The real nature of the human will. Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts #38, #39, #40

 

 

 Rudolf Steiner:

38. We have shown how man is to be regarded in his picture-nature and in the spirituality which thereby reveals itself. Once this perception is attained, then, in the spiritual world where we see man living and moving as a spirit-being, we are also on the point of seeing the reality of the moral laws of the soul. For the moral world-order is then revealed as the earthly image of an order belonging to the spiritual world. The physical world-order and the moral are welded together now, in undivided unity.

39. From out of man, there works the human will. This will confronts the ‘Laws of Nature’ which we derive from the external world, as something altogether foreign to their essence. The nature of the sense-organs can still be scientifically understood by virtue of their likeness to the objects of external Nature. In the activity of these organs the will, however, is not yet able to unfold itself. The nature that manifests itself in the human rhythmic system is already far less like any external thing. Into this system the will can already work to some extent. But the rhythmic system is in constant process of coming-into-being and passing-away, and in these processes the will is not yet free.

40. In the system of metabolism and the limbs we have a nature which manifests itself in material substances and in the processes they undergo; yet the substances and processes are in reality no nearer to this nature than are the artist and his materials to the finished picture. Here, therefore, the will is able to enter in and work directly. Behind the human organization living in ‘Natural Laws’ we must grasp that inner human nature which lives and moves and has its being in the spiritual. Here is the realm in which we can become aware of the real working of the will. For the realm of sense, the human will remains a mere word, empty of all content, and the scientist or thinker who claims to take hold of it within this realm leaves the real nature of the will behind him and replaces it in theory by something else.

Source: http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0026/English/RSP1973/GA026_a02.html