Cognition, Soul-Life & the Moral Path

The two soul-forces Steiner named in his 1919 Waldorf course: antipathy cools experience into thought and memory, sympathy warms the seed of the will.

The inner moral voice that Steiner calls a real soul-faculty, born around the Greco-Roman age as the cosmic Spirit withdrew into the human heart.

The inner warmth that kindles the soul toward a moral ideal, from the Greek en-theos, the god within.

Steiner's view that moral ideals come from the same thinking that knows nature, so the world holds no second power that legislates right and wrong.

The soul's healthy power to create living pictures from feeling and idea, the seed of true Imagination and the inner source of art.

Acting from a moral idea you grasp by your own intuition, not from instinct, authority, or duty.

In Steiner's spiritual science, love is the one cosmic and moral force that asks nothing for itself: the ground of all creation and the highest power, born of freedom.

In Anthroposophy, memory is the soul's power of recollection, which Steiner roots in the etheric body and locates in the intellectual or mind soul.

The individualized inner images the soul forms when concept meets percept, the representations it retains and can later remember.

The creative faculty by which a free person invents the concrete deed that answers a particular moral situation, rather than copying a rule.

The learnable skill of turning a morally imagined deed into a real act in the world, without breaking the natural laws that govern it.

The everyday belief that the perceived world is reality itself, which Steiner names and then transcends on the way to a thinking that grasps the whole.

The two halves of knowing: the percept is what observation gives us, the concept is what thinking adds, and cognition is the act that reunites them.

In Steiner's work, the cultivated soul-mood of love and devotion that educates the Consciousness Soul and opens the way to higher knowledge.

In Steiner's ethics, the good is the deed a free person performs out of love for the action itself, not from duty or any external command.

Steiner's name for the soul's lifelong arc: the I steadily transforms thinking, feeling, and willing into higher, freer capacities, life after life.

In Steiner's anthropology, the will is the deepest of the three soul-activities, asleep within the limbs and metabolism even while we are awake.

The three fundamental activities of the soul in Steiner's anthroposophy, resting on the nerve-sense, rhythmic, and metabolic-limb systems of the body.

Steiner's 1892 doctrine that knowing is the act which completes a reality given to us only in half, never a copy of a finished world.

The soul-mood of astonishment in which the world becomes a question, the first stirring by which thinking reaches toward what it does not yet know.