Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit, Part Two is the cycle catalogued as GA 206 in the collected works of Rudolf Steiner. It gathers eleven lectures given to members of the Anthroposophical Society at Dornach between 22 July and 20 August 1921, in the midsummer weeks when Steiner was working through a single long meditation on what the human being actually is. The core subject is the human being read from three sides at once: as a being of sense and perception, as a being of memory and love, and as a being whose very constitution has changed across history. Out of that triple reading Steiner builds his case that the deadlock of the materialistic age, the apparent gulf between natural necessity and moral freedom, can be resolved only by a finer anatomy of human experience itself.
Place in Steiner's Work
These are members' lectures, not public addresses, and the difference matters. Steiner speaks here to listeners who already know his fourfold picture of the human being, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, and he uses that shared vocabulary to go further than a congress hall would allow. GA 206 is the second half of a double cycle; the first half is catalogued as GA 205, and together the two volumes carry the summer of 1921 at the Goetheanum, a summer in which Steiner moved restlessly between epistemology, physiology, history and the diagnosis of his own age. The cycle sits directly downstream of his lifelong quarrel with Kant and with the theory of knowledge he had opposed since his earliest philosophical books, and directly upstream of the cosmological courses of the following years.
The date also matters. Three years after the end of the First World War, with the social order of central Europe still unsettled, Steiner treats materialism not as a scholars' error but as a civilisational condition with consequences. Two of the lectures in this volume, given on 5 and 6 August, read the whole history of Western cognition from the Gnostics through Scholasticism to the science of the nineteenth century, and end in a warning about where an instinct-driven culture is heading. The volume therefore belongs with Steiner's cultural diagnoses as much as with his psychology of the senses.
English readers have met this volume in pieces. The first three lectures were published in 1958 under the title Man as a Being of Sense and Perception, several of the August lectures circulated as single translations, and the closing four lectures have appeared more recently in a complete rendering. The study guide you are reading treats the eleven lectures as one arc, which is how they were given.
Themes and Structure
The cycle opens with the teaching for which it is best known, the doctrine of the twelve senses. Steiner argues that orthodox science counts only the senses with obvious organs, while honest observation of experience yields twelve distinct fields: an ego-sense that perceives the ego of another person, a sense of thought, a word-sense, then hearing, warmth, sight, taste, smell, balance, movement, life and touch. He then draws a line across this circle. The upper senses carry our soul life and reach out into the world; the lower senses report processes that are objective, world-processes happening inside our own skin. From this division he derives startling conclusions: that mathematics rises out of the deep senses of movement and balance rather than out of the head, that space can never be called subjective, and that reducing the higher senses to the manner of the lower ones is not merely a scientific mistake but the root of a kind of immorality.
The second movement, in the lectures of late July and early August, turns from perception to memory and love, and from there to history. Memory, Steiner argues, is bound to the body and to the same forces that build the child's organism in its first seven years; the change of teeth marks the moment when those forces are released for soul use. What lives in us as intellect is bound up with forces of decay and dying, and our inner life is a continual reversal of outer natural causality, a de-materialising counter-process whose final expression is the awareness that I am free. On this ground Steiner rereads the history of cognition: the old Gnosis still possessed spiritual content without intellectual labour, Aristotle stands at the birth of pure intellect, Scholasticism split knowledge into sense-cognition and revealed dogma, and the nineteenth century kept the split while dropping the revelation, arriving at the famous declaration of du Bois-Reymond that the super-sensible can never be known. The lecture on the remedy for a diseased civilisation presses the diagnosis to its sharpest point: the head of the materialist thinks matter, while his metabolism unconsciously works out a spiritualistic world-picture that, seized by egoistic instinct, threatens to end the century in a war of all against all.
The final movement, the four August lectures that give the cycle its title, rebuilds the human being member by member. Steiner distinguishes where the etheric, astral and ego principles are bound, imprinted into an organ, and where they are free and active, and uses that distinction to separate genuine imaginative cognition from visionary states, which he treats as vital forces overgrowing thought rather than revealing spirit. He follows the sedimenting, death-bearing processes in the human organism to the point where contemplation sees them flare as what he calls "sparks of darkness in an even luminous aura", and he sets the human being beside plant and animal, each culminating differently, the plant in fertilisation, the human being in death, where the ego is grasped. A lecture on Goethe anchors the historical claim of the whole cycle: the constitution of the human soul has itself evolved, from an age of picture-consciousness through an age of the word to the intellectual soul of the present, and a further metamorphosis of consciousness now stands before us as a task.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Twelve entries in the Thalira glossary draw their source material directly from GA 206, a measure of how dense this midsummer cycle is. Together they map all three movements of the volume, from the anatomy of the senses through the diagnosis of materialism to the meditative physiology of the closing lectures:
- The Upper And Lower Senses
- Mathematics From Movement And Balance
- Bound And Free Members
- Contra-Materialisation
- The Ignorabimus
- The War Of All Against All
- The Spiritualist In The Materialist
- Sparks Of Darkness
- The Four Soul Constitutions
- The Culmination Of Plant, Animal And Man
- Visions As Overgrowth
- Memory Forces And The Source Of Evil
The first two entries unfold the sense-doctrine of the opening lectures; the entries on bound and free members and contra-materialisation belong to the volume's physiology of freedom; the Ignorabimus, the war of all against all and the spiritualist in the materialist carry its reading of the modern age; and the remaining entries, from the four soul constitutions to the memory forces, open the historical and meditative teachings of the August lectures. Read in that order, the twelve terms form a compact study path through the whole cycle.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English translations of the GA 206 lectures alongside the original German, lecture by lecture. The Archive is the most convenient way to follow the eleven lectures in sequence and to test the summaries offered here against Steiner's own words.
For a printed edition, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because parts of this cycle have also appeared in English as Man as a Being of Sense and Perception, searching under both titles is the surest way to find a current printing for close study.
Continue Your Study
GA 206 opens onto Steiner's whole teaching on the senses, freedom and the evolution of consciousness. To follow its threads further, these paths are a good place to begin:
- Start with The Upper And Lower Senses and follow the sense-doctrine outward through its neighbouring terms, then test it against Mathematics From Movement And Balance, the cycle's most surprising single claim.
- Browse the complete Thalira glossary to trace how the ideas of this volume, the twelve senses, the bound and free members, the metamorphosis of consciousness, connect across the collected works.
- Return to the GA Work Library to set this cycle beside its companion volume and the other Dornach courses of the early 1920s.