Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit gathers three short lecture cycles that Rudolf Steiner gave in Berlin across three successive years, and they sit together in the Collected Works as GA 115. The first cycle, Anthroposophy, was given in October 1909; the second, Psychosophy, in November 1910; the third, Pneumatosophy, in December 1911. Each cycle runs to four lectures, so the volume holds twelve lectures in all. Steiner intended them as a single arc. He wanted to study the human being from the middle standpoint, neither dissolving the person into cosmic abstraction nor reducing the person to measured matter, and to follow that human picture upward from body to soul to spirit. The volume is the closest thing in his work to a sustained anthropology of inner life, and it is where his teaching on the twelve senses first takes recognizable shape.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1909 Steiner had spent several years lecturing on the cosmic and Christian themes that fill volumes such as the Gospel cycles and the studies of the spiritual hierarchies. In the opening lecture of GA 115 he names this contrast directly. Theosophy, as he uses the word, climbs to a high summit and looks down on the human being from the side of the cosmos. Anthroposophy, by his definition here, takes its stand in the middle, between nature below and spirit above, and speaks from the human point of view. The cycle is therefore a turning inward. Where the earlier work asked what the worlds of spirit contain, GA 115 asks what the human being is, examined as carefully as a natural scientist examines an organism, but without surrendering the spiritual dimension.
This makes the volume a methodological anchor for the movement that took its very name from the first cycle. The threefold scheme of Anthroposophy, Psychosophy, and Pneumatosophy maps onto the body, soul, and spirit that Steiner had already set out in his book Theosophy. The lectures give that scheme empirical texture. Steiner himself framed the three cycles as one continuous study. As he put it in opening the second cycle, the work was meant so that the three cycles will combine and form a bridge connecting the three worlds in which we live.
The timing matters too. These lectures were delivered to the German Section of the Theosophical Society in the years just before Steiner broke with that body and founded the Anthroposophical Society in 1912 and 1913. GA 115 therefore captures the moment when his independent method was crystallising under the banner word he chose for it. He repeatedly distinguishes his approach from a defunct academic philosophy that, in his account, inherited dried husks of concepts without the living perception that once filled them. He also separates it from a popular science of his day that examined the human being only from below, cell by cell, missing the larger order. The middle path he describes here is the working stance of all his later teaching, whether on medicine, education, or the arts.
Themes and Structure
The Anthroposophy cycle opens with the human senses, and this is the volume's most lasting contribution. Steiner argues that the conventional count of five senses is far too crude. He works outward from three inner senses, the sense of life, the sense of one's own movement, and the sense of balance, through the senses that meet the outer world, smell, taste, sight, and warmth, and then to the senses of comprehension, hearing, speech, and concept. This careful enumeration grows, in his later work, into the doctrine of the twelve senses that remains influential in Waldorf education and anthroposophic medicine. What is novel here is the principle behind the ordering: each sense, in Steiner's reading, lets us reach a little deeper into the being of a thing, from the mere surface disclosed by smell to the inner mobility revealed by tone. The remaining Anthroposophy lectures trace how inner force currents and supersensible processes stand behind ordinary sense perception in both the human and the animal organism.
The Psychosophy cycle turns from the senses to the soul itself. Steiner asks what the soul actually is when considered on its own, bounded by the body on one side and the spirit on the other. He reduces the inner soul life to two fundamental activities, reasoning on the one hand and the experiences of love and hate on the other, and shows how reasoning flows together into settled conceptions while love and hate well up from desire. From this simple base he builds toward attention, memory, the passions, and the practical matters of soul health, including boredom, weakened memory, and the conditions under which inner life becomes ordered or disordered.
One reason the Psychosophy lectures still repay study is their attention to ordinary inner life. Steiner does not begin with mystical states but with how a judgment such as the rose is red settles into a held mental picture, and how a feeling of pleasure or aversion rises out of a deeper current of desire. He then asks why memory fades, why attention wanders, and why boredom can corrode the soul. These are practical questions, and his answers connect the health of inner life to the rhythm between reasoning and feeling rather than to any one faculty alone. The cycle reads, in places, almost like an early psychology written from the inside.
The Pneumatosophy cycle completes the ascent toward spirit. It begins, strikingly, with the philosopher Franz Brentano and the Aristotelian doctrine of the spirit, using a rigorous thinker as the doorway into spiritual cognition rather than into mere speculation. From there Steiner treats truth and error in the light of the spiritual world and closes with the three stages of higher knowing that recur throughout his work: Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. He is careful to present these not as vague feelings but as graded, disciplined modes of perception, each building on the clarity of ordinary thinking rather than abandoning it. Read as a whole, the volume moves from the gates of the senses, through the inner weather of the soul, to the considered faculties by which the spirit may be known.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Thalira's glossary draws several entries directly from GA 115. Each links to its full study page:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of all twelve lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the public translations of the cycle. For a bound print edition, search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks, where the volume has appeared in English under titles including The Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, and as separate editions of Psychosophy and Pneumatosophy. Because the three cycles were sometimes printed apart, it helps to search for any of the three cycle names as well as the combined title.
Continue Your Study
GA 115 rewards reading alongside the broader map of Steiner's ideas. A few next steps:
- Begin with the soul-faculty entries this volume feeds, starting from Psychosophy and Pneumatosophy, to see how the body, soul, and spirit scheme unfolds.
- Browse the full Thalira Glossary to follow the threads of memory, attention, and the senses into neighbouring concepts.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place this volume among the lecture cycles that surround it in Steiner's output.