The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. The Relationship of the Human Constituents to Human Development and the Life Course of the Son of God and the Son of Man

[ 1 ] In the course of our studies in the spiritual sciences, we are first introduced to what is known as the structure of the human being, and then we distinguish within the human being the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, the I, and so on. Now it might seem to many that once we know the human being consists of these constituent parts, we have, so to speak, already grasped the essence of the human being to some extent. And many do indeed believe they know the most essential aspects of the human being if they can now list these various human constitutional elements, and at most can also describe how one or the other behaves as it passes through various incarnations. In reality, on the one hand, it is certainly necessary to start from these constituents when considering the human being, but then one must realize that, having familiarized oneself with them, one has essentially done only something very preliminary. For it is by no means merely a matter of the human being consisting of these seven or nine elements; rather, what matters is the relationship between these various elements of the human being—how one or the other relates to the other. Now, however, this relationship is by no means the same for all human beings and all times; rather, it varies, and above all, in the course of human development, this relationship of the elements to one another changes, so that we can say: If we look at humanity over a period of four to five thousand years in the past, these elements were connected differently than they are today, and in the future they will be connected quite differently. The manner of their combination, the relationship of the constituent parts, changes over time. The repeated appearance of the human being in the course of his incarnations has its profound significance in that, while the human being, so to speak, undergoes his own individual development from incarnation to incarnation, in the course of Earth’s evolution this complex of physical body, etheric body, astral body undergoes its own development in terms of the relationship between these members, so that with each new incarnation the human being encounters, as it were, a new composition. — Through this, the human being always experiences something new, in that they encounter such a different combination. We need only compare ancient times with our own in relation to one point, and we will then be able to gain an insight into what is meant.

[ 2 ] If we were to look back to the 4th and 5th millennia, to Egyptian culture, and observe the people of that time, we would see that the relationship between the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body was much looser among those people than it is today. In those ancient times, the astral and etheric bodies were, so to speak, more loosely chained to the physical body than is the case today, and this is precisely the trend in our present-day development: the astral and etheric bodies seek to bind themselves ever more closely and firmly to the human physical body. This is very significant, for as human development progresses into the future, the astral and etheric bodies tend to become increasingly bound to the physical body; consequently, the human being no longer exerts the same kind of influence on his physical body from the soul as he did in ancient times. In ancient times, the astral body and the etheric body were freer; the laws of the physical body did not act upon them as energetically as they do today. When a person felt an emotion or conceived an idea in ancient times, the power of that emotion or idea quickly extended into the astral and etheric bodies, and from there the person was able—because they were master of their etheric and astral bodies—to in turn control the physical body from the soul. This ability to control the physical body from the soul is steadily diminishing, because the astral and etheric bodies are becoming increasingly embedded within the physical body. But this has another consequence as well. It has the consequence that, over the course of time, human beings, by virtue of their natural constitution, are becoming increasingly inaccessible to those forces and powers that act upon them from the spiritual world. That is why in ancient times we had, so to speak, natural inspiration and imagination, an ancient form of clairvoyance, because the etheric and astral bodies were freer in the people of ancient times. Into these free astral and etheric bodies the forces of the superhuman hierarchies flowed, able to work into the etheric and astral bodies. Now, in the course of human evolution, the physical body snatches the etheric and astral bodies away from the very inner being of the human being, claiming them for itself, and the result is that the direct influence from the spiritual worlds becomes ever weaker, able to penetrate ever less and less into the human being’s etheric and astral bodies.

[ 3 ] We can see this for ourselves in the physical form of human beings. If we were to go far, far back into ancient, say, Egyptian humanity, we would find: Just as a person was constituted in their soul—for instance, if they had this or that passion or impulse—this continued to affect the astral body and the etheric body, and these astral and etheric bodies then imprinted the impulses and passions onto the physical body. Therefore, we would find that in very ancient times of Egyptian culture—but indeed in the times of ancient cultures in general—the human exterior was a kind of imprint of the soul. One could read on the forehead, in the physiognomy, what lived in the soul. There was a kind of complete analogy between the outer physical and the soul. Then came the time of Greco-Roman culture, came this remarkable Greek people, as if standing in the middle of the post-Atlantean era. It stands so in the middle that, in general, the forces of the spiritual world still flow into the soul and express themselves in the physical body. Hence that remarkable harmony among the Greeks between the outer physical form, the beauty of the outer physical form, and the beauty of the soul. This beautiful soul, because it was free from the physical body, was thereby able to open itself upward, toward the hierarchies. The hierarchies sent their forces into it. This was expressed in the physical body, and thus the entire physical body of the Greek became an expression of the beautiful soul. Thus we find that, to a high degree, something superhuman was expressed in the human body during the Greek era—a universal humanity.

[ 4 ] In the future, however—and this is the important point that we must take to heart—things will be quite different. In the future, the human physical body will become more demanding, binding the astral and etheric bodies to itself; and only by consciously approaching the spiritual world and absorbing the ideas, concepts, and feelings of the spiritual world—as we are now beginning to do in the spiritual movements—will he himself be able to develop those powerful forces that were formerly poured into his physical and etheric bodies by the hierarchies. And in the future, if the human being wishes to remain master of his physical body, he can consciously draw powerful forces from the spiritual world to overcome the resisting forces of the etheric body, which is bound to the physical body.

[ 5 ] We can therefore say: In ancient pre-Christian times, people were naturally given the ability to influence their physical bodies. In the future, this ability will only be granted to people if they take action to earn it. — As a result, however, it will become increasingly evident in the future of humanity that a clear distinction will emerge between those who resist spiritual teachings and insights, and those who approach spiritual knowledge gladly, willingly, and instinctively. We know that the latter still form only a small group today. But this separation will take place between those who will increasingly resist out of hatred and aversion to the spiritual, and those who, driven initially by a certain instinct, willingly approach spiritual movements. Those who resist will show this more and more in their countenance. They will show that they have no control over their gestures, over their physical nature, that their physical nature is stronger than they are in every respect. Those who approach the spiritual teachings will show that they are gaining strong powers to overcome the resistant physical nature.

[ 6 ] This will mean that, in terms of their external education and development, people will exhibit characteristics quite different from those of ancient times. Looking back once more to ancient times, we can say: When we look up to the Egyptians as they were four to five thousand years before our era, we can see childhood development after birth in such a way that the child did not really look human at all. It looked as if an angel had entered it, as if it had received its soft bodily forms—forms that directly expressed the spiritual in the physical—from the spiritual world. And the more it grew, the more human it became. It developed down into humanity. A great harmony between early and later humanity was evident among the Greeks. There, the imprint of the universal human was already evident in early childhood, and it remained; hence the Greek people are rightly regarded as a kind of childlike people. In the future, the fact will become increasingly apparent that human beings—and especially the most significant ones—are ugly as small children after birth, truly ugly in the sense of the Greek ideal of beauty. But the more human beings familiarize themselves with spiritual ideas, the more their form and figure will take on a distinctive character; what are at first blurred, indefinite, even ugly features in the child will be transformed, so that one will be able to discern in the facial features that they are the expression of ideas and concepts from the spiritual world. This will increasingly be the case.

[ 7 ] What occurs in outer humanity sometimes appears in art as if compressed together. In fact, the material for the humanity that is to face the future is, so to speak, drawn from the European masses, while the material for the humanity that once held dominion over the physical body originated in the South. Thus, in art—in Greek art—we also find the expression of the universally beautiful human being. Even in his depictions of the gods, the Greek imprints the expression of the beautiful human being, and this continues right into the Renaissance of southern Europe. Compare, however, a Madonna by Raphael with one from the North, and you will see that art anticipates what actually comes to pass. There you have the more characteristic form; the characteristic prevails. The echoes of Greek artistry had the effect of creating beauty as if by itself. A strong inner life, a powerful spiritual inner life—that is what humanity will depend on in the near future. We are moving toward such an age, and it is precisely this fact that we must connect with the other—that these various aspects of the human being have a different relationship at different times in human development. They used to be more loosely connected, and the lower aspects are increasingly striving to come closer together.

[ 8 ] Now, there are many things connected to this fact that can appear quite tangibly to the attentive observer of life in our time; for example, the inability of certain people to form concepts that are in any way appropriate to the facts of the world. There are already numerous people today who have the concepts that have been drilled into them so firmly in place that it is simply impossible for them to take on a new concept later on. Where does this come from? An etheric body that is not strongly connected to the physical body can take on more and more new concepts because it is elastic. An etheric body that is firmly connected to the physical body learns a certain set of concepts; once the physical body has taken on a specific form, it imposes that form on the etheric body. And so it happens that many individuals in our educated and scholarly circles today can no longer change what they have imprinted on their brains in later years and are rigid and inflexible with regard to their concepts. Their etheric body can no longer break free; it is no longer released from the physical body. It is then only the strength, power, and forcefulness of spiritual concepts and ideas that make it possible for a person to overcome this tendency. For a person must overcome a cosmic tendency through themselves here. This is precisely the mission of the human being: to overcome a cosmic tendency through themselves. One can essentially clarify the matter through a comparison. Simply imagine a plant that is permeated by liquid and is therefore fresh and green. Imagine the etheric body beneath the moisture and the human physical body beneath the other. This human physical body becomes powerful, I said, by drawing the etheric body to itself and also drawing the astral body to itself; it gains the upper hand. As a result, the etheric and astral bodies become powerless, just as when moisture is drawn from the plant and it becomes dry and woody. The human physical body gradually begins to become woody because the forces of the etheric and astral bodies are depleted. A brain that has thus become woody can take in only a few concepts because it wants to remain stuck in its existing concepts. We must revitalize our astral and etheric bodies by absorbing spiritual ideas and concepts.

[ 9 ] Thus we see that the spiritual movement of the present is a necessity for the future that lies within humanity’s mission—something just as necessary as any events that have befallen the human race without human intervention. People will, of course, continue to resist such truths vehemently for a long time to come, but all this resistance will be to no avail. People will perceive that this is the case through the course of cultural development, which will become increasingly evident in the coming times. Facts will prove it to them.

[ 10 ] Now, it is not only true of human evolution as a whole that this relationship between the individual components of the human being changes, but also of the individual human life. The relationship between the etheric body, the astral body, and the I is by no means the same in early childhood as it is in later life. Even in the individual human being, in the course of individual human development, we must take into account that this relationship changes. We consider the period encompassing roughly the first three years of life to be a particularly important time in the course of an individual human life. In essence, every human being is a completely different being then than later on. We know that these first three years and the later period are sharply distinguished from one another by two facts. The first is that it is only after this period has elapsed that a person learns to grasp the ego, to say “I” to oneself, to understand one’s own egohood. The second is that when a person later recalls the past, they can only go back as far as this point in time, which separates this period from later life. No human being, in a normal state, knows anything at all that precedes this point in time. In a certain sense, the human being is a completely different being at that stage. And even though today’s psychologists say the most unbelievable childish things, we must nevertheless hold fast to this insight: that in fact, the human being only comes to an awareness of their sense of self after this period has elapsed. There are even schools of psychology today in which one can read that human beings first learned to think and then to speak. Well, such drivel, as is written today in popular psychological writings, is only possible in an age in which those people who today practice psychology in official capacities are regarded as serious scientists. This fact is among the most important: that we must consider the distinction between these first years of life and the later ones, and view the human being throughout the first years of life, so to speak, as a completely different being than later on. Only later does the human ego—that to which everything is bound—emerge. But no one should claim that this ego was inactive before that. It was, of course, not inactive. It is not born only in the third year; it was there, it simply had a different task than intervening in the activity of consciousness.

[ 11 ] What was its task? It is the most important spiritual factor in the formation of the child’s three bodies: the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. The physical structure of the brain is constantly being reshaped. Here we see the “I” constantly at work. It cannot become conscious because it has a completely different task: it must first shape the instrument of consciousness. The very same thing that later becomes conscious to us first works on our physical brain during the first years of life. It is, so to speak, merely a change in the ego’s task. First it works on us, then within us. This “I” is truly a sculptor at first, and it is indescribable what this “I” accomplishes in shaping the physical brain itself. This “I” is a mighty artist. But who gives it the power? It possesses this power because, during the first three years of life, the forces of the next higher hierarchy—the angels—flow into the “I.” In fact—and this is not a metaphor, not a parable, but an actual truth—angels, that is, beings of the next higher hierarchy, work within the human being through the human ego. This being works in the ego and through the ego on the human being, shaping him plastically. It is as if the human being possessed the entire stream of spiritual life, as if it were flowing upward toward the higher hierarchies, and there the forces of the higher hierarchies were pouring into him. And at the moment when he learns to say “I,” it is as if something were separated from that power, as if he were called upon to do something of what the angel had previously done.

[ 12 ] But in the first years of life, we have indeed experienced something that seems to us like a final echo of what was still present to a certain degree throughout human life in the early post-Atlantean era. Just as human beings are in the first years of life, so were they throughout almost their entire lives, at least the first half of their lives, immediately following the great Atlantean catastrophe. We can clearly see this in the early Indian culture. The most childlike people in the early Indian culture were the great teachers of the Indian people, the holy Rishis. I have often drawn attention to them. If one were to imagine them in the mold of a modern scholar, one would be very much mistaken. If a person today were to meet them, they would not regard them as significant individuals at all. To them, they would simply be childishly naive peasants. Perhaps such childlikeness no longer exists today as it did in the Rishis. But then, when their time came, what flowed through them as a stream of inspiration spoke through them; they spoke of things that were the mysteries of the higher worlds, because throughout their entire lives they never actually uttered the word “I” in the sense that people do today. They never said “I.” They differed from a child in that a child has a primitive conception of the world. But into the same form of soul life flowed the highest treasures of wisdom, as if today a child in the first three years were to speak the greatest wisdom. It does not actually say it—but perhaps only not for a portion of people. Perhaps I may remind you that I have often uttered the sentence: The wisest person can perhaps learn the most from the child. — And if, in fact, the one who can look into the spiritual worlds himself has the child before him with the stream flowing up into the spiritual world, then it is so—forgive the trivial expression—then the one who is able to look into the spiritual worlds has in the child something like a telephone connection to the spiritual worlds. The spiritual world speaks through the child. People just don’t know it. The wisest person can learn the most from the child. It is not the child who speaks, but the angel within the child.

[ 13 ] The question now is this: How does the entire constitution of the human being relate to later life when the ego is not merely the fourth member, but at the same time the lowest member of an angel? We could even list the members of the angel for this period, naming the child’s ego as the lowest member of the angel. The relationships are quite different from those that exist later between the members of the being. The question then arises: How does this transform in the human being later on? What happens there later? — Something like a living current is cut off; the human being loses the living connection with the spiritual world. That is why, even in these first years of life, the forces that the human being brings with them from their earlier incarnations are most intensely noticeable. It is here that the core of the spiritual parts works most intensely to shape the physical body so that it is suitable for incarnation. How does later normal consciousness relate to this? In such a way that human beings today no longer have that body, that etheric body and its relationship to the physical body, as existed in the case of the holy Rishis. Throughout their entire lives, the holy Rishis retained that hereditary relationship for the etheric and astral bodies which made it possible for the I to work plastically on the human being’s outer shell. Today, we inherit at birth a physical body so dense and demanding that only a small part of the work that was previously performed by the I can be accomplished. Our physical body is no longer suited to what we are in the first three years. We inherit the physical body we need for the later years of life, and that body is not suited to lifting the gaze up into the spiritual worlds. The child does not know what is streaming down, and those around it certainly do not, for the physical body has changed; it has become denser and drier. We are born with a soul that still reaches up into the spiritual worlds during the first three years, but we are born with a body that is destined to develop the consciousness in which the I lives throughout the rest of our lives. If we did not have this dense physical body, we would indeed remain childlike by virtue of the current human cycle. But because we have it, coexistence with the spiritual world during the first three years cannot come to full consciousness.

[ 14 ] What must now take place in the course of human development? What is the only healthy course of action? We can most easily articulate this healthy course by using the two concepts from ancient times to describe these two human beings who live within us. One of these human beings is the spiritual-soul being of the first three years of childhood, who no longer quite fits the outer human being but cannot develop an ego-consciousness. In ancient times, this human being was called the Son of God. And the one who today has a physical body in which the ego-consciousness can live was called the Son of Man. So that the Son of God lives within the Son of Man. Today, the Son of God can no longer become conscious within the Son of Man, but must first be cut off so that today’s sense of self may emerge. But it is the task of the human being to transform the Son of Man—the outer shells—through the conscious reception of the spiritual world, to overcome them, and to rise above them in such a way that, little by little, the Son of Man is once again completely permeated by the Son of God. When the Earth has reached the end of its development, humanity must have made conscious what it has been unable to do unconsciously since childhood. With its divine part, it must have completely permeated its human son. What must completely permeate and fill the human being, what must pour into every limb of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, so that the human being may permeate his entire human son with the entire Son of God? That which lives in the first three years of life—permeated by the I and fully conscious—must permeate the whole human being; that must pour forth.

[ 15 ] Let us suppose that it were to appear before us as a model of what humanity is meant to become, a being like an ideal. What must be fulfilled in this being? That which resides within this being as a soul is of no use; it cannot penetrate the outer shells. An ordinary human being at today’s stage of development would not be able to realize the human ideal on Earth, nor would they be able to embody it. We would have to tear out the soul—to have them stand before us, so to speak, just as the Son of Man tears out the soul—and implant into this human being a soul that is like the soul in the first three years of life, but imbued with full ego-consciousness. In no other way could we set before us an ideal of earthly development than by taking a human being from whom we tear out the soul and into whom we implant a soul as in the first three years, and this childlike soul would have to possess full ego-consciousness. We would have to implant that. And how long could such a soul endure in a physical human life? The physical body can carry such a soul for only three years; then it must subjugate such a soul. So in such a human being, the physical body must break down after three years. The entire karma of the Earth would have to be arranged in such a way that the physical body breaks down after three years. For in human beings as they are today, what lives for three years is subjugated. But if it were to remain, it would conversely have to subjugate and shatter the physical body. Thus, an ideal of what the human mission on Earth is would only be fulfilled if, within a human being, the physical body, etheric body, and astral body remained separate, the ordinary soul-binding were torn away, and the soul-binding of the first three years were lowered into it with full ego-consciousness. Then the soul would shatter the human body, but during these years it would live out a complete model of what a human being can achieve.

[ 16 ] This ideal is the Christ ideal, and what took place at the baptism in the Jordan is the reality of what has been described. What we must understand as the human ideal was indeed set before humanity on Earth. It cannot be otherwise. What we perceive here actually happened. It happened that through the baptism in the Jordan, the soul to which we are bound during our first three years of childhood—but now fully permeated by the human ego—was transferred upward, in full connection with the spiritual world, into a human body from which the former soul had departed; and that after three years, this soul burst forth from the spiritual worlds into the bodies. Thus, in the first three years of life, we have before us a faint image of this, as it were, a completely stripped-down image of what lived on Earth for three years as the Christ-being in the body of Jesus. And when we try to develop within ourselves such a human being as the childhood soul, but one fully permeated by the entire content of the spiritual world, then we have a conception of that I-ness, that Christ-ness, of which Paul speaks when he makes the demand of human beings: “Not I, but Christ in me”—the childlike soul filled with full I-ness. Through this, the human being becomes capable of permeating his human self with his divine self and will be able to fulfill his earthly ideal, to overcome all external existence, and to rediscover the connection with the spiritual world.

[ 17 ] But how must we become? Every statement has multiple meanings in religious texts. We must become like children if we wish to glimpse the realms of heaven, yet with the full maturity of the self. This is what lies ahead for us until the time when the Earth has fulfilled its mission. It is something that can touch us in a very, very peculiar way when we look, so to speak, on the one hand at how our physical body is essentially heading toward a process of withering, and on the other hand at how the process of spiritualization sets in, overcoming what is leading toward withering as we look toward the future. From the spiritual worlds, the inner must become so strong that the resistant outer adapts in character. In this way, we as human beings are in harmony with our Earth’s development. Spiritual science tells us about our Earth that we have long since passed the point where the mineral kingdom, which forms the soil—from granite through gneiss and slate to our topsoil—possesses fresh building forces, but rather that all of this is in the midst of a continuous process of destruction. We do not walk on soil that is in the process of being newly formed, but—because the Earth has passed the midpoint of its development—on soil that is already disintegrating, that is already in the process of destruction. Our own development is entirely in harmony with the formation of our planet. We have a physical body within us that gradually withers away and which we overcome, but we also have in the soil something that is in the process of decay, and just as valleys and mountains are formed, so too is the decay of the Earth’s crust.

[ 18 ] Spiritual science states: You are walking upon a decaying Earth. When you climb a mountain, you must be aware that something there is broken and shattered, and that this breaking is not a process of further development. We have been past the midpoint of Earth’s evolution since the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Since then, we have been on a destroyed Earth, which will one day fall away from us like a corpse. — It is one of the most beautiful examples of how this spiritual insight is in full harmony with the real science of the present day. For anthroposophists should learn to distinguish between what is true science and all that which today, through countless popular channels, presents itself as science but is nothing more than a sum of prejudices and the like. When one goes to the true sources of the individual sciences, one gains the insight that spiritual knowledge is in full harmony with science. Here is one of the finest examples. For there is no geologist more thorough than Eduard Suess, and it is certainly true, as another geologist says, that Suess’s work *The Face of the Earth* is the geological epic of the Earth. It was, however, worked out with particular care. This work is the one in which one can find, as in a monumental work, what one can assert today—with all due caution and without being prejudiced by theories—on the basis of geological facts. Süss does not investigate, as Buch or Humboldt did, according to preconceived ideas, but simply what is fact. And there is indeed something interesting in what Süss has to say about the actual formation of the Earth’s surface, based on careful facts. For him, the formation of the Earth’s surface is precisely what the present-day Earth’s surface is for spiritual science, except that he knows nothing of spiritual science but draws his conclusions from purely physical facts. For him, valleys were formed because certain forces acted in such a way that rock and stone material collapsed, creating depressions, while elevations remained, and so on. All of this was formed through collapse, overturning, and folding, in which only the destructive forces are at work. I would like to present one passage from his great work to you. Thus you will see how this, where we are dealing with true science, is in harmony with what spiritual knowledge is. He says at one point in his work: “It is the collapse of the globe that we are witnessing. It certainly began a very long time ago, and the transience of the human race allows us to remain of good cheer in this regard. The traces are not found only in the high mountains. Large sections of land have sunk hundreds, and in some cases many thousands, of feet deep, and not the slightest step on the surface, but only the variety of rock types or deep mining reveal the existence of the fracture. Time has leveled everything. In Bohemia, in the Palatinate, in Belgium, in Pennsylvania, and in numerous other places, the plow quietly draws its furrows across the most massive faults.”

[ 19 ] This is mentioned here only to show you how our planet Earth, in the sense of spiritual wisdom, exhibits this process of withering, drying up, and destruction, just like the physical body. The people who formulate worldviews today do not engage in true science. For it takes a great deal just to study through Eduard Suess’s monumental work. But that would be of no help if one were not familiar with the entire body of contemporary geological science, insofar as it teaches one how to read such a work. Wherever a person approaches the true sources of knowledge, there they will find the absolute facts everywhere.

[ 20 ] But here there is a spiritual science that tells us: The facts are such—for example, regarding the course of our Earth’s development—that the Earth, before organisms existed, was not in that fantastical state where granite was molten, but rather where the entire Earth was permeated by an activity similar to that which occurs, for example, in a human being when he thinks. This process of decomposition was once set in motion, and as a result, one can say: The chemical substances that the Earth organism no longer contains today—such as the substances of which granite is composed—rained down from the Earth organism. This seeped down, and essentially it was these processes of destruction, in conjunction with the Earth’s chemistry, that created the possibility for granite to emerge as the Earth’s solid bedrock. — But a process of decomposition had already been set in motion back then, and what exists today must be the consequence. Our mineral processes are consequences of that process of decomposition, which continues in a straight line. What must true natural science show us? That the processes which must be there are indeed present. This is evident to us everywhere in true natural science. Nowhere does true natural science contradict what spiritual science demands; everywhere it is merely a confirmation.

[ 21 ] People will also find such confirmation with regard to reincarnation and karma. Humanity must, however, eventually move beyond all the theories, prejudices, and the like. Facts must be accepted wherever they are facts, not confused hypotheses such as the assumption that what geological theorists conceive of as the state of the Earth during the Granite Age ever existed, quite apart from the philosophical theories of the present day, in which we are faced with something that is quite devoid of all spirituality. We must not allow ourselves to be impressed by such talk as, for example, when someone comes along and says: “The individual human development that we base on reincarnation and karma originates from the infinities of spiritual development.” — It is possible that today a person can become world-famous and claim that individual human development originates from the infinity of spiritual development—which is nothing but hollow rhetoric, even if it is proclaimed as official philosophy and associated with the name of Wundt. Here we stand, in fact, at the dividing line between two spiritual worlds, and of this we must be aware. One is the actual natural science, which everywhere merely confirms spiritual science insofar as it is based on facts. The other consists of the various philosophical theories, hypotheses, and all manner of “spiritual” nonsense about what is supposed to underlie external processes. Spiritual science must strictly separate itself from this. Then we will also see how it becomes increasingly possible to grasp that what we acquire through spiritual knowledge—this composition of the human being and the relationships of the members to the various epochs of human development, as well as individual human development—points us deeply into the mysteries of the world, and that in something like a proper consideration of the first three years of childhood, the first step is given to recognize the Mystery of Golgotha in its truth and to truly understand a Scripture passage such as this: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven!”