Toward Imagination gathers seven lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered in Berlin between 6 June and 18 July 1916, published in the Collected Works as volume 169 (GA 169). Given during the second summer of the First World War, these talks return again and again to a single practical question: how a human being can wake ordinary thinking into a living, picture-forming faculty that Steiner calls imaginative knowledge. The cycle opens at Whitsun, moves through the constitution of blood and nerves, the twelve senses, the body across successive incarnations, and the balance between the two spiritual adversaries, and closes with the lecture that gives the volume its name. Read together, the seven addresses form a bridge from an account of the human being as a physical and cosmic organism to a description of the inner work by which perception itself can be transformed.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1916 Steiner had spent more than a decade building anthroposophy out of his earlier work on Goethe and on the theory of knowledge. GA 169 belongs to the wartime Berlin lectures, a stretch of talks in which he repeatedly set the crisis of the age against the failure of Europe to think in a living way. The volume sits close to the companion cycle he references directly in the first lecture, the February to May 1916 talks published as GA 167, and it shares their diagnosis: that a culture which has forgotten how to think cannot meet the trials placed before it. What distinguishes this cycle is its constructive turn. Rather than dwelling only on what has gone wrong, Steiner sets out the anatomy of human cognition and then points past ordinary intellect toward imagination as the first of the higher modes of knowing he described elsewhere as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. The book therefore functions as an accessible entry into his epistemology of spiritual perception, grounded in concrete pictures rather than abstract terms.
Themes and Structure
The opening lecture reads the three great Christian festivals as a map of the human being. Steiner links Christmas to the etheric body and the life of nature, Easter to the astral body and the passage through death, and Whitsun, or Pentecost, to the I, the immortal individuality that rises again from incarnation to incarnation. The festival becomes a yearly reminder that the human being is not only a creature of nature but a self that endures.
From this festive opening the cycle turns to the body itself. In the lecture on blood and nerves Steiner treats matter as a manifestation of spirit and asks how each specific substance reveals it, distinguishing the blood, which carries the forces of will and life, from the nerves, which serve consciousness. The talk on the twelve human senses expands the familiar five into a fuller inventory, from the sense of touch and life to the senses of word, thought, and the I of another person, and connects these twelve senses with the twelve forces of the zodiac that shaped the sense organs across the planetary stages of evolution named Saturn, Sun, and Moon.
The lecture on the human organism through the incarnations develops this cosmic embryology further. Steiner describes the physical body as a fourfold creation shaped across immense spans of time, argues that only the upright posture is truly new to earthly existence, and reads the shape of the present head as a residue of a prior earthly life. The centaur, he suggests, is an imaginative memory of the human form before it stood upright. He then extends the picture to the etheric body, which grows not by adding substance but by adding movement, so that the simple gestures of a child's life-body ripen over a lifetime into an increasingly intricate weave. This is where the glossary term for the rhythm of building-up and breaking-down finds its ground: growth and decay are not opposites but partners in a single living process, and the balance between them decides the quality of both waking thought and restful sleep.
At the center of the moral teaching stands the lecture on balance. Here Steiner insists that the world exists not through rest but through equilibrium, held between two one-sided powers he names Lucifer and Ahriman. Art would be impossible without the luciferic element, and the observation of nature impossible without the ahrimanic; the task is not to banish either but to hold them in balance in the human heart. Whoever tries to flee one, he warns, falls prey to the other. As he puts it in a single blunt sentence:
We can sin against reality, but we cannot suppress it!
The lecture on the feeling for truth turns to poetry, introducing verses in which the structure of the cosmos, the seven planets and the twelve signs, is meant to live in the form of the lines themselves. A poem of twelve stanzas, each of seven lines, is built so that the seven lines carry the movements of the seven planets and the twelve stanzas carry the passage through the zodiac. Here Steiner also makes room for satire and for laughter, insisting that a genuine feeling for truth includes the ability to laugh at what deserves it rather than wearing the long, solemn face he found in so many seekers. It is in this setting that the glossary distinction between the musical and the unmusical soul belongs, since the whole lecture asks how inwardly a person can hear the ordered music of the cosmos sounding through a made form. The closing lecture, "Toward Imagination," draws the threads together. Steiner compares the cosmos to a house whose bricks are themselves works of art, and the human being to a structure of rolled papers each hiding an interior painting. Ordinary perception sees only the outer bricks; imaginative knowledge learns to see the picture within. Just as waking distinguishes itself from dreaming by the weight of reality that pushes against us, so a higher waking is possible, in which the everyday world is recognized as a kind of dream and the reality of the spirit becomes perceptible.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Thalira's glossary draws on GA 169 for entries that unfold its psychology and its account of the human constitution. This volume is the hub for the following terms:
Each entry traces its idea back to the relevant lecture, so the glossary and this guide can be read side by side.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of the cycle at rsarchive.org. For the printed edition and current catalogue listings, search the publisher directly at SteinerBooks. The archive text is the quickest way to check any passage summarized here, since our aim is orientation rather than a substitute for Steiner's own words.
Continue Your Study
If this volume has drawn you in, a few paths lead further into Thalira's library:
- Begin with the two entries above, then browse the full Steiner glossary to see how the vocabulary of blood, nerves, and the senses connects across volumes.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place these 1916 lectures within the wider arc of Steiner's Collected Works.
- Follow the theme of equilibrium into related study guides on Lucifer and Ahriman, the two powers whose balance stands at the heart of this cycle's moral teaching.