The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] These Monday lectures aim to uplift more advanced theosophists, that is, those who have been immersed in the theosophical worldview for some time and, even more importantly, have adopted a theosophical way of thinking and attitude, to ever higher and higher levels of understanding. Therefore, if we really pursue this goal in these lectures, it will become increasingly difficult for those who come as stragglers, so to speak, to follow. They may still be able to follow intellectually, but it will become increasingly difficult to regard what is presented from the higher parts of Theosophy as something reasonable and healthy. Therefore, it will take a great deal of goodwill, especially for those who have been here for a shorter period of time, to follow these branch lectures with their understanding of feelings and emotions. However, it must be emphasized again and again that we would not make any progress if we did not have the opportunity to shine a light into the higher realms of spiritual existence in some places. That is what these lectures are intended to do.

[ 2 ] In the last lecture, I gave you an outlook on the development of our entire planetary system. This was preceded by a look at this planetary system itself, insofar as the individual planets are inhabited by all kinds of beings, which in turn have an influence on our human body. What is to be presented today will follow on from these two previous considerations. We will broaden our view of the planetary system and in doing so, learn many secrets of our existence from a spiritual point of view.

[ 3 ] If you consider any of the many common representations of the origin of our planetary system, you will initially be led back to a kind of primeval nebula , a nebulous, vast structure from which our sun and the planets orbiting around it have, as it were, coagulated. And as driving forces in this coagulation, as a rule only physical forces are taken into account. You know that this is called the – today widely modified – Kant-Laplacean theory, and you also know that those who have come so far in their understanding that they have grasped the gradual formation of the individual planets out of the primeval nebula to the state in which the planets, namely the Earth, are now, are very proud of this insight, and that they always emphasize how it is actually a rather inadequate way of looking at our tremendous progress, to speak of spiritual forces and spiritual entities when the individual heavenly bodies are released from the primeval nebula. You know that there are also popular books that describe such talk as the most backward and superstitious that can possibly exist. Now, the mind of a theosophist would be sufficient to understand everything that is presented in these fields in the right way. But it extends a little further. It is clear to him that the physical forces of attraction and repulsion and so on are not enough, that all sorts of other things are at play. Today, Theosophy still has to put up with being denounced by the usual official science, which could perhaps also be called “anti-sophy”, as a great stupidity and terrible superstition. But we live in an age that is, one might say, curiously hopeful for the theosophist. One might say that the theories, views and insights that today's science draws from its own facts seem like small, gasping, dwarfish entities, running after the facts from a great distance, puffing and panting. For the facts of today's science are actually far ahead of what today's science “believes”. They are such that with them new and new confirmations of theosophical truths are constantly emerging. Of course, they are not seen through as such. I would just like to point out that the effect of the astral body during the night has often been mentioned here: how the physical body and the etheric body are worn out during the day, and how the astral body is the one that has a repairing and building effect during the night, and removes the fatigue substances. To express this sentence in this form would be considered by today's science as something not at all presentable. But the facts speak for themselves: if, for example, we can read in an American magazine today that a researcher has put forward the theory that sleep activity in humans is an involving, constructive activity, while in contrast, activity during waking is a dismantling one, then here we have a scientific fact behind which the theories of natural science gasp like the little dwarves who cannot keep up, while in the spiritual scientific world view you have the bright, great views that are taken from a spiritual world view.

[ 4 ] If we look at the genesis of our present solar system from a spiritual-scientific point of view, we have no need whatever to contradict what is put forward by physical science, any more than we do in other fields. For there is nothing about what physical science seeks to understand – what our eyes could have seen in the course of evolution – that Theosophy objects to. If someone had placed a chair out in space at the time of the primeval nebula, and had sat on it, had a sufficiently long lifespan, and had watched how the individual balls had clumped together, then with physical eyes he would have seen nothing other than what this physical science has established. But that would be the same as if two people were standing in front of you and one of them slapped the other one, and then an observer came along and said: 'The one had a passionate anger against the other, and that made him swing his hand, and that's how the other one got slapped.' While the second person would say: You are fantasizing, I saw nothing of anger and passion, I only saw the hand move and deliver a blow; as a result, the other person received a slap in the face. That is the external, materialistic description, the method applied by modern science. It does not contradict the spiritual investigation of the facts. Only the person who believes that this materialistic description of the facts is the only one, naturally feels himself in his scientific sublimity very far above everything that spiritual research has to offer. So what is called the modified Kant-Laplace theory may well be considered an external event. But within this whole agglomeration, this whole crystallization of the individual worlds, spiritual forces and spiritual entities were at work.

[ 5 ] The experimenter today shows us very nicely how all this can happen according to the Kant-Laplace theory. You only need to take a relatively small oil globule floating in water: You can easily attach a small cardboard circle to it at the level of the equator and stick a needle through the center. If you now turn the needle very quickly, small oil globules will separate out. This is a very good way to visualize a miniature world system and to show how a world system is distributed in space. But in this picture the experimenter is forgotten, namely that he himself was present and made the necessary preparations, that he then turned the needle around, and that in the great cosmos cannot happen by itself, which also does not happen by itself in the small. Out there it should happen by itself! These things are not that difficult to see; but the correct physical principles have been so overused that those who do not want to see them really do not need to see them. So spiritual forces and spiritual beings were at work in all this planetary formation, and we now want to get to know some of them.

[ 6 I must remind you of the often-repeated fact that our Earth, before it became “Earth”, has completed previous embodiments, other planetary conditions: the Saturn condition, the Sun condition and the Moon condition – and only after passing through these has it progressed to its present Earth condition. Now imagine the ancient Saturn, which was the first embodiment of our Earth, floating in space in the distant past. This Saturn actually has nothing within its entire being of what we see around us today as our plants, minerals and animals. In the beginning, this Saturn consisted only of the very first human being. We speak of this old Saturn only as a conglomeration of human beings. At that time, the human being also existed only in the first form of his physical body. This old Saturn was composed of nothing but individual human physical bodies, just as a mulberry or a blackberry is composed of nothing but individual berries. And this old Saturn was surrounded, as our Earth is today, by air, by an atmosphere; but in relation to what we know as an atmosphere today, it was spiritual. It was completely spirit-like, and within the evolution of Saturn, man developed in his beginning. Then came a time when Saturn came to be in a similar situation to that of a human being today, when he is in a devachanic state between death and a new birth. This state of a world body is called a pralaya. Saturn thus passed through a kind of devachanic state and then emerged again into a kind of outwardly perceptible existence as the second planetary state of our earth, the sun. This state of the sun brought man further again. Certain entities that had remained behind now asserted themselves as a second kingdom on the sun, alongside the human kingdom, so that we now have two kingdoms. Then comes another devachanic state of the sun, a pralaya, and then the whole planet transforms into the lunar state; and so it goes through another pralya until the moon passes into our earth.

[ 7 ] When our earth emerged from the purely spiritual, devachanic state, when it first acquired some kind of externally perceptible existence , it was not as it is today; rather, it was such that, when viewed externally, it could truly be understood as a large primeval nebula, as described by modern physical science. We just have to think of this primeval nebula as large, far larger than the present Earth, and that it extended far beyond the outermost planets that belong to our solar system today, far beyond Uranus. In spiritual scientific terms, we imagine that what we see emerging from a spiritual state is not merely a kind of physical primeval nebula. Anyone who describes what is emerging as a kind of physical primeval nebula and nothing more is about as wise as a person who has seen another person and, when asked what he has seen, says: “Muscles attached to bones, and I saw blood!” — who thus describes only the physical. For in the Primordial Mist are contained a wealth of spiritual powers and spiritual entities. These belong to it, and what happens in the Primordial Mist is a consequence of the actions of the spiritual entities. Everything the physicist describes is as if he were to place a chair out in space and observe the whole thing. He really describes it as that observer who denies the anger and passion that cause a slap and only sees the moving hand. In truth, what is happening is the emergence of world bodies and globes, the action of spiritual entities; so that in the Primordial Nebula we see the garment, the outer manifestation of a host of spiritual entities.

[ 8 ] There are spiritual entities within it that are at the most diverse stages of development. These spiritual entities do not come from nothing, but they have a past, they have the Saturn, Sun and Moon past behind them. They have all gone through them once, and now they are on the verge of applying what they have gone through, of doing as deeds what they have learned on Saturn, Sun and Moon. And they stand at the most diverse levels of development. There are entities among them that were already as far advanced on old Saturn as man is today on earth. These have already passed through their human stage on Saturn, and are therefore considerably higher than man was at the beginning of the development of the earth; they are far above man. There are other entities that have passed through their human stage on the sun, and others that have done so on the moon. Man is waiting to pass through his stage of humanity on earth. If we therefore only consider this fourfold hierarchy of beings, we already have a multitude of different entities at different stages of development.

[ 9 ] We now call the entities that have undergone their human stage on the sun the “fire spirits”. However, you must not imagine that these fire spirits, who were human beings on the old sun planet, looked the same as present-day humans. They went through their human stage in a different outer form. The old sun planet had an extraordinarily fine, light matter, much lighter than our present matter. At that time, the solid and the liquid did not yet exist, only the gaseous, and the bodies of the fire spirits were only gaseous, although they had the rank of humans. One can pass through the stage of humanity in cosmic evolution in the most diverse forms. On earth, it is only experienced by terrestrial human beings in the flesh. Beings on the moon experienced it in a kind of watery state, and even on the moon they had already risen above the human stage.

[ 10 ] So these spirits and a whole host of other spirits were connected with that primeval nebula that lies at the starting point of our solar system. For example, you can easily imagine that what began for man on Saturn began in some way for other entities on the sun. Just as the first germ of the physical body began on Saturn, so other entities followed on the Sun, just as in schools there are always new children joining the ABC class. Today they have only come so far that they are now, physically embodied, in today's animals. On the Moon, those entities were added that are present in today's plants, and our present-day minerals were only added on Earth. These are the youngest companions in our development, whose pains and joys I described to you in a previous lecture. So not only advanced entities were present in this primeval mist, but also entities that were not yet at the human level.

[ 11 ] In addition to those I have listed for you now, there are such entities of which we have said that they remained at certain stages of cosmic development. Take the fire spirits, for example. The fire spirits have already completed their human stage on the sun. Now, on earth, they are exalted beings, two stages beyond human beings. They have reached such a stage that only when man has ascended through the Jupiter and Venus existence to the Vulcan existence will he be ripe for such an existence as the exalted sun spirits had when the earth began its evolution. Now there are entities that have remained behind, that is, those that could have reached the same level on the sun as the fire spirits, but for certain reasons were unable to develop to the full height that the fire spirits had reached when the earth was at the beginning of its development.

[ 12 ] You all remember that at a certain stage of its development, right at the beginning – and you can easily combine this with the nebula theory – the Earth was still one body with the Sun and the Moon. If you were to stir the three celestial bodies, Earth, Sun and Moon, in a huge cosmic pot, you would get a body that was once there. Then came the time when the sun withdrew, leaving the earth and the moon, and then came a time when the moon also withdrew, leaving our earth as it is today, surrounded on one side by the sun and on the other by the moon.

[ 13 ] Now we ask ourselves: Why did this happen, that three bodies emerged from one body? You will easily understand why this happened when you consider that such highly developed entities were present in the primeval nebula – connected with the outer existence of the primeval nebula – that were two levels higher than man. They would have had nothing to do on a world body like our present Earth; they needed a dwelling place with very different properties. In contrast, man would have had to be consumed in this existence, so to speak, if he had remained connected to the Sun. He needed a weaker, more moderate existence. So the Sun had to be lifted out of the Earth by the action of the fire spirits and made their arena. This is not a mere physical event; rather, we must conceive of it as the deed of the fire spirits themselves. They have released their dwelling place and all the substances they need from the earth and made the sun their arena. They are able to withstand this gigantic speed in their development by virtue of their nature. If man were exposed to this gigantic speed in his development, he would be old again almost as soon as he was young. All development would proceed at a double pace. Only those beings who are already two levels higher than man can tolerate such an existence as that of the sun. They separated themselves from the sun and left the earth with the moon.

[ 14 ] Now we can also answer the question of why the moon had to separate from the earth. If the moon had remained connected to the earth, then man would not have been able to fulfill his existence on earth either. The moon had to be expelled because it would have mummified the entire development of man. Men would not have undergone such a rapid development as when the sun remained. They would not have grown old so quickly, but they would have become wooden, dried up like mummies; their development would have become so slow that they would have become mummified. In order that just the right measure of development for man should come about, the Moon with its forces and subordinate entities had to be sent out. That is why those entities which I have described as remaining at one stage all their lives, which today on earth a seven-year-old child reaches, are also connected with the Moon. Since they only go through one existence, like a person does in the time up to the seventh year, when only the physical body develops, they need a setting like the moon is. If you add to this the fact that not only these various entities were connected with the primeval nebula, but also a whole series of entities at the most diverse stages of development, then you will understand that primordial nebula not only these world bodies, such as the earth, sun and moon, were formed out of it, but also the other world bodies; and all of them were formed out of it because scenes had to arise for the corresponding stages of development of the various entities. Thus there were entities that were hardly suited to participate in the further development when our earth's development began, that were still so young in their entire development that every further step would have brought them ruin. They had to be given, so to speak, a scene where they could retain their complete youthfulness. All the other scenes are there to provide dwellings for those who are already further along. For the entities that emerged last of all during the moon's existence, and which had therefore remained at a very early stage of development, a setting had to be formed that therefore has little connection with our earthly existence: the world body that we call Uranus was formed. This has become a scene for such entities that had to remain at a very low level of development.

[ 15 ] Then the development continued. Everything that, apart from Uranus, is in our world system, is now contained in a primeval pulpy mass. Greek mythology calls that which was there before Uranus emerged, “Chaos”. Now Uranus has emerged; the other, so to speak, has remained behind in Chaos. Entities are still connected to it that, in their development at that time, were at the same stage that we humans were at when our earth had passed through the state of Saturn. And for those who, precisely because they were at this stage, because they had only just begun their existence, could not experience everything that came later, a special realm, Saturn, was created for them. So a second world body split off, Saturn, which you can still see in the sky today. It came into being because there were entities at the stage that human beings had reached at the time of Saturn's existence on Earth. So while Saturn was emerging as a separate world body, everything else that belongs to our present planetary system was already present. The Earth, with all its creatures, was still in this primeval pulpy mass. Only Uranus and Saturn were already outside.

[ 16 ] The next event was the separation of another planet, which was bound to become the arena for a certain stage of development. This is now “Jupiter”, the third planet, which splits out of the nebulous mass that is actually the Earth for us. While Jupiter and the other planets that we already know are outside, the Sun and the Moon are still united with the Earth. These planets were indeed split off from the chaos when the Earth still had what is also present in our Sun today, when our Earth was still completely one with the Sun and the Moon. At that time, when Jupiter split off, the forerunners of today's humanity gradually emerged, that is, today's people came out again, just as a new plant comes out of the seed. These human seeds had gradually formed during the old Saturn state, during the old sun state and during the old moon state. Now - the sun was still connected to the earth - these human seeds came out again.

[ 17 ] Now, however, people could not have developed any further; they could not tolerate this pace when the earth was still with the sun. And now something happens that we understand well when we realize that the entities we have referred to as “fire spirits” take their scene out of the earth. The sun forces its way out of the earth, and we now have the sun and then the earth and moon together. During this time, in some way that will not be described in detail here because it would lead too far, the “Mars” is again left over as a setting for special beings, which then actually passes through the earth and moon in the further progression, and as it passes through, it leaves behind in the earth with the moon what we know today as iron. Therefore, it is also the cause of everything that is deposited as iron parts in living beings, thus in the blood. Now someone might say: iron is everywhere, even in the sun and so on. — That is not surprising, because just as other bodies were in the primeval nebula, so was Mars everywhere in it with its iron, which it left behind; that is also in all the other planets! Here again we have the fact that scientists today are already providing wonderful evidence that the matter is as it is presented here by spiritual science. You will remember that I once explained how one symbolically passes from the green plant sap, chlorophyll, to the blood of man. Plants originated as such before this Mars transit took place, and have retained their characteristic. Then, in the beings that are now more highly organized than plants, iron has been stored, filling the red blood. It is entirely consistent with these spiritual facts that it was recently found in a Bern laboratory that blood cannot be compared to chlorophyll. This is precisely because it is stored later. We must not imagine that blood depends on the substantiality of the chemical element “iron”. I say this in particular because someone might say that one cannot speak at all of a connection between chlorophyll and blood. Today, science is discovering that blood can be traced back to the element 'iron', while chlorophyll does not contain any iron at all. But it is nevertheless in complete harmony with what spiritual science has to say; it is only a matter of looking at things in the right light.

[ 18 ] Now, for reasons we have already mentioned, the “moon” separates itself, so that we have the earth on its own and the present moon as its minor planet. All entities that are essentially higher than man and that we have called the fire spirits are drawn to the sun. Now there are certain entities that have not risen so high that they can really endure the existence on the sun. Imagine what these entities are like: they are entities that are far superior to human beings, but have not yet reached the point where they, like the fire spirits, can live on the sun. A place of existence had to be created for these entities. All the other scenes would not have served them; for they are for entities of a different nature, which have not at all reached the advanced age of those entities, which are indeed to be counted among the fire spirits, but have not quite completed the cosmic course. There were two main types of entities that had been left behind; for them, two special locations were created when two other planets split off from the Sun, Mercury and Venus. Mercury and Venus are two planets that broke away from the Sun as the settings for those fire spirits that are far above human existence, but who could not have endured the solar existence. So you have Mercury near the Sun as the setting for those beings who could not live on the Sun with the fire spirits, and Venus as the setting for beings who, in some respects, were less evolved than the Mercury beings, but who were still far above humans.

[ 19 ] Thus you have seen these different world bodies emerging from the primeval nebula for inner reasons, through spiritually active activities. You have been able to deduce from this that if you only stick to the physical, it turns out as today's science tells us; but the point is to really get to know the spiritual reasons why it has become so. Within the nebula, the beings created their own dwellings in which they could live. Now these various entities, which were, so to speak, harmoniously side by side as long as not everything had split off, have not remained without connection, but they are working quite mixed up. The effect of the Mercury and Venus entities on Earth is of particular interest. Imagine yourself back in the time when the Sun was just splitting apart from the Earth, the Moon was splitting apart and human beings began their existence in today's form. Man attained his present existence by the fact that one of the sun spirits condescended, if I may use such an expression, to have his further existence not on the sun but to link himself with the moon. From this was formed an exalted ruler of the moon. On the moon there were otherwise lower entities, but one of the sun spirits united with the moon existence. This sun spirit, who united with the moon, who is actually a displaced sun spirit in the universe, is as a divine being, as a spiritual being, “Yahweh” or “Jehovah”, the regent of the moon. We will understand why this happened when we consider the following:

[ 20 ] We have seen that if the sun had remained connected to the earth, man would have consumed himself in the rapid succession of evolution; if only the moon were to work with its powers, man would be mummified. It was precisely the harmony of the forces of the sun and moon that created the balance that sustains man at his present pace of development. When the earth was transferred from the old moon, man had his physical body from Saturn, his etheric body from the sun, and his astral body from the moon. But because man had the three bodies, and now the seed sprouted with the three bodies, he had a completely different form. You would be amazed if I were to describe it to you, for the form that man has today developed very slowly and gradually from the time of the separation of the moon. But the bad, inferior forces of the moon could not have given man his present form. They could have given him a form, but an inferior one. If the lunar forces had remained connected with the earth, they would have held man in one form. From this you can see that the forces that give form must come from the moon, while the forces that continually change form come from the sun. But in order for man to have acquired his present form, a shaper of forms had to work from the moon. There was no other way at all. Thus began the evolution of the human being. The fourth link in the human entity begins, and Yahweh gives man the germ of a form such that he can become a vehicle for the I.

[ 21 ] But now man is not yet able to do the work of which I have spoken to you. I have told you that man, starting from his I, first reworks his astral body, then his ether body and then his physical body. Man can only tackle this step by step. Just as the child still needs teachers today, so man, when he was already prepared, needed an I-being to become, a stimulus on our earth, in order to progress; and there were two inspirers for man. You can imagine from the whole cosmic development where they came from.

[ 22 ] The beings that were closest to man were the Venus and Mercury beings. Until man was able to make the first weak attempts at the end of the Atlantean period to work independently from his ego on the three bodies - for this is only possible at the end of the Atlantean period - he had to have “teachers” who continued to work far beyond this Atlantean period. And these teachers were the same entities that worked on Venus and Mercury. But these entities are not to be thought of in the same way as teachers are today; rather, you must imagine that the Venus beings are the ones who endowed man with his intellectuality. Outwardly, people knew nothing about the fact that these Venusian entities were working on them, just as little as they knew that certain entities from the moon were influencing them in terms of their outer form. Just as I have shown you how the various humors affect man, so the forces of these entities affected man until he could work on his bodies independently. What we today find in man as intelligence was imparted to man by the spirits, which as fire spirits of an inferior order remained behind on Venus. Besides, there were still other teachers who were in fact consciously perceived as teachers by the first clairvoyant people: the teachers of the great mysteries in ancient times. In the early days there were not only the all-embracing influences of the Venus spirits, which affected more or less all of humanity, but there were also mystery centres where the most advanced people of the time received spiritual instruction from higher beings, from the fire spirits. In the mysteries, they themselves taught, the exalted fire spirits of Mercury. There they appeared, if we may say so, in a spiritual embodiment and were the teachers of the first initiates. Just as the first initiates became the teachers of the great masses of people, so the Mercury beings were the teachers of the first initiates. In this way you see at the same time how perceptibly the entities of other stars affect man; but these influences are of a very complicated nature. You can see this from the following.

[ 23 ] You remember from my 'Theosophy' that it is only a rough classification when we say that man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, the I, the spirit self, the life spirit and the spiritual man. You know that the more correct division is this: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and that we then distinguish, that in which the I is absorbed, as sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul, and that we have the spirit self or manas in it first, then the life spirit or buddhi, and finally the spirit man or atman. The soul-like element in man thus appears in three stages: the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. If we follow the development of man on earth, we can also say: First the sentient soul develops in addition to the three components brought over from the moon, then the mind soul arises, and the consciousness soul arises only towards the end of the Atlantean period, when man first learned to say “I” to himself. Only then can man learn to consciously work on the limbs of his being from within. So if we divide man into body, soul and spirit, we must further subdivide the soul into the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. These develop only gradually; the consciousness soul cannot yet have any influence because it is the last to arise. So these members must also be kindled from the outside again. In this process, entities from the outside are again active, and it is the case that Mars, with its entities, acts on the sentient soul. When the mind soul is to arise, Mercury is already split off and, with its entities, acts on the formation of the mind soul, and Jupiter, which has long been present, acts on the formation of the consciousness soul.

[ 24 ] Thus, in the soul of man, you have the activity of the three world bodies: the rule of Mars in the sentient soul, Mercury in the mind soul, and Jupiter in the consciousness soul; and as the spirit self is pushed into the consciousness soul, Venus with her beings is active. For the first initiates Mercury is also active again, so that the Mercury beings also have a twofold activity: first, one of which man is quite unaware, in that they develop his mind-soul; then they are the first teachers of the initiates, in which they work in a quite conscious way. The Mercury beings therefore always have a dual activity, somewhat like some country teachers who have to teach the children and also cultivate their allotted field. Thus the Mercury beings have to develop the mind soul and also be the great school teachers of the great initiates. You can understand all these things purely logically.

[ 25 ] Now you may ask why Jupiter of all planets should influence the consciousness soul, since it is such a backward planet. But these things are not investigated by logical reasoning, but by investigating the facts of the spiritual worlds. There you would indeed see that the consciousness soul is kindled by the Jupiter beings, which are helped on the other side by the retarded Venus entities. In cosmic activity, things must not be taken in an external and schematic way. It must be realized that when a planet has once fulfilled a task, its entities can later fulfill another task. During the time of the second human race, the Jupiter entities were involved in the formation of the etheric body; then they went a step further, and when the human being had reached the point where his consciousness soul could develop, they had to intervene again and help develop his consciousness soul. Thus that which works in space intervenes in the most manifold ways, and one cannot schematically pass from one to the other.

[ 26 ] So you see how the physicist, when he looks out into space, sees only the purely external bodies of spiritual organisms, and how spiritual science then leads us into the spiritual foundations that the physicist sees. I would like to say: now we have not given ourselves over to the illusion that the person who takes the oil globule and forgets that he himself turns it. We have sought out the entities themselves, which made what was made as it is. We did not succumb to the illusion that when we are not there the whole thing will continue to turn; instead we sought the 'turner', the one who is actually behind it as the spiritually effective entity, so that one can more and more find complete harmony between what spiritual science says and what external science finds. But you can never deduce from the facts of external science what spiritual science says. At most, you will come to an analogy. If, on the other hand, the spiritual facts are found by occult means, then they will always agree with what the physicist has to say, apart from what still has to be found by external science. So the theosophist will always be able to stand up to the physicist. He knows very well that when something happens in the physical world, it may very well be as the physicist describes it. But nevertheless there is always a spiritual process as well. This does not prevent some scientists, who feel highly exalted, from considering the theosophist a fool or something even worse. But Theosophy can look on calmly. In fifty years' time, things will be quite different; for the continued existence of mere materialistic science would be very detrimental to the welfare and health of mankind - if things really remained as they are today - if spiritual science did not counteract it.