Rudolf Steiner

“ The forces at work in the world are both destructive and creative. The destiny of manifested beings is birth and death. The Initiate is to behold this march of destiny. The veil, which in the ordinary course of life clouds the spiritual eyes, is to be uplifted, and the man is to see himself as one interwoven with these forces, with this destiny. His own nature contains destructive and creative powers. As undisguisedly as the other objects of his vision are revealed to the eye of the seer, his own soul is bared to his gaze. ”

“ Black night doth spread a curtain round my sight.
And many things that I must live and do,
Which spring as fruitage from my character,
Intensify the darkness of that night.
We two must seek clear vision in that light,
Which, though it vanish for a while from sight,
Can never be extinguished in the soul.
Johannes:
But then, Maria, dost thou realize
Through what my soul hath fought its way but now?
A grievous destiny awaiteth thee,
Most noble friend. For well I know that far
From thy pure nature lies that potent force,
That hath so wholly shattered me to bits. ”

“ Strader:
That is no way for us; for in our speech
We name such talk mere fancy, and we fain
Would seek firm ground, not fly to cloud-capped heights.
The Other Maria:
Then if ye wish to tread the other path
Ye must forthwith renounce your spirit’s pride.
Ye must forget what reason doth command,
And let the touch of nature conquer you.
In your men’s breasts let your child-soul have sway,
Artless and undisturbed by thought’s dim shades. ”

“ Whoever tries to work out for himself a theory of the relation of man to the world, [97] becomes aware of the fact that he creates this relation, at least in part, by forming ideas about the things and events in the world. In consequence, his attention is deflected from what exists outside in the world and directed towards his inner world, the realm of his ideas. He begins to say to himself, It is impossible for me to stand in relation to any thing or event, unless an idea appears in me. From this fact, once noticed, it is but a step to the theory: all that I experience is only my ideas ”

“ The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.
The spheres of life are many and for each there develops a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. ”

“ The naïve man believes himself to be the creator of his concepts. Hence he believes that each person has his private concepts. One of the first things which philosophic thought requires of us is to overcome this prejudice. The one single concept of “triangle” does not split up into many concepts because it is thought by many minds. For the thought of the many is itself a unity.
In thought we have the element which welds each man’s special individuality into one whole with the cosmos. ”

“ What we add to objects by thinking is merely thoughts about the objects. Thought adds nothing real to the percept.
But it is not only with reference to the existence of things that the naïve man regards perception as the sole guarantee of reality, but also with reference to the existence of processes. A thing, according to him, can act on another only when a force actually present to perception issues from the one and acts upon the other. The older physicists thought that very fine kinds of substances emanate from the objects and penetrate through the sense-organs into the soul. ”

“ In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same way philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life-forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths. ”

“ But we shall strive in vain to invent out of ourselves even a single perceptual element which has never appeared within the sphere of what has been given to us. It is one thing to be merely acquainted with the world; it is another to have knowledge of its essential nature. This nature, for all that it is closely identified with the world-content, does not become clear to us unless we build up reality ourselves out of the Given and the Forms of Thought. The real “what” of the Given comes to be affirmed for the Ego only through the Ego itself. ”

“ Thought leads all perceiving subjects back to the ideal unity in all multiplicity, which is common to them all. There is but one ideal world, but it realises itself in human subjects as in a multiplicity of individuals. So long as man apprehends himself merely by self-observation, he looks upon himself as this particular being, but so soon as he becomes conscious of the ideal world which shines forth within him, and which embraces all particulars within itself, he perceives that the Absolute Reality lives within him. ”

“ He could not find it; and so he replaced it with “class-consciousness” born of the economic life. His eyes are rivetted upon the economic life alone, as though some overpowering suggestive influence held them there. And he no longer believes that elsewhere, in the spirit or in the soul, there can be anywhere a latent force capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in the social movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic life, devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state of things, [38] which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. ”

“ According to our interpretation, it is due to the nature of our organisation that a particular object can be given to us only as a percept. Thought transcends this particularity by assigning to each percept its proper place in the world as a whole. As long as we determine the separate parts of the cosmos as percepts, we are simply following, in this sorting out, a law of our subjective constitution. If, however, we regard all percepts, taken together, merely as one part, and contrast with this a second part, viz., the things-in-themselves, then our philosophy is building castles-in-the-air. ”

“ The interposition of the world of ideas prevents man from perceiving any longer such a real world. He must suppose that he is blind to such a reality. Thus arises the concept of a “thing-in-itself” which is inaccessible to knowledge. So long as we consider only the relation to the world into which man appears to enter through the stream [98] of his ideas, we can hardly avoid framing this type of theory. Yet we cannot remain at the point of view of Naïve Realism except at the price of closing our minds artificially to the desire for knowledge. ”

“ For Monism, the situation is different. The point where the unity of the world appears to be rent asunder into subject and object depends on the organisation of the percipient. The object is not absolute but merely relative to the nature of the subject. The bridging of the gap, therefore, can take place only in the quite specific way which is characteristic of the human subject. As soon as the Self, which in perception is set over against the world, is again re-inserted into the world-nexus by constructive thought, all further questioning ceases, having been but a result of the separation. ”

“ The Self, through thought, takes part in the universal world-life. Through thought it establishes purely ideal (conceptual) relations between percepts and itself, and between itself and percepts. In feeling, it has [141] immediate experience of the relation of objects to itself as subject. In will, the opposite is the case. In volition, we are concerned once more with a percept, viz., that of the individual relation of the self to what is objective. Whatever in the act of will is not an ideal factor, is just as much mere object of perception as is any object in the external world. ”

“ We have done our share when we have recognised the connection between idea and percept. But with a human being the case is different. The content of his existence is not determined without him. His concept of his true self as a moral being (free spirit) is not a priori united objectively with the perceptual content “man,” so that knowledge need only register the fact subsequently. Man must by his own act unite his concept with the percept “man.” Concept and percept coincide with one another in this instance, only in so far as the individual himself makes them coincide. ”

“ What impresses itself as of real importance is, that what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the soul’s life,—the thought-basis, from which life takes its tone,—has been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole man turns. What has thus become [31] an inward reality in the worker is, however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. ”

“ In reality, what is observed is only the results of an unconscious activity which lies at the basis of thinking. It is only because, and just because, this unconscious activity escapes observation, that the deceptive appearance of the self-existence of the observed thinking arises, just as when an illumination by means of a rapid succession of electric sparks makes us believe that we see a movement. This objection, likewise, rests solely on an inaccurate view of the facts. The objection ignores that it is the Ego itself which, identical with the thinking, observes from within its own activity. ”

“ The idea of freedom has found enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty. There are those who, in their moral fervour, label anyone a man of limited intelligence who can deny so patent a fact as freedom. Opposed to them are others who regard it as the acme of unscientific thinking for anyone to believe that the uniformity of natural law is broken in the sphere of human action and thought. One and the same thing is thus proclaimed, now as the most precious possession of humanity, now as its most fatal illusion. ”

“ Every being has its inborn concept (the laws of its being and action) , but in external objects this concept is indissolubly bound up with the percept, and separated from it only in the organisation of human minds. In human beings concept and percept are, at first, actually separated, to be just as actually reunited by them. Someone might object that to our percept of a man there corresponds at every moment of his life a definite concept, just as with external objects. I can construct for myself the concept of an average man, and I may also have given to me a percept to fit this pattern. ”

“ It lies in the fact that our attention is concentrated only on the object about which we think, but not at the same time on the thinking itself. The naïve mind, therefore, treats thought as something which has nothing [80] to do with things, but stands altogether aloof from them and makes its theories about them. The theory which the thinker constructs concerning the phenomena of the world is regarded, not as part of the real things, but as existing only in men’s heads. The world is complete in itself even without this theory. ”

“ What he has actually accomplished is a magnificent thought-picture of the world, without any empirical content. As little as it is possible for the Materialist to argue the Mind away, just as little is it possible for the Idealist to do without the outer world of Matter.
When man directs his theoretical reflection upon the Ego, he perceives, in the first instance, only the work of the Ego in the conceptual elaboration of the world of ideas. ”

“ Man has no right to regard his percepts, limited as these are by his organisation, as in any way a standard to which reality must conform. Every new sense would confront him with a different picture of reality. Within its proper limits, this is a wholly justified view. But if anyone lets himself be confused by this view in the unprejudiced study of the relation of percept and concept, as set forth in these chapters, he blocks the path for himself to a knowledge of man and the world which is rooted in reality. ”

“ But development does not come to a standstill within the imaginative world. Anyone who would like to remain stationary in it, would, it is true, be able to note the entities in process of transmutation, but he would be unable to interpret the meaning of these processes of change. He would not be in a position to find his way about in this newly attained world. For the imaginative world is a realm of unrest—there is naught in it but movement and change ”

“ Every kind of reality which is assumed to exist outside the sphere of perception and conception must be relegated to the limbo of unverified hypotheses. To this category belongs the “thing-in-itself.” It is, of course, quite natural that a Dualistic thinker should be unable to find the connection between the world-principle which he hypothetically assumes and the facts that are given in experience. For the hypothetical world-principle itself a content can be found only by borrowing it from experience and shutting one’s eyes to the fact of the borrowing. ”