Mind and Matter, Life and Death (in German, Geist und Stoff, Leben und Tod) is the volume catalogued as GA 66 in Rudolf Steiner's collected works. It gathers public lectures given in Berlin in the spring of 1917, in the third year of the First World War, before a general audience rather than a members-only gathering. The Rudolf Steiner Archive carries five of these evenings in a recent English rendering, delivered on 1, 15, 17, 22 and 31 March 1917, and two of the same lectures also exist in an earlier translation from 1995. The subject Steiner names in his opening minutes is the relation between the human soul and the human body, and what that relation implies for destiny, for death, and for the question of whether anything in a person outlasts the organism. What follows is a reader's orientation to the volume, not a substitute for it.
Place in Steiner's Work
1917 was a concentrated year for Steiner, and GA 66 sits at its centre. In the same months he was completing Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the Soul, GA 21), the philosophical book in which he set down in print the threefold account of how soul life is carried by the body. The Berlin lectures are where he said that account aloud to a public that had not signed up for anything esoteric. He remarks in the second evening that he had put the matter to smaller circles for years and was now bringing it forward openly, which tells you how deliberate the step was.
The volume belongs to Steiner's long run of Berlin winter series addressed to educated readers of philosophy and popular science. It stands after the earlier public cycles on world riddles and life riddles, and before the practical work of the years that followed: the social writings of 1919, the first Waldorf school in the same year, and the medical courses from 1920 onward. The threefold physiology sketched here is the seed of all three. When Waldorf pedagogy speaks of educating thinking, feeling and willing, or when anthroposophic medicine treats the rhythmic system as a mediating middle, the argument being drawn on was first made in public in these lectures.
One more feature places the volume. Because each lecture is a single evening for a mixed audience, Steiner gives results rather than the road that led to them. He says so directly. Readers looking for the epistemology behind the claims should go to The Philosophy of Freedom and Riddles of the Soul; readers looking for the exercises should go to Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. GA 66 is the exposition, not the proof and not the practice.
Themes and Structure
Two languages that do not meet
Steiner opens by naming a stalemate. Those who study the soul cannot connect their observations to the achievements of physiology, and physiologists cannot connect their findings to anything a person recognises from the inside. His diagnosis is not that either side has its facts wrong. It is that a concept can be entirely correct and still be carried into territory where it does not apply, and that the habit of modern thinking is to treat a sound idea as valid everywhere at once. He illustrates the error with deliberately absurd cases before turning it on the debate itself. The point returns in the third lecture, where he observes that materialism can be rigorously proved and rigorously refuted, as can its opposite, so that anyone serious about the question has to know the case against his own position as well as he knows the case for it.
Thinking, feeling and willing in the body
The best known material in GA 66 is the threefold correspondence. Steiner proposes that mental representation, the picture-making side of thought, is bound up with the nerve and sense apparatus; that feeling belongs with breathing and everything continuous with it in the organism; and that will works on metabolism, on the processes of nourishment and their finer extensions into every organ that moves. He credits the psychologist Ziehen with an honest observation: examine the nervous mechanism and you find representation there, but you do not find feeling and you do not find will. Steiner accepts the observation and refuses the conclusion. Feeling and will are not absent from the body, he argues; they are anchored in a different part of it, and looking for the whole soul in the nerves is the reason the search comes up short.
The claim about motor nerves
From that picture follows the most contested assertion in the volume, which Steiner introduces by admitting how heretical it will sound.
There are no motor nerves.
What physiology classifies as a motor nerve is, on his account, a sensory nerve doing sensory work. It registers the metabolic process that the will has already set going, rather than causing the motion. He meets the obvious objection from spinal injury by saying that the broken connection removes perception of the limb, and a limb that cannot be perceived cannot be governed. He offers ordinary experience in support: learning the piano is not the wearing of grooves into nerve pathways but the will taking hold of fine metabolic processes while the nerves learn to feel what is happening, and the same reading is applied to a child moving from random limb movement to ordered gesture, and from babbling to speech. He also notes that no difference in structure or reaction between the two supposed kinds of nerve had been demonstrated. A reader in 2026 should know that this claim stands against mainstream neurophysiology then and now. It is set out here as what Steiner argued, which is the honest way to meet it.
The unconscious, and whether it must stay unconscious
The lecture of 1 March takes up the idea of the unconscious as Eduard von Hartmann had made it popular. Steiner agrees with the premise that ordinary daylight consciousness does not reach the ground of the soul. He parts from Hartmann on the prognosis. For Hartmann the depths are closed in principle and must remain so; for Steiner a different kind of thinking can be unfolded out of ordinary thinking, as a blossom unfolds from a plant not yet in flower, and what was subconscious can be brought into view. This is the methodological hinge of the series. Destiny, the shape of a biography, and the survival of the soul are then approached from that developed standpoint rather than argued from everyday premises.
Death, and the universe physics predicts
The lecture of 22 March sets spiritual science beside a Royal Institution address by the physicist Dewar on the far future of the earth: a world cooled towards two hundred degrees below zero, the oceans long since solid, the atmosphere lying liquid in a shallow sea, milk frozen and glowing blue, egg white luminous enough to read a newspaper by. Steiner treats the physics with respect, and jokes that he does not know who will be left to read the newspaper. Then he presses on what the calculation quietly assumes, namely that present conditions can be run backwards and forwards without limit while the being who observes them is left out of the reckoning. His counter-proposal is that life and death belong to any true description of the universe itself, not only to the organisms inside it.
What lies past the senses and past the soul
The closing lecture of 31 March names a second stalemate, and takes it again from Hartmann, who had pointed out that inner observation disturbs what it observes: attend closely to a delicate feeling and the attention alters the feeling. Steiner accepts the difficulty as fatal to any psychology built on casual introspection, and uses it as the argument for trained observation, a capacity formed on purpose rather than the ordinary glance turned inward. What lies past the senses and what lies past the soul, in his framing, are reached by one discipline approaching from two sides.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
This page is the hub for Thalira glossary entries that cite GA 66. Each entry takes a single idea from the volume, sets it against its wider background in Steiner's work, and links back here.
- Motor Nerves and the Will: the assertion that the nerves physiology calls motor are sensory, that will acts on metabolism directly, and what that reversal was meant to explain.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of this volume alongside the German originals: rsarchive.org. Navigate to the lecture collections and look for GA 66 under its English title.
For print editions and current availability, search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Be aware that the English versions of GA 66 in circulation are translations of differing vintage rather than one long-established trade edition, so the wording of a single evening can differ noticeably between the 1995 and the more recent rendering. Reading both versions of the lecture of 15 March is a useful exercise in itself, since it shows how much of a translated Steiner sentence is the translator's judgement.
Continue Your Study
- The Thalira glossary: start with the entry above, then follow the threads on soul, body, will and destiny that GA 66 opens.
- The GA Work Library: study guides to other volumes in the collected works, with the same orientation to date, place, subject and terms.
- Paths to Knowledge: the practice side of the question, for readers who want the training Steiner assumes rather than the results he reports.
A study guide from Thalira Wisdom Temple. Original text of GA 66 is Rudolf Steiner's; the exposition on this page is our own.