Significant Facts Pertaining to the Spiritual Life of the Middle of the XIXth Century
GA 254
Lecture III
7 November 1915, Dornach
As there is an opportunity for us to be together again today, I will speak of certain matters connected in one way or another with subjects we have been studying. I should like, first of all, to direct your minds to the fact that the attitude of which I spoke last time, the attitude which leads to a certain denial of the reality of the spiritual worlds, is fairly universal in the external world today. Fundamentally speaking—and indeed it is evident—willingness to approach the spiritual worlds in order to receive from them something that will enrich and invigorate life, is to be found in only a tiny handful of men. We can see that this is so.
We shall not succeed
in understanding these matters unless we realise that not many people
today have experienced something that will become more and more
widespread in the world, namely, the tragic wrestling with
knowledge. The feeling that knowledge of the spiritual worlds is
needed but only to be attained by patient surrender of the soul to
the spiritual worlds—this experience, this inner wrestling
with knowledge, could not have been present in those olden times when
knowledge came to men through their atavistic clairvoyance.
This wrestling with
knowledge in our time can only be explained in the light of facts of
which I have been speaking here in recent weeks.
When it is a matter of striving for knowledge today, people are all
too prone to give way to delusions. On the one side they want to be
free from any kind of belief in authority, and on the other side they
have succumbed to it in its very worst form. This is particularly
the case at the present time. For when anything that bears the mantle
of science is propounded, belief in it becomes universal. Men do not
want to rouse themselves into embarking upon a genuine, individual
striving for knowledge. Without being aware of it, they are actually
too easy-going, too lazy, to kindle those forces of the soul which
become active whenever it is a matter of wrestling with knowledge.
And so they like to pacify themselves with what is universally
accepted as scientific and authoritative, and acts as a kind of
narcotic for the soul-and-spirit. They want to take over ready-made
what is universally accepted so that they need not themselves make
any individual efforts to acquire knowledge. The rebellion against
the world-outlook of spiritual science is to be traced back,
fundamentally, to the fact that the soul is required to activate its
own individual forces of thinking and feeling. But this is not to
people's liking; they prefer to accept knowledge that is ready-made
and authoritative.
Men who by their
very nature share in the wrestling for knowledge that characterises
our age—and “our age” means the last three or
four centuries—such men dimly divine and feel that they must
evoke all that lies in the depths of the soul in order to approach
the spiritual worlds, in order to unite their own souls with the
spiritual forces weaving and surging through the world. Study of such
souls will make it evident to us how they feel themselves involved in
the wrestlings and strugglings of the age.
In the last lecture
I spoke of significant literary works from which these wrestlings of
the soul amid the impulses of the times can be perceived. But souls
who want to lull themselves to sleep by inducing a kind of mental
narcosis, settle down in some stream of thought into which they were
born or educated. This certainly applies to a large number of souls
in our time who through their karma and the circumstances connected
with it, incline more to materialism. They accept the view of the
world presented by materialism. Other souls are more spiritually
inclined and they accept what spiritism or idealism have brought into
the world, stupefying their minds with what they accept, without
having the will to engage in the wrestlings in which the soul is
necessarily involved if it is to find its way into the spiritual
worlds.
But today I want to
give an example of a genuinely struggling soul—an unassuming,
yet for all that a significant soul—who participated to
the full in the spiritual wrestlings of the 19th century. At the time
of the great wave of philosophic thinking, the man of whom I am
speaking was young. He lived with all the great thoughts and ideas
put forward by the idealist philosophers and nature-philosophers at
the beginning of the 19th century who believed, as did Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel, that it was possible by dint of intense efforts
of thinking to reach the sphere where the world-riddles are unveiled.
The man in question lived through that wave of philosophy which
sought to show that a certain rigid, one-sided kind of thinking can
explain everything in the universe. He lived on through the
transition to the time when this thinking was held to be of no avail,
when it was believed that the riddles of the world can never be
unveiled in this way. It was the time when men were saying: thinking
leads us nowhere; we must turn to the vast field of outer, sensory
experience; the objects of sensory experiences must be measured,
weighed, compared, traced back to their origins in an external way.—The man of whom I am speaking was one of those who still preserved
their belief in the power of thinking in days in the second half of
the 19th century when a certain mistrust of thinking became
predominant and faith was invested in external, material observation
alone. This same man made very important discoveries in the field of
external observation, in a domain that is extraordinarily
illuminating for the theory of knowledge.
But because he had
lived on from the time of the sovereignty of thinking into that of
sense-observation, there surged within him those inner forces of the
soul which wrestle with the question: How can man find the link with
the actual reality, the actual truth in the universe? In such
circumstances the human soul lives through strange moments, moments
when it feels itself standing as it were before an abyss; when it
says to itself: No matter what efforts are made to develop really
creative thoughts and ideas, where is there any certainty, where
is there any criterion for knowing that it has not all been brought
out of the soul itself, that it is not all subjective and will lose
significance at death, showing thereby that it would not have led
into the realities of world-existence?
Then again there are
moments when the soul asks itself: What is the use of trying to bring
forth anything from the soul? There can be no certainty in it! When
investigations are made in the domains of chemistry or physics where
one has to depend upon the physical world, one can at least feel
guided further by the thread of outer reality.
Such moods of the
soul must be taken for what indeed they are—moods in which
the soul is tossed to and fro between the urge to seek and the urge
to abandon all seeking. A soul of this character is usually one who
sincerely and genuinely strives for knowledge, but who in our age is
bound to stand in a peculiar position in the world—for such a
soul, observing the people around, may well realise: How easily these
people persuade themselves into believing that something or other is
irrefutable! The eyes of the mind need be opened only a little and
the frailty of such belief will be evident.
The soul to whom I
am referring was able to find from experience that those upon whom
the responsibility for certain matters in the world rests, witness
the appearance of some apparently important invention or discovery
that is blazoned abroad as great and epoch-making and that they
themselves consider highly significant—and then after a year
or two say that there is nothing in it. This soul was particularly
struck by the fate of different medicaments. A remedy is discovered
and then triumphantly proclaimed to the world as a certain cure for
some illness.
People who take life
in a happy-go-lucky way accept such a discovery as epoch-making; but
those who have some knowledge also know that such things appear on
the scene and then disappear again. And so at the time shortly before
the thirties of the 19th century, this soul found that a certain
medicament—iodine—had become famous. But he could not
bring himself to join without further ado in the furor created by
iodine, for he was only too familiar with the levity with which
people acquire knowledge—due for the most part to indolence.
And so in the year 1821 he writes the first edition of a short
treatise at the time when iodine was beginning to create a stir. The
second edition appeared in 1832. It actually reckoned to find a
temporary and partly local interest only. I will leave the brochure
here in case anybody may still be interested in it.
The contents would
probably quite rightly be called absurd by every “enlightened”
man. But that does not prevent this “enlightened” man
from making similar mistakes at any time. He does not, however,
notice the mistake when it is a matter of something he has accepted
as an object of belief. The man who wrote this treatise in 1821—at that time he called himself “Dr. Mises”—is the
same whom you know from scientific literature as Professor Gustav
Theodor Fechner, who in the fifties of [the] last century tried to build
a theory of aesthetics from below upwards, on the basis of actual
physical experiments, and not from above downwards, that is to say,
not out of material provided by the thoughts and experiences of the
life of soul. He was a man of whom it can truly be said that he
passed through all the throes of the wrestling for knowledge in the
19th century. He was the same man who had the controversy with
Schleiden, the botanist, about the influence of the moon upon various
happenings on the earth. I have told you how the decision as to which
of the two professors was right, devolved upon their wives.
He is
also the same man who struggled to acquire an idealistic and
spiritual conception of the world. You can see how he endeavoured
to do this from what I have said about Gustav Theodor Fechner in my
book “Riddles of Philosophy.”
It may truly be said
that such a soul is a clear illustration of the reality of the
experience which comes to a man when he strives earnestly for
knowledge. But when all is said and done, spiritual science alone can
make clear to us the whole seriousness and significance of a matter
such as this. When a man like Gustav Theodor Fechner writes as he
does in this little treatise “Proof that the Moon consists of
Iodine,” he is really trying to show the limitations of man's
thinking, how easily it is prevented from making even an approach to
reality and therefore how remote it is from reality. The fact is that
people do not realise or feel the seriousness, significance and
import of human evolution. And so the aim of spiritual science is to
make the horizon of our view of man's being wider than is possible by
means of the recognised science of today. Spiritual science points
our attention to epochs of human evolution lying in the far distant
past, to what man was like in Atlantis and in what changes he is
involved in the course of his development.
Think only of the
following:—Recalling what we have heard about ancient
Atlantis—what is to be said about the world of the animals
and the world of men round about us? Everything was entirely
different in the times of Atlantis! We know that it was during that
epoch that men came down again as souls from their sojourn in the
world of the stars. It was then that they again sought for bodies
which had been fashioned for them out of earthly substance. And from
the descriptions given we know, too, how different these human bodies
were in Atlantean times. I have repeatedly emphasised—and you
can also read it in my writings—that in those times the human
body was still malleable, pliant, flexible, was of such a nature that
it was still possible for the souls descending from the heavenly
worlds to shape and mould the bodies.
Suppose
a woman—or also a man, to be strictly fair!—becomes
furious with anger, thoroughly malicious, and sends evil thoughts
towards another human being. This does not come so very strongly to
expression in an actual change of the countenance—true, it
does so a little, but not drastically—for people today can
be very malicious without this being directly expressed in their
physiognomy. In the times of ancient Atlantis it was different. When
there was malice in a man, his countenance was entirely transformed
into an expression of his inner being—so that it would not
have been incorrect to say: that man or woman looks like a cat. Such
a person actually looked like a cat—or if he were utterly
deceitful, like a hyena. His external appearance was wholly an
expression of his inner being. He was capable of metamorphosis,
transformation, in the highest degree.
The animals were
less mutable, but metamorphosis was possible in them too; their
physical body was already far more consolidated than that of man and
metamorphosis took place only very gradually. As species, the
animals were capable of metamorphosis—nor did they transmit
to their offspring such stereotyped characteristics as is the case
nowadays. Since the time of Atlantis everything in man's physical
body has become consolidated, has taken on fixed forms. It is still
possible for man today to move his hands and to have a certain play
of expression on his countenance; but in a certain sense his bodily
form has become fixed. The forms of the animals have become
completely fixed; this explains their immobile, inflexible
physiognomy. But in their case, too, this inflexibility was less
marked in ancient Atlantean times.
In the general
sense it can be said of man that his physical body today is fixed
and inflexible in a high degree. His etheric body is still mobile;
therefore the etheric body still shapes itself according to what a
man is in his inner being.—So there is meaning, indeed a
certain reality, in the fact that if a man is crafty and malicious
his etheric body and his facial expression take on a slight
resemblance to a hyena. The etheric body is still mutable, still has
something about it that enables it to be metamorphosed; but
equally with the physical body, the etheric body too is on the way
to becoming inflexible. Just as since the Atlantean epoch onwards
into our fifth post-Atlantean epoch the physical body has acquired
fixed forms, so from the fifth epoch on into the sixth and from then
onwards into the second main epoch after Atlantis, the etheric body
too will acquire firmer forms, with the consequence—as I
have indicated in several lectures—that the etheric body, as
it passes with its fixed forms into the physical body, will assert
itself very strongly. We are living now in the fifth epoch (of the
first main epoch after Atlantis), then comes the sixth and then
the seventh, and in these sixth and seventh epochs, the etheric
body, with its inflexibility, will exercise a very strong influence
upon the physical, will make the physical body into a faithful image
of itself.
This has momentous
consequences, namely, that in the sixth epoch of post-Atlantean
evolution, men will be born with bodies quite definitely expressing
their inner, moral qualities. A man's moral qualities will be
recognised from his actual appearance. The moral physiognomy
will then be very strongly in evidence and the physiognomy as it now
is, will have receded more into the background. Man's
physiognomy today is largely determined through heredity: he
resembles his parents, his grandparents, his people, and so forth.
In the sixth epoch this will play no part at all; man will himself
determine his outer appearance—as the result of his
incarnations. Human beings will all be very different, but each will
have a very definite stamp. It will then be known with certainty:
You have before you now a well-disposed or an ill-disposed man. Just
as it is known today: You now have before you an Italian or a
Frenchman, it will then be known: Here is a malicious or a kindly
man—with all the many gradations. More and more, therefore,
the moral qualities will be expressed in the countenance.
In its external
aspect, the surrounding world too will be much changed in this sixth
epoch. Particularly those animals which are nowadays consumed as
food, will have died out. Men will sing the praises of a fleshless
diet, for it will then be an ancient memory that the ancestors in
olden days actually ate flesh. It is not the case that all animals
will die out, but only certain species of animals—especially
those which have acquired the most inflexible forms will have
disappeared from the earth.—So the outer face of the earth
itself will have changed.
To have a
physiognomy which in future time will be so inevitably an expression
of the moral qualities will be like a nemesis, a destiny, setting
the seal on a man's whole being. He will not be able to find
in himself any possibility of resisting this fate. And now imagine
the tragic situation! Man will then actually be obliged to say to
himself: Yes, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch there were
materialists who believed that when the occipital bone does not
exactly cover the cerebellum, these men are bound to be criminals.
For the materialists at that time, this was a theory, but now it has
become a reality; what they regarded as still flexible (the etheric
body) has now assumed a fixed form.—We are actually tending
in the direction of bringing the theories of the materialistic
world-conception to fulfilment. They are not reality as yet—but that is the direction towards which we are tending.
We come here to a
strange secret.—Those who would indignantly repudiate being
called prophets today are the true prophets; they are those who say:
The reason why a man is a criminal is that the occipital bone does
not cover the cerebellum. These men will prove themselves to have
been true prophets.—It is indeed so! The materialists of
today are wonderful prophets, without wanting to be. In our time it
is still possible, through proper education, for a counterweight
to be provided for a peculiar formation in the physical body such as
an undersized occipital bone; in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch this
will no longer be possible, for etheric bodies then will no longer
be capable of mutation. When this is the case, quite different
measures are required as preventives. If this state of things
is not obviated, the condition described by the materialists will
become a reality. It is the condition depicted with such agonised
suffering in the poems of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie which have been
recited today. These poems can be related to an age already
foreshadowed, an age that will actually have dawned in the
sixth post-Atlantean epoch. The poems give one the impression of
having been written by a soul who feels as if plunged into the void
through what can be acquired by way of modern knowledge. The soul
longs to progress but knows nothing as yet that can be a remedy—and then a picture arises—a picture of what will come to
pass if materialism continues as at present. And if no remedial
measure were created against the direction in evolution which man is
induced to take by the forces that are in him, then in the sixth
post-Atlantean epoch he will be subject to the very same fate
already now depicted by delle Grazie.
All the systems of
religion hitherto existing in the world could not prevent a terrible
fate overtaking man in the sixth epoch—the fate of having
his moral qualities expressed in his countenance, in his whole
bodily physiognomy. Nor could he do anything to prevent this if he
were to let things remain as the modern world-conception desires.
These are grave
thoughts. A good means for turning the dreams of materialists into
reality would be if victory were won by those who say: “Spiritual
science cherishes the dream that in the future men will see etheric
beings, first of all the Christ in an etheric form and after that
still other etheric forms. Spiritual science dreams all this, but
those who say such things are lunatics and ought to be shut up in
asylums.”—The people who maintain that the things of
which spiritual science speaks are sheer delusions are clever
people. Yet if this world-view were to be victorious, then what I
have described will certainly come about. But this world-view must
not, shall not, gain the day—that must be our
unshakable conviction. We must know: If our etheric bodies are to be
so strong that they are able to correct the mistakes of our physical
body, this strength must come from the fact that men learn to take
in an earnest and true way, what will come to them from the etheric
world. This will then work more and more as a factor of healing as
we move towards the future. But above all we must receive spiritual
science into our hearts in order to prepare ourselves to see the
Christ in His etheric form, and to take this event with true
earnestness.
A great stroke can
be drawn across the evolution of humanity. Before it, the etheric
forces in man were at work, still shaping and moulding the Physical;
but a time will come when the Physical and the etheric have become
fixed. Man will have to accustom himself to seeing the etheric
forces outside him in all manner of forms and figures, and it will
be the etheric realities in accordance with which we must act, just
as now his actions are influenced by sense-perceptions. We must
go forward to a time when we find, first of all, Christ as an
Etheric Being, and in His train, more and more etheric realities.
These etheric realities will then have the strength still to make
true individuals out of us.
Many are the
secrets lying behind the process of world-evolution, and many of
those secrets are shattering.—Once upon a time there was a
Homer. Read carefully what I have said in different lectures and
also in the little book
“The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,”
and you will find yourselves asking: How did Homer
become what he was?—It was because he was guided by a still
higher Spirit. Homer well knew that it was so. Hence his poems do
not begin with the words “I sing,” but with the words
“Sing, O Muse”. This must be taken with all seriousness.
Homer knew that a higher Spirit was inspiring him. It is only in the
present age that this is regarded as a phrase, just as is the case
with Goethe's lines:
“The sun, with many a sister-sphere,
Still sings the rival psalm of wonder,
And still his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes, with tread of thunder ...”
In so far as Homer incarnates again, the “man” will incarnate, not, however, the Spirit who guided him in those days. But the Being by whom Homer was inspired will be encountered in the etheric world—or again, the Spirit who inspired Socrates or Plato, in so far as they were inspired.—We must begin to understand the spiritual world, the world of spiritual science. Vision will then come of itself. But if we do not make a beginning with understanding spiritual science, we move towards the time which brings a terrible nemesis upon mankind.
The materialistic
world-conception may not be true, but for all that it contains an
inner truth. Of this inner truth it can be said: What the
materialistic world-conception describes regarding man would become
actual fact if this world-conception were to gain the day. And it
lies with men by means of a different world-conception, to prevent
this materialism from being victorious. The matter is not so simple
as to enable it to be said that the materialistic world-conception
is false; the point is that it lies in the hands of men to gain the
victory over it through deeds, not through feeble thoughts of
refutation. The more men there are who open their eyes to the
spiritual world, the more there will be who realise that the
fulfilment of materialism can be frustrated and the greater will be
the possibility of frustrating it.
A man who is
perhaps a poet or an artist today still has inklings which make him
say: I feel my inspiration within myself! Such experiences will
continue for some time yet. But this mood will vanish, will vanish
altogether! For men will have an experience which makes them say: An
etheric Being appeared to me, telling me this or that. I am the
instrument through which this spiritual Being works into this age!—
The spiritual world
is present in all truth; but men can alienate themselves from it.
The materialistic world-conception may be called: the conspiracy
against the Spirit. This materialistic world-conception is not a
fallacy only, it is conspiracy against the Spirit.
In spite of these
very sketchy indications, I hope your souls will grasp these
thoughts and work upon them. It is essential that those who hold the
spiritual-scientific view of the world should know something about
the impulses operating in the life of humanity. Many people will
come and say; This is not so, that is not so; this
is not Christian, that is not Christian—and so forth.
If these people come, then, if we have worthily understood through
Spiritual Science by what impulses the world is moved, in our
meditative life we shall be able to glimpse eternal principles. Let
people call us fantastic dreamers, or whatever it may be—we
know how mankind and the world evolve. And He Who for the sake of
this evolution fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, He is seeing, too,
what is born in our souls as the expression of world-evolution.
“Christ is seeing us”—by this we shall be
sustained.
