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In order to give focus to our study of this question, let us now turn our attention to the
three fundamental activities of the human being in so far as he is not physical human
being. I refer to the activities of Willing, Feeling and Thinking.
So long as we regard man in respect of his physical body alone, we do not of course see
this willing, feeling and thinking. Only in its physiognomy or in the performance of
certain gestures or the like, does the physical body give us any indication of what is in
man's inner nature. The etheric body, however, which is in perpetual movement, is
continually giving expression to man's thinking, feeling and willing.
A purely external science finds itself in difficulties when it comes to consider these
activities of the human soul. If you will study the various philosophies you will find that
one gives pre-eminence to the will, another to thought; and there are again others which
consider feeling as the most important force in man. But as to how thinking, feeling and
willing unite in man to form a whole - to that problem none of the philosophies of
modern times can offer a solution. This inability to form a correct idea of the relationship
between thinking, feeling and willing in the life of the soul is not unlike the difficulty
someone might experience who, in order to relate himself rightly to the world around
him, set out to form a clear conception of man as he appears in the external world. We do
not know - so say the philosophers - whether the human soul in its essential nature has
more the character of willing or feeling or thinking. It is exactly as if someone were to
say: "I have no idea what a 'man' really is. One person brings me a five-year-old child and
says: There is a man for you! Then another person comes along and points me out a much
taller being, who is what is called 'middle-aged.' Finally a third person comes and shows
me an entirely different being, with wrinkled countenance and grey hair. And now I am
really at a loss to know what the being called 'man' is, for I have been shown three totally
different beings with this name." Of course the true answer is that they are all of them
"man." The one is very young, the second somewhat older and the third quite old; they
are very different in appearance. But by taking all three ages together we acquire a
knowledge of "man." It is the same with willing, feeling and thinking. The difference
there too is one of age. Willing is the same soul-activity as thinking, but willing is still a
child. When it grows a little older, it becomes feeling, and when it is quite old it is
thinking. The matter is made difficult by the fact that the different ages live together in
our soul in these three activities.
We have explained on other occasions (and you may read of it in my book The Threshold
of the Spiritual World) that when we leave the physical world we come into a world
where the law of change prevails instead of the law of persistence or fixity. There all is in
constant change; what is old can suddenly grow young again and vice versa. Hence in
that world the three activities can and actually do appear at one and the same time.
Willing shows itself contemporaneously as young willing, as older willing (i.e., feeling)
and at the same time also as quite old willing (i.e., thinking). The different ages are in
that world intermingled, everything is mobile. This is how it is with the etheric body of
man.
These changes cannot, however, simply come about of themselves. To begin with, a
uniform and single action of the soul does not come to consciousness at all in ordinary
life, we are quite incapable of bringing such a thing into consciousness. If we think of the
etheric body in the likeness of a flowing stream - for it is in the etheric body that we have
to make our observations - then we are obliged to say that this stream of soul-activity
does not come to consciousness at all in our life; but into this stream, into this perpetual
movement of the etheric body that flows in the current of time, Luciferic - and again
Ahrimanic - activity enters. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young.
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