Metamorphoses of the Soul-Life, Volume 2 gathers the second half of a lecture series that Rudolf Steiner gave in Berlin during the winter and spring of 1910. Catalogued in the collected edition as GA 59, the volume holds nine public lectures delivered between January and May of that year, continuing the sequence begun in the first volume. Where many of Steiner's cycles climb toward cosmic evolution or the life between death and rebirth, this series turns inward and stays close to ordinary experience. Its subject is the soul as we actually live it: how we speak, why we laugh and weep, what happens when we pray, where error shades into illness, and how conscience speaks within us. The result is one of the most accessible doorways into Steiner's view of human inner life, because every lecture begins from something the listener already knows from their own day.
Place in Steiner's Work
These lectures fall in Steiner's mature Berlin period, the years when he was building a public audience for spiritual science alongside the more guarded teaching he gave to members of the Theosophical Society. The winter cycles of these years were open evening lectures, addressed to educated listeners who were not specialists, and that setting shapes the tone of GA 59. Steiner argues rather than asserts, and he repeatedly tests his claims against the science of his day, naming working physicians, linguists, and philosophers before showing where their explanations stop short.
The volume also marks a characteristic move in Steiner's method. Rather than describing higher worlds directly, he takes a familiar capacity of the soul and traces it back to its hidden sources. Conscience, prayer, and memory are treated not as fixed faculties but as living processes that have grown out of earlier conditions and that point toward future development. This is the same approach to inner transformation that runs through his books on the path of knowledge, applied here to the textures of everyday feeling rather than to formal exercises. For a reader new to anthroposophy, GA 59 offers a gentler entry than the cosmological works, because nothing in it asks to be accepted on trust before it has been weighed.
The title itself signals the central idea. The German word Steiner used, here rendered as metamorphosis, is borrowed deliberately from Goethe, whose study of how a single plant unfolds its leaf into petal and seed had shaped Steiner's thinking from his earliest scientific work. Just as Goethe watched one organ transform into another while remaining the same living form, Steiner asks his listeners to watch the soul's powers change into one another over time. A capacity that appears in one age as instinct may reappear in another as conscience; an impulse that once moved the body outward in speech may turn inward as the silent judgement of the moral life. Reading the two volumes of this series together, one sees that Steiner is not cataloguing separate faculties but watching a single soul-life pass through its successive forms.
Themes and Structure
The nine lectures move from the outward expression of the soul toward its innermost moral core. Steiner opens with two talks on language and speech, presenting the human capacity for the word as the work of a formative power active in us before the conscious self awoke. He compares this shaping force to an artist, and warns against any theory that treats words as mere copies of outer things. The larynx and the whole speech apparatus, in his account, were sculpted in us much as the eye was shaped for light.
From speech the series turns to its near relative, the lecture on laughing and weeping, where Steiner reads these two gestures as the soul expanding beyond itself in laughter and drawing inward in tears. He treats both as a kind of language without words, a way the inner life spills over when feeling outruns what speech can carry. A talk on mysticism follows, distinguishing genuine inner experience from vague feeling, and cautioning that the mystical path can be misunderstood as a flight from clear thinking rather than its deepening. The fourth lecture takes up the nature of prayer, treating it not as a request for favours but as an inner attitude that aligns the soul with the stream of the future and prepares it to receive. Steiner is careful here to separate true prayer from selfish wishing, and to show how the prayerful mood can become a source of inner strength even for those who would not call themselves religious in any conventional sense.
The later lectures grow more searching. In Sickness and Healing Steiner relates illness to the interplay of the soul's members; in Positive and Negative Man he sketches two basic temperaments of receptivity and resistance. The seventh lecture, on error and mental disorder, is among the most carefully reasoned in the volume. Steiner is at pains to insist that a correct statement can be more dangerous than a false one when it is carried past its proper limits, and he refuses the easy claim that no firm line divides the healthy soul from the disordered one. As he frames the boundary in one passage:
"Who would deny that this borders on the pathological?"
The eighth lecture, on human conscience, is the moral summit of the cycle. Steiner opens it with a personal recollection from his student days, then traces conscience as an inner voice that is neither inherited instinct nor mere social training, but a genuine spiritual reality maturing across the history of the soul. The series closes with a lecture on the mission of art, which returns to the creative, healing side of the very forces that, when they go astray, produce the suffering described earlier. Read as a whole, the volume forms an arc: from how the soul reaches outward in speech, through how it falters in error and illness, to how it judges itself in conscience and heals itself in beauty.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 59 as a primary source. Each term below is treated in one of the volume's lectures, and this page serves as the hub linking them together:
Following these links will take you into the detailed entries, where each idea is set in the context of Steiner's wider vocabulary and connected to related volumes.
Where to Read It
The full text of these lectures is freely available. You can read the complete English and German versions at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the lecture transcripts of GA 59 in their entirety. For a printed edition, you can search the publisher's catalogue through SteinerBooks, which carries the English-language volumes of the soul-metamorphoses lectures. Reading the lectures in sequence is worthwhile, since each one quietly assumes the picture of the soul built up in those before it.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper, you might follow any of these paths through the wider library:
- Browse the full Thalira Steiner glossary to see how the terms above connect to hundreds of other entries across the collected works.
- Compare this volume with its companion, the first set of soul-metamorphoses lectures, to follow the complete arc of Steiner's study of inner life.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides to other volumes in Steiner's collected edition, from the early Goethean writings to the late karma lectures.