The Post-War Surgence: The Twenties 4. Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy

Abstract

A_ll through his writing Steiner proclaims that he could never accept the sense-world as an ultimate. Physical perceptions are real enough and so are sense-data and everyone can agree that thinking and systematic logic represent an analysis of situations and experience which can be more or less verified:

I wished to turn away from that road to knowledge which looked toward the sense-world, and which would then break through from the sense-world into true reality. I desired to make clear that true reality is to be sought not by such a breaking through from without, but by sinking down into the inner life of man.… When from within man sense-free thought comes forth to meet the sense-perception… the human spirit, living its own life within, meets the spirit of the world which is now no longer concealed from man behind the sense-world, but weaves and breathes within the sense-world.¹