The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I had to show how we can observe ourselves in two ways, and how the riddle of the world and of man confronts us from both directions. If we look once more at what we found yesterday, we see, on the one hand, the human physical body, perceived—at first—in the same way as the external, physical world. We call it the physical body because it stands before our physical senses just as the external, physical world. At the same time, however, we must call to mind the great difference between the two. Indeed, yesterday we had to recognise this great difference from the fact that man, on passing through the gate of death, must surrender his physical body to the elements of the external, physical world; and these destroy it. The action of external Nature upon the human physical body is destructive, not constructive. So we must look quite outside the physical world for what gives the human physical body its shape between birth (or conception) and death. We must speak, to begin with, of another world which builds up this human body that external, physical Nature can only destroy.

On the other hand there are two considerations which show the close relationship between the human physical body and Nature. In the first place, the body requires substances—building materials in a sense—although this is not strictly accurate. Let us say, it has need of the substances of external nature, or, at least, needs to take them in.

Again: when we observe the external manifestations of the physical body—whether it be its excretions, or the whole body as seen after death—it is nevertheless substances of the external, physical world that we observe. We always find the same substances as in the external, physical world—whether we are studying the separate excretions or the whole physical body cast off at death.

So we are compelled to say: Whatever the inner processes going on in the human body may be, their beginning and end are related to the external, physical world.

Materialistic science, however, draws from this fact a conclusion that cannot be drawn at all. Though we see how man, through eating, drinking and breathing, takes in substances from the external physical world and gives these same substances back again, in expiration, in excretion or at death, we can only say that we have here to do with a beginning and an end. We have not determined the intermediary processes within the physical body.

We speak so glibly of the blood man bears within him; but has anyone ever investigated the blood within the living human organism itself? This cannot be done with physical means at all. We have no right to draw the materialistic conclusion that what enters the body and leaves it again was also within it.

In any case, we see an immediate transformation when external, physical substances are taken in—let us say, by the mouth. We need only put a small grain of salt in the mouth and it is at once dissolved. The transformation is immediate. The physical body of man is not the same, in its inner nature, as the external world; it transforms what it takes in, and then transforms it back again. Thus we must seek for something within the human organism that is, at first, similar to external nature and, on excretion, becomes so again. It is what lies between these two stages that we must first discover.

Try to picture this that I have said: On the one hand, we have what the organism takes in; on the other, what it gives of including even the physical body as a whole. Between these are the processes within the organism itself. From the study of what the human physical organism takes in we can say nothing at all about the relation of man to external nature. We might put it this way: Though external physical nature does destroy man's corpse, dissolving and dissipating it, man does, with his organism, ‘get even’ with Nature. He dissolves everything he receives from her. Thus, when we commence with man's organs of assimilation, we find no relationship to external nature, for this is destroyed by them. We only find such a relationship when we turn to what man excretes. In relation to the form man bears into physical life, Nature is a destroyer; in regard to what man casts off, Nature receives what the human organism provides. Thus the human physical organism comes eventually to be very unlike itself and to resemble external Nature very much. It does this through excretion.

If you think this over you will say to yourself: There, outside, are the substances of the different kingdoms of Nature. They are, today, just what they have become; but they have certainly not always been as they are. Even physical science admits that past conditions of the earth were very different from those of today. What we see around us in the kingdoms of Nature has only gradually become what it is. And when we look at man's physical body we see it destroys—or transforms—what it takes in. (We shall see that it really destroys, but for the moment we will say ‘transforms’.) At any rate, what is taken in must be reduced to a certain condition from which it can be led back again to present physical Nature. In other words: If you think of a beginning somewhere in the human organism, where the sub-stances begin to develop in the direction of excretions, and then think of the earth, you are led to trace it back to a similar condition in which it once was. You have to say: At some past time the whole earth must have been in the condition in which some-thing within man is today; and in the short space of time during which something incorporated into the human organism is transformed into excretory products, the inner processes of the organism recapitulate what the earth itself has accomplished in the course of long ages.

Thus we look at external Nature today and see that it was once something very different. But when we try to find something similar to its former condition we have to look into our own organism. The beginning of the earth is still there. Every time we eat, the substances of our food are transformed into a condition in which the whole earth once was. The earth has developed further in the course of long periods of time and become what it is today; our food substances, in developing to the point of excretion, give a brief recapitulation of the whole earth-process.

Now, you can look at the vernal point of the zodiac, where the sun rises every spring. This point is not stationary; it is advancing. In the Egyptian epoch, for example, it was in the constellation of Taurus. It has advanced through Taurus and Aries, and is today in the constellation of Pisces; and it is still advancing. It moves in a circle and will return after a certain time. Though this point where the sun rises in spring describes a complete circle in the heavens in 25,920 years, the sun describes this circle every day. It rises and sets, thereby describing the same path as the vernal point. Let us contemplate, on the one hand, the long epoch of 25,920 years, which is the time taken by the vernal point to complete its path; and on the other hand, the short period of twenty-four hours in which the sun rises, sets and rises again at the same point. The sun describes the same circle. It is similar with the human physical organism. Through long periods the earth consisted of substances like those within us at a certain stage of digestion—the stage midway between ingestion and egestion, when the former passes over into the latter. Here we carry within us the beginning of the earth. In a short period of time we reach the excretory stage, in which we resemble the earth; we hand over substances to the earth in the form they have today. In our digestive processes we do in the physical body something similar to what the sun does in its diurnal round with respect to the vernal point. Thus we may survey the physical globe and say: Today this physical globe has reached a condition in which its laws destroy the form of our physical organism. But this earth must once have been in a condition in which it was subjected to other laws—laws which, today, bring our physical organism into the condition of food-stuffs midway between ingestion and egestion. That is to say, we bear within us the laws of the earth's beginning; we recapitulate what was once on the earth.

You see, we may regard our physical organism as organised for taking in external substances—present-day substances—and excreting them again as such; but it bears within it something that was present in the beginning of the earth but which the earth no longer has. This has disappeared from the earth leaving only the final products, not the initial substances. Thus we bear within us something to be sought for in very ancient times within the constitution of the earth. It is what we thus bear within us, and the earth as a whole has not got, that raises us above physical, earthly life. It leads man to say: I have preserved within me the beginning of the earth. Through entering physical existence through birth, I have ever within me something the earth had millions of years ago, but has no longer.

From this you see that, in calling man a microcosm, we cannot merely take account of the world around us today. We must go beyond its present condition and consider past stages of its evolution. To understand man we must study primeval conditions of the earth.

What the earth no longer possesses but man still has in this way, can become an object of observation. We must have recourse to what may be called meditation. We are accustomed merely to allow the ‘ideas’ or, mental presentations [Vorstellungen], whereby we perceive the world, to arise within us—merely to represent the outer world to ourselves with the help of such ideas. And for the last few centuries man has become so accustomed to copy merely the outer world in his ideas, that he does not realise his power of also forming ideas freely from within. To do this is to meditate; it is to fill one's consciousness with ideas not derived from external Nature, but called up from within. In doing so we pay special attention to the inner activity involved. In this way one comes to feel that there is really a ‘second man’ within, that there is something in man that can really be inwardly felt and experienced just as, for example, the force of the muscles when we stretch out an arm. We experience this muscular force; but when we think we ordinarily experience nothing. Through meditation, however, it is possible so to strengthen our power of thinking—the power whereby we form thoughts—that we experience this power inwardly, even as we experience the force of our muscles on stretching out an arm. Our meditation is successful when we are at length able to say: In my ordinary thinking I am really quite passive. I allow something to happen to me; I let Nature fill me with thoughts. But I will no longer let myself be filled with thoughts, I will place in my consciousness the thoughts I want to have, and will only pass from one thought to another through the force of inner thinking itself. In this way our thinking becomes stronger and stronger, just as the force of our muscles grows stronger if we use our arms. At length we notice that this thinking activity is a ‘tension’, a ‘touching’, an inner experience, like the experience of our own muscular force. When we have so strengthened ourselves within that our thinking has this character, we are at once confronted in our consciousness by what we carry within us as a repetition of an ancient condition of the earth. We learn to know the force that transforms food substances within the body and retransforms them again. And in experiencing this higher man within, who is as real as the physical man himself, we come, at the same time, to perceive with our strengthened thinking the external things of the world.

Suppose, my dear friends, I look at a stone with such strengthened thinking. Let us say it is a crystal of salt or of quartz. It seems to me like meeting a man I have already seen. I am reminded of experiences I had with him ten or twenty years ago. In the mean-time he may have been in Australia, or anywhere, but the man before me now conjures up the experience I had with him ten or twenty years ago. So, if I look at a crystal of salt or of quartz with this strengthened thinking, there immediately comes before my mind the past state of the crystal, like the memory of a primeval condition of the earth. At that time the crystal of salt was not hexahedral, i.e. six-faced, for it was all part of a surging, weaving, cosmic sea of rock. The primeval condition of the earth comes before me, as a memory is evoked by present objects.

I now look again at man, and the very same impression that the primeval condition of the earth made upon me, is now made by the ‘second human being’ man carries within him. Further: the very same impression is made upon me when I behold, not stones, but plants. Thus I am led to speak, with some justification, of an ‘etheric body’ as well as the physical. Once the earth was ether; out of this ether it has become what it is today in its inorganic, lifeless constituents. The plants, however, still bear within them the former primeval condition of the earth. And I myself bear within me, as a second man, the human ‘etheric body’.

All that I am describing to you can become an object of study for strengthened thinking. So we may say that, if a man takes trouble to develop such thinking he perceives, besides the physical, the etheric in himself, in plants and in the memory of primeval ages evoked by minerals.

Now, what do we learn from this higher kind of observation? We learn that the earth was once in an etheric condition, that the ether has remained and still permeates the plants, the animals—for we can perceive it in them too—and the human being.

But now something further is revealed. We see the minerals free from ether, and the plants endowed with it. At the same time, however, we learn to see ether everywhere. It is still there today, filling cosmic space. In the external, mineral kingdom alone it plays no part; still, it is everywhere. When I simply lift this piece of chalk, I observe all sorts of things happening in the ether. Indeed, lifting a piece of chalk is a complicated process. My hand develops a certain force, but this force is only present in me in the waking state, not when I am asleep. If I follow what the ether does in transmuting food-stuffs, I find this going on during both waking and sleeping states. One might doubt this in the case of man, if one were superficial, but not in the case of snakes; they sleep in order to digest. But what takes place through my raising an arm can only take place in the waking state. The etheric body gives no help here. Nevertheless if I only lift the chalk I must overcome etheric forces—I must work upon the ether. My own etheric body cannot do this. I must bear within me a ‘third man’ who can.

Now this third man who can move, who can lift things, including his own limbs is not to be found—to begin with—in anything similar in external Nature. Nevertheless external Nature, which is everywhere permeated by ether, enters into relation with this ‘force-man’—let us call him—into whom man himself pours the force of his will.

At first it is only in inner experience that we can become aware of this inner unfolding of forces. If, however, we pursue meditation further, not only forming our ideas ourselves, and passing from one idea to another in order to strengthen our thinking, but eliminating again the strengthened thinking so acquired—i.e. emptying our consciousness—we attain something special. Of course, if one frees oneself of ordinary thoughts passively acquired, one falls asleep. The moment one ceases to perceive or think, sleep ensues, for ordinary consciousness is passively acquired. If, however, we develop the forces whereby the etheric is perceived, we have a strengthened man within us; we feel our own thinking forces as we usually feel our muscular forces. And now, when we deliberately eliminate, ‘suggest away’ this strengthened man we do not fall asleep, but expose our empty consciousness to the world. What we dimly feel when we move our arms, or walk, when we unfold our will, enters us objectively. The forces at work here are nowhere to be found in the world of space; but they enter space when we produce empty consciousness in the way described. We then discover, objectively, this third man within us. Looking now at external Nature we observe that men, animals and plants have etheric bodies, while minerals have not. The latter only remind us of the original ‘ether’ of the earth. Nevertheless there is ether wherever we turn, though it does not always reveal itself as such.

You see, if you confront plants with the ‘meditative’ consciousness I described at first, you perceive an etheric image; likewise if you confront a human being. But if you confront the universal ether it is as if you were swimming in the sea. There is only ether everywhere. It gives you no ‘picture.’ But the moment I merely lift this piece of chalk there appears an image in the etheric where my third man is unfolding his forces.

Picture this to yourselves: The chalk is, at first, there. My hand now takes hold of the chalk and lifts it up. (I could represent the whole process in a series of snapshots.) All this, however, has its counterpart in the ether, though this cannot be seen until I am able to perceive by means of ‘empty consciousness’—i.e. until I am able to perceive the third man, not the second. That is to say, the universal ether does not act as ether, but in the way the third man acts.

Thus I may say: I have first my physical body (oval),¹ then my etheric body, perceived in ‘meditative’ consciousness (yellow), then the third man, which I will call the ‘astral’ man (red). Everywhere around me I have what we found to be the second thing in the universe—the universal ether (yellow). This, to begin with, is like an indefinite sea of ether.

Now the moment I radiate into this ether anything that proceeds from this third man within me, it responds; this ether responds as if it were like the third man within me, i.e. not etherically, but ‘astrally’. Thus I release through my own activity something within this wide sea of ether that is similar to my own ‘third man’. What is this that acts in the ether as a counter-image? I lift the chalk; any hand moves from below upwards. The etheric picture, however, moves from above downwards; it is an exact counter-image. It is really an astral picture, a mere picture. Nevertheless, it is through the real, present-day man that this picture is evoked. Now, if I learn, by means of what I have already described, to look backwards in earth-evolution—if I learn to apply to cosmic evolution what is briefly recapitulated in the way described—I discover the following:

Here is the present condition of the earth. I go back to an etheric earth. I do not find there, as yet, what has been released through me in the surrounding ether. I must go farther back to a still earlier condition of the earth in which the earth resembled my own astral body. The earth was then astral—a being like my third man. I must look for this being in times long past, in times long anterior to those in which the earth was etheric. Going back-wards in time is really no different from seeing a distant object—a light, let us say—that shines as far as this. It is over there, but shines as far as here; it sends images to us here. Now put time instead of space: That which is of like nature with my own astral body was there in primeval times. Time has not ceased to be; it is still there. Just as, in space, light can shine as far as here, so that which lies in a long gone past works on into the present. Fundamentally speaking, the whole time-evolution is still there. What-ever was once there—and is of like nature with that which, in the outer ether, resembles my own astral body—has not disappeared.

Here I touch on something that, spiritually, is actively present and makes time into space. It is really no different from communicating over a long distance with the help of a telegraph. In lifting the chalk I evoke a picture in the ether and communicate with what, for outer perception, has long passed away.

We see how man is placed in the world in a quite different way from what appears at first. And we understand, too, why cosmic riddles present themselves to him. He feels within that he has an etheric body, though he does not realise it clearly: even science does not realise it clearly today. He feels that this etheric body transforms his food-stuffs and transforms them back again. He does not find this in stones, though the stones were already there, in primeval times which he discovers, there as general ether. But in this ether a still more remote past is active. Thus man bears within him an ancient past in a twofold way; a more recent past in his etheric body and a more ancient past in his astral body.

When man confronts Nature today he usually only studies what is lifeless. Even what is living in plants is only studied by applying to them the laws of substances as discovered in his laboratory. He omits to study growth; he neglects the life in his plants. Present-day science really studies plants as one who picks up a book and observes the forms of the letters, but does not read. Science, today, studies all things in this way.

Indeed, if you open a book but cannot read, the forms must appear very puzzling. You cannot really understand why there is here a form like this: ‘b’, then ‘a’, then ‘l’, then ‘d’, i.e. bald. What are these forms doing side by side? That is, indeed, a riddle. The way of regarding things that I have put before you is really learning to read in the world and in man. By ‘learning to read’ we come gradually near to the solution of our riddles.

You see, my dear friends, I wanted to put before you merely a general path for human thinking along which one can escape from the condition of despair in which man finds himself and which I described at the outset. We shall proceed to study how one can advance farther and farther in reading the phenomena in the outer world and in man.

In doing this, however, we are led along paths of thought with which man is quite unfamiliar today. And what usually happens? People say: I don't understand that. But what does this mean? It only means that this does not agree with what was taught them at school, and they have become accustomed to think in the way they were trained. ‘But do not our schools take their stand on genuine science?’ Yes, but what does that mean? My dear friends, I will give you just one example of this genuine science.—One who is no longer young has experienced many things like this. One learnt, for example, that various substances are necessary for the process referred to today—the taking in of foodstuffs and their transformation within the human organism. Albumens (proteins), fats, water, salts, sugar and starch products were cited as necessary for men. Then experiments were made.

If we go back twenty years, we find that experiments showed man to require at least one hundred and twenty grammes of protein a day; otherwise he could not live. That was ‘science’ twenty years ago. What is ‘science’ today? Today twenty to fifty grammes are sufficient. At that time it was ‘science’ that one would become ill—under-nourished—if one did not get these one hundred and twenty grammes of protein. Today science says it is injurious to one's health to take more than fifty grammes at the most; one can get along quite well with twenty grammes. If one takes more, putrefying substances form in the intestines and auto-intoxication, self-poisoning, is set up. Thus it is harmful to take more than fifty grammes of protein. That is science today.

This, however, is not merely a scientific question, it has a bearing on life. Just think: twenty years ago, when it was scientific to believe that one must have one hundred and twenty grammes of protein, people were told to choose their diet accordingly. One had to assume that a man could pay for all this. So the question touched the economic sphere. It was proved carefully that it is impossible to obtain these one hundred and twenty grammes of protein from plants. Today we know that man gets the requisite amount of protein from any kind of diet. If he simply eats sufficient potatoes—he need not eat many—along with a little butter, he obtains the requisite amount of protein. Today it is scientifically certain that this is so. Moreover, it is a fact that a man who fills himself with one hundred and twenty grammes of protein acquires a very uncertain appetite. If, on the other hand, he keeps to a diet which provides him with twenty grammes of protein, and happens, once in a while, to take food with less, and which would therefore under-nourish him, he turns from it. His instinct in regard to food becomes reliable. Of course, there are still under-nourished people, but this has other causes and certainly does not come from a deficiency of protein. On the other hand, there are certainly numerous people suffering from auto-intoxication and many other things because they are over-fed with protein.

I do not want to speak now of infectious diseases, but will just mention that people are most susceptible to so-called infection when they take one hundred and twenty grammes of protein [a day]. They are then most likely to get diphtheria, or even small-pox. If they only take twenty grammes, they will only be infected with great difficulty.

Thus it was once scientific to say that one requires so much protein as to poison oneself and be exposed to every kind of infection. That was ‘science’ twenty years ago! All this is a part of science; but when we see what was scientific in regard to very important matters but a short time ago, our confidence in such science is radically shaken.

This, too, is something one must bear in mind when we encounter a study like Anthroposophy that gives to our thinking, our whole mood of soul, a different direction from that customary today. I only wanted to point, so to speak, to what is put forward—in the first place—as preliminary instruction in the attainment of another kind of thinking, another way of contemplating the world.

• 1. The drawings in this volume are reconstructions of those freely drawn by Rudolf Steiner in coloured chalks on the blackboard. Some were made progressively but as depicted here they are from the completed sketches. Reproduction in colour is impracticable.

Today I should like to give another transitional lecture and indicate, from a certain aspect, the relation between exoteric and esoteric life; or, in other words, the transition from ordinary knowledge to knowledge attained through initiation. In this connection we must bear in mind what I have already explained in the News Sheet for Members when describing the Free College of Spiritual Science, namely: that the content of the Science of Initiation, expressed in appropriate words, can certainly be understood by everyone who is sufficiently free from prejudice. One should not say that a person must first be initiated himself in order to understand what the Science of Initiation has to give. Today, however, I should like to discuss the relationship of Anthroposophy to its source, which is the Science of Initiation itself. These three lectures will then form a kind of introduction to the composition of man (physical body, etheric body, etc.) which will be given next in the lectures of the General Anthroposophical Society.

When we consider the consciousness of present-day man, we are led to say: He stands here on the earth, and looks out on the wide spaces of the cosmos, but does not feel any connection between these and himself and what surrounds him on the earth, just consider how abstractly the sun is described by all who claim today to be the representatives of sound science. Consider, too, how these same savants describe the moon. Apart from the fact that the sun warms us in summer and leaves us cold in winter, that the moon is a favourite companion of lovers under certain conditions, how little thought is given to any connection between man, as he lives on earth, and the heavenly bodies.

Nevertheless, to know such connections, one need only develop a little that way of looking at things of which I spoke in the lecture before last. One need only develop a little understanding of what men once knew who stood nearer to the cosmos than we do today, who had a naive consciousness and an instinct for knowledge rather than an intellectual knowledge, but were able to contemplate the connection between individual heavenly bodies and the life and being of man.

Now this connection between man and the heavenly bodies must enter human consciousness again. This will come about if Anthroposophy is cultivated in the right way.

Man believes today that his destiny, his ‘Karma’, is here on the earth, and does not look to the stars for its indications. It is for Anthroposophy to grasp man's part in the super-sensible world. All that surrounds him, however, really belongs in the first place to his physical, or at most his etheric body. However far we look into the starry worlds we see the stars by their light. Now light, and all that we perceive in the world by light, is an etheric phenomenon. Thus, no matter how far we look in the universe, we do not get beyond the etheric by merely turning our gaze this way or that.

Man's being, however, reaches out into the super-sensible. He carries his super-sensible being from pre-earthly existence into the earthly realm, and carries it out again at death—out of the physical and the etheric too.

In reality there is in the whole of our environment on the earth or in the cosmos nothing of those worlds where man was before descending to earth and where he will be after passing through the gate of death. There are, however, two gates which lead from the physical and etheric worlds to the super-sensible. One is the moon, the other the sun. We only understand the sun and moon aright when we realise that they are gates to the super-sensible world, and have very much to do with what man experiences as his destiny on earth.

Consider, in the first place, the moon. The physicist knows nothing about the moon, except that it shows us reflected sunlight. He knows that moonlight is reflected sunlight, and gets no further. He does not take into account that the cosmic body visible to our physical eye as the moon, was once united with our earth-existence.

The moon was once a part of the earth. In primeval times it separated off from the earth and became an individual cosmic body out there in cosmic space. That it became a separate body is not, however, the important point; after all, that can also be interpreted as a physical fact. The important point is something essentially different.

If anyone, in full earnestness, extends his studies of human civilisation and culture back into remote times, he finds a wide-spread primeval wisdom. From this is derived much that endures today and is really much cleverer than what our science can explore. And whoever studies, for example, the Vedas of India or the Yoga philosophy from this point of view, will feel deep reverence for what he finds. It is presented in a more poetic form to which he is not accustomed today, but it fills him with deeper reverence the more deeply he studies it. If one does not approach these things in the dry, prosaic manner of today, but lets them work upon him in their stirring, yet profound, way, one comes to understand, even from a study of the documents, that Spiritual Science, Anthroposophy, must say from its own cognition: There was once a widespread primeval wisdom, though it did not appear in an intellectual, but rather in a poetic form.

The man of today, however, is constrained by his physical body to understand, through the instrumentality of his brain, what confronts him as wisdom. Now this brain, as his instrument of understanding, has only evolved in the course of long periods of time. It did not exist when the primeval wisdom was here on earth. Wisdom was then the possession of beings who did not live in a physical body.

Such beings were once companions of men. They were the great, original teachers of humanity, who have since disappeared from the earth. It is not only the physical moon that went out into cosmic space; these beings went with it. One who looks at the moon with real insight will say: There above is a world with beings in it who once lived among us on earth, and taught us in our former earthly lives; they have retired to the colony of the moon. Only when we study things in this way do we attain to truth.

Now today, within his physical body, man is only able to contemplate a very weak infusion—if I may use this term—of the primeval wisdom. In ancient times, when these beings were his teachers, man possessed something of this wisdom. He received it, not with his understanding but with his instinct, in the way by which higher beings could reveal themselves to him.

Thus everything connected with the moon points to man's past. Now, for the man of today, the past is over and done with; he no longer possesses it. Nevertheless, he bears it within him. And though we do not, in our present condition between birth and death, really encounter those beings of whom I spoke just now who were once earth-beings but are now moon-beings, we do meet them in our pre-earthly life, in the life between death and rebirth. That which we bear within us and which is always pointing to our earlier existence before birth—which speaks from our subconscious life and never attains full intellectual clarity, but has, on this account, much to do with our feelings and emotional disposition—this directs to the moonlight, not only the instinct of lovers, but the man who can value these sub-conscious impulses of human nature.

Our subconscious life, then, directs us to the moon. This may witness to the fact that the moon, with the beings who dwell there, was once united with the earth. In this sense the moon is a gate to the super-sensible; and one who studies it rightly will find, even in its external, physical configuration, support for this statement.

Just try to recall the way the moon, with its mountains, etc., is described. It all indicates that these mountains cannot be like those on the earth. The whole configuration of the moon is different. It is always stressed that the moon has neither air nor water, for example. The configuration of the moon is, in fact, like that of the earth before it became quite mineral.

I should have to read you a large number of my books and many passages from the lecture-cycles if I had to draw together what I am here presenting as a result of what has been worked out here. I only want to sketch, in an introductory way, how Anthroposophy proceeds. It leads us, in the manner described, from the physical to the spiritual again. Through Anthroposophy we learn to think in accordance with Nature. This men cannot do today.

For instance, men know today that the physical substance of their bodies is often changed in the course of life. We are continually ‘peeling off’. We cut our nails, for example; but every-thing within us is moving towards the surface until, at last, what was in the centre of the body reaches the surface and peels off-You must not believe, my dear friends, that the flesh and blood—or any physical substance—sitting on your chairs today would have sat on these chairs had you been here ten years ago. That substance has all been exchanged. What has remained? Your psycho-spiritual being. Today, at least, it is known to everyone that the people sitting here today would not have had the same muscles and bones had they sat here ten or twenty years ago; only, this is not always borne in mind.

Now, when people look up at the moon, they are conscious, to a certain extent, of its external, physical substance, and believe this was the same millions of years ago. As a matter of fact, it was just as little the same then as your present physical body was the same twenty years ago. Of course, the physical substances of the stars are not exchanged so quickly; still, they do not require so long a time as our physicists estimate in the case of the sun. These calculations are absolutely accurate—but they are wrong. I have often referred to this. You see, you may measure, for example, the changes in the inner configuration of a man's heart from month to month. You may estimate them over a period of three years. You may then calculate, quite correctly, what the configuration of his heart was three hundred years ago, or what it will be in three hundred years' time. You can arrive at some fine numbers; your calculations may be quite correct—only, his heart was not there three hundred years ago, and will not be there in three hundred years to come.

Geologists calculate in this fashion today. They study the strata of the earth, estimate the changes occurring in the course of centuries, multiply their figures and say: Twenty millions of years ago the earth was so and so. This is just the same sort of calculation, and just as sensible; for twenty million years ago all these strata were not yet there, and will no longer be in twenty million years to come.

However, apart from this, all the heavenly bodies are subject to metabolism, as man is. The substances we see when we look up at the moon were just as little there a certain number of centuries ago, as your own substances were on these chairs ten years ago. It is the beings themselves who sustain the moon, just as it is the psycho-spiritual in you that maintains your body. True, the physical moon once went out into cosmic space; but what went out is continually changing its substance, while the beings who inhabit the moon remain. It is these who form the permanent element of the moon—quite apart from their passage through repeated moon-lives.—But we will not go into that today.

When you study the moon in this way you acquire a kind of ‘science of the moon’. This science becomes inscribed in your heart, not merely in your head. You establish a relationship to the spiritual cosmos, and regard the moon as one gate thereto. Everything present in the depths of our being—not only the indefinite feelings of love, to mention these once again, but every-thing in the subconscious depths of our souls that results from earlier lives on earth—is connected with this ‘moon-existence’. From this we free ourselves in all that constitutes our present life. We are continually doing so. When we see or hear outer things with our senses, when we exercise our understanding—i.e. when we disregard what comes from the depths of our soul life and is clearly recognised as part of an active past, and turn to what draws us again and again into the present—then we are directed to the ‘sun-existence’, just as we are directed by the past to the moon-existence. Only, the sun works on us by way of our physical bodies. If we want to acquire independently, of our own free will, what the sun gives us, we have to exert that will: we must set our intellect in action. Yet, with all that we human beings of today understand through our busy intellect and our reason, we do not get nearly so far as we do instinctively—simply through there being a sun in the universe.

Everyone knows, or can, at least, know, that the sun not only wakens us every morning, calling us from darkness to light, but is the source of the forces of growth within us, including those of the soul. That which works in these soul-forces from out of the past is connected with the moon, but that which works within the present and which we shall only really acquire in the future through our own free choice, depends on the sun.

The moon points to our past, the sun to the future. We look up to the two luminaries, that of the day and that of the night, and observe the relationship between them, for they send us the same light. Then we look into ourselves and observe all that is woven into our destiny through past experiences undergone as men; in this we see our inner moon-existence. And in all that continually approaches us in the present and determines our destiny, in all that works on from the present into the future we see the sun-element. We see how past and future are weaving together in human destiny.

Further: we can study this connection between past and future more closely. Suppose two people come together for some common task at a certain time of life. One who does not think deeply about such things may say: He and I were both at Müllheim (let us say), and we met there. He thinks no more about it. But one who thinks more deeply may follow up the lives of these two who came together when one was, perhaps, thirty years of age and the other twenty-five. He will see in what a wonderful and extraordinary way the lives of these two people have developed, step by step, from birth onwards, so as to bring them together at this place. One may say, indeed, that people find their way to one another from the most distant places to meet about half-way through their lives. It is as if they had arranged all their ways with this end in view. Of course, they could not have done this consciously, for they had not seen one another before—or, at least, had not formed such a judgment of one another as would make their meeting significant. All these things take place in the unconscious. We travel paths leading to important turning points, or periods in our lives, and do so in deep unconsciousness. It is from these depths that—in the first place—destiny is woven. (Now we begin to understand people like Goethe's friend Knebel, whose experience of life was deep and varied and who said in his old age: On looking back on my life it seems as if every step had been so ordained that I had to arrive finally at a definite point.) Then the moment comes, however, when the relationship between these two people takes place in full consciousness. They learn to know one another, one another's temperament and character, they feel sympathy or antipathy for one another, etc. Now, if we examine the connection between their relationship and the cosmos, we find that moon-forces were active on the paths taken by these two people up to the moment of meeting. At this point the action of the sun begins. They now enter, to a certain extent, the bright light of the sun's activity. What follows is accompanied by their own consciousness; the future begins to illuminate the past, as the sun the moon. At the same time the past illuminates man's future, as the moon the earth with reflected light.

But the question now is, whether we can distinguish the solar from the lunar in man's life. Well, even our feelings can distinguish much, if we study them more deeply. Even in childhood and early life we come into contact with people whose relation-ship to us remains external; we ‘pass them by’ as they us, even though they may have a good deal to do with us. You all went to school, but only very few of you can say you had teachers with whom you had any deeper relationship. Still, there will be one or two of you who can say: Yes, I had a teacher who made such an impression on me that I wanted to be like him; or: He made such an impression on me that I wished him off the face of the earth. It may have been either sympathy or antipathy.

There are others, again, who only affect our understanding, so to speak, or our aesthetic sense at most. Just think how often it happens that we learn to know somebody and, meeting others who know him too, we all agree that he is a splendid fellow—or a terrible person. This is an aesthetic judgment, or an intellectual one. But there is another kind of judgment. There are human relationships that do not merely run their course in the above two ways, but affect the will; and this to such an extent that we do not merely say, as in childhood, that we would like to become like this person or that we wish him off the face of the earth—to mention extreme cases—but we are affected in the unconscious depths of our will life, and say: We not only look upon this man as good or bad, clever or foolish, etc., but we would like to do, of our own accord, what his will wills; we would rather not exert our intellect in order to judge him. We would like to translate into action the impression he has made upon us.

Thus there are these two kinds of human relationships: those that affect our intellect, or, at most, our aesthetic sense; and those that affect our will, acting on the deeper life of our soul. What does that mean? Well, if people act on our will, if we do not merely feel strong sympathy or antipathy towards then but would like to give expression to our sympathy or antipathy through our will, they were somehow connected with us in our previous life. If people only impress our intellect or our aesthetic sense, they are entering our life without such a previous connection.

You can see from this that in human life, especially in human destiny, past and present work together into the future. For what we experience with others, even though they have no effect on our will, will come to expression in a future life on earth.

Just as the sun and moon circle in the same path and are interrelated, so, in the human being, are past and future, moon element and sun-element. And we can come to look upon the sun and moon, not as external luminaries, but as mirrors reflecting, in the wide spaces of the cosmos, the interweaving of our destiny. Past and future continually interpenetrate and interweave in our destinies, just as moonlight passes into sunlight, and sunlight into moonlight. Indeed, the interweaving takes place in every case of human relationship.

Consider the paths travelled by two people, the one for thirty years, the other for twenty-five. They meet here, let us say. All they have passed through until now belongs to the moon-element in man. Now, however, through learning to know one another, through confronting one another consciously, they enter the sun-element of destiny, and weave past and future together, thus forming their destiny for future lives on earth.

Thus, from the way destiny approaches man we may see how, in the one case, a person acts on another through intellect or aesthetic sense, in another case through the will and the life of feeling connected therewith.

As I have said, I only want today to sketch these things in a brief, fragmentary way in order to show you the path of Anthroposophy and of its source—the Science of Initiation. We shall study the details in the future. As far as I have gone at present however, everyone can have direct, first-hand knowledge of these things. He can study his destiny with understanding. That peculiar, intimate, inner relationship in which another person speaks from within us—as it were—indicates tics of destiny from the past. If I feel that someone ‘grips’ me, not merely in my senses and intellect but inwardly, so that my will is engaged in the very way he grips me, he is connected with me by ties of destiny from the past. Such ties can be felt with a finer, more intimate sense.

One experiences this in an essentially different way, however, when one attains a certain stage of the path described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, or in the second part of my Occult Science. When one attains initiation another person with whom one has ties of destiny is not only experienced in such a way that one says: He acts on my will, he acts in my will. One actually experiences the other personality as really within oneself. If an initiate meets another person with whom he has ties of destiny, this other person is present within him with independent speech and gestures—speaks from out of him, as one who stands beside us speaks to us. Thus the tics of destiny, which are usually felt only in the will, take such a form for the initiate that the other person speaks from out of the initiate himself. For one possessing the Science of Initiation a karmic encounter means, then, that the other person works not only on his will, but as strongly as a man standing beside him.

You see, what ordinary consciousness can only surmise by way of feeling and will, is raised for higher consciousness to full reality. You may say: That means that the initiate walks about with a group of people inside him with whom he is connected through destiny. That is actually the case. The attainment of knowledge is not a mere matter of learning to say more than other people while talking just as they do; it really means enlarging one's world.

Thus, if one intends to speak on the way Karma operates in human lives, fashioning mutual destiny, one must be able to confirm what one says from a knowledge of how others speak in one, how they really become a part of oneself.

If we then describe these things, they need not remain out of reach of one who has not been initiated; for he can and—if sane and healthy—will say: True, I don't hear a person speaking within me, if we are connected through destiny; but I feel him in my will, in the way he stirs it. One learns to understand this effect on the will. One learns to understand what is experienced in ordinary consciousness but cannot be understood unless we hear it described, in its true concrete significance, out of the Science of Initiation.

It was my special concern today to explain that this feeling of karmic connection with another, which otherwise enters consciousness in a kind of nebulous way, becomes a concrete experience for the initiate. And all that the Science of Initiation can achieve, can be described in this way.

There are many other indications of our karmic connections with other people. Some of you will know, if you study life, that we meet many people of whom we do not dream; we can live long with them without doing so. We meet others, however, of whom we dream constantly. We have hardly seen them when we dream of them the next night, and they enter our dreams again and again.

Now dreams play a special part in the subconscious life. When we dream of people on first meeting them, there is certainly a karmic connection between us. People of whom we cannot dream make only a slight impression on our senses; we meet them but have no karmic connection with them.

What lives in the depths of our will is, indeed, like a waking dream; but it becomes concrete, fully conscious experience for the initiate. Hence he hears those with whom he has a karmic connection speaking from within him. Of course he remains sensible and does not walk about speaking, as an initiate, from out of others when he converses with all sorts of people. Nevertheless, he does accustom himself, under certain conditions, to hold converse with persons connected with him through Karma. This converse takes place in a quite concrete way, even when he is not with them in space, and things of real significance come to light. However, I shall describe these things at some future time.

Thus we can deepen our consciousness on looking out into the wide spaces of the cosmos, and on looking into man himself. And the more we look into man himself, the more we learn to understand what the wide cosmic spaces contain. Then we say to ourselves: I no longer see merely shining discs or orbs in stellar space, but what I see in the outer cosmos appears to me as cosmically woven destiny. Human destinies on earth are now seen to be images of cosmically woven destinies. And when we realise clearly that the substance of a heavenly body is changing—is being exchanged, just as is the bodily substance of man—we know there is no sense in merely speaking of abstract laws of Nature. These abstract laws must not be regarded as giving us knowledge. It is just as in life insurance companies. To what do these owe their existence? To the fact that they can calculate a man's ‘expectation of life’. One takes a certain number of people aged twenty-five and, from the number of these who reach the age of thirty, etc., one can calculate the probable number of years a man of thirty will live. He is insured accordingly. Now, one gets on quite well with such insurance, for the laws of insurance hold. But it would not occur to anyone to apply these laws to his innermost being; otherwise he would say: I insured myself at the age of thirty, because my ‘probable death’ would occur at the age of fifty-five. I must die at fifty-five. He would never draw this conclusion and act accordingly, although the calculation is quite correct. The correctness of the reasoning has no significance for actual life.

Now we only arrive at laws of nature by calculations. They are good for technical applications; they enable us to construct machines, just as we can insure people in accordance with certain natural laws. But they do not lead us into the true essence of things, for only real cognition of the beings themselves can do that.

The laws of Nature, as calculated by astronomers for the heavens, are like insurance laws in human life. What a real Science of Initiation discovers about the being of the sun or moon is like my funding someone still living in ten years' time when, according to his insurance policy, he should have died long before. It lay in his inner being to live on.

Fundamentally speaking, actual events have nothing at all to do with the laws of Nature. These laws are good for applying natural forces; real Being, however, must be known through the Science of Initiation.

This concludes the third of the lectures in which I only wanted to indicate what the tone of Anthroposophy should be. We shall now begin to describe the constitution of man somewhat differently from the way it is done in my “Theosophy.” In doing this we shall build up an Anthroposophical Science, an Anthroposophical Knowledge from its foundations. You may regard the three lectures I have just given as illustrations of the difference in tone between the speech of ordinary consciousness and the speech of that consciousness which leads into the real being of things.

I shall now continue, in a certain direction, the more elementary considerations recently begun. In the first lecture of this series I drew your attention to the heart's real, inner need of finding, or at least seeking, the paths of the soul to the spiritual world. I spoke of this need meeting man from two directions: from the side of Nature, and from the side of inner experience.

Today we will again place these two aspects of human life before us in a quite elementary way. We shall then see that impulses from the subconscious are really active in all man's striving for knowledge in response to the needs of life, in his artistic aims and religious aspirations.

You can quite easily study the opposition, to which I here refer, in yourselves at any moment.

Take one quite simple fact. You are looking, let us say, at some part of your body—your hand, for example. In so far as the act of cognition itself is concerned you look at your hand exactly as at a crystal, or plant, or any other natural object. But when you look at this part of your body and go through life with this perception, you encounter that seriously disturbing fact which intrudes on all human experience and of which I spoke. You find that what you see will one day be a corpse; external Nature, on receiving it, has not the power to do anything else than destroy it. The moment man has become a corpse within the physical world and has been handed over to the elements in any form, there is no longer any possibility that the human form, which has been impressed on all the substances visible in his body, will be able to maintain itself.

All the forces of Nature which you can make the subject of any scientific study are only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Every unprejudiced study that is not guided by theory but controlled by life itself, leads us to say: We look at Nature around us in so far it is intelligible. (We will not speak, for the present, of what external cognition cannot grasp.) As civilised people of today we feel we have advanced very far indeed, for we have discovered so many laws of Nature. This talk of progress is, indeed, perfectly justified. Nevertheless, it is a fact that all these laws of Nature are, by their mode of operation, only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Human insight is unable, at first, to discover anything in the external world except laws of Nature which destroy man.

Let us now look at our inner life. We experience what we call our psychical life, i.e. our thinking, which can confront us fairly clearly, our feeling, which is less clearly experienced, and our willing, which is quite hidden from us. For, with ordinary consciousness, no one can claim insight into the way an intention—to pick up an object, let us say—works down into this very complicated organism of muscle and nerve in order to move, at length, arms and legs. What it is that here works down into the organism, between the formation of the thought and the perception of the lifted object, is hidden in complete darkness. But an indefinite impulse takes place in us, saying: I will this. So we ascribe will to ourselves and, on surveying our inner life, speak of thinking, feeling and willing.

But there is another side, and this introduces us again—in a certain sense—to what is deeply disturbing. We see that all this soul life of man is submerged whenever he sleeps and arises anew when he wakes. If we want to use a comparison we may well say: The soul life is like a flame which I kindle and extinguish again. But we see more. We see this soul life destroyed when certain organs are destroyed. Moreover, it is dependent on bodily development; being dreamlike in a little child and becoming gradually clearer and clearer, more and more awake. This increase in clarity and awareness goes hand in hand with the development of the body; and when we grow old our soul life becomes weaker again. The life of the soul thus keeps step with the growth and decay of the body. We see it light up and die away.

But, however sure we may be that our soul, though dependent in its manifestations on the physical organism, has its own life, its own existence, this is not all we can say about it. It contains an element man must value above all else in life, for his whole manhood—his human dignity—depends on this. I refer to the moral element.

We cannot deduce moral laws from Nature however far we may explore it. They have to be experienced entirely within the soul; there, too, we must be able to obey them. The conflict and settlement must therefore take place entirely within the soul. And we must regard it as a kind of ideal for the moral life to be able, as human beings, to obey moral principles which are not forced upon us. Yet man cannot become an ‘abstract being’ only obeying laws. The moral life does not begin until emotions, impulses, instincts, passions, outbursts of temperament, etc., are subordinated to the settlement, reached entirely within the soul, between moral laws grasped in a purely spiritual way and the soul itself.

The moment we become truly conscious of our human dignity and feel we cannot be like beings driven by necessity, we rise to a world quite different from the world of Nature.

Now the disturbing element that, as long as there has been human evolution at all, has led men to strive beyond the life immediately visible, really springs from these two laws—however many subconscious and unconscious factors may be involved: We see, on the one hand, man's bodily being, but it belongs to Nature that can only destroy it; and, on the other hand, we are inwardly aware of ourselves as soul beings who light up and fade away, yet are bound up with what is most valuable in us—the moral element.

It can only be ascribed to a fundamental insincerity of our civilisation that people deceive themselves so terribly, turning a blind eye to this direct opposition between outer perception and inner experience. If we understand ourselves, if we refuse to be confined and constricted by the shackles which our education, with a definite aim in view, imposes upon us, if we free ourselves a little from these constraints we say at once: Man! you bear within you your soul life—your thinking, feeling and willing. All this is connected with the moral world which you must value above all else—perhaps with the religious source of all existence on which this moral world itself depends. But where is this inner life of moral adjustments when you sleep?

Of course, one can spin philosophic fantasies or fantastic philosophies about these things. One may then say: Man has a secure basis in his ego (i.e. in his ordinary ego-consciousness). The ego begins to think in St. Augustine, continues through Descartes, and attains a somewhat coquettish expression in Bergsonism today. But every sleep refutes this. For, from the moment we fall asleep to the moment of waking, a certain time elapses; and when, in the waking state, we look back on this interval of time, we do not find the ego qua experience. It was extinguished. And yet it is connected with what is most valuable in our lives—the moral element!

Thus we must say: Our body, whose existence we are rudely forced to admit, is certainly not a product of Nature, which has only the power to destroy and disintegrate it. On the other hand, our own soul life eludes us when we sleep, and is dependent on every rising and falling tide of our bodily life. As soon as we free ourselves a little from the constraints imposed on civilised man by his education today, we see at once that every religious or artistic aspiration—in fact, any higher striving—no matter how many subconscious and unconscious elements be involved, depends, throughout all human evolution, on these antitheses.

Of course, millions and millions of people do not realise this clearly. But is it necessary that what becomes a riddle of life for a man be clearly recognised as such? If people had to live by what they are clear about they would soon die. It is really the contributions to the general mood from unclear, subconscious depths that compose the main stream of our life. We should not say that he alone feels the riddles of life who can formulate them in an intellectually clear way and lay them before us: first riddle, second riddle, etc. Indeed, such people are the shallowest.

Someone may come who has this or that to talk over with us. Perhaps it is some quite ordinary matter. He speaks with a definite aim in view, but is not quite happy about it. He wants something, and yet does not want it; he cannot come to a decision. He is not quite happy about his own thoughts. To what is this due? It comes from the feeling of uncertainty, in the subconscious depths of his being, about the real basis of man's true being and worth. He feels life's riddles because of the polar antithesis I have described.

Thus we can find support neither in the corporeal, nor in the spiritual as we experience it. For the spiritual always reveals itself as something that lights up and dies down, and the body is recognised as coming from Nature which can, however, only destroy it.

So man stands between two riddles. He looks outwards and perceives his physical body, but this is a perpetual riddle to him. He is aware of his psycho-spiritual life, but this, too, is a perpetual riddle. But the greatest riddle is this: If I really experience a moral impulse and have to set my legs in motion to do something towards its realisation, it means—of course—I must move my body. Let us say the impulse is one of goodwill. At first this is really experienced entirely within the soul, i.e. purely psychically. How, now, does this impulse of goodwill shoot down into the body? How does a moral impulse come to move bones by muscles? Ordinary consciousness cannot comprehend this. One may regard such a discussion as theoretical, and say: We leave that to philosophers; they will think about it. Our civilisation usually leaves this question to its thinkers, and then despises—or, at least, values but little—what they say. Well; this satisfies the head only, not the heart. The human heart feels a nervous unrest and finds no joy in life, no firm foundation, no security. With the form man's thinking has taken since the first third of the fifteenth century magnificent results in the domain of external science have been achieved, but nothing has or can be contributed towards a solution of these two riddles—that of man's physical body and that of his psychical life. It is just from a clear insight into these things that Anthroposophy comes forward, saying: True; man's thinking, in the form it has so far actually taken, is powerless in the face of Reality. However much we think, we cannot in the very least influence an external process of nature by our thinking.

Moreover, we cannot, by mere thinking, influence our own ‘will-organism’. To feel deeply the powerlessness of this thinking is to receive the impulse to transcend it.

But one cannot transcend it by spinning fantasies. There is no starting point but thought; you cannot begin to think about the world except by thinking. Our thinking, however, is not fitted for this. So we are unavoidably led by life itself to find—from this starting point in thought—a way by which our thinking may penetrate more deeply into existence—into Reality. This way is only to be found in what is described as meditation—for example, in my book: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

Today we will only describe this path in bare outline, for we intend to give the skeleton of a whole anthroposophical structure. We will begin again where we began twenty years ago.

Meditation, we may say, consists in experiencing thinking in another way than usual. Today one allows oneself to be stimulated from without; one surrenders to external reality. And in seeing, hearing, grasping, etc., one notices that the reception of external impressions is continued—to a certain extent—in thoughts. One's attitude is passive—one surrenders to the world and the thoughts come. We never get further in this way. We must begin to experience thinking. One does this by taking a thought that is easily comprehended, letting it stay in one's consciousness, and concentrating one's whole consciousness upon it.

Now it does not matter at all what the thought may signify for the external world. The point is simply that we concentrate our consciousness on this one thought, ignoring every other experience. I say it must be a comprehensible thought—a simple thought, that can be ‘seen’ from all sides [überschaubar]. A very, very learned man once asked me how one meditates. I gave him an exceedingly simple thought. I told him it did not matter whether the thought referred to any external reality. I told him to think: Wisdom is in the light. He was to apply the whole force of his soul again and again to the thought: Wisdom is in the light. Whether this be true or false is not the point. It matters just as little whether an object that I set in motion, again and again, by exerting my arm, be of far-reaching importance or a game; I strengthen the muscles of my arm thereby. So, too, we strengthen our thinking when we exert ourselves, again and again, to per-form the above activity, irrespective of what the thought may signify. If we strenuously endeavour, again and again, to make it present in our consciousness and concentrate our whole soul life upon it, we strengthen our soul life just as we strengthen the muscular force of our arm if we apply it again and again to the same action. But we must choose a thought that is easily surveyed; otherwise we are exposed to all possible tricks of our own organisation. People do not believe how strong is the suggestive power of unconscious echoes of past experiences and the like. The moment we entertain a more complicated thought demonic powers approach from all sides, suggesting this or that to our consciousness. One can only be sure that one is living in one's meditation in the full awareness of normal, conscious life, if one really takes a completely surveyable thought that can contain nothing but what one is actually thinking.

If we contrive to meditate in this way, all manner of people may say we are succumbing to auto-suggestion or the like, but they will be talking nonsense. It all turns on our success in holding a ‘transparent’ thought—not one that works in us through sub-conscious impulses in some way or other. By such concentration one strengthens and intensifies his soul life—in so far as this is a life in thought. Of course, it will depend on a man's capacities, as I have often said; in the case of one man it will take a long time, in the case of another it will happen quickly. But, after a certain time, the result will be that he no longer experiences his thinking as in ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness our thoughts stand there powerless; they are ‘just thoughts’. But through such concentration one really comes to experience thoughts as inner being [Sein], just as one experiences the tension of a muscle—the act of reaching out to grasp an object. Thinking becomes a reality in us; we experience, on developing ourselves further and further, a second man within us of whom we knew nothing before.

The moment now arrives when you say to yourself: True, I am this human being who, to begin with, can look at himself externally as one looks at the things of nature; I feel inwardly, but very dimly, the tensions of my muscles, but I do not really know how my thoughts shoot down into them. But after strengthening your thinking in the way described, you feel your strengthened thinking flowing, streaming, pulsating within you; you feel the second man. This is, to begin with, an abstract characterisation. The main thing is that the moment you feel this second man within you, supra-terrestrial things begin to concern you in the way only terrestrial things did before. In this moment, when you feel your thought take on inner life—when you feel its flow as you feel the flow of your breath when you pay heed to it—you become aware of something new in your whole being. Formerly you felt for example: I am standing on my legs. The ground is below and supports me. If it were not there, if the earth did not offer me this support, I would sink into bottomless space. I am standing on something. After you have intensified your thinking and come to feel the second man within, your earthly environment begins to interest you less than before. This only holds, however, for the moments in which you give special attention to the second man. One does not become a dreamer if one advances to these stages of knowledge in a sincere and fully conscious way. One can quite easily return, with all one's wonted skill, to the world of ordinary life. One does not become a visionary and say: Oh! I have learnt to know the spiritual world; the earthly is unreal and of less value. From now on I shall only concern myself with the spiritual world. On a true, spiritual path one does not become like that, but learns to value external life more than ever when one returns to it. Apart from this, the moments in which one transcends external life in the way described and fixes attention on the second man one has discovered cannot be maintained for long. To fix one's attention in this way and with inner sincerity demands great effort, and this can only be sustained for a certain time which is usually not very long.

Now, in turning our attention to the second man, we find at the same time, that we begin to value the spatial environment of the earth as much as what is on the earth itself. We know that the crust of the earth supports us, and the various kingdoms of Nature provide the substances we must eat if our body is to receive through food the repeated stimulus it needs. We know that we are connected with terrestrial Nature in this way. We must go into the garden to pick cabbages, cook and eat them; and we know that we need what is out there in the garden and that it is connected with our ‘first’ or physical man. In just the same way we learn to know what the rays of the sun, the light of the moon and the twinkling of the stars around the earth are to us. Gradually we attain one possible way of thinking of the spatial environment of the earth in relation to our ‘second man’, as we formerly thought of our first (physical) body in relation to its physical environment.

And now we say to ourselves: What you bear within you as muscles, bones, lung, liver, etc., is connected with the cabbage, the pheasant, etc., out there in the world. But the ‘second man’ of whom you have become conscious through strengthening your thinking, is connected with the sun and the moon and all the twinkling stars—with the spatial environment of the earth. We become more familiar with this environment than we usually are with our terrestrial environment—unless we happen to be food-specialists. We really gain a second world which, to begin with, is spatial.

We learn to esteem ourselves inhabitants of the world of stars as we formerly considered ourselves inhabitants of the earth. Hitherto we did not realise that we dwell in the world of stars; for a science which does not go as far to strengthen man's thinking cannot make him conscious of his connection, through a second man, with the spatial environment of the earth—a connection similar to that between his physical body and the physical earth. Such a science does not know this. It engages in calculations; but even the calculations of Astrophysics, etc., only reveal things which do not really concern man at all, or—at most—only satisfy his curiosity. After all, what does it mean to a man, or his inner life, to know how the spiral nebular in Canes venatici may be thought of as having originated, or as still evolving? Moreover, it is not even true! Such things do not really concern us. Man's attitude towards the world of stars is like that of some disembodied spirit towards the earth—if such a spirit be thought of as coming from some region or other to visit the earth, requiring neither ground to stand on, nor nourishment, etc. But, in actual fact, from a mere citizen of the earth man becomes a citizen of the universe when he strengthens his thinking in the above way.

We now become conscious of something quite definite, which can be described in the following way. We say to ourselves: It is good that there are cabbages, corn, etc., out there; they build up our physical body (if I may use this somewhat incorrect expression in accordance with the general, but very superficial, view). I am able to discover a certain connection between my physical body and what is there outside in the various kingdoms of Nature. But with strengthened thinking I begin to discover a similar connection between the ‘second man’ who lives in me and what surrounds me in supra-terrestrial space. At length one comes to say: If I go out at night and only use my ordinary eyes, I see nothing; by day the sunlight from beyond the earth makes all objects visible. To begin with, I know nothing. If I restrict myself to the earth alone, I know: there is a cabbage, there a quartz crystal. I see both by the light of the sun, but on earth I am only interested in the difference between them.

But now I begin to know that I myself, as the second man, am made of that which makes cabbage and crystal visible. It is a most significant leap in consciousness that one takes here—a complete metamorphosis. From this point one says to oneself: If you stand on the earth you see what is physical and connected with your physical man. If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the second man you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your ‘second existence’ to the cosmic ether through whose activities earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body. You see, merely to systematise and think of man as composed of various members gives no real knowledge. We only attain real insight into these things by regarding the complete metamorphosis of consciousness that results from really discovering such a second man within.

I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel, in a sense, the flowing force in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a touching that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

The moment now arrives when one is obliged to descend another step, if I may put it so. Through such ‘imaginative’ thinking as I have described we come, at first, to feel this inward touching of the second man within us; we come, too, to see this in connection with the far spaces of the universal ether. By this term you are to understand nothing but what I have just spoken of; do not read into it a meaning from some other quarter. Now, however, we must return again to ordinary consciousness if we are to get further.

You see, if we are thinking of man's physical body in the way described, we readily ask how it is really related to its environment. It is doubtless related to our physical, terrestrial environment; but how?

If we take a corpse, which is, indeed, a faithful representation of physical man—even of the living physical man—we see, in sharp contours, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lung, bones, muscles and nerve strands. These can be drawn; they have sharp contours and resemble in this everything that occurs in solid forms. Yet there is a curious thing about this sharply outlined part of the human organism. Strictly speaking, there is nothing more deceptive than our handbooks of anatomy or physiology, for they lead people to think: there is a liver, there a heart, etc. They see all this in sharp contours and imagine this sharpness to be essential. The human organism is looked upon as a conglomeration of solid things. But it is not so at all. Ten per cent., at most, is solid; the other ninety per cent. is fluid or even gaseous. At least ninety per cent. of man, while he lives, is a column of water.

Thus we can say: In his physical body man belongs, it is true, to the solid earth—to what the ancient thinkers in particular called the ‘earth’. Then we come to what is fluid in man; and even in external science one will never gain a reasonable idea of man until one learns to distinguish the solid man from the fluid man this inner surging and weaving element which really resembles a small ocean.

But what is terrestrial can only really affect man through the solid part of him. For even in external Nature you can see, where the fluid element begins, an inner formative force working with very great uniformity. Take the whole fluid element of our earth—its water; it is a great drop. Wherever water is free to take its own form, it takes that of a drop. The fluid element tends everywhere to be drop-like.

What is earthly—or solid, as we say today—occurs in definite, individual forms, which we can recognise. What is fluid, however, tends always to take on spherical form.

Why is this? Well, if you study a drop, be it small or as large as the earth itself, you find it is an image of the whole universe. Of course, this is wrong according to the ordinary conceptions of today; nevertheless it appears so, to begin with, and we shall soon see that this appearance is justified. The universe really appears to us as a hollow sphere into which we look.

Every drop, whether small or large, appears as a reflection of the universe itself. Whether you take a drop of rain, or the waters of the earth as a whole, the surface gives you a picture of the universe. Thus, as soon as you come to what is fluid, you cannot explain it by earthly forces. If you study closely the enormous efforts that have been made to explain the spherical form of the oceans by terrestrial forces, you will realise how vain such efforts are. The spherical form of the oceans cannot be explained by terrestrial gravitational attraction and the like, but by pressure from without. Here, even in external Nature, we find we must look beyond the terrestrial. And, in doing this, we come to grasp how it is with man himself.

As long as you restrict yourself to the solid part of man, you need not look beyond the terrestrial in understanding his form. The moment you come to his fluid part, you require the second man discovered by strengthened thinking. He works in what is fluid.

We are now back again at what is terrestrial. We find in man a solid constituent; this we can explain with our ordinary thoughts. But we cannot understand the form of his fluid components unless we think of the second man as active within him—the second man whom we contact within ourselves in our strengthened thinking as the human etheric body.

Thus we can say: The physical man works in what is solid, the etheric man in what is fluid. Of course, the etheric man still remains an independent entity, but he works through the fluid medium.

We must now proceed further. Imagine we have actually got so far as to experience inwardly this strengthened thinking and, therefore, the etheric—the second—man. This means, that we are developing great inner force. Now, as you know, one can—with a little effort—not only let oneself be stimulated to think, but can even refrain from all thinking. One can stop thinking; and our physical organisation does this for us when we are tired and fall asleep. But it becomes more difficult to extinguish again, of our own accord, the strengthened thinking which results from meditation and which we have acquired by great effort. It is comparatively easy to extinguish an ordinary, powerless thought; to put away—or ‘suggest away’—the strengthened thinking one has developed demands a stronger force, for one cleaves in a more inward way to what one has thus acquired. If we succeed, however, something special occurs.

You see, our ordinary thinking is stimulated by our environment, or memories of our environment. When you follow a train of thought the world is still there; when you fall asleep the world is still there. But it is out of this very world of visible things that you have raised yourself in your strengthened thinking. You have contacted the supra-terrestrial spatial environment, and now study your relationship to the stars as you formerly studied the relation between the natural objects around you. You have now brought yourself into relation with all this, but can suppress it again. In suppressing it, however, the external world, too, is no longer there—for you have just directed all your interest to this strengthened consciousness. The outer world is not there; and you come to what one can call ‘empty consciousness’. Ordinary consciousness only knows emptiness in sleep, and then in the form of unconsciousness.

What one now attains is just this: one remains fully awake, receiving no outer sense impressions, yet not sleeping—merely ‘waking’. Yet one does not remain merely awake. For now, on exposing one's empty consciousness to the indefinite on all sides, the spiritual world proper enters. One says: the spiritual world approaches me. Whereas previously one only looked out into the supra-terrestrial physical environment—which is really an etheric environment—and saw what is spatial, something new, the actual spiritual world, now approaches through this cosmic space from all sides as from indefinite distances. At first the spiritual approaches you from the outermost part of the cosmos when you traverse the path I have described.

A third thing is now added to the former metamorphosis of consciousness. One now says: I bear with me my physical body (inner circle), my etheric body (blue) which I apprehended in my strengthened thinking, and something more that comes from the undefined—from beyond space. I ask you to notice that I am talking of the world of appearance; we shall see in the course of the next few days how far one is justified in speaking of the etheric as coming from the spatial world, and of what lies beyond us (red) coming from the Undefined. We are no longer conscious of this third component as coming from the spatial world. It streams to us through the cosmic ether and permeates us as a ‘third man’. We have now a right to speak, from our own experience, of a first or physical man, a second or etheric man, and a third or ‘astral man’. (You realise, of course, that you must not be put off by words.) We bear within us an astral or third man, who comes from the spiritual, not merely from the etheric. We can speak of the astral body or astral man.

Now we can go further. I will only indicate this in conclusion so that I can elaborate it tomorrow. We now say to ourselves: I breathe in, use my breath for my inner organisation and breathe out. But is it really true that what people think of as a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen enters and leaves us in breathing?

Well, according to the views of present day civilisation, what enters and leaves is composed of oxygen and nitrogen and some other things. But one who attains ‘empty consciousness’ and then experiences this onrush—as I might call it—of the spiritual through the ether, experiences in the breath he draws something not formed out of the ether alone, but out of the spiritual beyond it. He gradually learns to know the spiritual that plays into man in respiration. He learns to say to himself: You have a physical body; this works into what is solid—that is its medium. You have your etheric body; this works into what is fluid. But, in being a man—not merely a solid man or fluid man, but a man who bears his ‘air man’ within him—your third or astral man can work into what is airy or gaseous. It is through this material substance on the earth that your astral man operates.

Man's fluid organisation with its regular but ever changing life will never be grasped by ordinary thinking. It can only be grasped by strengthened thinking. With ordinary thinking we can only apprehend the definite contours of the physical man. And, since our anatomy and physiology merely take account of the body, they only describe ten per cent of man. But the ‘fluid man’ is in constant movement and never presents a fixed contour. At one moment it is like this, at another, like that—now long, now short. What is in constant movement cannot be grasped with the closed concepts suitable for calculations; you require concepts mobile in themselves—‘pictures’. The etheric man within the fluid man is apprehended in pictures.

The third or astral man who works in the ‘airy’ man, is apprehended not merely in pictures but in yet another way. If you advance further and further in meditation—I am here describing the Western process—you notice, after reaching a certain stage in your exercises, that your breath has become something palpably musical. You experience it as inner music; you feel as if inner music were weaving and surging through you. The third man—who is physically the airy man, spiritually the astral man—is experienced as an inner musical element. In this way you take hold of your breathing.

The oriental meditator did this directly by concentrating on his breathing, making it irregular in order to experience how it lives and weaves in man. He strove to take hold of this third man directly.

Thus we discover the nature of the third man, and are now at the stage when we can say: By deepening and strengthening our insight we learn, at first, to distinguish in man:

the physical body which lives in solid forms on the earth and is also connected with the terrestrial kingdoms,

the fluid man in whom an ever mobile, etheric element lives and which can only be apprehended in images (Bilder)—in moving, plastic images,

the astral man who has his physical copy or image (Abbild) in all that constitutes the stream of inspired air.

This stream enters and takes hold of our inner organisation, expands, works, is transformed and streams out again. That is a wonderful process of becoming. We cannot draw it; we might do so symbolically, at most, but not as it really is. You could no more draw this process than you could draw the tones of a violin. You might do this symbolically; nevertheless you must direct your musical sense to hearing inwardly—i.e. you must attend with your inner, musical ear and not merely listen to the external tones. In this inward way you must hear the weaving of your breath—must hear the human astral body. This is the third man. We apprehend him when we attain to ‘empty consciousness’ and allow this to be filled with ‘inspirations’ from without.

Now language is really cleverer than men, for it comes to us from primeval worlds. There is a deep reason why breathing was once called inspiration. In general, the words of our language say much more than we, in our abstract consciousness, feel them to contain.

These are the considerations that can lead us to the three members of man—the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies—which find expression in the solid, fluid and airy ‘men’ and have their physical counterparts in the forms of the solid man, in the changing shapes of the fluid man and in that which permeates man as an inner music, experienced through feeling. The nervous system is indeed the most beautiful representation of this inner music. It is built from out of the astral body—from out of this inner music; and for this reason it has, at a definite part, the wonderful configuration of the spinal cord with its attached nerve-strands. All this together is a wonderful, musical structure that is continually working upwards into man's head.

A primeval wisdom that was still alive in Ancient Greece, felt the presence of this wonderful instrument in man. For the air assimilated through breathing ascends through the whole spinal cord. The air we breathe in ‘enters’ the cerebro-spinal canal and pulsates upwards towards the brain. This music is actually per-formed, but it remains unconscious; only the upper rebound is in consciousness. This is the lyre of Apollo, the inner musical instrument that the instinctive, primeval wisdom still recognised in man. I have referred to these things before, but it is my present intention to give a resume of what has been developed within our society in the course of twenty-one years.

Tomorrow I shall go further and consider the fourth member of man, the ego organisation proper. I shall then show the connection between these various members of man and his life on earth and beyond it—i.e. his so-called eternal life.

I have described how man must be regarded as composed of physical, etheric and astral bodies, and how we can acquire a deeper insight into this composition by exercising our cognitive powers—powers of mind, heart and will—in a certain way. This composition that we discern in man is also found in the external world. Only, we must be clear that there is a consider-able difference between what we find in the world outside and what we find in man.

When, to begin with, we study the physical world—and we can really only study its solid, ‘earthy’ manifestations—we come to distinguish various substances. I need not go into details. You know, of course, that the anatomist, investigating what remains of the living man after he has passed through the gate of death—the corpse—need not take account of any but earthly substances which he also finds outside man. At least, he believes he need not, and within certain limits his belief is justified. He investigates the elements or the salts, acids and other compounds found outside of man, and he investigates what the human organism contains. He does not find it necessary to enlarge his physical and chemical knowledge.

Indeed, the difference only becomes apparent when we study these things on a somewhat bigger scale, and notice what I have emphasised so strongly, namely: that the human organism as a whole cannot be maintained by external Nature, but is subject to destruction. Thus we can say that, in the solid, earthy, physical realm, we do not find, to begin with. very much difference between what is outside and what is inside man. We must recognise a greater difference however, in what is etheric.

I have drawn your attention to the way the etheric really looks down on us from the world beyond the earth. I pointed out that, from out of the etheric, everything, whether it be a large or small drop, is made spherical, and that this tendency to spherical formation, due to the complex of etheric forces, extends to the etheric body of man. We have really to fight continually to overcome this tendency in our etheric body.—Of course, all this takes place in the subconscious. In its present form the human etheric body is closely moulded to the physical body. It has not such sharp boundaries and is mobile in itself; nevertheless we can distinguish a head part, a trunk part and, indistinctly, limb parts where the etheric body becomes diffuse. Thus, when we move an arm the etheric body, which otherwise conforms to the human shape, only protrudes a little beyond the arm, whereas below it is widely extended. But it has from the cosmos the tendency to take on spherical form. The higher being of man—the astral man and the ego—must oppose this tendency and mould the spherical form to the human shape. So we may say: man, as an etheric being, lives in the general etheric world by building up his own form out of the etheric, whereas the formative tendency of the surrounding etheric is to give spherical form to what is fluid. In man what is fluid takes on human form, and this is due to his inner forces opposing the external, cosmic forces.

This opposition is still stronger in the astral man. As I indicated yesterday, the astral comes streaming in from the indefinite, so to speak. In the earthly realm outside man it streams in (arrows in green circle) in such a way that it develops the plant form out of the earth; and the plant form clearly shows this response to the astral. The plant has only an etheric body, but it is, indeed, the astral forces which draw the plant out of the earth. Now the human astral body is extraordinarily complicated and one really perceives it in the way I described yesterday, i.e. as an inner musical element, a whirling, weaving life, an inner activity and all one might describe as music inwardly sensed. But everything else that is astral is discovered streaming in centripetally; it is transformed into the human astral form, whereby complicated things appear.

Let us say, for example, that something astral is streaming in from this side. The human being moulds it to the most varied forms in order to make it serviceable and incorporate it. One might say, the human being wins his astral body by subduing the centripetal astral forces.

Now, when we turn our psycho-spiritually sharpened gaze to the cosmos, we do gain the conception of the etheric as described, but we also receive the impression that it is due to the etheric that we strive away from the earth. While we are held to the earth by gravity, we tend away from the earth because of the etheric. It is really the etheric that is active in this centrifugal tendency. In this connection you need only think of the following: The human brain weighs approximately 1,500 grammes. Now a mass with this weight, pressing on the delicate blood vessels at the base of the brain, would quite compress them. If our brain actually exerted its 1,500 grammes weight in the living man we could not have these blood-vessels. In the living man, however, the brain weighs twenty grammes at most. It is so much lighter because it floats in the cerebral fluid and loses in weight by the weight of fluid displaced. The brain really strives away from man; and in this tendency the etheric is active. Thus we may say that it is just in the brain that we can see most clearly how matters stand.

Here is the brain floating in its fluid, whereby its weight is reduced from 1,500 to about twenty grammes. This means that its activity shares, to a remarkably small degree, in our physical, bodily life. Here the etheric finds tremendous scope for acting upwards. The weight acts downwards but is reduced. In the cerebral fluid there is principally developed the sum of etheric forces that lifts us away from the earth. Indeed, if we had to carry our physical body with all its forces of weight, we would have a sack to drag about. Every blood corpuscle, however, swims and is reduced in weight.

This loss of weight in a fluid is an old piece of knowledge. You know, of course, that it has been ascribed to Archimedes. He was bathing one day and noticed, on lifting his leg out of the water, how much heavier it was than when in the water, and exclaimed: Eureka! I have found it. He had discovered that every body in a fluid loses in weight the weight of the fluid displaced. Thus, if you think of Archimedes in his bath, here his physical leg and here the same leg formed of water, then the physical leg is lighter in water by the amount that this water-leg weighs. It is lighter by just this amount. Likewise the weight of our brain in the cerebral fluid is reduced by the weight of a mass of cerebral fluid of the size of the physical brain. That is, it is reduced from 1,500 to 20 grammes. In physics this is called ‘upthrust’, and here the etheric acts. The astral, on the other hand, is stimulated—to begin with—by breathing, whereby the airy element enters the human organism and eventually reaches the head in an extremely attenuated state; in this distribution and organisation of the air the astral is active.

Thus we can really see in the solid earthy substance the physical; in the fluid, especially in the way it works in man, the etheric; in the airy, the astral.

It is the tragedy of materialism that it knows nothing of matter—how matter actually works in the several domains of life. The remarkable thing about materialism is just its ignorance of matter. It knows nothing at all about the way matter works, for one does not learn this until one is able to attend to the spiritual that is active in matter and is represented by the forces.

Now, when one progresses through meditation to the ‘imaginative’ knowledge of which I have already spoken, one finds the etheric at work in all the aqueous processes of the earth. In the face of real knowledge it is childish to believe that all that is at work here—in the sea, in the rivers, rising mists, falling drops and cloud formations—contains only what the physicist and chemist know about water. For in all that is out there in the mighty drop of the ‘water-earth’, in what constantly rises in the form of vapour, forms clouds and descends as mist, in all the other aqueous processes—water plays, indeed, an enormous part in shaping the face of the globe—in all this etheric currents are working. Here is weaving the ether revealed to one in ‘pictures’ when one has strengthened one's thinking in the way I have described. Everywhere behind this weaving water the cosmic ‘imagination’ is weaving, and the astral ‘music of the spheres’ plays everywhere into this cosmic imagination, coming—in a sense—from behind.

In man, however, all these conditions are found to be quite different from what they are outside him. If one looks, with vision sharpened in the way I have indicated, at what is outside man, one finds the world built up in the following way: To begin with, there is the physical, in direct contact with the earth; the etheric, which fills the whole cosmos; then the astral, which streams in as living beings. indeed, it is no merely general, abstract, astral weaving that we behold, but actual beings entering space, beings of a psycho-spiritual nature just as man, in his body, is also a psycho-spiritual being. This is what one beholds.

If we now look back to man, we find in him, too, an etheric body corresponding to the external etheric. But this etheric body is not perceived in such a way that you can say: there is the physical man, and here is his etheric body. Certainly, you can draw it so, but that would only be an arrested section. You never see merely the present etheric body; this section which you can draw is seen to be continuous with what has gone before. You always see the whole etheric body extending back to birth. Past and present form a whole. If you have a twenty-year-old person before you, you cannot see merely his twenty-year-old etheric body; you see all that has happened in his etheric body back to birth and a little beyond. Here time really becomes space. It is just as when you look down an avenue and see the trees drawing closer and closer together on account of perspective; you see the whole avenue in space. Likewise you look at the etheric body as it is at present but see its whole structure, which is a ‘time-structure’. The etheric body is a ‘time-organism’, the physical body a ‘space-organism’. The physical body is, of course, self-contained at any given moment; the etheric body is always there as a totality which comprises our life up to the given moment. This is a unity. Hence you could only draw or paint the etheric body if you could paint moving pictures; but you would have to be quicker than the pictures. The momentary configuration that you draw or paint is only a section and is related to the whole etheric body as the section of a tree-stem to the whole tree. When you draw a diagram of the etheric body, it is only a section, for the whole etheric body is a ‘time-process’. Indeed, on surveying this time-process one is led beyond birth, even beyond conception, to the point where one sees the human being descend from his pre-earthly life to his present life on earth, and, just before he was conceived by his parents, draw together etheric substance from the general cosmic ether to build his etheric body.

Thus you cannot speak of the etheric body without surveying man's life in time back to birth and beyond. What one regards as the etheric body at some definite moment is only an abstraction; the concrete reality is the time-process.

It is different again with the astral body. This is apprehended in the way I described yesterday. I can only draw it diagramatically, and in the diagram space must become time for you. Let us assume we are observing the astral body of a person on the 2nd February 1924. Let this be the person.¹ He does indeed make this impression upon us: Here is the physical body, here his etheric body. We can also observe his astral body and this makes upon us the impression I described in my book Theosophy. It is so. But when one comes to the really ‘inspired’ knowledge which appears before empty consciousness—I described such knowledge yesterday—one attains the following insight. One says to oneself: What I am observing as the astral body of this person is not really present today, i.e. on the 2nd February 1924. If the person is twenty years of age, you must go backwards in time—let us say, to January 1904. You perceive that this astral body is really back there, and extends still further back into the unlimited. It has remained there and has not accompanied him through life. Here we have only a kind of appearance—a beam. It is like looking down an avenue; there, in the distance, are the last trees, very close together. Behind them is a source of light. You can have the radiance of the light here, but the source is behind—it need not move forward that its light may shine here.

So, too, the astral body has remained behind, and only throws its beam into life. It has really remained in the spiritual world and has not come with us into the physical. In respect to our astral body we always remain before conception and birth, in the spiritual world. If we are twenty years old in 1924, it is as if we were still living spiritually before the year 1904 and, in respect to our astral body, had only stretched forth a feeler.

That, you will say, is a difficult conception. Well, so it is. But you know there was once a Spanish king who was shown how complicated the structure of the universe is. He thought he would have made it simpler. A man may think like this, but, as a matter of fact, the world is not simple, and we must exert ourselves somewhat to grasp what man is.

To look intently at the astral body is to look directly into the spiritual world. (Only in the world external to man have you around you what is astral.) When you look at human beings spiritually, you look into the spiritual world in respect to their astral bodies. You perceive directly what a man has undergone in the spiritual world before he descended to earth.

But, you will say, my astral body is active within me. Of course it is; that is self-understood. But imagine some being or other were here, and by means of cords mechanically connected, were to produce some effect at a considerable distance away. It is like that with respect to time. Your astral body has remained behind, but its activities extend through the whole of your life. Thus the activity that you notice in your astral body today has its origin in a time long past, when you were in the spiritual world before descending to earth. That time is still active—in other words, it is still there, as far as the spiritual is concerned. Anyone who believes that the past is no longer ‘present’ in the real time-process resembles a man in a railway train to whom one might say: That was a beautiful district through which we have just passed, and who would reply: Yes, a beautiful district. But it has vanished; it is no longer there. Such a man would believe that the district through which he had passed in an express train had disappeared. It is just as stupid to believe that the past is no longer there. As a matter of fact it is always there, working into man. The 3rd of January 1904, is still there in its spiritual constitution, just as what is spatial remains after you have travelled through it. It is there, influencing the present.

Thus, if you describe the astral body as I have done in my Theosophy, you must realise, in order to complete your insight, that what is active here is the ‘radiance’ of something far back in time. The human being is really like a comet stretching its tail far back into the past. It is not possible to obtain true insight into man's being unless we acquire these new concepts.

People who believe one can enter the spiritual world with the same concepts one has for the physical world should become spiritualists, not anthroposophists. Spiritualists endeavour to conjure the spiritual—only somewhat thinner than ordinary matter—into the ordinary space in which physical men walk about. But it is nothing spiritual—only fine exudations. Even the phantoms described by Schrenck-Notzing are only fine, physical exudations which retain in their shape traces of the etheric. They are mere phantoms, not something really spiritual.

If you study the world and man in the way I have described you will realise the presence of the higher worlds in external Nature. In the case of man, a study of the successive worlds will lead you at once to the ‘time-process’ within him. In his case, however, you can go further still and reach a domain which our philistine materialistic age will not recognise as accessible to knowledge.

I have referred to perception, by the senses, of the coarse, tangible physical objects around us as the first stage of cognition.

The second stage was that of ‘strengthened thinking’ in which we apprehend the living, moving images of the world. The third kind of cognition was ‘inspiration’ in which we perceive the beings that express themselves through these images—hear a kind of music of the spheres that sounds from beyond. In the case of man we are led, not merely out of the material world, but out of the present into his pre-earthly life—into his existence as a psycho-spiritual being before descending to earth. This ‘inspired’ knowledge is attained by emptying our consciousness after strengthened thinking.

The further stage in cognition is attained by making the power of love a cognitive force. Only, it must not be the shallow love of which alone, as a rule, our materialistic age speaks. It must he the love by which you can identify yourself with another being—a being with whom, in the physical world, you are not identical. You must really be able to feel what is passing in the other being just as you feel what is passing in yourself; you must be able to go out of yourself and live again in another. In ordinary human life such love does not attain the intensity necessary to make it a cognitive force. One must first have attained ‘empty consciousness’, and have had some experience with it. And then we undergo what many who are striving for higher knowledge do not seek: we suffer what may be called the pain of knowledge.

If you have a wound somewhere, it hurts you. Why? Because, owing to the wound, your spiritual being cannot permeate your physical body properly at the place concerned. All pain comes from not being able, from one cause or another, to permeate the physical body. And when something external hurts you, this is also because you are unable to ‘unite’ yourself with it—to accept it. Now, when one has attained the empty consciousness into which there flows an altogether different world from that to which one is accustomed, then, for such moments of inspired cognition, one is without one's whole physical man; this is then one large wound and hurts all over. One must first undergo this experience; one must endure the leaving of the physical body as actual pain and suffering in order to attain inspired knowledge. Of course, an understanding of such knowledge can be acquired without pain, and people should acquire this understanding apart from suffering the pain of initiation. But to acquire an immediate, spiritual perception—not a mere understanding—of what works into man from his life before birth, that is, of what he leaves behind in the spiritual world, one must cross the abyss of universal suffering and pain.

We can then experience the above identification with, and coming to life in, another being. Only then do we learn the highest degree of love which consists not in ‘forgetting oneself’ in a theoretical sense, but in being able to ignore oneself completely and enter into what is not oneself. And only when this love goes hand in hand with that higher—inspired—cognition are we really able to enter the spiritual with all the warmth of our nature, with all our inwardness of heart and mind; that is, with our soul forces. We must do this if we are to progress in knowledge. Love must become a cognitive force in this sense. When such love has attained a certain height and intensity, you pass through your pre-earthly life to your last life on earth; you slip over, through all you have undergone between your last death and your present life, into your former life on earth—into what we call previous incarnations.

Now, it was, of course, also in a physical body that you then trod the earth. But nothing remains of all that made up that physical body; it has been absorbed into the elements. Your innermost being of that time has become entirely spiritual and lives in you as spirit alone.

In truth, our ego, in passing through the gate of death and the spiritual world to a new life on earth, becomes wholly spiritual. It cannot be grasped with the ordinary powers of every-day consciousness; we must intensify the power of love in the way I have described. The man we were in a previous life is just as much outside us as another human being of today. Our ego has the same degree of externality. Of course, we then come to possess it—to experience it as ourself—but we must first learn to love without any trace of egotism. It would be a terrible thing indeed, if we were to become enamoured—in the ordinary sense—of our former incarnation. Love, in the highest sense, must be intensified so that we may be able to experience our former incarnation as something quite other than ourself. Then, when our cognitive power emerges through the empty consciousness, we acquire knowledge through love intensified in the highest degree, and reach the fourth member of man—the ego proper.

Man has his physical body through which he lives at each moment in the present physical earth. He has his etheric body through which he lives continually in a time-process extending back to a little before his birth, when he drew together this etheric body out of the general cosmic ether. He has his astral body through which his life extends over the whole period between his last death and his last descent to earth. And he has his ego through which he reaches back into his previous life on earth. Thus, when we speak of the various members of man's being we must speak, in each case, of his extension in time. We bear our former ego-consciousness within us today, but unconsciously. How? If you want to study how you must realise that man, here in the physical world, is not only a solid body, a fluid man and an airy man, but an organism of warmth as well. This is also the way to approach the ego. Everyone knows this, at least in a very partial way. If we measure a person's temperature we get different degrees of fever in different parts of the body. But there are different temperatures throughout man's whole organism. You have one temperature in your head, another in your big toe, another inside your liver, another within your lung. You are not only what you find drawn in definite outlines in an anatomical atlas. You have a fluid organism in constant motion. You have an organism of air which permeates you continually, like a mighty, symphonic organism of music. And, in addition, you have a surging organism of warmth, differentiated with respect to temperature. In this you yourself live. Indeed, you feel that this is so. After all, you are not very conscious of living in your shin-bone, or in any other bone, or in your liver, or in your vascular fluids. But you are very conscious of living in your warmth, though you do not distinguish between your ‘warmth-hand’, ‘warmth-leg’, ‘warmth-liver’, etc. Nevertheless this differentiation is there, and if the temperature differences proper to the human warmth-organism are absent or disturbed, we feel this as illness, as pain.

When, with developed consciousness, we attain the picture stage—‘imagination’—we perceive the etheric as weaving pictures. When we perceive the astral, we hear the music of the spheres which sounds towards us or, we might say, from out of ourselves. (For our own astral body leads us back to our pre-earthly life.) And when we advance farther to the form of cognition that attains the highest degree of love—when the power of love becomes a cognitive force—when, to begin with, we see our own existence flowing from a former life on earth into this present life, we feel this former life in the normal differentiation of the ‘warmth-organism’ in which we are living. This is real intuition. We live in this. And when some impulse arises in us to do this or that, it does not only work, as in the astral body, out of the spiritual world, but from still farther back—from our former life on earth. Our former life on earth works into the warmth of our organism, and kindles this or that impulse. Thus we see in the earthly, solid man the physical body, in the fluid man the etheric body, in the airy man the astral body, and in the warmth element the ego proper. (The ego of the present incarnation is never complete; it is always developing.) It is the ego of the former life on earth, working in subconscious depths, that is the ego proper. And when you perceive a man clairvoyantly you are led to say: lie is standing here and I see him, to begin with, with my external senses. But I also see what is etheric and what is astral; then, behind him, the man he was in his previous incarnation.

In fact, the more this consciousness is developed, the more clearly do we see, in a kind of perspective, the head of his last incarnation a little above the head of his present incarnation, and, some-what higher still, the head of his second last incarnation. In civilisations in which there was still a kind of instinctive consciousness of these things, you will find pictures which show, behind the clearly drawn countenance of the present incarnation, a second countenance less clearly painted; behind this a third that is still less clear. There are Egyptian pictures like this. You understand such pictures if you are able to perceive, behind the present man, the man he was in his last and second last incarnations. Not until one can extend man's life in time to include previous incarnations can one really speak of the ego as the fourth member of human nature.

All this acts in the ‘man of warmth’. ‘Inspiration’ approaches you from without or from within, you yourself are within the warmth; here is ‘intuition’, true intuition. We experience warmth within us quite differently from anything else.

Now, if you look at it in this way, you will get beyond what should be a great riddle to the man of today, if he gives attention to his soul in a really unprejudiced way. I have spoken of this riddle. I said, we feel ourselves morally determined by certain impulses given us in a purely spiritual way. We want to carry them out. But we cannot, to begin with, understand how that to which we feel ourselves morally bound shoots into our muscles. If, however, we know that we bear within us, from our last incarnation, our ego which has become entirely spiritual and now acts upon our warmth-man, we have the required connection. Our moral impulses act indirectly, through the ego of our last incarnation. Here the connection between the moral and the physical is first found. It cannot be found by merely studying the present world of Nature and man as a section of it.

You see, if you study the present world of Nature, you may say: Well, there outside is Nature; man takes in its substances and builds up his organism—one does actually picture it in this naive way. Thus man is a portion of Nature, being compounded of certain of its substances. Good! But you suddenly realise that there are moral impulses and you should act in accordance with them! How, I would ask, can a portion of Nature do that? A stone cannot do it, nor can calcium, or chlorine, or oxygen, or nitrogen. But man, who is compounded of these, is supposed to be able to do so! He experiences a moral impulse and is expected to act in accordance with it, although he is compounded of all these substance which cannot do so.

But in all that is thus welded together in man there arises—especially indirectly through sleep—something that passes through death, becomes more and more spiritual, and enters a body again. It is, of course, already in the present body, for it comes from the last incarnation. It became spiritual and now works into the present incarnation. What is compounded of earthly substances will work into the warmth-man of the next incarnation. Here the moral element flows from one earth life into another; here we can grasp the transition from physical to spiritual Nature and from spiritual to physical Nature again. We cannot understand this transition with one life alone, if we are honest with ourselves and do not close our eyes to the whole psycho-spiritual problem.

What we can regard as the earthly elements—the solid, liquid, gaseous and warmth elements—is permeated everywhere by what can be designated as the etheric, the astral and the ‘ego-like’, i.e. what is of like nature with the ego. In this way we see the connection between man's members and the universe, and gain an idea of the extent to which man is a ‘portion’ of time, not only of space. He is only a portion, or section, of space in regard to his physical, bodily nature. For spiritual perception the past is continually present; the present moment is, at the same time, a real eternity.

What I am explaining to you was once the content of instinctive forms of consciousness. If we really understand ancient records we find a consciousness of this fourfold composition of man and his connection with the cosmos. But this knowledge has been lost to man for many centuries; otherwise he could not have developed the intellect he has today. But we have now reached the point in human evolution when we must again advance from the physical to the really spiritual.

• 1. A sketch—not reproduced—was made.

When we study human life on earth, we see it proceed in a kind of rhythm expressed in the alternating states of waking and sleeping. It is from this point of view that one must consider what was said in the last lectures about the constitution of man. Let us look, with ordinary consciousness, and in what might be called a purely external way, at the facts before us. In the waking man there is, first, the inner course of his vital processes; but these remain subconscious or unconscious. There is also what we know as sense impressions—that relation to our earthly and cosmic environments which is mediated by the senses. Further, there is the expression of the will—the ability to move as an expression of impulses of will.

Now, when we study man with ordinary cognition we find that the inner life-process, which runs its course in the subconsciousness, continues during sleep; sense activity and the thinking based upon it are, however, suppressed. The expression of the will is also suppressed; likewise the active life of feeling that connects willing and thinking, standing between them to a certain extent.

Now if we simply study, in an unbiased way and without succumbing to preconceived opinions, what we have just found by ordinary consciousness, we are led to say: The processes described as psychical, and the processes taking place between the psychical and the external world, cease in sleep. At most we can say that the dream life finds expression when man sleeps. But we must certainly not assume that these psychical processes are created anew—out of nothing, as it were—every time we wake. This would doubtless be a quite absurd thought, even for ordinary consciousness. On unbiased consideration we must assume that the vehicle of man's psychical processes is also present in sleep. We must admit, however, that this vehicle does not act on man during sleep, i.e. that which evokes in man's senses a consciousness of the external world, and stimulates this consciousness to think, does not act on man in sleep. Moreover, that which sets the body in motion from out of the will is also absent; likewise, what evokes feeling from the organic processes, is not there.

During waking life we are aware that our thoughts act upon our bodily organism. But, with ordinary consciousness, we cannot see how a thought or idea streams down, as it were, into the muscular and bony systems so that the will is involved. Nevertheless, we are aware of this action of our psychic impulses upon our body, and have to recognise that it ceases while we sleep.

Thus even external considerations show us that sleep takes something from man. The only question is, what? If, to begin with, we look at what we have designated man's physical body, we see that it is continually active, in sleep as in the waking state. Moreover, all the processes we described as belonging to the etheric organism continue during sleep. In sleep man grows, he carries on the inner activities of digestion and metabolism, he continues to breathe, etc. All these activities cannot belong to the physical body as such, for they cease when it becomes a corpse. It is then taken over by external, earthly Nature and destroyed. But these destructive forces do not overpower man in sleep; therefore there are counter-forces present, opposing the disintegration of his physical body. Thus we may conclude, from mere external considerations, that the etheric organism is also present during sleep.

Now we know from the preceding lectures that this etheric organism can become an object of knowledge through ‘imagination’; one can experience it ‘in a picture’, just as one experiences the physical body through sense impressions. And we know too that what may be called the astral organism is experienced through ‘inspiration’.

We will now go further—Of course, we could go on drawing conclusions in the above way. But, in the case of the astral body and ego-organisation, we prefer first to study how they actually appear to higher consciousness.

Let us recall how we had to describe the activity of the astral body in man. We saw that it works through the medium of what is airy, or gaseous, in the human organism. Thus we must recognise, to begin with, the astral body in all the activities of the airy element in man.

Now we know that the first and most essential activity of the astral body within the airy element is breathing; and we know from ordinary experience that we have to distinguish between breathing in and breathing out. Further, we know that it is the act of breathing in that vitalises us. We deprive the outer air of its life-giving power and return, not a vitalising, but a devitalising element. Physically speaking, we take in oxygen and give off carbonic acid. But we are not so much concerned with this aspect at the moment; it is the fact of ordinary experience that interests us here: we breathe in the vitalising and breathe out the devitalising element.

The higher knowledge which, as discussed in these last few days, is acquired through ‘imagination’, ‘inspiration’, and ‘intuition’, must now be directed to the life of sleep. We must actually investigate whether there is something that confirms the conclusion to which we were led, namely: that something is lifted out of man when he sleeps.

This question can only be answered by putting and answering another. If there is something that is outside man in sleep, how does it behave when outside?

Well, suppose a man, by such soul exercises as I have described, has actually acquired ‘inspiration’, i.e. a content for his emptied consciousness. He is now able to receive ‘inspired’ knowledge. At this stage he can induce the state of sleep artificially; this, however, is no mere sleep but a conscious condition in which the spiritual world flows into him.

I should now like to describe this in quite a crude way. Suppose such a man is able to feel, as it were, in an element of spiritual music, the spiritual beings of the cosmos speaking ‘into’ him. He will then have certain experiences. But he will also say to himself: These experiences which I now have, reveal something very peculiar; through them what I had to assume as outside of man during sleep no longer remains unknown. What now happens can really be made clear by the following comparison.

Suppose you had a certain experience ten years ago. You have forgotten it, but through something or other you are led to remember it. It has been outside your consciousness; but now, after applying sonic aid to memory or the like, you recall it. It is now in your consciousness. You have brought back into your consciousness something that was outside it, though connected with you in some way. It is like that with one who has a more inner consciousness and reaches inspiration. The events of sleep begin to emerge, as memories do in ordinary life. Only, the experiences we recall in memory were once in consciousness; the experiences of sleep, however, were not there before. But they enter consciousness in such a way that we really feel we are remembering something not experienced quite consciously before, at least in this life. They come to us like memories. And, as we formerly learnt to understand and experience through memory, we now begin to understand what happens during sleep. Thus into ‘inspired’ consciousness there simply emerges the experience of what leaves man and remains outside him during sleep, and what was unknown becomes known. We learn to know what it is really doing while he sleeps.

If you were to put into words what you experience with your breath during life, you would say: That I am inwardly permeated with life is owing to the element I breathe in. I cannot owe it to the element I breathe out, for that has the forces of death.

But when, as we saw just now, you are outside your body during sleep, you become extremely partial to the air you breathe out. When awake you did not notice what can be experienced with this exhaled air; you have only heeded the inhaled air which is the vitalising element while you and your soul are within the physical body. But now you have the same—indeed a more exalted—feeling towards the air you so anxiously avoid when you find it accumulated in a room. You express your dislike of the exhaled air. Now the physical body cannot bear it, even in sleep, but your soul and spirit, outside the body, actually breathe in—to put it physically—the carbonic acid you have exhaled. Of course, it is a spiritual, not a physical process; you receive the impression made by your exhaled air. In this exhaled air you remain connected with your physical body. You belong to your body, for you say to yourself: There is my body and it is breathing out this devitalising air. You say this unconsciously. You feel yourself connected with your body through its returning the air in this condition. Youfeel yourself entirely within the air you have exhaled. And this air you breathe out brings you continually the secrets of your inner life. You perceive these, although this perception is, of course, unconscious for the untrained sleeping consciousness. This exhaled air ‘sparkles forth’ from you and its appearance leads you to say: That is I myself, my inner human being, sparkling out into the universe.

And your own spirit, streaming towards you in the exhaled air has a sun-like appearance.

You now know that man's astral body, when within the physical, delights in the inhaled air, using it unconsciously to set the organic processes in action and induce in them inner mobility. But you also realise that the astral body is outside the physical when you sleep and receives, in its feelings, the secrets of your own human being from the exhaled air. While you ray forth towards the cosmos, your soul beholds unconsciously the inner process involved. Only in ‘inspiration’ does this become conscious.

Further, we receive a striking impression. It is as if what confronts the sleeping man stood out against a dark background. There is darkness behind, and against this darkness the exhaled air appears luminous: one can put this in no other way. We recognise its essential nature, inasmuch as our everyday thoughts now leave us and the active, cosmic thoughts—the objective, creative thoughts of the world—appear before us in what is flowing out of ourselves. There is the dark background, and the sparkling radiating light; in the latter the creative thoughts gradually arise. The darkness is a veil covering our ordinary, every day thoughts—brain thoughts, as we might call them. We receive a very clear impression that what we regard as most important for physical, earthly life, is darkened as soon as we leave the physical body. And we realise, much more strongly than we could have believed in ordinary consciousness, the dependence of these thoughts upon their physical instrument—the brain. The brain retains these, by an adhesive force as it were. Out there we need no longer ‘think’ in the sense of everyday life. We behold thoughts; they surge through what appears to us as ourself in the exhaled air.

Thus inspired knowledge perceives how the astral body is in the physical during waking life, initiating, with the help of the inhaled air, the functions it has to perform; how it is outside during sleep and receives the impressions of our own human being. While we are awake the world on which we stand, the world which surrounds us as our earthly environment and the vault of heaven above, form our outer world. When we sleep what is inside our skin, and is otherwise our inner world, becomes our outer world. Only, to begin with, we feel what is here streaming towards us in the exhaled air; it is a felt outer world, that we have at first.

And then something further is experienced. The circulation of the blood, which follows closely the process of respiration and remains unconscious during waking life, begins to be very conscious in sleep. It comes before us like a new world, a world, indeed, that we do not merely feel but begin to understand from another point of view than that from which we understand external things with ordinary consciousness. With ‘inspired’ consciousness—though the will as a life process is present in the unconsciousness of every sleeper—we perceive the circulatory process, just as we perceive external processes of Nature during earthly life. We now come to see that all we do through that will of which we are ordinarily unconscious, involves a counter-process within us.

With every step you transport your body to another place, but something else occurs as well: a warmth-process takes place within you, setting the airy element in motion. This process is the furthest extension of those general processes of metabolism that, like it, occur inwardly and are connected with the circulation of the blood. With ordinary consciousness you observe externally a man's change of place as an expression of his will; but now you look back upon yourself and only find processes occurring within you, and these make up your world.

Truly, what we here behold is not what the theories of present-day science or medicine describe on anatomical grounds. It is a grand spiritual process, a process that conceals innumerable secrets and shows of itself that the real driving power at work within man is not his present ego at all. What man calls his ego in ordinary life is, of course, a mere thought. But it is the ego of man's past lives on earth that is active in him here. In the whole course of these processes, especially of the warmth-processes, you perceive the real ego, working from times long past. Between death and a new birth this ego has undergone an evolution in time; it now works in an entirely spiritual way. You perceive all these metabolic processes, the weakest as well as the most powerful, as the expression of just the highest entity in man.

Moreover, you now perceive that the ego has changed its field of action. It was active within, working upon the breath provided by the mere respiratory process; but now you perceive, from without, the further stages of the warmth-processes that the ego has elaborated from the respiratory processes. You behold the real, active ego of man, working from primeval times and organising him.

You now begin to know that the ego and astral body have actually left the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. They are outside, and now do and experience from without what they otherwise do and experience from within. In ordinary consciousness the ego and astral organisations are still too weak, too little evolved, to experience this consciously. ‘Inspiration’ really only consists in inwardly organising them so that they are able to perceive what is otherwise imperceptible.

Thus we must actually say: Through ‘inspiration’ we come to know the astral body of man, through ‘intuition’, the ego. During sleep, intuition and inspiration are suppressed in the ego and astral body; when they are awakened, man, through them, beholds himself from without. Let us see what this really means.

You remember what I have already said. I spoke of man in his present incarnation (sketch, right centre), and of the etheric body which extends back to a little before birth or conception (yellow); of his astral body which takes him back to the whole period between his last death and his present birth (red); and of ‘intuition’ that takes him back to his previous life on earth (yellow).

Now, to sleep means nothing else than to lead back your consciousness, which is otherwise in the physical body, and to accompany it yourself. Sleep is really a return in time to what I described as past for ordinary consciousness, though nevertheless there. You see, if one really wants to understand the Spiritual,

one must acquire different concepts from those one is accustomed to apply in ordinary life. One must actually realise that every sleep is a return to the regions traversed before birth—or, indeed, to former incarnations. During sleep one actually experiences, though without grasping it, what belongs to one's pre-earthly state and earlier incarnations.

Our concept of time must undergo a complete change. If we ask where a man is when asleep, the reply must be: he is actually in his pre-earthly state, or has returned to his former lives on earth. When talking simply we say: he is ‘outside’ his body. The reality is as I have explained. It is this that manifests as the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping.

All this becomes quite different at death. The most striking change is, of course, that man leaves his physical body behind in the earthly realm, where it is received, disintegrated and destroyed by the forces of the physical world. It can no longer give rise to the impressions I described as being made upon the sleeping man through the medium of the exhaled air. For the physical body no longer breathes; with all its functions it is now lost to man. There is something, however, that is not lost—and even ordinary consciousness can see that this is so. Thinking, feeling and willing live in our soul, but over and above these we have something very special, namely: memory. We do not only think about what is at present before, or around, us; our inner life contains fragments of what we have experienced, and these re-arise as thoughts. Now those people, often somewhat peculiar, who are known as psychologists have developed quite curious ideas about memory. These investigators of the human soul say something like this: man uses his senses; he perceives this or that and thinks about it. He has then a thought. He goes away and forgets the whole thing. But after a time he recalls it; the memory of what has been, re-appears. Man can recall what is past and has been out of his mind meanwhile; he can bring it to mind again. On this account, these people think that man forms a thought from his experience, this thought descends somewhere, to rest as it were in some chest or box and to re-appear when remembered. Either it bobs up of its own accord, or has to be fetched.

This sort of thing is a very model of confused thinking. For the whole belief that the thought is waiting somewhere whence it can be fetched, does not correspond to the facts at all. Just compare an immediate perception which you have, and to which you link a thought, with the way an image of memory, or a memory-thought, arises. You make no distinction at all. You receive a sense impression from without, and a thought links itself thereto. The thought is there; but what lies behind the sense impression and calls forth the thought, you usually speak of as unknown. The memory-thought that arises from within you is, indeed, no different from the thought that emerges for outer perception. In one case—representing it schematically—you have man's environment (yellow); the thought presents itself from without in connection with this environment (red); in the other it comes from within. The latter is a memory-thought (vertical arrow). The direction from which it comes is different.

While we are perceiving—experiencing—anything, something is continually going on beneath the mental presentation, beneath our thinking. It is really as follows: Thought accompanies perception. Our perceptions enter our body, whereas our thought ‘stands out’. Something does enter our body, and this we do not perceive. This goes on while we are thinking about the experience, and an ‘impression’ is made. It is not thought that passes down but something quite different. It is this something that evokes the process which we perceive later and of which we form the memory-thought—just as we form a thought of the outer world. The thought is always in the present moment. Even unprejudiced observation shows that this is so. The thought is not preserved somewhere or other as in a casket, but a process occurs which the act of memory transforms into a thought just as we transform outer perception into a thought.

I must burden you with these considerations, or you will not really come to an understanding of memory. That the thought does not want to go right down, is known to children—and to grown up people, too, in special cases—though only half consciously. So, when we want to memorise something, we have recourse to extraneous aids. Just think how many people find it helps to repeat a thing aloud; others make curious gestures when they want to fix something in their minds. The point is that an entirely different process runs parallel to the mere process of mental presentation. What we remember is really the smallest part of what is here involved.

Between waking up and falling asleep we move about the world, receiving impressions from all sides. We only attend to a few, but they all attend to us. It is a rich world that lives in the depths of our being, but only some few fragments are received into our thoughts. This world is like a deep ocean confined within us. The mental presentations of memory surge up like single waves, but the ocean remains within. It has not been given us by the physical world, nor can the physical world take it away. When man sheds his physical body, this whole world is there, bound up with his etheric body. Upon this all his experiences have been impressed, and these man bears within him immediately after death. In a certain sense, they are ‘rolled up’ in him.

Now man's first experience, immediately after death, is of everything that has made its impression upon him. Not only the ordinary shreds of memory which arise during earthly consciousness, but his whole earthly life, with all that has ‘impressed’ him stands before him now. But he would have to remain in eternal contemplation of this earthly life of his if something else did not happen to his etheric body, something different from what happens to the physical body through the earth and its forces. The earthly elements take over the physical body and destroy it; the cosmic ether, working (as I told you) from the periphery, streams in and dispels in all directions what has been impressed upon the etheric body. Thus man's next experience is as follows: During earthly life many, many things have made their impression upon me. All this has entered my etheric body. I now survey it, but it becomes more and more indistinct. It is as if I were looking at a tree that had made a strong impression upon me during my life. At first I see it life-size, as when it made its impression upon me from physical space. But it now grows, becomes larger and more shadowy; it becomes larger and larger, gigantic but more and more shadowy. Now it is like that with a human being whom I have learnt to know in his physical form. Immediately after death I have him before me as he impressed himself upon my etheric body. He now increases in size, becomes more and more shadowy. Everything grows, becomes more and more shadowy until it fills the whole universe, becomes thereby quite shadowy, and completely disappears.

This lasts some days. Everything has become gigantic and shadowy, thereby diminishing in intensity. Man sheds his second corpse; or, strictly speaking, the cosmos takes it from him. He is now in his ego and astral body. What had been impressed upon his etheric body is now within the cosmos; it has flowed out into the cosmos. We see the working of the universe behind the veils of our existence.

We are placed in the world as human beings. In the course of earthly life the whole world works upon us. We roll it all together in a certain sense. The world gives us much and we hold it together. The moment we die the world takes back what it has given. But it is something new that it receives, for we have experienced it all in a particular way. The world receives our whole experience and impresses it upon its own ether.

We now stand in the universe and say to ourselves, as we consider, first of all, this experience with our etheric body: truly, we are not only here for ourselves; the universe has its own intentions in regard to us. It has put us here that its own content may pass through us and be received again in the form into which we can transmute it. As human beings we are not here for our own ends alone; in respect to our etheric body, for example, we are here for the universe. The universe needs us because, through us, it ‘fulfils’ itself—fills itself again and again with its own content. There is an interchange, not of substance but of thoughts between the universe and man. The universe gives its cosmic thoughts to our etheric body and receives them back again in a humanised condition. We are not here for ourselves alone; we are here for the sake of the universe.

Now a thought like this should not remain merely theoretical and abstract; indeed it cannot. If it were to remain a mere thought, we would have to be creatures of pasteboard, not men with living feelings. In saying this I do not deny that our civilisation really does tend to make people often as apathetic towards such things as if they really were made of pasteboard. Civilised people today often appear to be such pasteboard figures. A thought like this preserves our human feeling and sympathy with the world, and leads us directly to the point from which we started. We began by saying that man feels himself estranged from the world in a two-fold way: on the one hand, in regard to external Nature which, he must admit, only destroys him as physical body; on the other hand, in regard to his inner life of soul which, again and again, lights up and dies away. This becomes for him a riddle of the universe. But now, as a result of spiritual study, man begins to feel himself no mere stranger in the universe. The universe has something to give him, and takes from him something in turn. Man begins to feel his inner kinship with the world. He now sees in a new light the two thoughts that I have put before you and which are really cosmic thoughts, namely:

Thou, O Nature, canst only destroy my physical body.

I, myself. have no kinship with thee, in spite of the thinking, feeling and willing of my inner life. Thou lightest up and diest down; and in my inner being I have no kinship with thee.

These two thoughts, evoked in us by the riddles of the universe, now appear in a new light, for we begin to feel ourselves akin to the cosmos and an organic part of its whole life. Thus anthroposophical reflection begins by making friends with the world, really learning to know the world that, on external observation, repulsed us at first. Anthroposophical knowledge makes us become more human. If we cannot bring to it this quality of heart, this mood of feeling, we are not taking it in the right way. One might compare theoretical anthroposophy to a photo-graph. If you are very anxious to learn to know someone you have once met, or with whom you have been brought into touch through something or other, you would not want to be offered a photograph. You may find pleasure in the photograph; but it cannot kindle the warmth of your feeling life, for the man's living presence does not confront you.

Theoretical Anthroposophy is a photograph of what Anthroposophy intends to be. It intends to be a living presence; it really wants to use words, concepts and ideas in order that something living may shine down from the spiritual world into the physical. Anthroposophy does not only want to impart knowledge; it seeks to awaken life. This it can do; though, of course, to feel life we must bring life to meet it.

In the last lectures I have already drawn your attention to the way the Science of Initiation must speak of the alternating states of sleeping and waking, which are known to us from ordinary consciousness and through which we can really find a path of approach—one path of approach—to the secrets of human life. It is a life that finds expression while we sleep—soul life, dream life, a life that ordinary consciousness, if free from mystical or similar tendencies, does not take seriously at first. This attitude is certainly justified; the sober-minded man does not take his dream-life seriously and, to a certain extent, he is right, for he sees that it shows him all kinds of pictures and reminiscences of his ordinary life. When he compares his dream-life with his ordinary experience, he must, of course, hold fast to the latter and call it reality. But the dream-life comes with its re-combinations of ordinary experiences; and if man asks himself what it really signifies for the totality of his being, he can find no answer in ordinary consciousness.

Let us now consider this dream-life as it presents itself to us. We can distinguish two different kinds of dreams. The first conjures pictures of outer experiences before our soul. Years ago, or a few days maybe, we experienced this or that in a definite way; now a dream conjures up a picture more or less similar—usually dissimilar—to the external experience. If we discover the connection between this dream-picture and the external experience, we are at once struck by the transformation the latter has undergone. We do not usually relate the dream-picture to a particular experience in the outer world, for the resemblance does not strike us. Nevertheless, if we look more closely at this type of dream-life that conjures outer experiences in transformed pictures before the soul, we find that something in us takes hold of these experiences; we cannot, however, retain them as we can in the waking state, when we have full use of our bodily organs and experience the images of memory which resemble external life as far as possible. In memory we have pictures of outer life that are more or less true. Of course there are people who dream in their memories, but this is regarded as abnormal. In our memories we have, more or less, true pictures, in our dreams, transformed pictures of outer life. That is one kind of dream.

There is, however, another kind, and this is really much more important for a knowledge of the dream-life. It is the kind in which, for example, a man dreams of seeing a row of white pillars, one of which is damaged or dirty; he wakes up with this dream and finds he has toothache. He then sees that the row of pillars ‘symbolises’ the row of teeth; one tooth is aching, and this is represented by the damaged or, perhaps, dirty pillar. Or a man may wake up dreaming of a seething stove and find he has palpitation of the heart. Or he is distressed in his dream by a frog approaching his hand; he takes hold of the frog and fords it soft. He shudders, and wakes up to find he is holding a corner of his blanket, grasped in sleep. These things can go much further. A man may dream of all kinds of snake-like forms and wake up with intestinal pains.

So we see that there is a second kind of dream which gives pictorial, symbolic expression to man's inner organs. When we have grasped this, we learn to interpret many dream-figures in just this way. For example, we may dream of entering a vaulted cellar. The ceiling is black and covered with cobwebs; a repulsive sight. We wake up to fund we have a headache. The interior of the skull is expressed in the vaulted cellar; we even notice that the cerebral convolutions are symbolised in the peculiar formations constituting the vault. If Nye pursue our studies further in this direction we find that all our organs can appear in dreams in this pictorial way.

Here, indeed, is something that points very clearly, by means of the dream, to the whole inner life of man. There are people who, while actually asleep and dreaming, compose subjects for quite good paintings. If you have studied these things you will know what particular organ is depicted, though in an altered, symbolic form. Such paintings sometimes possess unusual beauty; and when the artist is told what organ he has really symbolised so beautifully, he is quite startled, for he has not the same respect for his organs that he has for his paintings.

These two kinds of dream can be easily distinguished by one who is prepared to study the world of dreams in an intimate way. In one kind of dream we have pictures of experiences undergone in the outer world; in the other, pictorial representations of our own internal organs.

Now it is comparatively easy to pursue the study of dreams as far as this. Most people whose attention has been called to the existence of these two kinds will recall experiences of their own that justify this classification.

But to what does this classification point? Well, if you examine the first kind of dreams, studying the special kind of pictures contained, you find that widely different external experiences can be represented by the same dream; again, one and the same experience can be depicted in different people by different dreams.

Take the case of a man who dreams he is approaching a mountain. There is a cave-like opening and into this the sun is still shining. He dreams he goes in. It soon begins to grow dark, then quite dark. He gropes his way forward, encounters an obstacle, and feels there is a little lake before him. He is in great danger, and the dream. takes a dramatic course.

Now a dream like this can represent very different external experiences. The picture I have just described may relate to a railway accident in which the dreamer was once involved. What he experienced at that time finds expression now, perhaps years afterwards, in the dream described. The pictures are quite different from what he had experienced. He could have been in a ship-wreck, or a friend may have proved unfaithful, and so on. If you compare the dream-picture with the actual experience, studying them in this intimate way, you will find that the content of the pictures is not really of great importance; it is the dramatic sequence that is significant: whether a feeling of expectation was present, whether this is relieved, or leads to a crisis. One might say that the whole complex of feelings is translated into the dream-life.

Now, if we start from here and examine dreams of this (first) type, we find that the pictures derive their whole character chiefly from the nature of the man himself, from the individuality of his ego. (Only, we must not study dreams like the psychiatrists who bring everything under one hat.) If we have an understanding of dreams—I say, of dreams, not of dream-interpretation—we can often learn to know a man better from his dreams than from observing his external life. When we study all that a person experiences in such dreams we find that it always points back to the experience of the ego in the outer world.

On the other hand, when we study the second kind of dream, we find that what it conjures before the soul in dream pictures is only experienced in a dream. For, when awake, man experiences the form of his organs at most by studying scientific anatomy and physiology. That, however, is not a real experience; it is merely looking at them externally, as one looks at stones and plants. So we may ignore it and say that, in the ordinary consciousness of daily life, man experiences very little, or nothing at all, of his internal organism. The second kind of dream, however, puts this before him in pictures, although in transformed pictures.

Now, if we study a man's life, we find that it is governed by his ego—more or less, according to his strength of will and character. But the activity of the ego within human life very strongly resembles the first kind of dream-experience. Just try to examine closely whether a person's dreams are such that in them his experiences are greatly, violently altered. In anyone who has such dreams you will find a man of strong will-nature. On the other hand, a man who dreams his life almost as it actually is, not altering it in his dreams, will be found to be a man of weak will.

Thus you see the action of the ego within a man's life expressed in the way he shapes his dreams. Such knowledge shows us that we have to relate dreams of the first kind to the human ego. Now we learnt in the last lectures that the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies in sleep. Remembering this, we shall not be surprised to learn that Spiritual Science shows us that the ego then takes hold of the pictures of waking life—those pictures that it otherwise takes hold of in ordinary reality through the physical and etheric bodies. The first kind of dream is an activity of the ego outside the physical and etheric bodies.

What, then, is the second kind of dream? Of course it, too, must have something to do with what is outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. It cannot be the ego, for this knows nothing of the symbolic organ-forms presented by the dream. One is forced to see that it is the astral body of man that, in sleep, shapes these symbolic pictures of the inner organs, as the ego the pictures of external experience. Thus the two kinds of dreams point to the activity of the ego and astral body between falling asleep and waking up.

We can go further. We have seen what a weak and what a strong man does in his dreams; we have seen that the weak man dreams of things almost exactly as he experienced them, while the strong man transforms and re-arranges them, colouring then by his own character. Pursuing this to the end, we can compare our result with a man's behaviour in waking life. We then dis-cover the following intensely interesting fact. Let a man tell you his dreams; notice how one dream-picture is linked to another; study the configuration of his dreams. Then, having formed an idea of the way he dreams, look at the man himself. Stimulated by the idea you have formed of his dream-life, you will be able to form a good picture of the way he acts in life. This leads us to remarkable secrets of human nature. If you study a man as he acts in life and learn to know his individual character, you will find that only a part of his actions proceeds from his own being, from his ego. If all depended on the ego, a man would really do what he dreams; the violent character would be as violent in life as in his dreams, while one who leaves his life almost unchanged in his dreams, would hold aloof from life at all points, let it take its course, let things happen, shaping his life as little as he shapes his dreams.

And what a man does over and above this—how does that happen? My dear friends, we can very well say that it is done by God, by the spiritual beings of the world. All that man does, he does not do himself. In fact, he does just as much as he actually dreams; the rest is done through him and to him. Only, in ordinary life we do not train ourselves to observe these things; otherwise we would discover that we only actively participate in the deeds of life as much as we actively participate in our dreams. The world hinders the violent man from being as violent in life as in dreams; in the weak man instincts are working, and once more life itself adds that which happens through him, and of which he would not dream.

It is interesting to observe a man in some action of his life and to ask: what comes from him, and what from the world? From him proceeds just as much as he can dream, no more, no less. The world adds something in the case of a weak man, and subtracts something in the case of a violent man. Seen in this light, dreams become extraordinarily interesting and give us deep insight into the being of man.

Many of the things I have been saying have, it is true, dawned upon psycho-analysts in a distorted, caricatured form. But they are not able to look into what lives and weaves in human nature, so distort it all. From what I have put before you today in a quite external way, you can see the necessity of acquiring a subtle, delicate knowledge of the soul if one wants to handle such things at all; otherwise one can know nothing of the relations between dreams and external reality as realised by man in his life. Hence I once described psycho-analysis as dilettantism, because it knows nothing of man's outer life. But it also knows nothing of man's inner life. These two dilettantisms do not merely add, they must be multiplied; for ignorance of the inner life mars the outer, and ignorance of the outer life mars the inner. Multiplying \(d \times d\) we get \(d\)-squared: \(d \times d = d^2\). Psycho-analysis is dilettantism raised to the second power.

If we study the alternating states of waking and sleeping in this intimate way, we can perceive and understand so much of the essential nature of man that we are really led to the portal of the Science of Initiation.

Now consider something else that I told you in these lectures: the fact that man can strengthen his soul forces by exercises, by meditations; that he then advances beyond the ordinary more or less empty, abstract thinking to a thinking inherently pictorial, called ‘imagination’. Now it was necessary to explain that man, progressing in ‘imagination’, comes to apprehend his whole life as an etheric impulse entering earthly life through conception and birth—strictly speaking, from before conception and birth. Through dreams he receives reminiscences of what he has experienced externally since descending to earth for his present life. ‘Imagination’ gives us pictures which, in the way they are experienced, can be very like dream-pictures; but they contain, not reminiscences of this earthly life, but of what preceded it. It is quite ridiculous for people who do not know Spiritual Science to say that imaginations may be dreams too. They ought only to consider what it is that we ‘dream of’ in imaginations. We do not dream of what the senses offer; the content represents man's being before he was endowed with senses. Imagination leads man to a new world.

Nevertheless there is a strong resemblance between the second kind of dream and imaginative experience when first acquired through soul exercises. We experience pictures, mighty pictures—and this in all clarity, we might say exactness. We experience a universe of pictures, so wonderful, so rich in colour, so majestic that we have nothing else in our consciousness. If we would paint these pictures, we should have to paint a mighty tableau; but we could only capture the appearance of a single moment just as we cannot paint a flash of lightning, but only its momentary appearance, for all this takes its course in time. Still, if we only arrest a single moment we obtain a mighty picture.

Let us represent this diagrammatically. Naturally, this will not be very like what we behold; nevertheless, this sketch will illustrate what I mean.

Look at this sketch I have drawn. It has an inner configuration and includes the most varied forms. It is inwardly and outwardly immense. If, now, we become stronger and stronger in concentrating, in holding fast the picture, it does not merely come before us for one moment. We must seize it with presence of mind; otherwise it eludes us before we can bring it into the present moment. Altogether, presence of mind is required in spiritual observation. If we are not only able to apply sufficient presence of mind in order to seize and become conscious of it at all, but can retain it, it contracts and, instead of being something all-embracing, becomes smaller and smaller, moving onward in time. It suddenly shrinks into something; one part becomes the human head, another the human lung, a third the human liver. The physical matter provided by the mother's body only fills out what enters from the spiritual world and becomes man. At length we say: what the liver is we now see spiritually in a mighty picture in the pre-earthly life. The same is true of the lung. And now we may compare it with the content of the second kind of dream. Here, too, an organ may appear to us in a beautiful picture, as I said before, but this is very poor compared to what imagination reveals.

Thus we gain the impression that imagination gives us some-thing created by a great master-hand, the dream something clumsy. But they both point in the same direction and represent, spiritually, man's internal organisation.

It is but a step from this to another and very true idea. When, through imagination, we discern the pre-earthly human being as a mighty etheric picture, and see this mighty etheric picture crystallise—as it were—into the physical man, we are led to ask what would happen if the dream-pictures, those relating to the inner organs, began to develop the same activity. We find that a caricature of the inner organs would arise. The human liver, so perfect in its way, is formed from an imaginative picture that points to the pre-earthly life. If the dream-picture were to become a liver, this would not be a human liver, not even a goose-liver, but a caricature of a liver. This gives us, in fact, deep insight into the whole being of man. For there is really some similarity between the dream-picture and the imaginative picture, as we now see quite clearly. And we cannot help asking how this comes about.

Well, we can go still further. Take the dream pictures of the first kind, those linked to outer-experiences. To begin with, there is nothing resembling these in imaginative cognition. But imaginative cognition reaches back to a pre-earthly experience of man's, in which he had nothing to do with other physical human beings. Imaginative vision leads to an image of pre-earthly experiences of the spirit. Just think what this implies.

When we look into man's inner life we receive the impression that certain symbolic pictures, whether they arise through imagination or in dreams [of the second kind], refer to what is within man, man's internal organisation; on the other hand, the imaginations which refer to outer experiences are connected, neither with man's internal organisation nor with outer life, but with experiences of his pre-earthly state. Beside these imaginations one can only place dream experiences of the first kind, those relating to external experiences of earthly life; but there is no inner connection here between these imaginations and these dreams. Such a connection only exists for dreams of the second kind.

Now, what do I intend by all these descriptions? I want to draw your attention to an intimate way of studying human life, a way that propounds real riddles. Man really observes life in a most superficial manner today. If he would study it more exactly, more intimately, he would notice the things I have spoken about in this lecture. In a certain sense, however, he does notice them; only, he does not actually know it. He is not really aware how strongly his dreams influence his life. He regards a dream as a flitting phantom, for he does not know that his ego is active in one kind of dream, his astral body in another. But if we seek to grasp still deeper phenomena of life, the riddles to which I referred become more insistent. Those who have been here some time will have already heard me relate such facts as the following: There is a pathological condition in which a person loses his connection with his life in memory. I have mentioned the case of an acquaintance of mine who one day, without his conscious knowledge, left his home and family, went to the station, bought a ticket and travelled, like a sleep-walker, to another station. Here he changed, bought another ticket and travelled further. He did this for a long time. He commenced his journey at a town in South Germany. It was found later, when the case was investigated, that he had been in Budapest, Lemberg (Poland), etc. At last, as his consciousness began to function again, he found himself in a casual ward in Berlin, where he had finally landed. Some weeks had passed before his arrival at the shelter, and these were quite obliterated from his consciousness. He remembered the last thing he had done at home; the rest was obliterated. It was necessary to trace his journey by external inquiries.

You see, his ego was not present in what he was doing. If you study the literature of this subject you will find hundreds and hundreds of cases of such intermittent ego-consciousness. What have we here? If you took trouble to study the dream-world of such a patient you would discover something peculiar. To begin with, you would find that, at least at certain periods of his life, the patient had had the most vivid dreams imaginable, dreams that were especially characterised by his making up his mind to do something, forming certain intentions.

Now, if you study the dreams of a normal person you will find intentions playing a very small part, if any. People dream all sorts of wonderful things, but intentions play no part, as a rule. When intentions do play a part in a dream, we usually wake up laughing at ourselves for entertaining them. But if you study the dream-life of such people with intermittent consciousness, you will find that they entertain intentions in their dreams and, on waking, take these very seriously; indeed, they take these so seriously that they feel pangs of conscience if unable to carry them out. Often these intentions are so foolish in the face of the external physical world that it is not possible to carry them out; this hurts such people and makes them quite excited. To take dreams seriously—especially in regard to their intentions (not wishes)—is the counterpart of this condition of obliterated consciousness.

One who is able to observe human beings can tell, in certain circumstances, whether a person is liable to suffer in this way. Such people have something which shows they never quite wake up in regard to certain inner and outer experiences. One gradually finds that such a person goes too far with his ego out of his physical and etheric bodies in sleep; every night he goes too far into the spiritual and cannot carry back into the physical and etheric bodies what he has experienced. At last, because he has so often not brought it completely back, it holds him outside—i.e. what he experiences too deeply within the spiritual holds the ego back and he passes into a condition in which the ego is not in the physical body.

In such a radical case as this it is especially interesting to observe the dream-life. This differs from the dream-life of our ordinary contemporaries; it is much more interesting, but of course this has its reverse side. Still, objectively considered, illness is more interesting than health; from the subjective side—i.e. for the person concerned, as well as from the point of view of ordinary life, it is another matter. For a knowledge of the human being the dream-life of such a patient is really much more interesting than the dream-life of an ordinary contemporary.

In such a case you actually see a kind of connection between the ego and the whole dream-world; one might say, it is almost tangible. And we are led to ask the following questions: What is the relation of the dream pictures that refer to internal organs, to the imaginations that also refer to internal organs?

Well, viewed ‘externally’, the pictures of man's inner organisation that are given in imagination, point to what was within man before he had his earthly body, before he was on the earth; the dream-pictures arise when once he is here. The imaginations point to the past, the dream-pictures to the present. But though an ordinary dream-picture that refers to an internal organ would correspond to a caricature of that organ, while the imagination would correspond to the perfect organ, nevertheless the caricature has the inherent possibility of growing into a perfect organ.

This leads us to the studies we shall be pursuing tomorrow. They centre in the question: Does the content of such an imagination relate to man's past life, and is the dream the beginning of the imagination of the future? Will a dream-picture of today evolve into the imagination to which we shall be able to look back in a future life on earth? Is the content of the dream perhaps the seed of the content of the imagination?

This significant question presents itself to us. What we have gained through a study of dreams is here seen in conjunction with the question of man's repeated lives on earth. You see, moreover, that we must really look more deeply into the life of man than we usually find convenient; otherwise we shall find no point of contact with what the Science of Initiation says about the being of man.

By such a lecture as this I wanted especially to awaken in you some idea of the superficial way man is studied in the civilisation of today, and of the need of intimate observation in all directions. Such intimate observation leads at once to Spiritual Science.

I have tried to show how various domains of scientific thought originated in modern times. Now I will try to throw light from a certain standpoint on what was actually happening in the development of these scientific concepts. Then we shall better understand what these concepts signify in the whole evolutionary process of mankind. We must clearly understand that the phenomena of external culture are inwardly permeated by a kind of pulse beat that originates from deeper insights. Such insights need not always be ones that are commonly taught, but still they are at the bottom of the development. Now, I would only like to say that we can better understand what we are dealing with in this direction if we include in our considerations what in certain epochs was practiced as initiation science, a science of the deeper foundations of life and history.

We know that the farther we go back in history,⁶⁹ the more we discover an instinctive spiritual knowledge, an instinctive clairvoyant perception of what goes on behind the scenes. Moreover, we know that it is possible in our time to attain to a deeper knowledge, because since the last third of the Nineteenth Century, after the high tide of materialistic concepts and feelings, simply through the relationship of the spiritual world to the physical, the possibility arose to draw spiritual knowledge once again directly from the super-sensible world. Since the last third of the Nineteenth Century, it has been possible to deepen human knowledge to the point where it can behold the foundations of what takes place in the external processes of nature.

So we can say that an ancient instinctive initiation science made way for an exoteric civilization in which little was felt of any direct spirit knowledge, but now it is fully conscious rather than instinctive.

We stand at the beginning of this development of a new spirit knowledge. It will unfold further in the future. If we have a certain insight into what man regarded as knowledge during the age of the old instinctive science of initiation, we can discover that until the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, opinions prevailed in the civilized world that cannot be directly compared with any of our modern conceptions about nature. They were ideas of quite a different kind. Still less can they be compared with what today's science calls psychology. There too, we would have to say that it is of quite a different kind. The soul and spirit of man as well as the physical realm of nature were grasped in concepts and ideas that today are understood only by men who specifically study initiation science. The whole manner of thinking and feeling was quite different in former times.

If we examine the ancient initiation science, we find that, in spite of the fragmentary ways in which it has been handed down, it had profound insights, deep conceptions, concerning man and his relation to the world.

People today do not greatly esteem a work like De Divisione Naturae (Concerning the Division of Nature) by John Scotus Erigena⁷⁰ in the Ninth Century. They do not bother with it because such a work is not regarded as an historical document since it comes from a time when men thought differently from the way they think today, so differently that we can no longer understand such a book. When ordinary philosophers describe such topics in their historical writings, one is offered mere empty words. Scholars no longer enter into the fundamental spirit of a work such as that of John Scotus Erigena on the division of nature, where even the term nature signifies something other than in modern science. If, with the insight of spiritual science, we do enter into the spirit of such a text, we must come to the following rather odd conclusion: This Scotus Erigena developed ideas that give the impression of extraordinary penetration into the essence of the world, but he presented these ideas in an inadequate and ineffective form. At the risk of speaking disrespectfully of a work that is after all very valuable, one has to say that Erigena himself no longer fully understood what he was writing about. One can see that in his description. Even for him, though not to the same extent as with modern historians of philosophy, the words that he had gleaned from tradition were more or less words only, and he could no longer enter into their deeper meaning. Reading his works, we find ourselves increasingly obliged to go farther back in history. Erigena's writings lead us directly back to those of the so-called pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.⁷¹ I will now leave aside the historical problem of when Dionysius lived, and so forth. But again from Dionysius the Areopagite one is led still farther back. To continue the search one must be equipped with spiritual science. But finally, going back to the second and third millennia before Christ, one comes upon very deep insights that have been lost to mankind. Only as a faint echo are they present in writings such as those of Erigena.

Even if we go no further back than the Scholastics, we can find, hidden under their pedantic style, profound ideas concerning the way in which man apprehends the outer world, and how there lives the super-sensible on one side and on the other side the sense perceptible, and so on. If we take the stream of tradition founded on Aristotle who, in his logical but pedantic way, had in turn gathered together the ancient knowledge that had been handed down to him, we find the same thing—deep insights that were well understood in ancient times and survived feebly into the Middle Ages, being repeated in the successive epochs, and were always less and less understood. That is the characteristic process. At last in the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Century, the understanding disappears almost entirely, and a new spirit emerges, the spirit of Copernicus and Galileo, which I have described in the previous lectures.

In all studies, such as those I have just outlines, it is found that this ancient knowledge is handed down through the ages until the Fourteenth Century, though less and less understood. This ancient knowledge amounted essentially to an inner experience of what goes on in man himself. The explanations of the last few lectures should make this comprehensible: It is the experiencing of the mathematical-mechanical element in human movement, the experiencing of a certain chemical principle, as we would say today, in the circulation of man's bodily fluids, which are permeated by the etheric body. Hence, we can even look at the table that I put on the blackboard yesterday from an historical standpoint. If we look at the being of man with our initiation science today, we have the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body (the inner life of the soul,) and the ego organization. As I pointed out yesterday, there existed (arising out of the ancient initiation science) an inner experience of the physical body, an inward experience of movement, an inner experience of the dimensionality of space, as well as experiences of other physical and mechanical processes. We can call this inner experience the experiencing of physics in man. But this experience of physics in man is at the same time the cognition of the very laws of physics and mechanics. There was a physics of man directed toward the physical body. It would not have occurred to anyone in those times to search for physics other than through the experience in man. Now, in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, together with the mathematics that was thenceforth applied in physics, what was inwardly experienced is cast out of man and grasped abstractly. It can be said that physics sunders itself from man, whereas formerly it was contained in man himself.

Something similar was experienced with the fluid processes, the bodily fluids of the human organism. These too were inwardly experienced. Yesterday I referred to the Galen who, in the first Christian centuries, described the following fluids in man: black gall, blood, phlegm, and the ordinary means of the intermingling of these fluids by the way they influence each other. Galen did not arrive at these statements by anything resembling today's physiological methods. They were based mainly on inward experiences. For Galen too these were largely a tradition, but what he thus took from tradition we once experienced inwardly in the fluid part of the human organism, which in turn was permeated by the etheric body.

For this reason, in the beginning of my Riddles of Philosophy,⁷² I did not describe the Greek philosophers in the customary way. Read any ordinary history of philosophy and you will find this subject presented more or less as follows: Thales⁷³ pondered on the origin of our sense world and sought for it in water. Heraclitus looked for it in fire. Others looked for it in air. Still others in solid matter, for example in something like atoms. It is amazing that this can be recounted without questions being raised. People today do not notice that it basically defies explanation why Thales happened to designate water while Heraclitus⁷⁴ chose fire as the source of all things. Read my book Riddles of Philosophy, and you will see that the viewpoint of Thales, expressed in the sentence “All things have originated from water,” is based on an inner experience. He inwardly felt the activity of what in his day was termed the watery element. He sensed that the basis of the external process in nature was related to this inner activity; thus he described the external out of inner experiences. It was the same with Heraclitus who, as we would say today, was of a different temperament. Thales, as a phlegmatic, was sensitive to the inward “water” or “phlegm.” Therefore he described the world from the phlegmatic's viewpoint: everything has come from water. Heraclitus, as a choleric, experienced the inner “fire.” He described the world the way he experienced it. Besides them, there were other thinkers, who are no longer mentioned by external tradition, who knew still more concerning these matters. Their knowledge was handed down and still existed as tradition in the first Christian centuries; hence Galen could speak of the four components of man's inner fluidic system.

What was then known concerning the inner fluids, namely, how these four fluids—yellow gall, black gall, blood, and phlegm—influence and mix with one another really amounts to an inner human chemistry, though it is of course considered childish today. No other form of chemistry existed in those days. The external phenomena that today belong to the field of chemistry were then evaluated according to these inward experiences. We can therefore speak of an inner chemistry based on experiences of the fluid man who is permeated by the ether body. Chemistry was tied to man in former ages. Later it emerged, as did mathematics and physics, and became external chemistry (see Figure 1.) Try to imagine how the physics and chemistry of ancient times were felt by men. They were experienced as something that was, as it were, a part of themselves, not as something that is mere description of an external nature and its processes. The main point was: it was experienced physics, experienced chemistry.

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In those ages when men felt external nature in their physical and etheric bodies, the contents of the astral body and the ego organization were also experienced differently than in later times.

Today was have a psychology, but it is only an inventory of abstractions, though no one admits this. You will find in it thinking, feeling, willing, as well as memory, imagination, and so forth, but treated as mere abstractions. This gradually arose from what was still considered as one's own soul contents. One had cast out chemistry and physics; thinking, feeling and willing were retained. But what was left eventually became so diluted that it turned into no more than an inventory of lifeless empty abstractions, and it can be readily proved that this is so. Take, for example, the people who still spoke of thinking or willing as late as the Fifteenth or Sixteenth Century.⁷⁵ If you study the older texts on these subjects you will see that people expressed themselves concerning these matters in a concrete way. You have the feeling, when such a person speaks about thinking, that he speaks as if this thinking were actually a series of inner processes within him, as if the thoughts were colliding with each other or supporting each other. This is still an experiencing of thoughts. It is not yet as abstract a matter as it became later on. During and towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, it was an easy thing for the philosophers to deny all reality to these abstractions. They saw thoughts as inner mirror pictures, as was done in an especially brilliant way by Richard Wahle, who declared that the ego, thinking, feeling, and willing were only illusions. Instead of abstractions, the inner soul contents become illusions.

In the age when man felt that his walking was a process that took place simultaneously in him and the world, and when he still sensed the circulating fluids within him, he knew, for instance, that when he moved about in the heat of the sun (when external influences were present) that the blood and phlegm circulated differently in him than was the case in winter. Such a man experienced the blood and phlegm circulation within himself, but he experienced it together with the sunshine or the lack thereof. And just as he experienced physical and chemical aspects in union with the outside world, so he also experienced thinking, feeling, and willing together with the world. He did not think they were occurring only within himself as was done in later ages when they gradually evaporated into complete abstractions. Instead he experienced what occurred in him in thinking, feeling, and willing, or in the circulation of the fluids as part of the realm of the astral, the soul being of man, which in that age was the subject of a psychology.

Psychology now became tightly tied to man. With the dawn of the scientific age, man drove physics and chemistry out into the external world; psychology, on the other hand, he drove into himself. This process can be traced in Francis Bacon and John Locke. All that is experienced of the external world, such as tone, color, and warmth, is pressed into man's interior.

This process is even more pronounced in regard to the ego organization. This gradually became a very meager experience. The way man looked into himself, the ego became by degrees something like a mere point. For that reason it became easy to philosophers to dispute its very existence. Not ego consciousness, but the experience of the ego was for men of former ages something rich in content and fully real. This ego experience expressed itself in something that was a loftier science than psychology, a science that can be called pneumatology. In later times this was also pressed into the interior and thinned out into our present quite diluted ego feeling.

When man had the inward experience of his physical body, he had the experience of physics; simultaneously, he experienced what corresponds in outer nature to the processes in his physical body. It is similar in the case of the etheric body. Not only the etheric, was experienced inwardly, but also the physical fluid system, which is controlled by the etheric. Now, what is inwardly experienced when man perceives the psychological, the processes of his astral body? The “air man”—if I may put it this way—is inwardly experienced. We are not only solid organic formations, not only fluids or water formations, we are always gaseous-airy as well. We breathe in the air and breathe it out again. We experienced the substance of psychology in intimate union with the inner assimilation of air. This is why psychology was more concrete. When the living experience of air (which can also be outwardly traced) was cast out of the thought contents, these thought contents became increasingly abstract, became mere thought. Just think how an old Indian philosopher strove in his exercises to become conscious of the fact that in the breathing process something akin to the thought process was taking place. He regulated his breathing process in order to progress his thinking. He knew that thinking, feeling and willing are not as flimsy as we today make them out to be. He knew that through breathing they were related to both outer and inner nature, hence with air. As we can say that man expelled the physical and chemical aspects from his organization, we can also say that he sucked in the psychological aspect, but in doing so he rejected the external element, the air-breath experience. He withdrew his own being from the physical and chemical elements and merely observed the outer world with physics and chemistry; whereas he squeezed external nature (air) out of the psychological. Likewise, he squeezed the warmth element out of the pneumatological realm, thus reducing it to the rarity of the ego.

If I call the physical and etheric bodies, the “lower man,” and call the astral body and ego-organization the “upper man,” I can say that in the transition from an older epoch to the scientific age, man lost the inner physical and chemical experience, and came to grasp external nature only with his concepts of physics and chemistry. In psychology and pneumatology, on the other hand, man developed conceptions from which he eliminated outer nature and came to experience only so much of nature as remained in his concepts. In psychology, this was enough so that he at least still had words for what went on in his soul. As to the ego, however, this was so little that pneumatology (partially because theological dogmatism had prepared this development) completely faded out. It shrank down to the mere dot of the ego.

All this took the place of what had been experienced as a unity, when men of old said: We have four elements, earth, water, air and fire. Earth we experience in ourselves when we experience the physical body. Water we experience in ourselves when we experience the etheric body as the agent that moves, mixes, and separates the fluids. Air is experienced when the astral body is experienced in thinking, feeling, and willing, because these three are experienced as surging with the inner breathing process. Finally, warmth, or fire as it was then called, was experienced in the sensation of the ego.

So we may say that the modern scientific view developed by way of a transformation of man's whole relation to himself. If you follow historical evolution with these insights, you will find what I told you earlier—that in each new epoch we see new descriptions of the old traditions, but these are always less and less understood. The worlds of men like Paracelsus, van Helmont, or Jacob Boehme,⁷⁶ bear witness to such ancient traditions.

One who has insight into these matters gets the impression that in Jacob Boehme's case a very simple man is speaking out of sources that would lead too far today to discuss. He is difficult to comprehend because of his clumsiness. But Jacob Boehme shows profound insight in his awkward descriptions, insights that have been handed down through the generations. What was the situation of a person like Jacob Boehme? Giordano Bruno, his contemporary, stood among the most advanced men of his time, whereas we see in Jacob Boehme's case that he obviously read all kinds of books that are naturally forgotten today. These were full of rubbish. But Boehme was able to find a meaning in them. Awkwardly and with great difficulty Boehme presents the primeval wisdom that he had gleaned from his still more awkward and inadequate sources. His inward enlightenment enabled him to return to an earlier stage.

If we now look at the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and especially the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, and if we leave aside isolated people like Paracelsus and Boehme (who appear like monuments to a bygone age,) and if we look at the exoteric stream of human development in the light of initiation science, we gain the impression that nobody knows anything at all anymore about the deeper foundations of things. Physics and chemistry have been eliminated from man, and alchemy has become the subject of derision. Of course, people were justified in scoffing at it, because what still remained of the ancient traditions in medieval alchemy could well be made fun of. All that is left is psychology, which has become confined to man's inner being, and a very meager pneumatology. People have broken with everything that was formerly known of human nature., On one hand, they experience what has been separated from man; and on the other, what has been chaotically relegated into his interior. And in all our search for knowledge, we see what I have just described.

In the Seventeenth Century, a theory arose that remains quite unintelligible if considered by itself, although if it is viewed in the context of history it becomes comprehensible. The theory was that those processes in the human body that have to do with the intake of food, are based on a kind of fermentation. The foods man eats are permeated with saliva and then with digestive fluids such as those in the pancreas, and thus various degrees of fermentation processes, as they were called, are achieved. If one looks at these ideas from today's viewpoint (which naturally will also be outgrown in the future) one can only make fun of them. But if we enter into these ideas and examine them closely, we discover the source of these apparently foolish ideas. The ancient traditions, which in a man like Galen were based on inward experiences and were thus well justified, were now on the verge of extinction. At the same time, what was to become external objective chemistry was only in its beginnings. Men had lost the inner knowledge, and the external had not yet developed. Therefore, they found themselves able to speak about digestion only in quite feeble neo-chemical terms, such as the vague idea of fermentation. Such men were the late followers of Galen's teachings. They still felt that in order to comprehend man, one must start from the movements of man's fluids, his fluid nature. But at the same time, they were beginning to view chemical aspects only by means of the external processes. Therefore they seized the idea of fermentation, which could be observed externally, and applied it to man. Man had become an empty bag because he no longer experienced anything within himself. What had grown to be external science was poured into this bag. In the Seventeenth Century, of course, there was not much science to pour. People had the vague idea about fermentation and similar processes, and these were rashly applied to man. Thus arose the so-called iatrochemical school⁷⁷ of medicine.

In considering these iatrochemists, we must realize that they still had some inkling of the ancient doctrine of fluids, which was based on inner experience. Others, who were more or less contemporaries of the iatrochemists, no longer had any such inkling, so they began to view man the way he appears to us today when we open an anatomy book. In such books we find descriptions of the bones, the stomach, the liver, etc. and we are apt to get the impression that this is all there is to know about man and that he consists of more or less solid organs with sharply defined contours. Of course, from a certain aspect, they do exist. But the solid aspect—the earth element, to use the ancient terminology—comprises at most one tenth of man's organization. It is more accurate to say that man is a column of fluids. The mistake is not in what is actually said, but in the whole method of presentation. It is gradually forgotten that man is a column of fluids in which the clearly contoured organs swim. Laymen see the pictures and have the impression that this is all they need to understand the body. But this is misleading. It is only one tenth of man. The remainder ought to be described by drawing a continuous stream of fluids (see Figure 2) interacting in the most manifold ways in the stomach, liver and so forth. Quite erroneous conceptions arise as to how man's organism actually functions, because only the sharply outlined organs are observed. This is why in the Nineteenth Century, people were astonished to see that if one drinks a glass of water, it appears to completely penetrate the body and be assimilated by his organs. But when a second or third glass of water is consumed, it no longer gives the impression that it is digested in the same manner. These matters were noticed but could no longer be explained, because a completely false view was held concerning the fluid organization of man. Here etheric body is the driving agent that mixes or separates the fluids, and brings about the processes of organic chemistry in man.

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In the Seventeenth Century, people really began to totally ignore this “fluid man” and to focus only on the solidly contoured parts. In this realm of clearly outlined parts, everything takes place in a mechanical way. One part pushes another; the other moves; things get pumped; it all works like suction or pressure pumps. The body is viewed from a mechanical standpoint, as existing only through the interplay of solidly contoured organs. Out of the iatrochemical theory or alongside it, there arose iatromechanics and even iatromathematics.⁷⁸

Naturally, people began to think that the heart is really a pump that mechanically pumps the blood through the body, because they no longer knew that our inner fluids have their own life and therefore move on their own. They never dreamed that the heart is only a sense organ that checks on the circulation of the fluids in its own way. The whole matter was inverted. One no longer saw the movement and inner vitality of the fluids, or the etheric body active therein. The heart became a mechanical apparatus and has remained so to this day for the majority of physiologists and medical men.

The iatrochemists still had some faint knowledge concerning the etheric body. There was full awareness of it in what Galen described. In van Helmont or Paracelsus there was still an inkling of the etheric body, more than survived in the official iatrochemists who conducted the schools of that time. In the iatromechanists no trace whatsoever remained of this ether body; all conception of it had vanished into tin air. Man was seen only as a physical body, and that only to the extent that he consists of solid parts. These were now dealt with by means of physics, which had in the meantime also been cast out of the human being. Physics was now applied externally to man, whom one no longer understood. Man had been turned into an empty bag, and physics had been established in an abstract manner. Now this same physics was reapplied to man. Thus one no longer had the living being of man, only an empty bag stuffed with theories.

It is still this way today. What modern physiology or anatomy tells us of man is not man at all, it is physics that was cast out of man and is now changed around to be fitted back into man. The more intimately we study this development, the better we see destiny at work. The iatrochemists had a shadowy consciousness of the etheric body, the iatromechanists had none. Then came a man by the name of Stahl⁷⁹ who, considering his time, was an unusually clever man. He had studied iatrochemistry, but the concepts of the “inner fermentation processes” seemed inadequate to him because they only transplanted externalized chemistry back into the human bag. With the iatromechanists he was still more dissatisfied because they only placed external mechanical physics back into the empty bag. No knowledge, no tradition existed concerning the etheric body as the driving force of the moving fluids. It was not possible to gain information about it. So what did Stahl do? He invented something, because there was nothing left in tradition. He told himself: the physical and chemical processes that go on in the human body cannot be based on the physics and chemistry that are discovered in the external world. But he had nothing else to put into man Therefore he invented what he called the “life force,” the “vital force,” With it he founded the dynamic school. Stahl was gifted with a certain instinct. He felt the lack of something that he needed; so he invented this “vital force.” The Nineteenth Century had great difficulty in getting rid of this concept. It was really only an invention, but it was very hard to rid science of this “life force.”

Great efforts were made to find something that would fit into this empty bag that was man. This is why men came to think of the world of machines. They knew how a machine moves and responds. So the machine was stuffed into the empty bag in the form of L'homme machine by La Mettrie.⁸⁰ Man is a machine. The materialism, or rather the mechanics, of the Eighteenth Century, such as we see in Holbach's Systeme de la nature,⁸¹ which Goethe so detested in his youth, reflects the total inability to grasp the being of man with the ideas that prevailed at that time in outer nature. The whole Nineteenth Century suffered from the inability to take hold of man himself.

But there was a strong desire somehow or other to work out a conception of man. This led to the idea of picturing him s a more highly evolved animal. Of course, the animal was not really understood either, since physics, chemistry, and psychology, all in the old sense, are needed for this purpose even if pneumatology is unnecessary. But nobody realized that all this is also required in order to understand the animal. One had to start somewhere, so in the Eighteenth Century man was compared to the machine and in the Nineteenth Century he was traced back to the beast. All this is quite understandable from the historical standpoint. It makes good sense considering the whole course of human evolution. It was, after all, this ignorance concerning the being of man that produced our modern opinions about man. The development towards freedom, for example, would never have occurred had the ancient experience of physics, chemistry, psychology, and pneumatology survived. Man had to lose himself as an elemental being in order to find himself as a free being. He could only do this by withdrawing from himself for a while and paying no attention to himself any longer. Instead, he occupied himself with the external world, and if he wanted theories concerning his own nature, he applied to himself what was well suited for a comprehension of the outer world. During this interim, when man took the time to develop something like the feeling of freedom, he worked out the concepts of science; these concepts that are, in a manner of speaking, so robust that they can grasp outer nature. Unfortunately, however, they are too coarse for the being of man, since people do not go to the trouble of refining these ideas to the point where they ca also grasp the nature of man. Thus modern science arose, which is well applicable to nature and has achieved great triumphs. But it is useless when it comes to the essential being of man.

You can see that I am not criticizing science. I am only describing it. Man attains his consciousness of freedom only because he is no longer burdened with the insights that he carried within himself and that weighed him down. The experience of freedom came about when man constructed a science that in its robustness was only suited to outer nature. Since it does not offer the whole picture and is not applicable to man's being, this science can naturally be criticized in turn. It is most useful in physics; in chemistry, weak points begin to show up; and psychology becomes completely abstract. Nevertheless, mankind had to pass through an age that took its course in this way in order to attain to an individually modulated moral conception of the world and to the consciousness of freedom. We cannot understand the origin of science if we look at it only from one side. It must be regarded as a phenomenon parallel to the consciousness of freedom that is arising during the same period, along with all the moral and religious implications connected with this awareness.

This is why people like Hobbes⁸² and Bacon, who were establishing the ideas of science, found it impossible to connect man to the spirit and soul of the universe. In Hobbes' case, the result was that, on the one hand, he cultivated the germinal scientific concepts in the most radical way, while, on the other hand, he cast all spiritual elements out of social life and decreed “the war of all against all.” He recognized no binding principle that might flow into social life from a super-sensible source, and therefore he was able, though in a somewhat caricatured form, to discuss the consciousness of freedom in a theoretical way for the first time.

The evolution of mankind does not proceed in a straight line. We must study the various streams that run side by side. Only then can we understand the significance of man's historical development.

• 69. Steiner, The Boundaries of Natural Science, pp. 59–87. Chapters 5 and 6, as well as 7 and 8.
• 70. Johannes Scotus Erigena: also Eriugena, Ireland 810–877 France. Pre-Scholastic philosopher, theologian with extensive comprehension of language. Came from Britain to France. Led the Emperor's Academy in Paris 845–877. Finished his translation of Dionysius the Areopagite in 858. His main work was De Divisione Naturae (Division of Nature), 867. He taught out of a Platonic comprehension. He stood up for the introduction of the hierarchical order in the worldly administration of the church. See also Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 71. The copy in Greek originated in the fifteenth century. Dionysius was a member of the Areopag in Athens and a student of the Apostle Paul (Acts 17:34). The setting up of the 3 times 3 hierarchies by Dionysius was adapted as dogma by the Catholic church. His writings in Latin translation were taken up enthusiastically, and were still taken as authentic in the seventeenth century. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Redemption of Thinking, Die Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974), GA Bibl. Nr. 96, and Otto Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus, Volume II, paragraph 59.
• 72. See Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy.
• 73. Thales of Milet: About 650–560 B.C.
• 74. Heraclitus of Ephesus: About 550–480 B.C.
• 75. See also the personalities spoken of in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 76. Jacob Boehme: Altseidenberg, Goerlitz 1575–1624 Goerlitz. Mystic. His profession was shoemaker. First writing Aurora, 1612. Further writings from 1619 onwards, despite the prohibition. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 77. Iatrochemistry: Name from the Greek “Iatro,” physician. Work with homeopathic remedies in continuation of Paracelsus' (1493–1541) method of healing, in the beginning with retention of his opinion about sulfur, mercury, and salt. The Iatrochemical School was established during Paracelsus' last years of life. It degenerated in the middle of the seventeenth century. In its place stepped Robert Boyle's chemistry (1627–1691), for which iatrochemistry had done good preparation. J.B. van Helmont (1577–1644) was one of the main contributors to Iatrochemical literature.
• 78. Iatromechanics and Iatromathematics. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the proponents of these teachings were nearly all university professors, while iatrochemistry was represented by a union of practicing physicians. But that was true only in the Romantic countries and England. In Italy the main universities were Padua, Pisa, and Rome. There the teachings were rejected on philosophic grounds, because they were based on experience. Germany, where both branches worked hand in hand, was an exception and in a special position.
• 79. Georg Ernst Stahl: Ansbach 1650–1734, Berlin. Physician and chemist, Professor of Medicine. Exponent of Animism and Vitalism and the hypothesis of the “life forces” in his major work Theoria Medico Vera, 1707.
• 80. Offray de la Mettrie: Malo 1709–1751 Berlin. Physician and writer. Main work is L'Homme Machine, published in Leyden 1748.
• 81. Baron Dietrich von Hollenbach: Heidesheim, Rheinpfalz 1723–1789 Paris. His main work Systeme de la Nature ou des Lois du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral appeared 1770 under the pseudonym Mira-baud. He only recognized mobile, material atoms, even in regard to thinking, and he based morals on self love.
• 82. Thomas Hobbes: Malmesbury 1588–1679 Hardwicke. English natural philosopher and humanist. Opera Philosophica, 1688. All phenomena in nature and humanity, even the psychological ones, are result of mobility of bodies. The social processes are traced back to mechanical processes. The leading force in this process is the egoism of the single human being. The state which is “crushing everything underfoot,” he called “Leviathan” and said: “The natural social condition is the war of all against all.”

It is in the nature of the case that the subject of a lecture course like this one is inexhaustible. Matters could be elaborated and looked at more thoroughly. But since, unfortunately, we must come to an end, we have to be content with given guidelines and indication. Today, therefore, I shall only supplement the scanty outlines and hints already discussed to that in a certain sense the picture will be rounded out.

Proceeding once again from the being of man as viewed by spiritual science, we must say that we member man into physical body, etheric or formative forces body, astral body (which essentially represents the soul life) and ego. Let us be clear that properly speaking the physical body resides only in the small part of the human organization that we can describe as solid and sharply defined. On the other hand, all that pertains to liquid or fluid forms is taken hold of by the etheric body in such a way that it is in a constant process of blending, separating, combining, and dissolving. It is in perpetual flux. Then there are the gaseous, aeriform elements, such as are active in oxygen and other gases. In these, the astral body is at work. Finally, the ego organization is active in everything that has to do with warmth.

What I have just outlined cannot, however, be reduced to a diagram. We must clearly understand, for instance, that because the formative forces body pulsates through all fluid and liquid elements of the body, it also sweeps along the solid substances. Everything in the human organization is in close interaction, in constant interplay. We must always be aware of that. But now let us also remember that this human organization has been experienced in different ways in the course of evolution. This was one of the main themes of these lectures.

What is described today as the subject matter of external physics or mechanics, was originally attained through an inward experience of the physical body. Our present-day physics contains statements that originated because there once existed an internally experienced physics of the physical body. As I have explained a number of times, this inward physics was divorced from man and now continues to function merely as a science that observes outer nature. During the decline of the medieval alchemy the same thing happened with what lives inwardly in man by virtue of the etheric body. The work of this body in the fluids was once experienced, but now it is only dimly perceptible in the fantastic, alchemistic formulas that we find in ancient writings. Originally this was intelligent science, but inwardly experienced within the etheric. In a way, this is still in the process of being divorced from man, because as yet we really do not have a fully developed chemistry. We have many chemical processes in the world that we seek to understand, but only in a physical and mechanical way.

In the beginning man experienced all this inwardly by means of his organization, but in the course of time he cast it all out of himself. In this process of casting out all our science developed, from astronomy to the meager beginnings of modern chemistry. On the other hand, thinking, feeling and willing, the subject matter of abstract psychology (which today is no longer considered real) was in former times actually not experienced inside man. Man felt himself at one with the external world outside his own being, when he experienced the soul life. Thus what was corporeal was once experienced inwardly, whereas the soul element was experienced by leaving one's being and communing with the outer world. Psychology was once the science of that aspect of the world that affects man in such a way that he appears to himself as a soul being. Physics and chemistry were cast out of man, whereas psychology and pneumatology (which I shall discuss directly) were stuffed into him and lost their reality. They turned into subjective perceptions with which nothing could be done.

What was experienced together with the cosmos through the astral body (which leaves us in sleep) has become the subject of psychology. What man experienced as spirit in union with the universe was pneumatology. Today, as I have already pointed out, this has shrunk down to the idea of the ego or to a mere feeling. Therefore we now have as science of external nature what was once inner experience, while our science of man's inner nature is what was once external experience.

Now we must call to mind what is needed, on the one hand for physics and chemistry, and on the other for psychology and pneumatology, in order to develop them further in a conscious way, since man today finds himself in the age of the development of the consciousness soul. Take physics, for example, which in recent times has become mostly abstract and mechanical. From all that I have said you will have seen that the scientific age has increasingly felt impelled to restrict itself to the externally observed mechanics of space. Long ago, man accompanied motion by means of inward experience and judged it according to what he felt within as movement. Observing a falling stone, he experienced its inner impulse of movement in his own inner human nature, in his physical body. This experience, after the great casting out, led to the measuring of the rate of fall per second. In our attitude toward nature, the idea prevails that what is observed is what is real.

What can be observed in the outer world? It is motion, change of position.⁸³ As a rule, we let velocity vanish neatly in a differential coefficient. But it is motion that we observe, and we express velocity as movement per second, hence by means of space. This means, however, that with our conscious experience, we are entirely outside the object. We are not involved in it in any way when we merely watch its motion, meaning its change of position in space. We can do that only if we find ways and means to inwardly take hold of the spatial, physical object by an extending of the same method with which we separated from it in the first place. Instead of the mere movement, the bare change of position, we have to view the velocity in the objects as their characteristic element. Then we can know what a particular object is like inwardly, because we find velocity also within ourselves when we look back upon ourselves.

This is what is necessary. The trend of scientific development in regard to the outer physical world must be extended in the direction of proceeding from mere observation of motion to a feeling for the velocity possessed by a given object. We must advance from motion to velocity. That is how we enter into reality. Reality is not taken hold of if all we see is that a body changes its position in space. But if we know that the body possesses an inner velocity-impulse, then we have something that lies in the nature of the body. We assert nothing about a body if we merely indicate its change of position, but we do state something about it when we say that it contains within itself the impulse for its own velocity. This then is a property of it, something that belongs to its nature. You can understand this by a simple illustration. If you watch a moving person, you know nothing about him. But if you know that he has a strong urge to move quickly, you do know something about him. Likewise, you know something about him, when you know that he has a reason for moving slowly. We must be able to take hold of something that has significance within a given body. It matters little whether or not modern physics speaks, for example, of atoms; what matters is that when it does speak of them it regards them as velocity charges. That is what counts.

Now the question is: how do we arrive at such a perception? We can discuss the best in the case of physics, since today's chemistry has advanced too little. We have to become clear about what we actually do when, in our thinking, we cast inwardly experienced mechanics and physics into external space. That is what we are doing when we say: The nature of what is out there in space is of no concern to me; I observe only what can be measured and expressed in mechanical formulas, and I leave aside everything that is not mechanical. Where does this lead us? It leads us to the same process in knowledge that a human being goes through when he dies. When he dies, life goes out of him, the dead organism remains. When I begin to think mechanistically, life goes out of my knowledge. I then have a science of dead matter. We must be absolutely clear that we are setting up a science of dead matter so long as the mechanical and physical aspect is the sole object of our study of nature. You must be aware that you are focusing on what is dead. You must be able to say to yourself: The great thing about science is that it has tacitly resolved that, unlike the ancient alchemists who still saw in outer nature a remnant of life, it will observe what is dead I minerals, plants, and animals. Science will study only what is dead in them, because it utilizes only ideas and concepts suitable for what is dead. Therefore, our physics is dead by its nature.

Science will stand on a solid basis only when it fully realizes that its mode of thinking can take hold only of the dead. The same is true of chemistry, but I cannot go into that today because of the lack of time.

When we look only at motion and lose sight of velocity, we are erecting a physics that is dead, the end-product of living things is then our concern, and the end-product is death. Hence, when we look at nature with the eyes of modern mechanics and physics, we must realize that we are looking at a corpse.

Nature was not always like this. It was different at one time. If I look at a corpse, it would be foolish to believe that it was always in this condition. The fact that I realize that it is a corpse proves to me that once it was a living organism. The moment you realize that modern mechanics and physics lead you to view nature in this way, you will see that nature is now a corpse so far as physics is concerned. We are studying a corpse.

Can we attain to something living, or at least an approach to it? The corpse is the final condition of something living. Where is the beginning condition? Well, my dear friends, there is no way to rediscover velocity by observing motion. You may stare at differential coefficients as long as you will but you will not find it. Instead, you must turn back to man. Whereas formerly he experienced himself from within, you must now study him from without through his physical organism, and you must understand that in man—and especially in his physical and etheric organizations—the beginning of a living condition must be sought.

No satisfactory form of physics and chemistry will be attained save through a genuine science of man. But I expressly call attention to the fact that such a genuine anthropology will not be reached by approaching man with the methods of present-day physics and chemistry. That would only carry death back into man and make his body (his lower organization) even more dead than before.

You must study what is living in man, and not revert to the method of physics and chemistry. What is needed are the methods that can be found through spiritual-scientific research. Briefly stated, spiritual-scientific research will meet the historic requirements of natural science.

This historic requirement can be put in the following words: Science has reached the point of observing what is corpse-like in nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science must discover in addition to this the beginning of a living condition. This has been preserved in man. In former periods of evolution it was also externally perceptible. At one time, the processes of nature were totally different. Today, we walk around on the corpses of what existed in the beginning. But in the two lower bodies of man, the beginning condition has been preserved. There we can discover all that once existed, right back to the Saturn condition. An historical approach leads beyond the present state of science. It is quite clear why this is so. We are in the midst of a period of development. If, as is so frequently the case, we consider today's manner of thinking to be the most advanced and do not realize that the real course of events was very different, then we are looking at history the wrong way. As an example, a twenty-five year old person need not only be observed in the light of the twenty-five years that he has been alive,—one must also observe the element in him that makes it possible for him to live on. That is one point.

The other point is that our psychology has become very thin, while pneumatology has nearly reached the vanishing point. Again, we must know how far it has gone with these two sciences in the present age. If one speaks today of blue or red, of C-sharp or G, or of qualities of warmth, he will say that they are subjective sensations. That is the popular attitude; But what is a mere subjective sensation? It is a “phenomenon.” Just as we observe only motions in outer nature, we study only the phenomenon in psychology and pneumatology. And just as velocity is missing from motion in our external observation, the essential thing—the living essence—is missing from our observation of the inner soul life. Because we only study phenomena and no longer experience the living essence, we never get beyond mere semblance. The way thinking, feeling and willing are experienced today, they are mere semblance. Modern epistemologists have the man who wants to lift himself up by his own pigtail, or like the man in a railroad car who pushes against the wall without realizing that he cannot move the carriage in this way. This is how modern epistemologists look. They talk and talk, but there is no vitality in their talk because they are locked into the mere semblance.

I have tried to put a certain end to this talk. The first time was in my Philosophy of Freedom,⁸⁴ where I demonstrated how this semblance, inherent in pure thinking, becomes the impulse of freedom when inwardly grasped by man in thinking. If something other than semblance were contained in our subjective experience, we could never be free. But if this semblance can be raised to pure thinking, one can be free, because what is not real being cannot determine us, whereas real being would do so. This was my first effort. My second effort was at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, when I analyzed the matter psychologically. I attempted to show that our sensations and thoughts are in fact outward experiences, rather than inward ones, and that this insight can be attained by careful observation.

These indications will have to be understood. Then, we shall realize that we must rediscover being in semblance, just as we must rediscover velocity in movement. Then, we will understand what this inwardly experienced semblance really is. It will reveal itself as the initial state of being. Man experiences this semblance; experiences himself as semblance and as such lives his way into semblance and thus transforms it into the seed of future worlds. I have often pointed out that from our ethics, our morals, born of the physical world of semblance, future physical worlds will arise, just as from today's seed the plant will grow.⁸⁵ We are dealing with the nascent state of being. In order to have a proper natural science, we must realize that psychology and pneumatology must understand what they observe as nascent states of being. Only then will they throw light on those matters that natural science wants to illuminate. But what is this “nascent” or “initial state?”

Now this nascent state is in the outer world, not within. It is what I see when I behold the green tapestry of plants, the world of colors—red, green and blue—and the sounds that are out there. What are these fleeting formations that modern-day physics, physiology and psychology regard only as subjective? They are the elements from which the worlds of the future create themselves. Red is not engendered by matter in the eye or the brain, red is the first, semblance-like, seed of future worlds.

If you know this, you will also want to know something about what will correspond in these future worlds to the corpse-like element. It will not be what we found earlier in our physics and chemistry, it will be the corpse of the future. We shall recognize what will be the corpse of the future, the future element of death, if we discover it already today in the higher organization of man, where astral body and ego are active. By experiencing the final condition there in reference to the initial one, we at last gain a proper comprehension of the nervous system and the brain insofar as they are dead, not alive. In a certain sense, they can be more dead than a corpse, inasmuch as they transcend the absolute point of death—especially in the case of the nervous system—and become “more dead than dead.” But this very fact makes the nervous system and the brain bearers of the so-called spiritual element—because the dead element dwells in them, the final state not yet even reached by outer nature—because they even surpass this final state.

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In order to find psychology and pneumatology in the outer world, we shall have to discover how the inanimate, the dead, dwells in the human organism; namely, in the head organization and in part of the rhythmic organization, mainly that of breathing. We must look at our head and say of it that it is constantly dying. If it were alive, the growing, sprouting living matter could not think. But because it gives up life and constantly dies, the soul-spiritual thoughts, endowed with being, have the opportunity to spread out over what is dead as new living, radiant semblance.

You see, here lie the great tasks that, by means of the historical manner of observation result quite simply from natural science. If we don't take hold of them, we move like ghosts through the present development of science, and not with the consciousness that an epoch that has begun must find a way to continue. You can imagine that much of this is contained implicitly in what science has discovered. Scientific literature offers such indications everywhere. But people cannot yet distinguish clearly; they like what is chaotic. They don't care clearly to contemplate physics and chemistry on one hand, and psychology and pneumatology on the other, because then they would have to consider seriously the inner and outer aspects. They prefer to vacillate in the murky waters between physics and chemistry. Due to this, a bastard science has arisen that has become the darling of natural research and even philosophy; namely, physiology. As soon as the real facts are discovered, physiology will fall apart into psychology on the one hand—a psychology that is also a perception of the world—and on the other, into chemistry, meaning a chemistry that is also a knowledge of man.

When these two are attained, this in-between science, physiology, will vanish. Because today you have a morass in which you can find everything, and because by juggling a bit to the left or the right, it is possible to find a bit of a soul or a corporeal element, people do quite well. The physiology of today is what above all must disappear as the last remnant of former conceptions that have become muddled. The reason physiological concepts are so abstruse is that they contain soul and corporeal elements that are no longer distinguished, thus they can play around with words and even juggle the facts. One who aims for clear insight must realize that physiology amounts in the end to fibbing with words and facts.

Until we admit this, we can't take the history of natural science seriously. Science does not proceed only from undetermined past ages to our time, it continues on from the present. History can only be understood, if one comprehends the further course of things, not in a superstitious, prophetic sense but by beginning now to do the right thing. And infinitely much needs to be set right, particularly in the domain of science. Natural science has grown tall; it is like a nice teenager, who at the moment is going through his years of unpolished adolescence, and whose guidance must be continued so that he will become mature. Science will mature, if murky areas like physiology disappear, and physics and pneumatology arise again in the way outlined above. They will come into being, if the anthroposophical way of thinking is applied in earnest to science. This will be the case, when people feel that they are learning something, when somebody speaks to them of a real physics, a real chemistry, a real psychology and pneumatology; when they no longer have the urge to comprehend everything concerning the world and the human being through bastardized chaotic sciences like physiology. Then, the development of human knowledge will once again stand on a sound basis.

Naturally, therapy is particularly affected and suffers under present-day physiology. You can well imagine this, because it works with all manner of things that elude one's grasp, when one begins to think clearly.

We cannot confront the great challenges of our time with a few anthroposophical catchwords and phrases. It also does not suffice to dabble with physiology on the borderline between psychology and chemistry. The only way to proceed is to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific anthroposophy to physics and chemistry. If you are lazy—forgive me for this harsh expression, I don't mean it in such a radical sense in this case—you say: These matters can only be correctly judged, if one is clairvoyant. Therefore I will wait until I am clairvoyant. I won't venture to criticize physics and chemistry or even physiology.

My dear friends, you need not have insights that surpass ordinary perception in order to know that a corpse is dead and that it must have originated in life. Neither do you need to be clairvoyant in order to analyze properly the true facts of today's physics and chemistry, and to refer them back to their underlying living element, once your attention is directed to the fact that this living element is to be found by studying the “lower man.” There you will have the supplement you need for chemistry and physics. Make the attempt, for once, really to study the mechanism of human movement.⁸⁶ Instead of constantly drawing axis of coordinates and putting the movements into them apart from man; instead of multiplying differential coefficients and integrals, make a serious attempt to study the mechanics of movement in man. As they were once experienced from within, so do you now study them from without. Then you will have what you need, to add to your outer observation of nature, in physics and chemistry.

In outer nature, those who proclaim atomism will always put you in the wrong. They even work themselves up to the very spiritual statement that when one speaks about matter in the sense of a modern physicist, matter is no longer material. The physicists, themselves are saying it;⁸⁷ our very opponents are saying it. In this case they are right, and if we in our replies to them stop short at the half-truths—that is to say, at the final conditions of being—we shall never be equal to that which issues from them.

Here lie the tasks of the specialists, here lie the tasks of those who have the requisite preliminary training, in one or another branch of science.

Then we shall not establish a physicized or chemicized Anthroposophy, but a true anthroposophical chemistry, anthroposophical physics. Then we shall not establish a new medicine as a mere variation on the old, but a true anthroposophical medicine.

The tasks are at hand. They are outlined in all directions. Just as the simple heart can receive the observations that are scattered everywhere in our lectures or lecture cycles, and that give spiritual sustenance, so too the need is to take up on every hand the hints that can lead us to the much-needed progress in the several domains of science.

In the future, it will not suffice if man and nature do not again become one. What physics and chemistry study in nature as the final state of being, must be supplemented by the state of being in “lower man” belonging to the realm of physics and chemistry—in man who is dependent on the physical and etheric bodies. It is important that this be sought. It is not important to single out as essential the valences of the structural formulas or the periodic law in chemistry, because these are but schemata. While they are quite useful as tools for counting and calculations, what matters is the following realization. If the chemical processes are externally observed, the chemical laws are not within them. They are contained in the origin of chemical processes. Hence, they are found only, if, with diligent effort, one tries to seek in the human being for the processes that occur in his circulation, in the activity of his fluids, through the actions of the etheric body. The explanation of the chemical processes in nature lies in the processes of the etheric body. These in turn are represented in the play of fluids in the human organism and are accessible to precise study.

Anthroposophy poses a serious challenge in this direction. This is why we have founded research institutes⁸⁸ in which serious, intensive work must begin. Then the methods gained from anthroposophy can be properly nurtured. This is also the main point of our medical therapy; namely, that the old, confused physiology finally be replaced with a real chemistry and psychology. Without this one can never assert anything about the processes of illness and healing in human nature, because every course of illness is simply an abnormal psychological process, and each healing process is an abnormal chemical process. Only to the extent that we know how to influence the chemical process of healing and how to grasp the psychological course of illness will we attain to genuine pathology and therapy. This will emerge from the anthroposophical manner of observation. If one does not want to recognize this potential in anthroposophy, then one only wants something a bit out of the ordinary and is unwilling to get to work in earnest. Actually, everything that I have sketched here is only a description of how the work should proceed, because a genuine psychology and chemistry come into being through work. All the prerequisites for this work already exist, because very man facts can be found in scientific literature that researchers have accidentally discovered but don't understand. Those of us who work in the spirit of anthroposophy should take up these facts and contribute something to their full comprehension. Take as an example what I emphasized yesterday⁸⁹ in speaking to a smaller group of people. The essential point about the spleen is that it is really an excretory organ. The spleen itself is in turn an excretion of the functions in the etheric body. Countless facts are available in medical literature that need only be utilize—and that is the point: they should be utilized—then the facts will be brought together and what is needed will result.

A single person might accomplish this if a human life spanned six hundred years. But by that time, other tasks would confront him and his accomplishments would long since be outmoded. These things must be attained through cooperation, through people working together. So this is the second task—we must see to it that this becomes possible. I believe that these tasks of the Anthroposophical Society will emerge most clearly and urgently from a truly realistic study of the history of natural science in recent times.

This history shows us at every turn that something great and wonderful has arisen through modern science. In earlier times, the truly inanimate dead aspects could never be discerned, hence, nothing could be made of them. In those times inward semblance could never really be observed; therefore, it couldn't be brought to life by human effort, and hence, one couldn't arrive at freedom. Today, we confront a grandiose world, which became possible only because natural science studies the dead aspects. This is the world of technology. Its special character can be discerned from the fact that the word “technique” is taken from the Greek. There, it still signifies “art,” implying that art reveals, where technology still contains spirit. Today, technology only utilizes spirit in the sense of the abstract, spirit-devoid thoughts. Technology could be achieved only by attaining a proper knowledge of what is dead. Once in the course of humanity's evolution it was necessary to concentrate upon the dead; it thus entered into the realm of technology. Today, man stands in the midst of this realm of technology that surrounds him on all sides. He looks out on it and realizes that here at last is a sphere in which there is no spirit in the proper sense. In regard to the spiritual element, it is important that in all areas of technology human beings experience this inner feeling, almost akin to one of pain over the death of a person. If feeling and sensation can be developed in knowledge, then such a feeling will arise, somewhat like the sensation one experiences when a person is dying and one sees the living organism turn into a corpse. Alongside the abstract indifferent cold knowledge, such a feeling will arise through the true realization that technology is the processing of the inanimate, the dead. This feeling will become the most powerful impetus to seek the spirit in new directions.

I could well imagine the following view of the future: Man looks out over the chimneys, the factories, the telephones—everything that technology has produced in wondrous ways in the most recent times. He stands atop this purely mechanical world, the grave of all things spiritual, and he calls out longingly into the universe—and his yearning will be fulfilled. Just as the dead stone yields the living fiery spark if handled correctly, so from our dead technology will emerge the living spirit, if human beings have the right feelings about what technology is.

On the other hand, one need only understand clearly what pure thinking is; namely the semblance from which can be brought forth the most powerful moral impulses—those individual moral impulses that I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom. Then, in a new way, man will face the feeling that was once confronted by Nicholas Cusanus and Meister Eckhart. They said: When I life myself beyond everything that I am ordinarily accustomed to observe, I come to “nothingness” with all that I have learned. But in this “nothingness” there arises for me the “I.” If man really penetrates to pure thinking, then he finds in it the nothingness that turns into the I and from which emerges the whole wealth of ethical actions, that will create new worlds. I can imagine a person who first lets all knowledge of the preset, as inaugurated by natural science, impress itself on him and then (centuries after Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus) turns his gaze inward and with today's mode of thinking arrives at the nothingness of his inner life. In it, he discovers that the spirit really speaks to him. I can imagine that these two images merge. On the one hand, man goes to the place where barren technology has left the spirit behind. There he calls out into cosmic expanses for the spirit. On the other hand, he stops, thinks and looks within himself. And here, out of his inner being, he receives the divine answer to the call he sent out into the distances of the universe.

When we learn, through a new, anthroposophically imbued natural science, to let the calls of infinite longing for the spirit, sent out into the world, resound in our inner being, then this will be the right starting point. Here, through an “anthroposophized” inner perception, we will find the answer to the yearning call for the spirit, desperately sounded out into the universe.

I did not want to describe the development of natural science in recent times in a merely documentary fashion. Rather, I wanted to show you the standpoint of a human being, who comprehends this natural-scientific development and, in a difficult moment of humanity's evolution, knows the right things to say to himself in regard to the progress of mankind.

• 83. See Drawings, pages 92, 95 and compare with the ones on page 125.
• 84. See footnote 45.
• 85. See Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Vocation (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 86. Literature: Adolf Fink has studied the mechanism of human movement and the heat produced by muscular work, and published in 1857, 1869, and 1882 Gesammelte Schriften, (1903–06 in German).
• 87. In the beginning of the century Rudolf Steiner pointed to the speech of the philosopher and Prime Minister A.J. Balfour of August 17, 1904, in front of the British Association, immediately after it was held; see Rudolf Steiner, Lucifer Gnosis (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1969), GA Bibl. No. 34, p. 467. Often Steiner also mentioned the lecture of Max Planck of 1910: “Die Stellung der Neueren Physic zur Mechanischen Weltanshaung” in Max Planck, Physikalische Abhandlungen und Vorträge (Brunswick, Germany, 1958), Vol. 3, pp. 30–46.
• 88. In 1920 a research institute was founded in Stuttgart for physics and chemistry, with a biological branch through the joint stock company “Der Kommende Tag.” A few years later it was transferred to Dornach. The first works from the Institute were published in Der Kommende Tag: Scientific Research Institute News. It contains Heft I (1921), “Milzfunktion und Blaettchen Frage” von L. Kolisko; Heft II (1923), “Der Villardsche Versuch” von Dr. Rer. Nat. R.E. Maier; Heft III (1923): “Physiologischer und Physicalischer Nachweis Kleinster Entitaeten” von L. Kolisko. Later works appeared in the volumes Gaea Sophia, Jahrbuch der Wissenschaftlichen Sektion der Freien Hochschule fuer Geisteswissenschaft am Goetheanum, Volume I (1926), etc.
• 89. From this scientific discussion of January 5 no known copy exists.

(from the 2nd German Edition, abridged).

NOTE BY EDITOR: The following pages are notes of collective conversations with Dr. Steiner on various occasions.

After the more or less harmful effects of mineral fertilisers had been referred to, Dr. Steiner said on one occasion: In view of the obvious increase in output which people today seem to, think necessary, this kind of fertiliser might perhaps not be dispensed with. But the harmful effects upon man and animal will not fail to ensue. Some of these effects will appear only after several generations have passed. Remedies, therefore, have to be found in time. Such remedies are e.g. the leaves of fruit trees. It can be recommended, therefore, to plant fruit trees around arable land.

In another discussion, Dr. Steiner spoke of the value of horn meal (ground horns and claws of cattle) as a fertiliser. He said that horn meal was one of the very best fertilisers if mixed with farmyard manure. The horn meal should not be sharply baked; the fresh horn meal is better because of its higher content of hydrogen. Hydrogen, Dr. Steiner said, is more important for its effect on the soil even than nitrogen. The Science of today has not yet discovered the importance of hydrogen for plant growth.

(Taken from a conversation between Dr. Steiner and Dr. chem. Streicher)

Dr. Streicher complained that modern agriculture confined itself to replacing in the soil the nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potassium, just as Liebig had suggested decades ago. Great danger arises from the nitrogen being compounded with very strong acids, which cause acidity of the soil and in case of drought in summer may become disastrous.

DR. STEINER: Actually, the only healthy fertilizer is cattle, manure. This should be our starting point. In addition to this a principle has to be found whereby a healthy nitrogen content of the soil may be brought about. I cannot yet tell how this can be done; it ought to be a principle which causes the earthworms and similar animals to “work the soil through.” Besides this, certain weeds have to be discovered which should be planted in the neighbourhood of the field. It is, for example, important to plant sainfoin on rye and wheat fields—at least along the edge. This influence actually exists. You have to test rationally [“rational” is often used by Dr. Steiner in the sense of Goethe, as opposite to mere empiricism.] by experiment the fact that it is good to have horse radish planted along the edge of potato fields, and corn flowers grown among corn and to have the poppies destroyed. It is such things as these which have to be considered in studying the whole problem of fertilizers. Otherwise you arrive at abstract principles and confine yourselves to the mere neutralisation of the acidity of the soil. This would kill step by step the fertility of the soil; it would make it “deaf” (taub).

Neither should one fall into the other extreme and use only plant manure. This is without doubt unfavourable to plant growth. The only ideal fertilizer is cattle manure. Besides this much depends on plant association, e.g. leguminous plants, especially sainfoin. And care should be taken to place all herbaceous plants in a dry soil, whereas cereals need a moist soil.

But importance certainly attaches to the personal human relation of the sower to the seed (paradoxical as this may seem to the modern chemist and biologist). If you observe carefully you will find a different effect produced by the way in which the sower proceeds, whether he simply takes the seed from out of the sack and flings it down, or whether he is accustomed to shake it a little in his hand and to strew it gently on the ground. These differences are of importance for the problem of manuring and it would be good to discuss them with interested farmers for they have experience in the things which are beginning to be lost in modern agriculture. I would advise you to examine old agricultural calendars to find hints on the problem of manuring. They contain ideas which sound strange but which could be formulated in chemical terms.

[DR. STREICHER here mentioned that the critical situation of the farmer has been aggravated by the infectious diseases which decimated the livestock last year, and by the shortage of food.]

DR. STEINER: Scientists should have the courage to point out where the principal harm is done. Stable feeding, which has been unduly praised in late years, has no doubt some connection with cattle tuberculosis as well as with the fact that the yield of milk is increased for a time and so on. The state of health, however, declines of course in the subsequent generations. And it is certain that the dung which the farmer's wife gathers in her basket or collects with a shovel from the meadow is better than the dung produced in stable-feeding.

Moreover, the animal should be prevented from taking in the breath of its neighbour while feeding. This is harmful. In walking across the pastures, you will see that the animals graze at some distance from each other, because they do not want to have the breath of the neighbour near themselves. It may also happen that an animal gets some little sores and if the breath of another animal touches this wound it will undoubtedly be a cause of disease.

[DR. STREICHER indicated that there are tendencies in modern agriculture to feed livestock directly on urea and to avoid the “indirect” way of feeding them on plants; the urea is gained from synthetic nitrogen. People think that the farding bag (rumen) of the cow contains certain bacteria which decompose the urea and builds it up into albumen. If these experiments are adopted in practice by farmers, the deterioration of the livestock may be intensified.]

DR. STEINER: With experiments of this kind no true results can be attained. We have to realise that in the sphere of vitality there is always present the law of inertia, if I might call it so. The effects may not manifest themselves in this or the following, but certainly they will do so in the third generation. The workings of the vital force will meantime veil the result. If such experiments deal only with one generation, you get quite a wrong impression. In the third generation one will have effects which have their cause in the feeding of the grand-parent animals, but science will seek for the causes elsewhere. Vitality cannot be broken down at once, but only in the course of generations.

DR. STREICHER mentioned experiments of the English botanist Bottomley who succeeded in producing in peat moss a certain bacterial life., which results in decomposing the humus substance to other unknown substances, which have a stimulating effect upon plant growth. He calls them `Auximones’ and puts them on the same level as biologists do vitamins.

DR. STEINER: If these substances are used to stimulate the growth of plants destined for human food, no ill results may appear in those who eat this food. But their children will perhaps be born with hydrocephalus. The procedure shows that the plants will become hypertrophied and if they serve as food, the nerve life of the succeeding generations deteriorates. One has to realise that certain effects upon the life process do not manifest themselves until the succeeding or even the third generation. Research has to be extended as far as this.

DR. STREICHER said that experiments of a scientist in Freiburg have shown that organic compounds of quicksilver have an extraordinarily stimulating effect upon vegetable growth« People hope that in this way vegetables can be produced in a very short time. The plants exhibit signs of hypertrophy.

Dr. STEINER: In this case one should find out whether the children of those who consume them become impotent. All this has to be considered. Experiments must not be carried out in too restricted a sphere, because the vital process is something which goes on in “Time,” and only in course of years does it degenerate in its inherent forces.

Further Indications on Agriculture given by Rudolf Steiner.

DR. STEINER in answer to a question by Herr Stegemann.: In sowing oats one should take care that the soil is dry; the same applies to potatoes and root crops. [Wheat and rye on the other hand should be sown in moist soil.] As marginal plants for cereals, Dr. Steiner named deadnettle and sainfoin; they should be planted at a distance of 4½ to 5½ yards. Turnips and potatoes can be surrounded by horseradish; this need only be planted at the four corners of the field and must be removed every year.

Animal pests, Dr. Steiner said, will vanish gradually with the cultivation of new kinds of plants.

To combat wireworms, Dr. Steiner recommended the exposure of rain water to the waning moon for a fortnight. The water must be poured on the places where the wireworms occur and must moisten the ground as deep as the worms go.

In order to prevent the degeneration of the potato, he recommended that seed potatoes be cut into small pieces with one eye only in each. This process should be repeated the following year.

To a question by Count von Keyserlingk: As a remedy against rust, the field can be surrounded with a border of stinging nettles.

Manure heaps should be carried out to the field and remain there until they are wanted.

Dr. Steiner recommended that an orchard on peaty ground be treated with Kali Magnesia.

On looking at the flower garden at Whitsuntide, 1924, Dr. Steiner said: “The flowers do not seem to be quite happy here| there is too much iron in the soil.” On coming to the roses, which were not flowering well and were suffering from mildew, he recommended that very finely distributed lead should be added to the soil.

When he was questioned about the enormous number of cow horns that would surely be necessary for treating the 30,000 acres at Koberwitz, Dr. Steiner gave the astonishing reply that when all measures were fully applied, as few as 150 cow horns would suffice.

When asked about sainfoin, his instructions were to use about 2 lbs. for sowing with one acre of corn.

To combat snails and slugs, Dr. Steiner recommended that a solution of 3-in-100 seed of conifers should be sprayed. This is understood to mean: obtain the sap of these seeds by pressure, dilute it in the proportion of 3:1000 of water and spray this on to the plant beds. Dr. Steiner encouraged such an experiment. Similar experiments should be made elsewhere. On a walk through the fields at Arlesheim and Dornach, Dr. Steiner told those who were with him that to increase the vigour of Preparation 500 for use upon meadows .and fields with fruit trees the following should be done: Take some fruit and a handful of leaves of the fruit trees in question and boil them in ¼ gallon of water so as to form a kind of infusion, then add this “fruit tea” when the content of the cow horn is stirred in the pail.

In order to strengthen diseased and weak fruit trees a 4-irich deep trench can be made around the stem at a distance corresponding to the crown of the tree and into this a considerable quantity of the diluted and stirred cow horn preparation (Nr. 500) can be poured.

Referring to the silica preparation (Nr. 501), Dr. Steiner said that it might even suffice to take a lump of quartz the size of a. bean and knead it with moist soil from the ground on which the preparation later on is to be sprayed; this mixture to be filled into the horn. If little pieces of it are diluted and stirred with water, this will hold sufficient silica-radiation.

Marginal plants for vegetables in the garden: sainfoin, dandelion and horseradish.

Concerning plant diseases, Dr. Steiner said that plants actually cannot be ill because the etheric principle is always healthy. When troubles appear, they show that the environment of the plants, and especially the soil, is out of order. Thus the soil has to be treated, not the plant. As an example, he recommended the strengthening of aged trees by taking fresh soil from the roots of blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) and birch and spreading that around the roots of the trees.

One can make the weed-destroyer (pepper) more effective by burning the root-stock together with the seeds of the weed in question.

(Report by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer)

Some years before the war, when asked about the use of human faeces, Dr. Steiner gave a warning against the use of them because the circle from man to plant and from the (manured) plant back to man is too short. The way should lead from man to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to plant and then back again to man.

Peat moss as a means of soil improvement was more than once rejected by Rudolf Steiner. It is, he said, neither suitable as manure nor for improving the physical condition of the soil. We ought to add humus again' and again in every form instead: as compost, leaf mould, etc.

To a question concerning mineral manure (cf. page 39, 47 of this lecture course) Dr. Steiner replied: If one is compelled to use it, one has always to mix it up with liquid or solid stable manure. The use of liquid matter from the closet he strongly objected to; neither should this be poured on fresh compost “even if the soil is not to be used for four years, it will still contain what is harmful.”

Under trees infested with Woolly Aphis, nasturtium (Tropaeolum) should be planted in a circle.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! You will have realized from all we've said that our earth in its present form is only the last remains of what was once essentially different. If we want to compare its earlier condition with anything, we can only compare it really—as you have seen—with what one has in an egg cell. Our earth today has a solid kernel of all sorts of minerals and metals. And we have the air around us, and in the air two substances which especially affect us-we could not live without them: oxygen and nitrogen. We can say therefore that in the earth we have a hard kernel of all kinds of substances, seventy to eighty of them, and around us the air-envelope containing mainly nitrogen and oxygen.

Nitrogen and oxygen, however, are only the main constituents. The air always contains other substances, though in very small quantities, such as carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, among others. But these are also the substances contained in the white of an egg, in the white of a hen's egg. Oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and sulphur! The difference is merely that in the egg white the sulphur, hydrogen and carbon are closely combined with the oxygen and nitrogen, while in the outer air they are present in a much looser way. So the same substances are in the air that are in the hen's egg. The same substances are present in a much smaller amount in the yolk, and we can therefore say that when it hardens, densifies, it becomes what the earth is. One must observe such things if one wants to know what the earth once looked like.

Today, however, things are done in quite a different way, and in order that your judgment of what I am telling you here may not be confused by what is commonly accepted, I would like to give you a small view of this general knowledge. It agrees perfectly with what I say if only one considers it in the right way.

People today do not think about things as we have done here in the last two lectures. They say: Here is the earth; it is made of mineral substance. This mineral earth is convenient to investigate, so let us examine first what lies on top, what we walk on. Then if we make quarries, if we make railway cuttings and open up the ground, we find there are certain layers or strata of earth. The uppermost layer is the one on which we walk. If we go somewhere or other into the depths, we find deeper-lying strata. But these strata are not always lying so nicely above one another that we can say: the one is always above the other.

When you really examine the earth, here you have one stratum [See drawing-red], it is curved over, not level; another stratum below is also curved [green]. And above them comes the stratum on which we walk [white]. Now, as long as we remain on foot on this side of a hill we find an upper layer that could become good arable land if we would use the right manuring methods and so on. But if we are building a railway we may have to remove certain strata and by making these cuttings we come into the depths of the earth. That has led to the discovery that strata are superimposed on one another, not level, but they have been jumbled up in all sorts of ways.

But these strata are sometimes very remarkable. People have asked how one can determine the age of the strata—which layer is older. Of course the most obvious answer is this: When the strata lie above one another, then the lowest is the oldest, the next above, younger, and the one at the very top the youngest of all. But, you see, that is not always the case. In some places it is so, but not everywhere. And one can show in the following way why it is not the case everywhere.

We are accustomed, as you know, in our civilized lands to bury our domestic animals when they die, so that they may not be injurious to people. But if the human race were not so far evolved, what would happen with the animals then? Wherever the animal died, there it would lie. Now at first it remains on the surface. But, as you know, when it rains the soil gets washed up and after a time part of the decaying creature is mingled with the soil thrown up by the rain. There it will remain, and after some time the whole animal is penetrated with earth by the rain or by water that flows down over a slope and then the rest of the earth goes over the animal. Now someone can come along and say: Heavens! The earth looks so uneven there, I must dig and have a look! He need not dig very far, just a little, and then he finds what is left of the skeleton, let us say, of a wild horse. Then he says: Well, now I'm walking on a stratum that only appeared later, the one below was formed when there were wild horses like that. And one can know that that is the next stratum, that the age in which this man lives was preceded by an age in which these horses lived.

You see, what that man does is what the geologists have been doing with all the strata of the earth, ever since the time when they could be reached by quarries, railway cuttings, excavations, and so on. One learns in geology to investigate quarries everywhere, with a hammer or some other instrument, in order to record what is exposed in the mountains through landslides or something similar. One goes hammering everywhere, makes various statements and then one finds in some stratum the so-called fossils. Then one can say: There are strata beneath the ground that contain animals quite different from those of today. Then one discovers in excavating the earth's strata what the animals were like that existed in other ages.

This is nothing so very special, for people often underestimate the time it takes for something like this to happen. People find today in southern regions churches or other buildings just standing there. The people come along, do some digging for some reason or other, and Heavens! there's something under this church that is hard; that's not earth. They dig down and find a pagan temple underneath! What had happened? A relatively short time ago this surface layer on which the church or building stands was not there at all. It was pushed up by man, perhaps with the help of nature-forces, and underneath there is the pagan temple. What was once above, is now below. Layer upon layer has in fact been piled up in the earth. And one must find out, not from the way the strata lie, but from the nature of the fossils, how these animals and the various plants have come into the strata.

Then, however, the following comes about: You find one layer of the earth [See drawing below, yellow], you find another [green]; you are able for some reason or other to excavate [arrow], and if you look merely at the stratification, then it seems as if what I have marked green were the lower layer and what I have marked yellow were the upper layer. You cannot get in here at all, you cannot excavate, there is no railway, no tunnel nor anything else by which one can get in. You make a note that the yellow is the upper stratum, the green the lower. But you must not decide immediately, you must first look for fossils.

Now one very frequently finds fossils in the upper stratum which are earlier, of fish, for example, strange fish-skeletons which are earlier. And perhaps below, one finds interesting mammal skeletons which are more recent. Now the fossils contradict the strata, up above appear the older, the earlier; below, the more recent, the younger. One must realize how that has happened. You see, it is because some sort of earthquake, some inner movement has flung what was below up above the top layer. It is the same as if I were to lay a chair on the table and the original position would be: here the chair-back and here the table-top, and then through an earthquake the table would be turned over the chair.

One can perceive in the most varied instances that there has been an inversion, a turning upside down. And one can come to the following conclusions as to when the inversion took place: It must have happened later than when all the animals were alive, it must have happened after the fossils were formed, otherwise they would lie differently.

One comes in this way not to judge the strata simply as they lie one above the other, but one must be able to see how they have changed their positions. The Alps, this mighty chain of mountains stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the region of the Danube, this main mountain range in Switzerland, is not to be understood at all unless one can go into such things. For all the strata that were built up in the Alps have later been thoroughly jumbled up. There what was lowest often lies at the top, and what was at the top is lowest of all. One must first find out how all these shifts have taken place.

It is only when all this is taken into account that one can tell which are the oldest strata and which are the newest. Modern natural science, only going by the externals of research, then naturally says: Those strata are the oldest in which the remains of the very simplest animals and plants are found. Later on, animals and plants grew more complicated, and so we find the most complicated remains in the latest strata. In the oldest strata one finds fossils because the calcium or quartz structure of the animal has been preserved, while everything else has been dissolved. When one comes to the later strata the skeleton has been preserved.

Now there is another remarkable way in which fossils are formed. Sometimes this is very interesting. Picture that there once existed some simple type of ancient creature; it had a body, perhaps with tentacles in front. I am drawing it rather large; in the strata known to geology it will as a rule be smaller. Now this creature perishes lying on this piece of ground, and this particular soil does not penetrate and permeate the creature; it avoids, so to say, the acids in the body. Then something very remarkable occurs: the earth in which the animal lies approaches it from all sides and envelops it, and a hollow space is made in the shape of the animal. That has happened very frequently; such hollow spaces are formed, earth is shaped around the animal. But there is nothing inside; the soil has not been absorbed by the body, but round about, because the animal was scaly, a hollow space is formed. Later, the scales are dissolved and still later a brook winds through.

This then fills the hollow space with stony gravel, [green] and there within, a cast of the animal is finely modeled, by a quite different material. Such casts are particularly interesting, for there we don't have the animals themselves, but their casts.

However, you must not imagine that things are always so easy. Of present man, for instance, with his organism of soft substance, there is extraordinarily little left—nor of the higher animals. There are animals of which only the casts of their teeth have remained. One finds casts of the teeth of a kind of primeval shark which were formed in this way. One comes to realize that every animal has its own form of teeth and man has a different form. The dental formation is always in keeping with the whole structure of the creature. One must have the talent to imagine the appearance of the whole animal from the form of its teeth. So things are by no means simple.

But as one studies these strata one finds out how things really developed. And then it simply becomes clear that there was a time when such animals as we have now did not exist, when there were much, much simpler creatures, somewhat like our snails, mussels, and so on. But one has to know how much has remained of them. Let us imagine that the following could happen. Just suppose that a small boy who did not like to eat crab sneaked a crab from his parents' dinner-table and played with it. He is not caught and buries it in the garden. Now there is earth over it and the whole business is forgotten. Later the garden belongs to new owners; they dig about and in one place they see some funny little things looking like lime-shells. (You know about the so-called crab's eyes which are not eyes, but little lime-shells in the body of the crab.) Those are the only traces left.

Now one cannot say that those are fossils of some kind of animal; they are fossils of only part of the creature. Similarly in older strata, especially in the Alps, one finds some sort of fossil having that shell-like appearance. That is how they look; they no longer exist today but are found in the earlier strata. One must not suppose, however, that this had been the whole creature. One must assume that there was something around it that dissolved, and only a small piece of the animal is left.

Modern science goes into this very little. Why? Well, it simply says that in this mighty Alpine mass the layers have been mixed with one another, the lowest flung to the top, the uppermost to the lowest—that the strata show it. But can you imagine, gentlemen, that with the present earth-forces such massive mountains could be flung up in that way? The little that happens now on earth is by comparison a dancing through, one fleck lightly tossed on another—today that is all, a sort of dancing through!

If a man lived 720 years instead of seventy-two, he would experience in his old age that he was walking on ground a little higher than before. But we live too short a life. Just think if a fly that only lives from morning till evening were to relate what it experiences! Since it lives only in the summer, it would tell us of nothing but flowers, that there were always flowers. It would have no idea of what goes on in the winter; it would believe that each summer joined on to the one before. We human beings are certainly a little longer-lived than a one-day fly, but still we have a little of the fly nature with our seventy to seventy-two years! We see indeed little of what goes on. Even with the scanty forces prevailing today, there is no doubt that more happens than man usually sees. Yet, comparatively speaking, all that happens is that rivers flow along to the sea and leave alluvial soil behind. So a little soil is deposited, and this then reaches beyond the shores and the fields get a new stratum. That is comparatively little. When one considers how something like this great mountain mass of the Alps has been jolted and shaken through and through, it is obvious that the forces which are active today were active in quite a different way in earlier times.

But now we must try to picture how such a thing can happen. Take, for instance, an egg cell from some mammal. It looks at first quite simple, a nucleus in the center with an albuminous mass all around. Now suppose that the egg is fructified. When it is fructified, the nucleus changes into all sorts of little forms; it develops very strangely into a number of spirals that go up like tails. And then the moment these little coils arise, star-formed structures develop out of the mass. The whole mass comes into formation because there is life in it. What goes on there is very different from what goes on in our earth today. The upheavals and over-turnings that are taking place in the egg cell are the same as what once took place in the massive Alps!

What then is more natural than to say: Well, then the earth must once have been alive, or these convulsions of inverting and overthrusting could not possibly have occurred! The present form of the earth does in fact show us that in past ages when neither man nor higher animal existed, the earth itself was alive. This obliges us to say that the present dead earth has come forth from a living earth. Yet animals can only live on this present dead earth! Just think if the oxygen and nitrogen in the air had not separated off and had not condemned hydrogen, carbon and sulphur to an almost complete passivity: we would then have to breathe in something like egg white—for that was what surrounded the earth.

Now we could imagine—for anything can happen in this world!—that instead of our lungs, we had developed organs able to draw in an albuminous atmosphere like that. Today, of course, we can take it in as food through the mouth. Why could not a sort of lung-organ have evolved, up nearer to the mouth? Anything can originate in this world; any possible thing might come about—even though we would never guess at such changes from observing man's present body. But think, gentlemen—we look today into lifeless air. It has died. Formerly the albumen was living. The air has died because the sulphur, hydrogen and carbon have gone and the nitrogen and oxygen have therefore also perished. We gaze into light-filled air that has died, but this has allowed our eyes to be physical, as they are indeed physical. If everything in our surroundings were living, then our eyes would have to be living too. But if they were living, we would be unable to see with them, and we would always be in a state of unconsciousness: just as a person becomes unconscious when there begins to be too much life in his head, when instead of the regularly developed organs he has all sorts of growths. He is then unconscious intermittently, and later it becomes so severe that he lies there as if he were dead. Likewise in our original condition on the earth, as it was then, we could not have lived consciously. The human being could only awake to consciousness as the earth gradually died. And so mankind evolves on an earth that is dead.

So it is, gentlemen! And this is true not only of nature but also of civilization. If you think back to what I said just now—that below the earth there could be pagan temples and above Christian churches—you will see that the Christian churches are related to the pagan temples just as the upper strata to the lower, only that in one case we have to do with nature, in the other with culture. But one will not understand how the Christian element evolved if one does not observe that it evolved out of paganism as its foundation. In culture too we have to consider these strata.

Now I have said that the human being has actually been there all the time, but as a spiritual being, not a physical being. And that again leads us to look for the real reason why man did not evolve as a physical being earlier. We have said that in the air today there are nitrogen and oxygen, with carbon, hydrogen and sulphur to a lesser degree. In our breathing we ourselves unite the carbon that is in us with the oxygen we inhale and exhale the two together as carbon dioxide. In our human existence we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide; our life consists of that. We would long, long ago have filled the earth and the air of the earth with carbon dioxide had there not been something else on the earth: the plants. They have the same hunger for carbon that we have for oxygen. They take up the carbon dioxide eagerly, hold on to the carbon and give out the oxygen again.

You see, gentlemen, how wonderfully these things complement each other! We human beings need the oxygen out of the air, we inhale it, unite it with the carbon we have within us and exhale carbon and oxygen together as carbon dioxide. The plants breathe this in and breathe the oxygen out again, and so there is always oxygen in the air.

Well, this is true today but in human evolution on the earth it was not always like that. When we find the fossilized creatures that lived long ago, we realize that they could not have been like our modern animals and plants, particularly not like our present plants. All the primeval plants must have been much more like our sponges, mushrooms, algae. There is a difference between our mushrooms and our other present plants. The latter take in the carbon and form their body from it. When they sink into the ground, their body remains as coal. The coal we mine today is the remains of plants.

All the research we are able to pursue into the kinds of plants that originally existed tells us the following: Our present plants, including the plants which are now providing us with coal, are built up from carbon. But much earlier plants were formed not from carbon but from nitrogen. That was possible because just as carbon dioxide is exhaled today by animal and man, in ancient times a combination of carbon and nitrogen was exhaled. That is prussic acid, the terribly poisonous hydrocyanic acid fatal to all life today. This poisonous prussic acid was once exhaled, and nothing that exists today could then have arisen. The early mushroom-like plants took in the nitrogen and formed their body from it. The creatures about which I spoke last time, the bird-like beings and the heavy, coarse animal-beings, breathed out this poisonous acid, and the plants around them took the nitrogen to form their plant-body. Here, too, we can see that substances still existing today were used in quite a different way in ancient times.

I spoke of this once before to those of you who have been here for some time. I related how in 1906 I had to give some lectures in Paris⁴ on the evolution of the earth, the origin of man, and so forth. The subject led me to say: Can anything in this world show that carbon and oxygen have not always had the role they play today, that nitrogen once had that role, and that once the atmosphere consisted of prussic acid, of hydrocyanic acid?

Now you know that there are old people and young children. Well, if a man of seventy stands here and a child of two next to him, they are both human beings; they stand beside each other, and the one who is now seventy was like the two-year-old sixty-eight years ago. Things of different ages stand side by side. And it is the same in the universe; there, too, the older and the younger are side by side. Our earth, from what I have just now described and what you can still see today, our earth is a greybeard, an ancient fellow, almost dead already-if one does not count the life newly sprung up, one can call it almost dead. But at its side in the universe there are again younger forms which will only later become what our present life is. For instance, we must regard the comets as one of these. We can know, therefore, that since the comets are younger, they must still have conditions that belong to a younger age. The comets are to the earth what the child is to the old man. And if the earth once had prussic acid, the comets must now have it, they must have hydrocyanic acid! If with today's body one were to touch a comet, one would instantly die. It is diluted prussic acid that is in them.

I said in Paris in 1906 that this follows from the premises of spiritual science. Those who acknowledge spiritual science accepted my statement even though it astonished them. Then later, a fairly long time afterward, a comet made its appearance. By that time people had got the necessary instruments and it was then found by ordinary scientific methods that comets do have cyanide, prussic acid, as I had said in Paris in 1906. So it was confirmed.

Naturally, when people hear of this, they call it a coincidence: Oh sure, Steiner made that statement in Paris, and then there was the discovery—just a coincidence. They say this because they know nothing else. But I have now told you why one must take it for granted that there is prussic acid in the comets. It was no accident, it was genuine science by which one first reached this knowledge. Physical research only confirmed it later. People realize now that this is true for all that anthroposophy sets forth; for everything is confirmed later. Quite a number of things will be discovered today outside the Anthroposophical Movement that were already given out many years ago by anthroposophy in a rather different way.

Yes, there are many other things that could be carefully investigated today by science. I am always saying that if people could really travel to a star, they would be amazed to find it different from the modern ideas about it determined by their life on earth. They imagine that it contains a glowing gas. But that is not at all what is found out there. Actually, where the star is, there is empty space, empty space that would immediately suck one up. Suction forces are there. They would suck you up instantly, split you to pieces. If people would work with the same consistent research and the same unprejudiced thinking as we do here, they would also come to see with intricate spectroscopes that there are not gases out there, but negative suctional space.

Some time ago I gave certain individuals the task of investigating the sun and stars with the spectroscope, simply in order to prove by external methods that the stars are hollow spaces, not glowing gases. That can be proved. The persons to whom I gave this task were tremendously enthusiastic when they started: “Oh! then we shall get somewhere!” But sometimes enthusiasm fades away; they delayed too long. And then a year-and-a-half ago news came from America that people were starting to investigate the stars and were gradually finding out that they were not glowing gases but hollowed-out space! It is no disaster, of course, for such a thing to happen. But naturally, it would have been more useful to us – externally—if we had done it. But it doesn't matter, as long as truth comes to light.

On the other hand, however, it can be seen through just such things that anthroposophy really wants to work in collaboration with ordinary science. So it would also like to work with ordinary science on the strata of the earth. One thoroughly accepts what science has to say about the upheavals and overturnings in the Alps. But one cannot go along with the scientists when they assume that these upheavals were caused by forces that are still existing today. The fact is that there were life-forces there then; only life-forces could have flung and tossed these strata of living substance through one another. Anthroposophy already incorporates ordinary science and extends far beyond it, but science always wants to stop whenever it is too lazy to approach things more closely.

So—we will continue on Wednesday at nine o'clock.

• 4. Paris, May 25-June 16, 1906: L'Esotérisme chrétien / Esquisse d'une cosmogonie psychologique, Paris 1957.