaphysical realism finally culminates when it has
   removed its contradictory elements, monism, because it combines one-sided realism with idealism to form a
   higher unity.

In our own later chapters we will be examining the macrocosmic dimension and the roots of monistic ideal-realism. We mention this at the present stage, because anyone who works with the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ understands that the problem of freedom is resolved within the triangle of idealism-realism-monism. Also in this triangle are rooted all the false paths of knowledge and life. And now, in the seventh chapter, where we have arrived at our fundamental conclusions, let us turn, with them, back to our two main opponents: naïve and metaphysical realism. Only in these surroundings can monism reveal itself individually and show how important is the role it has to play. And how forcefully, how brilliantly, how decisively it does this! If this well-founded, spiritually powerful manifestation of a true monism were to be made conscious and be livingly experienced by our contemporaries, we would not have the growing problem we have today with the materialist metaphysics of the parapsychologists.

CYCLE VI

1.   For naïve realism the real world is a sum of perceptual objects; for metaphysical realism, reality is to be
   ascribed not only to percepts but also to the non-perceivable forces; monism puts in the place of forces the
   ideal connections it obtains by means of thinking. Such connections, however, are the laws of nature. A
   natural law is nothing other than the conceptual expression for the connection between certain percepts.
       Monism has no need whatever to inquire after other principles than percept and concept to explain reality. It
   knows that, within the whole sphere of reality, there is no reason to do so. It sees in the world of percepts as it
   is given directly to perception, a semi-reality; in the uniting of this with the world of concepts it finds the full reality.

2.   The metaphysical realist can object as follows to the adherent of monism: It may well be that for your own
   organization your knowledge is complete within itself, that no component is missing; but you do not know how
   the world is mirrored in an organization that is different from yours.

3.   The answer of monism will be: If there are other intelligences than ours, if their percepts are configured
   differently from our own, only that will have any significance for me, which comes from them to me via percept
   and concept.

4.   I am, through my perception, through this specifically human perception, placed as a subject over against the
   object. A break has thereby arisen in the connection between things. The subject restores this connection by
   means of thinking. In this way it has reintegrated itself into the world-whole. As it is only through our subject that
   this totality appears split in two along a line between our perception and our concept, so, true knowledge is given
   through the uniting of these two. For beings with a different world of perception (for example, with twice as many
   sense-organs), the connection would appear broken at another place, and the restoration would need therefore
   to have a form specific to these beings.

5.   Only for naïve and metaphysical realism, both of which see in the content of the psyche only an ideal
   representation of the world, does the question of the limits to knowledge arise. For them, the world outside the
   subject is something absolute and self-contained, and the content of the subject is a picture of it that stands fully
   and entirely outside this absolute. The quality of knowledge depends on the greater or lesser resemblance of this
   picture to the absolute object. A being with fewer senses than man, will perceive less of the world, and one with a
   greater number of senses will perceive more than he does. Thus, the former will have less perfect knowledge
   than the latter.

6.   For monism the situation is different. It is through the organization of the perceiving being that the form is
   determined according to which the world totality appears split into subject and object. The object is not an
   absolute but a relative factor vis-à-vis this particular subject. The building of a bridge between these opposites
   can therefore only come about in the quite specific way peculiar to the human subject. As soon as the ‘I’, which
   is separated from the world in the act of perceiving, integrates itself again into the world-whole as a result of
   thinking activity, all questioning, which was due only to the separation, ceases.

6. A being of a different kind would have a different kind of cognition. Ours is sufficient to provide answers to the
questions posed by our own being.

The final, seventh, Cycle is devoted to the problem of cognitive method – not the method of spiritual science, but that of metaphysical realism. This realism is, as we have established, the chief opponent of the monism of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, and just as this has reached its conclusion and in many respects evolved to its present form thanks to its method, so do the mistakes of metaphysical realism also stem from its method. Thus the striving for all-unity in chapter 7, and hence also in the whole of Part I, has been leading over into the problem of method or, to express it more broadly, of methodology – which itself needed justification.

It might be objected that the problems of methodology cannot be resolved in the way it is done in Cycle VII: the Cycle is too “light- weight”. We would reply that it depends in what sense. In it, no more than an indication is given, the antithesis to the spiritual-scientific method which has been applied in the entire foregoing text is introduced. In Cycle VII it is merely suggested to the reader that he should make this conscious. If we read about the cognitive method used by metaphysical realism, and fail, as we do so, to perceive ideally within us the question: What method have we then been using? – then this means that our experience in working with the book has not been successful.

The new kind of generality that is inherent in Part I of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ and embraces both its content (the object) and the reader (the subject), must be experienced by us in Cycle VII. This represents for us a kind of examination. To pass it, we must experience Cycle VII in ‘beholding’ and hear sounding from within it the question as to Anthroposophical method.

If we only take up the Cycle on the level of content and try to understand the whole of Part I of the book in the light of the inductive method (towards which we are inclined instinctively), this can only result in bewilderment, pure and simple. Is it possible, we would say to ourselves, to conclude an important phase of research in this way, without giving emphasis to the conclusions drawn in relation to the main question, and letting the whole thing end in a discussion of secondary matters, etc.? But this bewilderment passes as soon as we recall the structure of this Part, which is very special owing to the method applied. We recall that its beginning lies in the middle, that the exposition proceeds from the middle in both directions, in such a way that the most important content is concentrated at the centre, and that chapters 1 and 7 are its periphery, where it enters into contact with the external world. From the latter comes from the one end the question about freedom, and from the other the method which stands in the way of a positive solution to this question.

The inductive method of cognition can also be clearly recognized in Part I when we travel backwards from chapter 7 to chapter 1. In this case we are starting with the method of metaphysical realism and ending with the universal “victory” over all the arguments of naïve realism. When, in accordance with the inductive method, we moved from chapter 1 to chapter 4 we grew convinced of the fact that the opponents of freedom view the matter from a naïve-realist standpoint. As to the monism of ideal-realism, however, with all its special spiritual-scientific features, it demands a method of its own – and this is as we have shown it, though, of course, not exhaustively.

CYCLE VII

1.-2. Metaphysical realism has to ask the question: How are the data of perception given; how does the subject
   come to be affected?
        For monism the percept is determined by the subject. This, however, has at the same time the means to
   overcome the determination that it has itself brought about. Metaphysical realism is faced with a further difficulty,
   when it wants to explain the similarity between different human individuals’ pictures of the world. It has to ask
   itself: How is it that the picture of the world that I build up out of my subjectively determined percepts and my
   concepts, resembles the one built up by another human individual out of the same two subjective factors? How
   can I draw any inferences at all from my subjective world-picture to that of another person? From the fact that
   people manage to reach an understanding with one another in practical life, the metaphysical realist feels able to
   infer the similarity of their subjective world-pictures. From the similarity of these world-pictures he then goes on
   to infer the similar nature of the individual spirits underlying the single human subjects of perception, or the “I-in-
   itself” underlying each human subject.

3.    This argument is, therefore, one that infers from a sum of effects the character of the causes underlying
   them. We believe that, from a sufficient number of cases, we know the situation well enough to be able to
   predict how the inferred causes will act in other cases. We say that a conclusion of this kind has been arrived
   at by inductive reasoning. We will find ourselves obliged to modify the results of such a line of argument if
   something unexpected arises from a later observation, because the character of the result is determined only
   by the individual nature of the observations made. However, this knowledge of the causes that is subject to
   certain conditions is, the metaphysical realist asserts, perfectly adequate for practical life. Inductive reasoning
   is the methodical basis of modern metaphysical realism.

4.    There was a time when people believed they could develop something out of concepts that is no longer
   concept. They believed it was possible, via concepts, to come to a knowledge of the real metaphysical entities
   that are needed by metaphysical realism. This way of philosophizing is now a thing of the past. The belief is,
   instead, that one can infer from a sufficient number of perceived facts the character of the thing-in-itself
   underlying these facts.

5.   Where formerly it was out of the concept, today it is out of the percept that one believes it is possible to
   develop the metaphysical element. As we have the concepts before us in transparent clarity, it was believed
   that the metaphysical, too, could be drawn out of them with absolute certainty. The percepts are not there for
   us with the same transparent clarity. Each successive percept shows itself in a somewhat different way than
   the previous one of the same kind. In the end, what has been inferred from the previous cases is therefore
   modified somewhat by each one that follows. The resulting form arrived at in this way for the metaphysical
   element must therefore be called relatively correct; it is subject to correction by future cases.

6. This methodical principle characterizes the metaphysics of Eduard von Hartmann, who put as a motto on
the title page of his principal work: “Speculative Results according to the Inductive Natural-Scientific Method”.

7.   The form given by the metaphysical realist at the present time to his things-in-themselves is one that has
   been arrived at through inductive reasoning. Through consideration of the cognitive process he is convinced of
   the existence of an objective-real sphere in addition to that “subjective” element in the world that we come to
   know by means of percept and concept. He believes he is able to determine the nature of this objective reality
   through drawing conclusions inductively from his percepts.

An Addition has been written to the seventh chapter. In the various chapters such Additions have different roles, as we mentioned earlier. But there is something they all have in common. This we can judge by referring to a statement made by Rudolf Steiner about one year after the publication of the second, extended edition of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. In one of the lectures to teachers he speaks about the characteristic features of the ego-sense, and comments: “just as I have attempted it (this characterizing) in the new edition of my ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’” (GA 293, 29.8.1919). In the Foreword to the new edition he says he has left the content of the book “almost completely unchanged” (GA 4, p.10). Thus Rudolf Steiner was attempting, in those texts which he added to some chapters of the book in 1918, to “characterize” the ego-sense – or, to be more precise, to strengthen it on a practical level.

We are working with the sense of thought when we try to experience the Cycles of thinking. But this is only possible if, during this work, all three members of the three-membered soul are actively engaged, united at least sporadically in the higher ‘I’. It is not by chance that we have mentioned a number of times already, that the ‘I’ of the cognizing subject is a real and indispensable element of Anthroposophical methodology. Regardless of the latter’s universal character, the most important thing about it is its practical realization, which is specific to each individual ‘I’. This came to expression with special clarity in the final Cycle of chapter 7.

In the Foreword to the second edition Rudolf Steiner explains that he made the Additions in order to forestall an “incorrect understanding” of the book. But we now know that it is not imperfections with regard to logic or sense which give rise to this wrong understanding. Let us recall that the book seemed to readers “to be written in Chinese”. In order to understand it, the ‘I’ must unfold a special activity in the transition from intellectual thinking to ‘beholding’. This activity receives stimulus from the Additions. The Addition to chapter 7 gives to the ‘I’ the task of carrying out the resultant metamorphosis of thinking which has already worked formatively on all seven chapters. This task is organically bound up with the necessity to perceive, out of a beholding of Cycle VII, the idea of the method. The entire content of the Addition appeals to what is observed in the book by the reader – i.e. it has a ‘beholding’ character. That which is observed without prejudice (i.e. the ‘beheld’, if we do not straight away impose our ideas) must be taken as the thesis in our work with the Addition. But how? It is so wide-ranging! – Only in the ‘I’, in the form of those modifications, those qualitative changes brought about in it by what is observed. Then we will feel what prejudiced observation approaches us with. Thus arise thesis and antithesis.

Addition to the 1918 edition

CYCLE I

1.   For an unprejudiced observation of experience in percept and concept, as we have attempted to describe it in
   the previous chapters, certain conceptions arising out of the observation of natural phenomena will continue to
   create a problem.

2.   Arguing from the scientific standpoint, people say to themselves that in the light spectrum the eye perceives
   colours from red to violet. But beyond the violet, forces are present in the radiation band of the spectrum for
   which there is no corresponding perception of colour by the eye, but, instead, a chemical effect; in the same
   way, beyond the limits of the activity of red there is radiation that only displays warmth effects. Reflection on
   these and similar phenomena lead to the following view: the scope of man’s world of perception is determined
   by the range of the human senses, and man would have before him a quite different world if in addition to his
   own he had others, or if he had entirely different sense-organs. Anyone wishing to indulge in the extravagant
   flights of fancy to which, in this direction, the brilliant discoveries of modern scientific research in particular offer
   an ever-present temptation, can come to the following conviction: Only those things find entry into the human
   field of observation, which are able to affect the senses formed out of his organization. He has no right to regard
   this perceptual field, with limitations due to our organization, as offering in any way a criterion for reality. Each
   new sense would of necessity present him with a different picture of reality.

Our task, as we proceed further, grows still more complicated. Initially we were asked to take as the thesis a certain element arising in the ‘I’. Now the ‘I’ starts to think actively and the new element in it (in the thesis) becomes an object of ‘beholding’. For this reason the element of ‘beholding’ is outwardly omitted from the text – to provide it would mean repeating dozens of pages already passed through. What has been presented “in these discussions” is element 4. And this finds itself in confrontation with the synthesis, where the partial validity of prejudiced observation has been acknowledged. But now we must operate skillfully and, maintaining within oneself the ‘beholding’ and the antithesis, move from element 3 to element 5 as the synthesis, in the ‘I’, of the triad of the elements 3, 4 and 5.

3. All this is, if conceived within the appropriate limits, an entirely justified opinion. However, anyone who lets
himself be misled by this opinion, in the unprejudiced observation of

4. the relation between percept and concept as put forward in these discussions,

5.   places an obstruction in his own path to a knowledge of world and man that is rooted in reality. Living
   experience of the essential nature of thinking, the active elaboration of the world of concepts, is entirely different
   from the experiencing, through the senses, of something perceptible. Whatever other senses the human being
   might have, none of them would convey to him a reality if he did not, by way of thinking, imbue with concepts the
   perceived world mediated by the sense-organ concerned; and any sense of whatever kind, if imbued in this way,
   gives the human being the possibility of living in reality. The phantasy of the perceptual image that is possibly
   quite different with the use of other senses, has nothing to do with the question: how the human being stands in
   the real world. It is important to recognize that any perceptual image is shaped by the organization of the
   perceiving being, but that the perceptual image, when it has been contemplated in the living experience of
   thought and pervaded with this element, leads the human being into reality. No fantastic speculation on how
   different a world would have to look, for senses other than man’s, can give us the impulse to seek knowledge
   about our relation to the world; only insight into the fact that every percept is but one part of the reality contained
   in it and thus diverts us from its own reality. This insight is then joined by the other; namely, that thinking leads
   into that part of reality which the percept hides from itself.

The Cycle is brought to a calm and normal/rational conclusion.

6.   It can also become a problem for the unprejudiced observation of the relation described here between the
   percept and the concept elaborated in thought, when in the experiential realm of physics the need arises to
   speak, not of directly perceivable elements, but of non-perceivable entities such as electrical or magnetic lines
   of force etc. It may appear to be the case, that the elements of reality of which physics speaks have to do
   neither with the perceivable world, nor with the concept elaborated in active thinking.

7.   But we would be deceiving ourselves if we drew such a conclusion. First of all, it must be recognized that
   everything arising from research in physics – apart from unjustified hypotheses which ought to be excluded – is
   arrived at through percept and concept. The content that is apparently non-perceivable in its nature is, thanks
   to a sound cognitive instinct of the physicist, placed within the field where the percepts lie, and thinking is
   conducted in terms of the concepts with which work is done in this field. The strength of electrical and magnetic
   fields etc. is, in essence, established by no other cognitive process than that which unfolds between percept and
   concept.

The ‘I’ realizes itself at the crossing-point of the opposites. In Cycle I and II of the Addition such an opposition is formed, let us say, by the physics and the metaphysics of perception, whose error regarding the relationship between percept and concept must be unequivocally overcome by the ‘I’. In the methodology of spiritual science the dualism of the metaphysics of perception is overcome through introduction of the concept of intuition, which is “for thinking, what observation is for perception” (GA 4, p.95 – p.200 in this book). Rudolf Steiner’s epistemological elaboration of the essential nature of intuition provides us with the only means of grasping the misguidedness of parapsychological, extrasensory experiments aimed at widening the range of human perception.

       CYCLE II

1.   An increase in number or a modification of the human senses would result in a different perceptual image,
   an enrichment or modification of human experience.

2. However, with regard to this experience also, real knowledge would have to be obtained through the interaction
of concept and percept.

3. The deepening of knowledge depends upon the powers of intuition that come to living expression in the thinking
(see chapter 5, Cycle 6).

4.   Within that experience which develops in thinking, this intuition can penetrate into greater or lesser depths of
   reality. Through the extension of the perceptual image such a deepening can receive new stimuli and be helped
   forward in this way, indirectly.

5.   Never, however, should penetration into the depths, as a reaching-through into reality, be confused with the
   presence of a more or a less extensive perceptual picture, in which we have, in every case, to do with no more
   than a semi-reality, subject to the conditioning influence of the cognitive organization. Anyone who does not
   get lost in abstractions will realize that, of relevance for knowledge of the human being also, is the fact that in
   physics elements in the perceptual field have to be deduced, for which no sense is immediately attuned as it
   is for colour or sound. The concrete nature of the human being is determined not only by what, by virtue of his
   organization, he stands over against as direct percept, but also by the fact that he excludes other elements from
   this direct perception. Just as we need, in order to live, an unconscious sleeping state in addition to our conscious
   waking state, so, as a precondition for the living self-experience of the human being there is needed, in addition to
   the full range of his sense-perceptions, a – far wider – range of non-sense-perceptible elements within the field
   from which the sense-perceptions originate. All this was already spoken of, indirectly, in the original version of
   this book. Its author is adding here this extension of its content, because experience has shown him that many
   a reader has not read carefully enough.

6.   It should also be borne in mind that the idea of perception, as it is developed here in this book, must not be
   confused with that of outer sense-perception, which is only a special case of it. One will recognize from what has
   gone before, but still more from what will be said later, that here everything of a sensory and spiritual nature that
   comes towards the human being is regarded as a percept before it has been grasped by the actively developed
   concept. In order to have percepts of a soul or spiritual nature, senses of the kind we usually speak of are not
   needed. Someone might say that such an extension of normal linguistic usage is not admissible. However, it is
   absolutely necessary if, in certain areas, one does not wish the use of language to place obstacles in the way of
   an extension of one’s knowledge.

7.    Anyone who speaks of perception only in the sense of sensory perception does not come, via this sense-
   perception, to a concept that is useful for cognition. Sometimes a concept has to be extended so that, in a more
   restricted sphere, it receives the meaning appropriate to it. Occasionally it is also necessary to add something to
   what is initially understood by a given concept, so that the meaning thus understood is confirmed or undergoes
   an adjustment. Thus in [p.267] of this book we find the words: “The inner representation is an individualized
   concept.” Someone objected that this was an unusual use of words. But this use of words is necessary if one
   wishes to solve the riddle of what an inner representation actually is. What would happen to the progress of
   knowledge if one objected to anyone who needed to readjust concepts: “That is an unusual use of words.”

Now let us make a comparative analysis of the thought-structure of all seven Cycles of chapter 7 (Table 8).

	Element 1 Thesis	Element 3 Synthesis	Element 5 Ideal perception	Element 7 All-unity
C. I	We draw from perception and thinking, the elements needed for explanation of the world	The world is given to us as a duality; cognition transforms it into a unity	The dualist understands cognition wrongly, when he divides unitary being into two parts	Percepts are separated out by our organization. Thinking overcomes their separation. The “thing-in-itself’ construct is meaningless
C. II	Existence outside perception, including the “thing-in-itself”, is an invalid hypothesis	Dualism cannot be overcome by the positing of the “thing-in-itself”	The physicist who follows the dualist falls into the trap of metaphysics	For monism, all that is required for the explanation of the given world lies within the latter
C. III	No limits are set to cognition. The things exist in inseparable unity with the laws that we gain knowledge of	The conditions for knowledge to come about exist through the ‘I’ and for the ‘I’	We are the conditioning factor of our knowledge. It grows in step with ourselves	The limits of knowledge are widened as perception and thinking progress
C. IV	The antithesis of subject and object exists only within the perceptual realm. The dualist transfers it to imagined entities lying outside it	For the dualist, ideal connections between the things are “airy”, and unreal	Naïve realism is refuted by the fact that its (perceivable) realities pass away, but the ideas remain	All known forms of realism are ultimately metaphysical and therefore dualistic

C. V	Metaphysical realism says: Where there is a perceivable relation between the things, there is reality	Metaphysical realism is a contradictory mixture of naïve realism and idealism	If we remove from metaphysical realism the non-perceivable percepts it becomes genuine monism	Monism unites one-sided realism with idealism to form a higher unity
C. VI	The monist says: The percept is one half of the reality, the concept is the other. Their union brings about the full reality	For the monist only that has meaning, which reaches him in the form of concept and percept	For the naïve and the metaphysical realist the absolute is found outside the subject: the more percepts, the more perfect the knowledge	The monist says: Our cognition is sufficient to provide the answers to the questions we ask
C. VII	The metaphysical realist arrives at the “thing-in-itself” with the help of the inductive method	The metaphysical realist believes that the inductive method is adequate for practical life	Starting out from the percept, one now hopes to obtain knowledge of the metaphysical by inductive means	The metaphysical realist argues inductively from the perceived to the non-perceived, the “thing-in-itself”

Table 8

In the brief formulation of the elements which we have arrived at, the summarizing character of chapter 7 has come into relief once more. They are more aphoristic than in the other chapters, and when one tries to experience them as a vertical sevenfold sequence there arise between them, so to speak, wider “intervals” with respect to their meaning. But these sevenfold sequences do exist; to experience them a greater effort of the ‘I’ is required; they also exist when they are read from below upwards.

Concluding Summary:

Percept and concept form the two halves of reality. Outside the realm of percept and concept there is no existence. The human organization separates off the percepts from the concepts. Thinking reunites them. For the dualist ideal connections between things are unreal; he seeks them in the manner of naïve realism in the “things-in-themselves”, by means of an inductive analysis of the percepts. In this way he comes to metaphysical realism. For the monist, only that has any meaning, which reaches him in the form of concepts and percepts.

* * *

In conclusion of our work with Part I of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, it would be valuable to formulate the final résumé of all seven chapters in a still more concise form, which would enable one to arrange them in columns and thereby experience the seven-membered metamorphosis, the thought-cycle of the whole of Part I. We recommend that the reader carry this out for himself, but for reasons of space we will not be doing this in the book.

If one wishes to intensify one’s experience of the character of Part I as a holistic system which undergoes metamorphosis in the way we have described, then it can help to use the pictures of the 7 capitals of the first Goetheanum. Here, we have to do with symbols of our entire evolutionary cycle – i.e. of the all-embracing sevenfoldness. It is interesting in this connection to hear what Rudolf Steiner experienced as he was working on them. In one of his lectures he describes how, as he was carving, he was following the living metamorphosis of the forms and recreating that activity which lives as spiritual creation in the natural world, letting one form arise out of the other. (One should note that he created the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ in a similar way.) “I have the feeling,” he said, “that no capital could be different from the way it now is” (GA 194, 12.12.1919).

In the course of his work he unavoidably came upon an important feature that we have also discovered in the character of the chapters of Part I of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. Echoing the well-known conceptions of evolution – so he continues – people say that out of the imperfect evolves the perfect, the more differentiated, more complex. And this is exactly how it was as he progressed from the first to the fourth capital. However, when the fifth began to emerge from the fourth, it became clear that it was going to be more perfect and more artistic in its form than the fourth, but simpler and not more complicated. The sixth was to become still simpler, and the seventh more simple again. “And thus it became clear to me,” Rudolf Steiner concludes, “that evolution is not a progression to ever greater differentiation; evolution is ascent to a higher level, but after this a falling into the more and more simple. This emerged for me out of the work itself. And I was able to see how this evolutionary principle which emerges out of the process of artistic work is the same as the principle of evolution in nature” (ibid.).

Exactly the same principle, we would add, was also working in Rudolf Steiner as he was writing the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ – and in all his thinking. Thus, inherent in the logic of ‘beholding’ thinking, when it becomes active in the human being, is aestheticism and, ultimately, religiosity – not in a mystical sense, but religiosity of the spirit and of truth, in which the feelings are born again on the heights of pure spirit.

In one of his lectures held especially for the priests of the Christian Community, Rudolf Steiner gave them advice on how, with the help of the ritual, they can contribute to the inner transformation of the human being, which could be described as an inner “imbuing with the Christ spirit” (Durchchristung). This advice cannot be understood unless one has penetrated into the depths of Anthroposophical methodology. But in combination with the latter, this single recommendation suffices to show how justified and how necessary our research is.

The human being, says Rudolf Steiner, is not born Christianized, through the working of natural inheritance; it is his task to find the Christ within himself. The religious cult, with the aid of simple but effective means, which come to expression in symbols, can help him to do this. For example, a priest, if he wishes to form a religious verse for his congregation, should clothe it in a sequence of seven lines.

“In the first three lines one would, in essence, give expression to the human being as he stands under the influence of heredity, showing how he is born out of the Father principle of the world. The fourth line, the one in the middle, would then show how these principles of inheritance are overcome by the soul principles. And the last three lines would show how the human being, in this way, becomes one who grasps the spiritual. One could then read these seven lines to the congregation in the following way: the first three lines in a somewhat abstract, unrefined tone; in the middle line, the fourth, the voice becomes warmer; and the last three lines are spoken in a more elevated style, with a raised tone. And one would have in this, on a simple level, a cultic act which would represent the process whereby the human being is imbued with the Christ and imbued with the Spirit” (GA 342, p.126 f.).

No explanation is needed of the fact that Rudolf Steiner is giving us here, in a nutshell, a picture of what we have described from various angles as our lemniscate of thinking.

From behind the seven chapters of the first and also of the second Part of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ we see, shimmering through, the images of the seven aeons of our evolutionary cycle, in which the aeon of the Earth consists of two parts (Mars and Mercury), and Vulcan leads the sevenfoldness up to the octave.

To conclude our work with Part I of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’, we would emphasize once again that our analysis is an undertaking that could be compared with the artistic contemplation of a painting or musical composition. The author of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ himself worked on it as an artist in thinking – which he expressed as follows:

“These books (‘Wahrheit und Wissenschaft’ (‘Truth and Science’) and ‘Die Philosophie der Freiheit’ –
G.A.B.) are not written in such a way that one could take a thought and put it in another place; they
are written in the way that an organism develops; this is how one thought grows out of another... (the
author) let himself be guided by what the thoughts themselves produced in him, by the way in which
they organized themselves” (GA 99, 6.6.1907).

116 Heinrich Leiste. ‘Von der Philosophie der Freiheit zur Christologie’. Verlag am Goetheanum. Dornach 1933, S. 9.

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117 Otto Palmer. ‘Rudolf Steiner über seine ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’’. Stuttgart 1966, S. 17 (English: ‘Rudolf Steiner on his book ‘The Phi- losophy of Freedom’’, Anthroposophic Press 1975). Regarding this book, we would note that it belongs to a branch of Anthroposophical literature that is fast dying out – created by people who knew how to appreciate Anthroposophy and found a rich life-conent in the search for the truth. Nowadays Anthroposophical books are often written merely to draw attention to the author, without the least thought being given to a holistic elaboration of any complex of ideas. In this connection we would point to a book whose title, for reasons of tact, we will not mention. Its author has covered a great number of pages with printer’s ink and has included a discussion of the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. Here, he has flung to the reader the single elements in a disjointed fashion and concludes by asking him to draw them into a unity himself! Anthroposophical publications suffer from a lack of scientifically- founded criticism. As a result, science takes on – with a few exceptions – an increasingly amateurish character in the Anthroposophical world.

118 Michael Kirn. ‘Freiheit im Leib?’ Verlag am Goetheanum, 1999, Band I.

119 Erfahrung des Denkens. Zum Studium der ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ Rudolf Steiners. Verlag freies Geistesleben, 1996. Band I.

120 Herbert Witzenmann. ‘Die Philosophie der Freiheit als Grundlage künstlerischen Schaffens’. Gideon Spicker Verlag, Dornach 1988.

121 Andrej Belyj. ‘Vospominanija o Rudolfe Steinere’. Im Buch: ‘Sobranie sotschinenij’. Moskau 2000, S. 256, 268-269.

122 In the Anthroposophical world it has become normal practice to rally around to this or that great personality and treat him/her as a figurehead or banner. Herbert Witzenmann could not escape this unhappy lot. We therefore must point out that we categorically reject the formation of any cliques of this sort. The clique is a relic of group-consciousness which is, more than any other influence, destructive of serious Anthroposophical work. The members of a clique regard any single word of scientifically-motivated criticism directed at their idol, as heresy and react accordingly.

For us, the book ofWitzenmann that we are discussing is a phenomenon of science, which has both merits and shortcomings. A critique of it is necessary if further creative work is to be possible.

When the new edition of his work appeared in 1988, the blind followers of Witzenmann reproduced for publicity purposes the book review of a Prof. L. Udert, who had written the following: “To my knowledge, no-one at the present time has rendered a greater service than Herbert Witzenmann in making Goethe known as the ‘Copernicus and Kepler of the organic world’. To the detriment of the world this role of Goethe’s has remained unrecognized to this day.” But it is generally known that this was done by Rudolf Steiner! (cf. GA 1, p.107: “Goethe is the Copernicus and Kepler of the organic world”.) The “pupils” of Witzenmann could not have compromised him more effectively than this!

123 Frank Teichmann. Auferstehung im Denken. Der Christusimpuls in der „Philosophie der Freiheit“ und in der Bewusstseinsgeschichte. Verlag Freies Geistesleben. Stuttgart 1996.

124 Below the walls of the fortress remarkable “heroes” meet together, whose appearance petrifies like the encounter with an extraterrestrial. After they have “sharpened” their “libido”, they storm the walls year after year with enviable stubbornness, passing through the fortress like ghosts. But one trace is left behind: in those who observe the “battle”. It recalls a passage in the Revelation of St. John, where it says: “So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy...” etc. (Revelation 17, 3).

125 Florin Lowndes. Das Erwecken des Herz-Denkens. Wesen und Leben des sinnlichkeitsfreien Denkens in der Darstellung Rudolf Steiners. Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 1998.

126 George und Gisela O’Neil. Der Lebenslauf. Lesen in der eigenen Biographie. Stuttgart 1995.

127 Das Goetheanum, Nr. 41, 1999, S. 750 f.

128 And O'Neil goes on to write: “In contemplating the totality of a living thought-organism, correspondences and symmetries, previously unseen, begin to emerge, each illuminating the other. Meanings come forth, never before expected, revealing interdependences and mutual support. The whole is experienced as a web of interrelationships. An Idea is experienced as weaving interplay of single thoughts, each reflecting the whole as experienceable from its single aspect.” This is how G. O'Neil conceives of the thought with which the ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’ was written. And in this we can only agree with him.

129 Nikolaj Berdjajew. ‘Filosofia swobody’ (‘Philosophy of Freedom’). In the compilation: ‘Sudba Rossii’ (‘The Destiny of Russia), Charkow 2000.

130 N.O. Losskij, ‘Svoboda voli’ (‘Freedom of the Will’, Selected Works p.484). In this work of Losky there are further references to Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’. For example, he polemicizes against Theodor Lipp's view on moral freedom and says: “Freedom of the will coincides with moral freedom, i.e. it exists only where will and decision are completely conditioned by the ideal essence of the human being, i.e. are not dependent on his sensory nature” (p.501). This corresponds exactly to Rudolf Steiner’s concept of ethical individualism! We will go into this in more detail at a later stage.

131 Heinrich Leiste. Ein Beitrag zur anthroposophischen Hochschulfrage. Selbstverlag 1970, S. 19 f.

132 B. de Spinoza. Ausgewählte Schriften. Band 6, Briefwechsel, 1907, S. 277.

133 Jacob Moleschott. Physiologie des Stoffwechsels in Pflanzen und Tieren. Erlangen 1851. S. XII (Einleitung).

134 N.O. Losskij. Mir kak organitscheskoe zeloe, a.a.O., S. 441.

135 I. Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, a.a.O., S. 80 f.

136 Zitat aus Winckelmann. Kapitel: Antikes. In der Weimarschen Ausgabe (WA) der GA. der Werke Goethes, 1. Abt., Bd. 46, S. 22.

137 Otto Palmer. ‘Rudolf Steiner on his Book ‘The Philosophy of Freedom’, Anthroposophic Press 1975.

138 N.O. Losskij. Tschuvstvennaja..., a.a.O., S. 288.

139 Ebenda, S. 137.

140 Vgl. I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, a.a.O., S. 119.

141 Ebenda, S. 118 f.

142 Ebenda, S. 78 f.

143 J. W. Goethe. Farbenlehre. Bd. I, S. 56. Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 1984.

144 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie..., a.a.O., S. 209.

145 Ebenda, S. 114.

146 This statement of Rudolf Steiner is quoted from: Otto Palmer. ‘Rudolf Steiner on his Book ‘The Philosophy of Freedom’’, Anthroposophic Press 1975.