Knowledge of Soul and Spirit (Die Erkenntnis der Seele und des Geistes) is Rudolf Steiner's public lecture cycle of the 1907 to 1908 winter season, gathered as volume 56 of the collected works. It holds fifteen lectures given between 10 October 1907 and 14 May 1908, twelve of them in Berlin and three in Munich, addressed not to members of an esoteric circle but to whoever bought a ticket and walked in. The governing subject is stated in the title and then tested to destruction across the season: can there be a disciplined knowledge of soul and spirit, and if there can, what does it actually say about marriage, illness, work, animals, and the sky overhead?
Place in Steiner's Work
From 1903 onward Steiner ran two lecture streams in parallel, and GA 56 belongs squarely to the outward one. The winter public series in Berlin was his standing appointment with the general educated public, and the volumes on either side of this one show the same habit of mind: GA 55 covered supersensible knowledge and its bearing on contemporary life in 1906 and 1907, and GA 57 asked where and how the spirit is to be found across 1908 and 1909. Read in sequence, they are a decade-long argument conducted in front of strangers.
The dating matters. In the autumn of 1907 Steiner was still General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, but the Munich Congress of that year had already made visible how far his own line diverged from Adyar's. He was also, in these same years, assembling the material that would become An Outline of Occult Science in 1910. The opening lecture of this cycle, on the mission of esoteric science in the present age, reads as a public rehearsal of that book's foundational claim, and it spends its opening minutes not on the spiritual worlds at all but on the two kinds of opponent a spiritual researcher faces: the scientist who thinks the whole thing is fog, and the enthusiast who loves it precisely because it is foggy. Steiner tells his audience, remarkably, that the second is the more dangerous of the two.
That posture is the reason this volume is useful to newcomers. Steiner had no captive audience here and no shared vocabulary to fall back on. Every concept has to be built in front of the listener from ordinary observation, which makes GA 56 one of the more approachable entry points into the middle period of his work, and a good corrective to the impression that anthroposophy was ever meant as a retreat from practical life.
Themes and Structure
The fifteen lectures are not a single continuous argument but five gatherings of related questions, and the cycle gains its force from how ordinary the later ones are.
Establishing the ground
The first three lectures set terms. The mission of esoteric science in the present, the position of natural science at a crossroads, and then the title lecture on knowledge of soul and spirit itself. Steiner's strategy here is to grant natural science everything it has earned and then ask what its own method leaves unaccounted for. He is not arguing against research; he is arguing that research has arrived at a fork it has not noticed.
Human relationships
Three lectures take up man and woman, then man, woman and child, then the souls of animals. The first two are the cycle's most conspicuously dated material and also its most instructive, because they show Steiner deliberately refusing the terms of the contemporary women's question debates and reframing them from what he calls a higher vantage point. His stated reason is practical rather than evasive: party programmes and slogans, he says, prove unworkable, while a view that sets the question in its eternal context can produce concrete solutions. The animal lecture extends the same method downward, asking what soul life means where individual biography does not exist.
The path of initiation
Two lectures, on initiation or consecration and on the so-called dangers of initiation, address the question every listener eventually asks: how would anyone come to know such things firsthand? Steiner concedes at the outset that no topic in the season is less welcome. He builds the answer from two premises he had laid down in the first lecture, that supersensible worlds exist beyond the sense world, and that human faculties can be developed to reach them. The follow-up lecture on dangers is the more candid of the pair and is worth reading by anyone tempted to treat inner development as harmless.
Health, illusion, and work
The Munich pair on illusory illness and the feverish pursuit of health, together with the Berlin lecture on profession and income, form the volume's most surprising stretch. Steiner opens the illness lecture with Goethe's lines from The Secrets about the person who is free being the one who overcomes himself, then illustrates health obsession with an anecdote about two strangers in a railway compartment trading symptoms and remedies until the exchange becomes comic. The point is diagnostic rather than mocking: a culture that has lost its balance between inner life and outer pressure will express that loss through the body. The lecture on profession and income applies the same balance question to earning a living, and begins by conceding the objection that spiritual science attracts people with nothing practical to do.
Cosmos and the two directions
The final four lectures widen outward: sun, moon and stars; the beginning and end of the earth; and then hell and heaven as a closing pair. The cosmological lectures start from unglamorous scientific data of the day, sunspot cycles and their correlation with climate and harvests, before proposing a wider account of the relation between human life and cosmic rhythm. The hell and heaven lectures treat those images as inherited pictures of good and evil that carry older wisdom than modern abstraction credits them with, tracing them back through Persian, Greek, and Norse sources.
spiritual science should bring strength, energy and open mindedness to humanity so that people can meet what daily life and our times demand
That sentence, from the lecture on man and woman, is the closest thing the cycle has to a thesis statement. It explains why a series titled after soul and spirit spends so much of its length on sanatoriums, salaries, and children.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Two entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 56, and both come from the practical middle of the cycle rather than its metaphysical frame.
- Man and Woman in the Light of Spiritual Science covers the Munich lecture of 18 March 1908 and Steiner's method of lifting a contested social question out of its immediate polemics before returning it to practice.
- Illusory Illness covers the Munich lecture of 3 December 1907 on self-induced and imagined sickness, the balance between inner and outer life, and its companion lecture on the anxious pursuit of health.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English translations of the GA 56 lectures alongside the rest of the collected works and is free to use. Several of these lectures circulate in more than one English rendering, so it is worth comparing translations where a passage seems to turn on a single term.
For print editions and current availability, search SteinerBooks. Individual lectures from this cycle have long circulated as standalone booklets, so a title search may return items that do not announce their GA number on the cover.
Continue Your Study
- Follow the two glossary entries above into the wider Thalira glossary, where the terms Steiner uses across this cycle are defined with their sources and cross-linked to the volumes they come from.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place this volume among its neighbours, particularly the public cycles immediately before and after it, which show the same questions being reworked for a new audience each season.
- If the initiation lectures are what held your attention, follow that thread through the glossary entries on inner development and the stages of the path, where the material Steiner could only sketch for a public hall is set out at length.