The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I have something further to add to what I began yesterday. I am reminding you of something that most of you have already heard from me. When the human being passes through death, the physical body remains behind within the earth-forces; the etheric body dissolves itself into the cosmic forces, and the human being finds his further life, his existence, throughout the realms that lie between death and a new birth. I said that within the human being himself we can follow the formative forces that reach from one life into the next. We know that man is essentially a threefold being, with three independent members; I am referring at first to the formative forces of the physical body, the physical organization. We have the nerve-sense organization, which extends over the whole body, of course, but is localized essentially in the head; we have the rhythmic organization, including the rhythm of the breath, of the circulation, and other rhythms; and we have the metabolic-limb organization, which we consider as one, because man's movements are intimately and organically connected with the metabolism.

You know that every human being has a differently formed head. If we now consider these forces that form the human head—of course you must not think here of the -physical substances but rather of the formative forces, of that which gives to the head its physiognomy, its whole character, its phrenological expression—if we consider these forces, we find them to be those of the metabolic-limb system from the previous incarnation that have now become form. We thus have in the head a metamorphic transformation of the metabolic-limb organization of the previous incarnation. If we consider again what we possess as our metabolic-limb system in this present incarnation, these formative forces are found to be undergoing a metamorphosis and shaping our head for the next incarnation. If we understand the human formation, therefore, we can look back directly, by means of an appropriate cultivation of the metamorphic thought, from the human head of today to the metabolic-limb system of the previous incarnation; and we can see from the present metabolic-limb system forward to the head organization of the next incarnation.

This conception—which in our spiritual science and throughout the spiritual science of all ages has played a particular role—of the truths concerning repeated earthly lives does not remain airy, without substantiation; rather, whoever understands the human organization can read these truths directly from the human organization. The present trend of natural science, however, is as far as possible from embarking upon the sort of investigation that would be necessary here. If one studies the human being through anatomy and physiology alone, it is naturally impossible not to arrive at the foolish conception that the liver can be investigated in the same way as the lungs. One places the liver next to the lungs on the dissecting table and regards them as organs of equal value, since both consist of cells, and so on. One can obtain no knowledge of these things in such a way, and two organ systems that are as different from one another as the lungs and liver cannot be studied merely outwardly by comparison of their cellular configuration, as will necessarily follow from present-day conceptions.

If we really wish to discover the pertinent relationships, methods must be employed by means of which a conception of these things may be gained. If the methods that I described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are sufficiently developed, human cognition is greatly strengthened, reinforced. I am repeating here certain things that I already explained in lectures given last autumn in the Goetheanum. Our ordinary cognition is strengthened, that cognition through which we look out, by means of the senses, into our environment and through which we also look into our inner being, where we at first perceive our thinking, feeling, and willing. If we broaden this cognition, if we broaden it as is possible through the exercises that have often been described, our view in relation to the outer world changes, and in such a way that as a consequence one sees that it is absolute nonsense to speak of atoms as is done with the present world conception. What is behind sense beholding, behind sense qualities, behind yellow and red, behind C-sharp, G, and so forth, is not vibration but spiritual being-ness (Wesenhaftigheit). The world from without becomes ever more spiritual the further we press forward in cognition. One thereby really ceases to take seriously all those constructions derived from chemical or similar conceptions. All atomism is thoroughly driven from the mind when one broadens cognition from without. Behind the phenomena of the senses there is a spiritual world.

If, through such a broadened cognition, we look more deeply into the inner being, there arises—as I pointed out yesterday—not that confused mystical beholding, which does indeed form a transition that is quite justified, but there arises instead, when cognition of the inner being is developed, a psychic cognition of the organs. We learn really to recognize our inner being; while from without our cognition is more and more spiritualized, from within it is at first materialized. Working from this inner being, the real spiritual researcher—not the nebulous mystic—will become acquainted with each single organ. He learns to know the differentiated human organism. We reach into the spiritual world by no other path than by way of this observation of our inner materiality. Without learning to know lungs, liver, and so forth, one also does not learn to know, by way of this inner being, any kind of spiritual enthusiasm, which works away from the confusion of mysticism and works toward a concrete cognition of the inner organs of the human being.

At all events, one learns to know more precisely the configuration of the soul element. To begin with, one learns to give up the prejudice that our soul element is merely connected with the nerve-sense apparatus. Only the world of mental images is connected with the nerve-sense apparatus, while the world of feeling no longer is. The world of feeling is connected directly with the rhythmic organism, and the world of will is connected with the metabolic-limb organism. If I will something, something must take place in my metabolic-limb organism. The nervous system is there only in order that one can have mental images of what actually takes place in the will. There are no "nerves of will," as I have often stated; the division of nerves into sensory nerves and motor nerves is nonsense. The nerves are all of one kind, and the so-called nerves of will or motor nerves exist for no other purpose than to perceive inwardly the processes of will; they too are sensory nerves.

If we study this thoroughly, we come at last to consider the human organization in its entirety. Take the lung organization, the liver organization, and so forth. You reach a point, looking inward, at which you survey, as it were, the surface of the individual organs, of course by means of a spiritual gaze directed inward. What exactly is the surface of our organs? This surface is nothing other than a reflecting apparatus for the soul life. What we perceive and also what we work through in thought reflects itself upon the surface of all our inner organs, and this reflection signifies our recollections, our memory during life. Thus, after we have perceived and worked through something, it mirrors itself upon the outer surface of our heart, lungs, spleen, and so forth, and what is thus thrown back constitutes our recollections. With a not-very-intensive training you already notice how certain thoughts ray back over the whole organism in recollection. The most varied organs take part in this. If it is a question of remembering very abstract thoughts, let us say, then the lungs participate very strongly, the surface of the lungs. If it is a question of thoughts colored by feeling, of thoughts that have a nuance of feeling, then the surface of the liver is strongly involved. Thus we really can describe in detail very well how the individual organs of the human being take part in this raying back that appears as memory, as the power of recollection. When we focus on the soul element we must not say that in the nervous system alone lies the parallel organism for the soul life—rather, in the entire human organism lies the parallel organization for the human soul life.

In this connection much knowledge that once existed as instinct has simply been lost. It still exists in certain words, but people no longer sense how wisdom is preserved in these words. For example, if someone had a tendency to come to his recollections in a state of depression, it was called in ancient Greece hypochondria, meaning a process of cartilage-formation or ossification of the abdomen, where, as a result of this ossification, the reflection was brought about in such a way as to make memory a source of hypochondria. The entire organism is involved in these things. This is something that must be kept in mind.

When speaking of the power of recollection, I spoke of the surface of the organs. Everything we experienced strikes the surfaces, as it were, is reflected, and that leads to recollections. Something also enters the organism at the same time, however. In ordinary life this is transmuted, undergoes a metamorphosis, so that the organ produces a secretion. The organs having this function are mostly glandular organs. They have an inner secretion, and such forces as enter during life are transformed into secretions. Not everything is transformed in this way into organic metabolism and the like; rather certain organs instead absorb something that becomes latent within them and constitutes an inner force. For example, all thoughts that we absorb in this way are connected mainly with outer objects. The forces developed in these thoughts are stored, as it were, in the inner aspect of the lungs.

You know that the inner aspect of the lungs comes into activity through the metabolism, through the movement of the limbs, and these forces are transmuted in such a way that during life between birth and death our lungs are a reservoir, as it were, of forces that are continually influenced by the metabolic-limb organism. When we die, such forces have been stored up. The physical matter, of course, falls away, but these forces are not lost; they accompany us through death and through the entire life between death and a new birth. And when we enter a new incarnation, it is these forces that were in the lungs that form our head outwardly, that stamp upon our head outwardly the physiognomy. What the phrenologist wishes to study in the outer form of the head must be sought in an earlier form in the inner aspect of the lungs in the previous incarnation.

You see from life to life how concretely the transformation of forces may be traced. When this is done these things are no longer seen as merely abstract truths but will be beheld concretely, as one can also behold physical things concretely. Spiritual science becomes truly valuable only if one penetrates into individual concrete facts in this way. If one speaks about repeated earthly lives and so forth only in generalities, these are mere words. They acquire meaning only if one can enter into the individual concrete facts.

If what has been stored in the lungs is not controlled in the right way, it is pressed out, as I said yesterday, in the same way as water in a sponge is pressed out, and then, from what actually should only form the head in the next incarnation there arise abnormal phenomena that are usually designated as compulsive thoughts or illusions. It is an interesting chapter in a higher physiology to study in persons suffering from lung disease the strange notions that arise in the advanced stages of the disease. This is connected with what I have just explained to you, with the abnormal pressing-out of thoughts.

You see, the thoughts that thus are pressed out are compulsive thoughts, because they already contain the forming force. The thoughts that now we ought normally to have in consciousness must be only pictures; they must not have in themselves a forming force; they must not compel us. Through the long period between death and a new birth these thoughts do compel us; then they are causative, they work in a forming way. During earthly life they must not overwhelm us; they must use their force only during the transition from one life into another. This is the point to be considered.

If you now study the liver in the same way as I have just explained regarding the lungs, you will discover that within the liver are concentrated all the forces that in the next incarnation determine the inner disposition of the brain. Again by way of the metabolic organism of the present life, the inner forces of the liver pass over, this time not into the form of the head, as with the lungs, but into the inner disposition of the brain. Whether or not someone is to be an acute thinker in the next incarnation depends upon how he behaves in the present incarnation. Thus by way of the metabolism there may appear within the liver certain forces; if these forces are pressed out during the present incarnation, however, they lead to hallucinations or to powerful visions.

You therefore see concretely now what I pointed out yesterday in abstractions: that these things arise through being pressed out of the organs; then they push their way into consciousness, and, out of the general hallucinatory life that should extend from one incarnation into the next, they assert themselves within a single incarnation and make their abnormal appearance in this way.

If we study in the same way everything that is connected with the kidney-excretory organs, we will see that they concentrate within themselves the forces that in the next incarnation influence the head organization more from the emotional side. The kidney organs, the organs of excretion, bring forth in preparation for the next incarnation essentially that which has to do with the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense, but by way of the head organization.

If these forces are pressed out during the present incarnation, they display all the nervous conditions, all the conditions connected with over-excitement of the human being, inner or soul over-excitement specifically, hypochondriacal conditions, depression, and so forth, in short all the conditions connected particularly with this side of the metabolism.

In fact, everything that is memorable more from the feeling or emotional side is also connected with what is reflected from the kidneys. If we consider lung or liver reflections, we find them to be more memory pictures, the actual memory pictures (Gedaechtnisvorstellungen). If we turn to the kidney system, we see there what we have as lasting habits in this incarnation, and within the kidney system are being prepared the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense which, by way of the head organization, are intended for the next incarnation.

Let us study the heart in a similar way. For spiritual scientific research, the heart is also an extraordinarily interesting organ. You know that our trivial science is inclined to treat knowledge of the heart quite lightly. It looks upon the heart as a pump, a pump that pumps the blood through the body. Nothing more absurd than this can be believed, for the heart has nothing whatsoever to do with pumping the blood; rather the blood is set into activity by the entire mobility (Regsamkeit) of the astral body, of the I, and the heart is only a reflection of these movements. The movement of the blood is an autonomous movement, and the heart only brings to expression the movement of the blood caused by these forces. The heart is in fact only the organ that expresses the movement of the blood; the heart itself has no activity in relation to this movement of the blood. Contemporary natural scientists become very angry if you speak of this issue. Many years ago, I think in 1904 or 1905, on a journey to Stockholm, I explained this issue to a natural scientist, a medical man, and he was almost apoplectic about the idea that the heart should no longer be regarded as a pump but that the blood itself comes into movement through its own vitality, that the heart is simply inserted in the general movement of the blood, participating with its beat, and so on.

Something is reflected from the surface of the heart that is no longer merely a matter of habit or memory but is life that is already spiritualized when it reaches the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the heart are the pangs of conscience. This is to be considered, I would like to say, entirely from the physical aspect: the pangs of conscience that radiate into our consciousness are what is reflected by the heart from our experiences. Spiritual knowledge of the heart teaches us this.

If we look into the inner aspect of the heart, however, we see gathered there forces that also stem from the entire metabolic-limb organism, and because what is connected with the heart, with the heart forces, is spiritualized, within it is also spiritualized that which is connected with our outer life, with our deeds. However strange and paradoxical it may sound to a person who is clever in the modern sense, the fact remains that the forces thus prepared within the heart are the karmic tendencies, they are the tendencies of karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart is the organ which, through mediation of the metabolic-limb system, carries what we understand as karma into the next incarnation.

You see, if one learns to know this organization, one learns to differentiate it, and it manifests then in its connection with the entire life, which extends beyond birth and death. One sees then into the entire structure of the human being. We have not been able to speak of the head, in speaking about transformations, for the head is simply cast off; its forces are fulfilled with this incarnation, having been transformed from the previous incarnation. What we have in these four main systems, however—in lung-, liver-, kidney-, and heart-systems—passes in a form-building way through the metabolic-limb system and forms our head with all its tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of the body for the forces that will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.

The human metabolism is by no means the mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a test-tube that modern physiology describes. You need only take a single step, and a certain metabolism is produced. This metabolism that is produced is not merely a chemical process, which may be examined by means of physiology, of chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a moral coloring, a moral nuance. And this moral nuance is, in fact, stored in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation. To study the entire human being means to find in him the forces that reach beyond earthly life. Our head itself is a sphere. Only because the rest of the organism is attached to it is this spherical shape modified. When we go through death we must, in the soul-spiritual organization that remains to us, adapt ourselves to the entire cosmos. The entire cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle point of the period between two incarnations—I have called this point, in one of my Mystery Dramas, the Midnight Hour of Existence—up to this moment, if I may express myself in this way, we continue to expand into the environment. We gradually become identical with the environment, and what thus proceeds from us into the environment gives the configuration for the astral and the etheric of the next incarnation.

This is determined essentially out of the cosmos within the mother. Through the father and fertilization comes that which is formed in the physical and what is in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, actually passes over into an entirely different world. It passes over into that world through which it can then take this path through the paternal nature. This is an extremely significant process. The period up to the Midnight Hour of Existence and the period following it—both periods between death and a new birth—are actually very different from each other. In my lecture cycle in Vienna in 1914 (The Inner Nature of Man, Vienna, 1914, six lectures), I described these experiences from within. If we look at them more from the outside, we must say that the I is more cosmic in the first half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares in the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly, by way of the mother. From the Midnight Hour of Existence until the next birth, the I passes over into what the ancient mysteries called the underworld. On the detour through this underworld it takes the path through fertilization. There the two poles of the human being basically meet, through the mother and the father: from the upper world and from the underworld.

At least as far as I know, what I am now saying was an essential content of the Egyptian mysteries, coming out of the instinctive ancient knowledge. The Egyptian mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they called at that time the upper and lower gods, the upper world and underworld of the gods; and it may be said that in the act of fertilization a polar equilibrium of the upper world and underworld of the gods is brought about. The I between death and a new birth goes first through this upper world and then through the lower world. In ancient times there were not at all the strange connotations that many today connect with upper world and underworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper world as the good and the underworld as the bad. These connotations were not originally connected with these worlds; they were simply the two polarities that had to participate in the general world formation. In directly experiencing the upper world, one perceived, beheld, it more,as the world of light, and the underworld more as the world of heaviness: heaviness and light as the two polarities, if one wishes to express it more outwardly. You thus see that things can be described concretely.

Regarding the other organs, I have told you that the out-flowing of organic forces can become hallucinatory life, especially what is pressed out of the liver system. If the heart presses out its contents, however, this is really a system of forces, pushed out and brought into consciousness, that call forth in the next incarnation that strange inclination to live out one's karma. If one observes how karma works itself out, it may be said from the human side that this living out of karma can only be described as a kind of hunger and its satisfaction.

This must be understood in the following way. Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking event: a woman meets a man and begins to love him. Now, as this is usually regarded, it is somewhat as if you were to cut a little piece from the Sistine Madonna—for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy—and were to gaze at it. You have, of course, a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that; one must trace it back. Before the woman met the man, she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons that the woman went from one place to another. This conceals itself, of course, in the subconscious, but there is reason in it, there is an inner connection throughout, and by going back into childhood one can retrace the path.

The woman in question—and this is directed at no one in particular—follows the path from the beginning, which culminates in the event under discussion. The human being, when he is born, hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is a result of such a generalized spiritual feeling of hunger. One is driven to the event. It just so happens that the entire human being has such forces within him that lead to later events, in spite of the freedom that exists nevertheless but plays itself out in a different realm. The forces that manifest themselves as such a hunger, leading to karmic fulfillment, living themselves out in this way, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out and thereby come into consciousness in the present incarnation, they create pictures that form a stimulus, and then raving madness results. Raving madness is basically a premature living out in this incarnation of a force of karma intended for the following incarnation. Think how differently one must accustom oneself to look upon world events if these connections are understood. Of course, if a person suffered from raving madness in the present incarnation—or if one were that fellow who ruled Spain once—he would say that if God had permitted him to rule the world, he would have done it better! People thus ask questions such as, why did God create raving madness? Raving madness has plenty of good reasons for existing, but everything working in this world can appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, in this case brought about by Luciferic forces—everything that works prematurely in the world is brought about by the activity of Luciferic forces—the manifestation in this incarnation of karmic forces intended for the next incarnation creates raving madness.

You see, what is to be carried over and continued in another life can actually be studied in the abnormalities of a present life.

You can easily imagine what a strong distinction exists between what now rests in our heart through our entire incarnation and the condition in which this will be once it has gone through the long development between death and a new birth, then coming into appearance in the outer behavior of a human being in the new life.

However, if you look into the inner aspect of your hearts, you can perceive quite well—though of course only latently, not in a finished picture—what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general, abstract statement that what will work itself out karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the vessel in which resides the karma of the following incarnations. These are the things that must be penetrated concretely if one wishes to practice a real spiritual science.
You can imagine what enormous significance these things will gain when they are studied and made a part of the general education. What does modern medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not know the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs? And this it does not know. It has not even discovered a correct connection between excitatory hallucinations and, let us say, the kidney system, nor does it understand that calm hallucinations, those that merely appear, are liver hallucinations, as it were. Hallucinations that appear as though crawling on a person so that the victim wants to brush them off come from the kidney system. These are excitatory hallucinations, which have to do with the emotional system, with the system of temperament. From such symptoms a much more sure diagnosis can be made than by the diagnostic means in ordinary use today. Diagnoses based upon purely outer evidence are very unsure in comparison with what they would be were these things studied.

Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as inner organs or organ system, actually contain the compressed compulsive thoughts and everything that we take up in perceiving outer objects and concentrating these in the lungs. The liver relates to the outer world in an entirely different way. Precisely because the lungs preserve, as it were, the thought material, they are structured quite differently. They are more closely connected with the earthly element, with the earth element. The liver, which conceals hallucinations, particularly the calm hallucinations, the hallucinations that merely appear, is connected with the fluid system and therefore with water. The kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, is connected with the air element. One naturally thinks that this ought to be the case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not only with it. On the other hand, the kidney system—as an organ—is connected with the air element, and the heart system as an organ is connected with the warmth element; it is formed entirely out of the warmth element. This element, therefore, which is the most spiritual, is also the one that takes up the inclination for karma into these exceptionally fine warmth structures that we have in the warmth organism.

Since the entire human being stands in relationship to the outer world, you can say to yourself that the lungs have a particular relationship to the outer world in connection with the earthly element, and the liver in regard to the watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for everything connected with diseases that have their origin in the lungs (this must be considered, of course, in its broadest implications). If you take what circulates in the plant, the circulation of the plant's juices, you will have therein the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver organization. Thus a study of the reciprocal relationship of the organs to the environment offers, in fact, the foundation for a rational therapy.

Our present therapy is a jumble of empirical notes. One can come to a really rational therapy only by studying in this way the reciprocal relationships between the world of organs within the human being and the outer world. Of course the sensual longing for subjective mysticism must then be overcome. If the aim is to reach no further than the well-known "little divine flame" of Meister Eckhardt and so on, if the outpouring of a mere sensual delight in the inner world is the aim, having beautiful images without penetrating through this entire element to the concrete configuration of the inner organs, then one cannot really penetrate to significant therapeutic knowledge. For this knowledge yields itself upon the path of a true mysticism, which advances to the concrete reality of the inner element of the human being. Just as there we penetrate into the inner element of the human being and by way of this inner element learn to know the passage through the incarnations, just as we learn to know this inner life of the human being, so we reach, when we study the outer world, through the sense world, through the tapestry of the senses, into the spiritual. We ascend into the world of the spiritual hierarchies, which we did not find by way of inner mysticism. The hierarchies are found by way of a deeper view of the, outer world. Upon this path something yields itself that may first be expressed in analogies. They are not merely analogies, however, for there exist much deeper relationships.

We breathe, of course, and I recently calculated for you the number of breaths we take in twenty-four hours. If we count eighteen breaths to the minute, we have in an hour 60 x 18, and in twenty-four hours 25,920 breaths, in a day and a night.

Let us take another rhythm in the human being, the rhythm of day and night itself. When you awake in the morning, you draw into your physical and etheric bodies the astral body and I. This is also a breathing. In the morning you inhale the astral body and I, and when you fall asleep at night you exhale them again; thus one complete breath in twenty-four hours, in one day. There are 365 such breaths in a year. Take the average age of a human being, 72 years, and you arrive at approximately the same figure, 25,920. If I had not started with 72 but a figure somewhat lower, I would have reached the same figure. That is to say, if you take the entire earthly life of the human being and you see each single day, each falling asleep and awakening, as one breath, you have then in an entire life as many inhalations and exhalations of the astral body and I as you have breaths in twenty-four hours. You take in the course of your life just as many breaths of the astral body and I as you take daily in breathing the air. These rhythms are in absolute correspondence, and we see how the human being is fitted into the world. The life of one day, sunrise to sunset, therefore a single circuit, corresponds to an inner sunrise and sunset that lasts from birth to death.

You see, the human being incorporates himself into the entire world, and I would like to close these considerations by pointing out to you an idea, asking you to think it through, to make it a subject of meditation. Science today pictures a world process, and within this world process the earth is thought to have arisen. Natural science believes that in the end, when entropy is fulfilled, the earth will end in a warmth death, and so on. If today one forms for oneself a view such as the Copernican view, or any modification of Copernicanism, one takes into consideration only the forces that formed the earth out of the primeval mist, and human life basically becomes a sort of fifth wheel on the wagon, for the geologist, the astronomer, does not take the human being into consideration. It does not occur to him to seek at all within the human being for the primal cause of a future shaping of the world. For modern science, the human being is everywhere present in this world process, but he is the fifth wheel on the wagon—the world process takes its course, but he has nothing to do with it. Picture it in this way: this whole world process comes to an end, ceases, dissolves itself in space. It ceases, and the primal causes of what then happens lie within the human skin, within the human being; there they continue. The origin of what is now the world lies far back within the human being in primeval ages. This is a reality. Just as the books of ancient wisdom relate such things to us in their own language, so the word of Christ Jesus also point to these things: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” All that constitutes the material world passes away, but that which comes from the spirit and the soul and is expressed in words survives the destruction of the earth and lives on into the future. The primal causes of the future do not lie outside our skin, and the geologists need not look for them in the ground. Rather we must seek them within, in the inner forces of our organization, which at first pass over into our next earthly life but then continue in other metamorphoses. Hence when you search for the future of the world you must look into the human being. Everything that is outer perishes utterly.

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The nineteenth century erected a barrier against this knowledge, and this barrier is called the law of the conservation of energy.

This law of the conservation of energy carries forward the forces residing in man's environment, but all these will dissolve and disappear. Only what arises within the human being builds the future. It is impossible to think of anything more false than the law of the conservation of energy. In reality its result is simply to make the human being a fifth wheel in the world process. It is not the statement of the law of the conservation of energy that is correct but rather that other saying: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” This is the correct statement. These two statements are diametrically opposed to one another, and it is simply a lack of thought when today certain adherents to this or that positive denomination wish to be believers in the Bible and at the same time adherents to the theories of modern physics. This is simply dishonesty, which appears today to be culturally creative. This dishonesty must be driven from the field of creative culture—which it actually opposes—if we are to emerge from these forces of decline into forces of ascent.

I propose to incorporate all the inquiries and requests I have received in the course of these lectures. Of course they contain repetitions, so I shall group the answers together, as far as possible. For it makes a difference whether we discuss what has been asked or suggested, before or after a certain basis has been laid down. Therefore, I shall try, in today's address, to establish such a basis for every future consideration, taking into account what I have had from you in the way of requests and suggestions.

You will remember that we first considered the form and inner forces of the osseous and muscular systems, that yesterday we reviewed illustrative examples of the process of disease, and the requisites of curative treatment; and that we took as our starting point on that occasion, the circulation in the cardiac system.

Today I shall describe the introductory principles of a conception that may be derived from a deeper study of human nature regarding the possibility and the essentials of healing in general. Special points will be dealt with in subsequent comments, but it is my intention to begin with these basic principles.

If we examine the medical curriculum of today we shall find, roughly speaking, that therapeutics are dealt with concurrently with pathology, although there is no clear and evident connection between the two. And in therapeutics at the present time, purely empirical methods generally prevail. It is hardly possible to discover a rational cure, combining practice with sound principles, in the domain of therapeutics. We are also aware that in the course of the nineteenth century, these deficiencies in the medical conception led to what was termed the Nihilist School. This Nihilism laid all stress on diagnosis, was content to recognise disease, and on the whole, was sceptical as regards any rationale of healing.

But in a purely rational approach to medicine, we might surely expect something suggesting lines of treatment to be given together with diagnosis? The connection between therapeutics and pathology must not be external only. The nature of disease must be recognised to such a degree that some idea can be formed from it as to the appropriate methods of the curative process.

And thus the question arises: How far does the whole intricate web of natural processes admit of curative Media and curative processes? An interesting axiom of Paracelsus has often been quoted, to this effect: the medical man must pass Nature's examination. But it cannot be maintained that the more recent literature dealing with Paracelsus has made much use of this axiom; for, if it had, there would be definite attempts made to unravel the curative processes from Nature herself. Of course, there are such attempts, in those processes of disease in which Nature herself gives counsel. But these examples are more or less exceptions, for there have already been injuries of one kind or another; whereas a genuine study of Nature would be a study of normal processes.

This leads to a further inquiry. Is there really any possibility of observing normal processes—in the current sense of the term—in Nature, in order to gather from them some conception of the healing method? You will immediately perceive the serious difficulty in this connection. We can of course, only observe curative processes in Nature in a normal way, if diseased processes are normally present in Nature. So we are confronted with this: Are there processes of disease in Nature itself, so that we can pass Nature's examination and thus learn how to heal them?

We shall try today to advance somewhat nearer to the answering of this question, which will be fully dealt with in the course of these lectures. But one can say at once in this connection that the path here indicated has been made impassable by the natural scientific basis of medicine as practised today. This means very “heavy going,” in the face of prevailing assumptions, for curiously enough, the materialistic tendency of the nineteenth century has led to a complete misconception of the functions of that system of the human organism with which we must now deal in sequence to the osseous, muscular and cardiac systems, viz. the nervous system.

It has gradually become the fashion to burden the nervous system with all the soul functions and to resolve all that man accomplishes of a soul and spirt nature into parallel processes which are then supposed to be found in the nervous system. As you are aware, I have felt bound to protest against this kind of nature study in my book Concerning the Problems of the Soul.

In this work, I first of all tried (and many empirical data confirm this truth, as we shall see) to prove, that only the processes proper to the formation of images are connected with the nervous system, whilst all the processes of feeling are linked—not indirectly but directly—with the rhythmic processes of the organism. The Natural Scientist of today assumes—as a rule—that the feeling processes are not directly connected with the rhythmic system, but that these bodily rhythms are transmitted to the nervous system, and thus indirectly, the feeling life is expressed through the nerve system.

Further I have tried to show that the whole life of our will depends directly on the metabolic system and not through the intermediary of the nerves. Thus the nervous system does nothing more than perceive will processes. The nervous system does not put into action the “will” but that which takes place through will within us, is perceived.

All the views maintained in that book can be thoroughly corroborated by biological facts, whereas the contrary assumption of the exclusive relation of the nerve system to the soul, cannot be proved at all. I should like to put this question to healthy unbiased reason: how can the fact that a so-called motor nerve and a sensory nerve can be cut, and subsequently grown together, so that they form one nerve, be harmonised with the assumption that there are two kinds of nerves: motor and sensory? There are not two kinds of nerves. What are termed “motor” nerves are those sensory nerves that perceive the movements of our limbs, that is, the process of metabolism in our limbs when we will. Thus in the motor nerves we have sensory nerves that merely perceive processes in ourselves, while the sensory nerves proper perceive the external world.

There is much here of enormous significance to medicine, but it can only be appreciated if the true facts are faced. For it is particularly difficult to preserve the distinction between motor and sensory nerves, in respect of the symptoms enumerated yesterday, as appertaining to tuberculosis. Therefore reasonable scientists have for some time assumed that every nerve has in itself a double conduction, one from the centre to the periphery, and also one from the periphery to the centre. Thus each motor nerve would have a complete double “circuit,” and if the explanation of any condition—such as hysteria—is to be based on the nervous system, one has to assume the existence of two nerve currents running in opposite directions. You see: as soon as one gets down to the facts, one must postulate qualities of the nervous system directly contrary to the accepted theories. Inasmuch as these conceptions about the nervous system have arisen, access has actually been barred to all knowledge of what goes on in the organism below the nervous system as in hysteria for example. In the preceding lecture, we defined this as caused by metabolic changes; and these are only perceived and registered by the nerves. All this should have received attention. But instead of such attentive study, there has been a wholesale attribution of symptoms and conditions to “nerves” alone, and hysteria was diagnosed as a kind of vulnerability and disequilibrium of the nervous system. This has led further. It is undeniable that among the more remote causes of hysteria are some that originate in the soul: grief, disappointment, disillusion, or deep-seated desires which cannot be fulfilled and may lead to hysterical manifestations. But those who have, so to speak, detached all the rest of the human organism from the life of the soul, and only admit a genuine direct connection between that life and the nervous system, have been compelled to attribute everything to “nerves.” Thus there has arisen a view which does not correspond in the least with the facts, and furthermore offers no available link between the soul and the human organism. The soul-forces are only admitted to contact with the nervous system, and are excluded from the human organism as a whole. Or, alternatively, motor nerves are invented, and expected to exercise an influence on the circulation, etc., an influence which is entirely hypothetical.

These errors helped to mislead the best brains, when hypnotism and “suggestion” came into the field of scientific discussion. Extraordinary cases have been experienced and recorded, though certainly some time ago. Thus, ladies afflicted with hysteria completely mystified and misled the most capable physicians, who swallowed wholesale all that these patients told them, instead of inquiring into the causes within the organism. In this connection, it is perhaps of interest to remind you of the mistake made by Schleich, in the case of a male hysteric. Schleich was fated to fall into this error, although he was quite well accustomed to think over matters thoroughly. A man who had pricked his finger with an inky pen, came to him and said that the accident would certainly prove fatal that same night, for blood poisoning would develop, unless the arm was amputated. Schleich, not being a surgeon, could not amputate. He could only seek to calm the man's fears, and carry out the customary precautions, suction of the wound, etc., but not remove an arm on the mere assertion of the patient himself. The patient then went to a specialist, who also declined to amputate. But Schleich felt uncomfortable about the case, and inquired early the next morning, and found that the patient had died in the night. And Schleich's verdict was: Death through Suggestion. And that is an obvious—terribly obvious explanation. But an insight into the nature of man forbids us to suppose that this death was due to suggestion in the manner assumed. If death through suggestion is the diagnosis, there had been a thorough confusion of cause and effect. For there was no blood poisoning—the autopsy proved this; but the man died, to all appearance, from a cause which was not understood by the physicians, but which must obviously have been deep-seated and organic. And this deep-seated organic cause had already—on the previous day—made the man somewhat awkward and clumsy, so that he stuck an inky pen into his finger, which is an action most people avoid. This was a result of his awkwardness. But this external and physical clumsiness was concurrent with an increased inner power of vision, and under the influence of disease, he foresaw that his death would occur that night. His death had not the least connection with the fact that he hurt his finger with an ink-stained pen, although this was the cause of his sensations, owing to the cause of death which he carried within him. Thus the whole course of events is merely externally linked with the internal processes which caused the death. There is no question of “death through suggestion” here. He foresaw his own death, however, and interpreted everything that happened, so as to fit into this sentiment This one example will show you how extremely cautious we must be, if we are to reach an objective judgment of the complicated processes of nature. In these matters one cannot take the simplest facts as a starting point.

Now we must pose this question: Does sensory perception, and all that resembles such perception, offer us any basis on which to estimate the somewhat dissimilar influences which are expected to affect the human constitution, through materia medica?

We have three kinds of influence upon the human organism in its normal state: the influences through sense perception, which then extend to the nervous system; the influences working through the rhythmic system, breathing and blood circulation; and those working through metabolism. These three normal relationships must have some sort of analogies in the abnormal relationships which we establish between the curative media—which we must after all take in some way from the external world of nature—and the human organism. Undoubtedly the most evident and definite results of this interaction between the external world and the human organism, are those affecting the nervous system. So we must ask ourselves this question: How can we rationally conceive a connection between man himself and that which is external nature; a connection of which we wish to avail ourselves, whether through processes, or substances with medicinal properties for human healing? We must form a view of the exact nature of this interaction between man and the external world, from which we take our means of healing. For even if we apply cold water treatment, we apply something external. All that we apply is applied from outside to the processes peculiar to man, and we must therefore form a rational concept of the nature of this connection between man and the external process.

Here we come to a chapter where again there is in the orthodox study of medicine a sheer aggregate instead of an organic connection. Granted that the medical student hears preliminary lectures on natural science; and that on this preparatory natural science, general and special pathology, general therapeutics and so forth, are then built up, but once lectures on medicine proper have begun, not much more is heard of the relationship between the processes discussed in these lectures, and the activities of external nature, especially in connection with healing methods. I believe that medical men who have passed through the professional curriculum of today, will not only find this a defect on the theoretical and intellectual side, but will even have a strong feeling of uncertainty when they come to the practical aspect, as to whether this or that remedy should be applied to influence the diseased process. A real knowledge of the relationship between the remedy indicated and what happens in the human body is actually extremely rare. So the very nature of the subject makes a major reform of the medical curriculum imperative.

I shall now try to illustrate the extent of the difference between certain external processes and human processes, by means of examples drawn from the former category. I propose to begin with what we can observe in plants and lower forms of animals, passing on from these to processes that can be activated through agencies derived from the vegetable, animal and especially the mineral kingdoms.

But we can only approach a characterisation of pure mineral substances, if we start from the most elementary conceptions of natural science, and then go on to the results, let us say, of the introduction of arsenic or tin into the human organism. But, first and foremost, we must emphasise the complete difference between the metamorphoses of growth in the human organism, and in external objects.

We shall not be able to escape forming some notion of the actual principle of growth, of the vital growth of and in mankind, and conceiving the same principle in external entities as well. But the difference is of fundamental significance. For instance, I would ask you to observe a very common natural object: the so-called locust tree, Robina pseudacacia. If the leaves of this plant are cut off where they join the petioles, there occurs an interesting metamorphosis; the truncated leaf stalk becomes blunt and knobby, and takes over the functions of the leaves. Here we find a high degree of activity on the part of something inherent in the whole plant; something that we will provisionally and by hypothesis term a “force,” which manifests itself if we prevent the plant from using its normally developed organ.

Now, observe, further, there is still a trace in mankind of what is so conspicuously present in the simple growing plant. For instance, if a man is prevented for one reason or another, from using one of his arms or hands for any purpose, the other arm or hand grows more powerful, stronger, and also physically larger. We must bring together facts like these. This is the path that leads to the cognition of remedial possibilities. In external nature these trends develop to extremes. For instance, this has been observed: A plant has grown on the slope of a mountain; certain of its stems develop in such a way that the leaves remain undeveloped; on the other hand the stem curves round and becomes an organ of support. The leaves are dwarfed; the stem twists round, becomes a supporting organ, and finds its base. These are plants with transformed stems, whose leaves have atrophied. (See Diagram 6).

Such facts point to inherent formative forces in the plant itself enabling it to adapt itself, within wide limits, to its environment. The same forces, active and constructive from within, are also revealed among lower organisms in an interesting way.

Take, for example, any embryo which has reached the gastrula stage of development. You can cut up this gastrula, dividing it through the middle, and each half rounds out and evolves the potentiality within itself of growing its own three portions of the intestine—the fore, middle and hind portion, independently. This means that if the gastrula is cut in two, we find that each half behaves just as the whole gastrula would have behaved. You know that this experiment can even be applied to forms of animal life as high in the scale as earthworms; that when portions are removed from these creatures, they are restored, the animal drawing on its internal formative forces to rebuild out of its own body the portion of which it has been deprived. We must point to these formative forces objectively; not as hypotheses, assuming the existence of some sort of vital force, but as matters of fact. For if we observe exactly what occurs here, and follow its various stages, we have this result. For instance, take a frog, and remove a portion in a very early stage of development, the bulk of the mutilated organism replaces the amputated portion by growing it again. A critic of a materialistic turn of mind, will say; Oh yes, the wound is the seat of tonic forces, and through these the new growth is added. But this cannot be assumed.

Suppose that it were the case, and I were to remove a part of an organism, and a new part grows on the site of the injury (b) (See Diagram 7) through the tonic force (c) located here; then the new growth should strictly speaking be the immediately adjacent part, its neighbour in the intact and perfect organism. Actually, however, this does not happen; if portions of the larval frog are amputated, what grows from the site of the injury are extremities, tails or even heads; and in other creatures antennae. Not, that is to say, the strictly adjacent parts, but those of most use to the organism. Therefore, it is quite impossible that the normally adjacent structure develops at the point of amputation through the specially localised tonic forces; instead, we are obliged to assume that, in these re-growths or repairs, the whole organism takes part in some way.

And so it is really possible to trace what happens in lower organisms. As I have indicated the path to follow you can extend its application to all the cases recorded, and see in all of them, that one can only achieve a conception of the matter along this line of thought.

And in man, you will have to conclude, however, that things do not happen in this way. It would be extremely pleasant and convenient to be able to cut off a finger or an arm, in the certainty that it would be grown again! But this simply does not happen. And the question is: what becomes of those forces, growth forces, which show themselves unmistakably in the case of animals, when it comes to the human organism? Are they lost in it? or are they non-existent?

Anyone who can observe Nature objectively knows that only by this line of inquiry can we arrive at a sound conception of the link between physical and spiritual in man. For the forces we learnt to know as plastic formative forces, which mould forms straight from the living substance, are simply lifted out of the organs, and exist entirely in the soul and spiritual functions.

Because they have been so lifted, and are no longer within the organs as formative forces, man has them as separate forces, in the functions of soul and spirit. If I think or feel, I think and feel by virtue of the same forces that work plastically in the lower animals or the vegetable world. Indeed I could not think if I did not perform my thinking, feeling and willing with these same forces, which I have drawn out of matter. So, when I contemplate the lower organisms, I must say to myself; the power inherent in them, which manifests as a formative force, is the same as I carry within me; but I have drawn it out from my organs and hold it apart. I think and feel and will with the same powers that are formative and active plastically, in the lower organisms.

Anyone wishing to be a sound psychologist, whose statements have substance, and not mere words, as is usual today, would have so to follow up the processes of thinking, feeling and willing, as to show that the very same activities in the regions of soul and spirit manifest themselves on the lower level as plastic formative forces.

Observe for yourselves how we can achieve within the soul things we can no longer achieve within our organism. We can complete trains of thought that have escaped us by producing them out of others. Our activity here is quite similar to organic production; what appears first is not the immediately neighboring, but one lying far removed. There is a complete parallelism between what we experience inwardly through the soul, and the external formative forces and principles of Nature. There is a perfect correspondence between them. We must emphasise this correspondence, and show that man faces the same formative principles in the external world, as he has drawn from his own organism for the life of his soul and spirit, and which therefore in his own organism no longer underlie the substance.

Moreover, we have not drawn these elements in equal proportions from all parts. We can only approach the human organism properly, if we have first armed ourselves with the preliminary knowledge outlined here. For if you observe all the components of our nervous system, you will find the following peculiarity: what we are accustomed to term nerve-cells (neurons) and the nerve tissue, and so forth, develop comparatively slowly in the early stages of growth; they are not very advanced cellular formations. So that we might reasonably expect these so-called nerve-cells to display the characteristics of earlier primitive cellular structures yet, they do not do so at all. For instance, they are not capable of reproducing themselves; nerve-cells, like the cells of the blood, are indivisible. Thus we find that in a relatively early stage of evolution, they have been deprived of a capacity that belongs to cells external to man. They remain at an earlier stage of evolution; they are, so to speak, paralysed at this stage. What has been paralysed in them, separates off and becomes the soul and spirit element. So that, in fact, with our soul and spiritual processes we return to what was once formative in organic substance. And we are only able to attain to this because we bear in us the nervous substances which we destroy or at least cripple in a relatively early stage of growth.

In this way we can approach the inherent nature of the nerve substance. The result explains why this substance has the peculiarity both of resembling primitive forms, even in its later developments; and yet of serving what is usually termed the highest faculty of mankind, the activity of the spirit.

I will interpolate here a suggestion rather outside the subject we are at present considering. In my opinion, even a superficial observation of the human head with its various enclosed nerve centres, reminds one rather of lower forms than highly developed species of animal life, in that the nerve centres are enclosed in a firm armour of bone. The human head actually reminds us of prehistoric animals. It is only somewhat transformed. And if we describe the lower animal forms, we generally do so by referring to their external skeleton, whereas the higher animals and man have their bony structure inside. Nevertheless our head, our most highly evolved and specialised part, has an external skeleton. This resemblance is at least a sort of leit-motif for our preceding considerations.

Now let us suppose that we have occasion, because of some condition that we term disease, (I shall deal with this in more detail later) to bring back into our organism what has thus been removed. If we replace or restore these formative forces of external nature—of which we have deprived our organism because we use them for the soul and spirit—by means of a plant product or some other substance used as a remedy—we thereby reunite with the organism something that was lacking. We help the organism by adding and returning what we first took away in order to become human. Here you see the dawn of what can be termed the process of healing: the employment of those external forces of nature, not normally present in man, to strengthen some faculty or function. Take as an example—purely by way of illustration—a lung. Here too we shall find that we have drawn away formative principles to augment our soul and spiritual powers. If we discover among the products of the vegetable kingdom, the exact forces thus drawn from the lung and re-introduce them in a case of disturbance of the lung system, we help to restore that organ's activity. So the question arises; which forces of external nature are similar to the forces that underlie the human organs and have been extracted in the service of soul and spirit? Here you will find the path, leading from the method of trial and error in therapy, to a sort of “rationale” of therapy.

In addition to the errors fostered in respect of the nervous system—which refers to the inner human being—there is another very considerable error, regarding extra-human nature. This I will just touch on today and explain more fully later.

During the age of materialism, people accustomed themselves to think of a sort of evolution of natural objects, from the so-called simplest to the most complex. The lower organisms were first studied in their structural evolution, then the more complex; and then attention was directed to structures outside the organic realm, that is in the mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom was envisaged merely as being simpler than the vegetable. This has led to all those strange questions and speculations, concerning the origin of life from the mineral kingdom, a changing over of substance occurring at some unknown point in time, from a merely inorganic to an organic activity. This was the Generation Aequivoca or spontaneous generation, which provoked so many controversies.

However an unbiased examination certainly does not confirm this view. On the contrary, we must put the following proposition to ourselves. In a way, just as we can conceive of a sort of evolution from plant life on through animal life to man, so it is not possible to conceive of another evolution, from organisms, in this case, plants, to the minerals, inasmuch as the latter are deprived of life. As I have said, this is only a hint which will be made clearer in later lectures. But we shall only avoid going astray here, if we do not think of evolution as ascending from the mineral through the vegetable and animal forms to mankind, but if we postulate a starting point in the center, as it were, with our evolutionary sequence ascending from plant through animal life to man, and another, descending to the mineral kingdom.

Thus the central point of departure would lie not in the mineral kingdom, but somewhere in the middle kingdoms of nature. There would be two trends of evolution, an upward and a downward. In this way we should come to perceive, in passing downwards from plant to mineral, and especially—as we shall see—to that particularly important mineral group, the metals, that in this descending evolutionary sequence, forces are manifest which have peculiar relationships to their opposites in the ascending trend of evolution. In short: what are those special forces inherent in mineral substances, which we can only study if we consider here the formative forces which we have studied in lower organic forms, and apply the same methods?

In mineral substances such formative forces manifest themselves in crystallisation. Crystallisation reveals quite definitely a factor in operation on the descending line of evolution that is in some manner interrelated—but not identical—with that which manifests as formative forces on the ascending line. Then if we bring to the living organism that force which inheres in mineral substances, a new question arises. We have already been able to answer a previous and similar inquiry: if we restore the formative forces that we have absorbed from our organism by our soul and spiritual activities by means of vegetable and animal substances, we help the organism thus treated. But what would be the effect of applying these other, different, forces coming from the descending evolutionary line, that is from the mineral world, to the human organism? This is the question which I will put to you today, and which will be answered in detail, in the course of our considerations.

But with all this, we have not yet been able to contribute anything of real help to the question at the forefront of our programme for today, viz: Can we gather by careful listening a healing process straight from nature itself?

Here it depends on whether we approach nature with real insight—and we have attempted to get at least an outline of such understanding—whether certain processes will reveal their inherent secret. There are two processes in the human organism—as also among animals, which are of less interest to us at the moment—which appear in a certain sense directly contrary to one another, when looked at in the light of the concepts with which we are now equipped. Moreover these two processes are to a great extent polar to one another; but not wholly so, and I lay special stress on this not wholly, so please bear it in mind to avoid misconstruction of my present line of argument. They are the formation of blood, and the formation of milk, as they take place in the human body.

Even externally and superficially these processes differ greatly. The formation of blood, is, so to speak, very deep seated and hidden in the recesses of the human organism. The formation of milk finally tends towards the surface. But the most fundamental difference is that the formation of blood is a process bearing very strong potentialities of itself, producing formative forces. The blood has the formative power in the whole domestic economy of the human organism, to use a commonplace expression. It has retained in some measure the formative forces we have observed in lower organisms. And modern science could base itself on something of immense significance, in the observation and study of the blood; but it has not yet done so in a rational manner. Modern science could base itself on the fact that the main constituents of blood are the red corpuscles, and that these again are not capable of reproducing themselves. They share this limitation of potentiality with the nerve-cells. But, in emphasising this attribute held in common, all depends on the cause; is the cause the same in both cases? It is not, for we have not extracted the formative forces from our blood to anything like the same extent as from our nerve substance. Our nerve substance is the basis of our mental life, and is greatly lacking in internal formative force. During the whole span of life from birth, the nerve substance of man is worked upon by or is dependent on external impressions. The internal formative force is superseded by the faculty of simple adaptation to external influences. Conditions are different in the blood, which has kept to a great extent its internal formative force. This internal formative force, as the facts show, is also present in a certain sense in milk; for if this were not so, we could not give milk to young babies, as the most wholesome form of nourishment. It contains a similar formative potentiality as the blood; in this respect both vital fluids have something in common.

But there is also a considerable difference. Milk has formative potentiality; but lacks a constituent that is most essential to blood, or has it only in the smallest quantity. This is iron, fundamentally the only metal in the human organism that forms such compounds within the organism as display the true phenomenon of crystallisation.

Thus, even if milk also contains other metals in minute amounts, there is this difference: that blood essentially requires iron, which is a typical metal. Milk, although also potentially formative, does not require iron as a constituent. Why does the blood need iron?

This is one of the crucial questions of the whole science of medicine. The blood actually needs iron (we shall sift and collect the material evidence for the facts I have sketched today). Blood is that substance of the human organism, which is diseased through its own nature, and must be continuously healed by iron. This is not the case with milk. Were it so, milk could not be a formative medium for mankind, as it actually is; a formative medium administered from outside.

When we study the human blood, we study something that is constantly sick, from the very nature of our constitution and organism. Blood by its very nature is sick and needs to be continuously cured by the addition of iron. This means that a continuous healing process is carried on within us, in the essential process of our blood. If the medical man is “a candidate for Nature's examination,” he must study first of all, not an abnormal but a normal process of nature. And the process essential to the blood is certainly “normal,” and at the same time a process in which nature itself must continually heal, and must heal by means of the administration of the requisite mineral, iron. To depict what happens to our blood by means of a graph, we must show the inherent constitution of blood itself, without any admixture of iron, as a curve or line sloping downwards, and finally arriving at the point of complete dissolution of the blood. (See Diagram 8, red). whereas the effect of iron in the blood is to raise the line continuously upwards as it heals. (yellow line).

There indeed we have a process which is both normal and a standard pattern to be followed if we want to think of the processes of healing. Here we can really pass Nature's examination, for we see how nature works, bringing the metal and its forces which are external to mankind, into the human frame. And at the same time, we learn how the blood, which needs must remain inside the human organism, must be healed and how what flows out of the human organism, namely milk does not need to be healed, but which if it has formative forces, can wholesomely transmit them to another organism. Here we have a certain polarity—and mark well, a certain, not a complete polarity—between blood and milk, which must have attention and observation, for we can learn very much from it.

Held before physicians

The wish has been expressed for me to expound somewhat further upon curative eurythmy. Basically, the empiric material related to curative eurythmy was developed and presented in the last course for physicians in Dornach, and it is hardly necessary to go beyond what was given at that time. Used in the proper manner, it will be of far-reaching importance. Today I would like to speak to you about the whole purpose and meaning of curative eurythmy.

Curative eurythmy took shape out of something purely artistic, out of what was first developed as an artistic impulse; and in certain connections a basis for the correct understanding of curative eurythmy must be taken from artistic eurythmy. Now perhaps I will be most clearly understood if at first I attempt to indicate the difference between artistic and curative eurythmy. Eurythmy in general is based on the possibility of transforming in a certain direction what takes place in the human organism in speech. For this reason eurythmy is, artistically, really a sort of visible speech. We must recognize that two components work together in human speech. One component originates through a particular use of the formative apparatus—of which I may speak on the basis of the preceding lectures—from a layer of the nervous system which lies further inward. What is related to the mental image plays in here. Esentially the apparatus of mental representation in the speech apparatus extends itself, to be sure in a somewhat complicated way, even into the construction of the nervous system, and it is exactly this which then produces in the further radiation one of the components at work in speech. The other component comes up out of the human being's metabolism. In a way we have a meeting of two dynamic systems, one coming out of the human metabolism and another arising from the nerve-sensory system. The two encounter each other in such a way that the metabolic system is transformed first into the circulatory processes; and that which has to do with mental representation, coming from the nerve-sensory system is metamorphosed into the respiratory system. In the respiratory and circulatory systems these two dynamic systems converge, and, since the whole is carried over into the air by means of the speech-system, it is possible for the human astral organism to stream into what is created there as movement of air. If we consider the outermost periphery of the human organism, we see that speech comes into being through an embodiment on the one hand of what has to do with mental picturing and on the other, of the metabolic nature which, when expressed in terms of the soul, is actually the will-nature. Thus we have what finds its expression in the soul as will, and bodily its expression in the metabolic system, that is, to the extent in which the nervous system has a part in the will (which it in fact has, insofar as metabolism takes place—not as nervesensory activity—in the nervous system). Thus, what is of a volitional nature and finds its bodily expression in the metabolic system, and that which is of the nature of mental representation which finds its expression in what I would like to call a section or stratum of the nerve-sensory system, conjoin to form what results. They then find physical expression in what manifests as ordinary speech or singing. In the case of song it is something different but nonetheless similar. In eurythmy one blocks out what is of the nature of mental representation to the greatest possible degree and brings volition into force. In this way ordinary speech is metamorphosed into movements of the entire human organism: one strengthens one component, the will or the metabolism, one weakens the mental representation or the nerve-sensory, and one has as a result eurythmy. In this way one is really in the position to create correlatives in human movement for the individual sounds, whether they be vowels or consonants. Just as a certain formation and movement of air can correspond to an A or an L, so can an outwardly visible form in movement correspond to an A or an L. Here we have a movement, or movement structure, as I would like to call it, derived from the human organism through sensible-super-sensible vision; which proceeds from the human organism with the same lawfulness as speech in sounds and which, although more volitionally-oriented, is only a metamorphosis of this speech. One can compose the entire alphabet in this speech; one can bring everything linguistic to expression through this eurythmy. When artistic eurythmy is performed, the attention of the human being and all the processes in the human physical, etheric and astral organisms which mediate this alertfulness, are directed to the corresponding sound, to the formation of the word or the artistic formation of the sentence, to the metric form, the poetic form and so on. When active in artistic eurythmy, one is completely absorbed in the possibilities of artistic formation and portrayal of the elements of speech. The human being surrenders to the outer world when he is artistically active in eurythmy, since in eurythmy one naturally follows the structure (“Gestaltung”) that is also common to speech. And since one does not stop at an A or an L in the middle of a word, but carries on further, in artistic eurythmy we have to do with something that may quite possibly take place in the normally functioning human organism. Ordinary artistic eurythmy has no other physiological consequences for the human organism other than that this artistic eurythmy calls forth in an energetic manner an inner harmony in the human functions, insofar as these functions form a totality in the human organism.

Thus one can say that when one refrains in the right manner from exaggeration in eurythmic artistic activity, it is conducive to health. But just as everything conducive to health can also make one sick if exaggerated, the artistic practice of eurythmy can be overdone. Professor Benedikt, the famous criminal psychologist, emphasized repeatedly—because he could not endure the anti-alcohol movement—that more people die from water than from alcohol. Even the statistics must concede this: over-indulgence in water leads to numerous sorts of illness. Eurythmy, in general, as long as it remains within the appropriate limits, can only be conducive to health; a certain artistic feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction will arise in any case.

That which lives in the devotion to the sound-, word- and sentence-formation in artistic eurythmy is reflected inwards in curative eurythmy. It is reflected inwards simply through the fact that in curative eurythmy the sound A, for example, must be repeated a number of times in succession. By this means, something entirely different is achieved than when I pass over from the sound A to an I or something else in an artistic presentation. Now it will be a question of gaining insight into the actual therapeutic process which can take place through eurythmy. I cannot avoid expressing concern about something which lies close at hand here: amateurs and dilettants appropriate such things very easily. From the beginning I have emphasized that curative eurythmy should be practised by the doctor himself or herself, or at the very least should only be practised in the most intimate collaboration with a doctor. The attitude which spiritual science takes in relation to such offshoots will be taken as indicative of spiritual science's position in regard to medicine as a whole.

Spiritual science does not operate in the field of medicine in such a manner as I once encountered twenty years ago. People who called themselves nature-therapy doctors were present at an anthroposophical convention and presented me with a treatise in which it was repeatedly stated in a variety of ways: all healing is based upon bringing into harmony what is inharmonious in the organism. This sentence was repeated for six pages in the most manifold variations: one should harmonize the disharmonious. There is nothing at all that one can object to in this sentence, it is only that one must be able to do it in a specific manner in a particular case. That is where it becomes unpleasant for people who hold an opinion such as was expressed in their final sentence: everything which has been said above proves that one can leave the unbelievably complicated medicine behind and restrict oneself to harmonizing the disharmonious. That would be, in their own words, “intoxicatingly simple.” Something so intoxicatingly simple I can't offer you. Medicine cannot be driven into intoxicating simplicity by spiritual science, but rather to greater complexity, as you will have gathered by now from various instances. Through spiritual science you will not have less to learn, but more, but there is a snag attached to learning less anyway, because through learning more everything will become clearer and more ordered and the learning thereby more interesting. Whoever had the idea that healing would be made easier through spiritual science will already have been convinced by the expositions that I have made here that this is not the case.

And so it is with curative eurythmy. It is definitely the case that curative eurythmy should not be applied without a thorough diagnosis and that it should only be practised in agreement with professional medical science, for the reason that one has to do here with the application of an exceedingly intimate knowledge of the human organism.

Because of the fact that in normal speech the metabolic activity and the plastic activity of the nerve-sensory system collide with one another, the result of this collision, is unloaded in the movement of the air (This is something which takes place in relative isolation from the human organism so that as a result speech is released from the organism.) all of what is shaped through curative eurythmy is thrown back into the organism, and one has thus to do with the following. Imagine that you place an A-movement together with an L-movement. First of all you have the movements repeated, so that the whole affair is not discharged outside, but rather that the repetition pours into the inner processes of the human organism. By allowing the vowel and consonantal elements, let us say in the A-movement and the L-movement, to work together, you will always induce a functioning in the human organism that implies a mutual activity of the metabolic-man and the nerve-sensory-man. To be sure, the activity of the nerve-sensory system is in any case weakened in eurythmy, but the two components, the dampened nerve-sensory activity and the heightened metabolic activity brought about by the eurythmic movement, work together in this exceptional proportion nevertheless. One has simply, a driving of the metabolic-man against the nerve-sensory-man, when one does the L-movement repeatedly, and when the L-movement is associated with an A-form. Thus one can say: the entire functioning of the human organism is carried along with the instigation of the forms and movements necessary. When, for example, you let someone carry out a consonantal movement, it works, to begin with, in such a way that it in essence unloads its whole power, its inner dynamic, on the process of inhalation; the whole procedure of inhalation actually lies in your control. According to the consonants you induce, you have the entire process of in-breathing in your hands. You strengthen the process of inhalation through each consonantal activity.

You perhaps know, from what has already been told about curative eurythmy, that movements of artistic eurythmy are somewhat modified for curative eurythmy. One can say that when an A- or an L-movement is carried out, it is always associated with a strengthening or weakening of the thrust initiated by inhalation. You must take inhalation into consideration here in its entirety. In examining the in-breath, we must to begin with follow its path into the middle part of the human organism, and then, however, through the medial canal, vertebral (“Rückenmarkscanal”) canal into the brain. The activity of the brain is in essence the harmonising of the breathing activity, in its refinement within the brain, with the nerve-sensory activity. There is no activity of the brain which may be considered alone; every such activity results from the nerve-sensory activity and the breathing activity. All the activities of the brain must be studied in such a way that respiration is taken into consideration. By inducing certain consonants, various consonants, you can, by way of the breath, influence the plastic activity of man, the sculptural activity, in the most striking manner. In the case of a child who is getting his second teeth, for example, you have only to know from a certain artistic grasp of the human organism how the upper teeth will be built up out of plastic activity which works from above downwards. In the case of the upper teeth, the plastic activity that forms them is active from the front backwards. How will the lower teeth be formed? In the teeth of the lower jaw the plastic activity works from the back to the front. If I were to express schematically the activity going on in teething, it would be as follows: the upper teeth are built up from front to back; thus, the back surfaces are shaped and the front surfaces are deposited. The lower teeth are built up from back to front. This is the manner in which the forces work together.

If you notice that a child is having difficulties in teething, you can assist the process in the maxilla, for example, simply by having the child do the movement for A. You can support the same process in the lower jaw with the O-movement. You can in fact gain control over the fictile powers through specific instigation. In order to give this plastic activity nourishment, so to speak, you must direct your attention principally to supporting the thrust that accompanies the inhalation; you must add to the plastic activity accomplished in this way by the A- and O-movements what you observe resulting from the entire human constitution. Let us say we have a person with weak peristalsis, who is somewhat inclined to constipation. In the period of life in which teething takes place, the intestinal activity is related to the building up of the teeth, and one must focus one's attention there, where irregularities in teething have their origin. If you wish to come to the assistance of the thrust of breath which travels through the vertebral canal into the brain and expedites from there the formative forces, which one has in one's power through the movements for vowels, you will be able to do this, if you have precisely such a case before you by having the child carry out the movmeent for L. If you simply study curative eurythmy, the way in which you should apply it will become clear to you through the diagnosis. Without a diagnosis it should not be practised, because in certain circumstances one can do entirely the wrong thing. However, it is indeed a fact that one must awaken in oneself a feeling for the artistic in the dynamics of the human being as a whole. One must develop an intuitive glance for the artistic. Let us assume that the child is observed to have certain difficulties at the time it begins to teethe; it has certain disorders which shouldn't be present. One discovers that the intestinal movement is irregular and insufficient. With the L-movement one is properly prepared. After one has done the L-movement for a time, one comes to the assistance of what one has conducted to the formative centre with the movement for A or O. The vowel movements affect the exhalation and begin to work already in the brain. The stream of breath works in the brain. Everything associated with inhalation, in its most extensive, inclusive sense, expresses itself in the consonantal element. That can be reinforced and promoted through consonantal eurythmy. Everything having to do with exhalation can be rein-forced by doing the vowels in eurythmy. When you do the vowels in eurythmy, the plastic element works directly together with the radiating element. You must judge, by how much strength must be applied, how many times the sound must be repeated. Let us say, for example, we have to do with a kidney disturbance of one sort or another. You may say to yourself that the kidney disturbance is in one stage or another, let us say in the beginning stage. The moment that I have certain movements performed—S-movements, for example¹—I will have a beneficial effect on the kidney disturbance in its early stages. If the kidney distrubance has been present a considerable length of time, and the insufficient function has led already to deformation, I must then first prepare the ground with consonantal eurythmy and follow with the vowels; in order to work on formation through the vowels as opposed to the deformation which has already taken place. In short, one must approach the matter as untheoretically as possible; one must discover, solely out of knowledge of the human organism in its healthy and diseased states, what was given in the rules I set out in Dornach that have been passed on to you.

Now if, for example, it should be a case of suppressed heart-lung function which in turn affects the kidneys, one will make progress in the beginning stages with the movement for B or P. From this you will see that one has the entire functioning within one's grasp here, and that everything depends upon one's understanding that a sort of centrifugal dynamic is present in each separate human organ which is rounded-off plastically by another dynamic working from without inwards—a dynamic which is not exactly centripetal, but which could be designated as a similar-to-centripetal dynamic that works into every human organ. One will only be able to pursue the study of physiology properly when one is able to contemplate each separate human organ in its polarity. These polarities lie within, a centrifugal and a centripetal, in each human organ. For everything that is of a sculptural nature, the distribution and differentiation of the relative warmth and the organization of the air-conditions play a great role. For everything which is centrifugal, radiating, a great role is played by what in the human organism comes from the dynamic of the substances of the world themselves and what is developed in surmounting the vitality proper to external nature (“der äusseren Wesenheit”) in the human organism. These two dynamics must be regulated reciprocally, and one can hope that curative eurythmists come forth who will cultivate a fine feeling for what can be achieved in different instances. Precisely here will extraordinarily much depend upon the artistic disposition of the soul.

Now when you take into consideration that the whole system of curative eurythmy can be reinforced by actual therapeutic methods, you find you have two factors which work together. One can say to oneself, such and such affects the heart in particular in this or that way; one can reinforce that effect with a curative eurythmy exercise: then one thing will promote the other in a complementary manner. That is something which opens up truly great vistas, which can have an extraordinarily great future. Just think of the effect of massage, in some instances. I do not want to say anything against it or to criticise it; I acknowledge its importance. Yet this outward scratching about on the human being is inconsequential in comparison to the massage that you apply when you induce entire systems of organs which work together to move inwardly in a different manner, through the elements of curative eurythmy. That is the most inward kneading of the whole organism, linked with effects in the etheric, the astral, the ego organisms. Thus it is possible to say that what one recognizes as correct in massage is, in an unendingly powerful way, made inward through curative eurythmy. One will in fact first gain an insight into the curative effects of gymnastics as well when one examines the resemblance between gymnastic exercises and eurythmic exercises. What is therapeutic in gymnastics is only of secondary importance to what is of significance in curative eurythmy. As I said at that time in Domach, if one has the E-movement carried out in a rhythmic sequence in the manner that was then demonstrated, one does a great deal to help weak-looking children—children who only feebly carry through their bodily functions—to become healthier and to begin to become stronger, as one would wish to see them. It is, however, necessary that one takes the whole human being into consideration in such matters. Again and again it happens that the entire human being is taken too little into consideration. I know that that is a triviality, for you will say: “We know that, of course.” Indeed, but again and again in practice it is not taken into consideration. How often one hears: this person has an irregularly functioning heart, something must be done for it. Yes, but if one were to take the total human being into consideration one would have to say: thank God that he has such a heart; his organism couldn't tolerate a normal one. Similarly, for example, under certain circumstances one would have to say of a person who had broken his nose, that he had suffered a favourable stroke of fate: if he breathed in air through completely developed channels, he would have too much air for his organism to process. What has its foundations in the organism as a whole must everywhere be taken into consideration.

When the movements for “I” are carried out in a certain manner, they tend to harmonize the association of the right and the left sides of the human organism. With “I” one can be of help in all asymmetries that appear in the human organism.. Through the cautious use of “I”-movements one can have excellent results with curative eurythmy, even in the case of squinting. With squinting I would only advise that one does not proceed as one would with a person who walks asymmetrically, for example, or who can use the right and left arms too asymmetrically. For squinting I would apply the usual I-movements but would carry them out only with the index finger, and in this way I would have them repeated as often as possible during the day. When the person is still growing this can bring good results, especially if the “I” is carried out with the big toe as well. The best results will be achieved, however, when one can bring the patient to do it with the little toe as well. On the asymmetries affecting the sight these eurythmic exercises performed at the periphery will have a most beneficial effect. On the other hand, when it is a question of evening-out an indexterity in the manner in which a person walks, it could even bring good results to have him do the reverse: that is, to carry out the I-movement with the line of vision, as when sighting. Provided, of course, it does him no harm. In fact, one can really establish a sort of law: everything which is abnormal in the lower human being tends to be normalized by what is created as a compensation in the upper man, and vice versa.

When you find insecurities in standing, which may, of course, arise in the most varied manners, the forms of “U” will be of especial importance. However, you must see that the U-form is brought to completion so that the limbs concerned are really contiguous. This being in direct contact with one another, so that one limb feels the other, is of particular importance. Only then is the U-form complete. In artistic eurythmy it is only necessary to indicate that this is so; in curative eurythmy, however, it must be carried out: one limb is brought up against the other so that one stands as when “at attention”—with the legs pressed against one another. That is an extraordinarily curative exercise for people who are affected with a compulsive twitching in the head. When it is fitting to treat corpulent children by means of curative eurythmy, the O-forms serve the purpose well. All these forms, however, if they are intended to bring results as curative eurythmy, must be combined with a distinct perception of the muscle system involved. If you simply make the O-form as many eurythmists do, it will suffice as an outward indication. It will not have a curative effect, however, unless in the process of doing the exercise you feel the muscles throughout the arm. The slack swinging form has no effect; the sensation of the whole muscle system in its details, however, will bring the respective curative eurythmic result. It is particularly important to take heed that the curative eurythmic exercise is strengthened by ex-tending it into the consciousness. When you do the O-movement as I just did it, it is associated with a strong projection into the consciousness. Tell the obese person whom you treat with the O-form: “think of your obesity, of your own girth, when doing the ‘O’!” In this way the consciousness centres on exactly that which is to be remedied. You thereby rein-force in its innermost nature what is intended, namely, that the element of consciousness is not in the least to be underestimated in healing.

In this connection I have reason to believe that when these things become known, a battle with the orthopedists will take place. Despite the fact that they are experiencing a great deal of success in their field at the present time, they are quite intent on treating the human being as a sort of mechanism. In the case of appliances used therapeutically in such a way that the person in question should continually feel them, that they enter his awareness, this consciousness is an excellent curative factor. Let us say, for example, that I find it would be advantageous for someone to straighten his shoulders; and I give him bandages which bring to his awareness that the shoulders should be held hack—in other words, so that the treatment isn't carried out unconsciously. It is exactly the same in curative eurythmy: these matters are brought to consciousness, in order that, as I have already said, this concentration vitally reinforce the curative eurythmic element itself.

Let us go on to something of particular importance which I want to tell you. Everything that is an E-form has a regulatory effect where the astral organism affects the etheric organism either too strongly or too weakly. Thus in all those cases where one determines that either an exaggerated or an insufficient activity of the astral organism is present, one will under circumstances be able to achieve a great deal with the E-forms, with the repetition of the E-forms. E-forms could have a curative effect upon both complexes of symptoms which I described in the previous hour. What I have just said is particularly true when the astral organism is under the influence of the etheric, when it is too weak, when it permits itself to be influenced by the etheric, which itself is too strong as the result of an irregularity in the astral organism of the head. The opposite condition in which the etheric is too strongly affected by the astral may also arise. That would be the case when the astral comes very forcefully to expression in the intestine: when one gets diarrhoea on every occasion when one is a bit afraid. The U-forms will have an especially advantageous effect here.

Yesterday a question arose which I would like to discuss briefly here, in closing: can one allow persons who are pregnant or who have gynaecological complaints to do certain eurythmic movements? Just examine what was given as a rule in Dornach. You should be able to adhere to it even though in the case of pregnant women and gynaecological patients you must make certain that the abdomen is left in peace. It must be left undisturbed. It must not be irritated by curative eurythmic exercises. Although the abdomen itself is left in peace, exercises may nevertheless definitely be done with the arms while sitting, or while lying down, with the head; and while that which must have quiet is in complete repose. You will still find enough in the indications given to be able to take measures through curative eurythmy. Naturally when the person cannot move at all, eurythmy would he quite the most beneficial for him, as in the case of paralytic symptoms; but under the circumstances the person cannot carry them out. They would definitely be the most wholesome. Such paralytic symptoms are of course in essence an abnormal functioning of the astral body, which does not engage itself in the etheric and physical organisation. Here one will be able to achieve a great deal with E-movements. An E-movement that is very beneficial for disturbances of the abdomen is the carefully performed, not exaggerated, artificial crossing of the eyes. It is in fact true that the somewhat decadent yogis who do certain exercises in which they focus their eyes on the tip of the nose, really intend to evoke the most harmonic activity of the abdomen possible, since they know the significance of abdominal activity for what such people call spiritual activity. Thus one can say: matters are such that one can simply replace, with a lighter eurythmy of the arms, the fingers, or even the eyes when it is necessary, certain things that a person with a healthy abdomen would do with jumps. A pregnant woman should never be induced to do curative eurythmy exercises with jumps. That, of course, won't do.

As you see, it was not intended to produce a panacea that could be learnt in half a day. Curative eurythmy too must be acquired through earnest labour, and it is necessary in fact that it is acquired through practice. For practically every time you put the curative eurythmy exercises into practice, with the help of your curative exercises, you will be able to make better use of them. It is indeed so: through practice one will make exceptionally good progress, most particularly in curative eurythmy.

Now it was my intention to present you with this more theoretical discussion of curative eurythmy, because everything else having to do with it, to the extent curative eurythmy exists today, was given earlier in Dornach and will be handed on by our physician friends and thus be available to you; and because I wanted to give you the possibility of understanding the whole physiological and therapeutic meaning of eurythmy. Of course, on the other hand, one must not overestimate something like curative eurythmy. In many cases it will be an extraordinarily important resource, but one should not overestimate it. One must make clear to oneself that really nothing can be achieved with intoxicating simplicity; one can no more heal a broken leg or broken arm through curative exercises alone, than one can heal a carcinoma through the intoxicating simplicity of harmonizing the disharmonious. One must be entirely clear that it is not an increase in dilettantism and medical amateurism which is to be found on the path of spiritual science, but rather a definite enrichment of professional medical ability. Excuse me for emphasizing it so often; in order to prevent misunderstandings, however, I particularly want to stress again that the methods are not brought forward in amateurish opposition to official medicine, as is often the case in fanatical movements. They take into account the state of medical science at present, and desire only to lead it along the path along which it must be led, for the simple reason that it is not true that the human being is only that which the physiology and anatomy of today maintain he is. He is that, to be sure, but he is something more as well: he must be recognized from the aspect of his soul and spirit. Then those peculiar mental pictures that constantly show up nowadays, in which the brain for example is seen as a sort of central telegraphic apparatus to which the so-called sensory nerves run, and from which the motor nerves lead, will disappear. The whole matter has no relation to reality, as will have become clear to you through today's lecture. In the nerve-sensory system one has rather to do with a sort of modelling dynamic, from which something is wrung which then accommodates itself to the activity of the soul. There is a great deal to be done in order to give back to a healthy physiology what has been taken from it through the correlations incorrectly established between the physical organism and the functions of the soul. Something physical is indeed present for every function of the soul during the course of man's life on earth, but, on the other hand, nothing is used for the soul which has not a much greater importance for the bodily organization in its reciprocal action with the other organs. Nothing which is used for the soul is used merely as an organ of the soul. Our entire soul and spiritual make-up is wrested from the bodily nature, is taken out of the bodily. We may not permit ourselves to indicate certain organs as belonging to the soul. We could only say that the soul-functions are such that they are disengaged from the organic functions and are particularly adapted to the activity of the soul. Only when we become earnest about what is at work in the human organism, when we no longer proceed in so outward a fashion, that we picture the whole nervous system as an insertion serving the life of the soul can we hope to perceive the human organization as it is. Only when the human organism is so perceived can it provide the basis for a physiology and therapy which work in the Iight, not grope in the dark. I make this last remark to you, so that you yourselves do not leave here under a misunderstanding, and to enable you to counter misunderstandings which arise again and again.

Our carcinoma medication, for example, has been criticized with the “intoxicating simplicity” that arises from having no idea whatever about the knowledge through which one has arrived at the medication. People have constructed instead some simple analogy or another and believe that in disposing of the analogy, one can have done with the matter itself. A proviso for the development and growth of the spiritual-scientific side of medicine is that one confront the misunderstandings at least to a degree. People will soon notice that when they cannot spread misunderstandings, they will have very little at all to say, for the principal concern of the opponents is the broadcasting of misconceptions about the whole of Anthroposophy. Count how many adversaries have something other than misconceptions to relate. I must say that I often read antagonistic articles or essays and could connect them with something else entirely, were my name not present. It has no relation to what is nurtured here; it deals with something entirely different. Sometimes I am very much surprised and would like to go and search out where that which is being refuted has been expounded; in any case not here. In medicine the same thing is done as in theology; there one encounters it as well. One can, for example, say to a theologian at the pinnacle of science: we have the same to say about the Christ as you, only somewhat more. He is, however, not content when one says what he himself says, and then something in addition. He maintains one should not add anything to it. He does not criticize what is contrary to his assertions, he criticizes what he says nothing at all about. He criticizes what is said, simply because one speaks about something he knows nothing about. He considers it a mistake to know something about what he knows nothing about. Medicine must not fall into this error. We must observe accurately, and, rather than contradicting, we must add a great deal, out of an extremely well-founded knowledge of the healthy and diseased human being.

References to books related to passages in the text

Page 2 “... metamorphic variation ... Goetheanistic contemplation ...” see: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Kurschner's “Deutsche National-Literature”, Vol. 1, Troxler-Verlag Bern 1949

Page 65 The lecture which appears here as number seven (April 18, 1921) was given in connection with the so-called second course for physicians and is printed in the book Geisteswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte zur Therapie, Dornach 1963, as well. Rudolf Steiner refers to this lecture at the end of the foregoing with the words: “After a short pause we will proceed with greater reference to eurythmy.”

Page 79 The eighth lecture was given in connection with the “Medical Week” held in Stuttgart from the 26th to the 28th of October 1922 (see Physiologisch-Therapeutisches auf Grundlage der Geisteswissenschaft, Dornach 1965.) This lecture is printed only here.

Page 92 “E-forms could have a curative effect upon both complexes of symptoms which I described in the previous hour.” See the fourth lecture in the series: Anthroposophische Grundlagen für die Arzneikunst, in Physiologisch-Therapeutisches auf Grundlage der Geisteswissenschaft. Dornach 1965, page 140

• 1. In another transcript A appears here rather than S.—German editor.

If we recall what I said yesterday about the opposite character of Earth and Sun, we shall perceive that in answering such questions it is all-important to follow up the empirical facts in the right way. We cannot form true ideas of what we see if we do not recognize from the outset that radical differences may be called for in the whole way we interpret what is seen in one case and in another. The phenomena that present themselves to us when looking at the so-called body of the Sun will only find their true interpretation if we start from such premises as we were indicating, for example, when we put this question:—

On Earth there are many phenomena the characteristic of which is that they work outward from the given center to the wide circumference,—out into cosmic space We interpret them accordingly. How must we then interpret similar phenomena—or rather, phenomena that seem superficially similar—when we are looking, with or with-out the help of optical instruments, towards the Sun? Truth is, the empirically observed phenomena will only reveal themselves in their true light if we then take our start from some such idea as this: whilst on the surface of the Earth an eruption or the like will naturally be interpreted as tending up and outward (Fig. 1a), a process on the Sun—a Sun-spot for example—must be interpreted rather as tending from without inward (Fig. 1b). Continuing this line of thought: Just as we have to imagine that if we went through and beneath the surface of the Earth we should get into dense matter, so shall we have to imagine that if we moved from outside the Sun towards the Sun's interior we should come into an ever more attenuated state of matter. And we may truly say: Look at the Earth and the whole way it is placed into the Universe. It manifests as so much ponderable matter in the Universe. Not so the Sun. Here we shall only come near the truth if we imagine that as we go from the circumference towards the interior we get ever mere remote from ponderable matter and ever more and more into the imponderable. We have precisely the opposite behavior as we draw near the middle point. The Sun must be conceived as a hollowing-out, shall we say, of cosmic matter, a hollow space, a hollow sphere,—a sphere enveloped by matter,—in contrast to the Earth where we have denser matter enveloped by more attenuated. As to the Earth, we think of air around it. Air is outside and denser matter inside. For the Sun it is the opposite; as we go inward we go from relatively denser matter into more attenuated and at long last into the very negation of matter whoever takes the phenomena with open mind and puts them all together will be obliged to recognize that this is so. The Sun is not only a more attenuated heavenly body, of a materiality less dense than earthly matter, but if we call the Earth's materiality positive, then in the Sun—in the Sun's interior—we shall have negative matter in a certain sense. We only do justice to the phenomena if we conceive that there is negative matter in the inner space of the Sun.

Now, my dear friends, as compared with positive matter negative matter is suctional. Positive matter exerts pressure, negative suction. And if you now conceive the Sun as a collection of suctional force, you need no further explanation of Gravitation. This is the explanation, Now think of it as I explained it yesterday. The movement of Earth and Sun is such that the Earth follows the Sun in the same path, in the same direction. Here then you have the cosmic relation between Sun and Earth. The Sun as a gathering of suctional forces goes on in front, and by this suctional force the Earth is drawn on after, moving through cosmic space in the same course and in the same direction in which the Sun thrusts forward.

You thus perceive and understand what you would otherwise fall short of in your thinking. In no other way will you reach an adequate idea, to comprise all the phenomena. You have to start from such ideas as these. You must imagine that in the realm of matter there is a positive and a negative intensity. Matter itself,—that is, earthly matter—is positive; it is of positive intensity. Solar matter on the other hand is negative—of negative intensity—and is therefore not only empty in relation to matter-filled space, but even “less than empty”. It is a hollowing-out of space itself.

This may be difficult to conceive. Yet if you are accustomed to having mathematical ideas, why should you not think of a certain degree of the fullness of space as a corresponding magnitude, say +a? Empty space would then be Zero, and a space less than empty would be conceivable as -a. This granted, you will be able to conceive a truly mathematical relation—or at least, a relation analogous to mathematical—between the different intensities of matter, as in this instance between terrestrial and solar matter.

As it were in parenthesis I may add the following: No matter how you think of the relation of positive and negative real numbers to imaginary numbers (I will not go into this question now), some interpretation of the so-called imaginary numbers must be discoverable, and since they too emerge in the solution of equations and the like. If in the way we have been saying you recognize a positive and a negative of intensity, you may well conceive that there is also an imaginary [intensity]. You must then have which would enable you to add to positive matter and negative the kind of matter for example (or if you will, the kind of spirituality) which Anthroposophy describes as the Astral. Thus you would find a mathematical way of approach to the Astral too. However, as I said before, this only in parenthesis.

Once again take the connection of what I have been saying with man himself. You will admit: without any doubt the human physical body is related to ponderable earthly matter, and since it is as waking man—upright in his physical body—that man is related to earthly matter, we may compare man's relation to earthly matter with the upright direction of the plant, following what was said in preceding lectures. However, yesterday we saw that the plant must be imagined with the very opposite direction in the human being, while the outer plant must naturally be conceived as growing upwards from below, the plant we have to think of in the human being moves in a manner speaking, from above downward (Fig. 2). What is it then that grows from above downwards? Certainly nothing visible; it must be something invisible. Now we related this to the Sun. It there fore in relating the forces of plant-growth to the path of the Sun and Earth we think of them as tending from the Earth towards the Sun, we must needs think of what grows in the reverse direction in the human being as growing, in effect, in his etheric body. This force of suction therefore, proceeding from the Sun, works also in the human being. permeating his etheric body from above downward. Upon the human being—the human body in this instance—two opposite entities are at work; Sun-entity, Earth-entity.

We should be able to prove in detail that these things are there, and we can indeed, once we perceive the true interpretation. This that is working in the human being from above downward may resolve itself in very many ways. For if we have a force, say, in the direction a - b, we can trace it not only in this direction but also in an imaginary sense. Namely if this (Fig. 3) is its intensity, we need only imagine it resolved into two components. Thus we can every where form components of forces in the direction of the path of Earth and Sun. If I press here with my finger, there will arise over this surface the force or pressure whereby the ponderable matter presses against me. The counter-pressure will then correspond to the force of the Sun that is working through me—through my etheric body, that is to say. Imagine a surface here pressing against the human being,—or against which he is pressing. Here you already have the opposition—the working of the ponderable and of the imponderable able force. It is the interplay of the ponderable pressure from without inward and of the imponderable from within outward (Fig. 4) which gives you the conscious sensation of pressure. If in our mind we see all these things clearly and comprehensively, we may truly say that the polarity of Sun end Earth into the midst of which the human being is placed, is felt by us in every sense-perception. In like manner, everything about the human being can be traced in such a way as to perceive the cosmic realities that are involved. Cosmic forces work into the human being upon every hand.

It is of untold importance for us to overcome the method that excludes the human being and that is always haloing fast to isolated things, see it without any connection with their surroundings. You will remember, I used the same comparison before. If we place man into the world in such a way as to study head, limbs, etc., one by one and in a merely outward sense, it is as though we were to study a magnet-needle, tending as it does ever in the same direction, and seek the cause of this behaviour not in the magnetic pole of the Earth but inside the needle. To understand any fact or object, we must go to the totality from which alone it can be understood. What matters is in every case to look for the totality in question. Precisely this, alas, is foreign to the habitual ways or thought in our time. Before attempting to decide a problem, look first for the totality on which it all depends. You take a crystal of salt into your hand. You may regard it as a totality, just as it is. Even this is only relatively true, but at least relatively you can so regard it. It is, in a sense, a self-contained entity. Not so if you have picked and place a rose before you. Placed there before you in this way, the rose is not a self-contained entity at all. It could not be there in the same way as salt-crystal can. The crystal, it is true, must also have been formed in a surrounding medium; nevertheless it is a totality, the rose can only be looked upon as a totality when seen in connection with the shrub on which it grew. Only there has it the kind or totality which the crystal-cube of salt has on its own. Likewise if we look at man with respect to his full being, we cannot stop short at the limits of his skin, we must regard him in connection with the great universe that is visible to us; only in this connection is he to be understood. Such then must be our method, and as we persevere in it we become able to see a deeper meaning in the phenomenon that present themselves to us,—that can indeed be mastered by our cognition.

During these lectures we haves recalled the fact that in comparing the periods of revolution of the planets incommensurable magnitudes emerge. For if they were commensurable, the planetary paths would presently come into such relation to one another that the whole system would rigidify. Our planetary system does indeed also contain this tendency to become rigid and dead.

We can express what confronts us in the planetary system by means of certain curves—and arithmetical formulae. Yet as we saw, these curves and formulae are never in full agreement with reality. We must therefore admit that if we try to contain the phenomena of the Heavens in succinct formulae or geometrical figures the phenomena elude us. Time and again they elude us. This then is true:—look outward on the one hand and behold the given picture of the celestial phenomena. Look on the other hand at what we are able to make of it by dint of calculation. We never do contrive a formula that coincides entirely with the phenomena. We may devise such a drawing as I was sketching yesterday—the system of lemniscates. We can do so indeed. Even this system however,—we only understand it rightly if we admit the following. Suppose I managed to draw this lemniscatory system in a precise and finished form; it would at most be true of present time. Even a time comparatively near our own—the time I indicated when speaking of the coming ice-age—would require me to modify the system not a little. The constants of the curves must themselves be taken as variable. The very constants would therefore be curves of some complexity by virtue of their variations. Thus I can never draw staple straightforward curves, but only complicated ones. Even when drawing these lemniscate-curves (Fig. 5) I should have to say: Good and well,—I draw a path for some heavenly body. (As we saw yesterday, it will always be a lemniscatory path.) I draw the path. Yet when a certain time has elapsed I must disqualify it; it is no longer valid. I must make the Lemniscate a little broader. And then again after a time I must draw such a Lemniscate (Fig. 5 once more), and so on.

In effect, my dear friends, if I were to trace the paths of the heavenly bodies, I should really have to go out into the Universe and trace them ever anew, varying them all the time. There is no constant path which I may draw. Whatever path I may work out, I must remember in so doing that I ought really to be changing it all the time, since every lapse of time involves a change of path, however slight. To apprehend the heavenly bodies and their paths of movement in any adequate way, I cannot draw ready-made lines at all. Ready-made lines, if I do draw them, will only be lines of approximation, and I shall have to bring in corrections. Whatever finished lines I may devise, the phenomena in the Heavens will presently elude them, No matter what mathematical curve I may devise, once it is fixed and finished the reality will certainly escape me; my finished curve will not contain it, yet in the very act of saying this, I am giving voice to an important reality. Namely, a planetary system has this essential feature: It tends in both directions,—on one hand towards rigidity and on the other hand to the forming of ever-mobile Lemniscates. In the solar Saturn or planetary system there is this contrast between the tendency to become rigid and the tendency to be ever variable, ever escaping from its established form.

If we now follow up this very contrast, not in the way of speculation but in the actual seeing and contemplating of the phenomena, we shall be led to recognize that what we call a comet, a cometary body, is not a body at all in the same sense that a planet is. (What I am giving her, I give once more as guiding lines which you can verify for yourselves. You need only observe the empirical data. Observe them with the greatest possible precision, but do not cling to the theories with which so many scientists would fetter them—theories that lie like shackles upon the facts, You will convince yourselves: what I am about to say is verifiable. It will be verified increasingly, the more the given facts are put together.)

Truth is that in studying the cometary phenomena we get into difficulties if we conceive the cometary body too in the same way as we are wont to think of a planetary body. The planetary body (I refer again to the same question of principle and method as in an earlier lecture),—the planetary body you may represent as though it were a self-contained body moving on in space. You will not go much against the facts in so conceiving it. Not so a cometary body. Again and again you will find yourself in contradiction to the phenomena if you conceive it after the same pattern as the planetary body. You will never understand the cometary body, in the way it moves—or seems to move—through cosmic space, if you regard it as you are accustomed to regard the planetary body.

See what becomes of it on the other hand it you regard it as I shall now describe. Take all the empirical facts that are available and try to thread them on this line of thought. Imagine that in this direction (Fig. 6)—towards the Sun, as we may say—the comet comes into being at every moment. It is for ever coming into existence in this direction. It pushes towards its cometary nucleus, or what appears as such. Behind, it melts away again. In this way it thrusts forward—for ever coming into being on the one hand, passing away again upon the other. It is not a body in the same sense as a planet is,—not at all. It is perpetually coming into being and passing away again—renewed in front, accruing all the time in this direction; losing the old at its tail. It pushes forward like a mere effulgence, a mere phenomenon of light; but please, I do not say that that is all it is.

And now remember what we were saying a few days ago. There is not merely the Moon up there and the Earth here (Fig. 7), but every planet has a certain sphere, and what we see is only a point at the periphery of the said sphere. The true Moon is the sphere, bounded by the lunar orbit. We, with the Earth, are in the Lunar Sphere. So also, in a certain sense, are we in the Solar Sphere and in the spheres of all the planets. The planets are not merely what is out there, moving in lemniscates,—what is at yonder point or yonder at any given moment. The visible point is only a specialized part of the whole; it is, as I was saying, like the ares of germination in the germinal vesicle of the human embryo.

If you remember this, then you will say to yourselves: Here now I have the Earth and the Sun. In fact, two spheres are interpenetrating, thrusting into each other,—spheres which are really due to materialities of opposite tendency and kind. The one comes from the centre of the Sun, towards which negative matter is tending; the other from the centre of the Earth, from which positive matter is raying out. Positive and negative materialities are interpenetrating here. Naturally, the interpenetration will not everywhere be homogeneous. Not even clouds that move through one another would interpenetrate homogeneously. It is essentially inhomogeneous. Imagine how, in this mutual penetration, the different densities will impinge on one another. Then, in the penetration of the one substantiality by the other you have the requisite conditions for such phenomena as comets to arise. Comets are ever-nascent phenomena, perpetually coming into being, passing away again; and if we draw our ideal picture of a planetary system, say the Copernican picture, with the Sun here and Uranus and Saturn here (Fig. 8), we have not to imagine that the comet is arriving there from some great distance and then making its departure. Out there—outside the system—we need not imagine it to exist at all, It is not there to begin with, but becomes; then, at the perihelion, changes the gesture of its form, which is in fact ever-becoming, ever-nascent. Out there at last it melts away again and is no more, The comet comes into being and passes away; that is its very nature. Hence it can sometimes have apparent paths that are not closed at all—parabolic paths or hyperbolic,—for there is nothing moving round such as would have to move in a closed path. All that there is comes into being, and may well do so in a parabolic direction and then vanish and be no more.

Altogether, we must look upon the comet as a fleeting thing. In relation to Sun and Earth, it is a phenomenon of compensation between ponderable and imponderable matter,—a meeting of the two kinds of matter, which do not immediately balance-out as when light extends in air. For in the latter instance too, there is a meeting of the ponderable and the imponderable; here however they spread continuously, homogeneously as it were,—do not impinge on one another. Take for example air, with light of a certain intensity passing through it. The light spreads homogeneously; but if so be the light does not adapt itself to the air quickly enough, a kind of inner friction will ensue between the ponderable and imponderable matter; only I beg you not to understand this in a mechanical sense but as an inward process (Fig. 9). Follow the comet in its movement. It is a mutual friction of ponderable and imponderable matter that moves on through space. It comes into being at every moment and passes away again.

What I have tried to give you in these studies, my dear friends, was meant to bear on scientific method above all. Although the shortness of time has obliged me to deal with some of these things in bare outline, scarcely more than hinting at them, yet if you follow up the thoughts and indications of these lectures you will see that this is what I have been pointing to: It is a transmutation of method, in the whole way of scientific thinking and research. It would be most important for such lectures to become a starting-point for real work. I can only give general directions, as it were; and yet again and again, where we may only seem to have been working with mathematical curves and the like, you will find inspiration for empirical research and experiment. On every hand, both in the coarser and in the finer aspects, you may attempt to verify what has here been presented in seemingly mathematical and geometrical guise. You may take one of those blue or red toy balloons and examine the effect when you forcibly indent it from without inward, where the indentation will of course follow certain laws. See then what form is taken by the same type or phenomenon when in another experiment you make the forces work from within outward radially. Whether, I say, you are examining only this crude phenomenon of stress and deformation or whether you follow the lines along which the heating effect will spread when you heat certain substances—from within outward in one case, from the periphery inward in another,—or again whether you try your hand it optical, magnetic or other phenomena, in every instance you will find that what has here been said about the contrast of Sun and Earth (to mention only this example) can be detected experimentally.

Above all, if such experiments are carried out, you will begin to penetrate the realities quite differently than has been done before. For you will meet with conditions, factual distributions, which have not hitherto been met with, or have been overlooked. From the realms of light and heat and so on, quite other effects will be derivable than hitherto, for the simple reason that the phenomena have not yet been approached in such a way as to become fully manifest.

Such, my dear Friends, are the developments which I would like to have suggested to you. May-be in future lectures, before very long, we can continue and make actual experiments. It will depend on how our physical and other laboratories prosper,—whether you will have reached experimental methods or real value for the future. Let us not pursue the ideal of equipping our new laboratories with the most costly and perfect apparatus from the scientific instrument makers and then experimenting in the same way as other people do. For on these lines they have done splendid work on every hand. What we must do, as I said before, is to devise new kinds of experiment. We should begin therefore, not with a fully equipped Physics Laboratory, but as far as may be with an empty room, which we go into with the thoughts of a new Physics growing in our minds and souls, not with the usual instruments all ready-made. The emptier our laboratories and the fuller our own heads, the better experimenters we shall grow to be in course of time, my dear Friends.

This is what matters most in the present connection, and in this sense we must do justice to the tasks of our time. Think only of the fetters that are cast around you in the different experimental sciences in the normal course of study nowadays; you had no opportunity to see or to set out the phenomena in any other form than was provided for by the accustomed apparatus. With these instruments, how can you expect to study the spectrum in Goethe's sense? You can not possibly. Given these instruments, nothing else can emerge than what you read of in your text books. You cannot even see why we reject the artificial insertion of “light-rays” in the interpretation of the phenomena of light, where in fact, there are no rays at all. We say to ourselves: There is a vessel filled with water (Fig. 10); on the bottom of it lies a coin. The coin seems to be at a different place. We hardly begin to think of this phenomenon, and we have already drawn our diagram with the normal and sundry other lines and rays (Fig. 10). We follow the whole process with such lines, where from the very outset we ought not to be pursuing such an isolated thing at all. Nowhere in reality are we confronted with such isolated things. If this (Fig. 11) is the bottom of the vessel and a coin is lying here, we only begin to see how the coin is to be treated when we think as follows. Imagine on the bottom of the vessel, not an isolated coin, but a circle, for example, made of paper (as in Fig. 12). The phenomenon is, that when seen through a surface of water the paper circle appears lifted and enlargerd. That is the pure phenomenon,—that you can draw. If then at the bottom of the vessel you have not the whole circle but only a little bit of it, you have no right to treat it differently. The coin in effect is like a little fragment of the paper circle. You have not to draw all manner of lines into the picture but to treat it as a portion of the circle, nay of the bottom of the vessel as a whole,—of what is there all the time even if not made visible by differentiation. The mere fact that I have made one point visible at the bottom of the vessel does not justify me theoretically, in treating this visible point as a point by itself. It has not the significance of a point, but only of a part of the larger circle (Fig. 13).

Likewise a magnet-needle: In its reality I may not treat it as though there were a centre here, and here a north pole and a south pole; but I must realize that purely and simply by virtue of this arrangement the whole of it is one unlimited line, with forces working peripherally on the one hand and centrically on the other (Fig. 14). In the electrical phenomena this finds expression in that we set the cathode on the one hand, the anode on the other. On the one hand we can only explain the luminous phenomenon by regarding it at a portion of a sphere, the radius of which is given by the direction in which the electricity is working; whereas the other pole is given as a tiny portion of the radius itself. It Is not justifiable to speak of a simple polarity of poles. We should speak in quite another way. Namely, wherever anode and cathode make their appearance, this will belong to an entire system; purely and simply by virtue of the simple arrangement it belongs to an entire system. Only by speaking in this way shall we attain true understanding of the phenomena.

Now, my dear Friends, I have been reading through the written questions; but I believe, if those concerned will reflect a little, they will find the necessary elements of an answer to their questions in what I have set forth. They should but try, in every case, to find the way from what I have been saying to their several questions. We shall advance in this bit by bit. Only one question I should like to deal with briefly. It is as follows:—

“In representing a Science of this kind to the outer world the question may easily arise, to what extent the higher powers of cognition—Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition—are needed for the discovery of these relations between phenomenon. What will be the answer to this question?”

Well, my dear Friends, and if it were the fact that Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are needed for the discovery of certain things? How then are we to do without Imagination,Inspiration and Intuition, if the fact is that ordinary, “objective”, intellectual cognition will not reveal the truth and the reality? What else are you to do than to proceed to higher 'modes of knowledge—Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition? That there is still this possibility—If it is really so that one is quite reluctant to advance to higher modes of knowledge—there is the possibility of simply taking the results of such research and testing them by what is found in the field of external empirical fact. One will always find them verified, of that you may be sure.

Yet in our time these things are not so remote as is commonly supposed. If only the path were really taken, from the ordinary analytical treatment of mathematics to the projective treatment—to a projective form of mathematics and beyond it—if one would cultivate and pay more heed to the idea from which I took my start some days ago, speaking or curves for which one has to go right out of space, one would not find it so very difficult to press forward to Imagination. It is indeed simply a question of inner courage—courage of soul. Today you need this inner courage of the soul for scientific work. Hence it is needful to maintain, for it is true: to the ordinary forms of observation and reflection the full reality will not reveal itself. But if one does not shrink from developing the latent forces of the human soul, depths of reality which would otherwise remain concealed will become ever more unveiled.

This I would like to have said to you in conclusion. For the rest, I would express the wish that all these things, which I can only claim to have imparted by way of stimulus and suggestion and in the barest outline, may stimulate you to research, experimental above all. For this is what we need. We need empirical verification of these truths, which must be taken hold of to begin with in the way we have been doing here. Sooner or later we must get beyond the old foundations of judgment, which have so long been responsible for such conditions as in the instance I shall now relate. I say again, we must get beyond them.

I was speaking to a Professor of Physics about Goethe's Theory of Color. The man has even published an edition of it, with his own commentary. When we had been discussing Goethe's Theory of Color for some time the man declared himself a strict Newtonian. He said, it is in fact impossible for any man to get a clear conception or Goethe's Theory of Color; no physicist can set a clear idea of what it means. You see, his education as a physicist had brought him to this point; he could get no real notion of Goethe's Theory of Color. I for my part could understand it. The modern physicist if he is candid, will have to admit that he cannot. He must first transcend the accepted foundations of present-day physical thinking; he must somehow be able to get away from these old foundations. If he succeeds in this, then he will find the way—for it can be found—from the actual phenomena to that interpretation which is contained in Goethe's Theory of Color and which can also provide an important starting-point for other physical researches, extending even to Astronomy.

Consider without bias the warmth-region of the spectrum and the chemical region of the spectrum, their quite different behavior towards a number of reagents. Even in the spectrum you will detect the contrast I have been describing—the contrast of terrestrial effects and solar. In the spectrum itself we have a picture of the contrast of Earth end Sun,—the same contrast which finds expression in the whole bodily organization of man. Every time you touch another body, perceiving it with your sensation of touch, Sun and Earth are at work. So too, in the spectrum, Sun and Earth are at work. Taking it as the solar spectrum you cannot truly think of it as being put into space just arbitrarily here or there. You must be clear that it is always in the real space—the space that is between Sun and Earth.

Indeed you never have to do with space in the abstract where real phenomena are concerned, for the real things are always there and have to be included. If you do not bear this in mind, you will at last be explaining the origin of the celestial system on the good old pattern—a little drop of oil floating in water, bearing a disk of paper with a pin stuck through it as a pivot, which you begin to turn. The drop of oil gets flattened and little drops detach themselves. A planetary system has arisen: You explain it to your audience: “You see, it is a planetary system”. You compare it with the solar system in the Universe outside—the Copernican conception,—it is the very same! Well and good. Yet you must not forget: There were you the teacher, turning the pin, and therefore—not to be untrue—you should also add the demon giant in the universe outside, turning the cosmic axis, for only so can there arise what you have been alleging. You have no right to use this illustration if you do not include the giant demon. In scientific explanation too, we need to be more scrupulous and careful.

Upon these inner and methodical conditions above all, I have been wanting to lay stress in the present lectures. Next time then we will speak again from other points of view, of certain realms of Science.

Ladies and Gentlemen! From the time of Ancient Greece, a familiar and much discussed phrase has come to us like a warning cry to the depths of the human soul: “Human Being, know yourself!” These words, though rarely heeded as such, call us with power. They can be interpreted as asking us to become aware, not only of our true being in the most important activities of soul and spirit, but also of our significance as human beings in the world order.

Ordinarily, when such a call sounds forth from a culturally significant center at a particular time in history, it does not indicate something easily attainable, but rather to the lack of ability; it points toward something not easily fulfilled.

If we look back at earlier historical epochs, not superficially or theoretically but with a real feeling for history, we shall experience how such a call indicates a decrease rather than an increase in the power of human self-knowledge. In previous times of human evolution, religious experience, artistic sense, and the inner comprehension of ideals still worked together in harmony. One can feel how, at that time when religion, art, and science still formed a unity, human beings felt themselves, naturally, to be likenesses or images of the divine spirit, living within and permeating the world. They felt themselves to be God-sent entities on Earth. During those ancient days, it was self-evident that seeking knowledge of the human being was also part of seeking knowledge of the gods—divine knowledge—the spiritual foundations, experienced and thought of as the ground of the world, and felt to be working also in the human being.

In remote times, when human beings spoke the word that would represent the word I in our current language, it expressed for them both the essence of fundamental world forces and their inherent world-being. The word thus indicated that the human self resonated with something much greater than the individual self, something pointing at the creative working in the universe. During the course of evolution, it became more and more difficult to reach what had been accepted naturally at one time, just as perceptible as color is today to our eyes. If these earlier people had heard the call for self-knowledge (which could hardly have come from an earthly being), if they had perceived the call “Know yourself!” as coming from a supersensible being, they may well have answered, “Why is it necessary to make such an effort for self-knowledge?” For human beings saw and felt themselves as reflections of the divine spirit that shines, sounds, warms, and blesses throughout the world. They felt that if one knows what the wind carries through the trees, what the lightning sends through the air, what rolls in the thunder, what constantly changes in the cloud formations, what lives in a blade of grass, what blossoms in the flower, then one also knows the human self.

A time came when such knowledge of the world, which was simultaneously knowledge of the divine spirit, was no longer possible, due to humanity’s increasing spiritual independence; the phrase “Know yourself!” began to be heard in the depths of human consciousness. It indicated something that had been a natural gift until that point, but was now becoming an exertion.

There is an important epoch of human evolution between the earlier admonition “Know yourself!” and another phrase coined much later, in our own times, in the last third of the nineteenth century. The later saying, voiced by the eminent natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond, rang out like a negative answer to the Apollonian call “Know yourself!” with the word Ignorabimus—“we are fated to ignorance.” Ignorabimus expressed Du Bois-Reymond’s opinion that modern knowledge of nature, despite its immense progress, was fated to be arrested at the frontier of natural science. A significant stretch of human soul development exists between these two historically momentous utterances. In the meantime, enough inner human strength survived as a residue of ancient times that, what previously had been a matter of course—that is, to look for the essence of the human being in the outer appearance of divine existence—now meant that, in due time, by strength of inner effort, the human being would gradually attain self-knowledge again. But this force of self-knowledge became increasingly weaker. By the last third of the nineteenth century, it had become so weak that, after the sun of self-knowledge had set, the negative counterpart of the Apollonian positive was heard: “Human being, you will never know yourself.”

For contemporary natural history, attuned to the needs of our time, to confess it impossible to fathom the secrets of consciousness working in matter, amounts to admitting that knowledge of the human being is completely unattainable. At this point something else must be mentioned: When the call “Human Being, know yourself!” was heard, self-knowledge, which in earlier times had also been knowledge of God, was already passing through its twilight stages; and in just that way the renunciation of self-knowledge was in its twilight stages by the time we were told, “Resign yourself! There is no self-knowledge, no knowledge of the human being.”

Again the words indicate not so much what is said directly, as to its opposite, which is what present-day humanity is experiencing. Precisely because the power of self-knowledge has increasingly weakened, the urge for the knowledge of the human being has made itself felt, an urge that comes, not from the intellect, nor from any theoretical ideas, but from the realm of the heart, from the deepest recesses of the soul. It was felt generally that the methods of natural science could not discover humankind’s true nature, despite the brilliant successes of natural-scientific research that had benefited humanity to such a degree. At the same time there was a strong feeling that, somehow, paths must exist.

The birth of this new search for knowledge of the human being, as expressed by natural scientists, included, side by side with other fundamental branches of life, the pedagogical movement, the movement to evolve a proper relationship between the human being and the growing human being—between the adult and the child who needs to be educated and taught. This movement prompted the call most strongly for a renewal of knowledge of the human being, even if outwardly expressed in opposite terms—namely, that such knowledge was beyond human reach. At the very time that these sentiments were being expressed, there was a growing conviction among those who really cared for the education of the young, that intellectualism, knowledge based only on external sense observation and its consequent interpretation, was unsuitable to provide human beings with what they need to teach and educate young people, the growing young men and women. One therefore heard increasingly the call for changing priorities between the training of rational thinking, which has made such precious contributions to the modern world, and the education of the children’s feeling life and of the forces of human will. Children were not to be turned into “know-it-alls,” but overall capacities for practical life were to be nurtured and encouraged.

There is one strange omission in this general demand for a renewal of education, however: the necessity to base educational demands on a clear insight into the evolving human being, into the child, rather than to depend on the teachers’ vague subconscious instincts. The opinion is that, while nature can be known, it is impossible to penetrate human nature in depth and in full consciousness in a way that would help educators. Indeed, one particular trend of modern pedagogy renounces any attempt to develop a conscious, thoughtful understanding of the human being, depending instead on the teachers’ supposed educational instincts. Any unbiased judge of the current situation has to acknowledge the existence (among a wide range of very praiseworthy pedagogical movements) of a strong tendency to build educational aims on elementary and instinctual human nature. One depends on vague, instinctive impulses because of a conviction that it is impossible to gain conscious knowledge of the depths of the human being.

Only when one can see through such an attitude in the contemporary spiritual and cultural life with the human interest it deserves, can one appreciate the aims of the science of the spirit as it applies to the development of pedagogical sense and competence. This science of the spirit does not draw its substance from ancient forms of human knowledge; nevertheless, it offers new possibilities in the praiseworthy natural-scientific urge to penetrate into the depths of human nature, especially in the field of education. Knowledge of the human being can only be attained in full consciousness, for we have definitely passed the stage when human beings lived by instinct. We cannot, of course, jettison instinct or elemental-primeval forces altogether, yet we need to work toward a fully conscious penetration into all the beings that come to meet us in human life.

It may feel nice to hear that we should not depend too much on intellect and reason, and thus we should trust again in the mysterious working of instinctive impulses. But this nice feeling is inappropriate for the current time, because, due to our being human and thus caught in human evolution, we have lost the old certainty of instinctual experience. We need to conquer a new certainty that will be no less primeval and no less elementary than earlier forms of experience, one capable of allowing us to plunge into the sphere of consciousness.

The very people who rush enthusiastically toward knowledge using the approach and methods that are used quite justifiably today to explore nature, will also come to realize that this particular way of using the senses, this way of using instruments in the service of experimental research cannot lead to knowledge of the human being; nor will we find it in a certain way of making rational judgments about sensory knowledge, a particular way of investigating nature. The natural scientists themselves will have to concede that a knowledge of the human being must exist that flows from completely different sources than the ones we tap these days in an attempt to invade the being of external reality.

In my books How to Know Higher Worlds and An Outline of Occult Science, I have described the forces that the human being must extract from the depths of the self. I have shown that it is possible to awaken forces in the human soul so that one can recognize something purely spiritual behind outer appearances, and that, by allowing dormant forces to reveal themselves, one can recognize spirit working in, and permeating, all matter.

Two things must be understood fully about spiritual science: First, it is impossible to fathom the secrets of human nature by knowledge gained exclusively from natural science; second, it is possible to penetrate the spiritual world in the same fully conscious state that so-called empirical research uses in the sense world, and with the same clarity. However, I must quickly add that the importance of what has just been said can be appreciated and confirmed only through personal, practical experience in matters of spiritual knowledge.

People who try—and this has been done again and again—to apply the methods of experimental laboratory research to the investigation of the human being will not succeed, for the essence of human nature must be experienced in one’s own self to be experienced at all in a living way. It is well known that, in the absence of self-knowledge, one remains always at the periphery of the human being, and I would like to make the following paradoxical statement: If a researcher were to apply the natural-scientific research method to the study of the human being, and then to verify the findings, applied them to his or her own being, believing this to really be what true humanity is about, the following would happen. Precisely when such a person felt most enthusiastic, the following realization would jump up in front of the soul: When I experience myself through the natural-scientific method, applying all my senses and all my powers of knowledge, I still feel the way one would feel looking at one’s own skeleton. The experience of such natural- scientific investigation would in fact be devastating. Human beings would “skeletize” themselves. To experience this feeling is to touch on the impulse that gave rise to spiritual science. We must bring the essence of the human being out in ways other than through bringing forth lifeless nature.

What kind of human knowledge will lead to this goal? It certainly cannot be the kind that makes us feel as if in our soul and spirit we were mere skeletons; there must be a way of evoking different images. Let us look at our blood circulation and our breathing. Although we are not generally aware of them in any great detail, they form an essential part of our life. The way we normally experience our blood circulation and our breathing when in good health represents a wholeness, even without our being able to put this perception into so many words. We experience it simply as part of our feeling healthy. Something similar must surely exist with regard to our knowledge of the human being. It must be possible to form ideas and perceptions of the human being that can be worked through inwardly, so that one experiences them as a natural part of the human entity, comparable with experiencing one’s breathing and blood circulation as a natural part of health. But then the question arises: What will lead us to an understanding of the child’s nature, with which we, as educators and teachers, must work?

How do we learn to know external sensory nature? Through our senses. Through our eye we gain knowledge of the multiple world of light and color. In order to make any of the world phenomenon part of our soul content, we must have the appropriate sense experiences, and we need the relevant sense organs for what is to become part of our soul content. If we study the wonderful construction of the human eye and the way it is linked to the brain, we will experience deeply what Goethe felt when he repeated the verse of an ancient mystic:

Were not the eye alike the Sun,
How could we ever see the light?
Lived not in us God’s own great power,
How could the Divine ever bring delight?

This Sun-like element of the eye, working selflessly within the inner human being, enables us to receive the external light.

We must look at the sense organs themselves if we want to understand the human connection with the external world, or if we wish to make any soul experience our own. Now let us look at the specific organ that can lead us to a true knowledge of the human being. Which sense organ would lead us to such a knowledge? We get to know external nature through our eyes, our ears and the other senses. For knowledge of the spiritual world, it is the spiritually enlightened being, which can be attained by following the paths described in How to Know Higher Worlds. In that book I describe two polarities in human striving for knowledge: On the one side is the knowledge resulting from what the physical senses give us; on the other side is the knowledge of the spirit, which pervades and weaves through both outer nature and the inner realm of the human being. This spiritual knowledge can be gained whenever human beings make themselves into spiritual sense organs by somehow transmuting all the forces of their human nature.

The field of knowledge of the human being lies precisely between these two poles. If we restrict ourselves to knowing external nature as transmitted to us through the senses, we cannot reach the essence of the human being for the reasons already stated. If we are cognizant of the spiritual aspects only, we have to transport ourselves to such heights of soul and spirit that the immediacy of the human being standing before us in the world vanishes. (You can read about this aspect in Occult Science and in my other writings dealing with the spiritual science I am speaking of here.) We need something that gives us even more intimate access to the human being than the subtle sense allowing us to see human beings as a part of the spirit nature that permeates the whole world. Just as I need the eye to perceive color, so a particular sense is needed for unmediated perception of the human being. What could such a sense be like at the present stage of human evolution? How can we penetrate the nature of human beings as they exist in the world, in the same way that we can penetrate the multiplicity of colors through the wonderful organization of the eye or the multiplicity of sounds through that of the ear? Where do we find this sense for the perception of the human essence?

It is none other than the sense granted us for the appreciation of art; the artistic sense can transmit to us spirit shining in matter, and revealed as the beauty we appreciate in art. At the present stage of evolution, this artistic sense allows us to apprehend the essence of what is truly human so that it can enter practical spheres of life. I know very well how paradoxical such a statement must sound to the ears of our contemporaries. But if I have the courage to think, to their very end, the concepts and ideas by which we comprehend external nature, and if having felt my way into them with all my humanity, I can say to myself that my ideas, my concepts have really brought me very close to nature, then I will feel that something at that very boundary is pulling me free of the limitations of these concepts and ideas, allowing me to soar up toward an artistic formulation of them.

This was why in 1894 I wrote the following words in the introduction to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: “To fully understand the human being, an artistic appreciation of ideas is needed, not merely an abstract comprehension of ideas.”3A real enlivening is required to make the leap that transforms the abstraction of concepts we use to understand nature into artistic display. This is possible. It requires that knowledge be allowed to flow into art, which leads to the development of the artistic sense. As long as we remain within the boundaries of natural science, we have to acknowledge that we will never understand how consciousness is connected with matter; but the moment we allow anything to flow naturally from the realm of ideas into an artistic view, the scales fall from our eyes. Everything in the realm of idea and concept is transformed into an artistic seeing, and what we see in this way spreads over the essence of humanity, just as the colors conceived by the eye spread their hues over the outer appearance of plants or other natural phenomena. Just as the physical organ of the eye, in the process of conceiving color, merges with the essence of color phenomena in nature, so the artistic sense grows inwardly in conjunction with the nature of the human being as a whole. We need to have seen colors with our eyes before we can think them. Likewise, only after we have had a vision of the nature of the human being through this artistic sense, can our abstract concepts and ideas fully encompass it.

If science thus becomes an art, then all our knowledge of the human being, and all our deliberations about first forming an artistic picture of the human being, will not turn to a bag of bones in the soul; instead, we will be at one with our own concepts and artistic ideas about the human being, and they will flow into and through the soul just as blood and breath circulate through the body. Something will reside in us that is as full of life as our sensations are when our breathing and blood circulation function normally and give us a sense of health and well being.

A sense of wholeness then embraces the entire nature of the human being, similar to a general feeling of health with regard to our physical organization; this sense will include something that is possible only when the artistic sense has attained the intimate contemplation of the human being living here in the present, not the elevated human being of insufficiently grounded spiritual speculation.

If we consider what such knowledge will eventually yield—knowledge that, like our breathing and blood circulation, continuously and in each of its aspects becomes will and activity—we will find that this extended metaphor helps us even further; for it is more than a mere comparison, and it has not been picked out in the abstract, but grows out of reality itself. What is it that causes our feeling of health, emanating from our entire constitution? What happens in such a general feeling of health, which, by the way, can be a very subtle feeling? It is the recognition that I, the human being, am so organized that I can look at myself as a healthy person standing in the world. What does it mean to be a healthy human being?

The crown of human life, the power of love is expressed in the healthy human being. Ultimately health and all healthy soul forces stream together into a feeling permeated with love, enabling me to acknowledge the person next to me, because I acknowledge the healthy human being in myself. Thus, out of this knowledge of the healthy human being sprouts love for our neighbor, whom we recognize as being like us. Our own self is found in another human being. Such knowledge of human nature does not become the theoretical instruction given to a technician who then applies it mechanically; rather, it becomes a direct inner experience leading immediately into practical life. For in its transformation it flows into the power of love and becomes an active form of human knowledge. If as teacher and educator, I meet a child through my knowledge of what a human being is, then an understanding of the child will blossom within my unfolding soul and spiritual love. I no longer need instructions based on the example of natural science and on theories about child development. All I need is to experience the knowledge of the human being, in the same way that I experience healthy breathing and healthy blood circulation as bases of my general health. Then the proper form of knowledge, correctly stimulated and enlivened, will become a pedagogical art.

What must this knowledge of the human being become? The answer will be found in what has been already said. We must be able to allow this knowledge of the human being to fly out on the wings of love over all our surroundings, and especially upon the children. Our knowledge of the human being must be transformed into an inner attitude where it is alive in the form of love. This is the most important basis for teaching today. Education must be seen as a matter of one’s own inner attitude, not as a matter of thinking up various schemes, such as how to avoid training the child’s intellect exclusively. We could constantly reiterate this tenet, of course, and then go about it in a thoroughly intellectual way, taking it for granted, for example, that teachers should use their intellects to think up ways to protect their pupils from intellectualism! It goes without saying that our work must begin with the teachers. We must encourage them not to fall back entirely on the intellect, which, by itself, never has an artistic nature. Starting with the teachers, we will create the proper conditions for the theory and practice of education, based on our knowledge of the human being and given in a form suitable for nurturing the child. This will establish the necessary contact between teacher and child, and it will turn our knowledge of the human being, through the working of love, into right education and training.

Natural science alone cannot understand how consciousness works in the physical organization. Why is this? Because it cannot comprehend how the artistic experience occurs and how it is formed. Knowledge of the human being makes us realize that consciousness is an artist whose material is the material substance of the human being. As long as knowledge of the human being is not sought with an artistic sense, the state of ignorabimus will hold sway. We must first begin to realize that human consciousness is an artist working creatively with matter itself; if we want to comprehend the true nature of the human being, we must acknowledge the artistic creator in each individual. Only then will we get beyond the stage of ignorabimus. At the same time, knowledge of the human being cannot be theoretical, but must able to enter the sphere of will. It will directly enter the practical sphere of life and feel at home there.

If the evolving child is viewed from this perspective, with insight stemming from an artistic sense and carried on wings of love, we will see and understand very much. I should like to describe just one example: Let us look at the extraordinary phase when the child undergoes the transition from playing to working. All children play. They do so naturally. Adults, on the other hand, have to work to live. They find themselves in a situation that demands it. If we look at social life today, we could characterize the difference between the child at play and the adult at work in the following way: Compared to the activities of the adult, which are dictated by necessity, the child’s play is connected with an inner force of liberation, endowing the playing child with a feeling of well-being and happiness. You need only observe children at play. It is inconceivable that they are not in full inner accord with what they are doing. Why not? Because playing is a liberating experience to children, making them eager to release this activity from the organism. Freeing, joyful, and eager to be released—this is the character of the child’s play.

What about the adult’s work? Why does it often, if not usually, become an oppressive burden? (And this will be even more so in the future.) We could say that the child grows from an experience of liberation while playing into the experience of the oppressive burden of work, dictated to the adult by social conditions. Doesn’t this great contrast beg us to ask: How can we build a bridge from the child’s liberating play activity to the burdensome experience in the sphere of the adult workday?

If we follow the child’s development with the artistic understanding I spoke of just now, we will find such a bridge in the role art plays at school. If applied properly as an educational tool, art will lead from the child’s liberating play activity to the stage of adult work. With the help of art, this work no longer needs be an oppressive burden. Unless we can divest work of its oppressive character, we can never solve the social question. Unless the polarity between the young child’s playing and the adult’s burdensome daily work is balanced by the right education, the problem of labor will reappear again and again in different guises.

What does it mean to introduce the artistic element into education? One could easily form misconceptions about artistic activities, especially at school. Everyone agrees that it is essential to train the child’s intellect. This notion has become so deeply ingrained in modern consciousness that indifference toward training the intellect is very unlikely to spread. Everyone can see also that, without moral education, one cannot do justice to human dignity, and the human being cannot be considered fully developed. In general, there is still a certain feeling that an immoral person is not fully human, but is disabled, at least in regard to the human soul and spirit. And so, on the one hand people assume that the intellect must be trained, and, on the other, that genuine human dignity must also be cultivated at school, including the concepts of a sacred sense of duty and human virtues. But the same attention is not given to what the human being can be presented with in full freedom and love—that is, the artistic element.

The high esteem for what is human and an extraordinary love for the human being are needed during one’s evolving childhood days; this was the case for Schiller, whose (alas!) insufficiently known Letters on the Esthetic Education of the Human Being was based on those qualities. We find in them a genuine appreciation of the artistic element in education, rooted in German culture. We can begin with these letters, and spiritual science will deepen our understanding. Look, for example, at child’s play and how it flows forth simply because it is in a child’s nature to be active. See how children liberate from their organization something that takes the form of play; their humanity consists of something that takes the form of play. Observe how necessity forces us to perform work that does not flow directly from the wholeness of our human nature; it can never express all of our nature. This is how we can begin to understand human development from childhood to adulthood.

There is one thing, however, that we should never lose sight of; usually, when observing children at play, people do so from the perspective of an adult. If this were not so, one would not hear again and again the trifling exhortation that “children should learn through play.” The worst thing you could do is teach children that work is mere play, because when they grow up, they then will look at life as if it were only a game. Anyone who holds such a view must have observed children at play only with an adult’s eyes, believing that children bring the same attitude to play as adults do. Play is fun for an adult, an enjoyment, a pleasure, the spice of life. But for children, play is the very stuff of life. Children are absolutely earnest about play, and the very seriousness of their play is a salient feature of this activity. Only by realizing the earnest nature of child’s play can we understand this activity properly. And by watching how, in play, human nature pours itself in complete seriousness into the treatment of external objects, we can direct the child’s inborn energy, capacity and gift for play into artistic channels. These still permit a freedom of inner activity while at the same time forcing children to struggle with outer materials, as we have to do in adult work. Then we can see how precisely this artistic activity makes it possible to conduct education so that the joy of engaging in artistic activities can be combined with the seriousness of play, contributing in this way to the child’s character.

Particularly after the child enters school, until the ninth or tenth year, one may be in a position to use the artistic element, and this must be more than dallying in fairy tales; rather, whatever subject is being taught, the child’s inherent impulse to play, which is such an intrinsic part of its makeup, can be guided into artistic activities. And when children enter the first or second grade, they are perfectly able to make this transition. However clumsy children of six or seven may be when modeling, painting, or finding their way into music and poetry, if teachers know how to permeate their lessons with artistry, even small children, as miniature sculptors or painters, can begin to have the experience that human nature does not end at the fingertips, that is, at the periphery of the skin, but flows out into the world. The adult human being is growing in children whenever they put their being into handling clay, wood, or paints. In these very interactions with the materials, children grow, learning to perceive how closely the human being is interwoven with the fabric of the world. And when working with musical sounds and colors, or handling wood, children grow outward into the world. If children are introduced to these artistic activities properly—however clumsy their first efforts may appear—they will greatly benefit from what is received in this way from the world. When music and poetry are brought to children, they experience the musical and poetical element in their own being. Then it is as if a heavenly gift had been bestowed on young students, enabling them to experience a second being within. Through sounds of music and poetry, it is as if a grace-filled being were sinking down into us through sounds of music and poetry, making us aware even in childhood, that in each of us something lives, which has come from spiritual heights to take hold of our narrow human nature.

If one lives this way with children, with the eye and mind of an artist and teaching them with a sensitive and artistic touch, their responses will reveal qualities that the teacher must endeavor to cultivate, however clumsy the children’s first efforts may be when working with color, sound, or other artistic media. One learns to know children intimately, both their gifts and limitations; watching the artistic element of the sculpture as it flows from little hands, living in empathy with the child, one learns to recognize the strength with which the child directs every bit of attention and forces toward the spirit worlds, and then brings that back into the physical world of the senses. One learns to know the children’s entire relationship to a higher spiritual world. And if music and poetry are brought to the children, as a teacher, one gains a glimpse of the latent strength in them, ready to develop later in life.

Having brought the children into close contact with the plastic, poetic, and musical arts, and having brought eurythmic movements into their bodies, having awakened to life through eurythmy what would otherwise be the abstract element of language, we create in the human being an inner harmony between the spirit-winged musical and poetic elements, and the spirit-permeated material elements of modeling and painting. Human consciousness, spiritually illumined, weaves soulfully and artistically into the physical corporeal part of the human being. One learns to teach by awakening spirit and soul in children, in such a way that teaching becomes health-permeating, stimulating growth and strength for all of life. This brings to mind a beautiful and deeply meaningful Greek expression. The ancient Greeks spoke of Phidias’s statue of Zeus as “healing magic.” Genuine art will not only take hold of soul and spirit, but it will also enhance health and growth. Genuine art has always had healing powers.

Educators and teachers who have the proper love for art and the necessary respect for human nature will always be in a position to implant the artistic element as a magic healing into all their teaching. Then training the intellect, which is a necessary part of schooling, as well as religious teaching and training the heart forces, will be permeated by an element that is inextricably connected to human freedom and human love. If teachers themselves feel a strong bond with the artistic element and appeal to the artistic appreciation in their pupils, and if they create an artistic atmosphere in the classroom, the proper teaching methods and human influence will stream out into all other aspects of education. Then they will not “save” the artistic element for other subjects, but let it flow and permeate all their teaching. The attitude must not be: Here are the main subjects—this one will train the intellect, this one the feelings and the sense of duty, and over there, separate, more or less on a voluntary basis, is the art lesson. On the contrary, art is in its proper place only when all teaching is arranged so that, at the right moment, the students’ souls feel a need for the artistic; and art itself must be cultivated so that, in the artistic activities themselves, students feel the need for a rational understanding of, and dutiful concentration on, the things they have come to see as beautiful, as truly free, and thus as human. This is intended to indicate how art can pervade the entire field of education, how it can illumine and warm through the entire pedagogical and sermonizing realm of education. Art and the esthetic sense place knowledge of the human being at the meeting of purely spiritual knowledge on the one side, and external sensory knowledge on the other. It also helps lead us most beautifully into the practical aspects of education.

Through an art of teaching such as I have outlined, those who love art and respect humanity will assign art the proper place in the life of a school. They will do so from a feeling for human nature, condensed into a pedagogical attitude and a pedagogical life through daily contact with the students. They will not neglect the spiritual aspects nor those more connected with the physical world. If art occupies the proper place in school life it will also stimulate the correct approach to the students’ physical training, since wherever art is applied in life, it opens a person to the spiritual light necessary for inner development. By its very nature, art can become permeated with the light of the spirit, and when this has happened it retains this light. Then, wherever art radiates, it permeates whatever it touches with the light it received from the spiritual Sun. It also permeates matter with light so that, outwardly radiant and shining with the light of soul, it can express spirit. Art can collect in itself the light of the universe. It can also permeate all earthly and material substance with shining light. This is why art can carry secrets of the spiritual world into the school and give children the light of soul and spirit; the latter will allow children to enter life so that they do not need to experience work as just a negative and oppressive burden, and, in our social life, therefore, work may gradually divest its burdensome load. By bringing art into school properly, social life can become enriched and freed at the same time, although that may sound unbelievable.

I will address other aspects tomorrow, when I speak of the place of morality and ethical attitudes in education. Today I only want to show that the spirit needed in schools can be magically engendered through art. If done properly, this light-filled art can produce a radiance in children that allows the soul to integrate into the physical body, and thus into the world, for the person’s entire future life.

I would like to talk again today about the nature and significance of our building, for the reason that a number of external personalities are among us at the course for medical professionals.

First of all, I would like to note that this building, as a representative of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, is intended to be in the world that which really gives an outward image of the significance and inner essence of this movement. If one wants to recognize this movement in its true significance, one must surely become familiar with the fact that this movement wants to enter the most diverse areas of life as something completely new, that its appreciation must arise from the realization that such a new thing is necessary in the face of the fact that old impulses in our present time clearly show how they are moving straight into decadence.

If our movement had not emerged from that which the signs of the times themselves demand, from that which is not now in any human program, but from that which can be read in the spiritual development of humanity that lies behind our physical human movement, even if our movement were like so many other movements that also found societies, set up programs, and set up so-called ideals, then at a certain point this movement would have needed a larger building, larger premises for its membership, and they would have turned to some outside builder to have a house built. The architect would have built something in the traditional style, and the Society would have carried on its work in such a building.

This is not how it should be with us. Rather, since we came to the point of being able to start a building project – which might even be completed one day – it had to be shown, precisely on the basis of this fact, how this spiritual movement, on the one hand, reaches the highest heights of spiritual life and, on the other hand, is a thoroughly practical movement that can directly engage with all aspects of practical life. That means that it had to be shown that our anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement is capable of producing new building forms, a new architectural style, out of itself. It had to be shown that our movement, down to the last detail, is not just a theoretical world-view movement, but something that can have a formative effect on everything that is placed externally in the physical world.

Thus this building was not constructed as an outwardly unimportant house, but was built out of spiritual science, out of its very own feelings, ideas and thoughts, and in every detail it is an expression of what this spiritual science wants to be. It does not want to be some mystical driveling, it does not want to be some abstract theory, but it wants to be something that can deeply intervene in the most everyday life, and must therefore also intervene most in that which is to be its own representative. The whole of this structure should express how it places itself in the present as a living protest against what the centuries, the millennia, have brought to humanity and what is currently leading humanity to decline.

Given that we could not build the structure in Munich due to the narrow-mindedness of the local artistic community, but had to erect it here on the Dornach hill, it must be seen as a stroke of good fortune that, by approaching the hill, this double-domed structure can now really be appreciated. For it is truly not for external reasons that this building has become a double-domed structure. This Goetheanum has become a double-domed structure – a building composed of a larger and a smaller dome – to show that something is to be revealed to contemporary culture and that something is to be received. That which emerges from the depths of spiritual life is represented by the small dome, and the fact of receiving is represented by the large dome. And I think that fate has done well that the one who approaches this hill in Dornach can already have the feeling, through the way in which this double dome rises above the hill, that something new is being added to human development, but something that can also have an effect on human development at the same time. The first pictures we will show you this evening should demonstrate to what extent this is the case.

The first picture we will show is of the building as seen from the north.

Another aspect. Approached from a slightly different angle, the building looks like this.

The third picture is supposed to show the northeast aspect.

The fourth picture is intended to represent the southwest aspect.

The next picture is supposed to show the northwest aspect.

This is yet another aspect.

And now let us visualize how the building appears to someone entering from the west. The building is oriented from west to east. You enter at the bottom, and the cloakrooms are downstairs. You come up to the walkway through a stairwell and enter the building through the gates, which are in the west. The whole building is designed in such a way that it presents an organic architectural concept in contrast to the dynamic-mechanical architectural concept to which one is otherwise accustomed. Therefore, the forms everywhere are such that they blend in with the organism of the whole building, just as I would say that any limb – even the smallest in humans, the earlobe – blends in with the whole organism. Thus, a limb blends into the whole organism in such a way that it must be in its place, as it is, as large and as shaped as it is. In the same way, every detail should be in its place in this building; every detail should take its form from the overall form of the building. Furthermore, without falling back on mystical symbolism, there is not a single symbol in the whole building; everything in the building should be poured into artistic forms and show in artistic forms what task each individual piece has.

The West Gate. The West Gate has the task of welcoming those who enter. This welcoming, this receiving, this welcoming, so to speak, should be expressed in forms that are not geometric, but which should be expressively organic forms.

As I said, you enter the building from below, via a staircase leading to the gallery, from where you then enter through the west gate.

Now the staircase. You are looking here towards the northern side of the staircase. It can be clearly seen from these things how everything here is designed so that it has to be in its place, where it is found. For example, you see how this column capital is perfectly adapted in form to this side, its inclination towards the place where the whole structure must be supported; narrowing on the other side, where the entrance is, where there is nothing more to support.

During on-site explanations, I have often pointed out this structure at the beginning of the staircase: there are three semicircular shapes with their planes perpendicular to each other. It is the shape that emerged in my mind when I tried to imagine how a person walking up these stairs would feel. He would have to feel at the point where the first step of the staircase begins: When I step into it, the external influences of life are calmed. Inner emotional movement will be found inside, which completely calms the outer feeling. In there I will stand on safe ground.

That was what I wanted to express. This presented itself to me because I had to develop this thing here. It is a formation that has an external similarity to the three semi-circular canals in the ear, which, when injured, lead to dizzy spells that thus take away the certainty of the person when they are injured. But that is a discovery that occurred to me only afterwards; the matter itself is formed entirely out of the sensation.

You can also see a radiator cover. These radiator covers are designed in such a way that they represent, on the one hand, growing out of the earth, that is, the forces that grow out of the earth in a supersensible way and permeate the sensible; they are counteracted by other forces coming from above. For those who can perceive this interplay of forces, elemental figures emerge, and these elemental figures are expressed in the forms of these radiator covers, which are otherwise built in their entirety according to Goethe's principle of metamorphosis. Each radiator is the organic metamorphosis of the other. Each was designed to fit exactly into the place in the house where it belongs. But at the same time, the principle of metamorphosis is carried out with the same fidelity as in the plant itself. Every single form, every line, every curve is shaped according to the spatial and functional requirements, and I would say, the original form, which of course is not found here. Every curve is appropriate to the position of the limb of the structure on which the curve is located. A curve that is diverted points to something else in the structure, as opposed to a curve that is bent inward, as you can see here, where the perspective is not even quite right.

There we saw the same thing again, in more detail. You can see here how an attempt has been made to replace the conventional mathematical-dynamic pillar with something organic, which in its form has the character of support, of support through a force that comes from the elementary forces of the earth and is precisely suited to the distribution of the load that is to be supported at this point in the way in which it shapes its forms. Of course, I am well aware of the many objections that can be raised against such designs from the point of view of traditional architecture. But it is high time that an attempt was made to replace the usual dynamic-mechanical building concepts with an organic building concept that is based not on dynamics and mechanics but on organic principles.

Here we have again seen the side on one side of the main entrance, where you can see how they tried to bring out the character of this being a side piece, how it turns towards the center, how it points to the side. This shaping is particularly important.

The next picture. Here you can see the side wing, as it goes north, with its windows. And you can see here how it has been tried to overcome the merely decorative. Here, the support is led down everywhere, so that the windows stand up at the bottom, so that not only the windows are worked out of the wall like a decoration, but that the windows stand up everywhere. But you can also see how, in the room containing the motif in question, the same motif that is above the side windows above the main entrance reappears here at these windows. But if you can properly visualize the metamorphosis internally, then such motifs take on such a form that, from a purely external point of view, they no longer resemble other motifs at all, and yet they are actually the same. Just as the sepals and stamens are no different from the petals and leaves of a flower – even though the leaves take on completely different forms depending on the plant's position – so it is here. Thus, Goethe's idea of metamorphosis has been realized in its entirety in the artistic process.

Here we have the upper part of the side entrance. You see, once again, the same motif above, transformed, but also the motifs that you see everywhere, metamorphosed.

Here you see my original model, cut in half, that is, at the point where the axis of symmetry lies. The forms were first worked into this model. This model was, after all, the basis for the construction.

This is the floor plan of the building. This floor plan shows the extent to which the building is designed as a double-domed structure. The small domed room faces east. The main group will stand here, which all of you already know. Here is the west domed room, the auditorium. You can see that when you come in through the entrance, you enter the auditorium. You first come to a vestibule lined with wood, each individual piece of which is handcrafted, and all surfaces and curves are worked so that their surfaces and curves must be exactly where they are.

You enter below the organ (Fig. 29). The casing and framing are designed so that you can see that the organ is not just placed in the room, but grows organically out of the entire surroundings of the building. Then you always have a walkway on which you can walk around outside and below during intermissions. The auditorium holds about nine hundred or a thousand people. Then the entire perspective of the building is arranged according to an axis of symmetry; you won't find the same axis of symmetry anywhere else, everything is oriented towards this one axis of symmetry, while otherwise the auditorium is arranged, stepping forward, from seven columns on each side. These columns in the auditorium have bases, have capitals, and above them are architraves. Everything that is worked into these columns is done so in strict accordance with the principle of the evolution of nature itself. If you follow how the capitals, bases and architraves of the individual columns grow out of one another, you will see an image of evolution, of development, in the emergence of one motif from another. It is necessary to immerse oneself in the way in which one form grows out of another in these columns, with artistic devotion, with artistic sensitivity, just as one form of nature's development always grows out of another.

It is not good to start from an abstract terminology in a philistine, pedantic way. There are certain reasons why one can name the one column Saturn's column, the other Venus' column, etc. But one must not obscure what is essential in the essence: the belonging together of the seven columns, the emergence of one column from the other. And above all, we must not obscure what lies in the forms themselves, which must be felt by following the line of swing, the curve of the form, by dreaming ourselves into a symbolism that does not exist. This is more inherent in the emergence of the form of one column from the form of the other column than in simply looking at a column.

In the process, it turned out, by recreating nature itself, so to speak, that the idea of development, which is very often understood as if in each development the following stage of development is always more complicated than the one before, that this idea of development is not correct. Every development proceeds in such a way that at first there is a simple form; then a more complicated one develops from it, then an even more complicated one. This reaches a certain culmination; then again the forms begin to become simpler and simpler, and outwardly the most perfect form reveals itself as the one that has been simplified again. It is only an apparent simplification, but it is still a simplification, I would say, in the limbs, and there is a certain complication in the formation of the limbs. This is strictly adhered to here.

You can see how the design of the columns becomes more complex up to the middle column, and then becomes simpler again towards the east, so that the seventh column is relatively simply designed again.

The small domed room is closed off in this way on each side by six columns, the bases of which are designed to hold twelve seats, and here too the principle of development is fully adhered to for the capitals, the bases, the seats and the architraves. When you endeavor to recreate nature, it is the case that you only truly discover your findings in the finished product that you have created. One can – and this is something that only presented itself to me after the design of the matter in the model – one can, if one takes the raised, convex form of the first column, one can place it in the concave form of the seventh column in a truly artistic way, of course with metamorphosis, but with a true one. The second column fits with its raised part into the concave parts of the sixth column, the third into those of the fifth, and the fourth column stands alone as the central column. Of course, the same principle cannot occur in the same way in the six columns. There, the first and the sixth, the second and the fifth, the third and the fourth really correspond to each other as I have just expressed it. It is something that is found throughout nature, that certain polarities occur, and it was interesting that only the idea of development was retained in the formation of the forms, and that the polarities resulted automatically from the pure retention of the developmental idea.

The next picture: Here you have a section through the building in a west-east plane, so that the order of the columns is presented to you exactly as it can be shown in a section.

Here you can see the glass studio in the area below where the windows were cut, which I will talk about later. This glass studio is in some ways a kind of metamorphosis of the whole Goetheanum; only the metamorphosis is brought about by the fact that, firstly, the domes have been pulled apart and a central element has been added, and secondly, the domes have become the same size. For all such inner processes of drawing apart and becoming equally large, metamorphic experiences then arise for the whole organism of a thing. These are then faithfully executed in every detail.

You can also see that the usual geometries in our building have been overcome by the fact that the symmetrical axis has been interrupted to the right and to the left. The idea that each individual piece should be seen in the context of the symmetry of the whole has been applied to the stairs.

You will also see this when you look at the gate for this studio (Fig. 99), with the staircase, the shape of which has been designed in such a way that it really does represent a staircase, precisely because of its shape: you go in, you have a right and a left, while very many stairs that are designed are now really nothing closed, have no right and no left. All these things are to be considered when it comes to a truly artistic creation.

The gate itself is designed in such a way that one recognizes its symmetry as a necessity. When you enter this glass studio, you will also see the lock. It is designed to differ from the usual philistine locks that are otherwise in use and which are really the opposite of anything beautiful.

The next picture: Now you see what has been most contested in a certain way, but which will also be understood over time. It is the building in which the heating and lighting are housed, the boiler house. And it is built according to the principle that what is inside has its envelope in the building. Just as a nutshell is shaped so that it is a shell for a nut, here the shell is entirely appropriate for what is inside, right up to the shapes of the chimney, which is only complete when it is smoking, because the smoke is part of these shapes; it then forms the top of the chimney. So everything is conceived according to the same principle by which nature creates when it forms the nutshell around the nut.

We will now turn our attention to the internal motifs. You have used the organ motif here as a model. The architecture around the organ should be such that the whole structure is organically integrated into it, so that one does not have the feeling that the organ has been placed in some random location, but rather that the organ grows out of the whole organization, as it were.

So, by walking through the space below the model and then turning around, we have the two symmetrical columns in the auditorium with the simplest architrave motif at the top. We will now look at each individual column each time.

And as we advance, we first see here the simplest column, one of the two, and now, after we have let its forms act on our perception, we will look at it in connection with the second column.

We shall see how what is simple here [at the first column] grows downwards, how the lower part grows towards it, and how what grows downwards, what grows from top to bottom, undergoes a certain complication of forms, from top to bottom undergoes a certain complication of forms, thereby pushing forward other rising motifs. This can only be felt by observing the succession of the two columns. It is precisely this succession that must be observed.

You can also see here how the architrave motif becomes more complicated. It is actually the case that by immersing yourself in these forms, you can learn more about the idea of development, the developmental principle, the developmental impulse in nature than through any theoretical discussion. Because nature is such that it creates in images, and it must be emphasized again and again that, even if our philosophers prove that one should work with abstractions, with analyses and with the discursive principle to build a science of nature, then nature simply turns its nose up at this science and does not let itself be grasped in this way; it eludes comprehension and leaves us alone with our abstractions. Because it does not create in natural laws, it creates in images.

But now, when we can rise to imaginations in abstract terms, we enter into nature and understand nature's growth. The entire structure should be designed in such a way that it is simultaneously the great hieroglyph through which the world can be grasped. Wherever you look in this structure, you should have a starting point for understanding the world. That is what is, if I may use the term, secretly woven into this structure, that in looking at these forms, that which, so to speak, governs the world at its core, is presented.

We will now see the second pillar on its own.

And now again the second with the third column in relation, with the modified architrave motifs. You see how here again the forms become more complicated from top to bottom, and how they are met by forms that become more compact towards the bottom. However, these forms can only be produced, one from the other, if the artistic design is based on the same developmental forces that nature uses to form a plant leaf by leaf, or in a series of developing creatures, one species emerges from the other, one species develops out of the other. By imitating nature, such forms are created. And those who immerse themselves in nature will succeed in recognizing the principle of development in nature. Indeed, something has been set up in this building that should inspire people to say: what surrounds me here as something growing, what surrounds me here as something formed, is something that stands as an explanation of the whole surrounding world.

We will now see the third column on its own.

And now we will see the third column in relation to the fourth column again. You can also see that the architrave motifs are becoming more complicated. You just have to imagine how, according to the principle of growth, one emerges from the other, one grows over the other, and you do not need to say: here is a caduceus, but you have a principle of growth that emerges out of it, grows over it, breaks through the overgrowth, and the caduceus does not stand there as an isolated symbol, but as a developmental phenomenon, as a developmental form that emerges from the other. It is the same below with the capital motif.

We will now look at the fourth column on its own.

Now again this column with the following one. You can see how purely by one growing over the other, this caduceus, snake-staff-like structure emerges. It is taken entirely from the growth, not placed as an isolated motif. It is perhaps also cleverer in the usual intellectual sense to throw one motif after the other. That is not what is aimed for here. The aim here is for each motif to emerge from the last, and for the harmony of the motifs to give the actual impression of reality.

The fifth column on its own.

Now again this column with the next. You can see how here, through the continued growth, not a complication occurs, but a simplification. The architrave motifs have long since become simpler; but here you can see how this motif simply continues to grow, grows upwards, and the motif arises in a completely natural way. In growing, there is always a pushing away. The two parts below here grow upwards; this is rejected, and the motif emerges in a natural way. This is eliminated as it grows; on the other hand, this grows downwards and the shape emerges quite organically from what went before.

The sixth motif on its own.

And again this motif together with the next one. You can see how the next motif simply emerges from the previous one by growing further, growing, then overgrowing at the top and finally merging.

Now the seventh motif on its own. Another simplification, but a complication in the lines. Tomorrow I will show you this artistic element, which lies in the complication and simplification, by means of a simple representation on the board.

We have now arrived at the point where the curtain column is, where the large dome space merges into the small one. Here you have the last column, the connection between the large and small dome spaces.

We are now moving further into the small domed room. You can see that it goes into the small domed room.

We have here the order of the columns and the architraves of the small domed room. If you remember how the two motifs were on the other columns, you will see that the forms have been changed to reflect the fact that this is a smaller room with only six columns. You just need to consider the following: If you have seven columns that are supposed to create a unified effect, then you have to give each column a different shape. Then imagine circling the same space with six columns instead of seven. In that case, the distances between the columns, which are one and one-seventh, or 8/7, would be different in relation to the previous ones, and so individual shapes would now be changed. And here, in addition, you have the smaller dome space. This further changed the forms. You see, when something like this is created, you get what I would call a sense of space.

Those who think abstractly – and such thoughts have even appeared in scientific literature – are of the opinion that, for example, one can also imagine a human being as very small, atomistically small, that size itself, the spatial volume, has no relationship to the being. But this is not true. Anyone who has immersed themselves in the essence of artistic creation knows that a particular form can only be reproduced in a particular spatial volume, that the size of the space is in an inner relationship to what is being depicted. If you have conceived of some figure for a particular large space, and you then make it en miniature, it seems distressing. But this feeling must be there. The artistic elements must be coordinated with their spatial content to this extent, otherwise they are not truly artistically designed.

The next picture shows another row of columns from the smaller dome with the corresponding architrave. You can see the slit for the curtain, the first column, the second column and so on. We will study the individual columns in their sequence later.

The first column of the small dome.

The next one will now be more complicated, according to the growth principle.

The next one is more complicated again.

Now it is about simplification, but it is a sham simplification; it is simply an outgrowth.

The next column.

There we come to the two columns that border the east end.

We have the carvings of the east end here. You will see them if you look closely. I would say that the forms here can be felt more than seen. If you look closely, you will find that the carving here in the east end encompasses everything that the other forms of the columns and the architraves contain, but of course modified for the vaulting of the room, metamorphosed. Above it a five-petal flower. Anyone who wants to can imagine a pentagram there, but in the same way that one can imagine one in a five-petal plant leaf in nature. A symbolist would have put any old pentagram there. But then one would be acting according to the principle by which we have often acted. Time and again, we have had to experience that artists came to our branch offices who were unpleasantly touched by the fact that unartistic motifs were found everywhere. A cross that was ugly in design, with seven roses around it, was something that was considered more dignified than something truly alive in artistic forms.

It is precisely when one is able to pour the spiritual out completely into artistic forms that what is to be achieved here is achieved: not intrusive symbols, but a shaping in forms in which the spirit lives. When we describe how the Earth developed from Saturn, the Sun and the Moon [gap in the text], we do so in such a way that what lives in the whole also lives in the ideas of our worldview. However, it does not live by expressing itself symbolically through any form, but rather the forms themselves have real inner forces of growth.

Here you can see this eastern end a little more clearly in its individual forms.

The next picture is a detail of the side of the small domed room.

And now, my dear friends, I have begun to use these pictures to explain something about the building to you. I will continue this discussion tomorrow so that those who are hearing it for the first time will get a complete picture of what our building should be from this presentation. I will continue these reflections tomorrow with the help of more slides.

Translated by Peter Stewart

Allow me today to add something about the architectural idea of Dornach to what I said a few days ago. I have tried to interpret the sequence of columns and column capitals. The question can be raised: Why are there progressively seven columns on each side of the building? And one can think of all kinds of nebulous mysticism in relation to the number seven - just as anthroposophy is generally accused of bringing up all kinds of such things, which one thinks are rooted in all kinds of superstition. But to interpret the seven columns in any other than an artistic way would contradict what lay at the basis of the model's elaboration, of the original work. If one proceeds in such a way that the individual capitals emerge from one another, that is, each successive capital emerges from the previous one, as I described last time, then one concludes that in a certain respect a kind of conclusion is reached with the seventh column. This simply corresponds to the successive feelings in the creation of the form. If one wanted to make an eighth column, one would have to repeat the form - albeit on a higher level. And since everything in an organic building must be based on connecting with the creative forces of nature and of the world-being in general, it is only understandable that that number should emerge which is, so to speak, the leading number for manifold natural phenomena.

We have seven tones in the musical scale. The octave is the repetition of the prime. If we place the phenomenon of light in front of us in the familiar way, we have seven colours in the well-known colour scale where the light shades into colour. The newer chemistry sets up the so-called periodic system, which is also a structure of the atomic weights and properties of the chemical elements according to the number seven. And one who follows organic life finds these numbers everywhere. It is not some superstitious prejudice, but the result of deep observation. And if one's feeling is such that one simply surrenders oneself to observation, dreaming nothing, mystifying nothing, then one will also be able to find the right relationship to the sevenfold-ness of the columns. Everything here has been attempted in such a way that the principle of the organic has been firmly established.

Here you see how the organ has been placed within the whole building in such a way that it does not stand in a corner, but that it has grown out of the forms with the building, so to speak, so that the architecture and sculpture of the building approach the forms created by the arrangement of the organ pipes, do not encompass them, but let them grow out of themselves, so to speak.

What must be considered in such architecture and sculpture is the feeling for the material. It is absolutely a question of the fact that, especially when working in wood, this feeling for the material is perceived on the one hand as something connected with the specific quality of the material in which one is working. But then in wood, because one has essentially a soft form in which one works, one has at the same time, that which makes it easiest to overcome the form as such, and which makes that which is to be revealed, that which is to be revealed artistically, emerges most in such a way that when one works in wood one must directly enter into the secrets of the world's existence.

I just want to draw attention to the following. Assume that one wants to sculpt the human figure in wood. The building will finally be completed here in the east by the fact that under this motif, which is painted in the middle, there will be a wooden sculpture of the same motif.¹ There you will also see the figure of the Christ in connection with Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. So, it was a question of creating a thoroughly idealised and spiritualised human figure out of the wood. With the prerequisites I have just described, it is quite different to work on the head of the human form than on the rest of the organism. These things cannot be approached with abstract knowledge.

The shaping, the forming, is of course just as much within the laws of nature as everything else that in some way arranges nature according to number, measure and the like. When one forms the human head, one has the feeling everywhere: one must work out the form from within, one must try to base it on the feeling that the head is formed from the centre outwards. With the rest of the human organism one has the feeling that one must enter from the outside and, as it were, form the outer surfaces from the outside. One has the feeling that in the case of the head the essential surface is that which lies below, which is therefore inside, which gives itself its curves, its surfaces, from the inside outwards; whereas in the case of the rest of the organism one must consider the outer surfaces as the most important.

By feeling such things, one comes close to the secrets of nature, especially in art. And it must be emphasised again and again that what is called knowledge today cannot lead at all to a real unveiling of the secrets of nature, that in a living comprehension of the ideas which are given to one in laws of nature and the like, one always feels the necessity of ascending from these ideas to that which can only be grasped in an artistic contemplation. And basically, one must not think of the mysteries of the world in any other way than in such a way that so-called scientific knowledge is a stage, but that it must rise to a living artistic comprehension of the world if one really wants to come close to the mysteries of the world. We must not think as we often think today, that art has nothing to reveal of the mysteries of the world, that everything must be left to science.

The only real natural view is the one on which Goethe's conception of the world was based, and which I have already characterised from various sides, - the one that led Goethe to say: art is a revelation of the secret laws of nature, - which would not reveal themselves without the very existence of art.

And so, one could say: In a building like this, a kind of extract of the world's secrets is at the same time presented to the human being. For this reason, many artistic problems arose during the construction of this building. They arose as something self-evident, above all the problem of painting.

On the one hand, it was necessary to express the feelings that could recognise a portrayal of certain mysteries of the world, but on the other hand, one had to direct attention to the artistic means of expression. You do not see in the paintings of the large dome anything symbolic or fantastically speculative, however much some people might believe that. If you look at the painting here at the west end, you will see that there is something in the compositions of colours that looks peculiar.

Now you all know that when you close your eyes, you see something like a mysterious shadow-eye opposite the eye. That which every human being can have before them in this way when the eye is closed, like a kind of shadow-eye, can, however, when one’s inner seeing is particularly formed, come before the soul in a much more elaborate, much more substantial way. It is then, however, no longer as robust, as coarse as the two eyes which one sees as shadow-eyes when one's real eyes are closed, but it contains that which, in a certain way, can be seen spiritually when one's inner attention is directed towards that part of the periphery of the human being which is situated towards the eyes. It is that which then appears to this inspired inner gaze, one might say - a whole world. And the sensation already arises: by looking, as it were, into one's own power of vision, into one's own visual space with one's eyes closed as a human being, one sees before oneself something that is like the beginning of creation.

The beginning of creation is what confronts you here at the west end of the large dome.² And it is not a mere figment of the imagination that up there is the Tree of Paradise, above it a kind of Father-God, that then these two eye-shaped forms appear. All this is something that definitely comes before the inner eye, before the soul's eye with a deepened inner feeling.

In the same way, what you see in the large dome at the eastern end is a kind of impression of the self. This I, which is, if one may say so, a kind of trinity, also reveals itself in these inner perceptions in such a way that it goes on the one hand to the luminous clarity and transparency of the thinking I, on the other hand, at the other pole, as it were, to the will side, to the willing I, and in the middle to the feeling I. At first, this can be expressed abstractly as the thinking, feeling, willing I, as I have just said it, but it is to be felt concretely as a human being who is able to look with love at the colours of nature, who is able to look with devoted love at everything that confronts them in nature for all the senses. When one experiences the I in such a way that at the same time one lets it flow out into the whole of nature, one is aware of the following perceptions:

If you look at a plant in its green colour, in the colour of its blossom, then what you bring before your soul as an image of the plant is basically what you also find when you look, as it is called, into your own inner being. That which is spread out in nature as a carpet of colour, colours itself in that you look into your inner being. And if you, as a human being who loves the world, turn your gaze outwards, turn towards the vastness of the daylight, which stretches into infinite expanses of space, then you feel connected with these expanses of space. By connecting the colours and sounds of these expanses of space with yourself, and by feeling all the configurations that present themselves to you, you feel something that you cannot translate into a symbol with your intellect, but which you can also directly paint artistically and intuitively.

And again, when you let your gaze wander in the direction of the earth's surface, this horizontal plane, let it wander over trees that cover the earth, over all that which expresses itself in the moving trees when the wind rushes through them, then you feel your feeling I, and you get the impulse not to construct this I an abstract design, but to paint it in colours.

If you direct your gaze downwards, so that you feel connected with all that is fruitful on earth, you then feel the need to express your willing I in a colour that imposes itself on you quite naturally.

One must think of the configuration of the ceiling as having been expressed in this way. And because in this way the mystery of the world, which expresses itself in the relationship of the human being to the world, as it can be felt, has been brought here to the ceiling, it was natural that onto this ceiling was also painted some of that which can be felt out of these mysteries of the world.

You will therefore find individual areas covered with that which results from a spiritual cognition of world evolution. These figures that you see here on the left and on the right, which seem to represent mythological figures, they are meant to represent approximately the situation as it was before the great Atlantean catastrophe.

The materialistic theory of evolution is not at all correct in the light of spiritual observation. If we go back in the evolution of humanity, we first come back to the Greek-Latin period, which begins around the eighth century BC. We then come back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, which begins around the turn of the fourth and third millennia before Christ. We return to older periods, and finally we come back to a time which, in terms of spiritual science, must be called the time of the Atlantean catastrophe. There was a great rearrangement of the continents. We gaze back in contemplation to a time in the evolution of the earth when that which is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean was covered by land. But at the same time, one comes back to a period of earthly evolution in which the human being could not yet have existed in the form in which they now exist, in a form shaped in the same way as the muscles and bones of today. If, for instance, you take sea creatures, jellyfish, which you can hardly distinguish from their surroundings, then you come to the material form in which the human being once was on earth, during the old Atlantean time, in which the earth was still covered everywhere with a permanent, dense fog, in which the human being lived and was therefore also had a completely different organic nature. And to the contemplative gaze, the clairvoyant gaze, there arise - if the word is not misunderstood - precisely these forms which are painted here on the left and right of the ceiling.

Something else has been attempted, I would like to say, as a painterly venture. Here you see a head.³ It is not true that when one paints naturalistically, a head must be closed off at the top because that is simply the way naturalistic human heads are. Here the head is not closed off at the top, for the soul and spirit of the ancient Indian, the first civilised human being after the Atlantean catastrophe, is painted here on the wall. And it was necessary to take the risk of not closing off the top of the head, but to leave it open, because in fact, when the Indian is grasped in their time, they present themselves in such a way that they feel in touch with the heavens through their primeval wisdom, that for them, I would like to say, the physical top of the head is lost in the unconscious, and they feel their soul to be reaching out into the vastness of the heavens. That is captured here in painterly form. And this ancient Indian felt connected with the so-called seven Rishis, who poured into them the wisdom of the world in seven rays.

Such things have been tried to be captured here on the ceiling of the auditorium through colours. You can see the truly artistic element that was to be attempted here in this building with regard to painting in the small dome here.

Attempts have been made to create what I would like to call - albeit in an as yet imperfect form - painting out of colour itself. And that seems to me to be connected with the future of the art of painting in general. On the one hand, in the further progress of humanity, we will come closer and closer to the spirit, and on the other hand we will strive more and more to find the spiritual in outer sensory reality.

Then, however, one will be compelled to penetrate oneself inwardly with that which is particularly needed in art: an intense sense of reality. With an intense sense of truth, artistically conceived, one is led to see the true essence of painting in that which is coloured. Is the line a truth? Is the drawing a truth: actually, it is not. Let us look at the line of the horizon: it is there when we capture in colours the blue sky above and the green sea below. If we paint the blue sky at the top and the green sea at the bottom, then the line comes into being by itself as the boundary of the two. But if I draw the line of the horizon with a pencil, that is actually an artistic lie. And you will find that if you have a feeling for the infinite fullness revealed by colour, you can actually create a whole world out of what is coloured.

Red is not just red, red is that which, when one confronts it, means an experience like an attack on our self from the outside world. Red is that which causes one’s soul to flee from that which thus reveals itself as red. Blue is that which invites us to follow it, and a harmony of red and blue can then result in a balance between moving backward and moving forward. In short, if the coloured is experienced, it produces a whole world. And out of the coloured, one can create the form by merely letting the colour in its mutual relationships have an effect on one.

In my first mystery drama, I had a person say that the form of the colour must be the deed in the kind of painting that we are striving toward.⁴ If you look at the small dome here, and if the tinting is just so, that you cannot see the individual figures with it at all, but merely let what is brought as a patches of colour onto this small dome have an effect on each other in their mutual relationships, then you will also get an impression: the impression of a ground of surging colours.

This is first of all that out of which the various forms arise. For those who are able to live into the life of the coloured within themselves, the truly human form, the actions between human forms, the relationships between human forms arise out of the coloured. One has the need to have a blue patch in a certain place, and orange and red nearby. And if one studies this inwardly, intuitively, something like this Faust-like figure, with a floating, angel-like figure in front of it, emerges of its own accord. And one gradually comes to the conclusion, that the blue patch of colour forms itself into a figure reminiscent of the medieval Faust. You will see everywhere in the painting of the small dome that the colouring is the essential thing, and that the forms that are with it have arisen from the colour. Whoever would say: Yes, but one must first think, interpret, if one really wants to feel these individual motifs - is right in a certain sense, if they feel at the same time that here is realised that which I have just characterised as an experiencing of the world of colours.

You can then see how this blue Faust-like figure has emerged here,⁵ underneath it a kind of skeleton, the brown figure, then this orange angel, actually a child, floating towards the face of Faust.

If one first takes the coloured as a basis and then rises from the coloured to the living, then, however, one is faced with the riddle of knowledge of the present human being. The figure of Faust is something that has survived from the 16th century. I would like to say that Faust expresses the protest of the modern human being, who seeks the secrets of the world within themself, versus the human being, who in the Middle Ages still stood in a completely different relationship to the world. The legend of Faust is not something that merely stands for itself alone.

Goethe took up this Faust legend because Goethe was a truly modern human being. But he also transformed the Faust legend of the 16th century. This Faust legend culminates in Faust's encounter with the devil, Faust's confrontation with the forces of the adversary of humanity, his struggle with them. This was intended to express how, as the human being approached modern times, they really became entangled in this struggle. The sixteenth century still felt that those who were brought into this struggle with the devil had to be defeated if they became involved with the devil in any way.

We have the polar opposite of the Faust legend in the Luther legend. Luther at the Wartburg - he is tempted by the devil just like Faust, but he throws the inkwell at the devil's head and drives him away. The Luther legend and the Faust legend are polar opposites for the 16th century.

As you know, anyone who comes to Wartburg Castle will still find the stain preserved from the ink that Luther poured on the devil's head. The custodians tell you, however, that this is always renewed from time to time. But it is there for the visitors.

After Lessing had already pointed out this necessary alteration of the Faust legend, Goethe then transformed the Faust legend of the sixteenth century and portrayed the man Faust as the one who, however, wrestles with the adversary of humanity, with Mephistopheles, but who does not fall prey to him, despite the fact that he responds to him in a certain way, but who achieves his human victory over this adversary who is hostile to humanity.

In this Faust legend, in the whole figure of Faust, is contained the riddle of knowledge of the modern human being. Really, what is called scientific knowledge is basically a caricature of knowledge. That which we develop today by taking possession of the laws of nature and expressing them in abstract propositions, is basically something in which, if we feel it profoundly, we feel to be completely lifeless. When we give ourselves over to abstract ideas, we feel something like a dead soul in us, like a soul corpse. And one who has enough lively feeling, feels in this soul corpse, precisely in what is valued today as the correct, as logical knowledge, something like the approach of death.

This is the feeling that underlies this figure here. And as the counter pole to death, there is the angel-like child floating towards us in orange.

Then the other figures, which are hidden in the whole harmony, are such that the next figures are more or less the figures of a Greek wisdom initiation: a kind of Pallas-Athena figure with the inspiring Apollo, an Egyptian initiate further up, with its inspiring being. Then we come to the whole region of evolving humanity, which strives to experience the human by perceiving duality in the world, good and evil, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. It is represented where this figure below, carrying a child in its hand, has above it the bright, seducing Lucifer and the dark, sinister Ahriman.⁶

This corresponds to the whole region of humanity which extends from Persia to Central Europe and the West, where the human being, if they strive cognitively, has to struggle with dualism, where all the doubts which are caused by being caught between truth and error, between good and evil, are triggered in one’s feelings.

If we approach the middle, in the east, we have this double form there. It is that which will one day grow out of the chaotic Russian. In the Russian soul we have, so to speak, the preparation for the soul-nature of the future, even if it has to work its way through the most diverse chaotic conditions. The human being exists in such a way that they basically always have a second person with them, and this also reveals itself to the contemplative gaze. Every Russian actually has their own human shadow which they carry with them. This then leads to feeling something like an inspiration from the gloomy soul, as is attempted here in the blue, on the other side in the orange angel figure and in the centaur-like figure that is above it. That relationship to nature and to the world, which the Russian soul has as a kind of soul of the future, is depicted there.

And all of this should come together to form the central image, which will then have its counterpart below in the wooden sculpture already mentioned. In the middle, in the east, you see the figure of Christ, above it the figure of Lucifer in red hues, below it, in various shades of brown, the figure of Ahriman. In this is to be felt what actually represents the essence of the human being.⁷

One does not get to know the human being if one only looks at how the human being’s external contours appear to the physical eye. In the physical, the soul and the spirit, the human being carries a trinity within. Physically the human being bears a trinity in the following way. Physically we have within us everything that constantly causes us to age while we are alive, that makes us sclerotic, that makes our limbs calcify, that makes death, as it were, always present in us with its force. That is the physical-ahrimanic working. If this were to get the upper hand, we would fall into old age even as children. But it works in us, and it works physically precisely because it is the solidifying, heavy, calcifying element that leads us towards death.

Above the figure of Christ, we see the figure of Lucifer. It is that physical element in the human being which brings about fever and pleurisy, which in a certain sense always cause us to dissolve, these are the forces of youth, which, if they alone were present, would dissolve the human being.

This polar, circular opposition can be perceived throughout the whole human being. If one feels it in colour, then one feels the luciferic upwards in a red hue, the ahrimanic downwards in a brown hue. And the human being themself is the equilibrium between the two. The human being is actually always the inner state of equilibrium, which, however, must be sought for at every moment, between that which dissolves in warmth, in fever-fire, and the hardening, petrification and solidification which brings death. One will only have a real physiology of the human being when one sees this polarity in each individual organ. Heart, lungs, liver, everything becomes comprehensible only when one sees them in this polarity.

Well, I mean, you can feel all that in what is painted on the ceiling. One could say: so these are symbols after all! - The Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, composed a poem "Ahasver", in which he did not depict human figures in a naturalistic way, but in a spiritual way. He was accused of creating symbols and not real people. He defended himself by saying: "If at the same time one feels so vividly that the figures are living people after all, then they may make a symbolic impression, for who can prevent Nero from being a symbol of cruelty? But one cannot say that Nero was not a real human being because of that!”

These things must be seen in the right light. And to those who do not want something like this to emerge in a new way from the experience of colour, who find it too complicated to look into these things, one must answer: Yes, what should someone who has no sense of anything Christian experience, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper or Raphael's Sistine Madonna? Just as Christianity is necessary there, but even then, when Christianity is present, everything can be perceived from the coloured elements on the surface: so, when there is that very elementary, natural way of looking at the world, to which this building wants to bear witness, all that can be grasped not in abstract terms but in direct, living contemplation.

And that is what is really important about this building: that it is not fantasised about, not interpreted, but that the people who enter it, or who look at it from the outside, become absorbed in the forms, in the colours, and take in what is there in their immediate inner perception. Then we shall see, when we gradually find our way into this building, that it does indeed represent at least an attempt - everything is imperfect at the beginning - at least an attempt to come so close to the meaning of human evolution that it produces, precisely out of the spiritual life necessary for the present, something artistic, just as the various ages have produced something artistic out of their particular conception of the world.

Let us put ourselves back for a moment into the Greek heart, into the Greek soul. Let us put ourselves back into that soul which, with inner sincerity and honesty, could make the traditional statement: Better a beggar here on earth than a king in the kingdom of shadows. The Greek felt bound to the earth by the peculiarity of the spirit of the age. If one may say so, the Greeks appreciated everything that was on earth through the forces of the earth's gravity as something that adorned and covered this earth. They felt the forces of the earth's gravity. And in the building of their temples they expressed how they experienced the forces of this earthly gravity. When in primeval times, the human being looked up to the immortal, to the eternal in the human soul, they looked back to the ancestors. Those souls, which were the souls of the ancestors, the souls of the forefathers, gradually became for them the souls of the gods. And the graves of the ancestors remained for them a sacred place which enclosed something spiritual within itself. For a certain cultural current, the tomb is the first building, the building of the human soul that has left the earthly. In the construction of the Greek temple, one still feels something of an echo of the construction of the tomb. And the melancholy building of the tomb has risen in a joyful way in the building of the Greek temple, in that the departed human soul, which was once divinely worshipped as the ancestral soul, has become the god. The building over the ancestral grave, where the soul, the divinely worshipped ancestral soul was to be given a resting place, became the temple of the god Apollo, Zeus, Athena. And the temple enclosure became the extension of that which once existed as an ancestral tomb. As the ancestral soul became the god, so the tomb became the Greek temple. Just as the ancestral soul was looked upon as the past, and the building of the tomb thus took on a tragic aspect, so the building of the tomb became the building of the temple in its cheerfulness, in its joyfulness, because it had now become the envelope not of the departed soul but of the immortal soul of the gods existing in the present.

One can only think of a Greek temple as the dwelling house of the god. The Greek temple is not perfect in itself. There can only be a temple of Apollo, a temple of Zeus, a temple of Athena. The Greek went to the temple knowing that this was where the god lived.

If we leave out some of the architectural styles, we can then move on to the example of the Gothic building, the cathedral. Let us look again at the form of the cathedral: We no longer see in it any reminiscence of the tomb, at most this is preserved in an inorganic way through tradition, in that the altar is reminiscent of the gravestone, but this is brought into the whole in an inorganic way; the Gothic architectural idea is something different. The Greek temple is that which has shaped its forms through the conquest of the earth's gravitational forces. How could one form that which grows out of the construction of the tomb, that which rises over the earthly tomb, over that which has been lowered into the earth, in any other way than by conquering the forces of the earth's gravity through the force-dynamics, through the form of the building, by mastering in the supporting column, in the supported beam, the forces of gravity which are the forces of the earth. Later, feeling does not go to the earth, not to the ancestral soul that has disappeared: it lifts itself out and goes into the expanses of the world to the God above. Accordingly, the Gothic architectural forms take on their special form.

The striving form of the gothic building is not the overcoming of weight: the most important thing in the form of the gothic building is mutual support. Nowhere do we actually see bearing, we see striving upward. We do not see weight, but a striving upwards toward heaven.

Therefore, the Gothic cathedral is not the dwelling place of any gods, like the Greek temple, but the Gothic cathedral is the meeting place of the faithful, the meeting place of the congregation. If one enters a Greek temple from which the image of the god has been removed, the Greek temple has no meaning. A Greek temple without the image of the god is meaningless. The image of the god must be supplemented in the imagination. If you go into a Gothic cathedral without mass being said and preached, or without a congregation praying together - it is not complete. The living congregation belongs there. And the word for cathedral, “Dom”, also expresses the flowing together of the congregation. Duma and Dom have the same origin. And when the Narodnaya Duma got its name, it was out of the feeling of working together, just as the Gothic cathedral got its name out of the feeling that people must flow together with their souls and together direct their feelings upwards in the direction of the striving Gothic forms.

We see how the perception of artistic forms demonstrates a certain progress in the course of human evolution. Today we no longer live in a time in which one feels as one did in the period when the Gothic flourished. Today we live in a time in which the human being must penetrate deeper into their own inner being. Today we can only establish a social community by each person experiencing "know thyself" in a higher sense than was previously the case - even if it resounds through the ages as the old Apollonian demand of "know thyself" - and fulfilling it in a deeper sense. Only by becoming individualities in the most intensive sense can we form human communities today.

When one immerses oneself in the forms of this Goetheanum, in a feeling way, what do they speak to us? What do they reveal to our gaze? If we want to speak about them, we must try to place before the human soul exactly the same thing that can be expressed through the anthroposophical world view as the mystery of the human being and the mystery of the world, as they reveal themselves to the human being, precisely through ideas, through concepts. The Greek temple represented the dwelling place of the God who descended to earth. The Gothic cathedral represented that which evokes in one the urge to feel "know thyself" and to be together with other people precisely out of this recognition.

When you enter this house, you should have the feeling: In the forms, in the paintings, in everything that is there, one finds the mystery of the human being, and one likes to unite with other people here, because here everyone finds that which reveals their human value, their human dignity, in which one likes to unite lovingly with other people.

In this way, this building wants to welcome all those who enter it, who approach it.

• 1. See the illustration in Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum. Published by Philos.-Anthrop. Verlag.
• 2. See the designs for the painting of the large dome in the first Goetheanum, picture 2 and 3.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's designs for the large dome in the first Goetheanum (an art portfolio executed by Alinari in Florence), Plate VI: The Indian. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 4. The Portal of Initiation. A Rosicrucian Mystery, through Rudolf Steiner. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 5. See: Spiritual Science explanations of Goethe's Faust, Volume I (with 2 picture supplements: Faust, Flying child from the small dome of the burnt Goetheanum) Faust, the striving human being, and Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, with 104 illustrations. Philos. Anthropos. Verlag.
• 6. See Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, Figure 75-79.
• 7. We refer to the colour print by Hanfstaengl of the design sketched by R. Steiner for this picture of the painting of the dome. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag am Goetheanum)

On a night when the stars are clear and we gaze at the expanse of the heavens, it is a feeling of sublimity that first flows through our souls as we let the innumerable wonders of the stars work upon us. This feeling of sublimity will be stronger in one person, less strong in another, according to his particular individual character. When faced with the appearance of the starry heavens, however, a person will soon be aware of his longing to understand something of these wonders of cosmic space. Least of all in regard to the starry heavens will he be deterred by the thought that this direct feeling of sublimity and grandeur might disappear if he wishes to penetrate the mystery of the starry world with his comprehension. We are justified in feeling that understanding and comprehension in this sphere cannot injure the direct feeling that arises in us. Just as in other spheres it soon becomes evident to a greater or lesser degree that spiritual scientific knowledge enhances and strengthens our feelings and experiences if only we have a healthy understanding (Sinn), so will a person become more and more convinced that, regarding these sublime cosmic facts, his life of feeling will not wither in the least when he learns to grasp what is really passing through space or remaining, in appearance, at rest.

In any presentation it is, of course, possible to deal only with a tiny corner of the world, and we must take time to learn to grasp, step by step, the facts of the world. Today we will concern ourselves with a part, a small, trifling part, of the world of space in connection with the life of man. Although a person may dimly divine it, he will learn with greater and greater precision through spiritual science that he is born out of the totality of the universe and that the mysteries of the universe are connected with his own special mysteries. This becomes particularly evident when we enter with exactitude into certain mysteries of existence.

A contrast is manifest in human life as it evolves on this earth—a contrast to be found everywhere and at all times. It is the contrast between the masculine and the feminine. We know that this contrast in the human race has existed since the time of ancient Lemuria; we know, too, that it will last for a certain period in our earthly existence and ultimately resolve itself again into a higher unity.

If we recollect that all human life is born out of cosmic life, we may then ask, if it is indeed true that what has shown itself in human life since the old Lemurian time as the contrast between man and woman has to a certain extent accompanied evolution on the earth, can we find something in the universe that in a higher sense represents this contrast? Can we find in the cosmos that which comes to birth in the masculine and feminine on earth? This question can be answered.

If we stand on the ground of spiritual science, we cannot proceed according to the maxims of a present-day materialist. A materialist can visualize nothing apart from what lives in his immediate environment and is therefore prone to seek for this contrast of masculine and feminine in everything, whereas it now applies only to human and animal life on earth. This is an offense of our time. We must bear clearly in mind that the designations “masculine” and “feminine” in the human kingdom hold good in the strict sense only since the Lemurian epoch and up to a certain moment in earthly evolution and, in so far as animals and plants are concerned, only during the ancient Moon evolution and the earth evolution.

The question remains, however: are masculine and feminine as they exist on earth born out of a higher, cosmic contrast? If we were able to find this contrast, a wonderful and at first mysterious connection would emerge between this phenomenon and a phenomenon in the cosmos. There are, of course, contrasts everywhere in the cosmos, but one must understand how to discover them in the right way. The first contrast in the cosmos whose significance for human life we can mention is that between sun and earth. In our various studies of earthly evolution we have seen how the sun separated from our earth, how both became independent bodies in space, but we may also ask: how does the contrast between sun and earth in the macrocosm, in the great world, repeat itself in man, the microcosm? Is there in the human being himself a contrast that corresponds to the contrast between sun and earth in our planetary system? Yes, there is. In the human organism—the whole organism, bodily and spiritual—it occurs between all that expresses itself externally in the organ of the head and all that expresses itself externally in the organs of movement, the hands and feet. All that is expressed in the human being in this contrast between the head and the organs of movement corresponds to the contrast or polarity that arises in the cosmos between sun and earth. We shall soon see how this is consistent with the correspondence between the sun and the heart. The point here, however, is that in the human being there is on the one hand the head and on the other what we call the organs of movement.

You can readily understand that, in so far as his limbs were concerned, man was a totally different being during the ancient Moon evolution. It was the earth that made him into an upright being, one who uses hands and feet as he does today; again, it was only on the earth that his head was enabled to gaze freely out into cosmic space, because the forces of the sun raised him upright, whereas during the ancient Moon evolution his spine was parallel with the surface of the moon. We may say that the earth is responsible for man being able to use his legs and feet as he does today. The sun, working upon the earth from outside and forming the contrast with the earth, is responsible for the fact that the human head, with its countenance, has in a sense torn itself free from bondage to the earth and is able to gaze freely out into space. That which in the planetary system is the contrast between sun and earth appears within the human being as the contrast between head and limbs. We find this contrast of head and limbs in every human being, whether man or woman, and we also find that here, in all essentials, men and women are alike, so that we can say that the contrast corresponding to that between sun and earth expresses itself in the same way in men and in women. The earth works to the same extent upon woman as upon man; woman is bound to the earth in the same way as man, and the sun frees the head of woman and of man alike from bondage to the earth.

We shall be able to gauge the profundity of this contrast if we remember that those beings, for example, who fell into dense matter too early, as it were—the mammals—were not able to attain free sight into cosmic space; their countenance is bound to earthly existence. For the mammals, the contrast between sun and earth did not become, in the same sense, a contrast in their own being. For this reason we may not speak of a mammal as a microcosm, but we can call the human being a microcosm, and in the contrast between head and limbs we have evidence of the microcosmic nature of man.

Here we have an example that at the same time shows how infinitely important it is not to become one-sided in our studies. One can count the bones of man and the bones of the higher mammals and also the muscles of man and of the mammals, and the connection that one can draw from this has led in modern times to a world view that places man in closest proximity to the higher mammals. That this can happen proceeds simply from the fact that people have yet to learn through spiritual science how important it is not merely to have truths but to add something to them. Be conscious, my dear friends, that in this moment something of great importance is being said, something that the anthroposophist should inscribe in his memory and in his heart: many things are true, but merely to know that a thing is true is not enough! For example, what modern natural science says about the kinship of man with the apes is undoubtedly true. With a truth, however, the point is not merely to possess it as a truth but to know the importance of it in the explanation of existence as a whole. A seemingly quite ordinary, everyday truth may fail to be regarded as decisive only because its importance is not recognized.

A certain familiar truth, known to everyone, becomes deeply significant for our whole doctrine of earthly evolution if its real importance is only understood: the truth that man is the only being on earth who can direct his countenance with real freedom out into cosmic space. If we compare the human being in this respect with the apes who stand near to him, we must say that, although the ape has tried to raise himself into the upright posture, he has somehow made a hash of it ... and that is the point. One must have insight into the relative weight of a truth! We must feel the importance of the fact that man has this advantage, and then we shall also be able to relate it to the other cosmic fact just characterized: it is not the earth alone but the sun in contrast to the earth—something beyond the earth—that above all makes man a citizen of heavenly space and tears him away from earthly existence. In a sense we may say that this whole cosmic adjustment that we know today as the contrast between sun and earth had to be made in order that man might be given this place of precedence in our universe. This constellation of sun and earth had to be brought about for the sake of man, that he might be raised from the posture of the animals. In the human being we thus have the same contrast that we see when we look out into heavenly space and behold the sun with its counterpart, the earth.

Now the question arises: can we discover in the cosmos the other contrast that is found on earth, that between masculine and feminine? Is there perhaps something in our solar system that brings about, as a kind of mirror-image on earth, the contrast between man and woman? Yes, this higher polarity can be designated as the contrast between the cometary and lunar natures, between comets and the moon. Just as the contrast of sun-earth is reflected in our head and limbs, so in feminine and masculine is reflected the contrast of comet-moon.

This leads us into certain deep cosmic mysteries. Strange as it may sound to you, it is true that the different members of human nature that can confront us in the physical body are in different degrees an expression of the spiritual that lies behind them. In the physical body of man, it is the head, and in a certain other sense the limbs, that correspond most closely in outer form to their underlying, inner, spiritual forces. Let us be clear about this: everything that confronts us externally in the physical world is an image of the spiritual; the spiritual has formed it. If the spiritual is forming something physical, it can form it in such a way that at a certain stage of evolution this physical form is either more similar or less similar to it, or is more or less dissimilar from it. Only head and limbs resemble as external structures their spiritual counterparts. The rest of the human body does not at all resemble the spiritual picture. The outer structure of man, with the exception of head and limbs, is in the deepest sense a mirage, and those whose clairvoyant sight is developed always see the human being in such a way that a true impression is made only by the head and limbs. Head and limbs give a clairvoyant the feeling that they are true; they do not deceive. With regard to the rest of the human body, however, clairvoyant consciousness has the feeling that it is untrue form, that it is something that has deteriorated, that it does not at all resemble the spiritual behind it. Moreover, everything that is feminine appears to clairvoyant consciousness as if it had not advanced beyond a certain stage of evolution but had remained behind.

Diagram 1 Click image for large view

We can also say that evolution has advanced forward from point A to B. If C were a kind of normal development, then we would be at point C as far as the human head and limbs are concerned. What appears in the form of the female body has remained as if it were at D, not advancing to a further point of development. If it will not be misunderstood, we can say that the female body, as it is today, has remained behind at a more spiritual stage; in its form it has not descended so deeply into matter as to be in accord with the average stage of evolution. The male body, however, has advanced beyond the average stage—apart from head and limbs. He has overshot this average stage, arriving at point E. A male body, therefore, has deteriorated, because it is more material than its spiritual archetype, because it has descended more deeply into the material than is called for today by the average stage of evolution. In the female body we thus have something that has remained behind normal evolution and in the male body something that has descended more deeply into the material than have the head and limbs.

This same contrast is also to be found in our solar cosmos.

If we take our earth and the sun as representing normal evolutionary stages, the comet has not advanced to this normal stage. It corresponds in our cosmos to the feminine in the human being. Hence, we must see cometary existence as the cosmic archetype of the feminine organism. Lunar existence is the counterpart of masculine existence. This will be clear to you from what has been said before. We know from before that the moon is a piece of the earth that had to be separated off. If it had remained in the earth, the earth could not have gone forward in its evolution. The moon had to be separated off on account of its density. The contrast between comet and moon out in the cosmos is therefore the archetype of feminine and masculine in the human being.

This matter is exceedingly interesting, because it shows us that whether we are considering an earthly being, such as man, or the whole universe, we must not simply think of one member side by side with others as they appear to us in space; if we do this we give ourselves up to a dreadful illusion. The various members of a human organism are, of course, beside one another, and the ordinary materialistic anatomist will regard them as being at equal stages of development. For one who studies the truth of things, however, there are differences, inasmuch as one thing has reached a certain point of evolution, another has not—although it has made some progress—and another has passed beyond this point. A time will come when the whole human organism will be studied along these lines; only then will an occult anatomy exist in the real sense. As I have told you, things that lie side by side can be at different stages of evolution, and the organs in the human body are only to be understood when one knows that each of them has reached a quite different stage of evolution.

If you recall that the ancient Moon evolution preceded that of our earth, you will realize from what has just been said that although the present moon is certainly part of the ancient Moon evolution, it is not now at that stage of evolution and does not represent it. The moon has not only advanced to the earth stage but has even gone beyond this; it was not able to wait until the earth becomes a Jupiter, and it has therefore fallen into torpor in so far as its material side is concerned—not, of course, in its spiritual relationships.

The comets represent the relationship of the ancient Moon to the sun that prevailed at a certain time in the ancient Moon evolution. The comet has remained at this stage, but now it must express this somewhat differently. The comet has not advanced to the point of normal earthly existence. Just as in the present moon we have a portion of a later Jupiter that was born much too early and is therefore torpid, incapable of life, so in our comets we have a portion of the ancient Moon existence projecting into our present earthly evolution.

I would like to mention here parenthetically a noteworthy point, through which our spiritual scientific ways of studying have won a little triumph. Those who were present at the eighteen lectures on cosmogony that I gave in Paris in 1906 (see Note 2) will remember that I spoke then of certain things that were not touched upon in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science (see Note 3) (one cannot always present everything; one must not write one book but endless books if one wishes to develop everything). In Paris I developed a point bearing more upon the material, chemical aspect of the subject, as it were. I said that the ancient Moon evolution—which projects itself in present cometary existence, because the comet has remained at this stage and, as far as present conditions allow, expresses those old relationships in its laws—I said that this ancient Moon evolution differs from that of the earth in that nitrogen and certain nitrogenous compounds—cyanide, prussic acid compounds—were as necessary to the beings on the ancient Moon as oxygen is necessary to the beings of our present earth. Cyanide and similar substances are compounds that are deadly to the life of higher beings, leading to their destruction. Yet compounds of carbon and nitrogen, compounds of prussic acid and the like, played an entirely similar role to that of oxygen on the earth.

These matters were developed at that time in Paris out of the whole scope of spiritual science, and those who inscribed them in their memories will have had to say to themselves that, if this is true, there must be proof of something like compounds of carbon and nitrogen in today's comets. You may recall (the information was brought to me during the lecture course on St. John and the other three Gospels in Stockholm) that the newspapers have now been saying that the existence of cyanide compounds has actually been proved in the spectrum of the comet. This is a brilliant confirmation of what spiritual research was able to say earlier, and it has at last been confirmed by physical science. As proofs of this kind are always being demanded of us, it is quoted here. When such a striking case is available, it is important for anthroposophists to point it out and—without pride—to remind ourselves of this little triumph of spiritual science.

So you see, we can truly say that the contrast between masculine and feminine has its cosmic archetype in the contrast between comet and moon. If we could proceed from this (it is not, of course, possible to go into all the ramifications) and could demonstrate the full effect of the body of the moon and of the comets, you would realize how great and powerful it is for the soul—how it surpasses all general feelings of sublimity—to experience that here on earth we see something reflected and that this, in its functioning, is an exact expression of the contrast between comet and moon in the universe. It is possible to indicate only a few of these matters. A few are very important, and to these we will allude.

Above all, we must become conscious of how the contrast expressed in comet and moon works upon the human being. We must not think that this contrast expresses itself only in what constitutes man and woman in humanity, because we must be clear that masculine characteristics exist in every woman and feminine characteristics in every man. We also know that the etheric body of man is female and that of the woman, male, and this at once makes the matter extremely complicated. We must realize that the masculine-feminine contrast is thus reversed for the etheric bodies of man and woman, and so are the cometary and lunar effects. These effects are also there in relation to the astral body and the I. Hence the contrast between comet and moon is of deep, incisive significance for the evolution of humanity on earth. The fact that the Moon evolution has a mysterious connection with the relationship of the sexes, a connection that eludes exoteric ways of thinking, you can recognize in something that might seem entirely accidental, namely, that the product of the union of male and female, the child, needs ten lunar months for its development from conception to birth. Even modern science reckons not with solar but with lunar months, because there the relation between the moon, representing the masculine in the universe and the earth, and the cometary nature, representing the feminine in the universe, is decisive, reflecting itself in the product of the sexes.

If we now regard this from the other side, from the comets, we have another important consequence for the evolution of humanity. The cometary nature is as though feminine, and in the movements of the comets, in the whole style of their appearance from time to time, we have a kind of projection of the archetype of the feminine nature in the cosmos. It is something that really gives the impression of having come to a halt before reaching the normal, average stage of evolution. This cosmic feminine—the expression is not quite apt, but we lack suitable terms—shoots in from time to time like something that stirs up our existence from the depths of a nature existing before the dawn of history. In the mode of its appearance, a comet resembles the feminine. We can also express it this way: as what is done by a woman more out of passion, out of feeling, is related to the dry, reasonable, masculine judgment, so is the regular, reasonable course of the moon related to the cometary phenomenon that projects apparently irregularly into our existence. This is the peculiarity of feminine spiritual life. Mark well—I do not mean the spiritual life of woman but the feminine spiritual life. There is a difference. The spiritual life of a woman naturally includes masculine characteristics.

Feminine spiritual life, whether in a man or a woman, projects into our existence something of the primitive, something elemental, and this is also what a comet does. Wherever this contrast between man and woman confronts us, we can see it, because it expresses itself with uncommon clarity.

People who judge everything by externals criticize spiritual science because many women are drawn to it at the present time. They do not comprehend that this is quite understandable simply because the average brain of a man has overstepped a certain average point of evolution; it has become drier, more wooden, and therefore clings more rigidly to traditional concepts; it cannot free itself of the prejudices in which it is stuck. Someone who is studying spiritual science may at times feel it difficult that in this incarnation he must use this masculine brain! The masculine brain is stiff, resistant, and more difficult to manipulate than the feminine brain, which can easily overcome obstacles that the masculine brain, with its density, erects. Hence the feminine brain can more readily follow what is new in our way of looking at the world. To the extent to which the masculine and feminine principles come to expression in the structure of the human brain, it can even be said that for our present time it is most uncomfortable and unpleasant to be obliged to use a masculine brain. The masculine brain must be trained much more carefully, much more radically, than a feminine brain. You can thus see that it is not really so extraordinary that women today find their bearings more easily in something as eminently new as spiritual science.

These matters are of the greatest importance in the history of culture, but one can hardly discuss them anywhere today except in anthroposophical circles. Except in our circles, who will take seriously the fact that to have a masculine brain is not so comfortable as to have a feminine brain? This, naturally, does not imply by any means that many a brain in a woman's body has not thoroughly masculine traits. These things are not as simple as we suppose with our modern notions.

The cometary nature is something elemental; it stirs things up and in a certain sense is necessary in order that the advancing course of evolution may be supported in the right way from the cosmos. People have always had a premonition that this cometary nature is connected in some way with earthly existence. It is only in our day that they reject any such idea. Only think what a face the average scholar of today would make if the same thing happened to him as happened between Professor Bode and Hegel. Hegel once stated bluntly to an orthodox German professor that good wine years followed comets, and he tried to prove this by pointing to the years 1811 and 1819, good wine years that were preceded by comets. This made a fine commotion! But Hegel said that his statement was as well founded as many calculations concerning the courses of stars, that it was an empirical matter that was verified in these two cases. Even apart from such comical episodes, however, we can say that people have always conjectured something in this connection. It is not possible to enter into details now, since that would be an endless task, but we wish to shed some light on one main influence related to human evolution.

The comets appear at great intervals of time. Let us ask: when they appear, is their relation to human evolution as a whole such that they stimulate, as it were, the feminine principle in human nature? There is, for example, Halley's Comet, which now again has a certain actuality. (see Note 4) The same could be said of many other comets. Halley's Comet has a quite definite task, and everything else that it brings with it stands in a particular connection to this task. Halley's Comet—we are speaking here of its spiritual aspect—has the task of impressing on human nature its own special being in such a way that this human nature and essence take a further step in the development of the I when the comet comes near the earth. It is that step which leads the I out to concepts on the physical plane. To begin with, the comet has its special influence on the two lower members of human nature, on what is masculine and feminine; there it joins company with the workings of the moon. When the comet is not there, the workings of the moon are one-sided; the workings change when the comet is present.

This is how the working of the comet now expresses itself: when the human I takes a step forward, then, in order that the whole man can advance, the physical and etheric or life bodies must be correspondingly transformed. If the I is to think differently in the nineteenth century from the way it thought in the eighteenth, there must also be something that changes the outer expression of the I in the physical and etheric bodies—and this something is the comet! The comet works upon the physical and etheric or life bodies of man in such a way that they actually create organs, delicate organs that are suitable for the further development of the I—the I-consciousness as it has developed especially since the imbedding of the Christ impulse in the earth. Since that time the significance of the comet's appearance is that the I, as it develops from stage to stage, receives physical and etheric organs it can use. Just think of it—strange as it may sound and crazy as our contemporaries will find it—it is nonetheless true that if the I of a Büchner, of a Moleschott, (see Note 5) and of other materialists had not possessed, around the years 1850–60, suitable physical and etheric brains, their thinking could not have been as materialistic as it was. Then, perhaps, the worthy Büchner would have made a good, average clergyman. For him to be able to arrive at the thoughts expressed in his Kraft und Stoff, it was necessary not only for his I to evolve in this way but for the corresponding organization to be present in the physical and etheric bodies. If we are searching for the evolution of the I itself, we need only look around at the spiritual-cultural life of the period. If we wish, however, to know how it was that these people of the nineteenth century had a physical brain and an etheric body suitable for materialistic thinking, we must say that in 1835 Halley's Comet appeared. In the eighteenth century there was the so-called Enlightenment, which was also a certain stage in the development of the I. In the second half of the eighteenth century the average human being had in his brain this spiritual configuration that is called “Enlightenment.” What made Goethe so angry was that a few ideas were thrown out and people declared themselves satisfied. What was it that created the brain for this “Age of Enlightenment?” Halley's Comet of the year 1759 created this brain. That was one of its central effects.

Every cometary body thus has a definite task. Human spiritual life takes its course with a certain cosmic regularity, as it were—a bourgeois regularity one could say. Just as a man undertakes with an earthly bourgeois regularity certain activities day by day, like lunch and dinner, so does human spiritual life take its course with cosmic regularity. Into this regularity there come other events, events that in ordinary, bourgeois life are also unlike those of every day and through which a certain noticeable advance occurs. So it is, for example, when a child is born into a family. The cosmic regularity manifesting in the whole of human evolution takes its course under the influence of the moon, of the lunar body. In contrast to these events, there are things that always bring about a step forward, that are naturally distributed over wider spans of time; these events occur under the influence of the comets. The various comets have here their different tasks, and when a comet has served its purpose it splinters. Thus we find that from a certain point of time onward, some comets appear as two and then splinter. They dissolve when they have completed their tasks. Regularity, all that belongs to the common round, is connected with the lunar influence; the entry of an elemental impulse, always incorporating something new, is connected with the influence of the comets. So we see that these apparently erratic wanderers in the heavens have their rightful place and significance in the whole structure of our universe.

You can well imagine that when something new, like a product of the cosmic feminine, breaks into the evolution of humanity, it can cause tumults that are obvious enough but that people prefer not to notice! It is possible, however, to make people conscious that certain events of earthly existence are connected with the existence of comets. Just as something new, a gift from the woman, may enter into the everyday bustle of the family, so it is with the comets. As when a new little child is born, so it is when, through the return of a comet, something quite new is produced. We must remember, however, that with certain comets the I is always driven out more and more into the physical world, and this is something we must resist. If the influence of Halley's Comet were to continue, a new appearance of it might bring about a great enhancement of Büchnerian thought, and that would be a terrible misfortune. A reappearance of Halley's Comet should therefore give us warning that it might prove to be an evil guest if we were simply to give ourselves up to it, if we were not to resist its influence. It is a matter of holding fast to higher, more significant workings and influences of the cosmos than those of Halley's Comet. It is necessary, however, that human beings should regard this comet as an omen; they should realize that things are no longer as they were in earlier times, when in a sense it was fruitful for humanity that it should come under these influences. This influence is no longer fruitful. Human beings must now unite themselves with different powers in order to balance this dangerous influence from Halley's Comet. When it is said that Halley's Comet can be a warning; that its influence, working alone, might make people superficial and lead the I more and more onto the physical plane; and that precisely in our days this must be resisted—this truly is said not for the sake of reviving an old superstition. The resistance can occur only through a spiritual view of the world, such as that of anthroposophy, replacing the evolutionary trend caused by Halley's Comet.

It could be said that once again the Lord is displaying His rod out there in the heavens in order to say to human beings through this omen: now is the time to kindle the spiritual life! On the other hand, is it not wonderful that cometary existence takes hold of the depths of life, including the animal and plant life that is bound up with human life? Those who pay close enough attention to such things would observe how there is actually something altogether different in the blossoming of flowers from what is usually the case. These things are there, but they are easily overlooked, just as people so often overlook the spirit, do not wish to see the spirit.

We may now ask: is there something in the cosmos that corresponds to the ascent to a spiritual life that has just been indicated? We have seen that head and limbs and masculine and feminine have polar contrasts in the cosmos. Is there something in the cosmos that corresponds to this welling up of the spiritual, to this advance of man beyond himself, from the lower to the higher I?

We will ask ourselves this question tomorrow in connection with the greatest tasks of spiritual life in—our time. Today I wished to give the preliminaries, in order that tomorrow we may understand through greater relationships an important question of the present time. Much that has been said today is admittedly remote, but we are living in a cometary year. It is therefore good to say something about the mysterious relationship of cometary existence to our earthly existence. Beginning with this, we will speak tomorrow about the great spiritual meaning of our time.

In the early lectures of this Course it will be necessary to repeat certain things that were said in explanation of the Gospel of St. Luke. There are facts and happenings in the life of Christ Jesus which cannot be understood unless these two Gospels are compared.

For any deeper understanding of the Gospel of St. Matthew it is of primary importance to know that in respect of his physical body, the Individuality with whom this record is primarily concerned had descended from Abraham through three times fourteen generations; he therefore represented a kind of quintessence of the whole Hebrew race. Spiritual Science knows that this Individuality and the original Zoroaster or Zarathustra were one and the same.

In the lecture yesterday some idea was given of the external scene of Zarathustra's activities in the very ancient times in which he lived, and now the views of life and the world prevailing in his environment must also be considered. Principles of profound significance were contained in the world-view held by men in those regions and to speak of only a few of the teachings that are rightly regarded as having been given by the first Zarathustra is to point to deep foundations of all post-Atlantean thought.

External history itself tells us of the two fundamental principles underlying the teachings of Zarathustra: the principle of Ormuzd, the Good Being of Light, and that of Ahriman, the Being of Darkness and Evil. But even in exoteric presentations of this religious system it is emphasized that these two, principles—Ormuzd or Ahura Mazdao, and Ahriman—derive from one universal principle: Zeruane Akarene.

What is this single, undivided origin, from which the other two principles—at war with one another in the world—derive? Zeruane Akarene is generally translated ‘uncreated Time’. The primal principle of which Zarathustra's teaching tells may therefore be thought of as the calm, as yet undisturbed flow of cosmic Time. Moreover, the very sense of the words implies that it is meaningless to pursue the question further—to ask what was the origin of this calm flow of Time. It is important to realise once and for always that one may speak of something in cosmic existence without being justified in putting further questions, let us say, about the causes of a First Principle such as this. Whenever mention is made of a cause, abstract thinking will seldom refrain from asking further questions about the cause of that cause, and so on, forcing the concepts back as it were to infinity But when there is a desire to stand firmly on the ground of Spiritual Science, genuine meditation will make it clear that questioning about causes must end somewhere and that to continue it beyond a certain point is merely to indulge in fantasy.

In the book Occult Science—an Outline I referred to this form of mental procedure. As an example, I said that the sight of wheel-tracks on a road may evoke the question: What has caused them? The answer is: The wheels of a cart. Further questions might be: Where, exactly, are the wheels joined to the cart? Why do they make tracks and why was the cart being driven along the road? Such questions can be answered. The cart made the tracks because it was being driven along the road and it was driven because someone wanted to be carried in it—but this kind of questioning leads finally to the intention which caused the person concerned to use the cart. And if a halt is not made here, further questions regarding the cause of the intention lose point and become no more than a game.

The same is true in connection with the great questions of Cosmogony. Somewhere our questioning must end. For the deeper teachings of Zoroastrianism it is meaningless to go back beyond the calm flow of ‘uncreated Time’.

We now see that Zoroastrianism divides Time itself again into two principles, or—better said—speaks of two principles proceeding from Time: a good principle of Light characterized as that of Ormuzd, and an evil principle of Darkness, that of Ahriman. This dual conception is based upon a profoundly significant truth, namely that all Evil in the world, everything that in its physical image must be called dark and sinful, was not originally so. I said that in ancient Persian thought, the wolf, for example—which in a certain way represented something savage and evil, an outcome of the working of the Ahriman-principle—was regarded as having degenerated; when left to itself the Ahriman-principle could become active in it. Thus the wolf had descended from a being in which the presence of the Good cannot be denied. According to the conceptions of the ancient Persians and the earliest Aryan peoples, the fundamental principle in evolution is that Evil comes into being because something that was good in the form in which it existed in an earlier epoch retains this form in a later age; in failing to transform itself it becomes retrogressive, for it preserves the form suitable for an earlier time. Therefore the cause of all Evil :all Darkness, was to the earliest Aryan peoples simply this: a form of being that was good in a previous epoch continues without change into later times and the consequence of the impact of such a form with one that has made progress is a. battle between the two—the battle between Good and Evil. So in the thought of ancient Persia, Evil is not absolute Evil but, rather, Good manifesting out of its appropriate time, something that once, in an earlier period, was good but is no longer so. Evil in the present, therefore, manifests in the form of events through which conditions suitable for the past are carried into the present. When there is as yet no conflict between the earlier and the later, Time is still undifferentiated, not divided into single ‘moments’.

This profoundly significant world-view held by very early post-Atlantean peoples can be regarded as, the basis of, Zoroastrianism; it includes the concept that was characterized in the lecture yesterday and was dominant in those who adhered to the teachings of Zarathustra. There is evidence on every side that these peoples recognized two phases proceeding from the hitherto undivided flow of Time—two phases coming into conflict as they encounter one another and resolving their conflict only in the stream of onflowing Time. It was realised that the new must come into being and that the old must not be swept away; the goal of the Universe—above all, the goal of the Earth—will be achieved through the creating of balance, of harmony, between the old and the new. This conception, as it has now been characterized, lies at the basis of all forms of higher development originating in Zoroastrianism.

Once the original centre of Zoroastrianism had been established in the region and epoch indicated yesterday, its influence was effective wherever it made its way. And we shall see what a tremendous effect it had upon subsequent epochs, giving expression everywhere to the teaching on the polarity between the old and the new.

The reason why Zarathustra was able to exercise such a far-reaching influence upon posterity was that at the time when he had attained the highest Initiation possible in his day, he had two intimate pupils of whom I have previously spoken.¹ To one of these pupils Zarathustra taught everything relating to the secrets of surrounding physical Space, the secrets of contemporaneous existence. To the other pupil he taught the secrets of Time in flow, the secrets of evolution, of development. On a previous occasion I said that at a certain point on the path of Initiation such as this, something of great significance is able to take place, namely that the teacher can offer up part of his own being to his pupils. And Zarathustra offered up to his two pupils his own astral body and his own etheric body. The Individuality of Zarathustra, the inmost core of his being, remained intact for ever-recurring incarnations. But his astral ‘raiment’, that is to say the astral body in which he had lived as Zarathustra in a very early post-Atlantean epoch—this astral raiment was so perfect, so charged with the essence of his whole being that it did not disperse as do the astral sheaths of other human beings, but remained intact. In the great process of evolution the power of an Individuality bearing human sheaths of this quality, may enable them to remain intact and be preserved, and this was so in the case of the astral body of Zarathustra.

The pupil who had received from Zarathustra the teaching about Space and everything that exists contemporaneously in physical Space—this pupil was reborn in the personality known in history as the Egyptian Thoth, or Hermes. Occult investigation reveals that he was destined not only to consolidate in his own being all the teaching imparted to him in an earlier incarnation by Zarathustra, but to do even more. This was made possible by the fact that through a process enacted in the holy Mysteries, the preserved astral body of Zarathustra himself was incorporated into him. Thus the Individuality of this pupil of Zarathustra was reborn as the inaugurator of Egyptian culture. The Egyptian Hermes therefore bore within himself part of the being of Zarathustra, and this power, together with the fruits of his own former discipleship, enabled Hermes to give the impulse for all that was great and significant in the culture and civilization of ancient Egypt.

In order that the mission of this messenger of Zarathustra might be fulfilled, there had naturally to be a folk suited to receive the impulse. Only among those peoples who had taken the more southerly path from Atlantean territories, had settled in the East of Africa and in whom a high degree of clairvoyance in its Atlantean form had been preserved—only among such peoples could fruitful soil be found for what Hermes, the reborn pupil of Zarathustra, was able to impart. The soul-life prevailing in the Egyptian population came into contact with the teaching of Hermes and from this source the culture of ancient Egypt developed.

It was a culture of a very special character. Think of what treasures of wisdom had been received by Hermes when Zarathustra imparted to him the secrets of things existing contemporaneously in Space. Hermes bore within his own being this supremely important teaching of Zarathustra. As we have often heard, the most characteristic feature of Zarathustra's teaching was that he directed the attention of his people to the Sun and the external light of the Sun, explaining to them that this solar body is only the outer sheath of a lofty Spiritual Being. Thus Zarathustra entrusted to Hermes the secrets of the the reality of being underlying the whole of Nature in the world of Space, the reality of being which underlies everything in contemporaneous existence but goes forward through Time from epoch to epoch, manifesting itself anew in each particular epoch. The wisdom possessed by Hermes concerned all that proceeds from the Sun and evolves to further stages. And the reason why he was able to instill this teaching into the souls of the descendants of Atlantean peoples was because those souls had at one time themselves gazed into the mysteries of the Sun and had preserved in memory something of their vision. Everything, of course, had advanced in evolution—the souls who were destined to receive the wisdom of Hermes, as well as Hermes himself.

Circumstances were different in the case of the second pupil of Zarathustra. To him had been entrusted the secrets relating to the flow of Time, and he had necessarily to experience the conflict between the old and the new, the active principle of contrast, of opposition and of polarity, implicit in evolution. Zarathustra had offered up part of his being for this second pupil as well, and when the latter was reborn he too was able to receive what had been bequeathed to him. Whereas the Individuality of Zarathustra remained intact, the astral and etheric sheaths were separated from him, but because they had been borne by such a mighty Individuality, they too remained intact and did not disperse. At a certain point in his new incarnation, this second pupil, to whom had been communicated the wisdom relating to Time—in contrast to that relating to Space—this second pupil received into him-self the etheric body of Zarathustra, who had offered it up as he had offered up his astral body. This second pupil of Zarathustra was reborn as Moses, into whom, in very early childhood, the preserved etheric body of Zarathustra was incorporated.

Religious chronicles that are genuinely based on occultism contain mysterious clues pointing to the secrets disclosed by occult investigation. To enable Moses, the reincarnated pupil of Zarathustra, to receive into himself the etheric body of his former teacher, something quite unusual must necessarily happen to him. It was essential that the miraculous legacy he was to receive from Zarathustra should be incorporated into him before impressions from the environment were made upon his individuality, as in the case of other human beings. This is narrated symbolically in the story that he was laid in a cradle of reeds and lowered into a river—an indication of a remarkable Initiation, During the process of Initiation a human being is shut off from the outer world for a certain period of time and what he is destined to receive is then instilled into him. Thus the etheric body of Zarathustra that had been preserved intact was incorporated into Moses at a certain moment while he was shut off from the outer world; and then there could come to flower within him the wonderful wisdom concerning Time once imparted to him by Zarathustra. He was able, now, to give expression to it in pictures suitable for his people.

Hence we have from Moses the mighty pictures of Genesis—external Imaginations of the wisdom of successive epochs. These pictures were the expression of reborn knowledge, of wisdom that had once been imparted to him by Zarathustra and was now rooted in his very being because the etheric sheath of Zarathustra himself had been incorporated into him.

But in a measure of such significance for the evolution of humanity, two factors are essential. Not only must there be an Initiate to inaugurate an impulse in culture, but it must be possible for this great Individuality to plant the seed of future culture in the folk-soil suitable for it. And to understand the nature of the folk-soil into which Moses could plant what had been transmitted to him by Zarathustra, it will be well to concern ourselves with a certain, characteristic of the Mosaic wisdom.

In an earlier incarnation, then, Moses had been a pupil of Zarathustra. At that time there had been imparted to him the wisdom relating to Time together with the secret that in all epochs the earlier clashes with the later, thus producing contrast. If Moses as the bearer of this wisdom was to become a factor in the evolution of humanity, it had to be presented as a contrast to the other stream of wisdom—the Hermes-wisdom. And this was what actually happened.

Hermes had received from Zarathustra the direct wisdom, the Sun-wisdom, that is to say, knowledge of the reality of being working mysteriously in the outer, physical sheath of the light—the solar body. With Moses it was different. The kind of wisdom of which he was the recipient is harboured more in the denser, etheric body, not in the astral body. His was the wisdom that does not only look upwards to the Sun, seeing all things streaming from the Sun, but is also concerned with what stands over against the light and essential quality of the Sun; this wisdom assimilates—without being corrupted by it—that which has become earthly, dense, solidified, old. This was Earth-wisdom, comprised, it is true, within Sun-wisdom, but for all that essentially Earth-wisdom, The secrets of Earth-evolution, of how man develops on the Earth and how the Earth evolves when the Sun has separated from it—these were the secrets imparted to Moses. And this, if we study the inner, not the external aspects of the matter, explains why we encounter in the teachings of Hermes something that is an utter contrast to the wisdom of Moses.

In studying all such matters, certain modes of thought current at the present time apply the principle that in the night all cows are grey! Those who think in this way have eyes only for similarities and are overjoyed when, for example, they find the same thing in the teachings of Hermes and of Moses: here a triad, there a triad, here a quaternary, there a quaternary, and so on. But there is not much point in this. It would be rather like a person setting out to train someone else to be a botanist without teaching him what differentiates, let us say, a rose from a carnation, but speaking only of features that are identical in both. This does not help. We must know in what respects the beings themselves, and also the forms of wisdom,differ; we must realise that the Moses-wisdom was quite different in character from the Hermes-wisdom. Both forms of wisdom proceeded, originally, from Zarathustra; but just as unity, divides and manifests in very various ways, so did Zarathustra give essentially different revelations to each of his two pupils.

If we steep ourselves in the Hermes-wisdom, we find illumination on cosmogony—it explains to us the origin of worlds and the operations of the inpouring light. But in the Hermes-wisdom we do not find the concepts which reveal the fact that in the evolutionary process the earlier works on into the later, and because of this, the past and the present come into conflict, causing the opposition between Darkness and Light. Earth-wisdom which makes intelligible to us how the Earth, together with Man, evolved after the Sun had separated—this is nowhere contained in the Hermes-wisdom. But it was to be the special mission of the Moses-wisdom to make comprehensible to men the evolution of the Earth after the separation of the Sun. Earth-wisdom was to be the gift of Moses; Sun wisdom, the gift of Hermes. To Moses, with his remembrances of all that had been imparted to him by Zarathustra, there is revealed the process of the Earth's evolution and man's evolution on the Earth. His starting-point as it were is the earthly; but the earthly is separated from the Sun and contains the Sun-nature in a weakened form only. The earthly comes towards and meets the Sun-nature. Hence the Earth-wisdom of Moses had actually to encounter the Sun-wisdom of Hermes in concrete existence; these two streams of wisdom had to contact each other. The outer circumstances too indicate this in a most wonderful way. Moses is born an Egypt, his people are brought thither and make contact with the. Egyptians—the people of Hermes. These happenings are the outer reflection of the contact of Sun-wisdom with Earth-wisdom. Both forms of wisdom stem from Zarathustra but pour over the Earth in quite different streams of evolution, eventually meeting and working in conjunction.

Now certain wisdom connected with proceedings in the Mysteries always expresses itself in, a very special way about the deepest secrets of human and other happenings. In the lectures on Genesis given at Munich, I indicated how extraordinarily difficult it is to speak in terms of current language of these great truths which embrace not only the deepest secrets of the being of man but also cosmic facts. Our words are often fetters, for they bear the connotations that have come to be attached to them from long usage, and when with the great wisdom-truths unfolding themselves in the soul we resort to language, endeavouring to clothe these inner revelations in words, we find ourselves battling with a dreadfully feeble instrument.

The greatest piece of nonsense uttered in the course of the 19th century and repeated times without number is that it should be possible to couch every real truth in simple words and that language, with the means of expression it offers, should actually be a criterion of whether a person is in possession of some particular truth or not. This statement, however, only shows that those who make it are not in possession of essential truth but only of such truths as have been conveyed to them through language in the course of the centuries, the forms of which may change. For such people language is adequate and they feel nothing of the struggle that must often be waged with it. But this struggle becomes only too glaringly real when something of great consequence has to be expressed.

(I referred in Munich to the hard struggle I had with language in connection with the passage spoken in the meditation chamber at the end of the first scene, in. the Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. It was actually no more than a faint echo—all that could be expressed through the feeble instrument of language—of what the Hierophant was intended to say to the pupil.)

In the sacred Mysteries the very deepest secrets were brought to expression and the inadequacy of language for this purpose was felt at all times. Hence the age-long efforts in the Mysteries to find means of expression for the soul's experiences. Terms and phrases that had been used in ordinary intercourse for centuries proved to be utterly inadequate, whereas the opposite was true of the pictures arising when the gaze was directed to the expanse of universal space, to the constellations, to the appearance of a certain star or the eclipse of one heavenly body by another at definite times. These were pictures well fitted to portray particular happenings and experiences in man's life of soul. I will give a brief example.

Let us suppose it was a matter of announcing that something of great and far-reaching importance would take place at a particular moment in time because some human soul would then be sufficiently mature to undergo a sublime experience and to communicate it to his people; or perhaps there might have been a desire to indicate that a people, or a particular section of humanity, had reached a certain state of maturity in evolution and that an Individuality had come to dwell among them, possibly from some quite different region. In the latter case, the highest point reached in the development of this individual was coincident with the highest point reached in the development of the folk-soul of the people concerned and it was desired to express the unique nature of this event. Nothing that could be conveyed through ordinary language was found to be lofty enough to impress men's feelings with the significance of such an event. It was therefore expressed pictorially by saying : When the highest power developed by an an individual coincides with the highest power developed by a particular folk-soul, it is as when the Sun is in the constellation of Leo and radiates its light from there. In this example the picture of the Lion was chosen to denote something manifesting in its greatest strength in the evolution of humanity. A phenomenon in cosmic space was thus used to indicate a happening in the life of humanity. Such is the origin of certain expressions used in history; they were derived from the stars and constellations,and were the means used to express spiritual facts in the life of mankind.

When it is said, for example, that an event in the evolution of humanity is expressed symbolically by a phenomenon in the heavens such as the Sun in Leo or in some particular constellation, trivial thinkers are very apt to reverse the real meaning and state that all happenings connected with the early history of humanity were mythical descriptions of movements of celestial bodies; whereas the truth is that earthly events were expressed in pictures taken from the constellations. The truth is invariably the opposite of the theories loved by superficial thinkers.

This connection with the Cosmos is something that should fill us with reverence for what we are told about the great events in the evolution of mankind and the expression of them in pictures derived from cosmic phenomena. There is actually a mysterious connection between all cosmic existence and what comes to pass in man's existence; for happenings on Earth are reflections of happenings in the Cosmos.

In a certain respect the convergence of the Sun-wisdom of Hermes and the Earth-wisdom of Moses in Egypt is also a reflection, a mirror-image, of happenings in the Cosmos. Picture to yourselves certain forces streaming out from the Sun and other forces streaming back from the Earth into cosmic space; the point in space at which they meet will not be without importance; according to whether the contact is made at a point nearer to or farther away from the sources in question, the effect of the radiations emitted and then sent back, will be different. The contact between the Hermes-wisdom and the Moses-wisdom in ancient Egypt was presented in the Mysteries in such a way that comparison was possible with something that according to spiritual-scientific cosmology had already taken place in the Cosmos. We know that Sun and Earth had separated, that for a time the Earth was still united with the Moon, that then a part of the Earth moved out into space to become our present Moon. The Earth had therefore sent back part of itself towards the Sun in cosmic space. And when, in Egyptian civilization, the Earth-wisdom of Moses came into contact with the Sun-wisdom of Hermes, this remarkable happening was also like a ‘radiation’—this time from the Earth towards the Sun.

After its subsequent separation from the Sun-wisdom of Hermes, the wisdom of Moses Earth-wisdom—can be said to have developed further as the science of the Earth and of Man; in its course towards the Sun it absorbed and steeped itself in the direct wisdom radiating from the Sun. There was, however, to be a limit to this absorption; the wisdom of Moses was destined to progress on its own and develop independence. Hence it remained in Egypt only until enough had been absorbed for its needs; then came the “Exodus of the Children of Moses from Egypt”, in order that the Sun-wisdom received by the Earth-wisdom might be assimilated and also developed.

Two phases must therefore be distinguished in the wisdom of Moses: one while it is developing in the sphere of the wisdom of Hermes, surrounded by it on all sides and perpetually absorbing it. Then comes the separation, and after the exodus from Egypt the wisdom of Moses, although now developing independently, elaborates the wisdom of Hermes it has absorbed and on its own further course reaches three stages . What was its goal and, its destined task?

The task of the wisdom of Moses was to find the way back again to the Sun. It had become Earth-wisdom. Moses was born with all that had been imparted to him by Zarathustra as a wise man of the Earth and he sought for the way back to the Sun in different stages. At the first stage he had steeped himself in the wisdom of Hermes; the course of his further development can best be portrayed in pictures drawn from cosmic existence. When the effects of what happens on the Earth stream back into cosmic space, the first encounter on the path towards the Sun is with Mercury. (We know that thc Venus of ordinary astronomy is Mercury in the terminology of occultism and the Mercury of astronomy is Venus according to occultism.) On the way from the Earth towards the Sun, therefore, the Mercury-nature is encountered first, at a later stage the Venus-nature and then the Sun-nature. Hence through, inner processes in the life of soul, Moses was to develop the heritage received from Zarathustra in such a way that on the returning path it would be able to find the Sun-nature again; it had therefore to reach a definite stage. The wisdom inculcated by Moses into culture and civilization had necessarily to develop in the form in which he had imparted to his people. Hence on the path of return, having first absorbed something of the wisdom imparted by Hermes as directly radiating from the Sun, Moses developed it with a new orientation, that is, in the opposite direction.

It is said that Hermes later called Mercury (Thoth), brought to his people art and science, knowledge of the external world, external art, in the form suitable for them. But it was in a different, indeed opposite way, that Moses himself was to reach this Hermes-Mercury-wisdom and develop it to further stages on the returning path. This process portrayed in the history of the Hebrews up to the time and reign of David; he is described as the royal psalmist, as a divine prophet, as a man of God, an armour-bearer and also a player on the harp. David is the Hermes, the Mercury, of the Hebrew people who had now developed to the stage of being able to produce a Hermes- or Mercury-wisdom in an independent form. At the time of David, therefore, the Hermes-wisdom, once assimilated by the Moses-wisdom, had reached the region, or stage, of Mercury.

On the returning pail towards the Sun the wisdom of Moses was to advance to the Venus-stage. Hebraism reached this stage at the time when the Moses-wisdom, as it had flowed down the centuries, was destined to unite with an entirely different element, with a stream of wisdom that had come from the other direction.

Whatever rays back from the Earth into space encounters Venus on the path to the Sun, and during the Babylonian captivity the wisdom of Moses encountered the wisdom that had made its way over from Asia and was presented in a modified form in the Babylonian and Chaldean Mysteries. This contact was made during the time of the Babylonian captivity. Like a wanderer who, having started from the Earth with a knowledge of what the Earth is, had passed through the region of Mercury and arrived in the region of Venus in order there to receive the light of the Sun falling upon Venus, so did the wisdom of Moses absorb what had proceeded directly from the sanctuaries of Zoroastrianism and was being continued in a modified form in the Mysteries of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It was this that the Moses-wisdom received during the Babylonian captivity, thus assimilating wisdom that had made its way to the region of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

But something else came to pass as well. Moses had encountered the wisdom that once upon a time had streamed from the Sun. In the sanctuaries that were known to and frequented by the wise men among the Hebrews during the captivity, the legacy of the wisdom bequeathed by Moses to his people mingled with the Sun-nature of the wisdom harboured in the Mystery-centres in the regions around the Euphrates and the Tigris where the reincarnated Zarathustra was teaching. Approximately at the time of the Babylonian captivity, Zarathustra himself was incarnated; thus while teaching in that region, he who had already given over one part of his wisdom, receive it back again. He himself incarnated time and time again, and in his incarnation as Zarathas or Nazarathos he became the teacher of the captive Jews who knew of the sanctuaries existing in those regions.

Thus in its later course the wisdom of Moses came into contact with what Zarathustra himself had been able to achieve after he had moved from the more distant Mystery-centres to those of Asia Minor. There he became the teacher of the initiated pupils of Chaldea as well as of individual initiated teachers; there were also those in whom the Moses-wisdom was fructified by the stream with which they could now make contact, being able to receive from Zarathustra himself, in his incarnation as Zarathas or Nazarathos, what he himself had formerly imparted to their ancestor—Moses. Such was the destiny of the wisdom of Moses. It had actually originated with Zarathustra and had been transplanted into foreign lands. It was as if a Sun-being with bandaged eyes had been carried down to the Earth and on the return journey must seek again for what it had lost.

Moses, then, was the reincarnated pupil of Zarathustra. In his existence in Egyptian civilization everything once imparted to him by Zarathustra lit up again within him; but isolated in the domain of the Earth, it was as if he did not know the source of his illumination. Hence he took the path towards what had once been of the nature of the Sun; in Egypt he turned to the Hermes-wisdom which presented the wisdom of Zarathustra in its direct form, not in reflection as in his own case. After he had absorbed enough of the Hermes-wisdom, the stream of his own wisdom developed in a straightforward course. Having established in the Davidic age a form of Hermes-Wisdom, with its own science and art, the stream of Moses-wisdom moved towards the Sun whence it had originally issued, but in a form which at first concealed its real nature.

In the centres of learning in ancient Babylon where he was also the teacher of Pythagoras, Zarathustra—Zarathas or Nazarathos—could only teach in a way that was possible in a specially constituted body, for he was obliged to use such a body as his instrument. If he was to give expression to the Sun-nature in its fullness as he had once done and had then imparted it to Hermes and Moses—if he was to give expression to this wisdom in a new form, suitable for the later epoch, he needed a bodily sheath that would be a worthy instrument. It was only in a form conditioned by a body such as ancient Babylonia was able to produce that Zarathustra could bring forth again all the wisdom which he then conveyed to Pythagoras, to the learned Hebrews and the Chaldean and Babylonian sages who at that time—in the sixth century B.C.—were in a position to hear it.

In regard to what Zarathustra was able to teach, it was actually as if the light of the Sun had first been intercepted by Venus and could not find its way directly to the Earth; it was as if the Zarathustra-wisdom could not manifest itself in its primal form but only in modification. For to enable this wisdom to work in its original form Zarathustra would have to be enveloped in a suitable body and such a body could only be produced in an altogether unique way—which may be characterized somewhat as follows.

It was said in the lecture yesterday that there were three folk-souls in Asia, each of a different character : the Indian in the South, the Iranian and the Turanian to the North. It was indicated that these three species of souls came into being, firstly, because the northern stream of the Atlantean peoples had passed into Asia across these regions and had spread through them. But another stream had passed through Africa and its final offshoots had penetrated as far as the regions of the Turanian peoples. Where the northern stream which had passed from Atlantis towards Asia met the other stream which had passed from Atlantis through Africa, a remarkable mixture of peoples was produced and a racial stock formed from which the Hebrews subsequently sprang.

Something very remarkable came to pass in these people. Faculties of astral-etheric clairvoyance that had remained in a state of decadence among certain people and had become corrupt as the last phase of a faculty of clairvoyance directed outwards—all this turned inwards in those who became the Hebrew people. The direction was entirely changed. Instead of manifesting in its outer operations in the form of a lower astral clairvoyance, as the remains of the old Atlantean clairvoyance, it worked as an organizing power in the inner constitution of the body. What had become a decadent outward clairvoyance and having remained static had been permeated by the Ahrimanic element—this had then developed in the right way through becoming an active force in the inner, organic constitution of the human body. In the Hebrew people this faculty did not come to expression as an outdated form of clairvoyance but it worked as a transforming force upon the bodily nature, thus bringing it to a stage of greater perfection. The faculty that in the Turanian people had become decadent, worked creatively and with transforming power in the inner constitution of the Hebrews.

The following may therefore be said. In the bodily nature of the Hebrew people as propagated through blood-relation- from generation to generation, there were working the forces which as outward clairvoyant vision had had their day and were no longer to continue in this form but were now to function in a different sphere where they would be in the right element. The faculty that had enabled the Atlanteans to look with spiritual vision into space and into spiritual regions and in the Turanians had become a degenerate residue of clairvoyance—this faculty turned inwards in the Hebrew people. What had been of a divine-spiritual nature in Atlantean culture worked inwardly, in the Hebrews as an organic formative force and within their blood was able to light up as an inner consciousness of the Divine. It was as if everything that had been seen by the Atlantean when he directed his clairvoyant gaze outwards to the expanse of space had now become wholly inward, arising in the inmost organism of the Hebrews as consciousness of, Jahve or Jehovah, as inner, consciousness of the Divine. Thus the Hebrews felt the Godhead to be united with their blood, felt themselves pervaded, impregnated, by the Godhead outspread in space, and knew that this same Godhead was living within them, pulsing through their very blood.

Yesterday we considered the contrast between the Iranian and the Turanian civilizations. Now, having compared the faculties of the Turanians with those of the Hebrew race, we see that what had become decadent in the former progressed in the latter, subsequently working in the blood. What had been visible to the Atlantean now manifested in the Hebrew in the form of inner feeling. This experience is summed up in a single word—the name JEHOVAH. Compressed as it were into a single point, into one inner centre of consciousness of the Divine, lived the God who had been revealed to Atlantean clairvoyance behind all external phenomena. Invisible and inwardly experienced, the God lived in the blood of the generations of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, leading them and all their succeeding generations from event to event on their path of destiny. In this way the outer had become inward; the outer was now experienced within, no longer seen, no longer called by different names but known by a single designation: ‘I AM THE I AM !’ The Divine had assumed an entirely different form. Whereas with the faculties man possessed in the Atlantean epoch he had found the God out yonder in the Universe, he now found the God in the centre of his own being, in his ‘I’, felt the God in the blood flowing through the generations. The great God of the Universe had now become the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, the God who flowed in the blood through the generations.

Thus was founded the racial stock whose inner mission for the evolution of humanity we shall study tomorrow. It has only been possible to-day to give an indication of the very earliest stage in the composition of the blood of this people, the stage when everything that in the Atlantean age man had allowed to work in upon him from outside was now com-pressed within his own being. We shall see what mysteries are fulfilled in happenings that have only been touched upon to-day, and we shall learn to understand the unique nature of the people from whom Zarathustra, as the Being we call Jesus of Nazareth, could derive his body.

• 1. e.g. in the Lecture Cycle The Gospel of St. Luke, Lecture Five.

The earthly and cosmic forces of which I have spoken work in the processes of Agriculture through the substances of the Earth. And we shall only be able to pass on to the difficult practical applications during the next few days if we occupy ourselves rather more closely with the question of how these forces work through the Earth's substances. But first we must make a digression and enquire into the activity of Nature in general.

One of the most important questions that can be raised in discussing production in the sphere of Agriculture is that concerning the significance and influence of nitrogen. But this question concerning the fundamental nature of the action of nitrogen is at present in a state of the greatest confusion. When one observes nitrogen today in the ordinary way one is only looking at the last offshoots, as it were, of its activities, its most superficial manifestations. We overlook the natural interconnections within which nitrogen is at work; nor indeed can -we help so doing if we remain enclosed within one section of Nature. To gain a proper insight into these connections we must bring within our survey the whole realm of Nature, and concern ourselves with the activity of nitrogen in the Universe. Indeed—and this will emerge clearly from my exposition—while nitrogen as such does not play the primary part in plant-life, it is nevertheless supremely necessary for us to know what this part is, if we wish to understand plant-life.

In its activities in Nature nitrogen has, one might say, four sister-substances which we must learn to know if we wish to understand the functions and significance of nitrogen in the so-called economy of Nature. These four sister-substances are the four substances which in albumen (protein), both animal and vegetable, combine with nitrogen in a way which is still a mystery for present-day science. The four sister-substances are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur. If we wish to understand the full significance of albumen, it is not enough to mention the ingredients hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon: we must also bring in sulphur, that substance the activities of which are of such profound importance for albumen. For it is sulphur which acts within the albumen as the mediator between the spiritual formative element diffused •; throughout -the Universe and the physical element. Indeed, if we want to follow the path taken by the spirit in the material world, we shall have to look for the activity of sulphur. Even if this activity is not so visible as those of other substances it is still of the utmost importance because spirit works its way into physical nature by means of sulphur: sulphur is actually the bearer of spirit. The ancient name “sulphur” is connected with the word “phosphor,” (which means bearer of light) because in the old days men saw spirit spreading out through space in the out-streaming m the light or the Sun. Hence, they called the substances which are linked up with the working of light into matter, like sulphur and phosphorus, the “light bearers.” And once we have realised how fine (delicate) is the activity of sulphur in the economy of nature we shall more easily understand its fundamental nature when we consider the four sister-substances—carbon. hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, and the part they play in the workings of the Universe. The modern chemist knows very little about these substances. He knows what they look like in a laboratory, but is ignorant of their inner significance for cosmic activities as a whole. The knowledge which modern chemistry has of these substances is not much greater than the knowledge we might have of a man whose external appearance we had noticed as he passed us in the street, and of whom we had perhaps taken a snapshot, whom we call to mind with the help of the snap-shot. For what science does with these substances is little more than to take snap-shots of them, and the books and lectures of to-day about them contain little more than this. We must learn to know the deeper essence of these substances.

Let us therefore start with carbon. The bearing which these things have upon plants will soon be made clear. Carbon, like so many beings in modern times, has fallen from a very aristocratic position to one that is extremely plebeian. All that people see in carbon nowadays is something with which to heat their ovens (coal) or something with which to write graphite. Its aristocratic nature still survives in one of its modifications, the diamond. But it is hardly of very great value to us today, in this form, because we cannot buy it. Thus, what we know of carbon is very little in comparison with the enormous importance which this substance possesses in the Universe. And yet, until a relatively recent date, a few hundred years ago, this black-fellow.—let us call him so—was regarded as worthy to bear the noble name of “Philosopher's Stone.”

A great deal of nonsense has been spoken about what was really meant by this name. For when the old Alchemists and their kind spoke of the Philosopher's Stone they meant carbon in whatever form it occurs. And they only kept their name secret because if they had not done so, all and sundry would have found themselves in possession of the Philosopher's Stone. For it was simply carbon. But why should it have been carbon?

A -view held in former days will supply us with the answer, which we must come to know again. If we disregard the crumbled form to which certain processes in nature have reduced carbon (as in coal and graphite) and grasp it in its vital activity in the course of serving the bodies of men and animals and as it builds up the body of the plant from its own inherent possibilities, the amorphous and formless substance which we generally think of as carbon will appear as the final outcome, the mere corpse of what carbon really is in the economy of Nature. Carbon is really the bearer of all formative processes in Nature. It is the great sculptor of form, whether we are dealing with the plant whose form persists for a certain time or with the ever-changing form of the animal organism. It bears within it not only its black substantiality, but, in full activity and inner mobility it bears within it the formative cosmic prototypes, the great world-imaginations from which living form m Nature must proceed. A hidden sculptor is at work in carbon, and in building up the most diverse forms in Nature, this hidden sculptor makes use of sulphur. If, therefore, we regard the activities of carbon in Nature in the right way, we shall see that the cosmic spirit which is active as a sculptor “moistens” itself, as it were, with sulphur, and with the help of carbon builds up the relatively permanent plant form and also the human form which is dissolved at the moment it is created. For what makes the human body human, and not plant-like, is precisely the fact that at each moment, through the elimination of carbon, the form it has taken on can be immediately destroyed and replaced by another, the carbon being united to oxygen and exhaled as carbon-dioxide. As carbon would make our bodies firm and stiff like a palm tree, the breathing process wrenches it out of its stiffness, unites it with oxygen and drives it outwards. Thus, we gain a mobility which as human beings we must have. In plants, however (and even in annuals) carbon is held fast within a fixed form.

There is an old saying that “Blood is a very special fluid.” We are right in saying that the human ego pulsates in the blood, and manifests itself physically in doing so; or speaking more strictly it is along the tracks provided by the carbon, in its weaving and working, and forming and unforming of itself that the spiritual principle m man, called the ego, moves within the blood, moistening itself with sulphur. And just as the human ego, the essential spirit of man, lives in carbon, so also does the world-ego live (through the mediation of sulphur) in that substance that is eyer forming and unforming itself—carbon. The fact is that in the early stages of the Earth's development it was carbon alone which was deposited or precipitated. It was not until later that, for example, lime came into existence, supplying man with the foundation for the creation of a more solid bony structure. In order that the organism which lives in the carbon might be moved about, man and the higher animals provided a supporting structure in the skeleton which is made of lime. In this way, by making mobile the carbon form within him, man raises himself from the merely immobile mineral lime formation which the' earth possesses and which he incorporates in order to have solid earth-matter within his body. The bony lime structure represents the solid earth within the human body.

Let me put it in this way: Underlying every living being there is a scaffolding of carbon, more or less either relatively permanent or continually fluctuating, in the tracks of which the spiritual principle moves through the world. Let us make a schematic drawing of this so that you can see the matter quite clearly before you. (Drawing No. 6) Here is such a scaffolding which the spirit builds up somehow or other with the help of sulphur. Here we have either the continuously changing carbon which moves in the sulphur in highly diluted form, or else we have, as in the plants? a more or less solidified carbon structure which is united with other ingredients. Now as I have often pointed out, a human or any other living being must be penetrated by an etheric element which is the actual bearer of life. The carbon structure of a living being must therefore be penetrated by an etheric element which will either remain stationary about the timbers of this scaffolding or retain a certain mobility. But the main thing is that the etheric element is in both cases distributed along the scaffolding.

This etheric element could not abide our physical earth world, if it remained alone. It would slide through instead of gripping what it has to grip in the physical earthly world, if it were without a physical bearer. (For it is a peculiarity of earth conditions that the spiritual must always have physical bearers. The materialists regard the physical bearer only, and overlook the spiritual. To an extent, they are right, because it is indeed the physical bearer which is first met with. But they overlook the fact that it is the spiritual which makes necessary everywhere the existence of a physical bearer). The physical Dearer of the spiritual which works in the etheric element (we may say that the lowest level of the spiritual works in the etheric); this physical bearer which is permeated by the etheric element, and “moistened” as it were with sulphur, introduces into physical existence not the form, not the structure, but a continuous mobility and vitality. This physical carrier which, with the help of sulphur, brings the vital activities out of the universal ether into the body is oxygen.

Thus, the part which I have coloured green in my sketch can be regarded, from the physical point of view, as oxygen, and also as the brooding_? vibrating etheric element which permeates it. It is in the track of oxygen that the etheric element moves with the help of sulphur.

It is this that gives meaning to the breathing process. When we breathe, we take in oxygen. When the present-day materialist talks of oxygen all he means is the stuff in his test-tube when he has decomposed water through electrolysis. But in oxygen there lives the lowest order of the supersensible, the etheric element; it lives there when it is not killed, as e.g. in the air around us. In the atmosphere around us the living principle in the oxygen has “been killed in order that it may not cause us to faint. Whenever too great a degree of life enters into us, we faint. For any excess of the ordinary growing forces within us, if it appears where it should not be, will cause us to faint or worse. If therefore we were surrounded by an atmosphere which contained living oxygen, we should reel about as though completely stunned by it. The oxygen around us has to be killed. And yet oxygen is from its birth the bearer of life, of the etheric element. It becomes the bearer of life as soon as it leaves the sphere in which it has the task of providing a surrounding for our human external senses. Once it has entered into us through breathing, it comes alive again. The oxygen which circulates inside us' is not the same as that which surrounds us externally. In us it is living oxygen, just as it also becomes living oxygen immediately it penetrates into the soil, although in this case the life m it is lower in degree than it is in our bodies. The oxygen under the earth is not the same as the oxygen above the earth. It is very difficult to come to any understanding with physicists and chemists on this subject, for according to the methods they employ the oxygen must always be separated with its connection with the soil. The oxygen they are dealing with is dead, nor can it be anything else. But every science which limits itself to the physical is liable to this error. It can only understand dead corpses. In reality oxygen is the bearer of the living ether and this living ether takes hold of the oxygen through the mediation of sulphur.

We now have pointed out two extreme polarities: On the one hand the scaffolding of carbon within which the human ego—the highest form of the spiritual given to us here on earth, displays its forces or with the case of plants the world-spiritual which is active in them. On the other hand, we have the human process of breathing, represented in man by the living oxygen which carries the ether. And beneath it we have the scaffolding of carbon which in man permits of his movement. These two polarities must be brought together. The oxygen must be enabled to move along the paths marked out for it by the scaffolding; it must move along every track that may be marked out for it by the carbon, by tne spirit of carbon; and throughout Nature the oxygen bearing the etheric life must find the way to the carbon bearing the spiritual principle. How does it do this? What here acts as the mediator?

The mediator is nitrogen. Nitrogen directs the life into the form which is embodied into the carbon. Wherever nitrogen occurs its function is to mediate between life and the spiritual element which has first been incorporated in the carbon substance. It supplies the bridge between oxygen and carbon—whether it be the animal and vegetable kingdoms, or in the soil. That spirituality which with the help of the sulphur busies itself within the nitrogen is the same as we usually refer to as astral. This spirituality, which also forms the human astral body, is active in the earth's surroundings from which it works in the life of plants, animals and so on. Thus, spiritually speaking we find the astral element or principle placed in between oxygen and carbon; but the astral element uses nitrogen for the purpose of revealing itself in the physical -world. Wherever there is nitrogen there the astral spreads forth in activity. The etheric life-element would float about in every direction like clouds and ignore the framework provided by the carbon were it not for the powerful attraction which this framework possesses for nitrogen; wherever the lines and paths have been laid down in the carbon, there nitrogen drags the oxygen along; or more strictly speaking, the astral in the nitrogen drags the etheric element along these paths. Nitrogen is the great “dragger” of the living principle towards the spiritual. Nitrogen is therefore essential to the soul of man, since the soul is the mediator between life, i.e. without consciousness and spirit. There is, indeed, something very wonderful about nitrogen. If we trace its path as it goes through the human organism, we find a complete double of the human being. Such a “nitrogen man” actually exists. If we could separate it from the physical we should have the most beautiful ghost imaginable, for it copies in exact detail the solid shape of man. On the other hand, nitrogen flows straight back into life.

Now we have an insight into the breathing process. When he breathes, man takes in oxygen, i.e. etheric life. Then comes the internal nitrogen, and drags the, oxygen along to wherever there is carbon, i.e. to wherever there is weaving and changing form. The nitrogen brings the oxygen along with it in order that the latter may hold on the carbon and set it free. The nitrogen is thus the mediator whereby carbon becomes carbon-dioxide and as such is breathed out. Only a small part, really of our surroundings consists of nitrogen, the bearer of astral-spirituality. It is of immense importance to us to have oxygen in our immediate surroundings, both by day and by night. We pay less respect to the nitrogen around us in the air which we breathe because we think we have less need of it, and yet nitrogen stands in a spiritual relation to us.

The following experiment might be made: One could enclose a man in a gas-chamber containing a given volume of air, and then remove a small quantity of nitrogen, so that the air would be slightly poorer in nitrogen than it normally is. If this experiment could be carefully carried out it would convince you that the necessary quantity of nitrogen is at once restored, not from outside, but from inside the man's body. Man has to give up some of his own supply of nitrogen in order to restore the quantitative condition to which the nitrogen is “accustomed.” As human beings, it is necessary that we should maintain the right quantitative relation between our whole inner being and the nitrogen around us; the right quantity of nitrogen outside us is never allowed to become less. For the merely vegetative life of man a less quantity than the normal will do. because we do not need nitrogen for the purpose of breaming. But it would not be adequate to the part it plays spiritually; for that the normal quantity of nitrogen is necessary.

This shows you how strongly nitrogen plays into the spiritual and will give you some idea of how necessary this substance is to the life of the plants. The plant growing on the ground has at first only its physical body and etheric body but no astral body; but the astral element must surround it on all sides. The plant would not flower if it were not touched from outside by the astral element. It does not take in the astral element as do men and the animals but it needs to be touched by it from outside. The astral element is everywhere, and nitrogen, the bearer of the astral, is everywhere; it hovers in the air as a dead element, but the moment it enters into the soil it comes to life again. Just as oxygen comes to life when drawn into the soil, so does nitrogen. This nitrogen in the earth not only comes to life but becomes something which has a very special importance for Agriculture because—paradoxical as it may seem to a mind distorted by materialism—it not only comes to life but becomes sensitive inside the earth. It literally becomes the carrier of a mysterious sensitiveness which is poured out over the whole life of the earth. Nitrogen is that which senses whether the right quantity or water is present in any given soil and experiences sympathy; when water is deficient it experiences antipathy. It experiences sympathy when for any given soil the right sort of plants are present, and so on. Thus, nitrogen pours out over everything a living web of sensitive lire. Above all nitrogen knows all those secrets of which we know nothing in an ordinary way, of the planets Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on, and their influences upon the form and life of plants, of which I told you yesterday, and in the preceding lectures. Nitrogen that is everywhere abroad, knows these secrets very well. It is not at all -unconscious of what emanates from the stars and becomes active in the life of plants and of the earth. Nitrogen is the mediator which senses just as in the human nerves and senses system, it also mediates sensation. Nitrogen is in fact the bearer of sensation. Thus, if we look upon nitrogen, moving about everywhere like fluctuating sensations, we shall see into the intimacies of the life in Nature. Thus, we shall come to the conclusion that in the handling of nitrogen something is done which is of enormous importance for the life of plants. We shall study this further in the subsequent lectures.

In the meantime, there is, however, one thing more to be considered. There is a living co-operation of the spiritual principle which has taken shape within the carbonic framework with the astral principle working within nitrogen, which permeates that framework with lire and sensations, that is, stirs up a living agility in the oxygen. But in the earthly sphere this co-operation is brought about by yet another element, which links up the physical world with the expanses of the cosmos. For the earth cannot wander about the Universe as a solid entity cut off from the rest of the Universe. If the earth did this it would be in the same position as a man who lived on a farm, but wished to remain independent of everything that grew in the fields around him. No reasonable man would do that. What to-day is growing in the fields around us tomorrow will be in human stomachs, and later will return to the soil in some form or another. We human beings cannot isolate ourselves from our environment. We are bound up with it and belong to it as much as my little finger belongs to me. There must be a continuous interchange of substances, and this applies also to the relation between earth with all its creatures and the surrounding Cosmos. All that is living on earth in physical shape must be able to find its way back into the Cosmos where it will be in a way purified and refined. This leads us to the following picture. (Drawing No. 6)

We have in the first place the carbon framework (which I have coloured blue in the drawing), then the etheric oxygenous life-element (coloured green) and then, proceeding from the oxygen and enabled by nitrogen to follow the various lines and paths within the framework, we have the astral element which forms the bridge between carbon and oxygen. I could indicate everywhere here how the nitrogen drags into the blue lines which I have indicated schematically with the green lines. But the whole of the very delicate structure which is formed in the living being must be able to disappear again. It is not the spirit which disappears, but that which the spirit has built up in the carbon and into which it has drawn the etheric life borne in the oxygen. It must disappear not only from the earth, but dissipate into the Cosmos. This is done by forming a substance which is allied as closely as possible to the physical, and yet is allied as closely as possible to the spiritual; This substance is hydrogen. Although hydrogen is itself the most attenuated form of the physical substance, it goes still further and dissipates physical matter which, borne by sulphur, floats away into that cosmic region in which matter is no longer distinguishable. One may say then: Spirit has first become physical and lives in the body at once in its astral form and reflecting itself as ego. There it lives physically as spirit transformed into something physical. After a time, the spirit begins to feel ill at ease. It wishes to get rid of its physical form. Moistening itself once again with sulphur it feels the need of yet another element by means of which it can yield up any kind of individual structure and give itself over to the cosmic region of formless chaos where there is no longer any determinate organisation. This element, which is so closely allied both to the physical and to the spiritual, is hydrogen. Hydrogen carries away all that the astral principle Has taken up as form and life, carries it out into the expanses of the Cosmos, so that it can be taken up again from thence (by earthly substance) as I have already described. Hydrogen in fact dissolves everything.

Thus, we have these 5 substances which are the immediate representatives of all that works and weaves in the realm of the living and also in the realm of the seemingly dead, which in fact is only transiently so: Sulphur, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen, each of these substances is inwardly related to its own particular order of spiritual entity. They are therefore something quite different from which our modern chemistry refers to by the same names. Our chemistry speaks only of the corpses of these substances, not of the actual substances themselves. These we must learn to know as something living and sentient, and, curiously enough, hydrogen, which seems the least dense of the five and has the smallest atomic weight, is the least spiritual among them.

Now consider: What are we actually doing -when we meditate? (I am compelled to add this to ensure that these things do not remain among the mists of spirituality). The Oriental has meditated in his own way. “We in Middle and Western Europe meditate in ours. Meditation as we ought to practise it only slightly touches the breathing process; our soul is living and weaving in concentration and meditation. But all these spiritual exercises have a bodily counterpart, however subtle and intimate. In meditation, the regular rhythm of breathing, which is so closely connected with man's life, undergoes a definite if subtle change. When we meditate we always retain a little more carbon-dioxide in us than in the ordinary everyday consciousness. We do not. as in ordinary life, thrust out the whole bulk of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere where nitrogen is everywhere around us. We hold some of it back.

Now consider: If you knock your head against something hard, like a table, you become conscious only of your own pain. But if you gently stroke the surface of the table, then you will become conscious of the table. The same thing happens in meditation. It gradually develops an awareness of the nitrogen all around you. That is the real process in meditation. Everything becomes an object of knowledge, including the life of the nitrogen around us. For nitrogen is a very learned fellow. He teaches us about the doings of Mercury. Venus, etc. because he knows, or rather senses them. All these things rest upon perfectly real processes. And as I shall show in greater detail, it is at this point that the spiritual working in the soul activity, begins to have a bearing upon Agriculture. This interaction between the soul-spiritual element and that which is around us is what has particularly interested our dear friend Stegemann. For, indeed, if a man has to do with Agriculture it is a good thing if he is able to meditate, for in this way he will make himself receptive to the manifestations of nitrogen. If one does become receptive in this way, one begins to practise Agriculture in quite a different way and spirit. One suddenly gets all kinds of new ideas; they simply come, and one then has many secrets in large estates and smaller farms.

I do not wish to repeat what I said an hour ago, but I can describe it in another way. Take the case ox a peasant who walks through his fields. The scientist regards him as unlearned and stupid. But this is not so, simply because—forgive me but I speak the truth—simply because instinctively a peasant is given to meditation. He ponders much throughout the long winter nights. He acquires a kind of spiritual knowledge, as it were, only he cannot express it.. He walks through his fields and suddenly he knows something; later he tries it out. At any rate this is what I found over and over again in my youth when I lived among peasant folk. The mere intellect will not be enough, it does not lead us deep enough. For after all Nature's life and weaving is so fine and delicate that the net of intellectual concepts—and this is where science has erred of recent years—has too large a mesh to catch it.

Now all these substances of which I have spoken, Sulphur, Carbon, Nitrogen, Hydrogen are united in albumen. This will enable us to see more clearly into the nature of seed formation. Whenever carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen are present in leaf, blossom, calyx or root they are always united to other substances in some form or other. They are dependent upon these other substances. There are only two ways in which they can become independent. One is when the hydrogen carries all individual substances out into the expanses of the Cosmos and dissolves them into the general chaos; and the other is when the hydrogen drives the basic element of the protein (for albumen) into the seed formation and there makes them independent of each other so that they become receptive of the influences of the Cosmos. In the tiny seed, there is chaos, and in the wide periphery of the Cosmos there is another chaos, and whenever the chaos at the periphery works upon the chaos within the seed, new life comes into being.

Now look how these so-called substances, which are really bearers of spirit, work in the realm of Nature. Again, we may say that the oxygen and nitrogen inside man's body behave themselves, in an ordinary way, for within man's body they manifest their normal qualities. Ordinary science ignores it, because the process is hidden. But the ultimate products of carbon and hydrogen cannot behave in so normal a fashion as do oxygen and nitrogen. Let us take carbon first. When the carbon, active in the plant realm enters the realms of animals and man, it must become mobile—at least transiently. And in order to build up the fixed shape of the organism it must attach itself to an underlying framework. This is provided on the one hand by our deeply laid skeleton consisting of limestone, and on the other hand by the siliceous-element which we always carry in our bodies; so that both in man and in the animals carbon to a certain extent masks its own formative force. It climbs up. as it were, along the lines of formative forces of limestone and silicon. Limestone endows it with the earthly formative power, silicon with the cosmic. In man and the animals carbon does not, as it were, claim sole authority for itself, but adheres to what is formed by lime and silicon.

But lime and silicon are also the basis of the growth of plants. We must therefore learn to know the activities of carbon in the breathing, digestive and circulatory processes of man in relation to his bony and siliceous structure—as though we could, as it were, creep into the body and see how the formative force of carbon in the circulation radiates into the limestone and silicon. And we must unfold this same kind of vision when we look upon a piece of ground covered with flowers having limestone and silicon beneath them. Into man we cannot creep; but here at any rate we can see what is going on. Here we can develop the necessary knowledge. We can see how the oxygen element is caught up by the nitrogen element and carried down into the carbon element, but only in so far as the latter adheres to the lime and silicon structure. We can even say that carbon is only the mediator. Or we can say that what lives in the environment is kindled to life in oxygen and must be carried into the earth by means of nitrogen, where it can follow the form provided by the limestone and silicon. Those who have any sensitiveness for these things can observe this process at work most wonderfully in all papilionaceous plants (Leguminosae), that is, m all the plants which in Agriculture may be called collectors of nitrogen, and whose special function it is to attract nitrogen and hand it on to what lies below them. For down in the earth under those leguminosae there is something that thirsts for nitrogen as the lungs of man thirst for oxygen—and that is lime. It is ä necessity for the lime under the earth that it should breathe in nitrogen just as the human lungs need oxygen. And in the papilionaceous plants a process takes place similar to that which is carried out. By the epitheliumfissue in our lungs lining the bronchial tubes. There is a kind of in-breathing which leads nitrogen down. And these are the only plants that do this. All other plants are closer to exhalation. Thus, the whole organism of the plant-world is divided into two when we look at the nitrogen-breathing. All papilionacae are, as it were., the air passages. Other plants represent the other organs in which breaching goes in a more secret way and whose real task is to fulfil some function. We must learn to look upon each species of plant as placed within a great whole, the organism of the plant-world, just as each human organ is placed within the whole human organism. We must come to regard the different plants as part of a great whole, then we shall see the immense importance of these Papilionacae. True, science knows something of this already, but it is necessary that we should gam knowledge of them from these spiritual foundations, otherwise there is a danger, as tradition fades more and more during the decades, that we shall stray into false paths in applying scientific knowledge. We can see how these papilionacae actually function. They have all the characteristics of keeping their fruit process which in other plants tends to be higher up in the region of their leaves. They all want to bear fruit before they have flowered. The reason is that these plants develop the process allied to nitrogen far nearer to the earth {they actually carry nitrogen down into the soil) than do the other plants, which unfold this process at a greater distance from the surface of the earth. These plants have also the tendency to colour their leaves, not with the ordinary green, hut with a rather darker shade. The actual fruit, moreover, undergoes a kind of atrophy, the seed remains capable of germinating for a short time only and then becomes barren. Indeed, these plants are so organised as to bring to special perfection what the plant-world receives from Winter and not from Summer. They have, therefore, a tendency to wait for Winter. They want to wait with what they are developing for the Winter. Their growth is delayed when they have a sufficient supply of what they need, namely, nitrogen from the air which they can convey below in their own manner. In this way one can get insight into the becoming and living which goes in and above the soil.

If in addition you take into account the fact that lime has a wonderful relationship with the world of human desires, you will see how alive and organic the whole thing becomes. In its elemental form as calcium, lime is never at rest; it seeks and experiences itself; it tries to become quick-lime, i.e. to unite with oxygen. But even then, it is not content; it longs to absorb the whole range of metallic acids, even including bitumen, which is not really a mineral. Hidden in the earth, lime develops the longing to attract everything to itself. It develops in the soil what is almost a desire-nature. It is possible, if one has the right feeling in these matters, to sense the difference between it and other substances, lime fairly sucks one dry. One feels that it has a thoroughly greedy nature and that wherever it is, it seeks to draw to itself also the plant-element. For indeed everything that limestone wants lives in plants, and it must continually turn away from the lime. What does this? It is done by the supremely aristocratic element which asks for nothing but relies upon itself. For there is such an aristocratic substance. It is silicon. People are mistaken in thinking that silicon is only present where it shows its firm rock-like outline. Silicon is distributed everywhere in homeopathic doses. It is at rest and makes no claim on anything else. Lime lays claim to everything, silicon to nothing. Silicon thus resembles our sense-organs which do not perceive themselves but which perceive the external world. Silicon is the general external sense-organ of the earth_? lime the representing general which desires; clay mediates between the two. Clay is slightly closer to silicon, and yet it acts as a mediator with lime. Now one should understand this in order to acquire a knowledge supported by feeling. One should feel about lime that it is a fellow fall of desires, who wants to grab things for himself; and about silicon that it is a very superior aristocrat who becomes what the lime has grabbed, carries it up into the atmosphere, and develops the plant-forms. There dwells the silicon, either entrenched m his moated castle, as in the horse-tail (equisetum), or distributed everywhere in fine homeopathic doses, where he endeavours to take away what the lime has attached. Once again, we realise that we are in the presence of an extremely subtle process of Nature.

Carbon is the really formative element in all plants; it builds up the framework. But in the course of the earth's development its task has been rendered more difficult. Carbon could give form to all plants as long as there was water below it. Then everything would have grown. But since a certain period, lime has been formed underneath, and lime disturbs the work, and because the opposition of the limestone had to be overcome, carbon allies itself to silicon and both together, in combination with clay, they once again start on their formative work.

How, in the midst of all this, does the life of a plant go on? Below is the limestone trying to seize it with its tentacles, above is the silicon which wants to make it as long and thin as the tenuous water-plants. But in the midst of them is carbon which creates the actual plant-forms and brings order into everything. And just as our astral body brings about a balance between our ego and etheric body, so nitrogen works in between, as the astral element.

This is what we must learn to understand—how nitrogen manages things between lime, clay and silicon, and also between what the lime is always longing for below, and what silicon seeks always to radiate upwards. In this way the practical question arises: What is the correct way of introducing nitrogen into the plant-world? This is the question which will occupy us tomorrow and which will lead us over to deal with the different methods of manuring the ground.